Opposites Do What?

Welcome back. Opposites attract with magnetic poles; not so much with people. Any such attraction is usually short-lived. 

Opposite magnetic poles attract (www.stanfordmagnets.com/what-are-magnetic-poles.html).

That opposites attract was postulated by Robert Francis Winch in the 1950s. Studying spouses, he concluded that it was complementarity not similarities that made relationships work. A good couple’s personality traits complement one another. An extrovert, for example, would be better with an introvert.

Interesting, but numerous studies have since chipped away at opposites attracting. They instead find that people tend to be attracted to one another because of shared interests and attributes, with lasting relationships built on similar values.

You probably realized that long ago. In case you didn’t, a recent study by researchers with the University of Colorado Boulder really knocked it out of the park.

Examining Couples’ Traits
The researchers dug into more than a century of data to analyze 133 traits of millions of couples. They conducted systematic reviews and meta-analyses of previous research as well as their own data analysis.

Their meta-analyses examined 22 traits across 199 studies, including millions of male-female co-parents and engaged, married and cohabitating pairs. The oldest study was from 1903.

In addition, they calculated 133 trait correlations across nearly 80,000 opposite-sex pairs in the United Kingdom drawing from the UK Biobank dataset. (The researchers are exploring same-sex couples separately.)

What They Found
The researchers found that partners were likely to be similar for 82% to 89% of traits analyzed. As for opposites, individuals tended to partner with those different from themselves for only 3% of traits in only one part of the analyses.

Across analyses, political and religious attitudes, educational attainment and some substance use traits (smoking, drinking) showed the highest correlations, while psychological and anthropometric (physical measurements) traits generally yielded lower but positive correlations.

Point estimates of mean meta-analyzed and UKB partner correlations for comparable traits (Fig 1 from www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01672-z#Sec14 truncated to higher correlations).

A handful of traits in the UK Biobank data had small, negative correlations (e.g., whether someone is a “morning lark” or “night owl,” tendency to worry and hearing difficulty).

As you might expect, the trait for which couples were most likely to be similar was birth year.

Correlations for comparable UKB demographic/family traits (Fig 2 from www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01672-z#Sec14 truncated to higher correlations).

Wrap Up
If you’re prone to speculating, shared traits could have downstream consequences. The offspring of short and tall couples would tend toward more height extremes in the next generation. You might extend that to psychiatric, medical or other traits.

Some studies have suggested that people with similar educational backgrounds are more likely to couple, a trend that could widen the socioeconomic divide.

But don’t fear. The study also showed that the strength of correlations were fairly modest and differed across populations. They’re also likely to change over time.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Articles on complementary needs in American Sociological Review:
- www.jstor.org/stable/2087753
- www.jstor.org/stable/2088200
Blog post on do opposites attract: www.talkspace.com/blog/do-opposites-attract/
University of Colorado Boulder study in Nature Human Behaviour: www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01672-z#Sec14
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1000409

What’s Attractive To You?

Welcome back. This should stir your mind: What do people find attractive in a potential mate? Apparently, there’s ongoing debate in the field of evolutionary mate choice psychology regarding how similar or different male and female preferences are across age.

What’s in that person’s magnet that attracts you (graphic from leadg2.thecenterforsalesstrategy.com/blog/5-characteristics-of-a-landing-page-that-converts)?

A recently published study by a team of researchers affiliated with Australia’s Queensland University of Technology and University of New South Wales and Switzerland’s Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts joined that debate, investigating competing evolutionary theories.

The researchers used data from the national online Australian Sex Survey of 2016, analyzing the responses of 7,325 Australian participants, ages 18 to 65.

Rating Attraction Characteristics
Participant responses were to the same basic question asked about nine characteristics associated with attraction--age, attractiveness, physical build/features, intelligence, education, income, trust, openness and emotional connection: To what extent do you find a person’s [specific characteristic] influences how sexually attractive you find them? The responses were ratings from 0, not important, to 100, extremely important.

The researchers grouped the nine characteristics into three categories commonly associated with sexual attraction: aesthetics (age, attractiveness and physical build/features), resources (intelligence, education and income) and personality (trust, openness and emotional connection).

Nine characteristics and three categories of attraction (developed from journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151).

They found the pattern of responses regarding the nine characteristics were similar for both genders. The three personality characteristics, physical build and attractiveness were rated quite high in importance; age, intelligence and education were rated more evenly; and income was rated quite low.

But there were significant gender differences on the 100-point scale for many characteristics. Most notably, females rated age, education, intelligence, income, trust and emotional connection from 9 to 14 points higher in importance than did males.

Relative Importance of Characteristics
In addition to the absolute or raw ratings of the nine characteristics, the researchers also standardized the responses to gauge the relative importance of the nine characteristics for each participant. (Calculate the average value of the nine responses and the standard deviation, then subtract the value of each characteristic from this average and divide by the standard deviation.) The standardized values are essentially the importance of one characteristic relative to the average importance of all nine characteristics.

Analysis of the relative importance of characteristics identified subtle and not-so subtle differences. For example:

Males regarded attractiveness and physical build as the most important aesthetic characteristics, rating them higher than all other characteristics. Females regarded age as the most important aesthetic characteristic and rated attractiveness and physical build somewhat above their average rating.

Both genders regarded income as the least important characteristic for sexual attraction, with no significant gender difference.

Females gave a higher absolute rating to openness than did males; however, males actually regarded the relative importance of openness slightly higher than did females.

The Effect of Respondents’ Age
The researchers conducted a series of statistical analyses (regression) to explore the effect of respondents’ age on preferences. For aesthetics, they found males had a consistently higher preference, though it decreased with age. The gender difference was opposite for resources and personality, with females exhibiting a stronger relative preference at most ages.

Gender differences in relative importance of aesthetic, resource and personality characteristics of attraction across age. Graph displays males (M) having higher regard as values above 0 and females (F) having higher regard as values below 0 (modified from journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151).

Example observations for individual characteristics were:
- females’ higher regard for age shows little change across age.
- males’ higher regard for physical build was maximum when younger than 30s, and for attractiveness, from mid-20s to low 50s.
- females’ higher regard for education was lowest from mid-20s to 40, while that for intelligence was maximum from mid-20s to mid-50s.
- males’ higher regard for openness and trust tended to increase with age, while females’ higher regard for emotional connection varied little with age.

Wrap Up
Should you wish to delve into the field evolutionary mate choice, the researchers note that many of the study results are consistent with theories of selection pressure and that they align with theories of parental investment, the gender similarities hypothesis and mutual mate choice.

They conclude that the broader discipline still contains considerable scope for further inquiry toward a unified theory, particularly when exploring gender differences across age.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of gender attraction across age in PLOS ONE journal: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/quot-bsb051721.php
Evolutionary psychology: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

People Are Generous

Prosocial: Relating to or denoting behavior which is positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship (www.lexico.com/).

Tasty prosocial behavior (from quizlet.com/240141367/).

Welcome back. With political partisanship and hateful behavior peaking, it’s easy to think people either don’t give a hoot about their fellow human beings or that they’ve narrowed the concept. 

Take heart! A recently published study found human prosociality is alive and well.

Prosociality and Reciprocity
Theoretical models and empirical tests have shown that prosocial behavior is promoted by reciprocity. Forms of reciprocity include helping those in our social networks who have helped us (direct reciprocity); paying forward help we receive from one person to another in our network (generalized reciprocity); giving more in the presence of network members who can reward our giving (reputational giving); and rewarding network members who have given to others (rewarding reputation).

Illustration of four forms of reciprocity, with individuals denoted by letters and help shown by arrows; e.g., in direct reciprocity, B helps A after A helped B (from advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaba0504).

On their own, each form of reciprocity predicts prosociality; each motivates people to behave in a way that benefits other people. But what happens if we are confronted with multiple forms of reciprocity simultaneously? Will some forms of reciprocity crowd out other forms? For example, will giving solely to gain a positive reputation eliminate gratitude and other more sincere prosocial giving via generalized reciprocity? Does human prosociality break down when multiple forms of reciprocity co-occur?

Testing Prosociality with Co-occurring Forms of Reciprocity
Researchers affiliated with Ohio State and South Carolina universities set out to determine if the forms of reciprocity persist in the presence of other forms. They assessed the robustness of reciprocity with a web-based experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk in which more than 700 participants interacted. The participants, unseen by and unknown to each other, had no known social network relationship.

For the experiment, the researchers crossed the four forms of reciprocity with three levels of each form. In all, they generated 81 conditions to isolate the effects on prosociality while enabling the different forms to be embedded together.

Participants were provided the information corresponding to different conditions and asked how many, if any, of a 10-point endowment they wanted to give to other people. Helping was costly to the giver and socially beneficial; the points had monetary values to participants, and any point given was doubled.

The researchers found that, with the four forms of reciprocity combined, direct reciprocity did not vary and generalized reciprocity, though strongest in the absence of rewarding reputation, was present across all conditions.

While reputational giving and rewarding reputation were moderated by direct reciprocity, reputational giving promoted giving across all conditions and rewarding reputation failed to increase giving in only one condition--when the person to whom the participant was giving had previously given to the participant.

Wrap Up
With a single exception, all four forms of reciprocity positively predicted giving, regardless of whether the other forms of reciprocity were present or how they were combined.

People overwhelmingly chose to be generous to others at a cost to themselves. And in this experiment, the others were strangers. I think that’s pretty cool. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of prosociality and reciprocity in Science Advances journal:
advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaba0504
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/osu-ptt052920.php

What Sways Social Status?

Welcome back. Tell me. How do you rate your social status, your reputation? No, wait. This is better. What criteria would you consider if you were rating someone’s social status? Would you use different criteria for men and women?

An international team, led by researchers with the University of Texas at Austin, investigated the criteria people in different countries would use to rate social status. The study provides the first systematic measure of potentially universal and gender-differentiated behaviors and traits by which individuals are accorded high or low status by their peers.

Study Background
The study was not aimed at justifying the number of social media followers. Rather, as the researchers discuss, its significance begins with social status being a central feature of our highly social species. Relevant resources, including food, territory, mating opportunities, alliances and group-provided health care, flow to those high in status and trickle slowly to those low in status.

Some serious social status--ancient Egypt
(from www.thinglink.com/scene/885586337846001665).

Most  of us would be content to just learn key status criteria, but the lead researchers, being evolutionary psychologists, set out to test hypotheses drawn from evolutionary meta-theory. They hypothesize that (a) men’s and women’s status criteria will depend equally on skills and characteristics that increased their relational value equally throughout our evolutionary history and (b) there will be gender differences in status criteria where ancestral relational value differed between the sexes.

I refer you to the paper (see P.S.) should you wish to pursue their hypotheses further. I’ll stick to the criteria themselves.

Surveying Social Status Criteria
The researchers surveyed 2,751 people (average age 23; 1,487 female) from 14 countries across 5 continents.

Social-status criteria survey sample by country
(from doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206).

A total of 240 status-affecting actions, characteristics and events were generated through a mix of nomination and expert input. American undergraduate students nominated items, which were culled to 175. Other items were added over time in consultation with anthropologists and psychologists who had specific knowledge of the cultures surveyed.

Survey respondents rated the full list of items available at the time of data collection. With required translations, they were provided an explanatory prompt, then asked to rate (from +4 to -4) the likely effect of each item on a person’s status and reputation in the eyes of the individual’s peer group. Each respondent rated the items twice, once for the impact on men and once for the impact on women.

Status-Impacting Criteria
Of the 240 items rated, 123 were judged to increase and 117 to decrease a person’s status. The most status-increasing criteria were being a trusted group member, being intelligent and getting accepted at a prestigious university. The most status-decreasing criteria were being known as a thief, being unclean and being stupid. 

The most status-affecting criteria and mean ratings for men and women combined across all countries (from doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206).

Many criteria did not differ by gender and appear to have similar effects across the countries sampled. Three candidates for universal status criteria are those associated with general value to the group and to individuals within the group, value to one’s kin, and physical health.

Traits of acting masculine (e.g., assertive, forceful, willing to take risks) and feminine (e.g., affectionate, sympathetic, understanding) showed the largest gender-differentiated status consequences. Leadership qualities appear more central to men’s than women’s status, while domestic skills, attractiveness and aspects of women’s sexual strategy (e.g., chastity/purity) appear more central to women’s status.

Sexual promiscuity lowers the status of both genders, albeit more for women than for men. Nevertheless, items that address simply finding a long-term mate tend to be equally beneficial to the status of both men and women.

Wrap Up
Although the study is the first to examine specific criteria by which humans evaluate and accord status cross-nationally, the researchers have been able to highlight criteria central to both men and women as well as those that are gender-differentiated. Their theoretical modeling suggests that status criteria reflect a complex mixture of evolutionary, environmental and cultural forces.

Perhaps you can draw insight to examine your own social status, though I’m confident there’s little room for improvement. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Social-status criteria study in Jour. of Personality and Social Psychology: doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/uota-bat060220.php

Judging Leaders

Welcome back. The Harvard Business Review had an interesting article about leader competence last month. I’m not a subscriber and don’t recall ever seeing the magazine. Occasionally, however, the magazine’s articles make it to one of the published research lists I follow.

My interest in leader competence was honed by the leaders I worked with and under during my 20 years in the federal government. Some were very effective, some had us seeking transfers after the first week. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Who Chooses to Lead?, a mandatory course on leadership styles and behavior was one of the few I enjoyed.

Good leaders need competence and character
(from www.andersonleadershipsolutions.com/what-is-a-leader-of-character/).

And it would be hard to ignore that the last few years have heightened my and likely many other people’s concern about leadership.

Confidence vs Competence
The author of the article, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, is affiliated with the ManpowerGroup, University College London, Columbia University and Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab.

In this and earlier articles, he discusses and cites studies that show competent leaders generate trust, engagement and productivity; incompetent leaders engender anxious, alienated workers, who spread toxicity through the organization.

He argues that, for an organization to have competent leaders, those responsible for selecting candidates need to do a better job at distinguishing between confidence and competence. Both are desired leadership traits, yet incompetent leaders are commonly overconfident.

He refers to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which the scope of poor performers’ ignorance is often invisible to them.

A market trader’s depiction of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
(from pg.4, www.marketcalls.in/trading-lessons/).

Identifying arrogance as a key trait of incompetence, he cites a review of how hubristic leaders overestimate their own abilities, believe their performance to be superior to that of others, make overconfident and overambitious judgements and decisions, and tend to resist criticism and advice.

Testing for Incompetence
On the bright side--yes, there is a bright side--Chamorro-Premuzic cites one of his earlier articles in which he observed there are scientifically valid assessments to predict and thereby avoid leadership incompetence. He allows that even simple tests can be useful in predicting leadership style and competence. As an example, he points to the Single Item Narcissism Scale, which correlates significantly with longer narcissism scales.

He also provides a list of questions, which are characteristic of assessments used to evaluate leadership potential. For example, Do you have an exceptional talent for leadership? Would most people want to be like you? Are you destined to be successful?

How can such simple self-assessments predict incompetence? Because arrogant and overconfident individuals, as well as those with narcissistic tendencies, seldom portray themselves in a humble manner.

Wrap Up
Unfortunately, the bright side afforded by assessment tools remains in the shadows. Despite their availability, few organizations use them. The problem, Chamorro-Premuzic writes, is not that we lack the means to spot incompetence, but that we more often choose to be seduced by it.

Rather than select people based on their charisma, overconfidence and narcissism, we must opt for competence, humility and integrity. He concludes: The issue is not that these traits are difficult to measure, but that we appear to not want them as much as we say.

Leadership traits people said mattered most two years before the 2016 election; Pew Research Center survey of 1,835 U.S. adults conducted online in 2014 (from www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/01/14/chapter-2-what-makes-a-good-leader-and-does-gender-matter/).

Thanks for stopping by. 

P.S.
Leadership article in Harvard Business Review: hbr.org/2020/03/how-to-spot-an-incompetent-leader
Dunning–Kruger Effect in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123855220000056
Review of hubristic leaders in Leadership journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1742715016680666
Article on scientifically valid personality assessments in Forbes magazine: www.forbes.com/sites/tomaspremuzic/2014/05/12/seven-common-but-irrational-reasons-for-hating-personality-tests/#f8b21cc6bdf4
Study of Single Item Narcissism Scale in PLOS ONE journal: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103469

Which Physicians Speed?

Welcome back. Since you’re reading this post and I hope following this blog, you’re no doubt on the upper end of the intelligence spectrum. You know, for example, that you can learn about any topic, even if you can’t remember or never learned the location of the nearest library. You have the internet.

Is that a physician stopped for
speeding? How fast was he going?
What is his medical specialty?
(photo from evidentiarymatters.com/?m=201307).

Of course, some topics, especially those reviewed here, are rather new and require more digging. And then some have just never been addressed. How frustrating when it’s something you’ve always wondered about, such as today’s topic: Do speeding, luxury car ownership and leniency by police differ across physician specialties?

We’ve finally got answers thanks to researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Their assessment was predicated upon (1) driving behavior and luxury car ownership have been linked to personality, (2) many people believe there’s a link between personality and a physician's specialty and (3) some specialists interact more with police in their work (e.g., emergency medicine), which could influence leniency.

Speeding Ticket Review
The researchers matched publicly available records on speeding tickets and physicians and, for comparison, non-physicians, who were issued one or more speeding tickets in Florida, 2004-2017. Speed was recorded on 38% of the physicians’ tickets and car make on 64%.

They broke the data down by medical specialty and took account of age and sex, which are correlated with specialty. Tickets issued to physicians younger than 30 were excluded as those might have been issued before the drivers became physicians.

The analysis focused on rates of speeding and extreme speeding (exceeding the speed limit by more than 20 mph), luxury car ownership (e.g., Audi, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati and Porsche) and police officer leniency, which was defined as recording speeds just below the threshold at which a larger fine would otherwise be imposed ("speed discounting").

Speeding tickets issued to physicians in Florida, 2004-2017 (from www.bmj.com/content/bmj/367/bmj.l6354.full.pdf).

Do Physicians or Specialties Differ?
The study sample included 5,372 physicians, issued 14,560 tickets, and 19,639 non-physicians, issued 63,382 tickets. The proportion of drivers ticketed for extreme speeding was almost identical for physicians and non-physicians, 26.4% vs. 26.8%, respectively. (Of interest, one third of physicians in the U.S. are female, yet female physicians were issued only 18.5% of tickets for extreme speeding.)

Speeding was broadly similar across medical specialties, and extreme speeding was common, accounting for one quarter of physicians’ tickets. Psychiatrists were the most likely to be ticketed for extreme speeding. (The prize, however, went to one general internist who was ticketed at 70 mph over the limit.)

Unlike speeding, luxury car ownership by physicians who received a speeding ticket was quite different across specialties. Luxury cars were most commonly being driven by cardiologists and least commonly being driven by those in emergency medicine, family practice, pediatrics, general surgery and psychiatry.

Leniency by police was common, but it did not differ by specialty or between physicians and non-physicians.

Wrap Up
The researchers point out that, being an observational study based on speeding in Florida, cause cannot be established, unmeasured factors may have had an influence and the results may vary in areas with different driving cultures, demographics or policing practices.

So, while the study provides answers we’ve always wondered about, there’s no guarantee those answers apply in your or my neck of the woods. Drive safely and thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of physician driving behaviors in The British Journal of Medicine (BMJ): www.bmj.com/content/bmj/367/bmj.l6354.full.pdf
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/b-pml121619.php

Head Tilt for Dominance

Welcome back. Years ago, in a blog post that warned scientists to do a better job at garnering the public’s trust, I wrote:

All this time I thought people didn’t trust science and scientists because of lobbyists, biased or clueless media, politics and contrarians. Nope. It’s because scientists are cold fish…scientists may be respected by the public but not necessarily trusted; and it’s all because scientists are not perceived as warm (from Trust a Scientist).

Seeking ways to assist not only warn scientists, I then blogged about an older study on facial evaluation; in essence, certain facial features tend to convey trust. I described how those researchers developed models for representing facial trustworthiness and dominance (from Trust a Scientist Addendum).

Judgments of 300 emotionally neutral faces found that certain facial features tend to convey trust (from www.pnas.org/content/105/32/11087.full).

I wasn’t suggesting plastic surgery or other such tweaks. I just thought scientists might use a mirror to practice certain facial expressions or use makeup to raise their inner eyebrows. Or maybe not.

From Trust to Dominance
Today, instead of trust, I’m going for dominance. And this pertains to everyone, even those who failed science in school.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia demonstrated that the perception of dominance need not focus on facial evaluation. In a series of tests involving over 1,500 participants, they found head movements--tilting one’s head downward with eyes looking forward--increased the perception of dominance.

Tests of Perceived Dominance
For one online test with 101 participants, the researchers generated avatars with neutral facial expressions in one of three head positions, tilted up or down 10 degrees or looking straight ahead.

The participants judged the dominance of each avatar image, rating their agreement with statements including “This person would enjoy having control over others” and “This person would be willing to use aggressive tactics to get their way.”

Avatars with downward head tilt were rated most dominant.

In a similar online test with images of humans instead of avatars, 570 participants had the same results. An important additional finding from that test was that the part of the face around the eyes and eyebrows was both necessary and sufficient to produce the dominance effect. 

Images of avatars (top row) and humans (other rows) with neutral facial expressions and heads looking straight ahead (center images) or tilted 10 degrees (from journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797619838762).

Other tests showed that the angle of the eyebrows drove the effect. Tilting the head downward can have the same effect on perception as lowering one’s eyebrows. The eyebrows appear more “V shaped,” even if they have not moved from a neutral position.

The researchers point out that “Brow Lowerer” is Upper Face Action Unit 4 in the Facial Action Coding System, which I blogged about in Facial Expressions Addendum. 

Upper Face Action Units (AU) from the Facial Action Coding System for human expressions (from what-when-how.com/face-recognition/facial-expression-recognition-face-recognition-techniques-part-1/).

Wrap Up
Clearly, social judgments about faces are derived not only from facial shape and musculature but also from head movements.

The researchers are continuing to pursue the topic, exploring whether the effects might extend beyond perception of dominance to how we interpret facial expressions of emotion. They’re hoping to define practical implications for our everyday social interactions.

Appearing dominant is a good start, at least for some of us. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of head tilt perception of dominance in Psychological Science journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797619838762
News release on study from Assoc. for Psychological Science: www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/head-tilt-dominance.html

Waiting for Income

Save your money. (Barney Large Coin
Piggy Bank from www.amazon.co.uk)

Welcome back. Today’s question is Why do some people make more money? If I may get personal, what factors had the greatest effect on your earnings? Go ahead, fill in the blanks.

Researchers from Temple University did. Along with the expected results, such as education and occupation, they found one interesting surprise: Delay discounting ranked high as a predictor of future income.

What’s Delay Discounting?
If you had to choose between receiving $1 today or $2 tomorrow, would you take the $1? Those who take the smaller reward today rather than wait for the larger reward tomorrow are discounting the value of the future reward. Delay discounting refers to how much a person devalues future rewards compared to present rewards.

The classic studies of delayed gratification--the marshmallow experiment--were conducted at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Children were offered one reward (e.g., a marshmallow) immediately or two rewards if they waited about 15 minutes while the person administering the test left the room. Get this: Follow-up studies found children who waited longer tended to have better life outcomes.

Factors Related to Future Income
To improve upon earlier investigations of income attainment, the Temple researchers tested a large, diverse population: 2,564 racially and ethnically heterogeneous, male and female participants, 25 to 65 years in age, pre-high school to PhD in education, $10,000 to $235,000 in annual income and from over 1,700 zip codes.

In addition, they employed a novel analytic approach, using three machine-learning algorithms to model the relationship between income and key factors identified in earlier research--age, gender, ethnicity, height, race, zip code, education, occupation and delay discounting behavior.

Measuring Delay Discounting
Test participants were initially asked to choose between $500 immediately versus $1,000 at five different delays (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year). If they chose the immediate reward, the next question offered an immediate reward midway between the prior immediate reward and zero. If they chose the delayed reward, the next question offered an immediate reward midway between the prior immediate reward and $1,000.

This narrowing pattern continued until participants’ choices converged on the dollar amount subjectively equivalent to the discounted delayed reward if the value were offered immediately. Lower dollar amounts indicated increased devaluation of delayed rewards in favor of immediate rewards.

Study Findings
Modeling with the three machine-learning algorithms, the researchers found that individual differences in income were explained by factors that could be ranked in a consistent manner.

Average ranking of factors according to how well they predicted salary by three machine-learning algorithms (from www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01545/full).

Occupation and education were paramount with each algorithm, and on average, zip code and gender were the next most important factors. The fifth most important factor was delay discounting, which was more predictive than ethnicity, height age and race.

One study shortcoming is that representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the sample population was only about half that in the U.S. population at large.

Wrap Up
As to why individual differences in discounting of future rewards predicts income attainment, the researchers speculate that it may be a consequence of the correlation between higher discounting and undesirable life choices.

Difficulties delaying gratification may also be affected by episodic future thinking, i.e., the ability to project oneself into the future to pre-experience an event. If people can vividly imagine themselves in the future with the larger rewards, they are more likely to be patient.

So, relax. As you’ve likely heard, all things come to those who wait. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of delay discounting for income attainment in Frontiers in Psychology journal: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01545/full
Articles on study on ScienceDaily and ScienceAlert websites: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180903101741.htm
www.sciencealert.com/your-ability-delay-instant-gratification-predict-money-earn-delay-discounting-marshmallow-test
Marshmallow experiment: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment
Update study of children’s delay of gratification in Developmental Psychology journal: psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-29923-001?doi=1

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.

Who Chooses to Lead?

Welcome back. Early in my years in government, I had a mandatory course on leadership styles and behavior. It was one of the few courses I enjoyed, especially compared to the many I had on contracts and project management.

Along with learning to give feedback, which I never quite mastered, and being exposed to a raft of other long-forgotten tips, my leadership style was characterized as “coaching.” That was hardly surprising since I’d spent the previous 20 years in academia teaching.

I thought of that course, not the style or behavior of our country’s leader, when I saw a study on leadership. Researchers from Switzerland’s University of Zürich and ETH Zürich examined what determines someone’s willingness to lead, to take responsibility for others.

Who takes the lead? (photo from
www.aleanjourney.com/2013/09/lean-leadership-lessons-we-can-learn.html)

Testing Decision Preferences
The researchers collected a variety of behavioral, computational and neurobiological information from test participants.

For a baseline task, 40 participants completed 200 trials selecting either a risky or a safe gamble based on the probabilities of success and the possible gains or losses. In 140 of the trials, only partial information regarding the probabilities was provided.

Placed in groups of four for a delegation task, each participant was later presented the same choices from the 140 trials in both self trials and group trials (280 trials).

For these trials, participants had the option of deferring the selection of the risky or safe gamble to their group, which collectively had more information regarding probabilities of success. In the self trials, only the participant’s payoff was at stake; in the group trials, the selection determined the payoff of every group member equally.

One example of the 140 group trials of the Delegation Task, where the decision to Act could be deferred to the group. The probabilities of success (e.g., 20%) and failure (e.g., 30%) were shown by the proportion of green or red slices. In each trial, a varying amount of probability information was obscured (e.g., 50%), and different group members saw different information on the underlying probabilities. Choosing to Not Act gave an outcome of 0 for that trial. The same example appeared in a Baseline Task trial, where the decision could not be deferred. (figure from science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6401/eaat0036)

The researchers also collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on a separate sample of 44 participants as they performed the same decision-preference tasks.

Decision Preferences and Leadership Scores
In addition to the decision-preference tasks, participants completed questionnaires on two widely used scales that predict leadership positions.

The researchers found no consistent correlation between the decision-preference measures and leadership scores. Preferences for decisions and control over self or others did not explain individual differences in leadership scores, suggesting the study should seek different motivational forces. They focused on a critical difference between self and group trials: the responsibility for others’ welfare.

Leadership and Responsibility Aversion
Deferrals, or what the researchers termed responsibility aversion, increased an average of 17% from self to group trials. That varied substantially across individuals (standard deviation of 43%). Most important, participants who deferred less--who showed lower responsibility aversion--had higher leadership scores.

To validate the association between responsibility aversion and leadership, the researchers collected factual expressions of the participants’ leadership behavior (mandatory military service rank, leadership experience in scouts’ organizations).

Responsibility aversion was the only measure that significantly correlated with these expressions of leadership.

Computational modeling of the decision-preference group data and functional connectivity modeling of the fMRI group data confirmed that responsibility aversion is a key determinant of the willingness to lead.

They postulate that responsibility aversion is driven by a cognitive process that reflects an increase in the demand for certainty about the best choice when others’ welfare is affected.

Wrap Up

High-scoring leaders. Five
presidents in the Oval Office
of the White House,
7 Jan 2009. (photo from CNN)

The researchers conclude that high-scoring leaders’ preferences for risk, loss and control can vary substantially. The unifying element is that the leaders calibrate their beliefs about decision-making similarly across self and group trials.

An authoritarian leader (think Trump) with a strong preference for control would have a very narrow deferral threshold in both self and group trials; an egalitarian leader (think Obama) with a strong preference for consensus would have a rather broad deferral threshold in both self and group trials.

The study’s findings provide a conceptual framework for an individual’s decision to lead--to assume responsibility for others’ outcomes--as well as insights into the cognitive and neural mechanisms driving the choice.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of leadership and responsibility in Science: science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6401/eaat0036
Article on study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180803103257.htm

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.

So Many Lies

Welcome back. Two years ago, I highlighted a study of how partisanship and prior beliefs influenced the way people processed political misinformation (Political Fact Checking).

I introduced that blog post noting, Having grown up a staunch believer in Superman’s truth, justice and the American way, I was quite troubled by the 2015-2016 presidential primaries and election.

PolitiFact fact check rating
(www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/).

Trump’s statements in the primaries were used in two experiments that found: Once false information is in the public sphere, it is difficult to correct; reservations regarding factual information are difficult to overcome; and partisanship and Trump support were the best predictors of whether corrections to false statements would produce any change in belief.

Despite the study results, I stated that it would be interesting to see if President Trump’s continued mix of fact and fiction will have any effect on his supporters.

Unprecedented Number of Falsehoods
The Washington Post Fact Checker reported that, as of St. Patrick’s Day, President Trump made 9,179 false or misleading claims. During his first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 per day; that increased over time. Not every day was filled with falsehoods, yet some offered remarkable numbers--one had 128!

Running tally of President Trump’s false or misleading claims on all topics through 17 March 2019 (from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, see P.S.).

The New York Times published its own, more conservative list and reported: In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.

Brain’s Slippery Slope
By chance, I happened to see an MSNBC news segment in which the host had invited two cognitive neuroscientists to provide insight into Trump’s increased lying propensity.

Avoiding specific comment about the president, and without mentioning a narcissist’s tendency to lie and exaggerate, they offered possible reasons, such as covering up lies with more lies; repeating falsehoods so many times they’re considered to be true and repeated more; and the brain adapting to dishonesty, which they had investigated in a 2016 study, when both were at the University College London.

The brain adapts to
dishonesty--little
lies can escalate
(multiple websites).

In that study, they showed that the extent to which 80 volunteers engaged in self-serving dishonesty increased with repetition. Using functional MRI, they found the brain’s amygdala, which is associated with emotions, adapts to the history of dishonest behavior. Its response to lying declined with every lie; larger drops in amygdala activity predicted bigger lies.

In effect, the biological mechanism supports a slippery slope, whereby small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions.

Why Don’t the Lies Bother Everyone?
There are likely to be several explanations for why the president’s supporters don’t appear to care about his fabrications.

Clearly, some supporters believe the lies. I suppose that starts with their news sources. Driving home from my Friday trek to the supermarket, I listen to talk radio and shudder at the misinformation.

Somewhat akin to true believers would be Stephen Colbert’s truthiness--the belief or assertion that a statement is true based solely on intuition or perception.

Many forgive the lies, hoping to gain politically or just enjoying Trump’s impromptu style.

Counterfactual Thinking
A study by a London Business School researcher addressed a spinoff of forgiving the lies. Counterfactual thinking focuses on how an outcome could have turned out differently or a lie could have been true.

Counterfactual thinking (from
macrocentrics.com/2016/09/29/susie-if-only-what-if/).

The researcher conducted three experiments in which nearly 2,800 Trump and Clinton supporters judged falsehoods either aligned or misaligned with their political preferences. Although the participants knew the falsehoods were false, when they reflected on how the falsehood could have been true, they judged it as less unethical. Falsehoods aligned with their views received less condemnation; simply considering a counterfactual magnified that effect.

When Trump’s staff defends a lie by suggesting how an outcome could have turned out differently or the lie could have been true, supporters might become more accepting of the lie.

Wrap Up
Unlike previous presidents, when Trump is caught lying, he expects others to accept his alternative facts. If they don’t, he attacks and charges fake news.

Superman’s truth, justice
and the American way
doesn’t get old like
this action figure.

As a recent Brookings Institution article discussed: When a president continues to insist that his previous false statements are true, the institutions of government become corroded and democracy is undermined.

I’m still a believer in Superman’s truth, justice and the American way, and am even more troubled than I was during the primaries and election. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
The Washington Post Fact Checker database on Trump’s lies: www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/
The New York Times article on Trump’s lies vs. Obama’s: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-lies-obama-who-is-worse.html
MSNBC interview on lying: www.rawstory.com/2018/05/watch-psychologist-explains-trump-lies-much-getting-control/
2016 study of brain adapting to falsehoods in Nature Neuroscience journal: www.nature.com/articles/nn.4426
Article on 2016 study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161024134012.htm
Example articles on narcissistic personality disorder:
- psychcentral.com/disorders/narcissistic-personality-disorder/
- www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662
- www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/communication-success/201707/6-common-traits-narcissists-and-gaslighters
Wikipedia write up on truthiness: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
Study of counterfactual thoughts in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167217746152
Interview with counterfactual researcher in The New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/why-trump-supporters-dont-mind-his-lies.html
Article about Trump’s lies on The Brookings Institution website: www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/04/13/trumps-lies-corrode-democracy/

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.

Neuroticism Predicted Presidency

Given the tone and nature of Trump’s populist presidential campaign, it’s not surprising that the voters’ neurotic traits--fear, lost pride, loss aversion--could have predicted the outcome of the election. 

On 16 June 2015, Trump announced his candidacy for president, stating, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” (from video of PBS News Hour coverage, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpMJx0-HyOM, 46:33 min.)

Welcome back. An international study, led by a researcher from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology, examined the psychological factors underlying voting behavior in both the U.S. presidential election and the U.K. vote on Brexit. Bowing to space and focus, I’ll stick with the U.S. election; the methods and results were similar.

Associating politics with the Big Five personality traits--Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism--is nothing new. But the established personality correlates of voting are Openness and Conscientiousness (e.g., conservatives are typically characterized by low openness and high conscientiousness). Linking voting behavior to Neuroticism is new.

General descriptions of Big Five personality traits.
(from nobaproject.com/modules/personality-traits)

Personality Trait Data
To model the effects of Neuroticism, the researchers used personality data from the Gosling-Potter Internet Project, a noncommercial website on which people can voluntarily complete a questionnaire on socio-demographic variables, personality traits and, since 2003, zip codes.

The study’s sample population, collected between 2003 and 2015, included 3,167,041 respondents from 2,082 counties (nearly 70% of the total), averaging 1,521 respondents per county; the average age was 26 and 64% were female.

Sub-facets of Neuroticism. (from
nobaproject.com/modules/personality-traits)

The researchers focused on neurotic traits--Neuroticism as the broad trait and Anxiety and Depression as sub-facets. Trait scores were aggregated by county to relate to voting data.

Election Vote Data
Two types of election data were obtained from open sources: Trump’s share of the two-party 2016 vote and the change in the Republican share of the two-party vote from the previous presidential election, Obama vs Romney in 2012.

In modeling, the researchers attempted to control for factors which might explain voting behavior. For example, to capture the effect of a region’s industrial decline, they included the manufacturing and mining share of employment in 1970. Since racial composition can predict voting, they included the proportion of white inhabitants. For level of education, they added the proportion of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Wrap Up
Demonstrating that Trump’s populist campaign played on voters’ fears, the study found counties high in Neuroticism were more likely to vote for Trump. Neuroticism positively predicted voting behavior in electing Trump and even more so in predicting Trump’s gains over the 2012 election.

Although the effect of Neuroticism was reduced when socioeconomic control factors were added, it still persisted. Similar results were also found for the Neuroticism sub-facets Anxiety and Depression.

The researchers posited that Neuroticism may exert a “sleeper effect” and potentially have a profound impact on the geopolitical landscape with the rise of populism. Questioning whether Neuroticism can be harnessed by any political campaign, they judged that campaigns built on fear and threat are better suited to conservative than liberal campaigns. I suspect that may not be true if Trump runs again.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of Neuroticism and voting behavior in Social Psychological and Personality Science journal: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550618755874
Article on study on ScienceDaily website:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180308190807.htm
Gosling-Potter Internet Project: www.personality-project.org/

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.