Wages Are Only Skin Deep – Abstract

Joni Hersch recently posted a fascinating paper, titled “Color, Discrimination, and Immigrant Pay” on SSRN.  This is her latest paper in a larger set of articles on the topic.  Here’s the abstract.

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In “Profiling the New Immigrant Worker: The Effects of Skin Color and Height,” (Journal of Labor Economics 2008), I present strong evidence of a wage penalty to darker skin color among new legal immigrants to the United States. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17 percent higher wages than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color, taking into account Hispanic ethnicity, race, country of birth, education, English language proficiency, family background, and occupation in the source country. This current paper demonstrates that the penalty to darker skin color is not a spurious consequence of omitted variables bias. Instead, discrimination on the basis of skin color is the most likely explanation of the findings.

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To download the paper for free, click here. To read some related Situationist posts, see “Colorblinded Wages – Abstract,” “Shades of Fairness and the Marketing of Prejudice,” and “Black History is Now.”

Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” – Video

At the 2007 Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference, Jennifer Eberhardt’s presentation was titled “Policing Racial Bias.” Here is the abstract for her talk.

Despite our desire to be egalitarian, racial bias fundamentally alters how we see.  In the first part of her talk, Dr. Eberhardt will focus on the implicit processing of a well-rehearsed, explicit association: the association of African Americans with criminality.  She will argue that this association influences how both ordinary citizens and police officers will perceive and analyze the people and objects they encounter.  For example, the mere presence of a Black face may enhance perceivers’ ability to detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects.  The association of Blacks with criminality may also inform decisions about where and how to look.  Thinking about crime, for example, may alert perceivers to Black faces more so than thinking about other matters.

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In the second part of her talk, Dr. Eberhardt will focus on the implicit processing of an implicit association: the association of African Americans with animals.  Despite the fact that this association is rarely discussed or consciously available, she will argue that it can alter how we see, as well.  She will conclude by presenting data demonstrating the potential importance of this particular association in the context of criminal justice.

Below you can watch a video of Eberhardt’s amazing presentation (31minutes).

Vodpod videos no longer available.

To watch similar videos, visit the video libraries on the Project on Law and Mind Sciences website (here).

For information on the Third PLMS conference (scheduled for March 7, 2009), click here.

Juliet Schor on the Situation of Consumption

Boston College sociologist (and economist) Juliet Schor is one of the confirmed presenters at the Third Annual Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference (titled “The Free-Market Mindset:  History, Psychology, and Consequences” and scheduled for March 7, 2009).

Schor’s recent work — as summarized on her website and as illustrated by her brilliant book, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture — focuses “on issues pertaining to trends in work and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women’s issues and economic justice.”

Here are two Youtube videos in which Professor Schor summarizes some of her research and writing.  In this first video (roughly 30 minutes), Schor discusses her book, Born to Buy.

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In the video below (roughly 3 minutes), Schor disccuses some of the forces detailed in two of her previous books, The Overworked American and The Overspent American.

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To learn more about this year’s Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference at Harvard Law School, click here.

The Criminal Situation of Certain Names

John Cloud of TIME Magazine has an interesting piece on a study finding that adolescent boys with unpopular names are likelier than other boys to be referred to the juvenile-justice system for alleged offenses. We excerpt it below.

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In the Shel Silverstein–penned Johnny Cash hit “A Boy Named Sue,” a father explains that he gave his son so improbable a name because “I knew you’d have to get tough or die, and it’s that name that helped to make you strong.” It turns out that your first name may also help make you a criminal.

In a new study to be published in the March issue of Social Science Quarterly, David Kalist and Daniel Lee, economists at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, find that adolescent boys with unpopular names are likelier than other boys to be referred to the juvenile-justice system for alleged offenses. The researchers conclude that the Ernests, Prestons and Tyrells of America are significantly more delinquent than the Michaels and Davids. Why? (See the top 10 crime stories of 2008.)

The short answer is that our names play an important role in shaping the way we see ourselves — and, more important, how others see us. Abundant academic literature proves these points. A 1993 paper found that most people perceive those with unconventionally spelled names (Patric, Geoffrey) as less likely to be moral, warm and successful. A 2001 paper found that we have a tendency to judge boys’ trustworthiness and masculinity from their names. (As a guy whose middle name is Ashley, I can attest to the second part.) In a 2007 paper (here’s a PDF), University of Florida economist David Figlio found that boys with names commonly given to girls are likelier to be suspended from school. And an influential 1998 paper co-authored by psychologist Melvin (a challenging first name if there ever was one) Manis of the University of Michigan reported that “having an unusual name leads to unfavorable reactions in others, which then leads to unfavorable evaluations of the self.”

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To read the rest of the piece, click here.  For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “John Darley on “Justice as Intuitions” – Video,” “The Situation of a Name,” “Jock or Nerd? Where Did You Sit at the Dinner Table?,” and “Women’s Situation in Economics.”

The Situation of Refereeing – Abstract

Vincenzo Scoppa has posted an intrguing article, “Are Subjective Evaluations Biased by Social Factors or Connections? An Econometric Analysis of Soccer Referee Decisions” (35 Empirical Economics (2008)) on SSRN.

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Many incentive contracts are based on subjective evaluations and contractual disputes depend on judges’ decisions. However, subjective evaluations raise risks of favouritism and distortions. Sport contests are a fruitful field for testing empirically theories of incentives. In this paper the behaviour of the referees in the Italian soccer (football) league (“Serie A”) is analyzed. Using data on injury (or extra) time subjectively assigned by the referee at the end of the match and controlling for factors which may influence it (players substitutions, yellow and red cards, penalty kicks, etc.), we show that referees are biased in favour of home team, in that injury time is significantly greater if home teams are losing. The refereeing bias increases greatly when there is no running track in the stadium and the crowd is close to the pitch. Following the 2006 “Serie A” scandal we test whether favouritism emerges towards teams suspected of connections with referees finding that these teams obtain favourable decisions. Social pressure by the crowd attending the match however appears to be the main cause of favouritism.

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To download the article for free, click here.  For a sample of related Situationist posts, see ” I’m Objective, You’re Biased,” “Unlevel Playing Fields: From Baseball Diamonds to Emergency Rooms,” and ” What’s Eating David Ortiz?”  To review the collection of posts on “situationist sports,” click here.

Gender and the Law – Conference

“Gender and the Law: Unintended Consequences, Unsettled Questions”

Thursday, March 12, 2009–Friday, March 13, 2009Thursday 2–5 p.m., Friday 9 a.m.–5:30 p.m., Radcliffe Gymnasium, 10 Garden Street, Radcliffe Yard, 617-495-8600
Registration is required by Monday, March 2.
Click here to register.

This event is free and open to the public.

Download a printable poster for this event.

Unsettled questions of gender and the law present a broad range of challenges in courtrooms, legislatures, and everyday lives. Laws meant to protect or promote gender equality may have unintended consequences, and laws that seem irrelevant to gender may nonetheless significantly impact gender issues. This conference will convene judges; legal practitioners; and scholars of law, the humanities, and the social sciences from around the world to explore the ways in which legal regulations and gender influence each other. From varying historical and cultural perspectives, participants will address legal encounters with gender in the essential spaces of daily life: the body, the home, school, work, the nation, and the world.

Schedule
Thursday, March 12, 2009

2 p.m.	Welcome and Introduction Barbara J. Grosz, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
2:15 p.m.	Session I: Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Conversation with Linda Greenhouse Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court Linda Greenhouse ’68, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow in Law, Yale Law School
3:15 p.m.	Break
3:30 p.m.	Session II: Gender and Schooling Convener: Martha Minow, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Panelists: Katharine T. Bartlett, A. Kenneth Pye Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law Lenora Lapidus, Director, Women’s Rights Project, American Civil Liberties Union Sandra L. Lynch, Chief Judge, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Associate Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
5 p.m.	Reception

Friday, March 13, 2009

9 a.m.	Session III: The Market, the Family, and Economic Power Convener: Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Panelists: Beshara Doumani RI ’08, Associate Professor of Middle East History, University of California at Berkeley Gillian Lester, Sidley Austin Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law Vicki Schultz RI ’01, Ford Foundation Professor of Law and the Social Sciences, Yale Law School Chantal Thomas, Professor of Law, Cornell University Law School
10:15 a.m.	Break
10:30 a.m.	Roundtable Discussion: The Market, the Family, and Economic Power (Session III continued) Convener: Margaret H. Marshall, Chief Justice, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Panelists: Lisa Duggan, Professor of American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, New York University Alice Kessler-Harris RI ’02, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University Sharon Rabin-Margalioth, Professor of Law, Radzyner School of Law at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya (Israel), and Global Visiting Professor of Law, New York University School of Law Ying Sun, Senior Consultant, Trainer, and Program Manager, TAOS Network (China) Philomila Tsoukala, Visiting Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center Mona Zulficar, Senior Partner, Shalakany Law Office (Egypt)
12:30 p.m.	Break
1:45 p.m.	Session IV: Gendered Bodies, Legal Subjects Convener: Jeannie Suk, Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Panelists: Karen Engle, Cecil D. Redford Professor in Law, University of Texas School of Law Hauwa Ibrahim RI ’09, 2008–2009 Rita E. Hauser Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Defense Lawyer, Aries Law Firm (Nigeria) Cecilia Medina Quiroga, Codirector, University of Chile Human Rights Center, and President, Inter-American Court of Human Rights Kendall Thomas, Nash Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
3:30 p.m.	Break
3:45 p.m.	Session V: Gendered States of Citizenship Convener: Jacqueline Bhabha, Director, Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies; Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer in Law, Harvard Law School; and Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School Panelists: Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of English, University of Chicago Brenda Marjorie Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, House of Lords (United Kingdom) Linda K. Kerber RI ’03, May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa Ayelet Shachar, Professor of Law and Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism, University of Toronto Faculty of Law Reva Siegel, Deputy Dean and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School
5:30 p.m.	Concluding Remarks

PlmsTube for Situationist Videos

Thanks to the outstanding work of Sara Igl, The Project on Law and Mind Sciences is proud to announce the creation of PlmsTube – a YouTube channel containing our own videos and collections of our favorites from elsewhere (many of which are also available on the multimedia page of the Project’s website). PlmsTube is a work in progress and we hope you’ll consider subscribing so that you receive notice of new videos as they become available.  Click here to take a look.

Ugly See, Ugly Do

In an article titled “Supermarket Trolleys Make Us Behave Badly,” Anjana Ahuja summarizes a fascinating study about the subconscious effects of disorder.  Here are some excerpts.

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The Cialdini effect might sound like a new mind-control trick from the illusionist Derren Brown, but it is more sinister than that. It is indeed a mind-control trick, but one that requires no tricksy showman to pull it off.

If, like me, you have ever abandoned a shopping trolley in a messy supermarket car park, then you have fallen under its subtly destructive spell and you have only your subconcious to blame.

The effect takes its name from Robert Cialdini, a American psychology professor who wrote a groundbreaking book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This was no pap psychology book; it was, appropriately enough, a highly influential work that continues to shape social psychology, that mesmerising scientific discipline which examines the sometimes irrational way we behave in our relationships with others. Cialdini showed, among other things, that people do what they see others doing, even when they know they shouldn’t.

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Now a Dutch study has shown that the Cialdini effect is only the start of our troubles. People can actually be steered into criminal behaviour, such as stealing, simply by tinkering with their environment. In fact, the scientists claim, if you know what psychological buttons to press, you can make antisocial behaviour spread like a contagious disease. The paper, which has gone virtually unnoticed beyond the academic community, should be read by anyone who cares how and why people disobey the rules of civil society.

It seems common sense that a litter-strewn, graffiti-spattered environment will suffer more petty criminality than a pristine one. . . . But, surprisingly, it has never been proven beyond reasonable doubt . . . .

And so Kees Keizer and a team of behavioural scientists from the University of Groningen designed some experiments that could settle the matter, all to be conducted secretly on Dutch streets. In the first set-up, they chose an alley near a shopping centre where people park their bikes. In the middle of the alley stood a large No Graffiti sign. Dr Keizer’s team looped flyers over the bikes’ handlebars; any cyclist would need to remove the flyer before pedalling away. Given there were no rubbish bins, would the cyclists take their litter home, or drop it on the ground? The scientists took up their spying positions, and waited.

When the alley walls were clean, 33 per cent of cyclists dropped the flyer on the pavement or put it on another bike (both counted as littering). When the scientists added graffiti and repeated the experiment on another day, 69 per cent of the cyclists littered, a far bigger difference than would be expected by chance. Could it be possible that one sign of disorder, graffiti, was triggering another undesirable behaviour, littering?

So they tested the theory another way, this time in a supermarket car park and using flyers shoved under windscreen wipers. When the car park was tidy, with all the shopping trolleys put away, 30 per cent dropped the flyers on the ground. When the car park looked chaotic, with four shopping trolleys strewn around (their handles smeared with petroleum jelly to deter shoppers from grabbing them and thus ruining the experiment), 58 per cent littered.

Despoiling the environment is one thing; stealing quite another. Dr Keizer’s team left an envelope hanging out of a postbox; the stamped and addressed envelope had a window through which could clearly be seen a five-euro note. How would passers-by, or those posting a letter, react when they saw it? The vast majority (87 per cent) either left it alone, or pushed it into the postbox. Only 13 per cent took it away (this was regarded as stealing).

But roughing up the environment had a dramatic effect. When the postbox was tagged with graffiti, 27 per cent of people stole the letter. When the postbox was surrounded by rubbish (but not graffitied), 25 per cent pocketed the cash.

The academics, who reported their startling results last month in Science, suggest that disorder does indeed beget disorder; when one social or legal norm is obviously violated, we are tempted to loosen our grip on others. Or, as Dr Keizer writes in the more precise language of psychology: “The most likely interpretation of these results is… that one disorder (graffiti or littering) actually fostered a new disorder (stealing) by weakening the goal of acting appropriately… The mere presence of graffiti more than doubled the number of people littering and stealing.”

Exactly why our capacity to act honourably melts away in nasty settings is a mystery. Dr Keizer speculates that, when the instinct to act appropriately is pushed to one side, competing instincts – such as to do what feels good or to give in to greed – take over. If we can see that bad behaviour has gone unpunished, perhaps we feel that our own lapses will go uncensured.

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To read the entire article, click here. To listen to a 22-minute interview of Robert Cialdini, click here.

For some related Situationist posts, see “The Situationist Overwhelmed with Visitors, Return Later if Necessary,” “The Situation of Body Temperature,” “Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Processes,” and Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of “The Unconscious Situation of our Consciousness.

The Situation of Legal Judgments – Abstract

Barbara O’Brien and Daphna Oyserman recently posted a draft of their paper, “It’s Not Just What You Think But Also How You Think About it: The Effect of Situationally Primed Mindsets on Legal Judgments and Decision Making” (forthcoming in 92 Marquette L. Rev. (2008)) on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

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Lawyers intuitively understand that individual differences matter for legal judgments and decision making, and that calling forth certain concepts can affect how people interpret and judge evidence. But they generally overlook the influence of mindset on those very same judgments–that is, they fail to consider how situational cues can prime a way of making sense of the world that affects how people perceive evidence and receive arguments. We present two studies demonstrating the effect of priming a particular type of mindset–a focus on either achieving success or avoiding failure–on attitudes about criminal justice policy and willingness to take action based on limited evidence in a criminal case. We then discuss other mindsets that are potentially relevant to legal judgments and decision making, offering hypotheses about their likely effects and highlighting the need for further empirical research.

Economist Stephen Marglin Thinking about Thinking Like an Economist

Harvard economist Stephen Marglin is one of the confirmed presenters at the Third Annual Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference (titled “The Free-Market Mindset:  History, Psychology, and Consequences” and scheduled for March 7, 2009).  Marglin’s recent work, as summarized on his website, focuses

“on the foundational assumptions of economics and how these assumptions make community invisible to economists. This work, reflected in his latest book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Harvard University Press, 2008), attempts to counter the aid and comfort these assumptions give to those who would construct a world in the image of economics, a world ultimately without community.”

Here are two videos in which Professor Marglin summarizes some of his work.

From ForaTV:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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From YouTube:

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To learn more about the PLMS conference or to register, click here.  To read some related Situationist posts, see “Smart People Thinking about People Thinking about People Thinking” and “Jeffrey Sachs on Our Situation – Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.”

Stereotype Lift – The Obama Effect

From Sam Dillon’s article, titled “Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers,” in yesterday’s New York Times.

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. . . [R]esearchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

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Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said.

“It’s a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study,” said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. “There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama’s election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions.”

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In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

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To read the entire article, click here.  For a sample of related Situationist posts discussing stereotype threat, see “Stereotype Threat and Performance,” “The Gendered Situation of Science and Math,” “Gender-Imbalanced Situation of Math, Science, and Engineering,” “Sex Differences in Math and Science,” “You Shouldn’t Stereotype Stereotypes,” “Women’s Situation in Economics,” and “Your Group is Bad at Math.”

Tom Tyler on “Strategies of Social Control” – Video

At the 2007 Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference, Tom Tyler’s presentation was titled “Strategies of Social Control: Motivating Rule Adherence in Organizational Settigings.” Here is the abstract for his talk.

Recent examples of abuse of authority have occurred in two types of organizational settings: corporations and the armed forces.  What strategies can be used to bring behavior in such settings into line with rules and policies about appropriate conduct?  Dr.  Tyler will talk about the value of self-regulatory approaches, examining whether they work and how to make them effective.  He will illustrate his arguments using data collected in two contexts: in a multinational corporate bank and among agents of social control (e.g., police officers, federal agents, and infantry soldiers). 

Below you can watch a video of Tyler’s fascinating presentation (in 3 roughly 9-minute videos).

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To watch similar videos, visit the video libraries on the Project on Law and Mind Sciences website (here).

For information on the Third PLMS conference (scheduled for March 7, 2009), click here.

Implicit Associations – Podcast

From the Science Podcast: Robert Frederick interviews Bertram Gawronski on how automatic mental associations predict future choices.

“Bertram Gawronski and colleagues report that they could predict the decision of 70% of those who indicated they were undecided about a controversial political issue. The prediction was based on testing people’s automatic mental associations, or how quickly people responded to and correctly categorized images and words. The results indicate that decision makers often already have made up their mind at an unconscious level, even when they consciously report they are still undecided.”

Open the file here or link to Science Podcast page here.

A Choice Worth Having

Renowned social psychologist Barry Schwartz has begun writing a blog for the Psychology Today web site called “The Choices Worth Having.”

Professor Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College.  He studies the relationship between economics and psychology, delivering startling insights into modern life.  In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice, for example, Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression?  Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s western world is actually making us miserable.

(In March Schwartz will speak about such topics at the Third Project on Law and Mind Sciences Conference at Harvard Law School in his presentation titled: “Addicted to Incentives: How the Ideology of Self Interest Can Be Self-Fulfilling.”)

On his new blog, Schwartz is writing about various issues of public concern offering his insightful perspective as a psychologist interested in the intersection of psychology and economics.  Please have a look (here), and share some of his posts with anyone who you think might be interested.  We look forward to reading his posts, and we’re confident that our readers will agree that the new blog is one of The Choices Worth Having.

Here are some excerpts from Professor Schwartz’s terrific first post, titled “A New Council of Psychological Advisors for President Obama?“

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After President Barack Obama figures out how to bring the economy out of recession, stabilize financial institutions, end two wars, and get every citizen health insurance, there is something else that he should consider: The United States needs a Council of Psychological Advisors.

This new body would parallel and complement the Council of Economic Advisors. When economists have the president’s ear, all their whispers concern incentives and self-interest. We need psychologists whispering in his other ear, about the economy, education, healthcare, and more.

On the Economy—Understand the “Irrational” Where did our financial institutions go wrong? Many accounts focus on greed, fear, and lack of trust. And why did things get so out of hand? Why was there a housing “bubble”? Somehow, “irrational exuberance” (Robert Schiller) or “animal spirits” (John Maynard Keynes) overwhelmed rational calculations of risk and reward. And it isn’t just that irrational optimism, or even blindness to market fundamentals, gets the better of our rational faculties. Rather, as George Soros has pointed out, these psychological phenomena can become part of a feedback loop that actually changes market fundamentals. “Reflexivity,” he calls it. The housing bubble was not the first such phenomenon, nor will it be the last.

Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. They also have little to tell us about how to prevent a “downward spiral of negative expectations” that makes fear of an economic downturn self-fulfilling. Economists largely make assumptions about the rationality of human decision-making and proceed from there. Witness Alan Greenspan’s recent admission that he was mistaken in assuming that markets operate rationally and efficiently. The current crisis makes it clear that ignoring the real psychology of greed, fear, trust, and irrational enthusiasm (0r pessimism) can be perilous. Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help.

On Education—More than Just Carrots and Sticks: One of President Obama’s top priorities is to improve the quality of American education. This will require recruiting and retaining excellent teachers and finding ways to motivate students. How can this worthy goal be achieved? At the moment, we’re pointing in the direction of school choice and competition to produce better schools, higher pay to produce better teachers, big tests to monitor their performance, and financial incentives to motivate students. A bunch of carrots and sticks. Will these kinds of measures be enough? Research in psychology suggests not. More important than pay (as long as it is adequate) are working conditions that allow teachers to be flexible, autonomous, and creative in their work with students, and that provide teachers with a sense that they are working in a community that has a common purpose. From this perspective, the regimentation of instruction ushered in by big-test accountability is actually counter-productive. And so is the move, now being tried in pilot projects around the country, to pay students for showing up to class and for getting good grades. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help design environments that encourage students to pursue mastery rather than money and teachers to view their work as a calling.

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Moving Beyond GDP: Finally, let us ask the most fundamental question: what is public policy for? We aim to increase collective welfare, but just what does welfare consist in? For the most part, under the sway of economic thinking, our aim has been to make the country more prosperous-to increase per capita GDP. The appeal of this goal is two-fold. First, we assume that if people are richer, they will be freer to choose as individuals the objects and activities that serve their welfare. We (the state and its technocrats) don’t have to choose for them. So wealth serves as a proxy for everything else. And second, GDP can be measured. But like a drunk looking under a lamp post for his car keys, even though he dropped them someplace else (because “that’s where the light is”), it doesn’t help much to pursue what you can measure if what you’re measuring is the wrong thing. It doesn’t help to get better at achieving goals if you’re achieving the wrong goals. Much research in the psychology of well being suggests that some wealth-enhancing policies improve welfare, but others do not. Indeed, some of what it takes to get more prosperous may be counterproductive when it comes to well being. A Council of Psychological Advisors can help here too, in the design of a system of national “psychological accounts” that does a better job of measuring well being than per capita GDP ever could.

Many of us hold out the hope that the coming Obama administration will mark a return to respect for knowledge and expertise. Agencies will be run and staffed not by political cronies, or by people who “just know in their gut” what needs to be done, or by ideologues, but by people who actually have respect for evidence. It would be a shame to bring experts on board in existing agencies, only to have them have to rely on personal intuition rather than knowledge in formulating policies and making decisions that could benefit from psychological expertise. A Council of Psychological Advisors is long overdue. This would be an excellent time to create one.

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To read the entire post, click here.  For a sample of Situationist posts discussing research by Barry Schwartz. click here.

A New Situation

From LATimes:

The Artistic Situation of U.S. Civil Rights History

Sometimes an image needs no explanation, and the cover of the new issue of The Nation seems to fit that description:

For a key to the persons in the portrait, click here.  For a diary by the artist behind the image, click here.

Take the Policy IAT

If you haven’t already (or even if you have), we invite to take, the “Policy IAT.”  We urge  individuals of all political and ideological orientations to participate in the on-line test designed to examine whether and to what extent people have implicit preferences for certain types of policy options.  Please encourage your friends (and, to those of you who are bloggers, your readers) to participate as well.

To learn more or to take the Policy IAT (a roughly 15-minute task), click here.

The Situation of a Loved One’s Clothes

Interesting piece by Linda Carroll of MSNBC on how we take comfort in the clothing worn by loved ones.  We excerpt the piece below.

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As many as three-quarters of women say they snuggle with shirts and other clothing worn by someone dear, but not near, researchers reported in a study published in the December issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Even more striking was the data on men: A full two-thirds of men admitted to cuddling with clothing.

To learn more about how ordinary people used body scents to evoke memories, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh rounded up 121 night school students. The students were asked several questions, including whether they’d ever intentionally smelled another person’s clothing to remember or feel closer to him or her, whether they’d ever slept with (or in) another person’s clothing because it smelled like him or her and whether they’d ever given an article of unlaundered clothing to a loved one because it smelled like them.

Although the students mostly reported smelling or sleeping with the clothing of a romantic partner, some said they had also gotten comfort from smelling the clothing of a child or other close relative.

The scent of love
The findings seem to run counter to what you’d expect from a culture inundated with products designed to obliterate personal scents, from deodorant to mouthwash. Even the researchers were surprised to see how many people use smell to conjure up a loved one’s memory.

“It’s the kind of thing that never really comes up in normal conversation,” says the study’s lead author, Melanie Shoup, now a doctoral student at the State University of New York at Albany. “But when I was going through high school and college, I would wear a boyfriend’s shirt to bed when I was separated from him. And when I asked my friends, they said they had done similar things.”

Some of the study subjects provided specifics, such as a father who smelled his baby daughter’s clothes to feel close to her and a woman whose boyfriend sent unlaundered shirts back from Iraq in plastic bags to preserve his scent.

Students also talked about memories evoked by a dead person’s belongings. People would say that as they were going through a relative’s clothing, the scent on the clothes would suddenly hit them. “It was almost like a presence,” Schoup says.

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To read the rest of the piece, click here.  To read an abstract of the study, click here.  To read other Situationist posts on clothing, click here.

Situationism in the Blogosphere – November 2008

Below, we’ve posted titles and a brief quotation from some of our favorite non-Situationist situationist blogging during November 2008. (They are listed in alphabetical order by source.)

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From BPS Research Digest blog: “Dazzled by digits: how we’re wooed by product specifications”

“From megapixels and gigabytes to calorie counts and sun protection factors, there’s barely a product out there that isn’t proudly boasting its enviable specs to would-be purchasers. A new study suggests these figures exert a powerful, irrational effect on consumers’ decision-making, even overriding the influence of a person’s direct experience with a product.” Read more . . .

From BPS Research Digest blog: “Rare, profound positive events won’t make you happy, but lots of little ones”

“Rather like a pond that soon returns to calm no matter the size of the stone you throw in it, psychological research has shown that people’s sense of happiness is stubbornly immovable, regardless of how good or bad the experiences one endures. . . . According to Daniel Mochon and colleagues, however, this is not the full story. Mochon’s team have tested the idea that whereas rare, massive events have no lasting effect on happiness, the cumulative effect of lots of little boosts may well have the power to influence happiness over the longer-term.” Read more . . .

From BPS Research Digest blog: “We’re better at spotting fake smiles when we’re feeling rejected”

“Bernstein’s team provoked feelings of rejection in students by asking them to write about a time they felt rejected or excluded. These students were subsequently better at distinguishing fake from real smiles as depicted in four-second video clips, than were students who’d either been asked to write about a time they felt included, or to write about the previous morning.” Read more . . .

From Everyday Sociology Blog: “Ideology”

“You probably hear the word ideology used a lot, whether it is used in political or economic discussions (or in sociology classes). But what does it really mean? Put plainly, ideology is a way of seeing the world. Ideologies are like lenses through which we view just about everything. . . .” Read more . . .

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For previous installments of “Situationism on the Blogosphere,” click on the “Blogroll” category in the right margin.

Dan Kahneman on the Situation of Well-Being

In Part II of his 2007 Hitchcock Lectures (titled “Explorations of the Mind – Well-Being: Living and Thinking About It“) , Daniel Kahneman explores meaning and causes of well-being:

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To view Part I of the lecture series, see “Dan Kahneman on the Situation of Intuition.” For a collection of videos of Dan Kahneman, click here.  For a sample of other Situationist posts related to Kahneman’s work, see “Dan Kahneman’s Situation,” “The Situation of Financial Risk-Taking,” “Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part I,” and “Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part II.”