How sunny weather lowers the college admissions bar, and more
 (Wesley Bedrosian) |
How sunny weather lowers the college admissions bar, and more
AS IF HIGH school seniors didn't have enough to worry about: the odds of getting into a college are affected by the weather on the day their applications are reviewed, a recent study suggests. The author of the study gained access to 682 applicant files, each with 16 different academic and extracurricular ratings, along with recommendations from two reviewers. The applicant's file also included the date each reviewer's recommendation was made, which allowed the author to link the recommendations to the weather. (The admissions offices, the author verified, all had windows.) Applications reviewed on the sunniest days were more than 10 percent likelier to be accepted, and the good weather prompted reviewers to give less weight to academic achievement.
Simonsohn, U., "Clouds Make Nerds Look Good: Field Evidence of the Impact of Incidental Factors on Decision Making," Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (April 2007).
CHESS IS A man's game. Not only do men vastly outnumber women in competition, but the perception that men are better seems to make women play worse. After confirming that there is a widely held stereotype - shared by men and women - that men are better at chess, researchers set up a chess tournament on the Internet to match comparably ranked men and women against each other. When the players were unaware of their opponent's gender, women played just as well as men. When the women were told that they would be playing a man and "that recent studies had shown that men earn clearly superior scores than women in chess games," their performance was cut in half. Their performance did not suffer if they were told they were playing against another woman, even if they were actually playing a man. The researchers found the women's performance drop was caused by a change in their style of play: they became less confident and aggressive, and more defensive.
Maass, A. et al., "Checkmate? The Role of Gender Stereotypes in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport," European Journal of Social Psychology (March/April 2008).
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ONE OF THE many firestorms in this year's presidential campaign erupted when Barack Obama described the reaction of a "typical white person" to the presence of a black man on the street. Some people protested that this was an unfair stereotype of white people. Nevertheless, a new study by a team of psychologists validates at least a fraction (of a second) of the stereotype. In an experiment, white people were shown a fleeting image of two faces - one white, one black - on a screen. They were then asked to locate an object, which appeared behind one of the two faces. The participants tended to find the object faster when it appeared behind a black man's face, suggesting that their attention had immediately oriented in that direction. However, the effect disappeared if the image of the black man's face showed eyes averted to the side - an unthreatening expression. So the "typical white person" may indeed be threatened by the sight of a black man on the street.
Trawalter, S. et al., "Attending to Threat: Race-Based Patterns of Selective Attention," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).
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A CENTRAL QUESTION in the debate about the death penalty is whether executions deter crime. There is extensive research on this question, with mixed results. But one economist is using new statistics to try to advance the debate. Her research looks at the impact of executions in Texas on daily homicide rates at the local level in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Such an approach is necessary if would-be murderers must hear about executions to be deterred by them and if one is more likely to hear about executions of locally convicted murderers, especially given that the local media is more likely to cover those executions. She finds no consistent evidence that executions deter would-be murderers.
Hjalmarsson, R., "Does Capital Punishment Have a 'Local' Deterrent Effect on Homicides?" American Law and Economics Review (forthcoming).
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HOPE MAY BE audacious, but it's also productive. Two researchers wanted to see how powerful a role hope plays in people's careers. Hope, they reasoned, can be thought of as not just a passive emotion, but as a set of attitudes: Hopeful people are those who are determined to reach goals and actively plan to reach them. They found that retail sales associates, mortgage brokers, and management executives who were more "hopeful" were more successful in meeting sales quotas, processing loans, and achieving quarterly targets, respectively. Hope correlated with performance above and beyond the effect of confidence or intelligence; indeed, for executives, it was the most significant factor. In another study, the researchers gave a group of executives two weeks to come up with solutions for a job-related problem scenario. The more hopeful executives generated more and better solutions.
Peterson, S. and Byron, K., "Exploring the Role of Hope in Job Performance: Results from Four Studies," Journal of Organizational Behavior (forthcoming).
Kevin Lewis is a columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com.
