Surprising insights from the social sciences
Baby smarts, the upside of binge drinking, and why you should cross your arms more often
PSYCHOLOGISTS IN EUROPE have found that your height can affect your propensity to jealousy. They asked men and women to indicate how jealous they were in their current relationships and how jealous they would be if they saw their partner talking to someone of the opposite sex. Taller men exhibited less jealousy. But for women, being of average height was associated with lower jealousy, apparently because average height confers better health and reproductive success in women, giving them less to worry about. There was an exception to this rule, though. When confronted with more dominant and higher-status rivals, average-height women were the more jealous ones. It could be that taller women gain some security from being perceived as stronger, which may reflect the idea that, at least in primitive cultures, women literally fought over men.
Buunk, A. et al., "Height Predicts Jealousy Differently for Men and Women," Evolution and Human Behavior (March 2008).
IF YOU'RE A new parent and you're not sure how much to save for your child's college expenses, new research implies that there's at least one way to determine if a six-figure Ivy League tuition may lie in your future. Back in the 1980s, psychologists tested a group of 6- to 12-month-old infants. The infants were shown pictures. Later, the infants were shown those same pictures, but paired with new pictures they hadn't seen. The researchers recorded how long the infants looked at each picture. The idea is that selective attention to novelty (i.e., the new picture) is a good proxy for intelligence. Fast forward 20 years, and the researchers were able to reestablish contact with many of the same individuals and collect new data on their years of education and adult IQ. Both of these measures exhibited a high correlation with the infant IQ tests. In addition, with other data from IQ tests administered at 3 years old, the researchers were able to conclude that "IQ from 3 to 21 years appears to be quite stable and achievement at 21 years is predicted about as well by the IQ estimate at 3 years as it is by IQ at 21 years."
Fagan, J. et al., "The Prediction, from Infancy, of Adult IQ and Achievement," Intelligence (May-June 2007).
PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE can agree that binge drinking is bad - it leaves people out of control and thus a danger to themselves and others - and this is especially true for those not of age. Recently, though, two economists observed an intriguing pattern. They analyzed data on thousands of individuals who were surveyed in high school and again a decade later. Among males who were later employed, those who had reported binge drinking in high school earned wages 6 percent higher than those who had not reported binge drinking. Although it is not clear exactly what is responsible for this relationship, the authors believe that for those males whose binge drinking does not coincide with other bad behaviors (like illegal drug use), binge drinking is correlated with socializing at parties and thus reflects inherent social ability that gets rewarded in the job market.
Chatterji, P. and DeSimone, J., "High School Alcohol Use and Young Adult Labor Market Outcomes," National Bureau of Economic Research (September 2006).
FOR MOST PEOPLE, stocks are those numbers they always hear about on the news, but there is another world of stocks - known as private equity - that is off-limits to the general public. Private equity funds invest for the elite - pension funds, university endowments, the super wealthy. But the managers of these funds are not obligated to disclose their investments, so there has always been some mystery surrounding how well they perform. A new study finds that private equity funds actually do worse than the S&P 500, a benchmark index of stocks available to the general public. An important reason for this underperformance is the fact that fund managers can end up skimming off more than 25 percent of the fund as a fee for their services. The study does find that some funds do consistently better than the average, but it's not clear why most funds underperform. The authors speculate that there may be enough mystery surrounding fund performance to keep new money rolling in, or that perhaps university endowments and pension funds have other interests that temper their focus on maximizing financial return.
Phalippou, L. and Gottschalg, O., "The Performance of Private Equity Funds," Review of Financial Studies (forthcoming).
SCIENTISTS ARE INCREASINGLY finding that gesturing while you think can actually improve your performance, but it's worth remembering that different gestures produce different effects. Now, research suggests that crossing your arms makes you persevere. In two experiments, psychologists asked people to solve anagrams while either crossing their arms or placing their arms over their thighs. In both conditions, people were told to close their hands and maintain a straight posture. People could move their arms only when submitting an answer. Those whose arms were crossed persisted longer on an unsolvable anagram and performed better on solvable anagrams as a result of greater persistence.
Friedman, R. and Elliot, A., "The Effect of Arm Crossing on Persistence and Performance," European Journal of Social Psychology (April/May 2008).
Kevin Lewis is a columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com.
