Surprising insights from the social sciences
Aiding the enemy, aggressive news, and blondes raise more money
BLONDES MAY OR may not have more fun, but it does look like they raise more money. An economist analyzed data from an experiment that recruited 23 women to knock on the doors of 955 households to raise money for a "Center for Natural Hazards Mitigation Research." As part of the experiment, photos of the women were used to evaluate hair color and attractiveness. Blond women were more successful than brunettes, even if they were rated equally attractive. However, this was only true when soliciting at white households: At minority households, the blondes were penalized.
Price, M., "Fund-Raising Success and a Solicitor's Beauty Capital: Do Blondes Raise More Funds?" Economics Letters (forthcoming).
NO ONE WOULD argue that our political system is immune to corruption, but it's very hard to determine how much a typical politician would compromise his or her values for money. One challenge is distinguishing situations in which money causes a change in position (a bribe, essentially) from situations in which money simply flows to those who already support a position (a reward). Two sociologists exploited the fact that having more daughters tends to make congressmen more supportive of reproductive rights. If offspring sex ratio - an ostensibly random factor - can then account for the correlation between support for reproductive rights and subsequent political contributions from a prominent reproductive-rights interest group, then it would suggest that money follows support, rather than vice versa. The data did indeed support this view, but the authors note that more arcane issues may be more vulnerable to vote buying.
Conley, D. and McCabe, B., "Bribery or Just Desserts? Evidence on the Influence of Congressional Voting Patterns on PAC Contributions from Exogenous Variation in the Sex Mix of Legislator Offspring," National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2008).
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THE WAR IN Iraq has been one of the most contentious political issues of the last five years. But there has also been a debate about the debate: Does airing criticism of the war effort help the enemy? Two researchers at Harvard decided to investigate this question by looking at whether prominent public dissent in the United States is followed by more attacks on US forces. The researchers leveraged the fact that some areas of Iraq have more satellite dishes - the main source of news about the United States - than other areas, a disparity that should generate a greater sensitivity to what is said here. To measure dissent, the researchers counted the number of times that top Bush administration officials complained about statements or actions that could embolden the enemy. The researchers also considered the timing of the release of major public opinion polls, which are also broadcast to Iraq via satellite. The data show that the number of attacks and US military fatalities was higher after the broadcast of salient public dissent, especially as Democrats became ascendant in Washington during 2006 and 2007.
Iyengar, R. and Monten, J., "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq," National Bureau of Economic Research (March 2008).
IF YOU GREW up with an older brother or sister and thought it was a mixed blessing, there's some new research that lends credence to that sentiment. A team of economists looked at data on the extracurricular activities of 10th-graders across the United States and found an interesting pattern. Girls with an older sibling were less likely to participate in non-athletic extracurricular activities, like yearbook, newspaper, youth groups, community service, music, and art. On the other hand, boys with an older sibling were more likely to participate in athletic extracurricular activities, like baseball, football, and swimming, though they were less likely to participate in youth groups, music, or art. The gender of the older sibling did not matter. The authors believe this pattern could be due to differences in attention or support from parents, or because of the way older siblings act as role models or mentors.
Rees, D. et al., "Birth Order and Participation in School Sports and Other Extracurricular Activities," Economics of Education Review (June 2008).
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NEWS CAN BRING out the worst in people. Several experiments with college students uncovered a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde temperament among those who consumed the most news. In one experiment, glancing at a textbook with an American flag on it caused heavy news-consumers to come up with more aggressive words to complete word fragments. In another experiment, the presence of a few words invoking America among dozens of other words in a scrambled sentence puzzle caused heavy news-consumers to make more hostile and negative attributions about another person. In a third experiment, heavy news-consumers who were exposed to 17-millisecond-long images of the American flag while engaged in a tedious computer task exhibited more hostility when the computer crashed. In all the experiments, heavy news-consumers were not more aggressive unless they had been subliminally primed. Light news-consumers generally responded in the opposite way - if primed, they became less negative and hostile. These results suggest that the national news depicts matters of aggression enough to create an unconscious association with national symbols, or that the news attracts people who already hold such an association.
Ferguson, M. and Hassin, R., "On the Automatic Association Between America and Aggression for News Watchers," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (December 2007).
Kevin Lewis is a columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com.
