Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you life. Using extensive survey and government data on thousands of people, an economist found that people who have earned more are much less likely to die. In fact, poor middle-age men have mortality rates many times that of their affluent peers. Worse, this disparity has increased over time, for both men and women. The life expectancy of poor women has actually declined, even as it has increased for affluent women. One possible explanation for this trend is that lifestyles are becoming increasingly different for people of different socio-economic status. Another explanation is that there is increasing inequality in access to healthcare.
Cristi, J., “Rising Mortality and Life Expectancy Differentials by Lifetime Earnings in the United States,” Journal of Health Economics (forthcoming).
How to get to ‘yes’
Some people are great negotiators, but, for the rest of us, it can easily be a negative experience. Two psychologists have found one way to grease the wheels: get people to focus on the big picture. In a mock negotiation experiment, people who were asked to think about the issues involved in the negotiation in a more abstract way were more likely to offer quid-pro-quo tradeoffs that ultimately resulted in win-win outcomes. People who were asked to think about the issues in terms of concrete details were more likely to focus on one issue at a time.
Henderson, M. & Trope, Y., “The Effects of Abstraction on Integrative Agreements: When Seeing the Forest Helps Avoid Getting Tangled in the Trees,” Social Cognition (June 2009).
The color that makes you dim
Red alert! Before taking a test, make sure you don’t see red. In a series of experiments, students were presented with an incidental instance of the word “red” before taking a test. In the first experiment, students were asked to take an analogy test and were told that they would be placed in the “red group” or the “place group” to facilitate data entry. In the second experiment, students also took an analogy test, but “red” or “gray” was subtly introduced as part of the answer to one of the sample questions in the instructions. In the third experiment, students took a numeric test, with either “red” or “gray” only visible in the copyright statement at the bottom corner of the first few pages of the test. The fourth experiment was the same as the third, except that “gray” was replaced with “green,” and the students had to answer questions about their emotions right after the test. Across all experiments, the students in the “red” conditions performed worse. Answers to the emotional questions suggest that exposure to the word “red” caused the students to worry more, which was largely responsible for the performance drop.
Lichtenfeld, S. et al., “The Semantic Red Effect: Processing the Word Red Undermines Intellectual Performance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).
Violence doesn’t sell
In the quest to be a more creative thinker, here’s an idea: be distant. Students at Indiana University were given two tests, one that ostensibly tested “linguistic skills” and another that tested creative problem-solving. For some students, the test was described as being developed locally in Indiana; for the other students, the test was described as being developed far away, in another state or country. Students did significantly better on either test when it was described as having been developed far away. Thus, the subtle suggestion of psychological distance seems to help people think outside the box.
Jia, L. et al., “Lessons from a Faraway Land: The Effect of Spatial Distance on Creative Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).
Way, way, way outside the box
Amid the ongoing debate about media violence, it is generally assumed that violence, like sex, sells. However, a new study challenges this assumption. Researchers randomly assigned hundreds of college students to view graphic, non-graphic, or completely nonviolent versions of popular TV dramas (“24,” “The Sopranos,” “The Shield,” “OZ,” or “Kingpin”). Not only was the nonviolent version of each program enjoyed more than either violent version, but, contrary to even the expectations of the researchers, men, aggressive people, and sensation-seekers also enjoyed the nonviolent version more. Although action was positively associated with enjoyment, it seems that the addition of violence is more of a creative norm in Hollywood than an imperative of the market - indeed, Hollywood may be paying a price for such creative license.
Weaver, A. & Wilson, B., “The Role of Graphic and Sanitized Violence in the Enjoyment of Television Dramas,” Human Communication Research (July 2009).
Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com. 
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