Smile as if there is no tomorrow in your college years and your marriage is likely to be a roaring success

There is two studies!

Smile intensity in photographs predicts divorce later in life

Abstract

Based on social–functional accounts of emotion, we conducted two studies examining whether the degree to which people smiled in photographs predicts the likelihood of divorce. Along with other theorists, we posited that smiling behavior in photographs is potentially indicative of underlying emotional dispositions that have direct and indirect life consequences. In the first study, we examined participants’ positive expressive behavior in college yearbook photos and in Study 2 we examined a variety of participants’ photos from childhood through early adulthood. In both studies, divorce was predicted by the degree to which subjects smiled in their photos.

Smile as if there is no tomorrow in your college years and your marriage is likely to be a roaring success.

"Based on social–functional approaches to emotion, Harker and Keltner (2001) conducted a study examining women’s yearbook pictures at an elite institution in relation to a variety of life outcomes including health, personality, and marriage. Harker and Keltner calculated the intensity of female students’ smiles in their senior yearbook photo. Throughout their adult lives, subjects completed assessments of their well-being, personality, and marriage. 

Harker and Keltner (2001) discovered that the more intense the subject’s positive expression shown in her senior yearbook picture, the more likely that she would be married by age 27 and would have a more satisfying marriage in adulthood. Furthermore, she was more likely to be more organized, content, nurturing, compassionate, and sociable than those women with less intense smiles."

Study 2 then provided less glad tidings.

"For the first time, the current studies provide evidence that the degree to which one smiles in photographs taken in early life predicts the likelihood that a person will be divorced later in life. In Study 1, photographs taken in early adulthood predicted this life outcome; whereas, Study 2 demonstrated that photographs throughout early life predicted divorce."

It might be worth noting that no gender-specific differences in smiling were found, in case you were wondering.

"Finally, both men and women emit Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles in approximately the same proportions, indicating that one gender’s smiles are no more ‘‘artificial’’ than the other’s (Brody and Hall; Hecht and LaFrance 1998)."

(PDF) Smile intensity in photographs predicts....

"Eating meat creates toxic masculinity"

All I have to say is she really needs some meat.

H/T Wirecutter

What is money?

Ryan Grim interviews Stephanie Kelton, economic adviser for Bernie Sanders 2016, about MMT by popular demand from our audience. There will be time for questions & answers. MMT = Modern Monetary Theory.

Hitler disappoints again. "Our findings suggest that Hitler’s speeches, while rationally targeted, had a negligible impact on the Nazis’ electoral fortunes."

What a loser. That was probably the reason he finally set an end to his life. Such was life in the Reich.

Examining a Most Likely Case for Strong Campaign Effects: Hitler’s Speeches and the Rise of the Nazi Party, 1927–1933

Abstract

Hitler’s rise to power amidst an unprecedented propaganda campaign initiated scholarly interest in campaign effects. To the surprise of many, empirical studies often found minimal effects. The predominant focus of early work was on U.S. elections, though. Nazi propaganda as the archetypal and, in many ways, most likely case for strong effects has rarely been studied. We collect extensive data about Hitler’s speeches and gauge their impact on voter support at five national elections preceding the dictatorship. We use a semi-parametric difference-in-differences approach to estimate effects in the face of potential confounding due to the deliberate scheduling of events. Our findings suggest that Hitler’s speeches, while rationally targeted, had a negligible impact on the Nazis’ electoral fortunes. Only the 1932 presidential runoff, an election preceded by an extraordinarily short, intense, and one-sided campaign, yielded positive effects. This study questions the importance of charismatic leaders for the success of populist movements.

Reading Lounge

1. Trump stars

2. See Ancient Greek Music Accurately Reconstructed for the First Time

3. YOU ARE NOT ORIGINAL OR CREATIVE ON INSTAGRAM - kinda sucks, right?

4. It wasn’t just hate. Fascism offered robust social welfare

5. "Rozenberg wanted to find a way to highlight the gender biases embedded in architectural terms learned by technology, to make it easier to produce "post-gender architecture". - switch off your BS detector

6. The Chinese broadcaster quoted Turkish economist Emre Alkin: “Stability for the Turkish Lira will come from cooperation with valuable countries like China ..."

"Generally, in line with the findings of Pennycook et al., we found that religiosity correlated positively with a tendency to perceive meaningfulness in bullshit sentences."

Admit it, you were biting your fingernails and were waiting for this study. Guess what, the wait is over.

This is a highly recommended paper about bullshit sensitivity, sort of for intellectuals who inhabit the fringes of The Far Side.

To be sure, it does not deal with ordinary bullshit like the one politicians base their whole career on, this is about "pseudo-profound bullshit". Economists spring to mind.

As is mandatory for any serious and meaningful scientific study a definition is needed. Here it is:

"Seemingly impressive statements that are presented as meaningful or true but are actually vacuous (e.g. “Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity”) have been called pseudo-profound bullshit. Bullshit-statements are (a) constructed absent any concern for the truth and (b) do not consistently have any unambiguous meaning."

Good, now it needs to be remembered that in any form of communication we need to distinguish carefully between

Bullshit-receptivity, profoundness-receptivity and bullshit-sensitivity 

As noted by Pennycook and colleagues [1], the tendency to perceive bullshit sentences as meaningful, which is called bullshit-receptivity, is different from bullshit-sensitivity, which refers to the ability to distinguish bullshit sentences from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence”). Perceived meaningfulness ofgenuinely profound sentences and bullshit sentences are generally positively related (e.g. r = .38 and r = .43 in [1]; and r = .52 in [6]), which means that bullshit-receptivity could reflect either a general inclination to perceive any sentence or statement as meaningful or a propensity to perceive specifically bullshit sentences as meaningful. Bullshit-sensitivity, on the other hand, represents the ability to tell apart the pseudo-profound from the actually profound. In Pennycook’s original article [1], two of the four studies included bullshit-sensitivity calculated by subtracting bullshit-receptivity from profoundness-receptivity (i.e. the perceived meaningfulness ofgenuinely profound sentences), and although it was associated with lower paranormal belief, the results regarding bullshit-sensitivity were less conclusive than those regarding bullshit-receptivity. Because there are inherent scaling problems with variables made out ofdifference-scores [9], we opted to focus on bullshit-receptivity and profoundnessreceptivity in the analyses, inferring bullshit-sensitivity indirectly. If both bullshit- and profoundness-receptivity are positively (or negatively) associated with e.g. prosocial behavior, this suggests that it is the general inclination to perceive anything as meaningful that relates to prosocial behavior. On the contrary, if bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity predict prosocial behavior in opposite directions, this suggests that it is the ability to distinguish bullshit from the actually profound (i.e. bullshit-sensitivity) that relates to prosocial behavior.

You are all set now and ready to go.

Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

Arvid Erlandsson, Artur Nilsson, Gustav Tinghög, Daniel Västfjäll

Abstract

Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

Discussion 

This study is the first to demonstrate that individual differences in how people react to pseudo-profound bullshit statements and to actually profound statements predict their behavior. People with high bullshit-receptivity (i.e. those who find pseudo-profound bullshit statements such as “the unexplainable touches on the inherent experiences ofthe universe” to be highly meaningful) were overall less likely to engage in prosocial behavior than people with low bullshit-receptivity. Conversely, people with high profoundness-receptivity (i.e. those who think that actually profound statements such as “your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in” are highly meaningful), were overall more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than those with low profoundness-receptivity. 

This pattern emerged both when prosocial behavior was assessed in terms ofparticipants’ self-reported donation experience (whether or not they have donated to charity in the past year) and, even clearer, when it was measured in terms ofparticipants’ likelihood to volunteer in order to raise money to charity. For the most part, it also held up well when controlling for potential intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, education, religiosity, age, and time spent completing the survey. In addition to this, the fact that we had over a thousand participants from a roughly nationally representative Swedish sample, gives us further reason to think that the obtained relations between bullshit- and profoundness-receptivity and prosocial behavior are robust and generalizable. 

The take-home message of this article is that although bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity were positively correlated with each other, they yet correlated in opposite directions with prosocial behavior, which suggests that it is primarily individual differences in bullshit-sensitivity (the ability to distinguish the pseudo-profound from the actually profound), and not individual differences in the propensity to perceive any given sentence as meaningful, that positively predict prosocial behavior.

Pdf is highly recommended.

"It is a general stylized fact that girls underperform in math; this constitutes one of the most resistant gender gaps of modern societies. We show that this specific handicap has been sharply attenuated in East Germany."

In those rare individual cases 

where women approach genius 

they also approach masculinity.

Otto Weininger - Sex and Character

A sentimental glance back into history.

Math, girls and socialism (Pdf)

Quentin Lippmann & Claudia Senik

Abstract:

This paper argues that the socialist episode in East Germany, which constituted a radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances, has left persistent tracks on gender norms. We focus on one of the most resilient and pervasive gender gaps in modern societies: mathematics. Using the German division as a natural experiment, we show that the underperformance of girls in math is sharply reduced in the regions of the former GDR, in contrast with those of the former FRG. We show that this East–West difference is due to girls’ attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. We also provide illustrative evidence that the gender gap in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe. The lesson is twofold: (1) a large part of the pervasive gender gap in math is due to social stereotypes; (2) institutions can durably modify these stereotypes.

Conclusions 

The claim of this paper is that the socialist episode has exerted long lasting multidirectional effects on women’s expectations, self-confidence and choices. Previous studies have shown that women’s attachment to paid work was greater in East Germany. This paper extends the same conjecture to girls’ appetence for mathematics and achievement therein. It is a general stylized fact that girls underperform in math; this constitutes one of the most resistant gender gaps of modern societies. We show that this specific handicap has been sharply attenuated in East Germany. Even in recent years, girls’ performance in math, as measured by international standardized PISA scores, is closer to that of boys in the regions of the former GDR, as opposed to the former FRG. Evidence from the international standardized PISA scores, the International Mathematical Olympiads and International Chess competitions, suggest that the gender gap in math and math-minded competitions is generally smaller in countries of the former Soviet bloc, as opposed to other European countries. We interpret this stylized fact as a legacy of socialist institutions and policies that enacted, in a particularly compelling way, the objective of female full-employment. Policies that facilitated labor market participation and maternity for women were accompanied by official propaganda sustaining stereotypes of professionally active women, whose work was praised as a political engagement in the construction of socialism. Overall, this normative pressure changed the conception of gender roles and identity in many dimensions, including girls’ school curricula and performance.