Research Blogging - Social Science - English

I'm Older and I Have More Insurance

2012-05-25T13:02:48Z

If you've seen the 1991 movie Fried Green Tomatoes then you will remember this wonderful scene:Believe it or not, this scene actually relates to today's post about territorial behavior in parking lots.You are probably familiar with the concept of territorial behavior. In animals it typically involves occupying a defined territory and marking and defending it against interlopers. This territory is desirable because it contains resources (food, mates, etc.). However, there can be risk involved in defending this territory, risk that must be weighed in a sort of cost-benefit analysis. If the risk is low you defend the territory and if it is too high you flee it. Now what about public territories? Those places that do not belong to any one individual but instead an individual occupies a portion of it for a short period of time. In this case the territory is less important to the individual, and they only have minimal rights to occupy it. However, individuals occupying space in a public territory can show some territoriality. If you get a little more psychological with this train of thought then you start using terms such as "symbolic value," "identity," "control," and "competence." Basically, this is a way of explaining why an individual may defend a territory even if there is nothing to be protected or gained. And that is where we pick up the parking lot study.An older paper published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology tested these territorial behaviors in people leaving parking lots. The video example is of Evelyn Couch entering a parking lot and looking for territory. Here, the researchers are interested in whether the occupants of parking spaces defended those spaces even though their task at the location was complete and the space/territory no longer served any purpose for them. As with many psychological papers, this was broken down into three studies.Study 1: Do departing drivers take longer to leave their parking spaces when someone is waiting for the space?Here, the researchers observed 200 drivers in a mall parking lot and timed how long it took them to leave their parking spaces. The spaces were of prime real estate, in terms of mall parking, being the closest 52 spaces (excluding handicapped spaces) to the mall entrance. They started timing from when the departing shopper opened their car door until they had completely left the parking space, also noting if another driver was waiting for the departing driver's space. They also noted if the departing driver turned their head toward the waiting driver. They found that departing drivers took longer to leave their parking spaces if someone else was waiting for it. From this study it is unclear as to why they took longer. Sure, it could have been territoriality, but it also could have been caution to prevent collisions, distraction, or all sorts of other reasons.Study 2: Do departing drivers take longer to leave their spaces because they are territorial or because of some other reason?To test this they looked at four intrusion conditions (intrusion being the waiting car) in comparison to a no-intrusion condition. They also tested the distraction hypothesis by having someone drive by the subjects, independent of whether there was a car waiting for the space or not. They also tested the level of intrusion by having someone honk or not honk their horns. This study also found that drivers took longer to leave their parking spaces when another driver was waiting, regardless of the added distraction of a another car passing by. These departing drivers also took longer when the waiting driver was honking at them versus when they were not honking. Additionally, they found that male drivers took longer to leave than female drivers if the waiting car was of lower status or value than theirs. All findings that suggest territorial behavior.Study 3: Are people aware of how a waiting driver affects how much time they take leaving a parking space?In this study, the researchers gave questionnaires to 100 people who had parked at a shopping mall. This questionnaire contained scales that allowed the drivers to rate how they would feel while leaving a parking lot under three conditions: with no one waiting, with one driver waiting, and with a driver waiting who honks their horn. They also rated their beliefs about how a driver waiting for their space and and honking driver waiting for their space would affect how long it would take them and others to leave. The survey results showed that people recognized their territorial behaviors but would leave faster if a car were waiting for them but not if that car honked at them.I gotta say that if someone was sitting behind my car honking their horn at me to move faster that I would take my sweet time too. I don't even like that slow, creepy-, stalker-follow people do when they see you walking to your car. I'm tempted to weave through the aisles just to get them to stop.Next I'd like to find a study that looks at how well people park between the lines in a parking space and how much space they leave on either side. If I have to crawl in through the passenger side of my car one more time I might start handing out tickets for parking like a jackass.Ruback, R., & Juieng, D. (1997). Territorial Defense in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 27 (9), 821-834 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1997.tb00661.x...

Ruback, R., & Juieng, D. (1997) Territorial Defense in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 27(9), 821-834. DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1997.tb00661.x

Is the influence of classic writers on modern ones diminishing?

2012-05-23T17:50:00Z

Late last year, some researchers in the U.S. conducted a study that tried to determine the changing literary influences on writers, and the story seemed to be making the rounds on the news last week. The essential thesis is this: the influence of classic writers on our contemporaries is not what it used to be. Put in those terms, it sounds rather condemning, as though today’s writers are not reading up on their Chaucer and Milton and so are less culturally informed. That’s certainly how it’s been reported, but what did the researchers really mean? And is the claim even true? The paper’s basic purpose was to conduct the first large-scale stylometric analysis of literature throughout different periods (i.e. an analysis of different writers’ linguistic styles), which they achieved thanks to the marvellous resources of Project Gutenberg. The most important facet of the study, with the greatest ramifications on the conclusions we can draw from it, is that they focused on content-free words, which they defined as: “the ‘syntactic glue’ of a language: they are words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning.” Such words include and, but, to, and of. They narrowed their analysis to 537 authors, all of whom had at least 5 works on Project Gutenberg, though given the copyright laws that govern the texts they’re allowed to archive, they ranged from 1550-1952. Through some fancy linguistic equations and mathematical analysis, they were able to determine that the stylistic influences of preceding writers on their successors has diminished considerably in recent times. However, it’s extremely important to recognise that this concerns stylistic influence - the ands, buts, and ofs that a writer uses. This is how we can estimate the historical position of a line of Joyce and a line of Shakespeare without knowing exactly who we’re reading. It has little to do with the content of their works - their ideas, stories, and arguments - which bear no relation to their sentence structures. It’s quite misleading to even call the effects on style an “influence”, as a writer’s idiosyncratic use of prepositions and conjunctions is more likely a product of the natural evolution of language, driven by many complex social factors, than by the books they read. Of course, their analysis presented a continuous range of texts spanning 400 years, but to make a statement about anything “modern”, it’s necessary to determine an arbitrary boundary between that and “old” texts. While you or I might intuitively draw this line around 1900, the authors explicitly stated their “modern” writers as extending from 1784, so the results cannot be said to demonstrate an effect that is unique to the writers of today and yesterday - this goes right back to the end of the 18th century. They did go on to make further subdivisions, but this graph from their article demonstrates a paucity of data in some areas despite the number of books they covered: Here we see that the vast majority of analysis was concentrated on works from around 1830-1930. There were far fewer works from the decades straddling either side of that period, and an extremely small amount from before 1750. So what exactly can we learn from this paper? Not much. They’re right to suggest that it provides a statistical basis for the common perception that there exist “literary styles of the time”, but these regard linguistic style, not ideological influence or familiarity with classic literature. Our contemporary writers are perfectly able to read as much classic fiction as their forebears while demonstrating smaller amounts of linguistic influence. The reasons for the diminished effect are also inconclusive - while it is most strongly implied that it has to do with reading habits and aesthetic movements, it’s conceivable that the effects of linguistic influence, particularly in English, have been greatly affected by globalisation - a factor not taken into account. So don’t worry, the writers of today are not necessarily ignorant of their cultural heritage, it’s just journalists once again making tangential, unsubstantiated assumptions about a research article that the researchers gave them no cause for making. ————— Hughes JM, Foti NJ, Krakauer DC, & Rockmore DN (2012). ‘Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (20), 7682-6 PMID: 22547796...

Hughes JM, Foti NJ, Krakauer DC, & Rockmore DN. (2012) 'Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature'. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(20), 7682-6. PMID: 22547796

Rich People May Not Be So Unethical

2012-05-23T14:47:31Z

There was quite the stir a few weeks back about a psychology paper claiming that rich people aren't very nice: Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. The article, in PNAS, reported that upper class individuals were more likely to lie, cheat, and break traffic laws.However, these results have been branded "unbelievable" in a Letter to PNAS just published. Psychologist Gregory Francis notes that the paper contains the results of 7 seperate experiments, and they all found statistically significiant socioeconomic effects on unethical behaviour.Those 7 replications of the effect "might appear to provide strong evidence for the claim" - one study good, 7 studies better, right? - but Francis says that actually, it's too good to be believed.Each of the studies was fairly small, and the effects they found were modest, and only just significant. So the observed power of the studies - the probability that a study of that size would detect the effect that they did, in fact, find - was only about 50-88% in each case.Think of it this way: if you took a pack of cards and discarded half of the black ones, then shuffled the remainder, a random card from the deck would most likely be red. But even so, it would still be very unlikely that you'd pick 10 reds in a row.The chances of all 7 studies finding a positive result - even assuming that the effect claimed in the paper was real - is just 2%, by Francis's calculations.Ow.He concludes "The low probability of the experimental findings suggests that the data are contaminated with publication bias. Piff et al. may have (perhaps unwittingly) run, but not reported, additional experiments that failed to reject the null hypothesis (the file drawer problem), or they may have run the experiments in a way that improperly increased the rejection rate of the null hypothesis (4)".What might have happened? Maybe there were more than 7 studies and... maybe they peeked at the data before deciding on the same size, took other outcome measures unreported. See also the 9 Circles of Scientific Hell.Piff et al respond, firmly denying that they ran any other unpublished experiments, and saying that they "scrutinized our data collection procedures, coding protocols, experimental methods, and debriefing responses. In no case have we found anything untoward." They go on to criticize the method Francis used to get his magic 2% figure, which they point out relies on some debatable assumptions.Even if you buy the 2% figure, it doesn't mean that the true effect is zero; it might be real, but exaggerated. Ultimately it all becomes rather murky and subjective, which is why I think we need preregistration of research, which would prevent any possibility of such data fiddling, and also remove the possibility of false accusations of it... but that's another story.Francis, G. (2012). Evidence that publication bias contaminated studies relating social class and unethical behavior Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1203591109...

Francis, G. (2012) Evidence that publication bias contaminated studies relating social class and unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1203591109

Snakes Deceive to Get a Little Snuggle

2012-05-23T14:09:25Z

A lone red-sided garter snake. Photo by Tracy Langkilde.The red-sided garter snake is a small snake species with the largest and most northern distribution of all reptiles in North America. These northern ranges can get quite cold for any animal, let alone a reptile. Like most reptiles, they are ectotherms, meaning they regulate their body temperature largely by exchanging heat with their environment. If an animal gets almost all of its body heat from a cold environment, its body is also going to be cold… So what is a poor red-sided garter snake to do?Red-sided garter snakes that live in the northern end of their range in Manitoba, Canada spend their cold-season (6-8 months of it) hibernating in underground dens called hibernacula. Tens of thousands of snakes may share a winter den and every spring, they emerge to mate and eat and do all the other fun things that snakes do when they’re awake. (If you would like to witness the spectacular sight that is the emergence of the garter snakes, it is occurring this month in the world-famous snake-watching Interlake region of Manitoba).A whole lotta red-sided garter snakes in a spring-mating frenzy. Photo by Tracy Langkilde.When a snake first emerges from its groggy hibernation state its body is cold and movements are sluggish, which puts it at a high risk of predation from animals like crows and weasels. Females are generally at less risk of predation at this time because emergence-time is also sexy-time for this species and females generally find themselves in the middle of a writhing ball of already-warmed-up male suitors (appropriately called a mating ball). For the female, this both increases her body temperature faster (which will allow her to move faster sooner) and provides any would-be predators with many other snakes to choose from.Female red-sided garter snakes produce a male-attracting pheromone (a chemical released by an animal that affects the physiology and/or behavior of other individuals of the same species). Researchers Rocky Parker and Robert Mason at Oregon State University found that the amount of pheromone females produce increases as the females hibernate from fall to spring. This pheromone is a blend of saturated and unsaturated methyl ketones (molecules responsible for many natural odors and flavors) and males are more strongly attracted to the unsaturated components. The chemical composition of the female pheromone also changes from fall to spring, such that female spring pheromones are dominated by these highly attractive unsaturated pheromone components. Presumably, the sexier the pheromone, the more suitors are attracted and the more benefits a recently-emerged female can acquire.It seems that this smell-sexy-and-create-mating-ball strategy is a useful solution for recently-emerged females, but what about recently-emerged males? Parker and Mason collected courting male red-sided garter snakes and brought them into the lab. Then they either implanted them with estrogen (a sex hormone strongly involved in female sexual physiology and behavior) or did not (as a control group). Males with estrogen implants produced more pheromones, had higher ratios of unsaturated pheromone components to saturated pheromone components, and were more attractive to courting males. When the researchers removed the estrogen implants from some of the males, they became less attractive again. So in the lab, estrogen treatment of males makes them produce more female-like pheromones that other courting males respond to. This shows that males are capable of using this smell-sexy-and-create-mating-ball strategy, but do they use it in nature? This graph shows the amount of courtship received by females, "she-males", and "he-males" when either cold or hot. Figure from Shine, Langkilde and Mason's Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Paper (2012). Robert Mason at Oregon State University and Rick Shine and Tracy Langkilde at the University of Sydney, Australia collaborated to explore this relationship between temperature and male production of female-like pheromones. It turns out, male red-sided garter snakes in nature can and do produce female-like pheromones when they emerge from their den. Shine, Langkilde and Mason collected some of these males that were being courted by other males (the researchers refer to them as “she-males”). They also collected some males that were courting females (they called them “he-males”) and some females. They then exposed the snakes to different temperatures for 15-minute intervals and tested their attractiveness to other courting males. This graph shows the amount of courtship received by "she-males" when cooled (open circles) and heated (filled circles) for 15-minute intervals. Figure from Shine, Langkilde and Mason's Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Paper (2012). The researchers found that females were courted the most, “he-males” the least, and “she-males” were courted an intermediate amount. Interestingly, “she-males” only attracted courtship when they were cold (and their chances of survival could be improved by a mating ball) and their attractiveness shifted with every 15-minute shift in temperatures. How did they do this? 15 minutes is probably not enough time for a hormonal change to alter the pheromone composition enough to change attractiveness so drastically.An important clue comes from the composition of the pheromones themselves. Remember that red-sided garter snake pheromones are a blend of saturated and unsaturated methyl ketones and males are more strongly attracted to pheromones that have a high ratio of unsaturated components to saturated components. Well, saturated and unsaturated fats respond differently to cold: Unsaturated fats (like cooking oil) remain a liquid at cooler temperatures, whereas saturated fats (like margarine) become solid. Solids are less volatile than liquids, which makes them not smell as much. Shine, Langkilde and Mason hypothesize that the ratio of unsaturated to saturated ketones is lower in “she-males” than in females. In the cold, the high amount of saturated components of the “she-male” pheromone is turned off, which raises the ratio of unsaturated to saturated ketones, making them a...

Shine, R., Langkilde, T., & Mason, R. (2012) Facultative pheromonal mimicry in snakes: “she-males” attract courtship only when it is useful. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 66(5), 691-695. DOI: 10.1007/s00265-012-1317-4

Parker, M., & Mason, R. (2012) How to make a sexy snake: estrogen activation of female sex pheromone in male red-sided garter snakes. Journal of Experimental Biology, 215(5), 723-730. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.064923

Parker, M., & Mason, R. (2009) Low Temperature Dormancy Affects the Quantity and Quality of the Female Sexual Attractiveness Pheromone in Red-sided Garter Snakes. Journal of Chemical Ecology, 35(10), 1234-1241. DOI: 10.1007/s10886-009-9699-0

No Pain, No Gain: The Psychology of Self-Punishment

2012-05-22T23:07:01Z

Source One of my favorite professors once told the following story: She was in the check-out line at the grocery store, and two young children, a boy and a girl, were seated in the cart behind her. When she unloaded some containers of yogurt onto the belt, the girl gazed at them longingly. Slowly, she began to reach her little arm towards the yogurts. Before she could touch them, her father slapped her arm away and said sternly, "No!" The girl cowered back in shame. A moment later she reached out again, and this time her brother slapped her arm, mimicking his father's admonishment. The girl again pulled back. Being a young child (and really wanting those yogurts), it wasn't long before she made one final attempt. But before anyone could stop her, she slapped her own hand away, shouting "No!" at herself. My professor was struck—and saddened—by this series of events. You could argue that the little girl had learned not to take other people's things and regulate her behavior, which is a good thing. But she had also learned to punish herself. The self-punishment we learn as children may continue into adulthood, when we become, in effect, parents to ourselves. Although some adults are more prone to self-flagellation than others, this tendency appears to be common even among psychologically healthy individuals. Research conducted in the field of social psychology suggests at least three major reasons why people might, at times, choose to punish themselves. Read More->...

Bastian, B., Jetten, J., & Fasoli, F. (2011) Cleansing the Soul by Hurting the Flesh: The Guilt-Reducing Effect of Pain. Psychological Science, 22(3), 334-335. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610397058

Comer, R., & Laird, J. (1975) Choosing to suffer as a consequence of expecting to suffer: Why do people do it?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(1), 92-101. DOI: 10.1037/h0076785

Gaydar Works (A Bit, On Facebook)

2012-05-22T14:28:31Z

The media are gleefully reporting a recent paper showing that "gaydar is real" - we can tell who's gay just by looking: The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual OrientationWhile it's a fine paper, I'm afraid that the results really aren't that exciting.American undergraduate students were able to classify people as gay or straight with better than chance accuracy, based purely on photos of their face. For male photos, the hit rate was 0.57; for women it was better with an accuracy of 0.65.However, that's on a scale where you get 0.50 by flipping a coin. So saying that gaydar is '65% accurate', as almost everyone has, is misleading. Still, the numbers seem solid. The sample sizes were large and the effect was replicated very convincingly in two experiments.However... this tells us very little about real world "gaydar", and it wasn't intended to. There are reasons to think it could underestimate the accuracy:Most importantly - people only saw the pictures for 50 milliseconds each. 1/20th of a second. Followed by a backward mask. That's right on the threshold of conscious perception, almost 'subliminal' but not quite. With longer viewing times, they might have done better.All the faces were black and white photos with the hair and ears cropped out (see above - and I think those two photos from the paper are the authors, although I may be wrong!). Anyone with facial hair, glasses, or any other 'accessories' wasn't used. In the real world, we have that extra information.In real life, we get clues from facial expressions, body language, voice, clothes. You could argue that these are being used (consciously or not) specifically as signals of sexuality, so they don't count as 'gaydar' - but more on that later. But it could also overestimate gaydar's powers:These were photos that people chose for their Facebook profiles. We all know how much effort some people put into that choice. We also know that different photos of the same person can often seem like two different people. Your Facebook pic is probably the most "selected" photo of you in existence. It would be better - but also much harder - to use passport photos.All of the gays in the study were out of the closet: they broadcast their sexuality on Facebook. But lots of gay people don't do that. Now those cases are probably where 'gaydar' is most likely to be of interest to most people, I think; those people might be harder to spot.As far as I can tell, this study wasn't intended to "prove that gaydar works". It was meant to examine how it works, by seeing whether it works very quickly (yes - in 50 ms in some cases). The authors also tested how accuracy was changed by flipping the photos upside down; this reduced accuracy but it was still well above chance. Ultimately, we need to ask what "gaydar" means and why we find it so interesting.On a superficial level, it just means being able to sense, from someone's appearance, if they're gay. That certainly does 'work' - if you see a guy coming out of a gay club in a tight pink Boy George t-shirt then yeah, he's probably gay. But he's (effectively) told you so, by being in that club and wearing those clothes, so that's not very interesting. That's an extreme case, but clearly people advertise their sexuality (and much else of course) all the time. Gaydar, in a weak sense, is just perception.I think what makes "gaydar" intriguing is the stronger idea that it can go beneath such adverts. That we can see who's really gay, whether or not they admit it, even to themselves. If that were possible, then it would seem to mean that homosexuality is part of the essence of some people - in other words, that it's a biological trait.So gaydar in a strong sense is risque. It calls to mind un-PC ideas such as physiognomy and would seem to validate various stereotypes which are the stuff of dirty jokes more than polite discussion.Does gaydar in this strong, exciting sense exist? That's another question. This study doesn't tell us.Tabak, J., and Zayas, V. (2012). The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual Orientation PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036671...

Tabak, J., & Zayas, V. (2012) The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual Orientation. PLoS ONE, 7(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036671

Linguistics and Archaeology in North America

2012-05-22T00:56:54Z

The same special issue of the journal World Archaeology that I was discussing in the previous post has an article looking specifically at the relationship between linguistic and archaeological evidence in the study of the prehistory of North America. It is by M. Dale Kinkade and J. V. Powell, two linguists who specialized in the languages [...]...

Kinkade, M., & Powell, J. (1976) Language and the prehistory of North America. World Archaeology, 8(1), 83-100. DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1976.9979654

What would you do?

2012-05-21T20:41:54Z

Caroline Tennant Kelly with two of her photos from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement (Source: Sydney Morning Herald at http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-bohemian-and-her-mission-20100416-skgk.html) In 1924 the first university Department of Anthropology in Australia was founded at the University of Sydney. The founding professor was … Continue reading →...

Kidd, Rosalind. (1997) The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs - the untold story. University of Queensland Press. info:/

Having a Water Bottle for a Mom Not Ideal

2012-05-21T15:09:02Z

In the wild, young rhesus macaques can reasonably expect not to have their mothers replaced by kitchen props. The monkeys depend on their moms to nurse them and tote them through tree branches while they're small, just like other primates. But a laboratory experiment in Maryland took these babies from their mothers and had them raised alone or in groups of their peers. The monkeys' strange infancies had physical and mental effects that lasted into adulthood. At the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (part of the National Institutes of Health), rhesus macaques born between 2002 and 2007 were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The lucky first group got to stay with their mothers, who kept their young close by while living in a large cage with other monkeys. The rest of the young monkeys were taken from their mothers and reared by humans in a nursery for their first five weeks of life. Then, if they were in the second experimental group, they were put into a cage with three other monkeys of the same age. The four peers were left to "raise" each other, Lord of the Flies style. The final group of monkeys, after being nursed by humans for five weeks, spent two hours a day in these same peer cages. During the remaining 22 hours, they lived alone in a cage with a "surrogate mother." The name is a bit of an insult to primate intelligence, though, since researchers describe this object as "effectively a terry cloth-covered hot water bottle hanging from the top of the cage." By the end of their first year of life, all the juvenile monkeys had been moved from their experimental cages into one social group. Now the researchers, led by Gabriella Conti at the University of Chicago, began to collect data on the monkeys' health. Over the years of the study, they watched 231 rhesus macaques grow up in this bizarre daycare system. Even though the monkeys all ended up living together, their disparate childhoods left a mark. The first clear effect was illness. Male monkeys that had been raised by a "surrogate" got sick nearly twice as often as mother-raised or peer-raised monkeys, even though by this time in their lives they all shared the same living conditions. Nearly every surrogate-raised male monkey had an illness at some point during the study. Female monkeys that had been raised by peers, rather than by a real or fake mother, were more likely to have wounds and bald patches once they were living in the large group. Since these females displayed more aggressive behavior, the researchers think they may have been starting fights with the other monkeys. Their aggression may have goaded other monkeys into biting them and pulling their hair out. And across all the groups taken away from their mothers—male and female, peer-raised and surrogate-raised—monkeys were more likely to have repetitive habits called stereotypies. In the zoo, a stereotypy such as pacing or swimming in circles suggests that an animal is in distress. In humans, stereotypies can be a symptom of autism. Habits displayed by the rhesus monkeys in this study included "digit sucking (the most frequent behavior), pacing, head tossing, self-grasping, saluting, spinning, rocking, circling, and swinging." Some of the difference between monkeys raised by their mothers and the rest could be due to breastfeeding, Conti points out. But the increased illness in male monkeys was limited to the surrogate-mom group; the peer-raised monkeys, despite also missing out on breastfeeding, didn't have extra illnesses. And although all motherless monkey groups showed an increase in stereotypy, the effect was greatest in surrogate-raised males. This suggests that even if formula feeding causes some of the health effects seen here, it can't account for all of them. The not-shocking conclusion is that monkeys need their moms to develop normally. Being raised parentless seems to make them less able to cope with infections or social stressors later in life. It's something to consider for research centers or zoos raising animals without their mothers. Even if the young have been orphaned or abandoned, there may be ways for human keepers to mitigate the damage. Conti is an economist, though, and she's more interested in another primate: humans. She compares the rhesus research to studies of human children raised without either of their parents. These studies have found mental and physical health effects in children in Romanian orphanages, for example, or Israeli kibbutzim (where kids were raised communally). As smart and independent as we are, we're still primates who need someone to haul us through the tree branches when we're young. Gabriella Conti, Christopher Hansman, James J. Heckman, Matthew F. X. Novak, Angela Ruggiero, & Stephen J. Suomi (2012). Primate evidence on the late health effects of early-life adversity PNAS : 10.1073/pnas.1205340109 Image: Baby Japanese macaque by Nemo's great uncle/Flickr...

Gabriella Conti, Christopher Hansman, James J. Heckman, Matthew F. X. Novak, Angela Ruggiero, & Stephen J. Suomi. (2012) Primate evidence on the late health effects of early-life adversity. PNAS. info:/10.1073/pnas.1205340109

Inequality Aversion Is For Real

2012-05-21T00:57:19Z

A number of studies have found support for the idea that children as young as 4 or 5 dislike inequality. However, the studies generally don’t do a good job isolating the desire to curb inequality from concerns about social welfare or social comparisons. For example, if Billy is unhappy that Steve receives more candy than [...]...

Shaw, A., & Olson, K. (2012) Children discard a resource to avoid inequity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(2), 382-395. DOI: 10.1037/a0025907