This is a distinctly female story. And I’m surprised no one’s discussing the ending, and the complicated themes of self-sacrifice at its core. Going into the movie, I expected a bunch of sexy asskicking. I didn’t really expect Snyder to pull a Joss Whedon. In the course of this movie, three of the main characters die, and their deaths are genuinely shocking. Malone throws herself in front of a knife to save Cornish, playing her sister. Vanessa Hudgens’ and Jamie Chung’s characters are murdered. And, that moment between Abbie Cornish and Emily Browning? At the end of the movie, Babydoll sacrifices herself to save Sweet Pea, gives herself up to Jon Hamm’s lobotomist as a distraction so another woman can run away. They all choose collaboration. The price of getting just one woman to freedom is so high. And while that’s less dramatically true in the world at large, I think it’s still true

I wonder if there’s something to both of these stories that’s an interesting anecdote to the Strong Female Character nonsense, and to the triumphal narratives of action movies in general. There’s a difference between tearing your female characters down before building them up, the process Tad Friend described in his critically important profile of Anna Faris last summer, and recognizing that it’s extremely difficult to win. Particularly if you’re a woman. It is harder to beat a man of equal fitness in a fight. It may be harder to convince people of something terrible that’s happened to you or your family — or to the country — if you’re at risk of being dismissed as a crazy, hysterical woman whether that’s an accurate description of your brain chemistry or not. Women may be more accustomed to compromise, to accepting outcomes that are less than ideal for them if they think it’s the best deal they can get. That might not make for action movies or thrillers that are satisfying in the straightforward ways that most stories in that genre are. But they could be the basis for something more complex and uneasy, and very interesting.

People often resist information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. This disconfirmation bias is a particular problem in the context of political misperceptions, which are widespread and frequently difficult to correct. In this paper, we examine two different hypotheses about the prevalence of misinformation. First, people tend to resist unwelcome information because it is threatening to their worldview or self-concept. Drawing from social psychology research, we test whether affirming individuals’ selfworth and thereby buttressing them against this threat can make them more willing to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Second, corrective information is often presented in an ineffective manner. We therefore also examine whether graphical corrections may be more effective than text at reducing counter-arguing by individuals inclined to resist counter-attitudinal information. Results from three experiments show that selfaffirmation substantially reduces reported misperceptions among those most likely to hold them, suggesting that people cling to false beliefs in part because giving them up would threaten their sense of self. Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction. However, contrary to previous research, affirmed subjects rarely differ from unaffirmed subjects in their willingness to accept new counterattitudinal information.

In other words, if someone’s wrong about something, it’s easier to persuade them to change their mind with a graphical presentation than a textual one.

We matched public voter records to 54 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. We find that Democrats and Republicans had significantly different patterns of brain activation during processing of risky decisions. Amygdala activations, associated with externally directed reactions to risk, are stronger in Republicans, while insula activations, associated with internally directed reactions to affective perceptions, are stronger in Democrats. These results suggest an internal vs. external difference in evaluative process that illuminates and resolves a discrepancy in the existing literature. This process-based approach to political partisanship is distinct from the policy-based approach that has dominated research for at least the past half century. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations achieves better accuracy in predicting whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican than a well established model in political science based on parental socialization of party identification.

We’re seeing more and more of this kind of effort to approach political science through a life science lens, and I think it would be interesting to see more integration of this kind of work with some of the crude stylized demographic facts about American politics. A married 60 year-old regular churchgoing man is overwhelmingly likely to be a Republican if he’s white, but a Democrat if he’s black. Do you see this same neurological divergence within that kind of sub-sample?

Basically when you ask questions where the left-wing answer is also the one supported by economics, suddenly left-wing people have a better understanding of economics. But when you ask the other set of questions, it comes out the other way. Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there. This is why I think people who teach economics ought to think harder about their choice of examples when teaching.

Chris Mooney has a great piece in Mother Jones on why people aren’t persuaded by evidence:

In Kahan’s research (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either “individualists” or “communitarians,” and as either “hierarchical” or “egalitarian” in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: “The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert.” A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert “depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another.” The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that “expert,” in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist’s position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a “trustworthy and knowledgeable expert.” Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist’s expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another study (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)

There are a lot of bad policy consequences associated with humanity’s tendency to reason like this, and I don’t really know how to solve them. But it’s worth trying to fight confirmation bias in your own life by making sure to make an effort to seek out strong arguments against your own point of view. The world is full of bad arguments, and it’s easy to become obsessed with how bad the arguments being made by “the other side” are. And at times this is an important fact about the world. But it’s worth making sure you’re up-to-date on what the strongest arguments for the other side are.

(cc photo by John Pannell)

Initially I was puzzled by Stephanie Clifford’s article about how retailers are finding they can boost sales by packing more crap into the aisles. Maybe I’m a weirdo, I thought, but I greatly prefer to shop in sparser places. It turns out, however, that I’m not a weirdo and people are just huge hypocrites about this stuff:

“They loved the experience,” William S. Simon, the chief executive of Wal-Mart’s United States division, said at a recent conference. “They just bought less. And that generally is not a good long-term strategy.”

So after remodeling a large percentage of its stores, Wal-Mart is now re-remodeling them, adding back inventory, plopping stacks of stuff into aisles and stacking shelves with a dizzying array of merchandise.

As it turns out, the messier and more confusing a store looks, the better the deals it projects.

“Historically, the more a store is packed, the more people think of it as value — just as when you walk into a store and there are fewer things on the floor, you tend to think they’re expensive,” said Paco Underhill, founder and chief executive of Envirosell, who studies shopper behavior.

There’s a related and more serious issue, it seems to me, in the health care market. People naturally say that they want good health outcomes at a reasonable price, but there’s precious little evidence from action that this is really what folks are after. Lawsuits are more determined by bedside manner than by health results, people want to have a sense of agency and control, people want to demonstrate care and concern for loved ones, etc.

Human beings are famously bad at doing probability calculations, so it’s not surprising to learn that people often have ideas about risk that don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny. But according to the Mechanisms of Cultural Cognition Project from National Science Foundation and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, there’s a systematic valence to how we disagree about risk:

Individuals of diverse cultural outlooks–hierarchical and egalitarian, individualistic and communitarian–hold sharply opposed beliefs about a range of societal risks, including those associated with climate change, gun ownership, public health, and national security. Differences in these basic values exert substantially more influence over risk perceptions than does any other individual characteristic, including gender, race, socioeconomic status, education, and political ideology and party affiliation.

This is part of what makes politics so difficult. A hierarchical versus an egalitarian outlook have plenty of obvious political implications. Then layer different risk perceptions on top of that and it’s extremely difficult to get agreement on anything. There’s a ton of interesting stuff up on the website, including “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect”.

I find data like this almost impossible to interpret. What’s the baseline? Back in 2005 when the media wasn’t interested in housing problems and nobody was polling this issue, how many people would have said they were worried about mortgage payments? How much do people say they’re worried about things in general? How much more do people start worrying about their mortgage when you specifically start pestering them about it. I bet most Americans between the ages of 25 and 40, in practice, rarely worry about saving for retirement. But if you ask them about it then they’ll start worrying. Right?

(cc photo by moira)

The political science literature about what drives election outcomes is kind of at odds with the conventional wisdom among campaign operatives and reporters. But the emerging research on the psychological foundations of individual political belief is downright weird. Peter Liberman and David Pizarro, for example, have a good piece in the NYT about the link between disgust and conservatism:

Subtle cues about disgust and cleanliness can affect social and political judgments as well. In an experiment conducted recently by Erik Helzer, a Cornell Ph.D. student, and one of us (David Pizarro), merely standing near a hand-sanitizing dispenser led people to report more conservative political beliefs. Participants who were randomly positioned in front of a hand sanitizer gave more conservative responses to a survey about their moral, social and fiscal attitudes than those individuals assigned to complete the questionnaire at the other end of the hallway.

In another experiment one of us (Dr. Pizarro) was involved in, a foul ambient smell — emitted, unbeknownst to test subjects, by a novelty spray — caused people answering a questionnaire to report more negative attitudes toward gay men than did people who responded in the absence of the stench. Apparently, the slightest signal that germs might be present is enough to shift political attitudes toward the right.

I think it remains to be seen how these kind of dynamics play into macro-scale political phenomena, but suffice it to say that people aren’t making up their minds about political issues based purely on judicious consideration of the evidence.

(cc photo by adiything)

It’s pretty clear that most bias happens at an unconscious level and that things like racial and gender bias are much more pervasive than we’d like to believe. Check out some of the implicit association tests available online if you don’t believe me. But some of the details of how this plays out are downright scary. Consider the medical example cited in Shankar Vendatam’s column on unconscious bias:

If you ask people whether men and women should be paid the same for doing the same work, everyone says yes. But if you ask volunteers how much a storekeeper who runs a hardware store ought to earn and how much a storekeeper who sells antique china ought to earn, you will see that the work of the storekeeper whom volunteers unconsciously believe to be a man is valued more highly than the work of the storekeeper whom volunteers unconsciously assume is a woman. If you ask physicians whether all patients should be treated equally regardless of race, everyone says yes. But if you ask doctors how they will treat patients with chest pains who are named Michael Smith and Tyrone Smith, the doctors tend to be less aggressive in treating the patient with the black-sounding name. Such disparities in treatment are not predicted by the conscious attitudes that doctors profess, but by their unconscious attitudes—their hidden brains.

There are a lot of quality issues in our health care system beyond the basic access issues, and in an increasingly diverse society this sort of thing is not helping to resolve them.

David Card, Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti, and Emmanuel Saez demonstrate that most people think they’re above average and get really pissed when they find out their bosses think otherwise:

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers’ wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

The upshot for managers seems to be that an inefficiently undifferentiated compensation structure is sometimes the appropriate solution since making more fine-grained distinctions is going to do more to piss-off the non-rewarded than the reward the people you’re trying to reward.

But what these kind of findings always make me wonder is how possible is it for people to self-consciously reform their thinking around this kind of question. I myself have been known to get peeved when something good happens to someone else even though I in no way suffer as a result. But I also recognize that emotions in this spite/envy/bitterness conceptual space are irrationally and ethically ugly and try to rid myself of them. Is this something society as a whole can get better at over time?

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

Soon after the election, Rahm Emmanuel was quoted as saying something about how you don’t let a good crisis go to waste. And in general I think there’s a belief among many that bad times are good time to press the charge for reform. This, however, is based on a pretty simplistic reading of the New Deal (FDR’s first term, 1933-36, was actually a time of rapid economic growth wedged between the Hoover-era collapse and the 1937 recession) and Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth shows that the pattern from these experiments is much more likely. A bad situation makes people feel selfish and risk-averse.

Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.

The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

Put this in a box with a growing body of researching indicating that there’s a problematic relationship between what’s good for you to think and what’s accurate. For example, how well you fare in life is largely due to socioeconomic circumstances and luck. But individual initiative does play a role. And consequently people who overestimate the role of individual initiative tend to do better in life than those with more accurate perceptions, plausibly because getting this stuff wrong inspires you to try harder. There’s also a substantial literature on “depressive realism” indicating that people suffering from depression have more accurate perceptions about many things.

James Suroweicki takes an interesting look at the politics of health reform through the lens of the literature on loss aversion from psychology and behavioral economics. The lesson: People fear change. His advice:

Still, just because you can’t change human nature doesn’t mean you can’t change health care. The key may be to work with, rather than against, people’s desire for security. That’s surely one reason that Obama has consistently promised people that if they like the health insurance they currently have they can keep it. This promise will make whatever reform we get more inefficient and less comprehensive, but it also assuages people’s anxieties. It might even be possible to use the endowment effect and the status-quo bias in the argument for change. After all, although people tend to feel that they own their health insurance, their entitlement is distinctly tenuous. Because it’s hard for individuals to get affordable health insurance, and most people are insured through work, keeping your insurance means keeping your job. But in today’s economy there’s obviously no guarantee that you can do that. On top of that, even if you have insurance there’s a small but meaningful chance that when you actually get sick you’ll find out that your insurance doesn’t cover what you thought it did (in the case of what’s called “rescission”). In other words, the endowment that insured people want to hold on to is much shakier than it appears. Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage. The message, in other words, should be: if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it.

This seems sensible. However, two problems remain.

One is that along the same lines as the research Surowiecki is talking about, people find the experience of contemplating potential future loss to be intensely unpleasant. Insofar as people are already walking around filled with anxiety about loss of employer-provided coverage or rescission, then this kind of message will appeal to them. But if you run around trying to tell people they don’t have things as good as they think you do, will they embrace your policies or just decide you’re an unpleasant jerk? Nobody likes the bearer of bad news.

The other is that in politics you not only need a message but also messengers. Not just a plan for change, a constituency for it. And the main constituency for health reform consists of people who don’t think the present system is fundamentally sound. That’s a big part of the reason the public plan element of Obama’s proposals has become such an emotional touchstone for the left. The public plan is a fairly modest part of a fairly modest package of reforms, but it’s the slice of the package that holds out the prospect of eventual transformation of the system into something quite different and less driven by corporate profits.

I think it has to do with the dynamics of self-interest and self-deception. Some of the most virulent opponents of health reform are the elderly, who already have government-provided health insurance. While some may be too silly to know that that’s what they have, a great many assuredly do know it, and are happy to pull up the ladder behind them. Medicare is already very successful and very generous. Under universal coverage, it’s unlikely to get much better (except for prescription drug coverage, but not all the elderly take a huge number of pills). And it could, for all one knows, get worse. To avoid that risk, better that some youngsters go without.

This reasoning, though, is brutal–too brutal to acknowledge. While we’re a pretty selfish country, “I’m all right, Jack” is not an argument people comfortably make when others’ lives are at stake. But “if this passes, they’ll euthanize me and my friends” is another kind of argument altogether. It’s false, but easy to seize on as a morally comfortable pretext for opposing a bill that threatens one’s self-interest.

That seems right. One note I would make about Medicare, though, is that while people may not believe that reform will make it better, I think the odds are very good that reform will make it better. There’s been a tendency for the current debate to construe talk of cutting out unnecessary medical services as a way to save money. But it’s important to recognize that while access to beneficial health care services is an excellent thing, undergoing unnecessary medical treatments is annoying and potentially quite dangerous. Seniors may not believe it, but making Medicare more efficient will be good for them.

Interesting stuff from Tom Vanderbilt:

Talking about the city’s “Transit Tracker” program, which allows people to get real-time info on bus arrivals via their cell phones, Hansen mentioned a study that had been done in the U.K. of a similar program. What was noteworthy was that people using the service felt that the bus service itself had improved, that more buses were running, that they were running closer to schedule, even though none of this was empirically true.

I have a particular interest in the fluid nature of time, and the way travel, queuing, and even routing can play additive and subtractive games with this. Paco Underhill, for example, notes that people who wait in airport lines overestimate the time they waited by some 50 percent. I’ve also seen it noted that a train trip with a transfer feels longer to people than it really is, that people overestimate the time it will take to walk somewhere and underestimate the time it will take to drive somewhere. Of course, one of the masters of managing time is Disney, with its posted wait times (just posting the time makes it feel shorter for people) at queues, wait times which are then inflated — so the payoff at the end is even better: That wasn’t long at all!

Among other things, this is important because I think improving the level of objective and subjective service people get from the bus is important to our transportation future. Ultimately, I think rail is essential as the backbone of a major metropolitan area’s mass transit, but that rail backbone can have its utility massively extended if supplemented by good buses. This is also why if you’re ever taking the Subway in New York City you’ll generally be happier if you get on the local train rather than waiting for the express even if the express would be faster. Waiting around makes people very unhappy for some reason.

If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see “Nudge” by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.

I think that makes more sense if you just change the last sentence to say “their information feedback mechanism is more limited so they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.” But I think this is an important point — in just the areas where we’d most like effective regulation, we’re sort of unlikely to get it. If traders are likely to overestimate the effectiveness of their risk models, then regulators are prone to those exact same errors. Where does this leave us?

Brooks, I think, thinks it leaves us just as skeptical of regulation as we were before we took the behavioral turn. I think it arguably leaves us somewhere else. It leaves us with an appreciation of crude measures rather than hubristic efforts to get the regulations precisely right. Until the 1980s, banks couldn’t operate across state lines at all. This didn’t make any real sense. Some states (California, New York, Texas) are much bigger than others either in terms of land area or population or both. And of course New York City is much more integrated with parts of New Jersey (and even some parts of Connecticut) than it is with, say, Buffalo. So whatever the “right” rule was here, this clearly wasn’t it. At the same time, this rule, for all its arbitrariness, has the virtues of being clear and largely self-implementing. It doesn’t depend on anyone’s discretion being used wisely or honestly, and it doesn’t depend on anyone’s calculations being right. And it had the effect of limiting the size of banks so that you never had a really enormous bank failure.

Now that’s not to say we should go back to the ban on interstate banking (I honestly have no idea), but I think it shows the general shape of what we should be looking at. The best you can hope from a regulatory regime is that it will be a satisficing solution wherein some fairly crude rule will improve on the outcomes generated by the unfettered market. When that’s not the case, we may as well let the market go unfettered even though that, too, will be somewhat sub-optimal. But at the same time when we’re looking at a regulatory regime that seems to be working okay, and the regulated parties start saying we need tweaks x and y and z and oh there’s no danger there we should be very suspicious. We shouldn’t count on being to fine-tune our results to perfection, we should either lean in with a heavy hand or else stay away.

The Dow-Jones Industrial Average has spent 25 of the past 40 years–62%–between 800 and 1250 or between 8000 and 12500. These ranges comprise roughly 25% of the (logarithmic) total range of the Dow as a function of time.

It really looks like there may something special about the nominal value of a 1 followed by a bunch of zeros.

This is disturbing to me as an economist.

This seems like a proposition we could test by looking at other stock indexes. Nor do I really see why it should be all that shocking. We understand that expectations about market participants’ future behavior are relevant to rational market behavior. And it’s well known that decimal counting systems have an important role in human psychology. The tendency of goods to be priced at $9.99 rather than $10.01 is pretty well-understood.

Meanwhile, countries have been known to conduct their monetary policy in part by lopping off zeros. You’re in a situation where you’ve experienced a lot of inflation over the past twenty, so instead of $1 being equal to 600 francs, it’s now equal to 6,000 francs. To curb the inflation, you need to take some dramatic steps in “real” policy. But creating a “new franc” such that 1 new franc is equal to 1,000 old francs can also plausibly be part of the solution — it changes people’s thinking, and it symbolizes the new determination.

Maybe along these same lines we need to arbitrarily re-mark the nominal values of all our stocks, so that the DJIA will be equal to approximately 36,000 (to pick an arbitrary number) and then we can watch it slowly drift upwards until it gets into the 100,000 range. I’m not familiar enough with the workings of the system to say exactly how you would do that as a technical matter, but surely it can be done — it would just be a question of changing the meaning of labels.

This interesting Wired item got a lot of play a few days ago:

David Moxon subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff — a measure of their arousal — after hearing the revving exotics, but the amount the women had was off the charts.

The econobox, however, left everyone colder than a January day in Nome.

This was widely reported in the spirit of Wired‘s headline: “Science Proves Exotic Cars Turn Women On.” But of course this didn’t study cars, it studied car sounds. Dave Alpert wonders:

Nature or nurture? How about playing background sounds of a Lamborghini in the subway? If subways were privately run, I suspect the operators would do just that, just like stores pipe in odors to draw out greater spending behavior.

Consider this a cousin to the public sector design issue. Private enterprise makes it its business to try to understand the ecology of civilization and how environments impact people, and smart public sector agencies will consider this kind of thing as well. When I was in Nizhny Novgorod they played Russian pop music on the buses, which I don’t recall as having been very pleasant. But why not pipe music into Metro stations? You could probably earn payola-style money. I feel like I recall some city (Rome?) where they did play music in the subway stations. Am I crazy?