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Social Science Palooza
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By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 6, 2010
Every day, hundreds of thousands of scholars study human behavior.
Every day, a few of their studies are bundled and distributed via
e-mail by Kevin Lewis, who covers the social sciences for The Boston
Globe and National Affairs. And every day, I file away these studies
because I find them bizarrely interesting.
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In this column, I’m going to try to
summarize as many of these studies as
space allows. No single study is
dispositive, but I hope these
summaries can spark some
conversations:
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks
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Female mammals tend to avoid close
male relatives during moments of peak
fertility in order to avoid inbreeding. For the journal
Psychological Science, Debra Lieberman, Elizabeth
Pillsworth and Martie Haselton tracked young women’s
cellphone calls. They found that these women had fewer
and shorter calls with their fathers during peak fertility
days, but not with female relatives.
Classic research has suggested that the more people doubt
their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined
to proselytize in favor of them. David Gal and Derek Rucker
published a study in Psychological Science in which they
presented some research subjects with evidence that
undermined their core convictions. The subjects who were
forced to confront the counterevidence went on to more
forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming
the earlier findings.
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Physical contact improves team performance. For the
journal Emotion, Michael Kraus, Cassey Huang and Dacher
Keltner measured how frequently members of N.B.A. teams touched each other. Teams
that touched each other frequently early in the 2008-2009 season did better than teams
that touched less frequently, even after accounting for player status, preseason
expectations and early season performance.
According to John Gaski and Jeff Sagarin in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and
Economics, there is a surprisingly strong relationship between daylight saving time and
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lower SAT scores. No explanation was offered.
1. Is Law School a Losing Game?
For an article in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Mark Duggan, Randi
Hjalmarsson and Brian Jacob investigated whether gun shows increase crime rates. They
identified 3,400 gun shows in Texas and California and looked at crime rates for the areas
around the shows for the following month. They found no relationship between gun shows
and crime in either state.
Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive
Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found
that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than
subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between
diabetes (a disorder marked by poor glucose toleration) and low self-control. States with
high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that
leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during
peacetime.
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We tend to admire extroverted leaders. But Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David
Hofmann have added a wrinkle to this bias in an article in The Academy of Management
Journal. They found that extraverted leaders perform best when their employees are
passive, but this effect is reversed when the employees are proactive. In these cases, the
extroverted leaders are less receptive to their employees’ initiatives.
Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik
Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male
chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive female opponents,
even though the risk-taking didn’t improve their performance.
Environmental moments of 2010
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People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor
Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in
hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.
Would you rather date someone who dumped his or her last partner or someone who was
the dumpee? For an article in Evolutionary Psychology, Christine Stanik, Robert Kurzban
and Phoebe Ellsworth found that men will give a woman a lower rating when they learn
that she dumped her last boyfriend, perhaps fearing they will be next. But women rated
men more highly when they learned that they had done the dumping, perhaps seeing it as
a sign of desirability.
These studies remind us that we are strange, complicated creatures — deeply influenced by
primordial biases and our current relationships. But you don’t have to settle for my
summaries of these kinds of studies. Go to the National Affairs Web site, where there are
links to Kevin Lewis’s daily batch of studies. A day without social science is like a day
without sunshine.
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 9, 2010
An earlier version of this column inaccurately described diabetes as a disorder “marked
by low glucose levels.” This language followed the wording of the original study being
described which focused on lower levels of tolerance for glucose in the brain, not low
glucose levels in the blood. Given the complexity of the disease, it is more accurate, in
shorthand to describe diabetes as a disorder “marked by poor glucose toleration.”
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A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 7, 2010, on page
A33 of the New York edition.
Connect with The New York Times on Facebook.
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