Recent social science findings

Most social science research confirms the blindingly obvious. But sometimes it reveals things nobody had thought of, or suggests that the things we thought were true are actually false.

Here is a sampling of recent findings:

Working moms sometimes raise smarter students. Caitlin McPherran Lombardi and Rebekah Levine Coley studied the children of mothers who work and those of mothers who don’t. They found the children of working mothers were just as ready for school as other children. Furthermore, among families where the father’s income was lower, the children of working mothers demonstrated higher cognitive skills and fewer conduct problems than the children of nonworking mothers. As with all this work, no one study is dispositive, but here is some more support for the idea that mothers who work are not hurting their kids.

The office is often a more relaxing place than the home. Sarah Damaske, Joshua Smyth and Matthew Zawadzki found that people are more likely to have lower values of the stress hormone cortisol when they are at work than when at home. Maybe that’s because parenting small kids is so demanding. But, on the contrary: Having children around was correlated with less relative stress at home.

Winning hearts and minds may be a myth. Armies fighting counterinsurgency campaigns spend a lot of effort trying to win over the hearts and minds of the local populations. But Raphael Cohen looked at polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and found that public opinion is a poor predictor of strategic victory. Public opinion is not that malleable, and its swings are more an effect than a cause. That is, counterinsurgency armies get more popular as they win victories; they don’t get popular and then use that popularity to win.

Attractive children attract less empathy than unattractive children. Robert Fisher and Yu Ma studied how much help children received from unrelated adults when they were experiencing difficulties. People perceive that attractive children are more socially competent and, therefore, are less likely to help them, as long as the need is not severe. So, if you are creating an ad to get people to donate to your hospital or charity, you might avoid child models who are winners in the looks department.

Too much talent can be as bad as too little talent. Most people assume there is a linear relationship between talent and team performance. But Roderick Swaab and others studied team performance in basketball and found that more talent is better up to a point — after which more talent just means worse teamwork and ultimately worse performance. In baseball, more talent did lead to better team performance straight up the line, but in activities like basketball, which require more intra-team coordination, too much talent can tear apart teamwork.

Sports participation effects social outcomes . Phoebe Clarke and Ian Ayres studied the effect of sports on social outcomes. They found that a 10 percentage point increase in state level female sports participation generated a 5 or 6 percentage point rise in the rate of female secularism, a 5 point rise in the proportion of women who are mothers and a 6 point rise in the percentage who are single mothers. It could be that sports participation is correlated with greater independence from traditional institutions, with good and bad effects.

Moral stories don’t necessarily make more moral children. Kang Lee, Victoria Talwar and others studied the effectiveness of classic moral stories in promoting honesty among 3- to 7-year-olds. They found stories like “Pinocchio” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” failed to reduce lying in children. However, the story of “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” significantly increased truth-telling. Stories that emphasized the bad effects of lying had no effect, but stories that emphasized the good effects of telling the truth did have an effect.

Good fences make good neighbors. When ethnic groups clash, we usually try to encourage peace by integrating them. Let them get to know one another or perform a joint activity. This may be the wrong approach. Alex Rutherford, Dion Harmon and others studied ethnically diverse areas and came to a different conclusion. Peace is not the result of integrated coexistence. It is the result of well-defined geographic and political boundaries. For example, Switzerland is an ethnically diverse place, but mountains and lakes clearly define each group’s spot. Even in the former Yugoslavia, amid widespread ethnic violence, peace prevailed where there were clear boundaries.

Organic foods may make you less generous. In a study published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, Kendall J. Eskine had people look at organic foods, comfort foods or a group of control foods. Those who viewed organic foods subsequently volunteered less time to help a needy stranger and they judged moral transgressions more harshly.

Men are dumber around women. Thijs Verwijmeren, Vera Rommeswinkel and Johan C. Karremans gave men cognitive tests after they had interacted with a woman via computer. In the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the male cognitive performance declined after the interaction, or even after the men merely anticipated an interaction with a woman.

Women inhibit their own performance. In a study published in Self and Identity, Shen Zhang, Toni Schmader and William M. Hall gave women a series of math tests. On some tests they signed their real name, on others they signed a fictitious name. The women scored better on the fictitious name tests, when their own reputation was not at risk.

People filter language through their fingers. In a study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto asked people to rate real words, fictitious words and neologisms. Words composed of letters on the right side of the QWERTY keyboard were viewed more positively than words composed of letters from the left side.

We communicate, process and feel emotions by mimicking the facial expressions of the people around us. For a study in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Paula M. Niedenthal, Maria Augustinova and others studied young adults who had used pacifiers as babies, and who thus could not mimic as easily. They found that pacifier use correlated with less emotional intelligence in males, though it did not predict emotional processing skills in girls.

Judges are toughest around election time. Judges in Washington State are elected and re-elected into office. In a study for The Review of Economic Statistics, Carlos Berdejó and Noam Yuchtman found that these judges issue sentences that are 10 percent longer at their end of the political cycle than at the beginning.

New fathers pay less. In a study for the Administrative Science Quarterly, Michael Dahl, Cristian Dezso and David Gaddis Ross studied male Danish C.E.O.’s before and after their wives gave birth to children. They found that male C.E.O.’s generally pay their employees less generously after fathering a child. The effect is stronger after a son is born. Female employees are less affected than male employees. C.E.O.’s also tend to pay themselves more after the birth of a child.

Affluent neighborhoods challenge mental equilibrium. In a study for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, Terese J. Lund and Eric Dearing found that boys reported higher levels of delinquency and girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression when they lived in affluent neighborhoods compared with middle-class neighborhoods. Boys’ delinquency and girls’ anxiety-depression levels were lowest when they were from affluent families living in middle-class neighborhoods.

Premarital doubts are significant. In a study in the Journal of Family Psychology, Justin Lavner, Benjamin Karney and Thomas Bradbury found that women who had cold feet before marriage had significantly higher divorce rates four years later. Male premarital doubts did not correlate with more divorce.

Women use red to impress men. In a study for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Andrew Elliot, Tobias Greitemeyer and Adam Pazda found that women expecting to converse with an attractive man were more likely to select a red versus green shirt than women expecting to converse with an unattractive man or another woman.

Birth date affects corporate success. In a study for Economics Letters, Qianqian Du, Huasheng Gao and Maurice Levi found that C.E.O.’s are disproportionately less likely to be born in June and July.

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 cell phone calls. They found that these women had fewer and shorter calls with their fathers during peak fertility days, but not with female relatives.

 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 counter evidence went on to more forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming the earlier findings.

Physical contact improves team performance. For the journal Emotion, Michael Kraus, Cassey Huang and Dacher Keltner measured how frequently members of NBA 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.

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 low glucose levels) 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.

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.

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.

Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon? It's not because players perform better when their own fans are cheering them on. In basketball, free-throw percentages are the same home and away. In baseball, a pitcher's strike-to-ball ratio is the same home and away. Neither is it the rigors of travel disadvantaging the away team. Teams from the same metro area lose at the same rate as teams from across the country when playing in their rival's stadium. No, the real difference is the officiating. The refs and umpires don't like to get booed. So even if they are not aware of it, they call fewer fouls on home teams in crucial situations. They call more strikes on away batters in tight games in the late innings. Moskowitz and Wertheim show that the larger, louder and closer a crowd is, the more the refs favor the home team. It's not a conscious decision. They just naturally conform a bit to the emotional vibes radiating from those around them.

 They say you only hurt the ones you love. That may not be strictly true, but in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Johanna Peetz and Lara Kammrath find that people are more likely to break promises made to people they love. That's because they are driven by affection to make lavish promises in the first place. They really mean it at the time, but lavish promises are the least likely to be kept.

 It's best to motivate groups, not individuals. Organize your people into a group; reward everybody when the group achieves its goals. Susan Helper, Morris Kleiner and Yingchun Wang confirm this insight in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. They compared compensation schemes in different manufacturing settings and found that group incentive pay and hourly pay motivate workers more effectively than individual incentive pay.

What sorts of people are good at reading emotion? Age may play some role here. Jamin Halberstadt has a paper coming out in the journal Psychology and Aging that suggests that the young may on average read emotional cues more sensitively than the old. Halberstadt showed various people videos of someone committing a faux pas. Younger viewers were able to better discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Older subjects also performed worse on emotion recognition tests. Taste may play a role, too. For the journal Psychological Science, Kendall Eskine, Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz gave people sweet-tasting, bitter-tasting and neutral-tasting drinks and then asked them to rate a variety of moral transgressions. As expected, people who had tasted the bitter drink were more likely to register moral disgust, suggesting that having Cherry Coke in the jury room may be a smart move for good defense lawyers.

Are new immigrants weakening the social fabric? By one measure they are not. In fact, America seems to be corrupting them. In the journal Addictive Behaviors, Mildred Maldonado-Moline, Jennifer Reingle, Wesley Jennings and Guillermo Prado looked at drunk driving arrests among new immigrants and U.S.-born young adults. The recent immigrants had low DUI arrest rates. Second generation Americans had higher arrest rates than first generation Americans and third generation had higher rates than the second generation. The same pattern applied to arrests for marijuana use.

Best and Brightest .  If you could move anywhere in the world, where would you go? In the journal Israel Affairs, Yinon Cohen, Yitchak Haberfeld and Irena Kogan looked at the immigration patterns of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They found that the most skilled emigrants went to the United States, where labor markets are more flexible and return on skills are higher. The less skilled moved to Germany or Israel. The U.S. still seems to be attracting the Best and the Brightest.

Empathy’s Decline.  Young people today have a more expanded sense of self than young people a generation ago. The meaner way of saying this is that they are more narcissistic. Scientific American recently reported on research by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan who looked at surveys in which students were asked to rate their own empathy. She found that self-reported empathy has declined sharply over the past decade. Almost 75 percent of the students today rate themselves as less empathetic than the average student 30 years ago.

There is a link between reading and empathy (stories give you practice in experiencing other people’s emotions) and for the first time in recent memory, fewer than 50 percent of Americans now say they read for pleasure.

Knowledge Corrupts. when people hold high office they change a zillion different ways. They have power, with all the attendant corruptions. They become the center of every room they enter, with all the attendant narcissism. They also have inside information, and often leap to the conclusion that people who don’t have this information are simply not worth listening to.

Forgiveness has a down side. James McNulty had a paper in the Journal of Family Psychology last year suggesting that forgiveness may increase the chances that those who are forgiven will offend again. McNulty studied family diaries and found that newlywed partners were more likely to report misbehavior on days after they were forgiven for something else. It should be added that forgiveness is still a good thing to do. The downside probably doesn’t outweigh the positive effects.

Writing about stress before a test improves your performance on it. In the journal Science, Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock had students sit for a bit and describe their anxieties before they took a big exam. That brief assignment significantly improved their test scores. Maybe in baseball, hitters should be writing little essays on the on-deck circle.

The Thrill of Victory. In a forthcoming study for the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey compared Internet searches in red and blue states after the 2006 and 2010 elections. They found that the number of searchers for pornography was much higher right after the 2010 election (a big G.O.P. year) than after 2006 (a big Democratic year). Conversely, people in blue states searched for porn at much higher rates after 2006 than after 2010. One explanation is this: After winning a vicarious status competition, people tend to seek out pornography. 

Modern Status. Characters in Jane Austen novels made incredibly fine distinctions between the different layers of the British aristocracy. In our age, we make incredibly fine distinctions between colleges and universities, measuring, say, whether Princeton is better than the University of Miami, or whether Swarthmore College is better than Rhodes College. Scholars have also been trying to tease out differences, at least when it comes to something they can measure — future income. Recently Stacy Dale and Alan Kreuger came out with a study suggesting that the college you attend makes little difference when it comes to how much money you’ll earn. A self-confident student who gets a 1400 on her SATs will have the same income whether she goes to a super top university or merely a good one.

What  do elite employers look for when they recruit. In a forthcoming issue of the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Lauren Rivera tried to find out what elite employers look for when they recruit. It turns out they look for students who went to the top five universities. They attribute superior intellectual, moral and cultural qualities to people who can get into those places. That makes sense. A consultant wants to be able to tell a potential client they have eight Harvard grads working on their account — as a marker of high-level brainpower. Rivera also found that employers don’t care much about grades or academic accomplishments, but they do care about extracurricular activities. They are looking for out-of-school activities that they take to be signs of social and moral character. What’s interesting here is how employers try to peer into the academic world to pick out traits they value in the professional world. Employers aren’t looking for genius as much as energy and clubbability. They want people who are energetic enough to get good grades in high school and still drive themselves to be captain of this team or launch that tutoring program. Then in college they want them to display the same relentless drive. The message, which one does detect on elite campuses, is that the actual academic content to be found in these places is secondary. Colleges are distinguished most importantly by their cultures and personalities, not by anything that can be ranked by neat status rules.

What is the most important change of your lifetime?. We spend a lot of our time debating political events and the choices leaders make. But the most important changes are the shifts in culture, ideas and mentalities that people usually don’t even notice until after the fact. In 1960, it would have been absurd for most colleges to have co-ed dorms. A short time later, they were unremarkable.

It’s always worth emphasizing that no one study is dispositive. Many, many studies do not replicate. Still, these sorts of studies do remind us that we are influenced by a thousand breezes permeating the unconscious layers of our minds. They remind us of the power of social context. 


(Kevin Lewis’s blog at National Affairs provides links to hundreds of academic studies a year from which these selections have been drawn.)