Love Lost
Homeownership subsidies and the marriage decisions of low-income households
Michael Eriksen
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates the impact of being randomly assigned down payment assistance with a home purchase on the marriage and divorce decisions of low-income households using unique data from a field experiment. 1,103 participants in Tulsa, Oklahoma were randomly assigned in 1998 to either a treatment group eligible to receive a 2:1 match on saving for a down payment, or a control group that was not eligible. Using data collected on treated and controls 18 and 48 months after randomization, it is shown the offer of the subsidy had important impacts on participants' marriage and divorce decisions. Treated participants who reported being unmarried prior to randomization were 42% more likely to be married 48 months after opening an account than similar control group members. The offer to receive the subsidy is also shown to substantially increase the divorce rates for originally married participants, with the most pronounced effect occurring among women with children or those who reported poor spousal relations prior to randomization. Although the exact mechanisms for how the subsidy affects such decisions are unclear, homeownership is shown to have an important role.
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Quality of Available Mates, Education, and Household Labor Supply
Brighita Negrusa & Sonia Oreffice
Economic Inquiry, July 2010, Pages 558-574
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of sex ratios by education and metropolitan area on spouses' bargaining power and labor supplies, to capture the local and qualitative nature of mate availability. Using Current Population Survey and Census data for 2000, 1990, and 1980, we estimate these effects in a collective household framework. We find that a higher relative shortage of comparably educated women in the couple's metropolitan area reduces wives' labor supply and increases their husbands'. The impact is stronger for couples in higher education groups but not significant for high school graduates. Results are similar across decades. No such effects are found for unmarried individuals.
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Tomas Cvrcek
NBER Working Paper, July 2010
Abstract:
The growing education and employment of women are usually cited as crucial forces behind the decline of marriage since 1960. However, both trends were already present between 1900 and 1960, during which time marriage became increasingly widespread. This early period differed from the post-1960 decades due to two factors primarily affecting men, one economic and one demographic. First, men's improving labor market prospects made them more attractive as marriage partners to women. Second, immigration had a dynamic effect on partner search costs. Its short-run effect was to fragment the marriage market, making it harder to find a partner of one's preferred ethnic and cultural background. The high search costs led to less marriage and later marriage in the 1890s and 1900s. As immigration declined, the long-run effect was for immigrants and their descendants to gradually integrate with American society. This reduced search costs and increased the marriage rate. The immigration primarily affected the whites' marriage market which is why the changes in marital behavior are much more pronounced among this group than among blacks.
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Rose McDermott, Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler
University of California Working Paper, October 2009
Abstract:
Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one's friends' marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one's own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.
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Maria Agthe
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Within organizational judgment and decision-making contexts, biases based on an evaluated person's attractiveness are among the most salient and frequently investigated. An enormous amount of research indicates favoritism for attractive people compared to unattractive ones. The current research demonstrates that the nature of this bias depends on whether one is evaluating a member of the same sex or the opposite sex. Experiment 1 (N = 2639) investigated selection of scholarship applicants and demonstrated that a pro-attractiveness bias held only for selection of opposite-sex scholarship applicants; no such bias was observed for highly attractive same-sex applicants. Experiment 2 (N = 622) investigated evaluations of prospective job candidates and demonstrated again that pro-attractiveness bias was observed only for opposite-sex candidates; participants discriminated against highly attractive same-sex candidates. Moreover, this bias was not observed among highly attractive participants; it held only for moderately attractive participants, those for whom highly attractive same-sex individuals can pose especially potent social threats. Findings suggest that attractiveness biases in organizational decision-making are rooted partly in the social threats and opportunities afforded by attractive people.
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Karlijn Massar & Abraham Buunk
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present paper focuses on the effect a rival's facial attractiveness has on female jealousy. A parafoveal subliminal priming paradigm was employed to expose participants to rivals outside their conscious awareness. Female participants were exposed to either an attractive woman or an unattractive woman for 60 ms. They subsequently read a jealousy-evoking scenario which introduced a rival, but a description of her appearance was withheld. Our results suggest that participants have unconsciously linked the subliminally presented photograph to the rival. Women exposed to the attractive woman reported significantly more jealousy than women exposed to the unattractive rival. Moreover, they reported feeling significantly more worried, hurt, angry, and sad.
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Adaptations in humans for assessing physical strength from the voice
Aaron Sell, Gregory Bryant, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Daniel Sznycer, Christopher von Rueden, Andre Krauss & Michael Gurven
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has shown that humans, like many other animals, have a specialization for assessing fighting ability from visual cues. Because it is probable that the voice contains cues of strength and formidability that are not available visually, we predicted that selection has also equipped humans with the ability to estimate physical strength from the voice. We found that subjects accurately assessed upper-body strength in voices taken from eight samples across four distinct populations and language groups: the Tsimane of Bolivia, Andean herder-horticulturalists and United States and Romanian college students. Regardless of whether raters were told to assess height, weight, strength or fighting ability, they produced similar ratings that tracked upper-body strength independent of height and weight. Male voices were more accurately assessed than female voices, which is consistent with ethnographic data showing a greater tendency among males to engage in violent aggression. Raters extracted information about strength from the voice that was not supplied from visual cues, and were accurate with both familiar and unfamiliar languages. These results provide, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence that both men and women can accurately assess men's physical strength from the voice, and suggest that estimates of strength are used to assess fighting ability.
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Who Cares About Marrying a Rich Man? Intelligence and Variation in Women's Mate Preferences
Christine Stanik & Phoebe Ellsworth
Human Nature, June 2010, Pages 203-217
Abstract:
Although robust sex differences are abundant in men and women's mating psychology, there is a considerable degree of overlap between the two as well. In an effort to understand where and when this overlap exists, the current study provides an exploration of within-sex variation in women's mate preferences. We hypothesized that women's intelligence, given an environment where women can use that intelligence to attain educational and career opportunities, would be: (1) positively related to their willingness to engage in short-term sexual relationships, (2) negatively related to their desire for qualities in a partner that indicated wealth and status, and (3) negatively related to their endorsement of traditional gender roles in romantic relationships. These predictions were supported. Results suggest that intelligence may be one important individual difference influencing women's mate preferences.
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Handgrip Strength and Socially Dominant Behavior in Male Adolescents
Andrew Gallup, Daniel O'Brien, Daniel White & David Sloan Wilson
Evolutionary Psychology, May 2010, Pages 229-243
Abstract:
Handgrip strength (HGS) is highly heritable and a good overall measure of strength and muscle function. Indicative of blood testosterone levels and fat-free body mass, HGS is also highly sexually dimorphic. Recent psychological research shows that HGS is correlated with a number of social variables, but only in males. We conducted three studies to further investigate the relationship between HGS and measures of aggression and social competition among adolescents. Consistent with previous reports, correlations were almost exclusive to males, but this was only visible during late adolescence (i.e., high school). These findings support evolutionary hypotheses regarding grip strength in male-male competition and suggest that similar to measures of testosterone, HGS is a measure that is predictive of social behavior in older adolescent males.
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Eye color predicts but does not directly influence perceived dominance in men
Karel Kleisner, Tomáš Kočnar, Anna Rubešová & Jaroslav Flegr
Personality and Individual Differences, July 2010, Pages 59-64
Abstract:
This study focuses on the relationship between eye color, gender, and psychological characteristics perceived from the human face. Photographs of 40 male and 40 female students were rated for perceived dominance and attractiveness. Attractiveness showed no relation with eye color. In contrast, eye color had a significant effect on perceived dominance in males: brown-eyed men were rated as more dominant than men with blue eyes. To control for the effect of eye color, we studied perceived dominance on the same photographs of models after changing the iris color. The eye color had no effect on perceived dominance. This suggests that some other facial features associated with eye color affect the perception of dominance in males. Geometric morphometrics have been applied to reveal features responsible for the differences in facial morphospace of blue-eyed and brown-eyed males.
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Anthropometry and socioeconomics among couples: Evidence in the United States
Sonia Oreffice & Climent Quintana-Domeque
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the marriage-market aspects of weight and height in the United States using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on anthropometric characteristics of both spouses. We find evidence of positive sorting in spouses' body mass index (BMI), weight, and height. Within couples, gender-asymmetric trade-offs arise not only between physical and socioeconomic attributes, but also between anthropometric attributes, with significant penalties for fatter women and shorter men. A wife's obesity (BMI or weight) measures are negatively correlated with her husband's income, education, and height, controlling for his weight and her height, along with spouses' demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Conversely, heavier husbands are not penalized by matching with poorer or less educated wives, but only with shorter ones. Height is valued mainly for men, with shorter men matched with heavier and less educated wives.
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Johanna van Hooff, Helen Crawford & Mark van Vugt
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
To examine the time course and automaticity of our attention bias towards attractive opposite sex faces, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 20 males and 20 females while they carried out a covert orienting task. Faces that were high, low or average in attractiveness, were presented in focus of attention, but were unrelated to task goals. Across the entire sample larger P2 amplitudes were found in response to both attractive and unattractive opposite sex faces, presumably reflecting early implicit selective attention to distinctive faces. In male but not female participants this was followed by an increased late slow wave for the attractive faces, signifying heightened processing linked to motivated attention. This latter finding is consistent with sexual strategy theory, which suggests that men and women have evolved to pursue different mating strategies with men being more attentive to cues such as facial beauty. In general, our ERP results suggest that, in addition to threat-related stimuli, other evolutionary-relevant information is also prioritized by our attention systems.
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Petra Gyuris, Róbert Járai & Tamás Bereczkei
Personality and Individual Differences, October 2010, Pages 467-472
Abstract:
We have made an attempt at demonstrating the effect of parental influence, particularly sexual imprinting, on human mate choice. Extending our earlier studies that focused on facial similarities between couples, and parents and couples, now we investigate resemblances in personality characters. Forty-nine couples and their parents filled in Caprara's Big Five Questionnaire and the s-EMBU retrospective attachment test. We found significant correlations between the young men's wives and their mothers in Conscientiousness that may be a key factor for similarity, given that it is related to the attitudes regarding parental investment. As far as the effect of childhood experiences are considered, we have controversial results. We found several significant relationships for the same-sex parents and a reverse relationship between the quality of parent-child attachment and the degree of similarity between the child's parent and spouse, that may contradict the ethological notion of sexual imprinting. As a possible interpretation, we emphasize the very complexity of detecting and using parental personality structure as a model in mate choice. In general, our results suggest that childhood experiences would play an important role in shaping mate preferences, and parental models may guide partner choice in terms of personality traits.
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Male Incarceration, the Marriage Market, and Female Outcomes
Kerwin Kofi Charles & Ming Ching Luoh
Review of Economics and Statistics, August 2010, Pages 614-627
Abstract:
This paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market. Variation in marriage-market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts: the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race, location, and age and the fact that increases in incarceration have been very different across these three characteristics. Using a variety of estimation strategies, including difference and fixed effects models and TSLS models in which we use policy parameters to instrument for within-marriage market changes in incarceration, we find evidence that is, on the whole, consistent with the implications of the standard marriage-market model. In particular, higher male imprisonment appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry, modestly reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry, and shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward men. The evidence suggests that women in affected markets have increased their schooling and labor supply in response to these changes.
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Experiences of falling in love: Investigating culture, ethnicity, gender, and speed
Suzanne Riela, Geraldine Rodriguez, Arthur Aron, Xiaomeng Xu & Bianca Acevedo
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, June 2010, Pages 473-493
Abstract:
This research investigated 12 precursors to falling love - reciprocal liking, appearance, personality, similarity, familiarity, social influence, filling needs, arousal, readiness, specific cues, isolation, and mysteriousness - with respect to culture, ethnicity, gender, and speed. In Study 1, White-American and Asian-American participants wrote narratives of their falling in love experiences. In Study 2, participants from the United States and China wrote narratives and completed self-ratings of the precursors. Few ethnic, gender, and speed differences were obtained in either study, but those found were in the predicted direction. Many cultural differences were found in Study 2, the majority of which were consistent with individualism-collectivism models. Implications for understanding falling in love and directions for future research are discussed.
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Commercial Sexual Practices Before and After Legalization in Australia
Charrlotte Seib, Michael Dunne, Jane Fischer & Jackob Najman
Archives of Sexual Behavior, August 2010, Pages 979-989
Abstract:
The nature of sex work changes over time for many reasons. In recent decades around the world, there has been movement toward legalization and control of sex economies. Studies of the possible impact of legalization mainly have focused on sexually transmitted infections and violence, with little attention to change in the diversity of sexual services provided. This study examined the practices of sex workers before and after legalization of prostitution. Cross-sectional surveys of comparable samples of female sex workers were conducted in 1991 (N = 200, aged 16-46 years) and 2003 (N = 247, aged 18-57 years) in Queensland, Australia, spanning a period of major change in regulation of the local industry. In 2003, male clients at brothels and private sole operators (N = 161; aged 19-72 years) were also interviewed. Over time, there was a clear increase in the provision of "exotic" sexual services, including bondage and discipline, submission, fantasy, use of sex toys, golden showers, fisting, and lesbian double acts, while "traditional" services mostly remained at similar levels (with substantial decrease in oral sex without a condom). Based on comparisons of self-reports of clients and workers, the demand for anal intercourse, anal play, and urination during sex apparently exceeded supply, especially in licensed brothels. Within this population, legalization of sex work coincided with a substantial increase in diversity of services, but it appears that in the regulated working environments, clients who prefer high risk practices might not dictate what is available to them.