Thought Leaders
Heiner Rindermann & James Thompson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Traditional theories of economic growth stress the relevance of political, institutional, economic, geographic and historical factors. In contrast, human capital theories claim that peoples' competences are the deciding factor in achieving technological progress leading to wealth. Using large scale assessments (TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS) cognitive competence sums for N=90 countries were calculated for the mean and the upper and low level groups and compared for their influence on GDP. Cross-national analyses applied different statistical methods (path analyses, bootstrapping), measures developed by different research groups, for different country samples and historical periods. All results underscore the decisive relevance of cognitive ability, particularly of an upper ability group creating an intellectual class with high accomplishment in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and which predicts the quality of economic and political institutions, resulting in economic affluence. Cognitive resources enable the evolution of capitalism and the rise of wealth.
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The Norm-Activating Power of Celebrity: The Dynamics of Success and Influence
Siegwart Lindenberg, Janneke Joly & Diederik Stapel
Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2011, Pages 98-120
Abstract:
On the basis of previous evidence, we reasoned that even if people do not identify with celebrities, these celebrities can influence their behavior by activating bundles of social norms. Activating a norm means making both content and "oughtness" of the norm more directly relevant for behavior. We further reasoned that in order to have this norm-activating effect, celebrities have to have prestige. The question is whether they need to be seen as successful in order to have this effect. In four experimental studies, we examined the effects of a normative message presented by a celebrity on the activation of a target norm and of related and unrelated norms. As predicted, the normative message activated both target and related norms and did not activate unrelated norms. Also as expected, this ability to activate norms vanished entirely when the celebrities were tarnished by waning success. This result also shows that "success" and "lack of success" of a celebrity can be the result of relatively minor differences in media reporting. As expected, the norm-activating effect of celebrities was not mediated by self-reported measures of seeing celebrities as role models or of identifying with them. Implications for the impact of someone's environment on norm conformity beyond positive and negative sanctions are discussed.
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The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can be More Dishonest
Francesca Gino & Dan Ariely
Harvard Working Paper, January 2011
Abstract:
Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and creativity primes promote individuals' motivation to think outside the box and that this increased motivation leads to unethical behavior. In four studies, we show that participants with creative personalities who scored high on a test measuring divergent thinking tended to cheat more (Study 1); that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (Study 2); and that participants who were primed to think creatively were more likely to behave dishonestly because of their creativity motivation (Study 3) and greater ability to justify their dishonest behavior (Study 4). Finally, a field study constructively replicates these effects and demonstrates that individuals who work in more creative positions are also more morally flexible (Study 5). The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity.
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Determinants of congressional minimum wage support: The role of economic education
Brian O'Roark & William Wood
Public Choice, April 2011, Pages 209-225
Abstract:
Much has been made about the lack of economic education among the public at large, yet little has been said about the limited education of Members of Congress. This paper examines the economic education levels of Members of Congress voting on the 2007 increase in the minimum wage. Controlling for a variety of characteristics of members and constituents, this study finds that members who majored in economics as undergraduates were less likely to vote for the minimum wage increase than their colleagues. No other major had a consistent influence. A large number of statistical specifications confirm the robustness of the finding.
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Jason Clark, Cassie Eno & Rosanna Guadagno
Self and Identity, April 2011, Pages 248-262
Abstract:
Compared to other negatively stereotyped groups, a paucity of research has examined stereotypes of US southerners. Building from past research and theory on the phenomenon of stereotype threat, the current research examined the possibility that activating negative stereotypes of people from the southern US can undermine their performance on intellectual tasks. In four studies, southern US college students took a test consisting of difficult mathematical and verbal questions. When negative stereotypes about their group were activated, performance was lower compared to conditions in which stereotypes were not made salient. In addition, performance decrements associated with stereotype activation were found to be linked with individual differences in group identification. Results showed that higher levels of identification as a southerner predicted lower levels of test performance.
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Angelina Hawley-Dolan & Ellen Winner
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., "artist," "child") that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups' judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists' intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.
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Erik Dane et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, February 2011, Pages 3-12
Abstract:
We compared the effects of rational versus intuitive problem solving on creativity. We argued that the relative effectiveness of these approaches depends upon an individual's typical thinking style such that individuals will be more creative when they adopt a problem-solving approach that differs from their typical style of thinking (e.g., individuals who avoid rational thinking will exhibit higher creativity when they are instructed to rely on rational problem solving). We tested this hypothesis in a sample of undergraduate students generating creative ideas in response to a real-world problem. In support of our hypothesis, we found that problem-solving approach and individual differences in thinking style interact such that creativity is highest when individuals use a nontypical problem-solving approach.
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Annukka Lindell & Nicola Savill
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, November 2010, Pages 639-650
Abstract:
The human face expresses emotion asymmetrically. Whereas the left cheek is more emotionally expressive, the right cheek appears more impassive, hence the appropriate cheek to put forward depends on the circumstance. Nicholls, Clode, Wood, and Wood (1999, Proceedings of the Royal Society (Section B), 266, 1517-1522) demonstrated that people posing for family portraits offer the left cheek, whereas those posing as a Royal Society scientist favour the right. Given that the stereotypical representations of members of different academic disciplines differ markedly in their perceived openness and emotionality (e.g., "serious" scientist vs. "creative" writer), we reasoned that people may use cheek as a cue when determining a model's area of academic interest. Two hundred and nine participants (M=90, F=119) viewed pairs of left and right cheek poses, and made a forced-choice decision indicating which image depicted a Chemistry, Psychology or English student. Half the images were mirror-reversed to control for perceptual and aesthetic biases. Consistent with prediction, participants were more likely to select left cheek images for English students, and right cheek images for Chemistry students, irrespective of image orientation. The results confirm that determining the best cheek to put forward depends on your academic expertise: an impassive right cheek suggests hard science, whereas an emotive left cheek implies the arts. Psychology produced no left or right bias, consistent with its position as a discipline perpetually straddling the boundary between art and science.
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Status, Quality, and Attention: What's in a (Missing) Name?
Timothy Simcoe & Dave Waguespack
Management Science, February 2011, Pages 274-290
Abstract:
How much are we influenced by an author's identity when evaluating his or her work? This paper exploits a natural experiment to measure the impact of status signals in the context of open standards development. For a period of time, e-mails announcing new submissions to the Internet Engineering Task Force would replace individual author names with "et al." if submission volumes were unusually high. We measure the impact of status signals by comparing the effect of obscuring high- versus low-status author names. Our results show that name-based signals can explain up to three-quarters of the difference in publication rates between high- and low-status authors. The signaling effect disappears for a set of prescreened proposals that receive more scrutiny than a typical submission, suggesting that status signals are more important when attention is scarce (or search costs high). We also show that submissions from high-status authors receive more attention on electronic discussion boards, which may help high-status authors to develop their ideas and bring them forward to publication.
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Securities Trading of Concepts (STOC)
Ely Dahan et al.
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Identifying winning new product concepts can be a challenging process that requires insight into private consumer preferences. In order to measure consumer preferences for new product concepts, we apply a securities-trading approach where new product concepts are traded as financial securities: Securities Trading of Concepts (STOC). We apply this method because market prices are well known to efficiently collect and aggregate private information regarding the economic value of goods, services, and firms, particularly when trading financial securities. Our research includes the first application of securities markets to test potential new product concepts, and is the first to compare such an approach against stated-choice, conjoint, constantsum and longitudinal revealed preference data. In our research, we place STOC in the context of existing methodologies, as well as prior research on prediction markets and experimental economics. We conduct a series of experiments in multiple product categories to test whether STOC: 1) is more cost-efficient than other methods; 2) passes validity tests; 3) measures expectations of others; and 4) reveals individual preferences, not just those of the crowd. All results are confirmed, with the notable exception that STOC, as tested, does not accurately predict actual product market shares and price sensitivity. Our results also show that traders exhibit bias based on self-preferences when trading. Ultimately, STOC offers two key advantages to traditional market research methods - cost efficiency and scalability. For new product development (NPD) teams deciding where to invest resources, this scalability may be especially important in the Web 2.0 world where customers are constantly interacting with firms and with each other in suggesting numerous product design possibilities that need to be screened.
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Spillovers, Linkages, and Productivity Growth in the US Economy, 1958 to 2007
Edward Wolff
NBER Working Paper, March 2011
Abstract:
I speculate that technological spillover effects may have become more important over time as IT penetrated the U.S. economy. The rationale is that IT may speed up the process of knowledge transfer and make these knowledge spillovers more effective. Using US input-output tables for years 1958, 1967, 1977, 1987, 1997, and 2007, I compare my new results with Wolff and Nadiri (1993) covering years 1947-1977 and Wolff (1997) covering 1958- 1987. I estimate that the direct rate of return to R&D is now 22% and the indirect rate of return to R&D is 37%. The former is higher than in the previous studies. The indirect rate of return to R&D is now significant at the one percent level, in comparison to a 10 percent significance level in Wolff (1997). The newly estimated social rate of return to R&D is 59%, compared to 53% in Wolff (1997). In contrast to the earlier studies, the coefficients of R&D embodied in new investment are now statistically significant at the five percent level. Separate regressions on the 1958-1987 and 1987-2007 periods and the addition of successive periods to the sample also suggest a strengthening of R&D spillovers between the 1958-1987 and 1987-2007 periods. A decomposition of TFP growth also indicates a higher contribution from R&D spillovers in the later period. These results suggest a strengthening of the R&D spillover effect over time.
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Genetic Influences on Cost-Efficient Organization of Human Cortical Functional Networks
Alex Fornito et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 2 March 2011, Pages 3261-3270
Abstract:
The human cerebral cortex is a complex network of functionally specialized regions interconnected by axonal fibers, but the organizational principles underlying cortical connectivity remain unknown. Here, we report evidence that one such principle for functional cortical networks involves finding a balance between maximizing communication efficiency and minimizing connection cost, referred to as optimization of network cost-efficiency. We measured spontaneous fluctuations of the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal using functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy monozygotic (16 pairs) and dizygotic (13 pairs) twins and characterized cost-efficient properties of brain network functional connectivity between 1041 distinct cortical regions. At the global network level, 60% of the interindividual variance in cost-efficiency of cortical functional networks was attributable to additive genetic effects. Regionally, significant genetic effects were observed throughout the cortex in a largely bilateral pattern, including bilateral posterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortices, dorsolateral prefrontal and superior parietal cortices, and lateral temporal and inferomedial occipital regions. Genetic effects were stronger for cost-efficiency than for other metrics considered, and were more clearly significant in functional networks operating in the 0.09-0.18 Hz frequency interval than at higher or lower frequencies. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that brain networks evolved to satisfy competitive selection criteria of maximizing efficiency and minimizing cost, and that optimization of network cost-efficiency represents an important principle for the brain's functional organization.
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Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas
Laura Kornish & Karl Ulrich
Management Science, January 2011, Pages 107-128
Abstract:
A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times, because parallel exploration processes typically operate without information about the ideas that have already been identified. In this paper we analyze repetition in five data sets comprising 1,368 opportunities and use that analysis to address three questions: (1) When a large number of efforts to generate ideas are conducted in parallel, how likely are the resulting ideas to be redundant? (2) How large are the opportunity spaces? (3) Are the unique ideas more valuable than those similar to many others? The answer to the first question is that although there is clearly some redundancy in the ideas generated by aggregating parallel efforts, this redundancy is quite small in absolute terms in our data, even for a narrowly defined domain. For the second question, we propose a method to extrapolate how many unique ideas would result from an unbounded effort by an unlimited number of comparable idea generators. Applying that method, and for the settings we study, the estimated total number of unique ideas is about one thousand for the most narrowly defined domain and greater than two thousand for the more broadly defined domains. On the third question, we find a positive relationship between the number of similar ideas and idea value: the ideas that are least similar to others are not generally the most valuable ones.
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Flows of people, flows of ideas, and the inequality of nations
Thomas Barnebeck Andersen & Carl-Johan Dalgaard
Journal of Economic Growth, March 2011, Pages 1-32
Abstract:
The present paper examines a neglected determinant of aggregate productivity: temporary cross-border flows of people. We hypothesize that interaction between people from different nations facilitates the international diffusion of ideas, thus stimulating aggregate productivity. In order to assess the causal impact of people flows on productivity, we construct an instrument for people flows. By analogy to the trade/growth literature, this instrument is derived from a fitted gravity equation involving geographic determinants of bilateral travel flows. Our cross-section analysis reveal that greater international interaction leads to higher productivity; a very similar result, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, is obtained when we employ dynamic panel data methods for the purpose of identification.
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Working memory capacity and cognitive styles in decision-making
Jennifer Fletcher, Anthony Marks & Donald Hine
Personality and Individual Differences, May 2011, Pages 1136-1141
Abstract:
Human decision-making is thought to involve the interplay of two distinct information processing systems: a rational (logical) system and an experiential (intuitive) system (Epstein, 1994). Moreover, the ability to engage in rational processing is believed to be constrained by working memory capacity (WMC) (Feldman Barrett, Tugade, & Engle, 2004). Accordingly, preference for rationality, but not preference for experientiality, was expected to mediate the relationship between WMC and performance on cognitive tasks that require logical reasoning. Path analysis using AMOS 18, with data from 269 non-paired twins, confirmed this mediation hypothesis. Higher WMC was predictive of stronger preference for rationality, which, in turn, was predictive of better syllogistic reasoning, lower susceptibility to gambling biases, and lower superstitiousness and categorical thinking. As expected, WMC was unrelated to preference for experiential processing, and higher experientiality predicted poorer performance on the syllogistic reasoning task, higher susceptibility to gambling biases and greater superstitiousness.
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Making tools isn't child's play
Sarah Beck et al.
Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Tool making evidences intelligent, flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that 4- to 7-year-olds chose a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tube. In Experiment 2, 3- to 5-year-olds consistently failed to innovate a simple hook tool. Eight-year-olds performed at mature levels. In contrast, making a tool following demonstration was easy for even the youngest children. In Experiment 3, children's performance did not improve given the opportunity to manipulate the objects in a warm-up phase. Children's tool innovation lags substantially behind their ability to learn how to make tools by observing others.
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Patterns of temporal variation in online media
Jaewon Yang & Jure Leskovec
Stanford Working Paper, February 2011
Abstract:
Online content exhibits rich temporal dynamics, and diverse realtime user generated content further intensifies this process. However, temporal patterns by which online content grows and fades over time, and by which different pieces of content compete for attention remain largely unexplored. We study temporal patterns associated with online content and how the content's popularity grows and fades over time. The attention that content receives on the Web varies depending on many factors and occurs on very different time scales and at different resolutions. In order to uncover the temporal dynamics of online content we formulate a time series clustering problem using a similarity metric that is invariant to scaling and shifting. We develop the K-Spectral Centroid (K-SC) clustering algorithm that effectively finds cluster centroids with our similarity measure. By applying an adaptive wavelet-based incremental approach to clustering, we scale K-SC to large data sets. We demonstrate our approach on two massive datasets: a set of 580 million Tweets, and a set of 170 million blog posts and news media articles. We find that K-SC outperforms the K-means clustering algorithm in finding distinct shapes of time series. Our analysis shows that there are six main temporal shapes of attention of online content. We also present a simple model that reliably predicts the shape of attention by using information about only a small number of participants. Our analyses offer insight into common temporal patterns of the content on theWeb and broaden the understanding of the dynamics of human attention.
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Copyright piracy as prey-predator behavior
Francisco Vázquez & Richard Watt
Journal of Bioeconomics, April 2011, Pages 31-43
Abstract:
The economic analysis of the piracy of copyright products has used a variety of modeling assumptions, the majority of which use typical industrial organization settings. The results of such models are manyfold, but in general they are ambiguous as to the optimal protection strategy, and the effects of protection on the welfare of copyright holders, and on the existence of piracy. Concretely, little has been said about which types of protection mechanisms are most adequate for controlling piracy. In the present paper, we propose a new theoretical framework by drawing an analogy between copyright piracy and prey-predator behavior. This analogy gives us a new perspective to approach copyright issues and it provides the economic theory of copyright piracy with a new set of mathematical models. We consider a very simple model that can be used to show that publicly instigated and financed policies designed to deter piracy can have the effect of increasing the amount of piracy, while privately financed strategies (e.g. DRM) will always decrease piracy.
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Dongil Chung et al.
PLoS ONE, February 2011, e17044
Abstract:
Gifted adolescents are considered to have high IQs with advanced mathematical and logical performances, but are often thought to suffer from social isolation or emotional mal-adaptation to the social group. The underlying mechanisms that cause stereotypic portrayals of gifted adolescents are not well known. We aimed to investigate behavioral performance of gifted adolescents during social decision-making tasks to assess their affective and social/non-social cognitive abilities. We examined cooperation behaviors of 22 gifted and 26 average adolescents during an iterative binary public goods (PG) game, a multi-player social interaction game, and analyzed strategic decision processes that include cooperation and free-riding. We found that the gifted adolescents were more cooperative than average adolescents. Particularly, comparing the strategies for the PG game between the two groups, gifted adolescents were less sensitive to loss, yet were more sensitive to gain. Additionally, the behavioral characteristics of average adolescents, such as low trust of the group and herding behavior, were not found in gifted adolescents. These results imply that gifted adolescents have a high cognitive ability but a low ability to process affective information or to adapt in social groups compared with average adolescents. We conclude that gain/loss sensitivity and the ability to adapt in social groups develop to different degrees in average and gifted adolescents.
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Joint determination of biological encephalization, economic specialization
Richard Horan, Jason Shogren & Erwin Bulte
Resource and Energy Economics, May 2011, Pages 426-439
Abstract:
In this paper, we develop a paleoeconomic model of the co-evolution of economic specialization and encephalization-the common physiological measure of intelligence as reflected by brain mass relative to total body mass. Our economic analysis links ecological and social intelligence theories of increased encephalization in early hominins through a model in which both economic and ecological feedbacks jointly determined the evolutionary incentives. We focus on degrees of specialization affected by coordination costs with and without market exchange. Our results suggest encephalization would be a process characterized by diminishing returns to behavioral advances. In terms of the long-running debate in economics over whether specialization increases or decreases intelligence, our results suggest from an evolutionary perspective the answer depends on economic/social institutions and how these influence ecological interactions.
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Predicting beauty: Fractal dimension and visual complexity in art
A. Forsythe et al.
British Journal of Psychology, February 2011, Pages 49-70
Abstract:
Visual complexity has been known to be a significant predictor of preference for artistic works for some time. The first study reported here examines the extent to which perceived visual complexity in art can be successfully predicted using automated measures of complexity. Contrary to previous findings the most successful predictor of visual complexity was Gif compression. The second study examined the extent to which fractal dimension could account for judgments of perceived beauty. The fractal dimension measure accounts for more of the variance in judgments of perceived beauty in visual art than measures of visual complexity alone, particularly for abstract and natural images. Results also suggest that when colour is removed from an artistic image observers are unable to make meaningful judgments as to its beauty.