The 9th annual year in ideas: IDEAS IN SOCIAL&nbsp;SCIENCE

Black Quarterbacks Are Underpaid

When
Rush Limbaugh tried and failed to join the clubby ranks of National
Football League owners this year, his past comments came back to haunt
him, none more so than his assessment of the Philadelphia Eagles star
Donovan McNabb — namely that the news media overrated McNabb because he
is black and that he was simply not "that good of a quarterback." But
according to the economists David J. Berri and Rob Simmons, Limbaugh
might have been giving public voice to what the owners who spurned him
think privately.

In an article
for the February issue of Journal of Sports Economics, Berri and
Simmons found that black quarterbacks tend to be paid less than their
white counterparts and that the pay disparity is especially pronounced
for top-flight black quarterbacks, who don’t make as much money as the
best white quarterbacks.

Given
the N.F.L.’s sorry history when it comes to black quarterbacks — it
wasn’t until the mid-1990s that many black athletes even began playing
the position — it’s possible that the pay disparity is attributable to
simple racism. But Berri and Simmons offer a more subtle explanation:
statistical bias.

Chart by LamoscaWhite quarterbacks earned more on average, but black quarterbacks outperformed them in a key category over a similar period.

The
key is that owners do not fairly compensate quarterbacks who are good
at running the ball in addition to throwing it. Using 35 years of data,
Berri and Simmons found that while white quarterbacks, on average, run
with the ball on only 6.7 percent of their plays, gaining a measly 7.3
yards per game, black quarterbacks run, on average, 11.3 percent of the
time and gain 19.4 rushing yards per contest. In other words, many
black quarterbacks tend to be good runners as well as good passers. And
quarterbacks are not paid for the rushing yards they produce.

Perhaps
that’s because the quarterback rating — the N.F.L.’s gold standard for
evaluating quarterbacks statistically — does not include rushing yards
as one of its four components. The formula considers only completions,
passing yards, touchdowns and interceptions. Thus "a key offering" of
many black quarterbacks, write Berri and Simmons, "is ignored." JASON ZENGERLE

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE, SPORTS

Cognitive Illiberalism

Could
the Supreme Court be undermining its legitimacy through its ignorance
of some basic tenets of social psychology? Three law professors — Dan
M. Kahan of Yale, David A. Hoffman of Temple and Donald Braman of
George Washington — made that case in an article published in January
in The Harvard Law Review. They charged the justices with the sin of
"cognitive illiberalism."

The
article centered on a 2007 case, Scott v. Harris. Victor Harris was
rendered quadriplegic after the police rammed his car, ending a
nine-mile high-speed chase outside Atlanta. The issue was whether a
suit by Harris against the officer who rammed him should be allowed to
proceed to a jury trial. Lower courts were inclined to give Harris his
day in court, because he had committed no crime except speeding before
he fled, and while he topped 85 miles per hour during the chase, he was
in theory in control of his car.

The Supreme Court disagreed and defended its position in an
unprecedented way: by posting a video of the chase, taken by the
police, on its Web site. "No reasonable jury," Antonin Scalia wrote for
the majority, could watch the video without agreeing that the chase had
to be stopped, even if it meant killing Harris. John Paul Stevens was
the lone dissenter. Scalia wrote that Stevens’s argument that Harris
was not necessarily driving with life-threatening recklessness was so
plainly false that anyone with eyes could see so. "We are happy to
allow the videotape to speak for itself," Scalia wrote.

Did
it? Kahan, Hoffman and Braman showed it to a diverse group of 1,350
Americans. Most of the test subjects saw things as the Supreme Court
did: 75 percent concurred that deadly force was justified.

JUSTICE JOHN PAUL STEVENSILLUSTRATION BY CATH RILEY

The
dissenters, however, were not randomly distributed: they reflected
distinct subcategories of Americans, like liberal African-American
women from cities in the Northeast.

The
law professors argued that the justices in the majority were in the
grip of a common psychological fallacy: that other people’s perceptions
might be shaped by socioeconomic position or political commitment, but
they themselves perceived the objective truth.

The
authors recommend that, before summarily deciding a case, "a judge
engage in a sort of mental double-check." If he or she can picture a
discrete group of Americans who would disagree that a decision is
self-evident, go with a jury. To imply that minority groups are flatly
unreasonable sends a "denigrating and exclusionary message" and will
diminish support for the law. CHRISTOPHER SHEA

Counterfeit Self, The

Wearing
imitation designer clothing or accessories can fool others — but no
matter how convincing the knockoff, you never, of course, fool
yourself. It’s a small but undeniable act of duplicity. Which led a
trio of researchers to suspect that wearing counterfeits might quietly
take a psychological toll on the wearer.

ILLUSTRATION BY MR BINGO

To
test their hunch, the psychologists Francesca Gino, Michael Norton and
Dan Ariely asked two groups of young women to wear sunglasses taken
from a box labeled either "authentic" or "counterfeit." (In truth, all
the eyewear was authentic, donated by a brand-name designer interested
in curtailing counterfeiting.) Then the researchers put the
participants in situations in which it was both easy and tempting to
cheat.

In one situation, which
was ostensibly part of a product evaluation, the women wore the shades
while answering a set of very simple math problems — under heavy time
pressure.

Afterward, given ample
time to check their work, they reported how many problems they were
able to answer correctly. They had been told they’d be paid for each
answer they reported getting right, thus creating an incentive to
inflate their scores. Unbeknown to the participants, the researchers
knew each person’s actual score. Math performance was the same for the
two groups — but whereas 30 percent of those in the "authentic"
condition inflated their scores, a whopping 71 percent of the
counterfeit-wearing participants did so.

Why
did this happen? As Gino puts it, "When one feels like a fake, he or
she is likely to behave like a fake." It was notable that the
participants were oblivious to this and other similar effects the
researchers discovered: the psychological costs of cheap knockoffs are
hidden. The study is currently in press at the journal Psychological
Science.

Could other types of
fakery also lead to ethical lapses? "It’s a fascinating research
question," says Gino, who studies organizational behavior at the
University of North Carolina. "There are lots of situations on the job
where we’re not true to ourselves, and we might not realize there might
be unintended consequences." MARINA KRAKOVSKY

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE, CULTURE

Drunken Ultimatums

The so-called ultimatum game contains a world of psychological and
economic mysteries. In a laboratory setting, one person is given an
allotment of money (say, $100) and instructed to offer a second person
a portion. If the second player says yes to the offer, both keep the
cash. If the second player says no, both walk away with nothing.

The
rational move in any single game is for the second person to take
whatever is offered. (It’s more than he came in with.) But in fact,
most people reject offers of less than 30 percent of the total,
punishing offers they perceive as unfair. Why?

The
academic debate boils down to two competing explanations. On one hand,
players might be strategically suppressing their self-interest, turning
down cash now in the hope that if there are future games, the
"proposer" will make better offers. On the other hand, players might
simply be lashing out in anger.

The
researchers Carey Morewedge and Tamar Krishnamurti, of Carnegie Mellon
University, and Dan Ariely, of Duke, recently tested the competing
explanations — by exploring how drunken people played the game.

As
described in a working paper now under peer review, Morewedge and
Krishnamurti took a "data truck" to a strip of bars on the South Side
of Pittsburgh (where participants were "often at a level of
intoxication that is greater than is ethical to induce") and also did
controlled testing, in labs, of people randomly selected to get drunk.

The
scholars were interested in drunkenness because intoxication, as other
social-science experiments have shown, doesn’t fuzz up judgment so much
as cause the drinker to overly focus on the most prominent cue in his
environment. If the long-term-strategy hypothesis were true, drunken
players would be more inclined to accept any amount of cash. (Money on
the table generates more-visceral responses than long-term goals do.)
If the anger/revenge theory were true, however, drunken players would
become less likely to accept low offers: raw anger would trump
money-lust.

In both setups,
drunken players were less likely than their sober peers to accept
offers of less than 50 percent of the total. The finding suggests, the
authors said, that the principal impulse driving subjects was a wish
for revenge. CHRISTOPHER SHEA

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE

Forensic Polling Analysis

The
American Association for Public Opinion Research censured a
Georgia-based firm called Strategic Vision L.L.C. in September for
failing to reveal information about how it conducted its polls during
the 2008 presidential race. The company’s chief executive promptly
threatened to sue, which struck Nate Silver, a polling specialist and
political blogger, as a bizarre response.

Wondering
if the company had anything to hide, Silver, the proprietor of
fivethirtyeight.com, stayed up all night keying all of Strategic
Vision’s poll results over the last four years into a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet.

To test the polls,
Silver made use of a statistical truism. As he puts it, "Tell a human
to come up with a set of random numbers, and they will be surprisingly
inept at trying to do so." They unwittingly fall into nonrandom
patterns.

Silver took the
results of every Strategic Vision poll question — from more than 100
polls on political races and issues of every sort — and analyzed the
"trailing digits" in the results. (If a poll found that one candidate
led another by 52-48, the trailing digits were 2 and 8.) Silver thought
that, given the wide range of poll topics, the distribution of trailing
digits should be more or less random. Instead — shades of "C.S.I." — he
found a highly abnormal distribution of digits. For example, there were
nearly 60 percent more 8s than 2s.

NATE SILVER
ILLUSTRATION BY CATH RILEYThe probability of such a distribution occurring in authentic polls, Silver calculated, was "millions to one against."

Silver concluded that the firm’s data were not random. "It’s not close to random," he wrote. "It’s not close to close."

When
readers asked for a comparison study, he presented a similar analysis
for the well-respected Quinnipiac poll. In that case, there were "a few
too many 2s and 3s," but nothing outside the realm of chance.

In
the coup de grâce, a retired physics professor at the University of
Illinois, Michael Weissman, stepped in, deploying more sophisticated
tools (Fourier analysis). If Strategic Vision’s polls were legitimate,
Weissman concluded, the odds that they would produce the numbers

Strategic
Vision published were 1 in 5,000 — better than Silver found, but still
suspicious. Strategic Vision has threatened to sue Silver, too, but the
company has yet to release documentation of its methods. CHRISTOPHER SHEA

Infant Sleep Is Destiny

Attention, anxious parents with sleepless newborns: It’s even worse
than you think! You already know that a baby with poor sleep habits
means misery for you and doesn’t seem like much fun for him or her. But
this year, evidence emerged that those sleepless nights may also be a
sign of bigger troubles to come. According to a new study, erratic
sleep patterns in the first 18 months of life correlate at age 2 with
reduced "executive functioning" — the term psychologists use to refer
to the ability to focus your thoughts, control your impulses and avoid
distractions. And executive-function abilities in childhood, recent
research has determined, predict future success in school and in life.

Annie
Bernier, a psychologist at the University of Montreal; Stephanie M.
Carlson, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota; and two
colleagues followed 60 families with new babies, and at 12 and 18
months asked them to keep a "sleep diary" tallying how many hours the
babies slept at night and during the day. (They decided not to use
total hours slept as their measure of sleep quality, because babies
gradually need less sleep as they grow. Instead, the researchers
postulated that sleeping more hours at night and fewer during the day,
as older children do, was a sign of better, more "mature" sleep
patterns in infants.)

ILLUSTRATION BY MARC JOHNSEarlier
research showed that sleeplessness hampers cognitive skills in the
short term for both children and adults — an all-nighter before a big
exam is almost always a bad idea. But no one had measured the long-term
effect of early sleep deficits. So Bernier and Carlson followed the
same families over an extended period, and when they tested the
children’s executive-function abilities at 26 months, they found
lingering effects of early sleep troubles.

Bernier
and Carlson theorize that early sleep problems may be caused in part by
certain parental behaviors, but precisely which behaviors and how they
correlate to sleep isn’t yet clear. Which is more comforting news for
desperate parents to contemplate while singing lullabies and sipping
coffee at 3 a.m.: your baby’s sleep troubles are quite possibly your
fault, but no one can tell you what you’re doing wrong. Sweet dreams! PAUL TOUGH

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE, HEALTH

Myth of the Deficient Older Employee, The

Although workers who were 45 and older had lower unemployment rates in
2008 than younger workers, they stayed unemployed for longer periods,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is not surprising.
Employers are often reluctant to hire older workers, not only because
they have higher health care costs and sometimes command higher
salaries but also because of their reputational stigma. Older workers
are commonly thought of as being less productive and less willing to
learn than younger workers, as well as overly cautious. But this year
economists presented a more nuanced picture than the above stereotypes
suggest.

In The American
Economic Review in June, Gary Charness, an economics professor at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and Marie Claire Villeval, a
colleague from the University of Lyon, published the results of a study
in which they pitted "seniors" (those over 50) against "juniors" (those
under 30) in three different decision-making tasks. These were
formulated to test risk taking, competitiveness and cooperation.

As it turns out, the "seniors" more than hold their own. The seniors were also more cooperative, contributing

CHART BY LAMOSCAIn
risk-taking, which the researchers assessed via an investing game, the
seniors invested slightly more than the juniors. Seniors (50 and over)
performed better than juniors (30 and under) in several tests,
including a competitive word game.

more to their group during the cooperation
test. The seniors outperformed the juniors on one competitive word game
— and were only "very slightly less" competitive overall, Charness
says. "Older workers," he stresses, "don’t suffer from the deficiencies
that a lot of people think they do."

Another welcome finding of the study came
during the cooperation portion, when Charness and Villeval found that
groups with a mix of ages outperformed homogeneous groups. For an
optimum work force, Charness says, it is best to have a range of ages
in the office. LIA MILLER

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE, BUSINESS

Obama Effect, The

In
1995, two Stanford psychologists, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson,
demonstrated that African-American college students did worse on tests
of academic ability when they were exposed beforehand to suggestions
that they were being judged according to their race. Steele and Aronson
hypothesized that this effect, which they labeled stereotype threat,
might explain part of the persistent achievement gap between white and
black students. In the years since, this idea has spread throughout the
social sciences. Experimental studies have detected the negative effect
of stereotype threat on a wide variety of groups, including women, old
people, student-athletes at Swarthmore College and Ecstasy users.

Last
year, a week before the Democratic National Convention, David M. Marx,
an assistant professor of psychology at San Diego State University, was
sitting at a conference with a couple of colleagues when talk turned to
the presidential election. What would the rise of Barack Obama, they
wondered, do to the stereotype threat experienced by African-Americans?
Their idle contemplation quickly turned into a research project, and
they quickly designed an experiment to measure what they called the
Obama effect. At a series of moments during the 2008 campaign, Marx and
his colleagues gave tests of verbal ability to selected black and white
students after first priming them to focus on racial stereotypes of
academic performance.

BARACK OBAMA
ILLUSTRATION BY CATH RILEYIn
a paper published this year in The Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, Marx and his colleagues reported that there was indeed an
Obama effect, though it had certain limitations. Right after Obama’s
speech in Denver accepting the Democratic nomination, for instance, the
negative effect of stereotype threat was significantly reduced for
black students — but for only those who had actually watched the
speech. Right after the election, black students again scored better,
but at another point in the campaign, there was no measurable effect on
their scores.

Other scholars have
doubts about the phenomenon. In a separate study published in the same
issue of the journal, Joshua Aronson, one of the original Stanford
psychologists, found no Obama effect at all. "As much as I believe in
the power of role models," Aronson concluded, "I suspect that the
greatest contribution Obama will make to narrowing the achievement gap
will be his policies, not his persona." PAUL TOUGH

Predictive Smiles

Say
cheese and stay married? Yes, according to Matthew Hertenstein, a
psychology professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. He and
three colleagues recruited more than 600 people for a review of their
college yearbook photos. The researchers rated the yearbook smiles by
coding muscle movements around the mouth and the eyes.

The
researchers found a surprising correlation: the less people smiled, the
more likely they were to later divorce. The effect was statistically
significant, though not huge. But when Hertenstein compared the top 10
percent of brightest smilers with the bottom 10 percent of weakest
smilers, the "lowest were five times more likely to be divorced than
the top."

The researchers also
recruited 51 people to submit photos of their choosing. The
relationship between smiling and staying married held even for the
photographs this group submitted — posed and candid shots from when the
subjects were, on average, 10 years old. "I’m more confident in the
smiling effect because it held even with a) childhood and b) candid
photos," Hertenstein says. Studying smiles in photos is only the latest
in what has come to be called "thin slice" research, popularized in the
book "Blink," a couple of best sellers ago from Malcolm Gladwell. For
example, from very short video clips, research volunteers have
determined

ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN NASSEF

with
surprising accuracy the personality, socioeconomic status and sexual
orientation of those on camera. A still photograph is merely an
extremely wafer-thin slice.

The why of the smiling effect remains
elusive. Hertenstein acknowledges potentially "dozens" of possible
explanations, going with perhaps the most straightforward and benign.
He says his "gut inclination is that people who smile on average in
their photos have a positive disposition that serves them well in life
and relationships."

He cautions
that his study is "not destiny." Readers who frowned in their yearbook
photos are not putting off the inevitable if they fail to rush to court
to file for divorce. "There are plenty of people who defy the odds,"
offers the professor, only slightly reassuringly. JEFF STRYKER

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE

Rainfall Theory of Development, The

The
amount of rain that fell during your first year of life has affected
your education, your health and even how much money you can put your
hands on — CHART BY LAMOSCADry times are hard times in poor countries, especially for girls.at
least if you are a woman who grew up in the countryside in postwar
Indonesia. In 2000, for example, rural women between the ages of 26 and
47 who were born in areas with 20 percent higher rainfall than normal
the year after they were born were, on average, more than half a
centimeter taller than their luckless (and drier) counterparts. These
women also went to school for 0.22 grades longer and had more assets.
That may not sound like a lot more education, but it means a year more
of schooling for every five girls in those rain-enriched areas. And for

every
five girls in an area with 20 percent less rainfall than usual, a year
of school was lost, compared with women who were born into a year of
average precipitation. Just as notable, the Indonesian men who were
surveyed showed no rainfall effect either way. Sharon Maccini and Dean
Yang, a married pair of economists who teach at the University of
Michigan, published their mash-up of local rainfall data with life
outcomes in June in The American Economic Review. They point out that
"our finding of significant impacts for women and not for men is
consistent with gender bias in the allocation of nutrition and other
resources, particularly in times of unusual hardship."

Maccini
and Yang also demonstrate that rainfall shocks that occurred when
children were in utero had no long-term effect on adult men or women in
Indonesia, suggesting that the nutritional bias began only when the sex
of the child was revealed after birth. Less rice in this critical
period can lead to worse health, followed by less schooling and,
finally, fewer assets.

Economic
growth and better irrigation have probably begun to diminish the
rainfall effect in Indonesia, Yang says, but in other areas of the
world like sub-Saharan Africa, where "income levels are still very low
and people’s ability to nourish their kids is almost certainly affected
by rainfall fluctuations," it is most likely still going strong. AARON RETICA

Random Promotions

In
1969, the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter posited the "Peter
Principle": people in a workplace are promoted until they reach their
"level of incompetence." This happens, Peter argued, because we wrongly
assume that people who are good at their jobs will also be good at jobs
that are one rung up on the corporate ladder — so we promote them. But
often the new job is so different from the previous job that the
employee can’t handle it. Now performing incompetently, the employee
stays in place, dragging the efficiency of the firm downward.
Eventually the entire economy becomes like the paper company Dunder
Mifflin in "The Office" — clogged with incompetence.

Is
there any way to avoid this trap? Yes, by promoting people at random.
That’s what a trio of Italian scientists discovered this year. They
created a computer model of a 160-person corporation and programmed it
with Peter Principle-like logic: the best performers were promoted, but
they had only a random likelihood of being good at their new jobs. Sure
enough, the firm was soon cluttered with incompetents, and its
efficiency plunged. But then the researchers tried something different:
they reprogrammed the firm so that it

ILLUSTRATION BY OPENpromoted people entirely randomly, and the overall efficiency of the firm improved.

They
also tried alternately promoting the absolute best and absolute worst
performers. That, too, worked out better than promoting on merit. The
scientists say these strategies work because they harness "Parrondo’s
Paradox," a piece of game theory in which you win by alternating
between two losing strategies. "In physics or game theory, this isn’t
new," says Andrea Rapisarda, a physicist at the University of Catania
in Italy and a co-author of the study, which was recently published in
the journal Physica A.

As
Rapisarda points out, if you could know for sure that the people being
promoted would excel in their new jobs, that would be the best strategy
of all. But if you aren’t sure — and in the real world, we rarely are —
then random works better. CLIVE THOMPSON

TAG: SOCIAL SCIENCE, BUSINESS