The debate over the wealth gap can seem pretty abstract and wonkish, but a new study may help find the right words. It found that the Google search terms used more frequently by people in states with higher income inequality — controlling for average household income, state population, foreign-born population percentage, and urban population percentage — were much more likely to be related to social status (e.g., “Ralph Lauren”). In other words, when inequality is higher, people seem to be more interested in searching for ways to show off to the Joneses.
Walasek, L. & Brown, G., “Income Inequality and Status Seeking: Searching for Positional Goods in Unequal U.S. States,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).
Older women drove postwar baby boom
There are many explanations for the post-WWII baby boom. Economists now have another: Older women took jobs away from younger women. The story goes like this: “For the war generation of women, the high demand for female labor brought about by mobilization leads to an increase in labor supply that persists after the war. As a result, younger women who reach adulthood in the 1950s face increased labor market competition, which impels them to exit the labor market and start having children earlier.” This is consistent with the fact that the wages of young single women relative to young single men declined during this period; that young mothers giving birth were responsible for most of the baby boom; that the baby boom was greater — and young women were less likely to work and more likely to be married — in states where there had been greater wartime mobilization; and that other countries with high wartime female labor supply had similarly large baby booms.
Doepke, M. et al., “The Baby Boom and World War II: A Macroeconomic Analysis,” Review of Economic Studies (forthcoming).
Arresting offenders leads to more domestic violence deaths
Social science research can, and should, influence policy. But all such findings are provisional and subject to revision, or even reversal, as new evidence becomes available. One recent study is a great example. It was authored by an influential criminologist, whose own research three decades ago spurred many states to require arrest for any form of domestic violence, even when there is no injury. In the more recent study, the criminologist looked at the long-term mortality rate of victims who were involved in one of the early experiments on the subject — the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment, which randomly assigned cases without serious injury to arrest or warning. It turns out that the long-term mortality rate was higher for victims if their partner had been arrested rather than warned, particularly for black victims who were employed at the time of the incident. The conclusion: “If nothing else, the present findings may justify a shift in the burden of proof onto those who would prefer to see mandatory arrest continued.”
Sherman, L. & Harris, H., “Increased Death Rates of Domestic Violence Victims from Arresting vs. Warning Suspects in the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment (MilDVE),” Journal of Experimental Criminology (March 2015).
Women earn at the box office, too
In the year 2015, Hollywood is still getting criticized for undervaluing female talent. But could the lack of diversity simply reflect market demand? An analysis of widely distributed movies during 2000 to 2009 found that gross domestic box office revenue was lower for movies that pass the Bechdel Test (“whether a movie features two or more named women who speak to each about something other than a man”). However, upon controlling for star presence, critical reception, genre, art-house distributor, whether it was a sequel, and production budget, there was no significant difference in revenue, particularly once the production budget was factored in. This suggests that “given two otherwise equivalent movies with the same budget, audiences do not appear to penalize those with a female presence.”
Lindner, A. et al., “Million Dollar Maybe? The Effect of Female Presence in Movies on Box Office Returns,” Sociological Inquiry (forthcoming).
Beware the comments
Another reason not to read the comment section: In an experiment, researchers created a bogus website with an article that discussed a controversial affirmative action program for Asian students. After reading the article, participants were asked to leave a comment, which had to be entered (as in most comment sections) after scrolling down past comments ostensibly left by other readers (even though, in this case, they were actually entered by the researchers). When others’ comments were prejudiced against Asians, participants’ own comments were more prejudiced as well, and participants subsequently reported more prejudicial attitudes, both explicitly and implicitly (as measured by stronger automatic associations of white/good and Asian/bad).
Hsueh, M. et al., “‘Leave Your Comment Below’: Can Biased Online Comments Influence Our Own Prejudicial Attitudes and Behaviors?” Human Communication Research (forthcoming).
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Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com.
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