Author: Cathleen O'Grady

Research on inequality usually looks at fairly static social structures like schools, transport, healthcare, or jobs. But sometimes glaring inequality can be quite fleeting, as researchers Katherine DeCelles and Michael Norton argue in a recent PNAS article. Their example? Coming face to face with just how awful airplane economy class is in comparison to first class.

DeCelles and Norton wanted to study whether exposure to this kind of inequality could prompt people to behave badly. They looked at records of “air rage” incidents, where “abusive or unruly” passengers threaten staff or fellow travelers. “Popular explanations for air rage include crowded planes, frustrating delays, and shrinking seats,” they write—but they suspected these explanations are missing something.

They suggest that when people fly in economy class, their position in the social hierarchy becomes glaringly obvious. This is especially so if they have to walk through the first class section of the plane to get to their assigned space in a cramped hell.

User ratings are often a good way to make choices about a purchase, but they come with some inherent weaknesses. For a start, they suffer badly from sampling bias: the kind of person who writes a review isn’t necessarily a good representative of all people who bought the product. Review-writers are likely to be people who have had either a very positive or very negative response to a product. And often, only a few people rate a particular product. Like an experiment with a small sample size, this makes the average rating less reliable.

It turns out people are pretty bad at taking these weaknesses into account when they assess online product ratings, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. The authors found that Amazon ratings might not be the best way to predict the quality of a product, and these reviews often include more subjective judgments that don't get taken into account by potential buyers.

To assess the quality of user ratings, the researchers used ratings from Consumer Reports (CR), a user-supported organization that buys products and tests them rigorously before assigning a score. Generally, CR is considered a reasonable approximation of objective quality within a few different academic fields. To test the reliability, the researchers took CR scores for 1,272 products and compared them to more than 300,000 Amazon ratings for the same items.

Improving the public's understanding of anthropogenic climate change is vital to cultivating the political will to do something about it. However, a lot of research has shown that simply improving people’s understanding won’t necessarily do much to change their stance. This is because people’s opinions on many topics rest largely on their political affiliation, rather than how well they understand the science.

That leaves us with a thorny state of affairs. If improving science education isn’t going to shift public opinion, what can? A recent paper in Nature Climate Change suggests that education might not be as hopeless a cause as previously thought—but the work has some important limitations that may not give us much cause for optimism.

A problem with previous research on the topic is that “knowledge about climate change” was treated as a monolith, the authors of the new paper argue. Past studies didn't take into account that there are different kinds of knowledge about climate change. While knowledge in one area might be influenced by ideology, knowledge in other areas might not be.

When people think they’re being watched, they’re more inclined to behave themselves. This behavior pops up again and again: in blood donation, energy saving, and charitable giving. There are many explanations for why this happens—maybe we think people are more likely to treat us well if they see us behaving in a prosocial way; in some cases, we might behave ourselves in front of others in order to avoid awkward conversations or having to lie.

Harvard researchers Todd Rogers, John Ternovski, and Erez Yoeli wanted to find out if they could leverage this tendency in order to increase voter turnout. A “get-out-the-vote” (GOTV) letter is a simple, impersonal reminder that has a small but noticeable effect on voter turnout. A meta-analysis of 79 experiments on the effects of GOTV letters found that, on average, they boosted turnout by 0.194 percentage points—for example, from 39 percent to 39.194 percent.

It’s a tiny figure, but if applied across the US, it would result in around 450,000 extra voters (out of an estimated 235,248,000 eligible voters). Not nothing, but still not a lot. Rogers, Ternovski, and Yoeli suspected that adding a hint of oversight to the letters could make a bigger difference.

The role of genetics in mental illness is a complex topic. On the one hand, evidence of genetic and biological causes for mental illnesses may help to fight the stigma that often accompanies them. On the other hand, certain researchers have suggested that a focus on genetics rather than traumatic life events can run the risk of ignoring the social ills that underlie or enhance many mental illnesses.

Despite some ambiguous feelings, the work has gone on. A genetic study recently published in Nature Genetics describes the results from the work of an eye-popping 190 scientists around the world. It describes an in-depth exploration of three separate traits: depression, neuroticism (the tendency to experience anxiety and fear easily), and subjective well-being (an experience of life satisfaction and/or happiness). They found evidence suggesting that these three traits are influenced by some of the same genes and are linked to the pancreatic, adrenal, and central nervous systems.

Tiny cumulative effects

Psychology researcher Richard Bentall argues that genetic studies are fruitless; so many genes have been identified as playing a role in mental illness that their medical usefulness becomes diluted. And, even when the genetics are simple, it's not always helpful. “Consider Huntington’s Disease, a terrible degenerative neurological condition that is caused by a single dominant gene with a known biological function,” he writes. “Many years after this gene was discovered there is still no sign of a medical therapy for this simplest of all the genetic conditions.”

Laughter is, evolutionarily speaking, pretty old news. It’s a behavior we humans share with many of our primate relatives, who make similar vocalizations during play. In fact, based on the species that display this behavior, the precursor to all modern primate forms of laughter is thought to have emerged around 20 million years ago.

But humans differ from our cousins in one very important way: we’ve learned to voluntarily control an imitation of laughter. Much like crying, yawning, or screaming, laughter is at its core an involuntary emotional reaction for most primates. But humans have developed such control over our breathing and vocal apparatus that we can imitate these vocalizations.

The thing is, our imitations aren't exactly like the real thing. Real laughter has different acoustic features from imitation laughter and has more in common with the laughter of other primates—it’s louder and higher in pitch, among other things. Gregory Bryant, a UCLA researcher who studies the evolution of vocal communication, came up with a way to test whether these acoustic differences can actually be perceived by people.

Around 2,600 years ago, in a military fortress in Southern Judah, a man called Eliashib sent and received messages written in ink on fragments of pottery. The contents were mundane, mainly concerning food supplies, but they provide evidence of literacy that could inform the debate about when major Biblical texts were written.

Eliashib’s correspondence happened on the cusp of the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, which took place during 588-87 BCE. The date plays an important role in an ongoing debate among Biblical scholars: were the first Biblical texts produced before the fall of Jerusalem—as events were unfolding—or afterwards? One part of the debate hinges on the literacy levels at the time: if the pre-demolition population wasn’t generally literate, it wouldn't have been likely that important historical texts were created in this era.

But Eliashib and his colleagues in the Arad military fortress provide some evidence that literacy in this era may have been more widespread than previously thought. A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Tel Aviv University have combined their expertise in applied math, Jewish history, and archaeology to assess communications from the fortress, trying to establish how many people, and of what rank, were writing messages.

Apologies often march hand-in-hand with a claim about intent—"But I didn't mean it like that!" Even our legal systems recognize this idea. We differentiate between accidentally killing a person (manslaughter) and intentional, planned killing (first-degree murder). The intent of a person clearly matters in how we assess their offenses. And if someone means to do something wrong, it’s judged more harshly when it’s not just an accident, even if the outcome is identical.

Some researchers who study human systems of morality think that the importance of moral intent might even be a universal across all human societies. We have reams of evidence showing that people take intent seriously when they’re weighing up moral transgressions: psychological experiments, brain imaging, and even surveys of legal systems. But most of this evidence comes from what researchers call WEIRD societies: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic.

It’s not really possible to make claims about features that are universal to all humans unless we study a representative sample of humans. Perhaps something about living in large industrial societies, with their education systems and distribution of resources, leads to us WEIRDos to think about moral intent in a particular way. And because these societies interact a lot, ideas can easily spread between them.

Forget what J.R.R. Tolkien taught you about hobbits for a moment. In real life, Homo floresiensis, affectionately dubbed “the hobbit,” is a diminutive hominin species defined by skeletons discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. Since then, its status and identity have been the subject of much speculation, mystery, and controversy. That's partly because the hobbits were thought to have lived startlingly recently—just 12,000 years ago.

The idea of another hominin species living as recently as 12 kya (12 thousand years ago) had been both exciting and incredibly confusing. “We know that modern humans had got to Australia ... probably by 50 kya,” Richard Roberts, one of the researchers involved in the work, told Ars. Modern humans had passed through Southeast Asia on their way there, which means that they must have existed alongside any species living in their path at the time. Flores is not too far off that path.

In fact, many originally argued that the Flores skeletons were those of modern humans. Rather than a new species, some researchers suggested a variety of ailments that could create skeletons with a similar set of features to those of the hobbits. This would have cleared up another mystery—where modern humans go, related species go extinct. “We could never work out how you could have hobbits surviving so long after modern humans had [arrived],” says Roberts.

The more money that is spent on recovery efforts for an endangered or threatened species, the more likely that species is to recover. It’s an intuitive link, although intuitive links aren’t always borne out by reality. But in the US, where a large amount of funding for endangered species recovery efforts comes from the government, the money being spent often falls well short of what's needed, leaving many species to flounder.

Arizona State University researcher Leah Gerber has analyzed government spending on endangered species, finding ways to make the process more efficient. She found that some species are declining despite receiving more funding than they request, making them “costly yet futile,” she writes in a PNAS paper. Redirecting this extra funding could help us to save many more species.

There are currently around 1,500 species listed as endangered or threatened in the US, half of which are at high risk for extinction. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is set to assess approximately 800 more species for inclusion in the list within the next two years. The recovery plans for these species require $1.21 billion/year, but in reality, only a quarter of this budget is actually spent. It’s a “capacity challenge”, Gerber writes—the funding that's made available for recovery efforts is just not sufficient to meet the flood of demand.