Psychologyresearch.org.uk

Here are links to some old posts about psychology and advertising. About three years ago I was writing a lot about this, and I just thought I’d collect them here: Longer posts: Is there a science of advertising? Decoding adverisements Cognitive psychology & advertising Music wine and will advertising influences familiarity induces preference neuroscience and advertising where do implicit associations come from? Book review: Influence (by Robert Cialdini) Does advertising erode free will? ‘Briefly noted’ and links the price is right regardless of the cost When choice is demotivating Experimental psychology of advertising resources Why can’t we choose what makes us happy The Endowment effect and marketing A quick and miscellaneous list of advertising links

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Psychology and advertising

Big news today at the CHI Medicine Tri-Conference . Merck has pledged to donate a remarkable resource to the commons – a vast database of highly consistent data about the biology of disease, as well as software tools and other resources to use it. The resources come out of work done at the Rosetta branch of Merck (you might remember them as the company whose sale capped a boom in bioinformatics) and is at its root a network biology system. In use inside Rosetta/Merck last year alone it led directly to a ton of publications . This is all going to happen through the establishment of a non-profit organization called Sage to serve as the guardian of the resources. It’s not about making a quick data dump onto the web, however. Sage is going to take a while during an ” incubation period of three to five years…in which new project data are generated, critical tools for building and mining disease models are developed and governing rules for sharing, accessing, and contributing to the platform are established .” This is complex content and it’s going to take some ongoing work to expose everything in a usable way. But the resources are headed for the public domain, and will be a remarkable capacity builder for those who currently work without the best tools and data as a base for their science. Sage means that we are now on the path to a world in which scientists working on HIV in Brazilian non-profit research institutes (like my mother-in-law) will be able to use the same powerful computational disease biology tools as those inside Merck. I’m very much looking forward to living in that world. I am proud to serve on the founding Board of Directors for Sage. I hope to play a role in making sure that the Open Access part of Sage’s mission comes to life in a way that not only keeps the content and resources available to all, but serves as a key for future growth and applications. The law isn’t the big story here – the science is – but if we can get the law right, it can catalyze the emergence of a robust public domain in disease biology for us all to benefit from. This is an incredibly significant step on the road to open biology – time will tell if it’s as earthshaking as IBM’s embrace of GNU/Linux – and I can’t wait to see where it all goes. Congratulations to the team that built this platform and then had the vision to take it into the commons. Read the comments on this post…

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Sage – Open Access Data from Merck [Common Knowledge]

I had to read it just for the title alone: “Harmonic Convergence in the Love Songs of the Dengue Vector Mosquito” . It’s got romance, it’s got harmony, it’s got singing, and best of all, it has that delicious dramatic tension of being all about biting insects known to carry a nasty disease. Even in the lowliest, most obnoxious creatures, biologists find beauty. I’d tell you all about it — in short, courting mosquitos synchronize their wingbeats to sing in harmony — but Neurotopia beat me to it . When summer comes to Minnesota, I’ll have to remember that the incessant whines are actually tiny little liebeslieder. Read the comments on this post…

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The best article title this week goes to… [Pharyngula]

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This Shrew Holds His Long Nose Up When He Eats [Zooillogix]

Background New, practical models of central nervous system regeneration are required and should provide molecular tools and resources. We focus here on the tunicate Ciona intestinalis , which has the capacity to regenerate nerves and a complete adult central nervous system, a capacity unusual in the chordate phylum. We investigated the timing and sequence of events during nervous system regeneration in this organism. Methodology/Principal Findings We developed techniques for reproducible ablations and for imaging live cellular events in tissue explants. Based on live observations of more than 100 regenerating animals, we subdivided the regeneration process into four stages. Regeneration was functional, as shown by the sequential recovery of reflexes that established new criteria for defining regeneration rates. We used transgenic animals and labeled nucleotide analogs to describe in detail the early cellular events at the tip of the regenerating nerves and the first appearance of the new adult ganglion anlage. Conclusions/Significance The rate of regeneration was found to be negatively correlated with adult size. New neural structures were derived from the anterior and posterior nerve endings. A blastemal structure was implicated in the formation of new neural cells. This work demonstrates that Ciona intestinalis is as a useful system for studies on regeneration of the brain, brain-associated organs and nerves.

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Refining the <italic>Ciona intestinalis</italic> Model of Central Nervous System Regeneration

Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. “close friends” “high lord”). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex’s known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space.

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Social Distance Evaluation in Human Parietal Cortex

Long-time readers of this blog remember that, some years ago, I did a nifty little study on the Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish . The department has moved to a new building, the crayfish lab is gone, I am out of science, so chances of following up on that study are very low. And what we did was too small even for a Least Publishable Unit, so, in order to have the scientific community aware of our results, I posted them (with agreement from my co-authors) on my blog. So, although I myself am unlikely to continue studying the relationship between the circadian system and the aggressive behavior in crayfish, I am hoping others will. And a paper just came out on exactly this topic – Circadian Regulation of Agonistic Behavior in Groups of Parthenogenetic Marbled Crayfish, Procambarus sp. by Abud J. Farca Luna, Joaquin I. Hurtado-Zavala, Thomas Reischig and Ralf Heinrich from the Institute for Zoology, University of Gottingen, Germany: Crustaceans have frequently been used to study the neuroethology of both agonistic behavior and circadian rhythms, but whether their highly stereotyped and quantifiable agonistic activity is controlled by circadian pacemakers has, so far, not been investigated. Isolated marbled crayfish (Procambarus spec.) displayed rhythmic locomotor activity under 12-h light:12-h darkness (LD12:12) and rhythmicity persisted after switching to constant darkness (DD) for 8 days, suggesting the presence of endogenous circadian pacemakers. Isogenetic females of parthenogenetic marbled crayfish displayed all behavioral elements known from agonistic interactions of previously studied decapod species including the formation of hierarchies. Groups of marbled crafish displayed high frequencies of agonistic encounters during the 1st hour of their cohabitation, but with the formation of hierarchies agonistic activities were subsequently reduced to low levels. Group agonistic activity was entrained to periods of exactly 24 h under LD12:12, and peaks of agonistic activity coincided with light-to-dark and dark-to-light transitions. After switching to DD, enhanced agonistic activity was dispersed over periods of 8-to 10-h duration that were centered around the times corresponding with light-to-dark transitions during the preceding 3 days in LD12:12. During 4 days under DD agonistic activity remained rhythmic with an average circadian period of 24.83 ± 1.22 h in all crayfish groups tested. Only the most dominant crayfish that participated in more than half of all agonistic encounters within the group revealed clear endogenous rhythmicity in their agonistic behavior, whereas subordinate individuals, depending on their social rank, initiated only between 19.4% and 0.03% of all encounters in constant darkness and displayed no statistically significant rhythmicity. The results indicate that both locomotion and agonistic social interactions are rhythmic behaviors of marbled crayfish that are controlled by light-entrained endogenous pacemakers. I think the best way for me to explain what they did in this study is to do a head-to-head comparison between our study and their study – it is striking how the two are complementary! On one hand, there is no overlap in methods at all (so no instance of scooping for sure), yet on the other, both studies came up with similar results, thus strengthening each other’s findings. You may want to read my post for the introduction to the topic, as I explain there why studying aggression in crayfish is important and insightful, what was done to date, and what it all means, as well as the standard methodology in the field. So, let’s see how the two studies are similar and how the two differ: 1) We were sure we used the Procambarus clarkii species. They are probably not exactly sure what species they had, so they denoted it as Procambarus sp. , noting in the Discussion that it was certainly NOT the Procambarus clarkii , which makes sense as our animals were wild-caught in the USA and theirs in Germany. As both studies got similar results, this indicates that this is not a single-species phenomenon, but can be generalizable at least to other crayfish, if not broader to other crustaceans, arhtropods or all invertebrates. 2) We used only males in our study. They used only females. In crayfish, both sexes fight. It is nice, thus, to note that other aspects of the behavior are similar between sexes. 3) We used the term ‘aggression’. They use the term ‘agonistic behavior’, which is scientese for ‘aggression’, invented to erase any hints of anthropomorphism. Not a bad strategy, generally, as assumed aggression in some other species has been later shown to be something else (e.g., homosexual behavior), but in crayfish it is most certainly aggression: they meet, they display, they fight, and if there is no place to escape, one often kills the other – there is no ‘loving’ going on there, for sure. 4) The sizes of animals were an order of magnitude different between the two studies. Their crayfish weighed around 1-2g while ours were 20-40g in body mass. This may be due to species differences, but is more likely due to age – they used juveniles while we used adults. Again, it is nice to see that results in different age groups are comparable. 5) We did not measure general locomotor activity of our animals in isolation. We, with proper caveats, used aggressive behavior of paired animals as a proxy for general locomotor activity, and were straightforward about it – we measured aggressive behavior alone in a highly un-natural setup. As Page and Larimer (1972) have done these studies before, we did not feel the need to replicate those with our animals. The new study, however, did monitor gross locomotor activity of isolated crayfish. Their results, confirming what Page and Larimer found out, demonstrate once again that activity rhythms are a poor marker of the underlying circadian pacemaker (which is why Terry Page later focused on the rhythm of electrical activity of the eye, electroretinogram – ERR – in subsequent studies) in crayfish. Powerful statistics tease out rhythmicity in most individuals, but this is not a rhythm I would use if I wanted to do more complex studies, e.g., analysis of entrainment to exotic LD cycles or to build and interpret a Phase – Response Curve . Just look at their representative example (and you know this is their best): You can barely make out the rhythm even in the light-dark cycle (white-gray portion of the actograph) and the rhythms in constant darkness (solid gray) are even less well defined – thus only statistical analysis (bottom) can discover rhythms in such records. The stats reveal a peak of activity in the early night and a smaller peak of activity at dawn, similarly to what Page and Larimer found in their study, and similar to what we saw during our experiments. 6) They used an arena of a much larger size than ours. We did it on purpose – we wanted to ‘force’ the animals to fight as much as possible by putting them in tight quarters where they cannot avoid each other, as we were interested in physiology and wanted it intensified so we could get clearly measurable (if exaggerated) results. Their study is, thus, more ecologically relevant, but one always has to deal with pros and cons in such decisions: more realistic vs. more powerful. They chose realism, we chose power. Together, the two approaches reinforce and complement each other. 7) As I explained in my old post – there are two methodological approaches in this line of research: Two standard experimental practices are used in the study of aggression in crustaceans. In one, two or more individuals are placed together in an aquarium and left there for a long period of time (days to weeks). After the initial aggressive encounters, the social status of an individual can be deduced from its control of resources, like food, shelter and mates. In the other paradigm, two individuals are allowed to fight for a brief period of time (less than an hour), after which they are isolated again and re-tested the next day at the same time of day. They used the first method. We modified the second one (testing repeatedly, every 3 hours over 24 hours, instead of just once a day). What they did was place 6 individuals in the aquarium, a couple of hours before lights-off, then monitor their aggressive behavior over several days. What they found, similar to us, is that the most intense fights resulting in a stable social hierarchy occur in the early portion of the night: Once the social hierarchy is established on that first night, the levels of aggression drop significantly, and occasional bouts of fights happen at all times, with perhaps a slight increase at the times of light switches: both off and on. Released into constant darkness, the pattern continues, with the most dominant individual initiating aggressive encounters a little more often during light-transitions then between them. The other five animals had no remaining rhythm of agonistic behavior: they just responded to attacks by the Numero Uno when necessary. In our study we tried to artificially elevate the levels of aggression by repeatedly re-isolating and re-meeting two animals at a time. And even with that protocol, we saw the most intense fights at early night, and most conclusive fights, i.e., those that resulted in stable social hierarchy, also occuring at early nights, while the activity at other time of the day or night were much lower. The goals of two studies differed as well, i.e., we asked somewhat different questions. Our study was designed to provide some background answers that would tell us if a particular hypothesis is worth testing: winning a fight elevates serotonin in the nervous system; elevated serotonin correlated with the hightened aggression in subsequent fights, more likely leading to subsequent victories; crayfish signal dominance status to each other via urine; melatonin is a metabolic product of serotonin; melatonin is produced only during the night with a very sharp and high peak at the beginning of the night; if there is more serotonin in the nervous system, there should be more melatonin in the urine; perhaps melatonin may be the signature molecule in the urine indicating social status. In order to see if this line of thinking is worth pursuing, we needed to see, first, if the most aggressive bouts happen in the early night and if the most decisive fights (those that lead to stable hiararchy) happen in the early night. This is what we found, indicating that our hypothesis is worth testing in the future. They asked a different set of questions: Is there a circadian rhythm of locomotor activity? They found: Yes. Is there a circadian rhythm of aggression? They found: Yes. Do the patterns of general activity and aggressive activity correlate with each other? They found: Yes. Does the aggression rhythm persist in constant darkness conditions? They found: Yes. Do all individuals show circadian rhythm of aggression? They found: No. Only the most dominant individual does. The others just defend themselves when attacked. Is there social entrainment in crayfish, i.e., do they entrain their rhythms to each other in constant conditions? They found: No. All of them just keep following their own inherent circadian periods and drift apart after a while. Is there a pattern of temporal competitive exclusion, i.e., do submissive individuals shift their activity patterns so as not to have to meet The Badassest One? They found: No. All of them just keep following their own inherent circadian periods. So, a nice study overall, the first publication I know of that attempts to connect the literature on circadian rhythms in crayfish to the literature on aggressive behavior in crayfish. Except…. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish [A Blog Around The Clock]

In my last post, I brought up the topic of cognitive biases-which are a fancy way of describing our ability to lie to ourselves. Specifically, I was examining the case of quarterback Kurt Warner. Warner displayed a bias known as anchoring-meaning our tendency to make critical decisions based on one lone piece of information (a frequent example of this bias is people who buy used cars after reading the odometer but while ignoring all other sources of information). Warner ‘s anchor was that ‘he was a more accurate quarterback than Brett Farve. Unfortunately, at the time he reached this conclusion, he had no pro starts and only a year of college ball under his belt. Meanwhile Farve was one year away from winning his first Superbowl and his first MVP award. And therein lies the rub. Warner’s anchor was fictive, as was his resulting over-confidence. But this over-confidence served its purpose. Warner’s cognitive bias became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, Warner become a more accurate passer than Farve (which helps explain why the Arizona Cardinals will today play in the Superbowl). The question I raised but did not answer was how was it that Warner’s bias bore fruit based, as it was, on completely erroneous information. Turns out this is exactly how biases are supposed to work-especially in men. Roy Baumeister has argued that men are more evolutionarily dispensable than women. If you were to cut the world’s male population in half, the only real effect this would have on our species-provided we could overcome our predilections against bigamy- is that those men left alive would end up having even more sex. Cut the world’s population of women in half and the results are a disaster. This shows up in evolution as well. Since men are evolutionarily dispensable, nature has a tendency to experiment more with them. This explains why there are far more male geniuses and male retards than female. It also explains why, historically-and only until the advent of the airplane and the 20th century discovery of the military worth of civilian targets-men went off to fight wars and women stayed at home. This also effects personality. Historically, 80 percent of all women procreate and only 40 percent of all men do. Baumeister contends that the men who get lucky are the ones with greater visibility. Men have to stand out to attract women-which is why they’re built to take risks. In 1988 Daly and Wilson added to this argument when they realized that risk taking both increased men’s access to resources and their access to mating opportunities-which means not only are men built for risk, but it’s also sexually selected character trait. Evolutionary psychologists use this to explain why 83 percent of all arrests for violent crime (and 89.2 percent of all arrests for murder) are men. Cognitive psychologists argue that the urge to take risks needs to be based on something and in many cases this something is the result of our biases. As my fellow blogger and MIT’s Director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (maybe the best institutional name around) recently pointed out in a conversation: "Realism can be over-rated. And over-confidence can often be a great thing. Look at the information surrounding restaurants. All the data shows that most fail, but entrepreneurs ignore this repeatedly. Their biases are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do-convincing them to bet it all even when they shouldn’t." Warner’s success in football was based on exactly this type of self-deception. And in his case too, that deception paid big dividends. Which is ultimately why we have these biases in the first place-because evolution always bets the long shot.         © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Self-Deception, Over-Confidence and Disposable Men: A Risky Proposition

Recently, I received a book in the mail with a request that I review it for this blog. Hallie Crawford’s Flying Solo: Career Transition Tips for Singles may be of interest to some singles for what it offers at face value. I’ll describe that in Section I of this post. What I find even more intriguing, though, is the worldview that is conveyed between the lines. Crawford is an author who wants to send a positive message to singles. She is not a deliberate practitioner of singlism. So I read the book closely to see what assumptions about single and married life were woven throughout her text. That’s in Section II . As always, my hope is that from my analysis, you can get more than just a sense of the implicit messages in this particular book. I hope you can also hone your skills at recognizing and challenging implicit assumptions about singlehood and marriage, wherever you find them. Finally, in Section III , I’ll pose some bigger questions, at the societal level, about what it is like for single people to pursue major career changes, and what it could be like in a more idyllic world. I. About the Book: Face Value The book is what the subtitle says it is: a compendium of "career transition tips for singles." There are pieces of advice for all phases of the transition process, from figuring out whether it really is time to leave your current career, to coming up with your dream career, to marshalling the financial and emotional resources you will need along the way. There are sections on interviewing, networking, and writing a resume, as well as a list of resources. The author, Hallie Crawford, is a career coach, and the book also functions as an advertisement for her services. Flying Solo is a quick and easy read, and I think you can get from it some sense of what it would be like to have Crawford as your coach. Crawford strikes me as a motivated, talented, and gracious person who would be fun to work with, if having a coach is your thing. Personally, I don’t agree with her general approach. She takes too seriously "The Secret" and "The Law of Attraction," whereby we become magnets for anything we want (health, wealth, and all the rest) by thinking positive thoughts. Here’s a sample sentence from The Secret book: "Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can." By my reckoning, that’s not a secret, it’s a hoax. Millions of people are Secret fans, so I don’t presume my own skepticism to be widely shared. More importantly, I don’t think the magical thinking subtext of Crawford’s book takes away from the potential usefulness of some of her tips. I don’t agree with all of the tips. Still, if I were considering a big career change right now, I think I’d appreciate the opportunity to read through a discussion of so many of the issues that come up, especially from someone who has coached many other people through the process. I like Crawford’s recognition that employers will sometimes expect single people to work longer and harder than everyone else, and her recommendation that singles be prepared to set boundaries. She also raises the issue of friends who are not supportive of your plans to make a big career change, and suggests that you don’t bring up the topic with them until you are farther along in the process. I like that a lot better than what I’ve seen in some other self-help books – that is, if your friends don’t like your goal, ditch them. II. More about the Book: Between the Lines Although Crawford’s book is specifically about single people’s career transitions, her assumptions about what single and married life are like are implicit throughout. That’s what interests me most. Here is a non-random sampling of quotes from the book. Consider what you think of each point. • As a single person, you can "go anywhere and do anything you want because you have no personal obligations or responsibilities to anyone else." • Being single "can be a lonely place." • One of the emotional obstacles that singles face: "My friends aren’t being supportive." • As a single person, you might "start comparing yourself to your attached friends, wondering if and when you’ll be on that path." • For singles, when you are down, "there is no immediate partner who can pat you on the back and tell you everything will work out all right." • Here’s a quote from one of the author’s clients: "As a single person, I feel that my friends and family support my career transitions. But that’s not the same as a husband creating a life vision with me, or supporting me so I can take chances, or being there whether or not my risks pay off." What these quotes add up to is a conventional view of what it means to be single or married: Single people have their independence, because they do not have any obligations or responsibilities to anyone else. Single life can be lonely, and friends can be unsupportive. Even when your friends are supportive, that’s not the same as having a spouse who is always there for you. As a single person, you don’t have a partner to pat you on the back and tell you everything will be okay. You start looking at your "attached" friends and wondering when you will be on that path. Not all of these statements are untrue. Sure, single people can be lonely. Sometimes their friends are unsupportive. Sometimes married people have partners who share their vision and help and encourage them through their career transitions and everything else. What’s Missing from this Conventional View? What’s missing is the other side of the picture. Like so many other authors and journalists and scientists and pundits and people on the street, Crawford underscores what is potentially problematic about being single and what is potentially great about being married. The parallel advantages of being single and disadvantages of being married go mostly unacknowledged. I say that even though some of her observations about single people were offered up as pros rather than cons. Take the first quote, for example: As a single person, you can "go anywhere and do anything you want because you have no personal obligations or responsibilities to anyone else." A. The Missing Persons This is the view of a single person as an untethered free agent, with no obligations to any other humans. (Never mind that there are nearly 13 million single parents.) It is true that with regard to other adults, single people do not have the legal obligations (or protections) that come with official marriage. In fact, though, they are often the ones doing the work of keeping families and friends and communities together . They maintain intergenerational ties , and provide plenty of care for aging or ill relatives and friends. When my mother was gravely ill, she was in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, and I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, the university town where I taught. Ever chance I could get, I made the 377 mile trip to see her. A few years later, I made my big career transition and moved to the West Coast. I would not have done so while she was so sick – not because she would have guilted me into staying, or because I had an official legal obligation to stay. It was what I wanted to do. To say that single people have no obligations or responsibilities to others also dismisses or devalues or simply fails to recognize all of the important people in their lives. Again, it is true that single people have no official requirements to care for friends or siblings or any other category of person who has no standing in the law. But they may value deeply their relationships with those people, and that can be an emotional constraint to moving, though one that is rarely acknowledged or accommodated. In Virginia, I had friends who had a significant place in my life. I had what I thought of as concentric circles of friends , some very close, others not as close, but all geographically accessible. It took me years, if not decades, to develop that network. I wasn’t legally "responsible" for any of those people, but moving 3,000 miles away from them was one of the few serious downsides of making my life-changing transition. They are still emotionally important to me, but I no longer get to meet them regularly for dinner at an outdoor table on the downtown mall. B. The Missing Marriages Consider again how the author’s single client described the picture in her mind of what it means to be married. Having supportive friends, she said, is "not the same as a husband creating a life vision with me, or supporting me so I can take chances, or being there whether or not my risks pay off." To her, getting married is like stepping into a fairy tale, where the handsome prince is forever holding you, carrying you over rough waters and rocky streams and toward the rainbow. I think there really are some princely and princessly spouses, but if they were all that way, the divorce rate would not be so high. I would have liked the book better if it seemed to instill a more balanced view of single and married life. It is fine to acknowledge that some single people are lonely, but not without cautioning that marriage can be lonely, too. It is fine to list unsupportive friends as a possible emotional obstacle, but not without admitting that spouses can also be unsupportive. The tip that Crawford offered about unsupportive friends – just don’t bring up the topic of your big move – may be harder to implement if the nagging naysayer is sharing your home and your bed. My concern is that readers could come away from this book thinking that they need career tips because they are single, and if only they got married, many of the apparent challenges of making a big move would simply vanish. I don’t think the author actually believes that, and I know she is trying to be encouraging to singles. But there’s just too much talk, for my tastes, of the lonely, free-standing single people and the comforted and cushioned married people. C. The Missing Perspectives When I made my big career change, it was true (as Crawford notes) that as a single person I did not have the salary of a spouse to fall back on if my big plans did not turn out so great. I was taking a financial risk, and I was taking it myself. For me, though, that made it easier to go ahead with my move than if I had been married. Even with a supportive spouse, I would have been uncomfortable contributing less than my share to our collective finances, and taking an economic risk that would make my partner vulnerable, too. I liked the fact that the risk was my own. As for having no one to encourage me all through my career transition because I was single – that wasn’t my experience. I still remember the friend who first suggested that I try to create a career as an independent scholar, at a time when that seemed far too fanciful a possibility. I have a flashbulb memory of walking along the beach with another friend, at a time when I was due to pack up and return back to the East Coast after a 1-year sabbatical; she suggested that I try to extend my sabbatical for another year. A third friend was creating her own career out of the aspects of her training and expertise that she enjoyed the most; we exchanged stories all along the way. Still do. III. Thoughts toward a Fantasy World for Singles Making Career Changes The world of work, like so much of the rest of society, has not yet caught up with how we actually live our lives in the 21st century. Couples and nuclear families are still at the center of policies and procedures, but they are no longer the actual demographic center of American life. There are now more single-person households than nuclear family households. Most of those people who are living alone are not emotionally or socially isolated; there are important people in their lives – they just don’t live under the same roof. Now consider how employers treat their new recruits or the employees they are asking to make major moves. Do they offer to pay more in moving expenses if the employee is married than if the employee is single? Do they pull out all the stops to find employment for the spouse of the person they are hiring, without making any comparable efforts on behalf of the single worker? If so, maybe that should change. My suggestions are motivated in part by simple fairness. A company hiring two workers, one married and one single, for the same position should not compensate one of them more than the other. That’s the same reason I think that employers should offer all employees a menu of benefits from which each worker can choose the benefits they need most, adding up to the same dollar amount. The other motivation behind my suggestion is the more radical notion that it is time to recognize the most important people in everyone’s lives. If a company is willing to pay to move a spouse, why not do the same for a sibling or a close friend? (I know, it costs more – but the benefit is shared by all employees, and not just the married ones.) If a company is willing to look for employment opportunities for a spouse, why not also help find living arrangements for an aging parent? Those are just a few of my fantasies. What are yours? © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Changing Careers: Is It Different for Singles?

Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda : Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men are more likely to own land than monogamously married men, that polygynous marriages become more common as the district sex ratio becomes more female biased, that owning land is particularly important when men are abundant in the district, and that a man’s owning land most increases the odds of polygyny in districts where few other men own land. Results are discussed with reference to models of the evolution of polygyny. My piece for The Guardian , Monogamy: bucking the trend? , was fundamentally an argument against natural short term market forces. Read the comments on this post…

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To the big men go the women! [Gene Expression]