Improbable Research

What does one learn from reading about economics experiments? This:

Johannes Abeler

“Self-Selection into Economics Experiments Is Driven by Monetary Rewards,” Johannes Abeler [University of Oxford, IZA and CESifo] and Daniele Nosenzo [University of Nottingham], IZA [Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit / Institute for the Study of Labor] DP No. 7374, April 2013. The researchers explain:

“Laboratory experiments have become a wide-spread tool in economic research. Yet, there is still doubt about how well the results from lab experiments generalize to other settings. In this paper, we investigate the self-selection process of potential subjects into the subject pool. We alter the recruitment email sent to first-year students, either mentioning the monetary reward associated with participation in experiments; or appealing to the importance of helping research; or both. We find that the sign-up rate drops by two-thirds if we do not mention monetary rewards. Appealing to subjects’ willingness to help research has no effect on signup. We then invite the so-recruited subjects to the laboratory to measure a range of preferences in incentivized experiments. We do not find any differences between the three groups. Our results show that student subjects participate in experiments foremost to earn money, and that it is therefore unlikely that this selection leads to an over-estimation of social preferences in the student population.”

(Thanks to investigator Dan Vergano for bringing this to our attention, and for supplying the headline.)

Dan Dennett writes, in his new book, Intuition Pumps, which is extracted in The Observer:

“I am amazed at how many really smart people don’t understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes.

“Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.”

BONUS, from the same source, and maybe —or maybe not — feeling ironic, given where you are reading this:

Derek Muller writes (and explains in more detail than I’m presenting here): “It is a common view that ‘if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more people would understand.’ However it is debatable whether clear, concise explanations really work…. People have existing ideas about real world phenomena before they encounter scientific explanations.” Muller gives this example. Australians were asked “How long does it take the earth to go around the sun?” This video shows some of their opinions:

(HT Jennifer Ouellette)

Some years ago, at Harvard’s commencement, graduating students were asked to explain what causes the seasons. This video shows some of their explanations:

RELATED (in a slightly twisty, yet direct way): Some people are mistaken about mistakes

May 19th, 2013 was an historical moment in the history of European ornithology. Four Iago Sparrows (Passer iagoensis) arrived in The Netherlands from the Cape Verde Islands aboard a ship, named Plancius. They are the first know individuals of that species (endemic to the islands off West Africa) to have reached Europe. As the ship accommodated birdwatchers on their ‘Atlantic Odyssey’, the voyage of the sparrows is well documented. Eleven came aboard while the Plancius anchored off Raso Island on May 6th. Seven left the ship on Madeira Island, the remaining four, two pairs, continued their voyage to The Netherlands. They arrived safely.

As a sparrow enthusiast, I was among the first ornithologists to welcome the Iago Sparrows in Europe, in the late afternoon of May 19th, 2013. Although the Plancius was docked in the harbor of Hansweert, and new land was open for colonization, the sparrows remained on deck, enjoying breadcrumbs. One male (pictured above) still resided in the vessel — on the bridge, where he had become friends with the captain.

All four sparrows were timid and passive, up until the moment I released the male from his confinement on the bridge. The other male then sought the company of the Captain’s sparrow, and the two cocks started a fight on the middle deck. I observed this behavior from close quarters.

The aggressive display ended in a clear attempt to copulate. Although I could not observe direct cloacal contact, one male definitely mounted the other and tried to copulate. The male that was mounted did, however, not assume the classic submissive solicitation posture (crouched, neck drawn in, wings slightly drooped), a posture known from observation of female House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) that solicit copulation. Here are pictures that document this remarkable behavior.

It is striking that ‘The first case of a homosexual copulation attempt in the Iago Sparrow’ — a matter of interest to the scientific community — was observed upon first arrival of these birds in The Netherlands.

BONUS: What should happen with the Iago Sparrows in The Netherlands? [in Dutch]

Following our Improbable article on ‘Laughter at the Supreme Court‘, we turn now to the implications of ‘Filled Pauses’ at the same institution. A Filled Pause (FP) can be uhm, ah, uh, &etc. The questions are: how often do they crop up, and which of the court’s Justices make the most use of them? And, perhaps more importantly, is there a relation between the number of uhms (&etc) and the final decision of the Justice in the case?

These questions have been answered in a report from researchers at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia, in association with The Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia and with support from the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, US. The team examined recorded audio data from the 2001 sessions of the US Supreme Court. A chart was produced (above) which graphically displayed the uh-rate, the ah-rate, the eh-rate the um-rate (and the total Filled Pause rate) for each of nine Justices during their conversations with lawyers. (As can be seen, Justice Kennedy had the highest FP score, and Justice Ginsburg the lowest). But did the FP content affect the outcomes of the case?

“ [the] mean difference between adjacent filled pauses was smaller in those Justice-lawyer pairs in which the Justice gave a favorable vote than in those pairs in which the Justice gave a non-favorable vote.”

Perhaps future work may provide explanations for the found effect?

See :

‘Entrainment in spontaneous speech: the case of filled pauses in Supreme Court hearings’ Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications 2012.

Also don’t miss : ‘The many meaning(s) of “Uh(m)”s‘