SOCIAL STUDIES
Peer influence
Economics professors at Wellesley College found that women who enrolled at Wellesley between 1999 and 2013 were nearly twice as likely to get an economics degree as women who were admitted to Wellesley but enrolled elsewhere. The professors controlled for test scores, admissions-office ratings, expressed major interest, legacy connections, and individual and high-school demographics. Their conclusion: Women may be more likely to pursue economics — a field that traditionally has had more men than women — at a women’s college. Butcher, K., et al., “Women’s Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants,” National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2023).
Show me the money
Do most people want a meaningful job even if it means taking a pay cut? Not really. Across multiple surveys, a study found that most people prefer higher pay in a less meaningful job. The surveys found that people expected that a higherpaying job would enable more happiness and meaning outside of work. Indeed, their preference for a higher-paying job was weakened if they were told to assume the lower-paying-but-more-meaningful job “would enable you to have a happy, meaningful life outside of work.” Ward, S., “Choosing Money Over Meaningful Work: Examining Relative Job Preferences for High Compensation Versus Meaningful Work,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (forthcoming).
On defense
A study of case data in several counties across the country indicates that having an overworked public defender as your attorney doesn’t significantly change the probability you’ll be convicted, but it does significantly lengthen your likely sentence. Going from the 25th percentile of average caseload to the 75th percentile approximately doubles sentences. With increasing caseload, public defenders appear to devote the same amount of time to serious felonies but reduce time spent on less-serious crimes. The cost of hiring extra public defenders is estimated to be a small fraction of the extra cost of incarceration from these longer sentences. Caspi, A., “Overworking Public Defenders,” Stanford University (March 2023).
Gut reactions
For only half a second at a time, psychologists at Columbia University showed people images that each contained eight faces. These faces varied in trustworthiness as rated by other viewers. After each flash of the eight faces, the participant was shown another face and asked whether this new face was more or less trustworthy than the average trustworthiness of the previous group of faces. People were able to correctly perceive the relative trustworthiness level of the group, consistent with independent ratings, significantly above chance levels. A subsequent experiment found that the perceived trustworthiness of a face — and a study subject’s willingness to give money to the person depicted — was biased by the trustworthiness of the surrounding faces in a group, even when that group was glimpsed in half a second. Chwe, J., and Freeman, J., “Trustworthiness of Crowds Is Gleaned in Half a Second,” Social Psychological and Personality Science (forthcoming).