Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.

Understanding the gender gap in performance evaluations

In a series of experiments, evaluators form overly pessimistic beliefs about women’s performance due to failures of Bayesian updating.

Author(s)
Christine L. Exley and Kirby Nielsen
Journal
American Economic Review
Citation
Exley, Christine L., and Kirby Nielsen. 2024. "The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not Accounted For." American Economic Review, 114 (3): 851-85. Copy
Abstract

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises even though the confidence gap is expected and even though the confidence gap shouldn't be contagious if evaluators are Bayesian. Only an intervention that facilitates Bayesian updating proves (somewhat) effective. Additional results highlight how similar findings follow even when there is no room for discriminatory motives or differences in priors because evaluators are asked about arbitrary, rather than gender-specific, groups.

The political costs of environmental policies

Owners of older cars banned from driving in Milan under an anti-pollution regulation were more likely to vote for a populist right party in subsequent elections.

Author(s)
Italo Colantone, Livio Di Lonardo, Yotam Margalit, And Marco Percoco
Journal
American Political Science Review
Citation
Colantone, Italo, Livio Di Lonardo, Yotam Margalit, And Marco Percoco. “The Political Consequences of Green Policies: Evidence from Italy.” American Political Science Review 118, no. 1 (2024): 108–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000308. Copy
Abstract

For many governments, enacting green policies is a priority, but such policies often impose on citizens substantial and uneven costs. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan, which was strongly opposed by the populist right party Lega. Using several inferential strategies, we show that owners of banned vehicles—who incurred a median loss of €3,750—were significantly more likely to vote for Lega in the subsequent elections. Our analysis indicates that this electoral change did not stem from a broader shift against environmentalism, but rather from disaffection with the policy’s uneven pocketbook implications. In line with this pattern, recipients of compensation from the local government were not more likely to switch to Lega. The findings highlight the central importance of distributive consequences in shaping the political ramifications of green policies.

Trends in academic freedom

Expert survey measures of academic freedom for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022 are positively associated with democracy and negatively associated with state religiosity and militarism.

Author(s)
Julia C. Lerch, David John Fran, and Evan Schofer
Journal
American Sociological Review
Citation
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224231214000 Copy
Abstract

This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.

Estimating causal effects conditional on post-treatment events

The authors propose a strategy to estimate certain kinds of causal effects, called conditional separable effects, that are conditional on post-treatment events.

Author(s)
Mats J. Stensrud, James M. Robins, Aaron Sarvet, Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen, and Jessica G. Young
Journal
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Citation
Mats J. Stensrud, James M. Robins, Aaron Sarvet, Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen & Jessica G. Young (2023) Conditional Separable Effects, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 118:544, 2671-2683, DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2022.2071276 Copy
Abstract

Researchers are often interested in treatment effects on outcomes that are only defined conditional on posttreatment events. For example, in a study of the effect of different cancer treatments on quality of life at end of follow-up, the quality of life of individuals who die during the study is undefined. In these settings, naive contrasts of outcomes conditional on posttreatment events are not average causal effects, even in randomized experiments. Therefore, the effect in the principal stratum of those who would have the same value of the posttreatment variable regardless of treatment (such as the survivor average causal effect) is often advocated for causal inference. While principal stratum effects are average causal effects, they refer to a subset of the population that cannot be observed and may not exist. Therefore, it is not clear how these effects inform decisions or policies. Here we propose the conditional separable effects, quantifying causal effects of modified versions of the study treatment in an observable subset of the population. These effects, which may quantify direct effects of the study treatment, require transparent reasoning about candidate modified treatments and their mechanisms. We provide identifying conditions and various estimators of these effects along with an applied example.

Women as hunters in the Paleolithic

The available archeological record is consistent with the hypothesis that women participated equally in hunting along with men during the Paleolithic period.

Author(s)
Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock
Journal
American Anthropologist
Citation
Lacy, Sarah, and Cara Ocobock. 2024. “ Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence.” American Anthropologist 126: 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13914 Copy
Abstract

The Paleo-fantasy of a deep history to a sexual division of labor, often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer,” continues to dominate the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence, which reflects a failure to question how modern gender roles color our reconstructions of the past. Here we present examples to support women's roles as hunters in the past as well as challenge oft-cited interpretations of the material culture. Such evidence includes stone tool function, diet, art, anatomy and paleopathology, and burials. By pulling together the current state of the archaeological evidence along with the modern human physiology presented in the accompanying paper (Ocobock and Lacy, this issue), we argue that not only are women well-suited to endurance activities like hunting, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting in the Paleolithic. Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.

The uses of history in contemporary art

The AHR’s History Lab features curators from the National Gallery Singapore reflecting on the uses of Southeast Asian history in the work of contemporary artists.

Author(s)
Mark Philip Bradley
Journal
The American Historical Review
Citation
Mark Philip Bradley, Inside the History Lab, The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1695–1697, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad491 Copy
Abstract

The December AHR History Lab opens with another edition of the Art as Historical Method project, a series that moves around the world to examine historically situated works of contemporary art in museums, international expositions, and arts spaces. This Lab project explores the recent turn by contemporary art practitioners to history, research, and archives, and the ways in which such novel practices developed by visual artists might offer models for, and new forms of dialogue about, the work history does in the world.

Ethical challenges of smartphone location data

Newly available smartphone data allowing researchers to geolocate individuals’ movements pose new ethical challenges.

Author(s)
Roberto Lay González, Siugmin Huck, and Jonathan Dixon
Journal
American Psychologist
Citation
González, R., Lay, S., Huck, J., & Dixon, J. (2024). The use of GNSS technology in smartphones to collect sensitive data on human mobility practices: Ethical challenges and potential solutions. American Psychologist, 79(1), 52–64. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001194 Copy
Abstract

The advent of mobile smartphones and similar technology has opened new opportunities for studying human mobility within psychology and companion disciplines such as human geography, demography, and sociology. This article examines how such research raises novel ethical concerns. To do so, we outline two research projects: one based in Northern Ireland (The Belfast Mobility Project) and the other in Chile (The Norm-Contact Mobility Project), drawing concrete examples of the ethical challenges encountered throughout both projects, which used global navigational satellite systems as a tool for data collection. We discuss new threats to participant confidentiality and anonymity, problems of “unanticipated” data collection and exploitation, emerging difficulties in achieving properly informed consent, and concerns regarding the representation of vulnerable populations with limited access to smartphones and a legitimate fear of surveillance. We also reflect on the different measures we took to tackle these challenges and discuss the importance of implementing wider changes in the protocols associated with basic ethical research principles.

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