128 undergraduates' perceptions of tattoos on a model described as a college instructor were assessed. They viewed one of four photographs of a tattooed or nontattooed female model. Students rated her on nine teaching-related characteristics. Analyses indicated that the presence of tattoos was associated with some positive changes in ratings: students' motivation, being imaginative about assignments, and how likely students were to recommend her as an instructor.

Source: "Perceptions of a tattooed college instructor." from Psychol Rep. 2010 Jun;106(3):845-50.

Hat tip to @quidebo via @aaker.

While we may think of guys with tattoos as tough and badass, I learned in this book that one of the most consistent findings among Navy Seal instructors is that guys with tattoos tend not to make the grade.

In his phenomenal book Codes of the Underworld, Diego Gambetta describes why some people get tattoos for damn good reasons.

This paper examines the relation between prohibitions and violence, using the historical behavior of the homicide rate in the United States. The results document that increases in enforcement of drug and alcohol prohibition have been associated with increases in the homicide rate, and auxiliary evidence suggests this positive correlation reflects a causal effect of prohibition enforcement on homicide. Controlling for other potential determinants of the homicide rate does not alter the conclusion that drug and alcohol prohibition have substantially raised the homicide rate in the U.S. over much of the past 100 years.

Source: "Violence and the U.S. prohibitions of drugs and alcohol" from American Law and Economics Review V1 N1 1999 (78-114)

Recently added to my reading list: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

Background: a recent twin study has shown that ‘looking old for one’s age’ is associated with increased mortality. Approximately 40% of the variation in perceived age is due to non-genetic factors.

Objective: to examine environmental factors influencing perceived age controlling for diseases.

Design: a twin study.

Setting: in the 2001 wave of the population-based survey—the Longitudinal Study of Aging Danish Twins—participants provided information on a wide range of exposures and health indicators. Additionally, they were asked to have a face photograph taken.

Subjects: a total of 1826 elderly (70+) twins who had a high-quality face photograph taken.

Methods: ten nurses assessed the visual age of each twin from the face photograph. The mean of the nurses’ age estimates for each twin was used as the twin’s perceived age. Multivariate linear regression and intrapair comparison (for intact twin pairs) were used for analyses.

Results: statistically significant determinants of facial ageing associated with high perceived age for men were smoking (P = 0.01), sun exposure (P = 0.02) and low body mass index (BMI) (P<0.005), while for women they were low BMI (P = 0.05) and low social class (P<0.005). The number of children (men) and marital status (P = 0.08) and depression symptomatology score (women) were borderline significantly associated with facial ageing.

Conclusion: our study confirms previous findings of a negative influence of sun exposure, smoking and a low BMI on facial ageing. Furthermore, our study indicates that high social status, low depression score and being married are associated with a younger look, but the strength of the associations varies between genders.

Source: "Influence of environmental factors on facial ageing" from Age and Ageing 2006 35(2):110-115

I speculated before about whether age mediates susceptibility to cognitive biases. For an accessbile intro to cognitive bias check out Predictably Irrational as well Ariely's new book The Upside of Irrationality.

Related posts:

Do our decision-making abilities decline with age?

Can living like you're young prevent aging?

Is an active imagination one of the keys to aging well?

Does your personality determine whether you'll get dementia?

Is retirement lethal?

Can you tell if a man will get dementia just by looking at his face?

Do the elderly pick mates differently than younger people do?

Does youthful success mean you won't live as long?

How to avoid becoming senile

Is there really such thing as a mid-life crisis?

Do people who look young for their age live longer?

This paper provides the first empirical test of the Portia Hypothesis: Females with masculine monikers are more successful in legal careers. Utilizing South Carolina microdata, we look for correlation between an individual's advancement to a judgeship and his/her name's masculinity, which we construct from the joint empirical distribution of names and gender in the state's entire population of registered voters. We find robust evidence that nominally masculine females are favored over other females. Hence, our results support the Portia Hypothesis.

Source: "Do Masculine Names Help Female Lawyers Become Judges? Evidence from South Carolina" from American Law and Economics Review 2009 11(1):112-133

If you want to read more about men, women and human nature I recommend this book as well as The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.

Related Posts:

Is it only women who are negatively affected by idealized bodies in media?

Does being an ex-convict make it harder for a man to find a wife?

Are women less picky than men when choosing a marriage partner?

Do women receive lighter prison sentences than men? If so, why?

Are there more women than men in major cities because women want rich guys?

Should you command or ask when you want something from the opposite sex? How about from someone who is same sex?

Are women more likely to be victims of identity theft?

Why are women better at detecting non-verbal emotion?

What kind of men and women are more prone to anger and feeling entitled?

"...The existence of other women who are a little freer with their favors weakens the bargaining power of the Madonnas, and means that men have less incentive to marry. Some men will not bother at all, feeling that they can get all they want from a playboy lifestyle. or they delay marriage until middle age, cutting down on the pool of marriageable men and increasing male bargaining power.

As we have seen, the rational response is for women to go to college, bringing them both better prospects in the job market and better prospects in the marriage market. Meanwhile, the more capable women become of looking after children by themselves, the less men need to bother. It's a textbook case of free-riding: With highly educated women in excess supply, men have realized they can get sex, and even successful offspring, without ever moving too far from the recliner and the potato chips. Statistics seem to bear this out. Nowadays four U.S. women graduate from a university for every three men, and this is not a particularly American phenomenon: In fifteen out of seventeen rich countries for which the data are available, more women are graduating than men. The most educated generation of men in the United States was born just after World War 2 and graduated in the mid-1960's -- male graduation rate dipped after that, and have not yet returned to that peak. The rational choice perspective suggests it is probably not coincidental that this decline set in roughly when women got hold of the contraceptive pill."

This is from Tim Harford's very interesting book The Logic of Life.

Digests of posts:

Things you didn't know about sex

How to quickly and easily improve your life

Things you didn't know about sports

Things you didn't know about happiness

Things you didn't know about lies, liars and detecting lies

Things you didn't know about negotiation, persuasion and influence

Things you didn't know about marriage and relationships

You should follow me on Twitter here. You can also subscribe to the blog's feed or follow on Facebook. If you want to help support the blog, please do your Amazon shopping via this link. Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

Previous research has attempted to identify a deterrent effect of capital punishment. We argue that the quality of life in prison is likely to have a greater impact on criminal behavior than the death penalty. Using state-level panel data covering the period 1950–90, we demonstrate that the death rate among prisoners (the best available proxy for prison conditions) is negatively correlated with crime rates, consistent with deterrence. This finding is shown to be quite robust. In contrast, there is little systematic evidence that the execution rate influences crime rates in this time period.

Source: "Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence" from American Law and Economics Review V5 N2 2003 (318-343)

Great nonfiction crime books are "Low Life", "Homicide", "The Big Con", Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, Donnie Brasco and Wiseguy, which inspired GoodFellas.

Related posts:

Are attractive people less likely to be convicted of a crime and more likely to get a shorter sentence?

Does the male/female wage gap extend to crime?

When does the sex of a judge affect their rulings?

Are lawyers any good at predicting the outcomes of their cases?

Can watching TV crime dramas distort perception of the criminal justice system?

Why you should only reference low numbers when you're on trial for murder:

Does it work when a defendant tries to excuse away crimes by saying he was abused as a child?

How would the law punish Siamese twins if one committed murder without the other being involved?

Do women receive lighter prison sentences than men? If so, why?

You just committed murder. What should you do now?

Annotation: This study of the impact of mass media stories on homicide found that the number of homicides in the United States increases significantly after stories about prizefights, in which violence is rewarded, and decreases significantly after stories about murder trials and executions, in which violence is punished.

Abstract: Study data came from computerized death certificates generated by the National Center for Health Statistics from 1973 through 1979; from an earlier study listing heavyweight championship prizefights; and from newspaper and television indexes showing publicized acquittals, life sentences, death sentences, or executions for homicides. The analytic techniques used were developed specifically to detect short-lived fluctuations in mortality. The focus was on the period from 0 to 4 days after publicized events. Nearly all the publicized punishments involved white murderers and white victims. The publicized punishments had a short-term deterrent effect on the homicides of white victims, but the drop was only 3.32 victims per homicide story. Further research should examine the fluctuation of daily homicide statistics for a large population after heavily publicized punishment stories. Data tables and a list of 47 references are supplied.

Source: "When Violence is Rewarded or Punished - The Impact of Mass Media Stories on Homicide" from Journal of Communication  Volume:34  Issue:3  Dated:(Summer 1984)  Pages:101-116

Vaughan Bell had an interesting post recently on last words before executions.

I highly recommend the Oscar winning movie about boxing, When We Were Kings. Also, Facing Ali is quite good too. Just don't go kill anyone after you watch them.

Related Posts:

Do guns make men more aggressive?

Does movie violence increase violent crime?

Why UFC fighters should not take antidepressants

Can you tell if a man is dangerous just by looking at his face?

Does country music increase suicide rates?

You just committed murder. What should you do now?

And here's how to tell if someone is carrying a concealed gun.

You should follow me on Twitter here. You can also subscribe to the blog's feed or follow on Facebook. If you want to help support the blog, please do your Amazon shopping via this link. Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

The last one hundred years have witnessed a revolution in sexual behavior. In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19–... Now, 75% have experienced this. Public acceptance of this practice reacted with delay. Only 15% of women in 1968 had a permissive attitude toward premarital sex. At the time, though, about 40%of 19 year-old females had experienced it. The number with a permissive attitude had jumped to 45% by 1983, a time when 73% of 19 year olds were sexually experienced. Thus, societal attitudes lagged practice. Beyond the evolution and acceptance of sexual behavior over time, there are relevant cross-sectional differences across females. In the U.S., the odds of a girl having premarital sex decline with family income. So, for instance, in the bottom decile 70% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced it, versus 47% in the top one. Similarly, 68% of adolescent girls whose family income lies in the upper quartile would feel "very upset"if they got pregnant, versus 46% of those whose family income is in the lower quartile.

Source: "From Shame to Game in One Hundred Years: An Economic Model of the Rise in Premarital Sex and its De-Stigmatization" from IZA DP No. 4708

Here is a great book that covers sex and the illegal economy. Great non-porn movie about sex is here.

Related posts:

Things you didn't know about sex.

Do fertile women prefer flirty guys?

Can scents affect who you like?

Is intelligence sexy?

Do men's sexual tastes broaden when they're stressed?

Do women prefer men who are attached?

What are the top 10 reasons for accepting or rejecting a "booty call"?

How do women's tastes vary in short term vs long term partners?

Do women find football players sexier than tennis players?

How much of our sexuality is in our voices?

Under some conditions, cheerfulness promotes health, but cheerfulness also has been associated with unfavorable health outcomes. This study follows up the inverse relation between childhood cheerfulness and longevity found among 1,215 men and women first assessed as children by Lewis Terman in 1922. Risky hobbies, smoking, drinking, and obesity, as well as cause of death, are examined, along with adulthood personality and adjustment. Several hypotheses about mediating variables can be eliminated by these analyses; these data do hint, however, that cheerful children grow up to be more careless about their health. Although correlational and survival analyses suggest that health behaviors play a role, they are unable to explain the observed cheerfulness-mortality link, thus supporting the idea that cheerfulness is multifaceted and should not be assumed to be related to health in a simple manner.

I don't have that whole study but this one which I covered a few days ago references it, giving these startling specifics:

...individuals who were in the 75th percentile of cheerfulness when they were 10 or 11 years old were estimated to be 21% more likely to die at any given time than were those who were in the 25th percentile. Moreover, childhood cheerfulness in this sample was associated with more drinking, cigarette smoking, and risky hobbies and activities in adulthood...

To learn the science of raising kids (very much in line with what I do on this blog) check out NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children.

Related posts:

Does having children make you more like your parents?

Who gets treated better - genetic children or adopted children?:

Do children stereotype males more than females?

How To Praise Your Child

Does being poor change how much of a child's IQ is inherited?

Razor blades in kids' halloween candy!!!!!!!!! ...uh, no, that's a hoax

How to make your kid smarter

Bob Sutton highlights a piece in The Economist covering a new study can help you tell when people on conference calls are lying.

The Economist gives the best cheat sheet:

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception. As with Mr Skilling’s “asshole”, more frequent use of swear words indicates deception.

Bob Sutton's most popular book is The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.

I've posted a lot about the science of lie detection. Check out my digest of things you didn't know about lies, liars and detecting lies.

For more on lying and deception, check out this episode of the consistently excellent Radiolab.

Related posts:

How much do people lie in online dating profiles?

What leads us to trust people?

Can you tell if someone is lying by their handwriting?

When should we trust someone's reputation and when should we ignore it?

Are attractive people more trusting when they think they can be seen?

How to easily be more credible when complaining

Should you kiss ass if you're not good at it?

Does obvious flattery work?

Can you tell how smart your child is by how early they start lying?

What can you do to someone to make their lies easier to detect?