In two experimental studies of two-party information sharing, we demonstrate that affective state plays a role in the knowledge-transfer process. Study 1 (N = 108 MBA students) found that affective state has a larger impact on those in need of knowledge (“receivers”) than on those in possession of knowledge (“senders”), with elated/happy receivers more likely than angry/frustrated receivers to absorb and act on new information. Study 2 (N = 180 undergraduates) replicated this finding and also demonstrated that having receivers and senders in the same high-arousal affective state as each other (affective congruence) enhances knowledge transfer, regardless of whether the affective state is positive (elated/happy) or negative (angry/frustrated). These findings help fill an important gap in the literature regarding the influence of affect on knowledge transfer in groups.

Source: "The role of affect in knowledge transfer." from Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol 14(2), Jun 2010, 123-142.

Solid books on happiness are here and here.

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Does the meaning of "happiness" change as we age?

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My Wired piece on the science behind positive thinking is here.

Hope you enjoy it,

Eric

This paper tests whether being convicted of a crime affects marriage market outcomes. While it is relatively well documented that crime hurts in terms of reduced future income, there has been little systematic analysis on the association between crime and marriage market outcomes. This paper exploits a detailed Danish register-based data set to fill this gap in the literature. The main findings are that male convicts do not face lower transition rates into partnerships as such, but they face a lower chance of forming partnerships with females from more well-off families. In addition males who are convicted face a significantly higher dissolution risk than their law abiding counterparts.

Source: "Crime and Partnerships" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 3543, June 2008

Best book I've ever read about the subject of marriage is by Stephanie Coontz, "Marriage, a History."

And if you're curious whether you're headed for a divorce, ask Visa.

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In attempt to identify and validate different types of orgasms which females have during sex with a partner, data collected by Mah and Binik (2002) on the dimensional phenomenology of female orgasm were subjected to a typological analysis. A total of 503 women provided adjectival descriptions of orgasms experienced either with a partner (n = 276) or while alone (n = 227). Latent-class analysis revealed four orgasm types which varied systematically in terms of pleasure and sensations engendered. Two types, collectively labelled “good-sex orgasms,” received higher pleasure and sensation ratings than solitary-masturbatory ones, whereas two other types, collectively labelled “not-as-good-sex orgasms,” received lower ratings. These two higher-order groupings differed on a number of psychological, physical and relationship factors examined for purposes of validating the typology. Evolutionary thinking regarding the function of female orgasm informed discussion of the findings. Future research directions were outlined, especially the need to examine whether the same individual experiences different types of orgasms with partners with different characteristics, as evolutionary theorizing predicts should be the case.

Source: "Are There Different Types of Female Orgasm?" from Archives of Sexual Behavior

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

BTW: This movie has the best faked orgasm scene ever.

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Things you didn't know about sex

This experiment examined the effects of judicious swearing on persuasion in a pro-attitudinal speech. Participants listened to one of three versions of a speech about lowering tuition that manipulated where the word “damn” appeared (beginning, end, or nowhere). The results showed that obscenity at the beginning or end of the speech significantly increased the persuasiveness of the speech and the perceived intensity of the speaker. Obscenity had no effect on speaker credibility.

Source: "Indecent influence: The positive effects of obscenity on persuasion" from Social Influence, Volume 1, Issue 2 June 2006 , pages 138 - 146

Are you convinced now, damnit?

I've recommended Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini a lot on this site. And there's a (damn) good reason for that. I'm re-reading it again right now and it's that good.

What's fascinating is that he took on jobs with sales organizations, MLM's, and other companies that absolutely need to be persuasive in order to stay in business. He distilled different effective techniques they used into six key principles. The book breaks them down in an accessible way and colors it all with solid anecdotes. At one point I'll cover the book in depth with a post but if you're going to buy one book from all my recommendations, this would definitely be on the short list. And you don't have to take my word for it: the book has 4.5 stars with 334 reviews on Amazon.

That last sentence might have been pretty convincing to you. It's an example of social proof, one of the six principles of influence Cialdini discusses. :)

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The Federal criminal sentencing guidelines struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 required that males and females who commit the same crime and have the same prior criminal record be sentenced equally. Using data obtained from the United States Sentencing Commission’s records, we examine whether there exists any gender-based bias in criminal sentencing decisions. We treat months in prison as a censored variable in order to account for the frequent outcome of no prison time. Additionally, we control for the self-selection of the defendant into guilty pleas through use of an endogenous switching regression model. A new decomposition methodology is employed. Our results indicate that women receive more lenient sentences even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history.

Source: "Do You Receive a Lighter Prison Sentence Because You Are a Woman? An Economic Analysis of Federal Criminal Sentencing Guidelines" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 2870, June 2007

It's not pro-woman bias on the part of female judges that causes this, it's the paternalism of male judges:

Studies of federal prison sentences consistently find unexplained racial and gender disparities in the length of sentence and in the probability of receiving jail time and departures from the Sentencing Guidelines. These disparities disfavor blacks, Hispanics, and men. A problem with interpreting these studies is that the source of the disparities remains unidentified. The gravest concern is that sentencing disparities are the result of prejudice, but other explanations have not been ruled out. For example, wealth and quality of legal counsel are poorly controlled for and are undoubtedly correlated with race. This paper uses the political, racial, and gender composition of the district court bench to estimate the effect of judicial demographics on sentencing and on observed racial and gender disparities. The evidence presented here suggests that judicial demographics have little influence on prison sentences in general, but do impact racial and gender disparities. The findings regarding gender in the case of serious offenses are quite striking: the greater the proportion of female judges in a district, the lower the gender disparity for that district. I interpret this as evidence of a paternalistic bias among male judges that favors women. The racial composition of the bench has mixed effects that are open to different interpretations. The race and gender results suggest, however, that a judge's background affects his or her sentencing decisions. Finally, there is little evidence that the political composition of the district affects sentencing disparities.

Source: "Racial and Gender Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District-Level Judicial Demographics" from Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 57-92, January 2005

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.

"Caught Stealing" is the best crime fiction I've read in a long time. Charlie Huston is a harder, grittier, faster-paced Elmore Leonard.

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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?

You just committed murder. What should you do now?

For years, anecdotal evidence has suggested increased fertility rates resulting from catastrophic events in an area. In this paper, we measure this fertility effect using storm advisory data and fertility data for the Atlantic and Gulf Coast counties of the United States. We find that low-severity storm advisories are associated with a positive and significant fertility effect and that high-severity advisories have a significant negative fertility effect. As the type of advisory goes from least severe to most severe, the fertility effect of the specific advisory type decreases monotonically from positive to negative. We also find that most of the changes in fertility resulting from storm advisories come from couples who have had at least one child already. In addition to our short-term effect estimation, we also test the effects of storm advisories on long run fertility. Our results provide weak evidence at most that the highest severity storm advisories have a permanent negative fertility effect.

Source: "The Fertility Effect of Catastrophe: U.S. Hurricane Births" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 2975, August 2007

Great song, great movie, and a great book.

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We study the steady state of an overlapping generations economy where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their fecundity, in their earnings, and in their survival probabilities. These three features are agedependent and deterministic. Singles meet at random. They propose when the expected value of their current match exceeds that of remaining single. If both partners propose, the meeting ends up in a marriage. Marriages last until death does them apart, widows and widowers never remarry, and people make no other economic decisions whatsoever. In our model economy people marry because they value companionship, bearing children, and sharing their income with their spouses. The matching function depends on the single sexratios which are endogenous. Our model economy has only two free parameters: the search friction and the utility share of bearing children. We choose their values to match the median ages of first-time brides and grooms. We show that modeling the marriage decision in this simple way is sufficient to account for the age distributions of ever and never married men and women, for the probabilities of marrying a younger bride and a younger groom, and for the age distributions of first births observed in the United States in the year 2000. The previous literature on this topic claims that marriage is a waiting game in which women are choosier than men, and old and rich pretenders outbid the young and poor ones in their competition for fecund women. In this article we tell a different story. We show that their shorter biological clocks make women uniformly less choosy than men of the same age. This turns marriage into a rushing game in which women are willing to marry older men because delaying marriage is too costly for women. Our theory predicts that most of the gender age difference at first marriage will persist even if the gender wage-gap disappears. It also predicts that the advances in the reproductive technologies will play a large role in reducing the age difference at first marriage.

Source: "Gender Differences and the Timing of First Marriages" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 3539, June 2008

This is on my reading list. It's by the authors of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior and is described as "a fascinating psychological investigation of the forces behind what makes us click with certain people, or become fully immersed in whatever activity or situation we’re involved in."

Related posts:

Things you didn't know about marriage and relationships

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

Things you didn't know about sex.

In which countries does divorce impact happiness the most?

What really predicts divorce?

How common are couples where the man is shorter than the woman?

What you should look for in a marriage partner

How important is physical attractiveness to a happy marriage?

Is marriage a good idea for handsome men?

Does earning a lot of money make it harder for a woman to find a husband?

Does a female breadwinner raise risk of divorce?

Do you really have any idea what you're looking for in a romantic partner?

Law enforcement officers are allowed to exercise a significant amount of street-level discretion in a variety of ways. In this paper, we focus on a particular prominent kind of discretionary behavior by traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets, speed discounting. Officers partially forgive motorists by writing a lower speed level than the speed that officers observe. Verifying the level of speed discounting by different groups of officers and motorists and ascertaining the presence of racial disparities in this lenient policing are the main objectives of this paper. We find that minority officers, particularly African-Americans, are harsher on all motorists but even harsher on minority motorists regarding speed discounting. The minority-on-minority disparity appears to be stronger in situations involving Hispanic officers, infrequently ticketing officers, male motorists, those driving old vehicles, and minority neighborhoods.

Source: "Speed Discounting and Racial Disparities: Evidence from Speeding Tickets in Boston" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 3903, December 2008

For an insightful look into what it's like to be a cop and to hear some fascinating anecdotes from officers I recommend What Cops Know.

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On the basis of the experiments by Carli (1990) on the determinants of persuasion efficiency, we predicted that women are more effective using direct strategies in social influence to address women, and indirect strategies to address men; however, men's efficiency should not depend on strategy. Two field experiments presented in this article did not confirm these assumptions. Our data suggest that both sexes are more successful when asking their own sex, but commanding members of the opposite sex.

Source: "To command or to ask? Gender and effectiveness of “tough” vs “soft” compliance-gaining strategies" from Social Influence, Volume 1, Issue 1 March 2006 , pages 48 - 57

Getting to Yes can teach you to be a good negotiator while still being a nice person. If you're less Jedi and more Sith, check out Jim Camp.

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