Barking Up The Wrong Tree

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In a recent publication Kaminsky and Stucky (2009) claim our finding that the presence of a black mayor reduces killings of police officers (see Jacobs & Carmichael 2002) does not hold after they correct an error I made in the 2002 publication. Kaminsky and Stucky, however, ignore our most comprehensive models, which included a nonlinear specification with considerable explanatory power. They instead confine their reanalysis to a simplified and initial less exhaustive model in our paper that did not include the nonlinear specification without mentioning this and other omissions. After I correct my error, and retain the nonlinear specification that was in our definitive models, multiple versions of this model continue to support our hypothesis that the presence of a black mayor reduces killings of police officers. This comment concludes by outsome problems in Kaminski and Stucky’s analysis of later data.

Source: “The Influence of Black Mayors on Police Officers Killed: A Comment on Kaminski and Stucky” from Homicide Studies

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This research used a job interview context to investigate the relationship between peoples’ degrees of generalized trust—their default assessments of the likely trustworthiness of others—and their ability to detect lies. Participants watched videos of eight simulated job interviews: Half of the interviewees were completely truthful; half told a variety of lies to make themselves more attractive job candidates. Contrary to lay wisdom, high trusters were significantly better than low trusters were at detecting lies. This finding extends a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that high trusters are far from foolish Pollyannas and that low trusters’ defensiveness incurs significant costs.

Source: “Not Pollyannas, Higher Generalized Trust Predicts Lie Detection Ability” from Social Psychological and Personality Science July 19, 2010 vol. 1 no. 3 274-279

How can you tell when the boss is lying?

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?

Of course they are:

Previous studies have found that women with larger breasts than the average were considered to be more physically attractive. In these studies attractiveness was measured with the help of silhouette figures or photographs and the effect of breast size on men’s behaviour was not considered. In this study two experiments were carried out in order to test the effect of a woman’s breast size on approaches made by males. We hypothesized that an increase in breast size would be associated with an increase in approaches by men. A young female confederate was instructed to wear a bra that permitted her to artificially vary her breast size. In the first experiment the female confederate was instructed to sit in a nightclub for one hour whereas in the second experiment she was instructed to take a seat in a pavement area of a bar. It was found that increasing the breast size of the female confederate was associated with an increasing number of approaches by men.

Source: “Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation.” from Body Image. 2007 Dec;4(4):386-90.

Yes, you already knew this but now you can say it’s science.

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