Overcoming Bias

Equal Cheats

As math requires, men and women cheat in equal numbers:

[Researchers] gave 203 young heterosexual couples confidential questionnaires asking them whether they had ever strayed, and whether they suspected or knew their partner had strayed. In this, 29 per cent of men said they had cheated, compared with 18.5 per cent of women.  The men were better than women at judging fidelity. "Eighty per cent of women's inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, but men were even better, accurate 94 per cent of the time" ... However, men were also more likely to suspect infidelity when there was none. ... Complex statistical analysis of the data hinted that a further 10 per cent of the women in the study had cheated on top of the 18.5 per cent who admitted to it in the questionnaires, whereas the men had been honest about their philandering.

So why are men more honest than women in cheating surveys?

Porn vs Romance Novels

From an '04 book chapter by Cathy Salmon on porn vs. romance novels:

There is such a thing as a pornography consumed exclusively by women .. it is the romance novel.  Romance novels account for 40% of mass market paperback sales in the United States .... The realm of the romance novel, which might be called "romantopia," is a utopian erotic female counterfantasy to pornotopia.   Just as porn actresses exhibit a suspiciously male-like sexuality, romances are exercises in the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform with female standards.  ...

The public debate over pornography has been going on for years .... [and] had has covered everything from the treatment of women within the industry, to the image of women it presents and the impact of that image on men in the general population as well as the effects on women in the general population. ... [Studies show] men who viewed sexually explicit films did not have negative attitudes toward women's rights, nor were they more accepting of marital or date rape.  ... [Regarding] the incidence of rape in several societies ... increased availability was not associated with increased reports of rape. ...

On a personal level, women often express concern over a partner's regular purchasing of Playboy or watching pornographic videos.  In particular there is a verbalized concern that these things will effect their relationships.  ... [And in fact] males that viewed images of attractive models reported being less committee to their partner after the viewing.  ... Playboy centerfolds ... got the same results.  ... Modern media .. perhaps giving men an unrealistic view of how many attractive available women are out there.

If women complain porn hurts relationships by giving men unrealistic expectations, why don't men complain romance novels hurt relationships by giving women unrealistic expectations?  Why so much more effort to regulate porn than romance novels?  Is it just that men complain less overall?  HT to Fortune Elkins.

Added 2Nov: Robert Wiblin found this Atlantic quote:

in a 2006 study, the Clemson economist Todd Kendall found that a 10 percent increase in Internet access is associated with a 7 percent decline in reported rapes.

 

Equally Shallow Genders

Women think they are different but they are not.  When people about to start speed-dating are asked what they want in a partner, men rate physical attractiveness as far more important than earning prospects, while women rated attractiveness as only a bit more important than earnings.  In actual speed-dating choices, however, men and women both rely on looks much more than earnings:

No Rose-Colored Dating Glasses

We might see ourselves with rose-colored glasses, but apparently we see our dates clearly:

When less attractive people accept less attractive dates, do they persuade themselves that the people they choose to date are more physically attractive than others perceive them to be?  Our analysis of data from the popular Web site http://HOTorNOT.com suggests that this is not the case: Less attractive people do not delude themselves into thinking that their dates are more physically attractive than others perceive them to be.

Added: Anna points us to a study showing distorted sight:

Intimates in satisfying marriages perceive more virtue in their partners than their friends or their partners themselves perceive. ... In contrast, intimates in less satisfying marriages perceive less virtue in their partners than their friends or their partners themselves perceive.

So perhaps we see accurately on average, but some are biased up while others are biased down.  And perhaps we see more clearly while dating than after we've been married for a while. 

Manipulators as Mirrors

Mirror, mirror, on the wall ...  Do you want to see yourself as you really are, instead of as you wish you were?  If so, you can't do much better than to see how successful manipulators see you.  Listen in on successful professional marketers, salesfolk, coaches, bosses, recruiters, etc. telling each other how to manipulate folks like you.  And since some of our most cherished illusions are on romance, frank romantic advice could be especially disturbing:   

• Fein & Schneider's top 10 rules for women
• Roissy's 16 commandments of Poon

Unfortunately, these may be advisors telling people what they want to hear, rather than successful professionals giving frank inside advice.  How can we find the most frank inside accounts of how we are successfully manipulated?

Bias against some types of foreign wives

Consider a typical 35-year-old unattached heterosexual U.S. male who hopes to eventually get married.  One day he goes to a club in his city and finds that thousands of extremely beautiful 20 to 25-year-old Russian women in the club want to marry him.  Many of these women speak English and have a college degree.  True, they want to marry him in large part because of his income, but they still want to marry him.  Although I have no evidence, I strongly suspect that many 35-year-old men would agree to marry one of these Russian women.

Dating websites such as this do allow an American male to pick a beautiful 20-25 year old Russian woman to marry.  Yet few take advantage of this.  Why not?

Maybe it’s because men fear that they will be cheated by international matchmaking organizations.  But if this is true there should be a profitable market opening for a firm with a trusted brand name to start such a matchmaking operation.  Google, perhaps, could extend its search services to help men find international marriage mates.

To What Expose Kids?

State courts recently rebuked Texas Child Protective Services and told them to return 440 kids to their polygamous Mormon parents.  The main complaint I've heard is that these teen girls can not really consent to polygamous marriage because they were not exposed enough to the rest of the world.   For example, Will Wilkinson:

About kids raised on isolated compounds by religious fanatics ... It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. ... They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds.  Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children's psychological freedom.

Of course responsible parents know they should expose kids to more than just the local neighborhood.  But parents' judgments on optimal exposure surely depend on their judgments about that outside world.  Someone who sees outsiders as mostly immoral heathens will choose less exposure than we as outsiders would choose for those same kids. 

So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids?  For example, should we let polygamists argue for their way of life directly to our kids?  Should we let pedophiles argue their case directly to our kids?  Or is the principle here that we know we are right and those other parents are wrong, obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?

I wonder, could different cultures make a deal where they each give the other cultures X hours to make their case to their kids?   Of course with many cultures of differing sizes there'd be the issue of what fraction of that time each culture gets to use.  And of course unreasonable cultures might be excluded from the deal. (But what criteria could characterize "reasonable"?)  And if such a deal is not possible, even among some reasonable cultures, what exactly would that say about what we think about who should be exposed to what? 

Added 29June:  Will responds here.

Should Bad Boys Win?

Futurepundit:

Why do psychopaths exist? The ladies help the psychopaths reproduce by going to bed with them. Men who are narcissistic, self-obsessed, liars, psychopaths, Machiavellian, and thrill-seekers get laid more.

Bad boys, it seems, really do get all the girls. Women might claim they want caring, thoughtful types but scientists have discovered what they really want - self-obsessed, lying psychopaths.

OK this isn't really news to most people.  But still it raises a basic question.  The basic fact of mate selection is that men are collectively greatly responsible for which female traits win in competition for male attention, while women are collectively greatly responsible for which male traits win in competition for female attention.  Accepting this, here are some possible responses to the above results:

• The result is just wrong, such men do not get more women
• The result is correct, such men do get more women
  • This is good, these are just the sort of men we want more of
    • Such men are good for each woman they are with
    • Such men are bad for each women, but good for women overall
    • Such men are bad for women overall, but still good overall
  • This is bad, these are not the sort of men we want more of
    • Such behavior results from an inefficient signaling game
    • By choosing such men, women help themselves but hurt other women
    • This is a gender power struggle, where such men are overall good for men but bad for women

What say ye?  And why so little discussion on the gender reversed questions - do we want more of the kinds of women who win when competing to attract men?

In Innovation, Meta is Max

Building on my intro to innovation, which summarized previous work, let me now offer a new insight: the max net-impact innovations, by far, have been meta-innovations, i.e., innovations that changed how fast other innovations accumulated. 

Concrete studies of specific innovations in biology, tech, and business suggest that most innovation value comes from bazillions of small innovations.  Yes once in a while a large innovation appears, like computers or a-bombs, but even these require scores of supporting innovations to fulfill their potential.  And if we consider innovations that improve not just one industry or region, but the entire world overall, then it is hard to identify any innovations responsible for identifiable deviations from the steady exponential growth (plus noise) that comes from the usual bazillions of small innovations.

Yet we know of perhaps four innovations responsible for deviations that were not only identifiable, but overwhelmingly so!  As I reviewed in my singularity econ article, these are the innovations that allowed animal brains, human brains, farming, and industry.  These innovations do not seem to have directly increased the level of the relevant economy much -- instead within less than a previous doubling time each innovation increased the rate of innovation accumulation by a factor of sixty or more.  (If several innovations appeared together, they apparently had a single common cause.)

The first human minds, the first farmers, and the first industrialists were actually not much better hunters, gatherers, or builders than their immediate ancestors -- they were mainly just better at getting better faster. 

So if you want to worry about big disruptive future innovations, you should definitely consider meta-innovations.  Admittedly, since the above data covers only innovations that improved the world overall, it does not include predatory innovations that mainly let one group gain at the expense of other groups.  So this data allows the possibility of very large predatory innovations.  But if you are thinking about non-predatory innovations, history suggests you should be most concerned about a single new meta-innovation. 

Is She Just Friendly?

Men often have trouble knowing what women want.  In particular, men have trouble telling if a women is just being friendly or has a more sexual interest.  This is often blamed on male overconfidence and lack of empathy, but taken together two new papers from the April Psychological Science suggest otherwise.  One paper suggests that people with more empathy can only better read the emotions of those who are trying to be read:

We found that perceivers' trait affective empathy was unrelated to empathic accuracy unless targets' trait expressivity was taken into account: Perceivers' trait affective empathy predicted accuracy only for expressive targets. These data suggest that perceivers' self-reported affective empathy can indeed predict their empathic accuracy, but only when targets' expressivity allows their thoughts and feelings to be read.

The other paper says men are not so much biased as clueless about female sexual intent:

Men perceive more sexual intent in women's behavior than women perceive or report intending to convey. ... We found no evidence that men have lenient thresholds for perceiving women's nonverbal behavior as indicating sexual interest. Rather, gender differences were captured by a relative perceptual insensitivity among men. Just as in previous studies, men were more likely than women to misperceive friendliness as sexual interest, but they also were quite likely to misperceive sexual interest as friendliness.

Maybe, just maybe, most women do not want men and others to read their intent.