Do companies pay women more if a male CEO has a daughter?
men's salaries are higher when the boss has a daughter Drawing on research in sociology and economics suggesting that fathers' gender-related attitudes and behaviors are shaped by the gender of their children, we hypothesize that having daughters prompts male CEOs to implement wage policies that are more equitable to female employees. To test this hypothesis, we use a 12-year panel of Danish workforce data and an empirical specification with CEO–employee fixed effects, creating a quasiexperimental setting whereby the gender of…
1 min read
Is bribing your kids to eat vegetables a good idea?
rents commonly use rewards to encourage children to eat healthfully, but this practice remains controversial because rewards are suspected of undermining children’s intrinsic motivation. A cluster-randomized trial examined children’s acceptance of a disliked vegetable over 12 daily taste exposures. These exposures were paired with a tangible reward, a social reward, or no reward, and the findings were compared with the results from a no-treatment control condition. Liking and intake of the vegetable were assessed in a free-choice consumption task at…
1 min read
Can I tell whether you’ll get divorced by how you describe your marriage?
longitudinal study with 95 newlywed couples examined the power of the Oral History Interview to predict stable marital relationships and divorce. A principal-components analysis of the interview with the couples (Time 1) identified a latent variable, perceived marital bond, that was significant in predicting which couples would remain married or divorce within the first 5 years of their marriage. A discriminant function analysis of the newlywed oral history data predicted, with 87.4% accuracy, those couples whose marriages remained intact…
2 minutes
Do we use TV as a substitute for real relationships?
e current research examines the Social Surrogacy Hypothesis: parasocial relationships in favored television programs can provide the experience of belonging. Four studies support the hypothesis. Study 1 demonstrated that people report turning to favored television programs when feeling lonely, and feel less lonely when viewing those programs. Study 2 demonstrated that experimentally activating belongingness needs leads people to revel longer in descriptions of favored (but not non-favored) television programs. Study 3 demonstrated that thinking about favored (but not non-favored) television…
1 min read
Does insincere flattery work?
is research uses a dual attitudes perspective to offer new insights into flattery and its consequences. The authors show that even when flattery by marketing agents is accompanied by an obvious ulterior motive that leads targets to discount the proffered compliments, the initial favorable reaction (the implicit attitude) continues to coexist with the discounted evaluation (the explicit attitude). Furthermore, the implicit attitude has more influential consequences than the explicit attitude, highlighting the possible subtle impact of flattery even when a…
1 min read
Does seeing altruism make you more altruistic?
elings of elevation, elicited by witnessing another person perform a good deed, have been hypothesized to motivate a desire to help others. However, despite growing interest in the determinants of prosocial behavior, there is only limited evidence that elevation leads to increases in altruistic behavior. In two experiments, we tested the relationship between elevation and helping behavior. Prior to measuring helping behavior, we measured elevation among participants in an elevation-inducing condition and control conditions in order to determine whether witnessing…
1 min read
Do couples prefer sons over daughters?
parents have preferences over the gender of their children, and if so, does this have negative consequences for daughters versus sons? In this paper, we show that child gender affects the marital status, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this gap. First, women with first-born daughters are less likely…
2 minutes
Do the sexually promiscuous have more sons?
CKGROUND: The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis (gTWH) proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment will have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio, and parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the female reproductive success at a greater rate than male reproductive success in a given environment will have a lower-than-expected offspring sex ratio. AIM: One heritable trait which increases the reproductive success of…
2 minutes
