Associate Professor of Behavioral Science at University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Papers available at: https://t.co/axIOUVcUAN
Oct 3 • 20 tweets • 7 min read
The idea that MY attitudes determine my behavior is a WEIRD assumption? Risk beliefs are NOT predictive of COVID-19 vaccination in rice areas.
🚨 Neat new paper 🚨
Risk perception is a basic model for health decisions. It's simple: If people feel at risk, they'll do things like wear a mask or get vaccinated. 💉
Aug 28 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
A new study created an index of honor culture across the US. High = deep south, Appalachia, and the mountain west. Low = Great Lakes, northeast, Hawaii. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
The index is based on military enlistment, gun attitudes, gun policy, gender hierarchy, and patriarchal attitudes, such as "Men are naturally better leaders than women," and "The father should be the boss in the house."
Apr 4 • 28 tweets • 8 min read
🚨 New paper! 🚨 Rice theory = labor and irrigation networks of rice farming causes collectivism, but causality is hard to nail down in the pesky real world. Then THIS happened... nature.com/articles/s4146…
It was the 1950s. WWII and China's civil war had ended. The government wanted to put former soldiers to work and boost food production. So they started building collective state farms.
Jan 23 • 28 tweets • 8 min read
🚨 New study in @NatureHumBehav! 🚨 It's a showdown of psychology vs. money. 💵 I'm calling it "psychologists run studies in the places they're LEAST likely to find effects."
It all started in a meeting room at U Chicago. I listened to my colleague Devin Pope present his mega study. He asked **10,000** people on MTurk to push the "A" and "B" buttons as many times as they could for 10 minutes. academic.oup.com/restud/article…
Sep 12, 2023 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
New paper in @PsychScience! 🚨 Here's the one-minute version. ⏱️ There are two cities in Iran. One has water, so it has gardens, grapes, and the famous Shiraz wine.
Then there's Yazd. Yazd is bone dry.
Apr 4, 2023 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
Neuroticism is a puzzle for evolution. Worrying seems to be pretty bad for humans! Studies have linked it to lots of bad outcomes. But neuroticism is a good early warning alert! 🚨 New study found neurotic areas of Germany suffered fewer Covid cases.
Openness to experience was the opposite, at least in the US. Open-minded regions got hit harder at first. Could be all because openness entails more social mixing, more travel.
Jan 24, 2023 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
New paper! Here's the one-minute version. There's a puzzle I've been thinking about for a long time. Wealthy countries tend to be happier...
...but ALL of wealthy East Asia is less happy than it "should be" based on its wealth. Why?
Feb 1, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
New paper out! I was in China when COVID-19 broke out, and I was dumb enough to walk counting how many people were wearing masks.
With a research team, we observed 1,300 people in seven cities in a radius around Wuhan.
Jul 31, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
New paper just out in PNAS! Rice-farming societies have tighter social norms than wheat-farming and herding societies. Open access: pnas.org/content/early/…
Why? Rice farmers shared labor and faced commons problems with shared irrigation networks. Strong social norms helped farmers coordinate labor, water, repairing channels.