Social Engineering Blogs

The Humintell Blog December 28, 2016

Resolving for a New Year

new-years-eve-1905142_1280 Are you already stressed about your New Year’s resolution?

As we prepare for the New Year, it is important to remember that attempts at self-improvement are deeply rooted in psychological principles. It may be hard to stick with our resolutions, but an understanding of how to motivate ourselves can help you make lasting and powerful resolutions.

Of the millions of Americans who make them, only eight percent manage to stick with their goals throughout the year. In fact, less than half make it through the first six months, and only 64 percent last through January!

This rate of failure certainly does not signify weakness or lack of commitment, instead it is deeply rooted in how we make and change habits. We need to understand why New Year’s resolutions so often fail, and then we can look at some ways to make them stick.

Harvard social psychologist Dr. Amy Cuddy helps shed light on this question. Dr. Cuddy contends that resolutions suffer by focusing on outcomes far off into the future. If we aim to lose 30 pounds or quit smoking, it is incredibly difficult to realize those goals or to see any concrete progress. This leads to short-term failures completely derailing the whole process.

The author Charles Duhigg agrees. Mr. Duhigg, who has spent a reporting career analyzing the power of habits, argues that many resolutions fail by coming into conflict with deeply ingrained habits.

Mr. Duhigg encourages us to focus on developing new habits, creating goals that can be attained a little bit every day. This could involve beginning to go to the gym, rather than losing weight, or developing a substitute habit for smoking, instead of quitting outright.

Building off of this advice, the American Psychological Association (APA) compiled a series of tips on how to maximize the potential of our New Year’s resolutions.

They build on Dr. Cuddy and Mr. Duhigg’s advice in encouraging the development of new habits. Specifically, these habits should “start small,” making modest commitments and targeting only one behavior at a time. We cannot totally reinvent ourselves in the New Year.

Similarly, remember that you are not in this alone. It is easier to change habits if we talk to friends, family, or even join a support group. By talking to other people, we can open up about our challenges and be reassured that we are on the right track.

Finally, the APA stresses that we must be patient and kind to ourselves. If we fail in that diet or just really need to have that smoke, it is not a reason to abandon the whole endeavor. This often involves patience as different people form habits at different speeds. As behavioral psychologist Dr. Paul Marciano points out, “making lasting change takes time.”

For more holiday-related blogs, see our past content here and here.

psychmechanicsblog December 22, 2016

Do parents prefer sons or daughters?

Before we tackle this question, let’s review some fundamental concepts of evolutionary biology and psychology. You need to have an understanding of these concepts before proceeding and if you’re already familiar with them a nice little review won’t hurt.

Reproductive potential

It’s the number of children an individual organism can produce. In humans, males have a higher reproductive potential than females because they produce much more sperm in their lifetime than females produce eggs.

Reproductive certainty

While males have a higher reproductive potential, females have a higher reproductive certainty. This means that almost all females reproduce whereas a lot of men do not get a chance to reproduce at all.

Reproductive success

Our psychological mechanisms are wired to seek reproductive success i.e. successfully passing on as many genes to the next generation as possible (having kids who can successfully reproduce).

Keeping these concepts in mind, let’s delve into the eternal question of whether human parents prefer sons or daughters…

More sons = greater reproductive potential

Since human males have a very high reproductive potential compared to females, having more sons means more of your genes have the chance of making it to the next generation.

When it comes to reproductive success, more is better. Having a head start is always preferred. If conditions turn out bad later and some genes die, others can survive.

Therefore, in general, parents tend to prefer sons over daughters under average circumstances.

What exactly do I mean by ‘average circumstances’?

Average circumstances mean that the factors that influence reproductive success are not extreme.

Now, there are a lot of variables that can influence reproductive success but the most important of them all is ‘availability of resources’.

Hence, in this case, ‘average circumstances’ would mean that the resources that parents can invest in their children are neither large nor small, they’re average.

What if the resources are not average? What if the parents have less or more available resources? Will that affect their preference for sons versus daughters?

The answer is yes.

When available resources are meager

Reproductive success is both a function of reproductive potential and reproductive certainty. It’s just that under average circumstances, reproductive potential becomes more important because there’s already a good degree of reproductive certainty.

But when the available resources are meager, the balance of the equation shifts. Now, reproductive certainty becomes more important. In other words, when available resources are less, reproductive certainty becomes a more important determinant of reproductive success.

As you might have guessed, in such a situation daughters become more preferable than sons.

When you don’t have a lot of resources to invest, you can’t run the risk of producing sons whose reproductive certainty is low compared to daughters. They may not get a chance to reproduce at all, especially when their parents can invest very little in them.

There is a direct relationship between the reproductive success of males and their resourcefulness.

Therefore, when there’s a resource constraint, parents can’t simply go for the possibility of passing on a greater number of genes to the next generation. They’ve got to aim just for certainty. Beggars can’t be choosers.

It isn’t surprising, therefore, that women without a long-term partner or married to low-status men tend to produce an excess of daughters while women married into resourceful families tend to produce an excess of sons.

The logical conclusion that we can make from all that we’ve discussed above is that parents who have slightly more than average resources should show no preference towards either boys or girls. They should prefer boys and girls equally.

However, should economic conditions worsen, they’re likely to prefer girls over boys.

An interesting study conducted by researchers from two business schools showed that parents who had both daughters and sons spent more on daughters in bad economic times.

These parents seemed to unconsciously understand that in tough economic conditions reproductive certainty became more important than higher reproductive potential.

Even more intriguing is the fact that such preferences also exist at the womb level. When resources are scarce, female biology suppresses boys’ survival in the womb. The result being that mothers give birth to fewer males than normal.

Here’s a short video discussing this…

References:

Cameron, E. Z., & Dalerum, F. (2009). A Trivers-Willard effect in contemporary humans: male-biased sex ratios among billionaires. PLoS One, 4(1), e4195.

Durante, K. M., Griskevicius, V., Redden, J. P., & White, A. E. (2015). Spending on daughters versus sons in economic recessions. Journal of Consumer Research, ucv023.