Disgusting

How Disgust Influences Health Purity Attitudes 

Scott Clifford & Dane Wendell 
Political Behavior, forthcoming 

 Abstract: Food and health regulations are increasingly being pushed onto the political agenda, with rising concerns about genetically modified foods, obesity rates, and vaccination. Public beliefs and attitudes on these issues often conflict with the scientific evidence, yet we know relatively little about what influences opinion on these issues. The public lacks clear partisan cues, and many food and health attitudes cut across the ideological spectrum. We argue that these issues represent new 'purity' attitudes that are driven by the emotion of disgust. Across three studies, both by measuring individuals' trait disgust sensitivity and experimentally inducing an emotional state of disgust, we demonstrate the impact of disgust on food and health policy attitudes. Our results show that greater sensitivity to disgust is associated with support for organic foods, opposition to genetically modified foods, and anti-vaccination beliefs. However, we find only limited evidence that experimentally manipulated disgust affects attitudes toward genetically modified and organic foods. Overall, our results demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in attitudes regarding public health and broadens our understanding of purity attitudes.

Thanks to Kevin Lewis

Do Guns Prevent Suicide?

Wow.  Talk about a moving target.  We hate guns because the level of violence is rising sharply.  (No, it isn't, it's falling sharply).  Oh....okay, we hate guns because they cause (CAUSE!) suicides.

My good friend Prof. Greene at NC State has a piece where he calls several remarkably illogical arguments "nice."

The problem is that the facts are these:

The total level of gun violence has fallen dramatically since 1980.  DRA.MA.TIC.ALLY.

If you remove suicides and drug crimes, in fact, the danger of gun violence is negligible.

A few highly over-sensationalized incidents have shoved the lefty elite into a hissy fit, with their little private high school boxers in tight knots.  So they shriek and yelp that "we" have to "do" "something" (yup, three different scare quote words).

To his credit, Prof. Greene does at least focus on suicides, where the data don't directly contradict his argument.

Except, wait...the data comparing national suicide rates DO directly contradict his argument.  If guns cause suicides, then one would expect the nations with the most guns to have the highest suicide rates, right?

Not so much.  In fact, the correlation between suicide rate and gun ownership is weakly INVERSE.  That's right, guns CURE suicide!  The US, with high gun ownership, has fewer suicides than the gun control icons of Austria, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Japan, and of course FAR below those happy gunless states of Russia and China. 

Now, I'll admit that naive correlations like that don't mean much, and I'm not serious.   Guns do NOT cure suicide. But surely that one means at least as much as the equally naive correlations being whooped up by the good Prof. Greene:  guns also do not CAUSE suicide, though it may be that a person contemplating suicide might use a gun if he has one.  Clearly it is NOT true that in South Korea people say, "I want to commit suicide, but I can't, because I don't have a gun!"

Claiming that taking guns away reduces suicides is at best a within-country measure, and there is no reason to believe the effect would be significant.

Ease Her Pain... Not

Hard to imagine living without pain.  Many people think they would prefer it.

But suppose you had never felt pain, and didn't understand the concept.

This young woman has a genetic mutation that prevents her from feeling pain, though she can feel warmth or coolness.  The problem is that boiling hot things only feel warm, not painfully burning hot.

Excerpt:

The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light. She walked a few steps to the sink and ran cold water over all her faded white scars, then called to her mother, “I just put my fingers in!” Her mother, Tara Blocker, dropped the clothes and rushed to her daughter’s side. “Oh, my lord!” she said — after 13 years, that same old fear — and then she got some ice and gently pressed it against her daughter’s hand, relieved that the burn wasn’t worse.       

Her last name is "Blocker."  Wow.
 

Video Beatdowns

I am a fan of a good video interview beatdown.

Here are two exceptionally delightful ones.

The folks at CNN put the hammer down on Dr. Wakefield, the Bernie Madoff of vaccine science.

And Jon Stewart's man Aasiaf Mandvi goes after San Francisco. I giggled and jiggled uncontrollably. The sheer Orwellian arrogance of the SF guy, saying "we don't have that power." Really? REALLY?

(Nod to @BrendanNyhan and Angry Alex)

Going to Go Blind....

I have to have cataract surgery, in December. Not a big deal, and with the new lens my eyesight should be dramatically improved. No more glasses. Yippee!

Anyway, while we were driving, the LMM asked what the recovery would be like. I jokingly said that the doctor had said it would really help my eyesight if I had a lot of sex.

She stared out the window, and then said, "Well I guess you are going to go blind then, one way or another!"

Yikes... I must be a bad influence.

Big 'Uns Eat FREE!

warning: "mild death may occur..."

Quite a restaurant.

(Nod to the Blonde, who would have to pay a LOT to eat at this restaurant, skinny little thing that she is!)

The match of the week (so far)

Taylor Dent beat Ivan Navarro last night, winning the 5th set tiebreaker 11-9. Both guys played serve and volley (Dent went to net 109 times, Navarro 146) with accurate and huge serves (Dent made 70% of his first serves with a top speed of 147 mph, Navarro 81% with a top speed of 130).

The full match stats are here.

After the match, Dent commandeered the umpire's microphone to thank the crowd and took a victory lap around the Grandstand, slapping hands with the crowd. He is coming back from two spinal fusion surgeries and has a great attitude about the sport as revealed in his post match interview.

Next up for Taylor is the most handsome Scottish person in all of history, Andy Murray.

Hurry up and wait

I have been avoiding posting on anything serious lately because I promised Mrs. A after seeing all the jaguars we did in Brazil that I would be in a good mood for 6 months!

One thing that I do find interesting is the clash between the supposed urgency of political action and the implementation of policy that is contained inside the action plan.

Consider first the stimulus bill. President O insisted in fast action using semi-apocalyptic rhetoric to help insure very quick passage. Later, as unemployment rose faster than original no-stimulus projections, and people were either labeling the bill a failure or calling for a second stimulus, President O pointed out, correctly, that it was way too early to judge the bill, because the main chunk of spending wouldn't hit the economy until the second quarter of 2010!

Does anyone beside me think that is funny? By then, according to most forecasts, we should be into a recovery. Hey, maybe that's why fiscal policy is often pro-cyclical? So it will seem like it's working?

It seems like the same course is being taken with health care reform. The cause is urgent, action must be taken now, but I am pretty sure that many of the proposals in the bills under consideration do not take effect until years after passage!

It will be interesting to see if "hurry up and wait" works again.

Interview on Health Care

Did an "interview" with old friend, student, and colleague Don Taylor. He posted it on his (relatively) new blog, FREEFORALL (that's a health care joke, get it, Free For All?). Anyway, here is the interview....

An excerpt:

Question 1. What is the biggest problem facing the U.S. health care system?

Sharply rising costs. Two ways to "solve" the costs problem: (a) give everyone insurance, so that they are insulated from cost increases. (b) reduce cost increases, and find ways to make basic health care cheaper.

(a) is the most talked about option, but it is a bad idea. Someone (the taxpayer) still pays for insurance, so we are not really protected from cost increases. The French economist, Frederic Bastiat, said that the state is the fiction that each of us should be supported by all of us. It may be that universal coverage for serious illness would protect people, but "free" health care is too expensive, unless we get a handle on costs.

Option (b) is much better, but harder, because medical lobbies and interest groups will fight it. The problem is that we do not teach, or reward, preventive action by citizens or basic primary care by physicians. NC has a big shortage in primary care, at every level.

Put it this way: I have auto insurance. But it does NOT pay for oil changes. If I don't do the oil changes, then the car will decline in value and break down. Nobody else has to pay for my bad decisions, and insurance won't cover the new engine if I ruined the old one by running without oil or maintenance.

Why should other people have to pay for the fact that I don't exercise, that I smoke, and that I eat a bad diet? "Free" insurance protects me against my own choices.

The answer is to lift restrictions on primary practice by Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practitioners. I'm not saying they should do annual check ups; we need docters, with broad training and experience, for that. But for many complaints, and for advice on diet and exercise, and smoking, even a simple computer based expert system can do a fine job. If I have a minor infection in my finger, or need my blood pressure checked, or want to know about the tingling in my diabetic toes, then I should be able to show up an office, without an appointment, and pay no more than $30 for the visit.

We can do this with oil changes, and it works fine! Why not with basic office visits? Right now, people delay going to primary care, or can't get an appointment. Then they have a REAL infection, or a stroke, or they have to have gangrenous toes removed at the emergency room.

Legalize health care. Allow PAs to practice basic primary care. And reduce the costs and hassle of going to the doctor. There is no reason it should be harder, or more expensive, than an oil change.

ATSRTWT

UPDATE: Don had this interesting piece recently, in the N&O. It is an interesting question, though I would turn it around. He asks, "Why not tax health care payments?" I ask, "Why not eliminate taxes on everything?" But we agree that the strange disparity should be ended.

Health Care Article....

An article I missed, back in the N&O in Raleigh. By my friend and ex-student Don Taylor, at the Sanford Institute.

Excerpt: DURHAM -- In my health policy class at Duke, I teach students two "laws" that govern all health systems: (1) Everyone dies; the only questions are when and from what? and (2) before that, the healthy subsidize the sick.

The first law is inescapable. Making the second function is the essence of health policy. These two laws hold true in Canada. The U.K. Germany. Japan. The U.S. Medicare program. Duke University's private employee plans, and every Blue Cross and Blue Shield group plan sold in North Carolina. In fact, the reason you have heard discussion of the State Employees Health Plan this spring is because Law 2 above was no longer functioning because there were too few healthy state employees and dependents subsidizing the sick ones.

The whole article is interesting. My own view is that the problem is NOT that there are too few healthy subsidizing too many sick. The problem is that there are too many demands that health care "should be" free, and so it is expensive. Our system is focused on providing expensive cure, not cheap prevention.

Look, I have auto insurance, but it doesn't pay for oil changes. People need to pay more of their own costs, not in money terms but in basic maintenance and lifestyle choices. Get off your fat ass, put down the potato chips, and go for a walk.

ATSRTWT

Keep those germy humans away from my pigs

American farmers are concerned that their pigs might catch the swine flu from people! I understand that this actually could happen, but it's still funny to think about isn't it?

Plus some of the farmers seem a bit insular, if not clueless in their viewpoint:

"That is the biggest concern, that your herd could somehow contract this illness from an infected person," said Kansas hog farmer Ron Suther, who is banning visitors from his sow barns and requiring maintenance workers, delivery men and other strangers to report on recent travels and any illness before they step foot on his property.

Ummm, isn't the biggest concern that the death rates we seem to be seeing in Mexico will continue and spread to other parts of the world?

But apparently, Mr. Suther is not alone in his view:

Those sentiments were echoed by producers around the nation this week as fears of a possible global flu pandemic grew, with more than 200 people sickened, including more than 100 in the United States, and at least 177 dead, all but one in Mexico.

"There is no evidence of this new strain being in our pig populations in the United States. And our concern very much is we don't want a sick human to come into our barns and transmit this new virus to our pigs," said National Pork Producers chief veterinarian Jennifer Greiner.

Look, I like bacon as much (maybe more?) as the next guy but I think we still have more important things to worry about right now.

Words to live by

Do androids dream of electric cigs?

"With its slim white body and glowing amber tip, it can easily pass as a regular cigarette. It even emits what look like curlicues of white smoke. The Ruyan V8, which produces a nicotine-infused mist absorbed directly into the lungs, is just one of a rapidly growing array of electronic cigarettes attracting attention in China, the U.S. and elsewhere — and the scrutiny of world health officials.

Marketed as a healthier alternative to smoking and a potential way to kick the habit, the smokeless smokes have been distributed in swag bags at the British film awards and hawked at an international trade show.

Because no burning is involved, makers say there's no hazardous cocktail of cancer-causing chemicals and gases like those produced by a regular cigarette. There's no secondhand smoke, so they can be used in places where cigarettes are banned, the makers say."


I am pretty sure that nothing can go wrong with a product that sprays atomized nicotine down your throat. Kudos to you Ruyan Group LTD. Full story is here. FYI, according to the AP "Ruyan" means "like smoking". It doesn't say in what language.

The worst mistake in the history of the human race?

According to Jared Diamond, it's agriculture!

"archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered."

here's one of his cases:

"One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from
skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show
that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a
generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height
crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical
times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still
not regained the average height of their distant ancestors."

While his cases are (as always) just so, the argument seems iffy. After all, agriculture accompanied a rise in the population which in most endogenous growth models, raises the stock of ideas and long run growth. Plus, if we'd stayed hunter-gatherers neither me or Lebron James would currently stalk this planet and that, people, would be a tragedy indeed.

Birds, Bees: Choices, Costly Signals, and Genetic Adjustments

Intelligence and mate choice: Intelligent men are always appealing

Mark Prokosch, Richard Coss, Joanna Scheib & Shelley A. Blozis
Evolution and Human Behavior, January 2009, Pages 11-20

Abstract:
What role does a man's intelligence play in women's mate preferences? Selecting a more intelligent mate often provides women with better access to resources and parental investment for offspring. But this preference may also provide indirect genetic benefits in the form of having offspring who are in better physical condition, regardless of parental provisioning. Intelligence then may serve as both a cue of a mate's provisioning abilities and his overall heritable phenotypic quality. In the current study, we examined the role of a man's intelligence in women's long- and short-term mate preferences. We used a rigorous psychometric measure (men's WAIS scores) to assess intelligence (the first study to our knowledge), in addition to women's subjective ratings to predict mate appeal. We also examined the related trait of creativity, using women's ratings as a first step, to assess whether creativity could predict mate appeal, above and beyond intelligence. Finally, we examined whether preferences for intelligent and creative short-term mates shifted according to a woman's conception risk. Multilevel modeling was used to identify predictors of mate appeal. Study participants (204 women) assessed the long- and short-term
mate appeal of videos of 15 men with known measures of intelligence performing verbal and physical tasks. Findings indicate that both intelligence and creativity independently predicted mate appeal across mating contexts, but no conception-risk effects were detected. We discuss implications of these findings for the role of intelligence and creativity in women's mate choices.

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Duration of courtship effort as a costly signal

Robert Seymour & Peter Sozou
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7 January 2009, Pages 1-13

Abstract:
We consider a male and a female in a courtship encounter over continuous time. Both parties pay participation costs per unit time. The game ends when either one or other of the parties quits or the female accepts the male as a mate. We assume that there is a binary variable which determines whether the male is a “good” or “bad” type from the female's point of view, according to either his condition or his willingness to care for the young after mating. This variable is not directly observable by the female, but has fitness consequences for her: she gets a positive fitness payoff from mating with a “good” male but a negative fitness payoff from mating with a “bad” male. We assume also that a “good” male has a higher ratio of fitness benefit from mating to fitness cost per unit time of courtship than a “bad” male. We show that, under suitable assumptions, there are evolutionarily stable equilibrium behaviours in which time-extended courtship takes place. A “good” male is willing to court for longer than a “bad” male; in this way the duration of a male's courtship signals his type, and acts as a costly handicap. By not being willing to mate immediately the female achieves a degree of screening because the posterior probability that the male is “good”, conditional on his not having quit the game, increases with the duration of courtship.

--------------------

"A UK researcher has a new explanation for how the human race manages to keep a fairly even balance of males and females, despite massive deaths of young males in war and selective abortion of female fetuses in certain parts of the world. Corry Gellatly, a research scientist at Newcastle University, proposes that there's a gene that determines whether a man will father more sons, more daughters, or equal numbers of each. When females are in short supply, they have a better chance of snagging a mate, and are thus more likely to pass the gene for fathering daughters on to their offspring. And when men are scarce, they have a better chance of mating and passing along the gene for having sons...The ratio of male to female births jumped significantly at the end of each of the world wars in countries involved in the fighting. A number of hypotheses have been floated to explain why. One idea is that returning soldiers have extra-frequent sex with their partners, which could lead to fertilization earlier in the menstrual cycle, possibly making male births more likely. Another hypothesis holds that larger males are more likely to survive wars and more likely to father boys. After sorting through 927 family trees from North America and Europe, including 556,387 people in all, Gellatly proposes another explanation. In an article published online in the journal Evolutionary Biology, the researcher suggests that men carry a gene that controls their ratio of X to Y sperm, and thus the likelihood of their fathering sons or daughters. Women carry the gene as well and pass it along, but do not express it." [Source: Reuters]

Questions: How in the world did I ever get married? Fraud, perhaps? Is it really true that "good" men will court longer? Why? And having a gene that "controls" the ratio of X to Y....how? In response to what stimulus?

(Nod to KL)

This Week in Piracy

From the AP:

"It's been a busy, profitable week for Somali pirates: They hijacked one South Korean bulk carrier Wednesday, released another South Korean cargo ship Thursday and let a hijacked Thai ship go Saturday after getting a ransom."

But that's not all folks:

"Nearly a dozen ships and over 200 crew remain in the hands of pirates, including the hijacked Ukrainian arms ship MV Faina, for which pirates have demanded an $8 million ransom.

U.S. warships are still surrounding the Faina to keep the pirates from unloading its cargo of battle tanks and heavy weapons."

Maybe it's a good time to take a long position in grappling hooks, peglegs, eyepatches and parrots?

Update: hmmmm, I wonder if this has anything to do with the piracy uptick (hat tip to commentor SSFC)?

Andy Roddick joins the Angus Anti-Djokovic Club

Andy, congrats on making the quarters at the US Open and welcome to my club.

Here is a chunk of Andy's postmatch interview after beating Fernando Gonzalez:

Q. With the way he plays and his style, does it almost mandate that it's going to be a grind? Because it's not easy to knock Djokovic out of points early, even if you're playing well.

ANDY RODDICK: Oh, sure. You're going to have to go to work. He goes to work pretty much every point, and, my service game, he's going to put returns in, he puts guys in pressure. It seems like a lot of times there'd be breaks back and forth with him. You know going in that you're going to have to go to work.

Q. When asked about his injuries today, mentioning the right ankle as opposed to the left ankle, the other day ‑‑

ANDY RODDICK: Isn't it both of them? And a back and a hip?

Q. And when he said there are too many to count.

ANDY RODDICK: And a cramp.

Q. Do you get the sense right now that he is...

ANDY RODDICK: Bird flu.

Q. Lot of things. Beijing hangover.

ANDY RODDICK: Yeah.

Q. He's got pretty long list of illness.

ANDY RODDICK: Anthrax. SARS. Common cough and cold.

Q. Got a lot of things going on with him.

ANDY RODDICK: Sure.

Q. Do you think he's bluffing?

ANDY RODDICK: No, I mean, I'm sure ‑‑

Q. The way you're saying it, almost means you feel like...

ANDY RODDICK: No, if it's there, it's there. There's just a lot. You know, he's either quick to call a trainer or he's the most courageous guy of all time. I think it's up for you guys to decide.

Sweet!! Andy you can be secretary-treasurer for sure.

hat tip to LOL President

Walking: Yer doin' it wrong!

At least if you are wearing shoes you are. So says Adam Sternbergh in a fun article from New York Magazine. Here's an informative excerpt:

Still, while I can accept that barefoot-walking is beneficial, it’s hard to shake off 30 years of wrapping my feet in foam. So I put this question—if bare feet are natural, why do we need shoes to “protect” the foot?—to a podiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, who explained, “People who rely on the ‘caveman mentality’ are not taking into consideration that the average life span of a caveman was a heck of a lot shorter than the life span of a person today. The caveman didn’t live past age 30. Epidemiologically speaking, it’s been estimated that, by age 40, about 80 percent of the population has some muscular-skeletal foot or ankle problem. By age 50 to 55, that number can go up to 90 or 95 percent.” Ninety-five percent of us will develop foot or ankle problems? Yeesh. Those are discouraging numbers—but wait. Are we talking about 95 percent of the world population, or of North America? “Those are American figures,” he says. Which makes me think, North Americans have the most advanced shoes in the world, yet 90 percent of us still develop problems? We’ve long assumed this means we need better shoes. Maybe it means we don’t need shoes at all.

OMG!! It's the "the solution to government caused problems is more government argument " applied to footware. Well done Mr. Podiatrist and well questioned Mr. Sternbergh!

Bad news comes in Bunches

Great, just great. Not only are my stock portfolio and retirement portfolio totally in the tank, but now I find out I'm likely to need the money for a very long time!! Turns out it's EZ to live to 100 these days (Phone message for Robin Hanson: sell your freezer space!!!).

A larger study of men in their 70s found that those who avoided smoking, obesity, inactivity, diabetes and high blood pressure greatly improved their chances of living into their 90s. In fact, they had a 54 percent chance of living that long.

Their survival decreased with each risk factor, and those with all five had only a 4 percent chance of living into their 90s, according to Harvard University researchers.

Those who managed to avoid lifestyle-related ailments also increased their chances of functioning well physically and mentally two decades later.

The study followed 2,357 men for about 25 years or until death, starting in their early 70s. About 40 percent survived to at least age 90. Among survivors, 24 percent had none of the five risk factors.