Leslie Becker-Phelps highlights a study (pdf) that showing that couples who delayed having sex (showed “sexual restraint”) ended up with more successful marriages.
Why?
Because early sex may indicate less commitment to the long-term relationship. Also, it may undermine the couple’s ability to communicate verbally. The study’s authors speculate:
… we speculate that the rewards of sexual involvement early on may undermine other aspects of relationship development and evaluation such that individuals may not put as much energy into crucial couple processes such as communication and may stay with partners who are not as skilled in these processes, thereby resulting in a marriage that is more brittle.
—Busby et al (2010) (pdf): Compatibility or Restraint?: The Effects of Sexual Timing on Marriage Relationships
This is an important concept for adolescents to grasp, as Becker-Phelps points out:
These are the very messages that adults often deliver to adolescents who want to begin exploring their sexuality. Wait, they say. If you are meant to be together, it will happen. In the meantime, get to know each other and grow together. Decide whether this relationship really is right for you before you become sexually involved. It’s great advice.
As climate changes, biomes move, and the range of the brown recluse spider migrates north and east (blue area) from its current location (red dashed line). Image adapted from Saupe et al. (2011).
Just in time for us to learn about global change, this interesting study on the expanding range of brown recluse spiders came out. Once restricted to the southern U.S. and the midwest, future climate change will allow them to expand north to Minnesota and east into Pennsylvania.
The researchers, Saupe et al. (2011), used ecological niche modeling. This method takes known information about where the spiders live, such as climate (e.g. summer temperatures) or topography (e.g. mountains versus plains), to figure out the current extent of their ecological niche. Then they use climate models to figure out where those same conditions will apply in the future. Thus the spiders march north.
PsyBlog has an excellent summary of the research on social loafing, the phenomena where people working in a group work less compared to when they work alone. Because we do so much group work, this is sometimes an issue.
The first research on social loafing came from Max Ringelmann way back in 1913 (Ringelmann, 1913). He had people pulling on a rope, and compared the maximum they could have pulled, based on individual test, to how much each person actually pulled. The results were, kind of, sad; with eight people, each one only pulled half as much as their maximum potential strength. A graph of Ringelmann’s data is shown below. If everyone pulled at their maximum the line would have stayed horizontal at 1.
The relative loafing of people working in a group. As the group gets larger, the amount of work per person decreases from its maximum of 1. Data from Ringelmann (1913)
The PsyBlog article points out three reasons why people tend to loaf in groups:
We expect others to loaf so we do it, too.
We feel more anonymous the larger the group, so we feel less need to put in the effort.
We often don’t have a clear idea about how much we need to contribute, so we don’t put in as much as we could.
This can be summed up in Latane’s Social Theory:
If a person is the target of social forces, increasing the number of other persons diminishes the relative social pressure on each person.
The key is making sure students are motivated to do the work. We want self-motivated students, but creating the right environment, especially by training students in how to work in a group will help.
Make sure students realize the importance of their work; this makes them more motivated.
Build group cohesion; team members contribute more if they value the group they’re in.
Make sure the group clearly and fairly divides the work. Let everyone be part of the decision making process so students have choices in what to do will help them be more invested in their part of the work.
Make sure each group member feels accountable for their share of the work.
A Brief Excursion into Mathematics
Ringelmann’s data falls on a remarkably straight line, so I used Excel to plot a trendline. As my algebra students know, you only need two points to write the equation of a line, however, Excel uses linear regression to get the best-fit line through all the data. Not all the data points will be on the line (sometimes none of them will be on the line) but the sum of the distance from each point to the line is minimized.
Curiously, since the data is pretty close to a straight line, you can extend the line to the x-axis to find out how many people it would take for no-one to be exerting any force at all. Students should be able to determine the equation of the line on their own, but you can get Excel to give you the equation of the trendline. From the plot we see:
y = -0.0732 x + 1.0707
At the x-axis, y = 0, so;
0 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707
solving for x we first subtract the constant, 1.0707 from both sides to get:
0 – 1.0707 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707 – 1.0707
giving:
-1.0707 = -0.0732 x
then divide by -0.0732 to isolate x:
which yields:
x = 14.63
This means that with 15 people, no-one will be pulling on the rope. In fact, according to this equation, they’ll actually start pushing on the rope.
It’s an amazing result, but if you can find flaws with my argument or math, please let me know.
… an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking [my emphasis].
Every day (almost) we have half an hour blocked off for Personal World. It’s a time for reflection, a time to collect ourselves, and a time to be alone. Adolescents in general tend to be social animals, but, as Leon Neyfkh points out:
… a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school.
A silver fox. Image by Zefram via Wikimedia Commons.
Evan Ratliff has an excellent article that ties well into our discussions of evolution. It’s on the breeding of foxes to make them want human companionship, much the same way wolves were domesticated.
… researchers … gathered up 130 foxes from fur farms. They then began breeding them with the goal of re-creating the evolution of wolves into dogs, a transformation that began more than 15,000 years ago.
Wild boar (top) versus a domesticated pig (bottom). Note the floppier ears, a trait common to domesticated animals. Figure from Darwin (1968).
It worked remarkably well, and not just with foxes, but with rats and mink as well.
The scientist in charge, Dmitry Belyaev, was looking into something that Darwin observed in 1868: domesticated animals are smaller, with floppier ears and curlier tails, than their untamed ancestors.
In terms that we’ve studied, domesticated animals all have similar physical characteristics (phenotype) and Belyaev wanted to find the genotype. His theory is that there is:
… a collection of genes that conferred a propensity to tameness—a genotype that the foxes perhaps shared with any species that could be domesticated.
A successful democratic revolution may well need a relatively wealthy and educated population, however, one of the main things that seem to drive revolutions themselves is just how many young adults there are in a country.
… countries in which 60 percent or more of the population is under the age of 30 are more likely to experience outbreaks of civil conflict than those where age structures are more balanced.
— Madsen (2011): The Demographics of Revolt
When there are lots of young people getting to the age when they are just trying to find jobs and start families, but the country’s economy can’t grow fast enough to provide all the jobs they need, then you have a lot of dissatisfied, disaffected people with time on their hands; it’s a tinderbox ready for any spark.
I recently attended a talk by Jennifer Scuibba where she laid out the case. Scuibba’s blog, also has a
a very good set of links that look at the age demographics of the current revolutions in the Arab world.
One of the links goes to a report by Richard Cincotta and others (Cincotta et al., 2003) that used this type of demographic analysis to figure out which countries were most likely to end up in conflict.
They talk about the demographic transition, “a population’s shift from high to low rates of birth and death,” as being a key factor in reducing the likelihood of conflicts. Therefore, they suggest:
If civil conflict leads to a successful democratic transition, then political stability is probably not a net benefit.
However, once there is a democratic revolution, the same large cohort of young people still exists, which could make a country like Egypt unstable for quite a while, until it goes through the demographic transition. After all:
…countries do not become mature democracies overnight. They usually go through a rocky transition, where mass politics mixes with authoritarian elete politics in a volatile way. Statistical evidence covering the past two centuries shows that in this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less …
— Mansfield and Snyder (1995): Democratization and War
If we’re not skilled at something then only practice and learning can remedy the situation. But, according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), human nature tends to try to blame other things, like luck, instead of our own lack of skill when things go wrong. Interestingly, we’re even resistant to thinking that our lack of skill is the problem, even when we’re given that negative feedback.
So an essential skill for the student is to learn how to take criticism constructively. Self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to be honest with oneself are important. Let this be a warning:
“One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by comparing themselves with others.” “Incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior of other people.”
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)
P.S. Note that “incompetent” is used here to express a level of knowledge and skill that can be improved on to become “competent”. Incompetence is not a fixed quality, unless you let it be.
P.P.S. This is another reason why it’s important that students share their work with one another and the class. The best work tends to ratchet up the standards and expectations.
The Trans Alaska pipeline. The bend is due to the fact that it's sitting on a faultline. (Image via the USGS)
Back in 1991, Jay Anderson wrote and interesting article (free pdf) on how exactly to go about measuring “naturalness”.
After all, anywhere you go in this world, you’ll find it has been impacted by humans to some degree: agriculture in Brazil is affecting rainfall patterns in the remotest parts of the Amazon basin; and soot and anthropogenic chemicals gently, and subtly, contaminate the remotest Antarctic Ice Caps.
Anderson came up with three things to look at, but I think the two key are:
how much things would change if you removed people,
how many native species there are compared to how many their were in the past.
I think it’s important to try to at least better define what we mean by the word “natural” as we think about conserving the environment.
The World without Us by Alan Weisman
Anderson’s first point, about how much things would change if you removed the people, also brings to mind Alan Weisman’s book, The World without Us, which imagines what the world would look like if humans disappeared: what would happen to the cities and artifacts we leave behind?
Footprints in the sand of a small bay on the northeastern coast of Trinidad.
