What leads to happiness?

(Flickr photo by adwriter)

The Atlantic Magazine has a very interesting story called “What Makes us Happy?” (June 2009)

The author was granted rare access to a longitudinal surveyof 268 men who entered Harvard College in the late 1930s; Harvard scholars tracked them over the last 8 decades through adolescence, “war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.”  [The author suggests that the Harvard scholar who has guided this study (The W.T.  Grant Study) over the last roughly half century, George Vaillant, may have used the study to try to make up for deficiencies in his own childhood, suffered when his father committed suicide.]

“Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, ‘Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.’  The other boy runs to him and says, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!’

“The story gets to the heart of Vaillant’s angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of  ‘adaptations,’ or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called ‘defense mechanisms’) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

“Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

“At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or psychotic, adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the immature adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. Neurotic defenses are common in ‘normal’ people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or mature, adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

Vaillant found in general that people improve at adapting. Toddlers often exhibit psychotic adaptations and older children commonly show immature adaptations, but these disappear as children age.  In the Grant Study, adolescents used immature defenses twice as frequently as mature defenses, but by mid-life the ratio had reversed: they were four times more likely to respond in mature ways.  Vaillant also noticed that altruism and humor grew more prevalent between the ages of 50 and 75.  [It is for these reasons that Vaillant examined the subjects over their life trajectory rather than at a fixed point in time, because the progression or lack of progression in defenses was especially important.]

What were Vaillant’s conclusions?

• Relationships were the only thing that really matters: “It is social aptitude, not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging”, Vaillant said. Aside from an individual’s defenses, relationships at age 47 were the strongest predictor of late-life adjustment.  93 percent of those men who were happy at 65 had a close sibling when younger. Those who didn’t have close siblings found these connections in parents or uncles, or mentors or friends.
• Vaillant dismisses social determinism. Social ease predicted good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, but became less significant with time. And shy or anxious kids by age 70 were just as likely to be “happy-well” as outgoing kids by age 70.
• Besides relationships and mature defenses, the best predictors of thriving (physical and psychological) in senior years were “education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight”. If one had 5+ of these factors at age 50, half were  happy-well by 80 and only 7.5% “sad-sick.” Conversely, no one with with three or fewer of these health factors at age 50, ended up happy-well at age 80, regardless of physical shape at age 50.
• Cholesterol levels at age 50 did not predict happy-wellness in old age.
• Being fit in college explained late-life mental health better than late-life physical health.
• Of the men diagnosed as depressed by age 50, over 70% were dead or chronically ill by 63. Pessimists aged far less well than optimists.

Read the Atlantic article here by Joshua Wolf Shenk “What Makes Us Happy?“.

The Boston Globe also had an interesting recent article also on happiness called “Perfectly Happy:  The New Science of Measuring Happiness Has Transformed Self-Help” (by Drake Bennett, 5/10/09)

See other recent posts on happiness “Happiness is Contagious“, “Do Fat Friends make you fat (and less happy)?“   and “Gallup takes daily pulse of American happiness/Krueger’s interesting happiness research.”

Young Americans dropping out of religion, other American Grace findings by Putnam/Campbell

Saying Grace - Flickr photo by ImCait

Robert D. Putnam (Harvard) and David Campbell (Notre Dame) recently previewed selected themes from their forthcoming book American Grace at the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that draws a select group of the leading journalists on religion in America.

As Michael Gerson, ex-speechwriter to President George Bush and one of the Pew Forum attendees, noted in his opening paragraph in a recent nationally syndicated and well-nuanced op-ed in the Washington Post:

“There is a book that everyone will be talking about — when it appears over a year from now. American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives, being written by…Putnam and… Campbell, is already creating a buzz. Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, is the pre-eminent academic expert on American civic life. Campbell is his rising heir. And the book they haven’t yet finished will make just about everyone constructively uncomfortable.”

Putnam and Campbell’s analysis draws on the Faith Matters data they collected — a national, authoritative large-scale, hour-long survey on religion (beliefs, belonging and behavior),  social and political engagement, and religious and political beliefs.  They followed up in a very rare panel survey, reinterviewing the same respondents 6-9 months later to understand the stability of our religion and religious beliefs and to get traction on the issue of causation.  Their research also entails a dozen to fifteen in-depth case studies of religious denominations and churches of many stripes across all parts of the nation.

American Grace finds evidence of unprecedented polarization along religious and political lines, with politics driving changes in religious attendance rather than the reverse!  But amidst the deepening divides, they find a startlingly high level of support on all sides for religious diversity. Most deeply religious Americans reject the idea of a theocratic society run by Christian ayatollahs, while most secular Americans are quite comfortable with the idea of a society infused with religious and moral values.  In short, they argue, America today represents a historical rarity—a society that is both deeply religious and deeply tolerant.  [For example, Americans believe that Americans of other religions can go to heaven, even Christians of non-Christians.  Moreover, 8 of 10 Americans think there are "basic truths in many religions" and 85% of Americans say that religious diversity is good for the country.]

Here are a few of their interesting findings:

• Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of 5-6 times the historic rate (30-40% have no religion today versus 5-10% a generation ago).  But youth’s religious disaffection is largely due to discomfort with religiosity having been tied to conservative politics.  Putnam and Campbell expect, given the remarkable history of American religious entrepreneurship (from Mormonism to revival meetings to megachurches), that this disaffection from religion is temporary: religious entrepreneurs will rise to offer these young Americans the less politicized religion that they crave.
• Americans today inherit both religion and congregation far less than their parents and grandparents did and there is remarkable religious fluidity, with between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Americans changing religion from the one they were born into.  [The lower bound does not count a denominational shift like that from Methodists to Calvinists as a switch and only counts a change in religion from Judaism to Buddhism or from Baptist to no-religion.]  And there has been remarkably more entrepreneurial sorting of congregations and congregation shopping with congregants finding a religious home within a denomination that maximally meets their wants and needs (sometimes through stricter “churches”, sometimes through looser ones).
• There is a remarkable degree of religious bridging in our social networks: approximately 70% of Americans have at least some extended family of a different religion than they are, and this rises to 75% for closest friends, and 85% of Americans who live among at least some neighbors of a different religion.  The interlinkage of these religious networks helps to constrain any message of intolerance that parishioners get from the pulpit.
• Religious Americans are better citizens than non-religious ones (they give more to secular causes, volunteer more for secular causes, and join more, to mention a few markers of good citizenship). However, it is not their particular theology that predicts good citizenship, but the extent to which they are embedded in a friendship network of religious others (regardless of their religion). [Putnam refers to these religious friends as "powerful, supercharged friends."]  So it is religious social networks, not teachings from the pulpit that are key to them being 3-4 times more generous than the most secular Americans.

The American Grace book is expected to come out in the Fall of 2010.

Michael Gerson’s syndicated Op-Ed “Religion and Our Civic Behavior” is here. (Wash. Post, 5/8/09)

See “Getting to Know You” (Wall Street Journal by Naomi Schaefer Riley, 5/15/09) [which discusses the extent of religious bridging social capital in America, and how having friends of different religions changes ones views toward that religion]

Also, see “Religious People Make Better Citizens” (BeliefNet.org)

Excerpt below from “Religion and Our Civic Behavior” By Michael Gerson:

“[R]eligious affiliation has declined in America since World War II, especially among the young. The change was not gradual or linear. It arrived, according to Putnam, in “one shock and two aftershocks.” The shock came in the 1960s. As conservatives have asserted, the philosophy of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is an alternative to religious affiliation (though some of the rocking religious would dispute the musical part). Baby boomers were far less religious than their parents at the same age — the probable result, says Putnam, of a “very rapid change in morals and customs.”

“This retreating tide of religion affected nearly every denomination equally — except that it was less severe among evangelicals. While not dramatically increasing their percentage of the American population, evangelicals did increase their percentage among the religious in America. According to Putnam, religious “entrepreneurs” such as Jerry Falwell organized and channeled the conservative religious reaction against the 1960s into the religious right — the first aftershock.

“But this reaction provoked a reaction — the second aftershock. The politicization of religion by the religious right, argues Putnam, caused many young people in the 1990s to turn against religion itself, adopting the attitude: “If this is religion, I’m not interested.” The social views of this younger cohort are not entirely predictable — both the pro-life and the homosexual-rights movement have made gains. But Americans now in their 20s are much more secular than the baby boomers were at the same stage of life. About 30 percent or 35 percent are religiously unaffiliated…. Putnam calls this “a stunning development.” As many liberals suspected, the religious right was not good for religion.

The result of the shock and aftershocks is polarization. The general level of religiosity in America hasn’t changed much over the years. But, as Putnam says, “more people are very religious and many are not at all.” And these beliefs have become “correlated with partisan politics….There are fewer liberals in the pews and fewer unchurched conservatives.”

Should parents ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning?’

I wrote recently about Alan Krueger’s interesting research on how religion and sports/exercise bring happiness.

An NPR story recently referred to a meta-study of happiness and parenting featured in Newsweek magazine (which claimed that parents have 7% less happiness on average) and highlighted research of Florida State University’s Robin Simon (sociology) asserting that caring for kids brought greater depression and unhappiness, partly because of the childcaring itself and partly because of shriveled social networks that stemmed from parents staying in more (for the latter finding, Simon cites research by Linsbeth Levin at Duke).

Excerpts from NPR story:

“Dr. Simon: (reporting on parents’ self-rated emotions in sample of 13,000 time diary reports): They [parents] definitely experienced more depression. They – people with kids, all parents, that is to say including people with kids who are living at home, young children who are living at home, as well as empty-nest parents, surprisingly, when you combine all kinds of parents in the United States, and ask them, you know, if they experience these serious emotions, what you find is that they report significantly more feelings of depression than people who have never had kids.

MIKE PESCA: [NPR Bryan Project host] Does it correlate to the number of kids, or just having a kid?

Dr. SIMON: Well, we actually didn’t look at the number of kids, though I suspect that it does, because other sociological studies have found that the more kids one has the more feelings of depression.”

Simon goes on to say that some of this depression stems from the fact that parents are on their own and we don’t provide them enough social support and provide enough family-friendly policies for them to reap the full benefits of parenthood, including having access to decent healthcare. And host Mike Pesca describes Dan Gilbert’s work (Harvard, psychology) that asserts that parents are happier sleeping and grocery shopping than childrearing.

Simon goes own to admit that the while parents often report lower short-term happiness from parenting, most feel immense life satisfaction and pride from being parents.

Interestingly, this research doesn’t accord with careful research of hotshot economist Alan Krueger (at Princeton), whose work I discussed in an earlier blog post. He finds childcare giving as the fifth most pleasurable activity (out of 21 asked), where pleasurability (or their U-index) is the percent of 15-minute segments in which stressed/sadness/pain emotions exceeded happiness. Childcare had the 5th LOWEST U-index score. The Krueger research is preferably methodologically since it controls for respondents’ baseline levels of happiness, depression, etc. and thus is able to weed out whether parents, for example, are just more happier people in general. You can read the Krueger study here.

Volunteering, family ties forestall mental declines

Harvard School of Public Health researchers Karen Ertel, Lisa Berkman, and Maria Glymour, in a paper to appear in the July 2008 issue of American Journal of Public Health, found that an active social life forestalled memory losses. Before you get too excited, they didn’t find that an active party life was associated with the same beneficial impact!

The study of nearly 17,000 people found that the least socially connected individuals experience memory-loss (dementia) declines at twice the rate of the most socially connected individuals in their study. They used data from a large national health and retirement study in the U.S. that followed individuals over 6 years and calibrated their memory four times over the study.

Their social integration scale was composed of factors like:
- volunteering at least one hour in the past year;
- contacting one of their parents and one of their children once or more a week by phone email or in person;
- getting together with neighbors once a week just to chat; and
- being married.

These results held even when controlling for age, income, health status and other factors. And they found no evidence that the relationship between socializing and memory went the other way: i.e., that those with the best memories became more social.

The mechanism is unclear. One theory is that “the sort of emotional validation and sense of purpose that comes from these social contacts may have neuro-hormonal benefits” for the brain, Ertel said. Another hypothesis holds that being socially active stimulates the brain in a way that either boosts memory function or protects it from decline. Or it may be that people with a strong social network have lots of friends who encourage them to stay healthy and to keep up with their medication, Ertel says.
See press advisory about this study.

Quit your habit in groups and be more popular, say scientists

Nick Christakis and James Fowler made headlines recently for their study on obesity contagion (See Can your friends affect your weight?).

Now they’re back with analogous research that shows that you are far more likely to be able to quit smoking if you do it in groups (where those around you are also quitting). It’s scientifically-proven, but something that practitioners have known for a while: why do you think Jenny Craig has dieters work in groups, or why all the self-help groups (Alcoholics Anonymous and others of that ilk) use group norms to reinforce changes in behavior.

Study co-author Fowler notes that in tracking individuals and social groups (through the Framingham Heart Study) over 30-years, the average size of each cluster of smokers was of similar size, but Fowler notes: “It’s just that there are fewer and fewer of these clusters as time goes on.”

The social contagion of quitting smoking can extend to people that the quitter didn’t know. For example if Anne quits smoking, and Anne is friends with Barb and Barb is friends with Clarissa, Clarissa’s chance of quitting increases by 30%, even if Anne and Clarissa don’t know each other.

Christakis notes that smokers have moved more to the periphery of social networks, where they often were more at the center of these social networks several decades ago. While this doesn’t say that teen non-smokers will necessarily be more popular, it does suggest over their lifespan that non-smoking is more likely to be associated with popularity than smoking.

The obesity study appears in the May 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

See also, Clive Thompson, “Is Happiness Catching?” (NYT Sunday Magazine, 9/13/09)

The Pay-for-Performance NYC schools experiment: the Social Capital Story

Roland Fryer, the up-and-coming Harvard Economics Professor, who at age 30 is on leave as the Chief Equality Officer for the New York City Public Schools, talked yesterday at the Taubman Center on State and Local Government’s Annual Meeting. [Taubman director Ed Glaeser commented on the apparent tension between the words *Chief* and *Equality* in Roland's title, to which Roland noted that he's all in favor of equality as long as he can be the leader!]

Roland has been on a quest to marry economics and social science with how to make a difference in the lives of the very poor. Roland himself comes from a poor family growing up in the South (in Daytona Beach, FL), and to some extent wants to enable more poor kids to achieve what he has. [Fryer noted that his grandmother's sister and her husband, with whom he spent a lot of time. ran a crack ring, and he happened to be at the dog track watching greyhounds when federal agents arrested the two of them. And 8 out of 10 of his closest friends growing up had either died or served time in prison. And he would have gone to jail as he was planning at age 15 to participate with friends in a burglary, but got cold feet and chickened out at the last minute and his friends were all arrested and went to jail.]

His NYC schools experiment aims to marry cutting edge social science (and randomized intervention) with making a difference in these kids’ lives.

The program has a handful of different dimensions including incentive pay for principals, offering cellphones to high school youth who are doing well economically (called *The Million*), paying 4th and 7th graders to take math and reading tests that they were already taking several times a year (with higher pay if they get more right answers on them).

There has always been the most controversy around the *pay for performance* part of the plan, with some principals saying kids should be studying for the love of learning or claiming that when the financial incentive is removed in the future, any patterns of success will disappear. Roland noted that the media (originally negative) has turned positive with support for the plan in the Washington Post, USA Today and a handful of other papers. Interestingly, while white parents on Upper East Side or in Staten Island complaining that the pay-for-performance didn’t respect African Americans and played into stereotypes, there has been no such complaints among African-American parents of students in the pay-for-performance experiment.

Part of the way through the first year, the plan appears to be working for 7th graders, but less so for 4th graders. Roland notes that it is possible that the tests (every 5 weeks) are too far away for the financial incentive to mean as much, or that 4th grade is too young a grade to incent learning, although Roland is likely to try some tweaks to the program in the second year. Moreover, Roland is going to expand the 7th grade program to 8th grade randomizing who continues in the program and who does not (so they can see how the performance of those who do not get the program in the second year compare with those who never got the treatment or those who got it for two years). Among the 7th graders, those who got offered the treatment (pay for performance) were already 1-2 months ahead of their comparable peers after only 1/3 of a year in the program, although gains were higher in math than in verbal skills.

Hearing Roland talk, it was clear (even though he didn’t directly discuss this), the importance of social networks, trust and social capital to his success. He noted for example, that although principals think that they are in charge of these underperforming schools, that it is really probably 20 students who are running the place and his effort aims to change the culture of schools and create a demand-side for learning that can be spread through social networks. It is no accident that as part of *The Million* (his effort to brand student achievement and success), that he gives students state of the art cellphones, since the cellphones promote social networks where Fryer can communicate with the students or send a video (since he has their phone numbers), where teachers can text students about upcoming tests, and where students can spread the excitement of achievement through this program. And he notes that the payment can serve as a valuable foil for legitimzing studying hard; he hears about students claiming that ‘they don’t care about studying, that they are just in it for the money.’ Roland doubts this is true, but it protects them against the charge that African-American kids are “acting white.”

Roland also notes that social networks will play a role in the anticipated higher take-up rate in second year of program. In first year, many students failed to participate. Growing up in a culture and environment where many people couldn’t be trusted, many students thought the program was a scam. But now that students have seen payments deposited in the bank accounts that were automatically set up for them, word-of-mouth is spreading the messages that the program is legitimate.

Roland told a funny story –he has the look of a nerdy African-American with wire rim glasses and a three-piece suit, with a build of someone who might have played football at an earlier age). Yesterday, a group of wide-eyed NYC students had earned a trip to Harvard because of their performance. He asked the group of 7th graders how many of them expected to be professional athletes and 70% of them raised their hands. He then asked them which of them was the best athlete. They pointed to a 6 foot high kid. Roland made the kid a bet; he’d challenge the kid to a 50 yard dash in Harvard Yard. If Roland won, the kids would abandon their goal of professional athletes and focus on making it in academics since they were never going to be professional athletes if the best of them could be beat by a Harvard economics professor. If Roland lost, he’d wear whatever clothes they wanted him to wear for a day (they had decided it would be a frilly pink dress). Luckily for Roland, he won, although he said it was not easy.

Note: all of funding paid for in first year by foundations, with commitment that if the program shows results, NYC will pick up the tab of continuing this going forward.

For a description of Roland see this account by Freakonomics author Steven Dubner in NYT; for some accounts of this program see this NYT article, or “Cellphones as Incentives,” and this entry on “The Million“

Using community to fight drugs

I went to an interesting lunchtime talk of the Overt Drug Market Strategy used in the City of High Point, North Carolina. Presenting were: Jim Summey – Pastor, English Road Baptist Church; Jim Fealy – Chief, High Point Police Department; and Marty Sumner – Assistant Chief, High Point Police Department.

The background to the story is a classic inner city crime-ridden neighborhood where police can’t effectively prosecute drug markets since it looks like community norms sanction them and the community thinks that police are in cahoots with drug dealers because calls to police are relatively ineffectual. Police Chief Fealy called open meetings with the community in 2003 to admit bravely that the police had been ineffective and often caused more harm than good. That led to lots of useful dialogue. The Police Department got community residents to understand both that their walking away from drug dealers let the drug trade continue and that they had a lot of moral outrage about what was happening. The Chief emphasized that by partnering with police they could both dry up the drug markets and all the associated crime.

The police identified the key players in the drug market and then surreptitiously filmed them selling drugs to undercover cops (ideally twice). They made 4 key arrests and then summonsed the other dozen drug dealers to a meeting at the Police Station May 18, 2004. They told the drug dealers to bring a family member and they would not be arrested. The Police arranged for key community leaders (from churches, social service organizations, elders, etc.) and state and local law enforcement to be there. The drug dealers were openly surprised by the community presence at the meeting. There were 4 empty seats for the dealers who had been arrested (with cut-outs indicating how many years each of them would do) and blow-up pictures of the other drug dealers around the room. They had dossiers (crime files) for each of the dozen drug dealers summonsed and police told them that they had all been filmed doing drug sales and would be prosecuted immediately if they sold drugs in High Point again or other neighborhoods. They were told that their life would change immediately in one of two ways: they could turn around their lives (with help from the churches, social services, etc.) or do time.

They intentionally had these drug dealers bring family members so the family members would witness this as well and be a moral force to convince the drug dealers to change.

Half of those at the call-in immediately asked for help and produced a “need sheet” detailing what they needed to stop doing drugs that the police and community agencies worked to provide.

They said that starting the next day, you could see that the market had been broken. The Police only needed to provide additional Police patrols in that neighborhood for the next six weeks. The Police Chief notes that the strategy intentionally has improved relations with the heavily African-American community of West Point where this was tried.

Since then, violent crime in the High Point area has fallen 38% in the 3.5 years as compared with 3.5 years before the call-in. There has not been dispersion of crime to other neighborhoods; there have actually been city-wide drops. And there are qualitative benefits like people now building homes in the area, residents sitting out on front porches and feeling comfortable with kids walking the neighborhood. And the pastor reported increased attendance at the vacation bible school of English Road Baptist Church which had previously been only sparsely attended by community residents. The police also noted for example that someone who made an anonymous 911 call to report a shooting in the West End prior to the call-in felt comfortable being a witness and publicly fingering the shooter one year later when the case went to trial because she felt supported by the police and community.

Drug dealers realized that they could no longer operate with tacit community support. The Police observed that there are non-linear dynamics in the drug trade so if you convince a core number of key individuals not to do drugs and a core number of community members to oppose it, it spreads through the social networks. The dynamics are similar to that noted by Clay Shirky with the ‘Adios Pizzo’ sticker movement in Palermo, Italy. Pizzo refers to payments to the mafia for protection and as the number of pizzo stickers increased, the chance of the mafia being able to take reprisals dropped remarkably, since the mafia could harm one or two community members who felt isolated and not supported by the neighborhood, but couldn’t take action against many, all the more so when there was greater manifestation of community will against the mafia. The Adios Pizza movement also made it easier for residents to find which busineses had signed on to the campaign to make it easier for residents to channel business their way and hence increase social pressure more.

Back to High Point: The police chief noted that the “call-in” meeting was intentionally held in the police quarters so that the police could control the layout, so it sent a strong deterrent message and so the police could eject participants if they weren’t behaving properly.

They have replicated this in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, NC; in Providence, RI; and in Rockford, IL. The US Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten cities. The strategy is a brainchild of David Kennedy, who was then a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The presenters noted that critical to the success of replication is having a true partnership with community institutions and getting enough important voices from the community that people from the community who want to speak out have cover for their actions.

The program which won an Innovations in American Government award from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2007. The PowerPoint presentation from the lunchtime talk will be put up on the Innovations website.  This project was also reported in the Wall Street Journal in “Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out of Business” (9/26/06).

The Smoking Gun: Friends influence your smoking and quitting

New research by Professor Edward Glaeser (director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government) and David Cutler (economics professor at Harvard) shows that people are more likely to smoke when surrounded by smokers.  But positively, it shows a multiplier effect of smoking bans: those who quit smoking in turn influence their friends and spouses to stop smoking.

More specifically, “individuals whose spouse faced a workplace smoking ban were less likely to smoke themselves. The estimates suggest a 40 percent reduction in the probability of being an individual smoking if a spouse quits,” the authors write.   Cutler and Glaeser think that policy makers should consider these multiplier benefits when they are considering enacting smoking bans.

For more detail you can read their Kennedy School Working Paper, “Social Interactions and Smoking.”

I posted earlier on research on the sociological dynamics of obesity, depression, and some prior evidence on smoking (read further down in this link).

Cheaters (and now diehard punishers) never prosper

As AP reports it “Screaming sports coaches and cutthroat tycoons have it wrong: Nice guys do finish first, a new study suggests.”

The current issue of Nature summarizes the results of a Harvard study with 100 college students from Boston playing prisoner’s dilemma game.
The AP reported: “Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak. He is director of the evolutionary dynamics lab at Harvard where the study was conducted….”On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers,” Nowak said his experiments found.” And those who punished the most, did the worst.

Nowak and all found that none of the top 5 finishers used costly punishment and the use of costly punishment didn’t help groups overall. Effective players used a *tit for tat* strategy, much as Axelrod found earlier. Punishment may force others to do what you want, but researchers found that the situation could rapidly deteriorate.

See article on their story “It Pays to be Nice.”

And a related article in Nature called *Punisher Pays* by M. Milinski and B. Rockenbach. Abstract: The tendency of humans to punish perceived free-loaders, even at a cost to themselves, is an evolutionary puzzle: punishers perish, and those who benefit the most are those who have never punished at all.
___

Journal Nature

Play prisoner’s dilemma (without Nowak’s costly punishment) against a computer.

Spending money on others “buys” you happiness

They say money can’t buy you happiness, but new research suggests that it can, if you spend it on someone else.

“Simply making very small changes in how you spend money can make a difference for happiness,” said Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, who led the research along with a professor at Harvard Business School.”

They tested their theory at a small Boston-area medical supply company, where employees received fat bonuses averaging about $5,000, measuring levels of happiness before and after. What they found, said Michael I. Norton, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, was that “the size of the bonus you get has no relation to how happy you are, but the amount you spend on other people does predict how happy you are.”

Read Boston Globe article here and view other Social Capital blog entries on happiness.

Dunn et al. article appears here: “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness” by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin, and Michael I. Norton, Science, 3/21/08 319: 1687-1688

See also Harvard Gazette article on this research.