trends

MercuryNews.com reports on a new study out of Stanford University which suggests that the older a man is when he marries, especially after age 40, the more likely it is that his bride will be significantly younger, regardless of whether or not the man is wealthy.

Co-investigators Paula England and Elizabeth McClintock have found that “men in their 40s tend to marry women who average seven years younger, men in their 50s are marrying brides who average 11 years younger, and men in their 60s are marrying women who are 13 years younger. ” 

England and McClintock suggest that this may be due to changes in family structure after the 1960s, but attribute this trend largely to what they call “a double-standard of aging” — where “the male idea of beauty is found in women in their early twenties and remains fixed as men age.”

A new study from University of Maryland sociologists John P. Robinson and Steven Martin suggests that Americans are getting as much, if not more, sleep than they did 40 years ago. This study also made use of time diaries to determine how long Americans were sleeping, as opposed to previous studies that just asked respondents outright.

Key findings from the report:

“Sleep Patterns 1965-1995: There was little change in sleep averages during this period, particularly in comparison to the far larger shifts in time spent on housework, child care and watching TV. ‘The proverbial figure of eight hours per day (56 hours per week) has remained close to the diary norm for those aged 18 to 64 in each national study between 1965 and 1995,’ the report says.”

“Sleep Patterns 2003-2005: The time diaries collected by the federal government on an annual basis between 2003 and 2005 showed rising sleep averages – 8.2 hours on weeknights, 8.9 on Saturday and 9.5 on Sunday, a total increase of about three hours per week.”

“‘While these recent increases are statistically significant, we’re approaching them with some caution,’ says Maryland sociologist Steven Martin, the co-author of Not So Deprived. ‘The numbers didn’t change for more than 30 years. We want to see if these increases hold up in the long-run.'”

Sociologist Duncan Watts is getting some press for his challenge to science journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “Tipping Point” argument, in particular Gladwell’s “Law of the Few”: the idea that a few well-connected people, dubbed “Influentials,” make or break trends.

Fast Company’s Clive Thompson describes Watts’ work:

[Watts] has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez recounts an interview with Watts from 2004:

“We knew 50 years ago that this model was wrong. After the fact, and this is why Gladwell’s book is so beguiling, you see that crime rates dropped or Hush Puppies took off and then you can always find the people with whom it started,” he told me. “But if it’s something about them, why aren’t they driving all the other trends? What turns out to be the deciding factor is not the ‘influentials’ but the people who are easily influenced. You might have someone who influences five times as many people as the average, but the total numbers relative to a population are still very small. Almost all of the action is away from the center.”