Last year I posted a table showing the dramatic rise in the birth of twins among women 45-49 (from less than 25 per 1,000 to almost 200 per 1,000 in 2002).  The graphic below, included alongside a New York Times article on the topic, shows the increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight that comes with multiple births and the cost of taking care of premature babies (almost $51,000 versus under $5,000 for a baby born at term):

Given that the U.S. is discussing health care reform at the moment, it might be worth while to consider whether having a biological child is “worth” it.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In an earlier post I discussed how men, these days, are less likely than women to enroll and graduate from college.  One theory for why involves an anti-intellectualism that is specifically male.  That is, many men learn that to be a real man means rejecting prissy intellectual pursuits.  Thinking is for chicks (and fags).

This commercial for Wrangler, aimed at men specifically, asserts this exactly:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In the U.S., when people refer to the “traditional family,” they usually mean a family that they associate with the 1950s.  But the 1950s was a really unusual time in American history.  Elsewhere I’ve written about how the husband breadwinner/wife homemaker model is an American anomaly.  The data below, put together by the New York Times, shows that the 1950s was an unusual time in terms of age of marriage also:

Though the data is rough (five points across 107 years), you can see a distinct dip in the age of marriage that includes the ’50s.

So history isn’t, as we often suppose, a straight line from one point to another.  It’s a complicated story.  And the 1950s… well, to choose that era as “traditional” is no more reasonable than to choose today or the enlightenment or the dark ages or…

Also see: everyone needs a wife and what does “traditional marriage” look like?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Let’s say that you work in an office with several people, and everyone is expected to meet certain performance standards. You’re an outstanding performer, considered one of the best in the firm. A couple offices down from you is a guy named Wendel, and you feel sorry for Wendel because he’s not quite able to meet the performance standards and is always teetering on the edge of losing his job. Your sense of Wendel is that he’s a good guy who just never gets the right breaks, and if he were given more chances to succeed he could probably pull himself out of his slump.

One day, you’re working on a project team with Wendel and notice that he’s screwed up a major report bigtime—big enough that he’s sure to get fired if anyone else sees it—but so far only you have seen it and you have a brief opportunity to cover up Wendel’s mistakes. If you cover them up, in effect lying by passing off your work as Wendel’s, you’ll probably get away with it and Wendel will go on to work another day. If you don’t, he’s finished.

What will you do?

We normally associate acting dishonestly with causing harm to others, but it’s also quite possible that a dishonest act can help someone, like Wendel.  Under what conditions we’re prone to act dishonestly to hurt or help another is what a new study in the journal Psychological Science investigated.

Researchers created a mock scenario in which study participants were randomly assigned to one of two roles: solver or grader. Each solver was also randomly assigned to a grader. Participants in both roles became either ‘‘wealthy’’ or ‘‘poor’’ through a lottery in which they had a 50% probability of winning $20. This lottery, together with the random pairing of solvers and graders, created four pair types: wealthy grader and wealthy solver; poor grader and poor solver; wealthy grader and poor solver; and poor grader and wealthy solver. After the lottery, solvers solved multiple anagrams. Graders then graded solvers’ work. Graders had the opportunity to dishonestly help or hurt solvers by misreporting their performance. If a grader overstated a solver’s performance, then the solver earned undeserved money. If the grader understated the solver’s performance, then the solver did not earn deserved money.

The results: When a wealthy grader was assigned to a poor solver, the grader overwhelmingly misreported the score to help the solver (about 70% of the time). When a wealthy grader was assigned to a wealthy solver, the grader nearly always reported the score honestly (90%).  On the other side of the coin, when a poor grader was assigned to a poor solver, the grader nearly always misreported the score to help (95%). When a poor grader was assigned to a wealthy solver, however, the grader misreported the score negatively to hurt the solver about 30% of the time. A graph of the results is below.

The reasons for these results, the researchers surmise, are less about financial self interest and more about emotional responses to inequity.  Individuals increase their dishonest hurting behavior and reduce their helping behavior when they are worse off than the other person.  Conversely, they increase dishonest helping behavior when they are better off than the other person.

What we seem to be back to with this study is the realization that we’re not so rational after all.  Dishonesty, in either direction, appears to be motivated by emotional reaction more than rational evaluations of self interest – at least in the context of relatively small sums of money (it would be interesting to see what would happen if we jacked the amount up a few hundred bucks).

So, not to forget about Wendel – how’d he make out in your mind?

Source: Gino, F., & Pierce, L. (2009). Dishonesty in the Name of Equity Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02421.x

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David DiSalvo is a science and technology writer who regularly blogs at Neuronarrative and Brainspin on the True/Slant network. He is also a freelance writer for Scientific American Mind magazine.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Citizen Parables and Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to this month’s French Vogue.  According to Jezebel, it features exactly zero black models.  It does, however, contain several images of Dutch model Lara Stone painted so as to look black.

The photos are being condemned as contemporary blackface.  I’d like to open it up to discussion:

1.  Is painting a white model so as to look black the same thing (in some important and significant way) as the derogatory minstrelsy with which blackface (with white mouths and red lips) is associated?  Is the intent (dehumanization) the same?  Is the effect the same?   Why or why not?  If not, could it be that we are as inured to racism now as they were then?

2.  Is the real (or part of the) problem the lack of actual black models?  That is, if there were black models in the magazine, would we read these images differently?

3.  If we saw models of different races being painted various colors, would the white model painted black cease to be significant?  Or, because of history, should this always (for the foreseeable future) be off limits?

4.  Is this “edgy” (and, therefore, fashion forward) exactly because it references historical blackface?  In that case, should fashion play with such topics?  Can people in the fashion industry do so responsibly?  And, if so, what would that look like?

More examples and discussion of contemporary “blackface” here, here, here, here, and here.  Also, Bugs Bunny.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

U.S. civilians, by virtue of geography and geopolitics, have rarely experienced war firsthand. The possibility of the destruction of our infrastructure or civilian casualties on our land has remained remote. Today, for example, though we are waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, non-military Americans do not expect to personally suffer (with the significant exception of harm to and the loss of loved ones).

That civilian populations can experience war in vastly different ways is illustrated by this photograph:

It is the early 1920s and the Soviet Union has been at war with much of Europe for several years. In the photograph, children practice their response to being gassed in an attack.

The Vietnam War was the first televised war and some sociologists credit the visual images returning from the war for increasing opposition.  But the idea that an understanding of the horrible, destructive, and deadly effects of war would require the mass media is predicated on U.S. geographical detachment.  That is, the mass media would be less necessary if the war was happening on our soil.

Earlier this month, the U.S. military hardened its rule against publishing photographs of dead or dying U.S. soldiers.  The rule for embedded journalists states that:

Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action.

This separates U.S. civilians from war in a second way, by politics.  So a civilian population can be isolated from its own wars by geography or by politics and, largely, the U.S. is separated by both.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for this great photograph.

For more posts discussing the impact of war on civilians, see license plate patriotism, sex protest, war is boring, WWII civilian sacrifices (carpooling and staying off the phone), war and euphemism, framing “their” deaths, the silent ranks, U.S. non-news about war, and reframing the “atomic bomb” (the evolution of the term and mushroom clouds have a silver lining).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

This last week New York Times suggesting that older woman/younger man relationships were on the rise.  But I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.  The data below shows that the percentage of men marrying women ten and especially five years younger is decreasing and the percentage of women marrying men ten and especially five years younger is increasing.

It all looks very dramatic until you check out the y axis.  Notice that the y axis for the “husband older” graph is zero to 35%, but the y axis for the “wife older” graph is zero to 10%.  This makes the data for men look more impressive than it is.  Not that 8 or 10 percentage points is insignificant, but it would be far less impressive on a zero to 100 scale.  The data for the women, especially sitting right next to the “husband older” table, look far more impressive than it is.

Only about 6% of women are marrying men five years younger or more.  That’s a two percentage point increase since 1960.  Not exactly a cougar revolution.  One in four men are still marrying women five years younger or more.  And, though it appears that they’re not marrying women five years younger or more as frequently, the age distribution of the remaining 69% of marriages is left invisible and most of them probably involve women that are somewhat younger than their husbands.

So, yes, today women are more likely to marry younger men than they were in 1960.  But the presentation of the data (the inconsistency in the y axis) makes the degree of difference seem larger than it is.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I have argued elsewhere on this blog that the fact that companies don’t sell make-up to men is a triumph of gender ideology over capitalism.

That said, a few companies are trying to sell make-up to men (and their strategies are really something else, see link above).  It turns out, however, that they’re not breaking new ground, as this vintage ad shows:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.