Links this week: Behavioral Public Choice: The Behavioral Paradox of Government Policy. HT: Ryan Murphy Happiness and growth. The genetic component of sex offending. "[I]is growth mindset the one concept in psychology which throws up gigantic effect sizes and always works? Or did Carol Dweck really, honest-to-goodness, make a pact with the Devil in which she offered her eternal soul in exchange for spectacular study results?

The Behavioural Economics Replication Project: This project will provide evidence of how accurately peer prediction markets can forecast replication of scientific experiments in economics. In order to incentivize prediction market activity, and collect evidence on actual replication, eighteen (18) prominently published studies in experimental economics were chosen for trading in prediction markets, followed by replication. They are laboratory studies, using student participants, that were published in the American Economic Review (AER) or in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) in the years 2011 to 2014, testing specific hypotheses using between-subjects designs.

Links this week: Misrepresentation of Asch’s studies. HT: Stuart Ritchie Don’t pretend sports events have big economic effects. And this holds for the Olympics too. Get rid of all the ordinary accidents, and you are left with the weird. HT: Tyler Cowen If told obesity is a disease, obese people are less worried about their weight. Jerry Coyne on the new paper arguing kin selection is a factor in eusociality.

Last week I posted on Owen Jones’s 2000 article Time-Shifted Rationality and the Law of Law’s Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology and his argument that behavioural economics (and law) requires the theoretical backbone of evolutionary biology. The second half of that article has a neat idea - what Jones calls the law of law’s leverage. The basic idea is that the effectiveness of laws will vary with the adaptiveness (in ancestral environments) of the behaviour the law is trying to change.

Two interesting education snippets. First, Brookings has released a new report that looks at the gender gap in reading: Girls outscore boys on practically every reading test given to a large population. And they have for a long time. A 1942 Iowa study found girls performing better than boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills. Girls have outscored boys on every reading test ever given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the first long term trend test was administered in 1971—at ages nine, 13, and 17.

Links this week: “If compulsory voting were to help Democrats at all, it would probably help the bad Democrats. The Democrats would end up running and electing more intolerant, innumerate, hawkish candidates.” The management / bureaucratic speak of World Bank reports. It’s worth clicking through to the full article. Paul Meehl was talking about today’s problems in psychology 30 years ago. The problems of financially strapped Americans are not caused by private jets and billionaires buying islands.

I often complain that behavioural economics (behavioural science) often appears to be no more than a loosely connected set of heuristics and biases, crying out for theoretical unification. Evolutionary biology is likely the source of that unification. Over the last few years, I’ve spotted the occasional attempt to analyse a bias through an evolutionary lens. But late last year, I came across Owen D Jones, a professor of law and professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University.

I spotted this in a tweet from Abe List yesterday, and love the idea. The original source is a speech by Michael Crichton (which is worth reading in itself). Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.

Links this week: Psychological research sucks. Are humans getting cleverer? Why the $10,000 Apple Watch is a good thing, especially for people who can’t afford it. [O]ur findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children’s outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth. And no posts this week, although with Robert Frank joining Twitter, here are three book reviews from the vault:

Links this week: A review of Baumeister and Tierney’s Willpower by Scott Alexander (I don’t buy the comparison between exercise, money and willpower - this comment sums up my view). When we act as though all opinions are equal. Some evidence on whether we should be inducing the best and brightest into teaching. (HT: Arnold Kling) Our tolerance of inequality is reference dependent.