John Coates’s excellent The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust tells the story of the effect of hormones on decision making in finance. By the end of the book, the idea that traders are rational calculating machines driven by their brains is torn apart. As Coates shows, the divide between body and mind is not as Descartes or economists would have us believe.

Links this week: Daniel McFadden on how people make choices. Not that new but only spotted this week - Gerd Gigerenzer has a great rants on statistics. (HT: Noah Smith) Forty per cent of modern Chinese are patrilineal descendants of only three super-grandfathers from 6,000 years ago. (HT: Carl Zimmer) Anti-marijuana advocates funded by drug companies. “There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse once we had adjusted for unobserved familial risk factors.

The history of twin studies is littered with attempts to discredit them - such as this bit of rubbish. Yet every challenge has been met, with a couple of newish studies knocking off another. The basic idea of twin studies is that by comparing the similarity of fraternal twins to the similarity of identical twins, you can tease out the influence of their genes. Twin studies tend to find that most behaviours have heritability of at least 0.

Links this week: Side effect warnings increase sales by building trust.Similar effects for disclosing conflicts of interest (ungated pdf). Absorbing information on paper versus kindle. Even without digital search, I often find it easier to find favourite passages in the physical form. Humans aren’t the only ones fighting wars. I pointed out a couple of weeks ago that Geoffrey Miller had joined forces with Tucker Max to give sex and dating advice.

Links this week: An awesome looking conference - Complexity and Evolution: A New Synthesis for Economics Hybridisation - what does it mean for conversation and the future of species? Picking up in a Lamborghini Status wars How far are we from designer babies? Neuroscience and marketing

I linked to this interview with Robert Sapolsky a couple of weeks ago, but after glancing through it again, I felt it worth highlighting two paragraphs (both for your interest and so I can find them again). First, on the evolutionary purpose of the teenage brain: What I’ve been thinking might actually be going on is that adolescence is something unavoidable that emerges not because it’s so cool and adaptive, but because the adaptive thing is wait a long, long time before you have fully wired up your frontal cortex.

Links this week: Academic urban legends spreading through sloppy citation. In PhD land, I have constantly found myself following citation chains that don’t lead to what they claim. Some progress in the replication wars. I’ll post about some of the specific examples over coming months. The evolutionary emergence of property rights (ungated working paper). HT: Ben Southwood Attribute substitution in charities - the evaluability bias.

Go to any behavioural science conference, event or presentation, and there is a high probability you will hear about “the jam study”. Last week’s excellent MSiX was no exception, with at least three references I can recall. The story is wonderfully simple and I have, at times, been mildly sympathetic to the idea. However, it is time for this story to be retired or heavily qualified with the research that has occurred in the intervening years.

Links this week: Some gold from Robert Sapolsky - what is going on in teenage brains? Plus a bonus interview. The latest issue of Nautilus (the source of the Sapolsky material) contains a lot of other good material - fruit and vegetables trying to kill you and chaos in the brain among them. I recommend scanning the table of contents. The changing dynamics of marriage inequality.

Yesterday was day one of the Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSiX). As I mentioned in a previous post, it has been an interesting opportunity to see behavioural science outside of the academic and economics environments I am used to. There were a lot of interesting presentations, and a lot of good books were mentioned along the way. First, a couple of blasts from the past: Claude Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising (if the one dollar Amazon price is prohibitive, it doesn’t take much searching to find some free pdf versions) and Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders.