News for March 6

Did Looks Hurt Sarah Palin?

In a paper just published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists suggests that sex appeal or physical attractiveness is a detriment for women’s success in business or politics. Much of the commentary about that study has linked it to Alaska Gov. and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and the GOP loss in the November presidential elections. They say that “the Alaska governor’s attractiveness may indeed have affected the race — by making voters less likely to support the GOP ticket.” Does this study have merit or does it simplify the issue too much? Links include:

Miller-McCune |  “So did the Republican Party make a mistake in heightening Palin’s attractiveness by buying her all those beautiful outfits (a controversy that didn’t break out until after Heflick and Goldenberg completed their experiment)? Perhaps so. Americans have come to accept the idea of a female president, but we may not quite be ready for a sex-symbol-in-chief.”

Geoffrey Dunn @The Huffington Post |  “As an alumnus of graduate courses in the methodologies of the social sciences taught by a legend in the field, Dane Archer, I’ve grown to take such studies with a hefty block of salt. Many are predicated on false assumptions or simply bad science. So it is with the South Florida study.
At best, it’s voodoo social-psychology. And, of course, the findings have been distorted and simplified by the media into a simple sound-bite: Palin was too sexy for the American electorate.”

Ezra Klein @The American Prospect |  “Sadly, I’d guess that this study would be true for political figures with a rather less sexualized public image than Palin. But as Dana points out, it’s hard to know how seriously to take this study because Palin was so relentlessly sexualized amidst the campaign. The McCain team sold her as “a gun-toting Alaskan frontier sex symbol” and the conservative movement picked up the message. ”

Los Angeles Times |  “Both outcomes would seem to strongly indicate there’s more to the glass ceiling for females than the actual glass. No news to them.”

Jezebel |  “The more we objectify women, judge them as other, and make them less human, the easier it is for all of us to tear them down and determine they’re not good enough. So, the next time we compare a woman to an inanimate object, let’s think a little harder about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Smart is not antithetical to pretty. We may not like Sarah Palin or her politics, but it’s hard to deny her skills as a politician — unless, of course, we’re judging based on her looks.”

Chris and Rihanna and the Violence We Don’t Talk About  |  Womanist Musings

What we need to do is refocus the conversation so that it is understood that violence against women is not racial; it is about patriarchy and sexism.  Brown beat Rihanna because he grew in a family in which violence occurred and he identified with the abuser.  We must break the familial links that teach children to express their hurt and pain in violence.  We must support the victims of violence and encourage them to find a place where they can heal and re group. Pretending that there are no incidents of abuse, or that victims bring it upon themselves is an abdication of our duty to protect the weakest amongst us.  We are not convicted by the actions of one individual but we are all cumulatively responsible if we fail to acknowledge incidents of abuse when they occur.

Why Felix Should Walk Away  |  Market Movers

How can anybody make a commitment to a house? I can see that Felix signed a contract with a lender, but remember that the lender was writing negative-amortization interest-only mortgages and then turning around and selling them off to an investment bank to securitize, pocketing an up-front profit. Such lenders kept on making this trade until there was no more appetite for such loans any more, at which point they closed their doors, keeping all their old profits and leaving the losses with the investment banks and the banks’ clients. So I don’t think that Felix has any kind of moral obligation to the lender, nor to the sophisticated financial institutions which ended up buying the lenders’ mortgages and who should have known exactly what they were doing.

• Related link: The Ethics of Foreclosure  |  Ezra Klein @The American Prospect
• Related link: One in Eight  |  Political Animal

Primates on Facebook  |  The Economist

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Celebrating Work –  All Kinds of Work  |  TEDTalks

Mike Rowe, the host of “Dirty Jobs,” tells some compelling (and horrifying) real-life job stories. Listen for his insights and observations about the nature of hard work, and how it’s been unjustifiably degraded in society today. Mike Rowe is the host of “Dirty Jobs” — an incredibly entertaining and heartfelt tribute to hard labor.