Bipartisan Alliance

a Society to Study the US Constitution, and Human Nature

[Hengist @hengistloves]

Why doesn't your language have a word for this? Are you stupid?

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Men strive for greater physical attractiveness in a mate than the partner market provides, and the pickiest men spent more time in singledom.
Humans seek to spend considerable portions of their lives in long-term mating relationships, yet remain selective about whom they are willing to partner with. We examined whether pickiness (i.e., minimum mate standards) predicts how many years individuals have spent single, in uncommitted relationships, and in committed relationships. A representative Norwegian sample indicated their pickiness...
The sample's pickiness was generally greater than the population could be expected to live up to. When all traits were averaged together, few participants were willing to partner with someone below average, and around a quarter of individuals could be classified as requiring a partner two standard deviations greater in desirability than the expected population average. [In practical terms, being two standard deviations above the population average means an individual or item ranks in the top 2.3% of desirability relative to the rest of that population, assuming a normal distribution, or "bell curve"].
For men, greater pickiness for physical attractiveness predicted more years single, fewer years in committed relationships, and fewer committed relationships overall. Furthermore 85% and 80% of men required their partner to be at least average or above average in facial and bodily attractiveness, respectively. As such, most men reported being unwilling to partner with someone below average in physical attractiveness. These findings may be interpreted as men's expectations for physical attractiveness being excessive, thereby resulting in increased singlehood.
The finding that pickiness for physical attractiveness increased singlehood among men need not reflect that men struggle to set realistic standards. On the contrary, it may be adaptive for men to trade half a year of additional singlehood per increase in pickiness for attractiveness in exchange for acquiring a mate of greater mate value.
Among women, overall pickiness was associated with more years in uncommitted relationships, but not with more years single. At the observed-variable level women's standards for physical attractiveness did not appear excessive, sometimes falling below the expected population average. For bodily attractiveness, more women were willing to partner with someone below average (35%) than required an above-average partner (23%).
Moreover, the greater women's overall pickiness, the more they reported both having been in uncommitted relationships they wished had become committed and being single due to interest in partners unwilling to commit.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Despite decades of research, the quest to identify the X-factors that drive people to overcome their supposed “instinct for survival” and commit suicide has proved completely fruitless.
Across the field, suicide is routinely framed as defying a presumed instinct for self-preservation or some such life tendency—and, therefore, scientifically puzzling. Suicidal outcomes are presumed to constitute a natural kind, for which the hypothesized “X” factor (conditions accounting for deviation from a default of survival) provides unifying causal substrate.
[However] a “survival instinct,” “life drive,” etc. would be both redundant and unworkable. It is unworkable because it would be underspecified: there is no particular input cue that it would be attuned to detect, and no particular output behavior with which it could respond. A biological mandate “Survive!” would be, as David Buss explains, like a chess-playing computer program with a single instruction “Win!” or “Make good moves!” Such a program would fail for lack of detail on how to win or what constitutes a good move.
Empirical grounds to question this approach reside in a longstanding and absolute failure to find credible evidence of “X”—that suicide is reliably induced or preceded by any special conditions. Thousands of correlates have been examined, and their statistical effects quantified with increasing precision. None show evidence of direct causation inasmuch as none predicts suicide much better than random guessing.
For example, [a] meta-study of 50 years of research finds that our ability to predict suicidal outcomes on the basis of risk and protective factors remains scarcely better than chance. Other meta-analyses corroborate this result.
Revealingly, there has been no incremental progress in predictive accuracy over the long history of this research program: despite exponential growth in research output and increasingly sophisticated methods, the effect sizes achieved today are as consistently low as they were decades ago.
The research program has not even encountered a signpost that could point to where evidence might be found. In other words, the hunt for a causal mechanism in suicide has not merely failed to find its quarry, it has found no trace—not even a way to begin to narrow the search space. The result of more than half a century of research into suicide’s supposed cause-and-effect is precisely nil.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

All over the world, women's faces are generally perceived as more beautiful than men's, with the average female face receiving higher ratings than two-thirds of male faces. But among men, there are more “outliers” at the attractive end of the spectrum.
Although research questions vary widely, [facial] attractiveness ratings are frequently interpreted as indicators of mate value and sexual preference, reflecting the central role of sexual selection in evolutionary theory. Across this extensive literature, one structural regularity has received surprisingly little attention, despite having been anticipated by evolutionary theorists since the earliest formulations of sexual selection. Charles Darwin noted that, in contrast to many sexually dimorphic species in which males display typically more elaborate ornamentation, humans appear unusual in that women are commonly regarded as the “beautiful sex.”
Only recently has a large-scale, cross-cultural integration of published facial-attractiveness datasets systematically examined this asymmetry. This meta-analysis revealed a robust, replicable pattern: when male and female faces are evaluated in the same study, female faces are rated, on average, approximately 0.4 standard deviations more attractive than male faces, meaning that the average female face would be expected to receive a higher attractiveness rating than roughly two-thirds of male faces. This asymmetry is referred to as the Gender Attractiveness Gap.
It is observed among both male and female raters, across sexual orientations, age groups, and cultural backgrounds, and across a wide range of stimulus characteristics, including racial ancestry and age. Moreover, the magnitude of the GAP is not uniform: it is consistently more pronounced among female raters than among male raters.
If attractiveness ratings are primarily interpreted as indicators of mate value or sexual preference, the observed rating pattern challenges this interpretation. Female faces are evaluated more positively not only by heterosexual men, but also by heterosexual women, gay men, lesbian women, and bisexual participants. The GAP points toward a broader aesthetic asymmetry in which female appearance occupies a privileged position within human facial aesthetic perception.
One is easily tempted to conclude that women are simply more attractive than men, or that female beauty is somehow superior to male beauty. Such an interpretation, however, sits uneasily with the prominent role that male beauty has occupied throughout human cultural history. Across millennia, male bodies and faces have been represented, idealized, and celebrated in sculpture, painting, literature, and popular media.
If attractiveness judgments were generated by the same underlying evaluative process in both sexes, one might expect male and female distributions to differ primarily in location (i.e., mean attractiveness), but not in shape. The observed pattern suggests otherwise. Female faces show higher mean attractiveness and remain close to normally distributed. Male faces, by contrast, are shifted leftward, reflecting lower average attractiveness, yet simultaneously exhibit a disproportioate right tail of exceptionally attractive individuals. In the harmonized dataset, this right-tail enrichment comprises roughly 10% of the approximately 8,000 male faces.
The prominence of male beauty in art may therefore be less paradoxical than it first appears: artistic representations may disproportionately draw from the extreme right tail of the male attractiveness distribution.
Why should male and female attractiveness distributions differ in this way? One biologically grounded possibility is that exceptional male attractiveness reflects a specialized route within a broader landscape of male reproductive strategies. Classical sexual-selection accounts derived from parental-investment theory emphasize resource acquisition, dominance, and social status as routes to male reproductive success. Yet Darwin himself repeatedly noted that sexual selection can operate through multiple channels, including ornamentation, courtship displays, or artistic performance. Exceptional male physical attractiveness may therefore constitute another such route.

[Michael 🇩🇪 @Bundeskanz50246]

Bäckerei Breitner in Pfaffenhofen verkauft seit 66 Jahren halbe Brote, indem ein ganzes Brot in der Mitte durchgeschnitten und der halbe Preis berechnet wird. Weil jetzt irgendein Penner sein halbes Brot zu Hause nachgewogen und festgestellt hat, dass die Hälfte, für die er 2,40€ bezahlt hatte, 10 g zu leicht war, schaltete er das Eichamt ein. Da es ja bei uns für alles irgendein Gesetz gibt, in diesem Fall die Fertigpackungsverordnung, ist es aber so, dass bei Halbierung des Brotes auf Kundenwunsch mit geeichter Waage nachgewogen und der exakte Preis berechnet werden muss. Deswegen musste der Bäcker jetzt neue Waagen und Software für seine Filialen anschaffen – Kosten: 15.000 €.
Jedes Wochenende verteilt der Bäcker übrigens auch von den Sachen, die er verkauft, gratis Proben zum Probieren - der nette Kunde hätte sich also eigentlich auch einfach kostenlos eine Scheibe Brot mitnehmen können.

[Nguyen Thi hong @NguyenThih36]

In 1995, China seized Mischief Reef &claimed it would be used only as a fishermen's shelter

In 2005, Xi denied that China was turning artificial islands into military bases

Now: China has turned the reef into a full-fledged fortified military hub.

CAN YOU DARE TO TRUST CHINA?

[Bipartisan Alliance @jorgemata]

Municipal waste incinerators destroy PFAS below detectable levels https://t.co/uPNyeGn85U

[Daniel Di Martino @DanielDiMartino]

You may not believe it but the U.S. economy in 2025 represented 25.7% of global GDP.

In 1980, the U.S. economy represented 25.4%, slightly less.

And this is despite the China boom, things get relatively better from now on as China slows down and Europe stagnates.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

"There is no evidence for a causal effect of perceived inequality on policy views or political behavior."
Despite a sustained increase in income inequality in the US since the 1950s, taxes have not followed suit. Why has higher inequality not led to a higher demand for redistribution?. In a comprehensive survey experiment with a large sample of US Americans, we identify participants’ (mis-)perceptions about income inequality together with their policy preferences and fairness views. US Americans underestimate the income earned by people at the bottom of the distribution and overestimate the income of top earners.
We find no statistically significant effect of perceived inequality on policy views or behavior: There is no evidence for fairness views, stated support for public and private redistribution, and the willingness to donate to a charity being causally influenced by beliefs about the income shares received by income earners at the top nor by those at the bottom of the US income distribution.
We find precisely estimated and robust null effects across different types of inequality beliefs and across different measures of support for redistribution. The null effect holds for different income groups and party affiliations, as well as for participants with different levels of trust in government and of perceived autonomy.
US Americans have highly inflated beliefs about the income share earned by the top 1%. While we can only speculate about the reasons, we believe it is likely that an emphasis on this group in discussions around inequality in political discourse and in the media may have led to a growing awareness about differences in income, especially of those at the very top, in recent years.
Taken together, our results do not offer support for information about the extent of inequality being able to increase support for redistributive policies.. Fundamental characteristics that more directly influence policy preferences may be party ideology or values such as personal responsibility and meritocratic preferences.
Political campaigns aiming at increasing awareness for the need for welfare interventions and more progressive taxation might want to refrain from focusing too much on information about the high incomes of top income earners since, while it is important that citizens are aware of such facts, it may have limited effects on their policy support.

[Bipartisan Alliance @jorgemata]

The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States https://t.co/Eu0dZI4pa9

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

@JesusFerna7026 @MahdiKahou Here is my entry:

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Meta-analysis: The extent to which people differ from one another in terms of personality remains surprisingly stable over the course of a lifetime.
In contrast to the broad evidence for mean-level and rank-order changes of personality traits across time and age, there has been little research on changes in personality trait variance across the lifespan. Personality trait variance captures how much people differ from each other in their patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In the present meta-analysis, we aimed to close this gap by meta-analytically integrating 4,180 effect sizes from more than 350 longitudinal studies.
Our findings demonstrated a remarkable stability of personality trait variance across the lifespan at a population level. That is, people neither became more different nor more alike as they aged. Our results show that the stability of personality trait variance cannot just be explained by a lack of power, extends almost across the entire lifespan, and is robust across various methodological moderators such as the region of data collection or the sample type.
This finding may be surprising given that other developmental indicators, such as mean-level and rank-order stability, show that personality traits remain malleable across the lifespan. Some scholars have suggested that corresponsive life experiences – people selecting into environments that match preexisting
individual differences – may lead to an increase in personality trait variance.
In contrast, normative life experiences like transitioning into employment in young adulthood may trigger similar personality trait changes across people and predict a decrease personality trait variance. The observed stability of personality trait variance may, hence, imply that these different processes act together and cancel each other out in shaping the development of personality trait variance.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Romantic partners consistently showed greater similarity in music preferences than in values or personality traits.
Although partner similarity in demographics, personal values, and personality has been well studied, little is known about partner similarity in aesthetic dispositions. Despite extensive research on partner similarity across a wide range of attributes, little attention has been paid to the similarity of couples’ music preferences and its potential impact on relationship outcomes. Across three studies and a mini meta-analysis, we assessed the profile similarity in couples’ music preferences.
Across all studies, couples exhibited greater similarity in their music preferences than in their personality traits and, in most analyses, also greater similarity than in their personal values. In two studies and a pooled analysis, similarity in music preferences also showed small positive associations with relationship outcomes, whereas no such associations were observed for similarity in the other domains.
Taken together, these findings suggest that similarity in music preferences lies at the higher end of assortative mating effects. Partner similarity of this magnitude is relatively uncommon and has typically been observed for domains such as intelligence, political orientation, religiosity, educational attainment, and some health-related behaviors..
Because of their close association with emotion and emotion regulation, shared music preferences may also indicate similar emotional needs or regulatory strategies, promoting mutual understanding and effective communication.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

The most common strategy women used to protect themselves from sexual violence was to enlist some kind of bodyguard.
Given the costly consequences of sexual violence, as well as its recurrence over human evolutionary history, it is reasonable to hypothesize that women have developed or evolved defenses to prevent its occurrence and stanch its costs. Despite much research devoted to the causes of sexual violence, less has focused on identifying the defenses women deploy to prevent sexual violence, or ameliorate its costs.
The current study advances knowledge by providing a taxonomy of over 19 separate categories of defenses—including 48 tactics and over 9,000 spontaneously nominated behavioral tactics to avoid and mitigate costs following sexual violence from 563 women..
One noteworthy aspect of our data was the high frequency with which bodyguard-related behaviors were nominated. Women’s most frequently nominated defense included the use of social allies. [The] original conception of the bodyguard hypothesis posited that women may value and seek romantic relationships with men, in part, because of the protection they may provide against sexual violence from others.
In support, single women were twice as likely to experience sexual violence in the previous year compared to women who lived with their boyfriends or were married. The original conception of the bodyguard hypothesis implies a women’s bodyguards are limited to their romantic partners. Our results suggest women’s bodyguards may be romantic partners, as originally suggested, but also same-sex friends, opposite-sex friends, and family members. These data support our previous theoretical expansion of the bodyguard hypothesis and confirms women may use any social allies as bodyguards.
Our study refined existing conceptualizations of bodyguard behavior. We documented that social allies can provide protection in various ways, including deterring would-be sexual assaulters, physically intervening during an attempted assault, or seeking revenge against a perpetrator to deter future assaults.
Our findings highlight variation within bodyguard related behaviors captured in previous work. Rather than simply enlisting bodyguards, our participants also nominated alerting bodyguards, such as letting their social allies know where they would be, when expected check-ins would happen, and instructions about next steps should check-ins fail. Another nuance captured by our paradigm included the use of feigning bodyguards. Participants described feigning bodyguards by lying to the potential perpetrator that others were expecting them.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Contrary to the pessimistic outlook of psychological research on the 'bystander effect', the vast majority of victims of real-life assaults are helped by bystanders. However, during commercial robberies, most bystanders hold back.
One of the classical hypotheses of social psychology—the bystander effect—states that in public emergencies, each bystander is less inclined to help a person in need when in the presence of others. This is ascribed to a psychological process where the responsibility for the situation becomes diluted among those present, thus inhibiting each bystander’s willingness to act.
Though the bystander effect is long considered a robust finding, recent work has challenged its validity in explaining bystander helping outside of controlled experimental settings. Furthermor,, its impact is found to reduce or even reverse in dangerous experimental setting. The largest systematic study of bystander intervention in real-life public assaults revealed that victims of aggression receive help from bystanders in 90.9% of assaults.
Using the same measurement instrument and similar kinds of video data, we examine the generalizability of this study in another dangerous violent emergency con-text involving fewer bystanders and more weapons: commercial robberies.
We analyzed CCTV-observed robbery incidents in commercial settings and found that bystanders took action to help the victim in 35.0% of the events, a frequency substantially lower than in pub-lic assaults. While the number of bystanders present was positively associated with bystander helping behavior in public assaults, this was not the case in the context of commercial rob-beries.
One explanation for the lower intervention rate in robberies is that the ‘cost’ of intervention in robberies for a bystander is so high that it outweighs the potential ‘reward’ of alleviating one’s own unpleasant arousal through intervention. Additionally, bystanders in robberies are likely to recognize that danger will further escalate, with a high likelihood of violent victimization, should they show non-compliance. This is because robberies typically follow a highly-structured and well-known social script, known from movies and news channel reporting, in which an offender requests goods and compliance in exchange for a fast and non-violent transaction.
Lastly, bystanders likely realize that the adverse result of nonintervention in robberies is the relatively trivial loss of commercial goods, which are often insured. This contrasts with public assaults, where the script is less clear and the aim of the antagonists undefined, bystander involvement may de-escalate violence is unlikely to result in bystander victimization, and where the adverse result of non-intervention may be serious bodily harm to a victim.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Darwin had it right: Across cultures, the parts of the body that are most sensitive to tickling are the ones that are touched the least.
Human ticklishness is one of the oldest yet unresolved scientific puzzles. Aristotle attributed ticklishness to the delicacy of the human skin, which could imply that it should be stronger in body areas where the skin is thinner. Darwin, by contrast, proposed that less frequently touched body areas tend to be more ticklish. Here we analysed data from three cultural groups (Chinese, Dutch and Greek) and reveal consistent behavioural patterns and social dynamics.
First, tickling is done using the hands and fingers,targeting areas such as the armpits, soles of the feet, belly, and neck, and eliciting laughter, just as great apes use their hands to tickle conspecifics on the exact same areas. eliciting laughter-like vocalizations. Critically, the ticklishness topography was distinct from that of other somatic sensations. This indicates that ticklishness is not merely a variant of tactility, pain, pleasure, self- or social touch per se, but may represent a specialized somatosensory experience.
When evaluated independently, tactile innervation density,epidermal thickness, arterial diameter and pleasure all failed to account for the ticklishness data. Strikingly, the only factor that showed a significant association with ticklishness was the low frequency of touch in those areas, providing support for the theory by Darwin. Body areas that are rarely touched may be especially ticklish because contact there is less anticipated, eliciting a stronger ‘surprise’ response. The relationship may even be reciprocal and self-reinforcing: some areas are ticklish because they are rarely touched, and they are rarely touched because they are ticklish.
Body regions most sensitive to touch are actually less ticklish. For example, densely innervated areas such as the hand are among the least ticklish regions. Taken together, these patterns strongly suggest that tickling behaviours are an evolutionarily rooted trait shared across hominids.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Women using hormonal contraceptives tend to perceive themselves as possessing higher mate value and enjoying greater overall mating success.
People’s perceptions of their mate value—a compilation of characteristics that are desirable to potential partners—functionally guide their mating behaviors. Hormonal contraceptives alter the hormonal profiles linked to some characteristics underlying women’s mate value (e.g., fertility, sociality, potential parenting ability). Thus, relative to naturally cycling women, women using hormonal contraceptives may perceive such characteristics more negatively (due to suppressed fertility) or positively (due to possible bolstered sociality and/or potential parenting ability).
We tested competing predictions regarding whether a hypothesized association between women’s hormonal contraceptive use and perceptions of their mate-value-relevant traits and outcomes would be negative versus positive.
In three studies, women using hormonal contraceptives perceived more positive mate-value-relevant traits and outcomes relative to naturally cycling women. Women using hormonal contraceptives perceived themselves as higher in mating success and generally embodying more traits that underlie mate value. This association is not due to sexual motives or sexual behaviors.
This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that hormonal contraceptives may pharmacologically boost some qualities underlying women’s mate value, including possibly their sociality and potential parenting ability.
Notably, although hormonal contraceptives are often thought to be negatively associated with psychological processes (e.g., lower sexual satisfaction, this work suggests hormonal contraceptive use are simultaneously positively associated with other important processes and outcomes.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

People overestimate the unethical actions of others while undervaluing their virtues, particularly when it comes to men.
Accurate beliefs about the social world are essential to adaptive social functioning. However, people's perceptions of the social world are often inaccurate. For instance, people systematically overestimate the size of small demographic groups and underestimate the size of large groups.
We focus on morally relevant behavior because such behavior is especially consequential for social life. Across three experiments we examine the accuracy of predictions of moral behavior across gender. We expected that errors, both in underestimating good and overestimating bad behavior, would be greater for men because research suggests that people tend to see women as more moral than men, and other work suggests that men make up the majority of negative news and even make up the majority of villains in fiction and entertainment.
Overall, we find consistent evidence of moral cynicism concerning the behaviors of others. People systematically assume more wrongdoing and less virtue than actually exists. People assume more wrongdoing and less virtue than actually exists, and predictions are shaped in part by gender expectations. We found that people overestimate the rates of unethical behaviors overall, but do so to a greater extent for men. In Study 2, we replicated this finding in a US representative sample.
We also found that similar patterns emerge for ethical behaviors—people underestimate rates of ethical behavior, again doing so to a greater extent for men than for women. In Study 3, we test whether similar patterns emerge in hypothetical settings, finding that they do. Overall, these results suggest a miscalibration between what people expect from others’ moral behaviors and what is actually true about them..
Importantly, miscalibrated beliefs can have downstream effects on behavior. Such beliefs can increase the likelihood that people will act in accordance with those errors.

[Rolf Degen @DegenRolf]

Your likes tell others more about you than your dislikes do.
Positive and negative attitudes are not equivalent. Whereas people tend to like things for similar reasons, they often dislike them for different reasons. We predict and show consequences of this asymmetry for impression formation in minimal-information contexts involving everyday attitude objects: People perceive others' positive attitudes (likes) as more informative than their negative attitudes (dislikes) and infer greater knowledge about a person from their likes.
Across six preregistered studies (total N = 1100), participants reported greater perceived knowledge about targets based on their positive attitudes than negative ones. This asymmetry held across diverse domains (e.g., music, movies, sports) and could not be attributed to attitudes' frequency or participants' own attitudes. Instead, participants judged dislikes as more ambiguous, reflecting the greater diversity and disjunctive nature of negativity.
If one learns that somebody likes playing tennis, one may infer that playing tennis falls within that person's desirable range of physical exertion and rule complexity. However, if somebody dislikes playing tennis, one cannot make similarly informative inferences about that person.
This greater diversity of negativity can be derived from the range principle and the Anna Karenina principle. [Range principle: Good things occupy a narrow intermediate (“just right”) range of continuous properties; bad things fall outside it in multiple directions (e.g., too hot or too cold). Anna Karenina principle: Good outcomes are alike because they require all key factors to be right at once; bad outcomes differ because failure can occur in many different ways, any single missing factor suffices].
Our findings help to explain why people experience stronger interpersonal attraction when they share a positive attitude than when they share a negative attitude.

[Oliver Scott Curry @Oliver_S_Curry]

"Are Social Media Ruining Our Lives?" A review of 9 meta-analyses (k ≈ 450, N ≈ 600,00) finds, as usual, an average correlation with loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction & self-reported depression etc of r ≈ 0.10 #smma https://t.co/5ZX0D3nAqE