Awards 08

Testing the Two Systems Theory of Anomalous Preferences

Recent theories in behavioral economics posit that certain fundamental preferences result from the interaction of two systems within the brain. In particular, while the emotional system wants to indulge immediate gratification and to resist taking (even prudent) small-scale risks, the deliberative system can override these desires by exerting cognitive resources. We propose to test this class of theories. In existing work, we have shown that short - run discounting and small-stakes risk aversion are less common among individuals with greater measured cognitive skills, consistent with the two-systems theories. We are requesting funding for a study that will more convincingly demonstrate a causal effect of cognitive resources on time and risk preferences. By requiring subjects to rehearse a list of names (“cognitive load”), we will experimentally reduce cognitive resources available for decision making. By requiring subjects to give reasons for their choices, we will cause subjects to increase the cognitive resources they apply to their decisions. We will test the prediction that increasing cognitive resources will lead to more patient and less risk-averse behavior, while reducing cognitive resources will have the opposite effect. This project is a first step in my larger research agenda on the role of cognition in economic decision-making.

Paying for Climate Change: The Role of Information and Social Preferences on Willingness to Pay

A growing literature has consistently found that people care about climate change and that they are willing to pay to mitigate its effects. However, prior studies primarily relied on hypothetical methods, and have ignored at least two important political realities: 1) implementing any policy to address climate change depends not only on individual preferences but also on how those preferences are aggregated in an election; 2) how the policy is structured – e.g. how costs are distributed – affects voter preferences. In this project, we use an incentive-compatible experimental design using carbon offsets to elicit voter preferences over alternative policies to mitigate the effects of climate change, and seek to understand how factors such as fairness, social norms, and social information affect choices.

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Grandparent-Grandchild Interactions in Custodial Grandparent Families

For many children, being raised by a grandparent serves as an alternative to foster care. However, very little is known about what life is really like for these families. The goal of this project is to gather new information on families in which grandparents are raising their adolescent grandchildren. We will develop and test a data collection tool and then use it to measure previously unknown aspects of the grandparent-grandchild relationship, including family routines and the household environment. The results of this study will be useful to both practitioners and policymakers working with custodial grandparent families.

Accumulating Insecurity, Securing Accumulation: A Conference on Militarizing Everyday Life

There is growing consensus that today's world is in dire social and economic crisis. Increasing numbers of people are vulnerable to dearth and death as their grip on social reproduction is unsettled. Yet, despite the fact that more people face morbidity and mortality through deprivation than from battlefield encounters, public attention continues to rivet on the body counts and body bags from military conflicts and state leaders seem oblivious to the multi-faceted “war at home” that renders vast populations materially and politically insecure. In this proposal, we seek partial support for a conference in April 2009 that brings together scholars who will have participated in two workshops in the fall of 2008 at Cornell. The conference will integrate and showcase papers produced in the preceding workshops and will provide the chapters for an integrated book project. This work will elaborate the conditions that generate everyday security measures of the Homeland Security State, the insecurities this fosters, and the ties between military security and social reproduction in the contemporary moment. We emphasize the distortions and impediments to social reproduction resulting from stockpiling arms, military engagements, and the open-ended war on terrorism. We explore the overtones of accumulation and capitalist modernity. Most importantly, we suggest that armed conflict abroad distracts attention from the embedding processes of military culture, lifestyle, and imagery in our everyday domestic lives. We anticipate developing this as an ISS theme project in the coming year.

The Implicit Operation of Ideology

Recent findings show that ideological knowledge can be activated from people’s memory without their awareness or intention and subsequently influence their decisions, attitudes, and voting behavior (Ferguson & Hassin, 2007; Hassin, Ferguson, Shidlovsky, & Gross, 2007). The objective of the present proposal is to collect preliminary support for a new model that explains how, why, and when such effects emerge. This work represents the first social-cognitive psychological analysis of how ideologies operate implicitly, and aims to ultimately provide an empirical test of the long standing assumption in the social sciences that ideologies serve as nonconscious “blueprints” for behavior across political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. With support from ISS, I will be able to conduct preliminary investigations of these ideas, with the end objective being a multi-disciplinary, collaborative research grant submission to a federal grant agency, as well as a submission as an ISS theme project.

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Mobile Social Networking in Urban Environments

This request is for funding to help complete a project exploring the use of mobile social networks in urban environments. Mobile social networks are services developed for mobile phones that facilitate communication and social interaction between networks of users. Thus far funding has been secured for two of three case studies. Exploratory in-depth interviews and fieldwork are proposed to identify the key issues with GPS-based mobile social networks. This project will help to develop knowledge about how and why people use mobile social networks to interact in urban environments in their everyday lives. This will also help to complete the final case study for a book project.

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Conference Proposal: The World Food Crisis: Event or Conjuncture? (April 3-4, 2008)

In June, 2008, the Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organization responded to a perceived world food crisis, by convening a High Level Conference on World Food Security in June 2008, following similar food summits in 1996 and 1974 at similar moments of concern. This is a proposal for an open Cornell conference to examine the current food crisis historically, considering its genealogy in the politics of food security and its relation to development policies over the past half century. Presenters will be asked to examine the food crisis from a number of perspectives, in order to situate it within the trajectory of the industrial age, the development project, the construction of a ‘world agriculture,’ and future sustainable possibilities. Conference papers will be published either as an edited collection, or as a special journal issue; and in addition, this conference will enable Cornell faculty to explore the possibility of developing an ISS theme project for the future.

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Health and Early Childhood Television and Video Viewing

Recent research in the pediatrics literature finds significant evidence that early childhood media usage is associated with negative health outcomes. The drawback of much of this work, however, is that the studies typically show correlations but do not demonstrate causation. In “Does Television Cause Autism?” we show how natural experiments can be used to investigate the relationship between media and childhood health using statistical techniques that are not subject to the reverse causation problem. We plan to continue our work on this topic and we are requesting funding that would be used mostly for data collection, data acquisition, and research assistance.

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Using Personal Stories to Raise Support for Social Policies to Reduce Obesity Rates

This proposal requests funding to advance research on message strategies to advance social policies that reduce rates of obesity in the United States. To date, no studies have tested the effects of personal stories highlighting societal causes for obesity on attributions of responsibility for causing and addressing the obesity epidemic. Societal attributions of responsibility drive support for policies to address social problems. This project seeks a greater understanding of how and when personal stories can influence attributions of responsibility for obesity and thus generate support for policies to address the problem. We propose a randomized, controlled experiment to test whether a personal story that emphasizes environmental barriers to healthy eating and active living can increase societal attributions of responsibility for obesity relative to a control group and a standard summary of research evidence. Study findings will aid the continued development of a broader research program to assess the role of strategic messages in gaining support for health policy by providing pilot data for larger-scale funding proposals.

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Developmental Origins of Childhood Attention Problems

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent neuropsychiatric disorder in US children; understanding ADHD is a serious challenge to interdisciplinary science. ISS funding would support our preliminary work on the dynamics of infant attention and the risk of later attention problems, work that integrates approaches from developmental psychology, neuroscience, and applied mathematics. This work has two aims. Aim 1: Test our mathematical model of infant visual attention . We have recently developed a dynamical model to account for the visual foraging behavior of very young infants; it will be tested with older infants whose visual system and behavior have passed important maturational milestones. The results will significantly strengthen the theoretical basis for our focus on the dynamics of body movement and attention across all aspects of our research program, both basic and applied. Aim 2: Validate our new method for measuring attention in infants . We have recently developed a new method for measuring changes in attention that combines simultaneous recording of gaze and brain activity. Validation of the method will allow us to study the dynamics of infant attention without making the risky assumptions required by traditional methods. It will also permit a more compelling analysis of links with later attention problems. The work described in this proposal will provide key preliminary results for an NIH grant application to study the mechanisms and functional significance of infant visual foraging behavior and Its link to later attention problems.

Authoritarian Domestic Political Institutions and International Conflict

While much previous scholarship has analyzed how democracies and non-democracies differ in their propensity for international conflict, almost no research has analyzed how different authoritarian institutions affect international behavior. This is partly due to a lack of systematic cross-national, longitudinal data on domestic political institutions in authoritarian regimes. This proposal seeks funding for the first stage of a large-scale data collection effort that will remedy this gap.

Poverty, Equity, and State Policy: The Move Toward Universal Pre-kindergarten in New York State Rural School Districts
John W. Sipple, Department of Education
Lisa McCabe, Department of Human Development
Judith Ross-Bernstein, Department of Human Development

Improving Distributed Collaboration by Understanding Interpersonal Attention

As geographically distributed workgroups become increasingly common and important, there is a simultaneous increase in the need for novel and effective communication technologies that enable these groups to do their work. One weakness in existing tools such as instant messaging or video conferencing is that they do not effectively support interpersonal awareness and the initiation of spontaneous informal interactions, which can be crucial to effective collaboration. Improving support for these interactions, however, requires a subtle understanding of how people attend to each other and how to leverage these behaviors in technology design. This proposal seeks funding to purchase mobile eye-tracking equipment that will facilitate the first in a series of studies aiming to improve our understanding of interpersonal attention, and to derive direct design implications for designing and implementing novel communication technologies. It is expected that results from this first study will substantially strengthen future proposals for additional resources, and will provide opportunities for collaboration with faculty and students in the computer science and information science programs at Cornell.

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Smoking Cessation Advertisements and Source Credibility

This request is for funding to dramatically advance interdisciplinary research on the efficacy of smoking cessation advertisements. To date, no studies have examined the influence of the identification of an advertisement sponsor on the individual processing of the advertisement. This gap in the literature is surprising because, generally, one of three types of sponsors is easily identifiable in a smoking cessation advertisement: a public health agency, a tobacco company, or a pharmaceutical company. Because sponsors tend to be faithful to a particular strategy or set of strategies, it is difficult to parse out whether the sponsor or the strategy is responsible for the success or failure of an ad campaign. When the sponsor of a smoking cessation ad is clearly identifiable, audiences may be making judgments about the sponsor during exposure and these judgments may influence the outcome regardless of strategy. A randomized, controlled experiment is proposed to test the varying effects of the content of an anti-smoking advertisement and the explicit sponsor, as well as the moderating effect of perceived credibility.

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Effect of Maternal Choline Intake On Neurocognitive Development In Infants

Early nutrition may have long-term influences on learning, attention and memory; processes that affect individual achievements as well as economic imperatives. The availability of choline, an essential micronutrient, during embryogenesis and prenatal development may be especially important. Choline is the precursor for many important compounds including phospholipids and the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. The developing brain may be especially sensitive to choline availability; in rats, dietary intake of choline by the pregnant mother directly affects brain development and results in permanent changes in brain functions. In 1998, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) established its first choline recommendations for humans, based on the estimated level of choline intake required to prevent liver damage (IOM 1998). However, optimum health may require more choline than current recommendations particularly for fetal brain development. Thus, as an extension of a larger project, the objective of this grant is to provide preliminary data on the relationship between varied human maternal choline intake and indices of neurocognitive development in the infant. In turn, these data will aid in the development of larger grants specifically designed to examine the potential role of prenatal choline consumption on human neurocognitive development.

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Schooling, Childbearing, and Work Transitions of Young Women in Africa: Understanding Determinants and Consequences

The decisions of young women and their families about schooling, marriage, childbearing, and work can have profound implications for their own futures and for society as a whole. However, rigorous and policy-relevant quantitative research on these early life transitions in Africa remains rare. This reflects a lack of appropriate data as well as statistical issues that raise challenges for causal inference. The proposed research is designed to improve our understanding of the determinants as well as societal impacts of the key family and economic transitions experienced by young women in Africa. The project will produce several innovative research papers that make use of unique data from Cameroon and Senegal that examine the national schooling impacts of reductions in fertility (Cameroon) and the determinants of schooling duration among young women and men (in Senegal). It will also build formal collaboration networks with African researchers on these issues. Finally, the research will be used as a basis for preparing proposals to seek external funding for follow-up surveys to capture recent family, school, and work transitions, ultimately providing detailed long term longitudinal information on cohorts of young adults.

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Agglomeration Effects: The Role of Selection

We propose research to investigate the extent to which firm learning and selection account for observed geographic agglomeration effects. A vast literature documents positive relationships between the wages and productivity of firms and various measures of agglomeration, effects that persist even after controlling for a broad array of worker, firm, and other local area characteristics. In many cases, researchers attribute the positive observed effects of spatial agglomeration on different outcome variables as evidence of agglomeration economies, suggesting that there may be knowledge spillovers or externalities associated with the geographic clustering of economic activity. However, if one considers a standard model of firm learning and selection (e.g., Jovanovic 1982) and believes that local factors, such as different competitive environments, might affect the parameters of such a model (including the speed of learning, reflected in the variance of signal noise), then it could be the case that observed agglomeration effects are merely the result of firm selection. The proposed research aims to explore the role of selection in explaining observed agglomeration effects using the U.S. Census Bureaus Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). These longitudinally linked micro-data contain information for nearly all non-farm private establishments in the U.S. from 1976 to 2005. The LBD not only contains basic information on firm age, industry, payroll, and employment, but it also provides detailed geographic classifications that will permit us to construct measures of agglomeration at fine geographic levels. This research is not only of broad academic interest, but also has wide-ranging practical and policy implications, as it will shed light on the sources of observed agglomeration effects, the drivers behind differential rates of firm turnover and economic growth across geographic areas, and the potential ramifications of policies aimed at encouraging or discouraging clustered business activity.

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Give & Take: Incentive Framing in Compensation Contracts

This research project will examine how the framing of a compensation contract impacts upon managerial work attitudes, performance and dysfunctional behavior (fraudulent financial reporting & the excessive consumption of perquisites). We will also examine how cuing of ethics impacts dysfunctional behavior. Performance contingent pay has increased dramatically since the 1980s and the accounting and practitioner literatures have documented many examples of accounting manipulations by executives seeking to increase their compensation. We will test our hypotheses using a laboratory experiment.

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Human Resources Policies and Discrimination Charges: A Multi-Industry Study

In an effort to comply with federal antidiscrimination laws, employers have adopted a host of diversity oriented human resource (HR) policies including diversity training, equal employment offices, affirmative action programs, and grievance procedures. Despite the proliferation of these policies, studies analyzing their impact on employment discrimination, legal compliance, and sex and race equity at work are inconclusive. Some researchers report that diversity-oriented policies facilitate nondiscrimination while others argue that such policies are simply symbolic structures adopted by organizations to minimize legal liability. To address this debate, this project provides a multi-industry study of the adoption and consequences of diversity-oriented HR policies in U.S. work establishments. With ISS funding, we will conduct a mail survey of employers HR polices and link the completed survey data to corresponding information on workers charges of discrimination filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. With these data, we will examine the conditions that lead employers to adopt HR policies, the effect of HR policies on the prevalence of discrimination complaints, how employers use HR policies in defending discrimination charges, and evaluate whether diversity-oriented HR policies actually promote gender and race equality at work. This project will be the first to explore how HR policies affect discrimination-charge filings in multiple industries and will shed light on the effectiveness of HR policies for improving workplace opportunities for disadvantaged groups.

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A Stitch in Time: Evaluating the Effects of an AP Incentive Program on
College Outcomes

Across the United States, college matriculation and completion rates for low-income and minority students are much lower than those for non-poor whites. I hope to analyze a program that was implemented in schools serving underprivileged populations in Texas that pays both students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement examinations with an aim to improving college readiness. The program has been found to increase Advanced Placement participation, improve the SAT and ACT performance and increase the college matriculation rates of affected graduating cohorts at these schools [ Jackson (2007)]. While these findings are encouraging, it is unclear that the program has a persistent and meaningful positive effect on the educational outcomes of affected students. Given the growing popularity of student incentive programs, it is important to determine the long-run effects of such interventions. I hope to conduct the first evaluation of these types of programs by analyzing the Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program and estimating its effect on medium-run outcomes such as success at college and college completion for these historically low-performing students.

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Beyond Diversity: Re-Situating Pluralism Conference

Because both ecological and cultural diversity are necessary for the survival of life on this planet, a new concept of pluralism is not an option, it is a necessity. In the context of dramatic socio-cultural and environmental change, where the so called clash of civilizations must contend with climatic change, global economic uncertainty, and the battle over energy resources; our notion of pluralism must be expanded and enriched. After preliminary discussions with scholars at Cornell and across the nation, we propose a workshop to explore how our understanding of pluralism can be enriched by adding and integrating perspectives drawn from ecological systems into the socio-cultural context that now defines pluralism. Thus, the notion of pluralism enriched by ecological and cultural diversity will intellectually moor meaningful conversations between applied scholars and practitioners. With support from the Institute for the Social Sciences, this project will engage a multi-disciplinary group of Cornell faculty, scholars from Harvard's Pluralism Project, Fellows of the MacArthur Foundation recognized for cross-disciplinary leadership in environmental sustainability, bio-cultural diversity foundation CEOs, and others. They will participate in a three day workshop that explores the intersections of heretofore discrete conceptualizations of socio-cultural, ecological, and bio-physical approaches to pluralism and diversity. The objectives of the Beyond Diversity: Re-Situating Pluralism workshop include: (1) articulation of an enriched concept of pluralism; (2) identification of new and integrated areas of research; and (3) development of a strategy for further research.

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Minimum Staffing Legislation and the Quality of Health Care: Evidence on Effectiveness and Necessity From a Natural Experiment

There has long been a worry in the U.S. that nursing shortages and low nurse staffing levels in nursing homes and acute care hospitals are compromising the quality of medical care that patients receive. Congress passed the Nursing Home Reform Act in 1987, requiring that nursing homes employ above a minimum level of licensed nurses per day. Since then, a number of state governments have experimented with stricter standards with California becoming the first state to mandate a specific number of hours per resident day in 2000. While these laws have been informed by a growing body of literature linking staffing levels to patient outcomes, the causal relationship between staffing levels and patient outcomes has yet to be conclusively documented. Moreover, it is unknown whether government regulation is effective or necessary in boosting the nurse employment levels of health care providers. Indeed, market forces may be sufficient or even more effective in forcing hospitals and nursing homes to make optimal nurse staffing decisions. In this project I plan on investigating these issues through the lens of a policy experiment in California that required a minimum number of nursing hours per patient among nursing homes.

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Tune in to Governance: An Experimental Investigation of Radio Campaigns in Africa

Can private media help improve government performance by motivating and assisting citizens to hold officials accountable? This research project investigates the influence of private media on individual citizens and local governments in Uganda. Specifically, we are conducting a randomized controlled field experiment whereby private FM radio stations broadcast information about the past performance and current projects of some local governments but not others. Pre- and post-treatment surveys will allow us to compare the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of otherwise similar citizens who do and do not have access to specific information about their local government officials. We will assess which individual-level traits make citizens more susceptible to media influences, and in which ways. We will also compare the subsequent performance of officials who were exposed to the media spotlight and those that were not. Additionally the research will reveal the differential effects of providing information through news bulletins versus talk shows that provide for dialogue between citizens and officials. Finally we will investigate whether the tone of talk show discussions matters more or less than the information content delivered during the shows.

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Conference of the Cornell Law School: Law Markets & Social Equity

The Cornell Law School Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture will host and organize an April 2008 conference entitled Law Markets & Social Equity. Leading scholars from Japan, China, Israel, and the United States, representing a range of disciplines, from law, economics, political science, history, sociology and anthropology, will come to Ithaca for the three-day conference to explore a broad range of new approaches to markets and their regulation. The Law Schools annual Clarke Lecture will kick off the conference on April 24, followed by intensive workshop-style presentations focusing on projects at the intersection of law and the social sciences on April 25 and 26. The objective of the conference is to take stock of rapid changes in the regulation of national markets in Asia and beyond, and to begin to define new parameters for evaluating and responding to these changes. In particular, we are interested in how new regulatory forms may create new forms of market equality and inequality. For more information, see http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/international/clarke_program/conferences/April-2008-Conference.cfm

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Racial Disparities in Patient Care and the Role of Medical Training: An Audit Study

To mitigate racial disparities in patient care by physicians, medical schools are changing their curricula. These interventions assume knowledge of a currently unanswered question: What is the association between medical training and racial disparities in patient care? We answer this question using data from a natural experiment conforming to a quasi-audit-study design actors of varying racial/ethnic backgrounds trained to present identical clinical cases to medical students. At our research site, medical students have annual encounters with these standardized patients (SPs) during medical school. Thus, we can identify trends in racial disparities in patient care over the course of medical training. Each possible association an increasing trend, a decreasing trend, or no trend has a distinct implication for how these disparities arise, how medical schools should intervene, and which mechanisms merit further research.

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Poverty, Equity, and State Policy: The Move Toward Universal Pre-kindergarten in New York State Rural School Districts

This interdisciplinary project examines the considerable expansion of New York States prekindergarten (pre-K) policy from a targeted (e.g., limited) program to a universal state-wide program (UPK). Specifically, this project examines the incidence and implementation of formal child care and pre-school availability in rural areas during a time of significant policy change (e.g. increased funding and expansion of state-funded pre-kindergarten programs) in New York State. We pay special attention to the rural portions of NYS as very little empirical research has been conducted on early child care and little is known about the impact of universal school-based pre-K programming in rural areas. To address this issue, the project involves two, inter-related streams of research: 1) quantitative data analyses of state-wide early education data bases and census data and 2) case studies of pre-kindergarten implementation in rural school districts. This ISS Small Grant expands the case studies to a fourth school district, and supplements funding already in place to continue the larger project (of 3 case studies and analyses of state-wide data)

For more information, please see the FAQ, funding statistics, and overview.

All questions should be directed to Anneliese Truame (607-255-3304), ISS Adminstrative Coordinator.