Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts

Friday, January 4, 2013

Does confidence really breed success? - No

Does confidence really breed success?

By William Kremer BBC World Service

A composite image showing (clockwise): A woman powdering her face, a woman applying red lipstick, a woman looking at her own reflection in a window, a man pulling his muscles and a man wearing sunglasses with his collar turned up. All images THINKSTOCK

In today's Magazine

Research suggests that more and more American university students think they are something special. High self-esteem is generally regarded as a good thing - but could too much of it actually make you less successful?

About nine million young people have filled out the American Freshman Survey, since it began in 1966.
It asks students to rate how they measure up to their peers in a number of basic skills areas - and over the past four decades, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of students who describe themselves as being "above average" for academic ability, drive to achieve, mathematical ability and self-confidence.
This was revealed in a new analysis of the survey data, by US psychologist Jean Twenge and colleagues.

Graphic showing how the the percentage of American students rating themselves as "above average" has gone up. Measures shown: Drive to achieve, social self-confidence, intellectual self-confidence, leadership ability and writing ability

Self-appraisals of traits that are less individualistic - such as co-operativeness, understanding others and spirituality - saw little change, or a decrease, over the same period.

Self-esteem and confidence

Psychologists rarely use the word confidence. They have separate measures for:

self-esteem - the value people place on themselves
narcissism - definitions vary, but essentially a negative, destructive form of high self-esteem
self-efficacy - the ability to achieve personal goals

Twenge adds that while the Freshman Survey shows that students are increasingly likely to label themselves as gifted in writing ability, objective test scores indicate that actual writing ability has gone down since the 1960s.

And while in the late 1980s, almost half of students said they studied for six or more hours a week, the figure was little over a third by 2009 - a fact that sits rather oddly, given there has been a rise in students' self-proclaimed drive to succeed during the same period.
Another study by Twenge suggested there has been a 30% tilt towards narcissistic attitudes in US students since 1979.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines narcissism as: "Excessive self-love or vanity; self-admiration, self-centredness."
"Our culture used to encourage modesty and humility and not bragging about yourself," says Twenge. "It was considered a bad thing to be seen as conceited or full of yourself."

The Freshman Survey

A nationally representative sample of first-year college and university students in the US
Conducted every year since 1966
Questions on a range of topics - including values, financial situation, and expectations of college

Not everyone with high self-esteem is a narcissist. Some positive views of the self may be harmless and in fact quite justified.

But one in four recent students responded to a questionnaire, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, in a way which leaned towards narcissistic views of the self.
Though some have argued that narcissism is an essential trait, Twenge and her colleagues see it as negative and destructive.
In The Narcissism Epidemic, co-written with Keith Campbell, Twenge blames the growth of narcissistic attitudes on a range of trends - including parenting styles, celebrity culture, social media and access to easy credit, which allows people to appear more successful than they are.
"What's really become prevalent over the last two decades is the idea that being highly self-confident - loving yourself, believing in yourself - is the key to success.
"Now the interesting thing about that belief is it's widely held, it's very deeply held, and it's also untrue."

Find out more

Jean Twenge was speaking to the BBC World Service programme Health Check

This bewitching idea - that people's lives will improve with their self-esteem - led to what came to be known as The Self-Esteem Movement.

Legions of self-help books have propagated the idea that we each have it within us to achieve great things - we just need to be more confident.
Over 15,000 journal articles have examined the links between high self-esteem and measurable outcomes in real life, such as educational achievement, job opportunities, popularity, health, happiness and adherence to laws and social codes.
Yet there is very little evidence that raising self-esteem leads to tangible, positive outcomes.
"If there is any effect at all, it is quite small," says Roy Baumeister of Florida State University. He was the lead author of a 2003 paper that scrutinised dozens of self-esteem studies.

All about me, me, me...

In a recent paper Jean Twenge examined changes in pronoun use in American books published between 1960 and 2008, using the Google Books ngram database
She found that first person plural pronouns (we, us our etc.) decreased in use by 10% while first person singular pronouns (I, me, my etc.) increased in use by 42%

He found that although high self-esteem frequently had a positive correlation with success, the direction of causation was often unclear. For example, are high marks awarded to people with high self-esteem or does getting high marks engender high self-esteem?

And a third variable can influence both self-esteem and the positive outcome.
"Coming from a good family might lead to both high self-esteem and personal success," says Baumeister.
"Self-control is much more powerful and well-supported as a cause of personal success. Despite my years invested in research on self-esteem, I reluctantly advise people to forget about it."

Am I a narcissist?

Close-up of a woman wearing red lipstick

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory asks 40 questions, then ranks you on a narcissism scale

Take the narcissism test

This doesn't mean that under-confident people will be more successful in school, in their careers or in sport.

"You need to believe that you can go out and do something but that's not the same as thinking that you're great," says Twenge. She gives the example of a swimmer attempting to learn a turn - this person needs to believe that they can acquire that skill, but a belief that they are already a great swimmer does not help.
Forsyth and Kerr studied the effect of positive feedback on university students who had received low grades (C, D, E and F). They found that the weaker students actually performed worse if they received encouragement aimed at boosting their self-worth.
"An intervention that encourages [students] to feel good about themselves, regardless of work, may remove the reason to work hard," writes Baumeister.
So do young people think they are better than they are?
If they are, perhaps the appropriate response is not condemnation but pity.
The narcissists described by Twenge and Campbell are often outwardly charming and charismatic. They find it easy to start relationships and have more confidence socially and in job interviews. Yet their prognosis is not good.

How self-esteem become a movement

The Self-Esteem Movement is said to have its roots in the civil rights movement, which promoted group solidarity - but also the rights of individuals to be who they want
A series of seminars were held in the 1960s on achieving happiness and fulfilment by tapping inner potential - it was called The Human Potential Movement
First popular book on self-esteem published in 1969 - The Psychology of Self-Esteem by psychologist Nathaniel Branden
Werner Erhard (above) held sessions aimed at boosting self-esteem in US prisons in the 1970s - there were similar programmes in the 1980s to try to reduce teen pregnancy rates and crime
Interest is still high - there were more than 40,000 articles about self-esteem in newspapers and magazines between 2002 and 2007

"In the long-term, what tends to happen is that narcissistic people mess up their relationships, at home and at work," says Twenge.

Narcissists may say all the right things but their actions eventually reveal them to be self-serving.
As for the narcissists themselves, it often not until middle age that they notice their life has been marked by an unusual number of failed relationships.
But it's not something that is easy to fix - narcissists are notorious for dropping out of therapy.
"It's a personality trait," says Twenge. "It's by definition very difficult to change. It's rooted in genetics and early environment and culture and things that aren't all that malleable."
Things also don't look good for the many young people who - although not classed as narcissists - have a disproportionately positive self-view.
A 2006 study led by John Reynolds of Florida State University found that students are increasingly ambitious, but also increasingly unrealistic in their expectations, creating what he calls "ambition inflation".
"Since the 1960s and 1970s, when those expectations started to grow, there's been an increase in anxiety and depression," says Twenge.
"There's going to be a lot more people who don't reach their goals."
Jean Twenge spoke to Health Check on the BBC World Service. You can listen to the programme or download the Health Check podcast.

Source

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

A Tale of Perseverance: A Youth Testimonial from Year Up

Sunday, October 28, 2012

A Point Of View: China and multiculturalism

The vast majority of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, a stark contrast to the multiracial composition of other populous countries. What effect does this have on how China views the world, ask Martin Jacques.

I was on a taxi journey in Shanghai with a very intelligent young Chinese student, who was helping me with interviews and interpreting. She was shortly to study for her doctorate at a top American university. She casually mentioned that some Chinese students who went to the US ended up marrying Americans.
I told her that I had recently seen such a mixed couple in Hong Kong, a Chinese woman with a black American. This was clearly not what she had in mind. Her reaction was a look of revulsion. I was shocked. Why did she react that way to someone black, but not someone white? This was over a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed. What does her response tell us - if anything - about Chinese attitudes towards ethnicity?
China's population is huge.

Find out more

Martin Jacques is an economist and author of When China Rules the World
A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST

What people aren't generally aware of, though, is that more than nine out of 10 Chinese people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han. This is remarkable. It is quite different from the world's other most populous nations: India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil. All recognise themselves to be, in varying degrees, multiracial and multicultural.

True, a country that is the size of a continent has obviously been home to countless different races down the ages. But that is not how the great majority of Chinese see themselves today.
Why is this?
The answer takes us back to the birth of modern China more than 2,000 years ago. China is extremely old - the longest continuously existing country in the world. The eastern half of China - where the vast majority of Chinese live now and lived then - has been more or less united ever since 211BC.
Over that extraordinarily long period - as a result of war, occupation, absorption, assimilation, ethnic cleansing and government resettlement - the sense of difference between the many races that lived in the eastern half of China was slowly eroded.
Fundamental to this process was the gradual emergence of a shared cultural identity.

Han Chinese

Trace ancestry back to Huaxia people who lived along northern China's Yellow River
Name comes from Han Dynasty that ruled a unified China from 206BC til 220
Han have absorbed many ethnic groups, taking on aspects of their culture and language
Speak a variety of dialects and even distinct languages, but share a common writing system based on Mandarin
Traditional Han beliefs are Confucianism and Daoism

China, along with part of today's Middle East, was home to the first settled agricultural communities in the world. They gradually supplanted nomadic culture and ushered in the beginnings of centralised governance.

Over the last two millennia, China has generally been one of the most advanced, often the most advanced, civilisation in the world. It is hardly surprising that, with a rich history like this, the Chinese have a very powerful sense of their cultural identity.
Every country has its own unique story of ethnicity. Take the US. It starts with arrival of the European settlers and the near extermination of the native American population, to be followed later by large-scale African slavery. Not surprisingly, these experiences have profoundly influenced American attitudes and the country's behaviour as a global power.
How did China evolve? It is essentially the story of the Han and the way in which over a period of two millennia they came to absorb the great majority of other ethnic groups.

Ethnic minorities in China

Of the 55 recognised ethnic minority groups, the 10 largest are:

Zhuang (16.9 million)
Hui (10.59 million)
Manchu (10.39 million)
Uyghur (10.07 million)
Miao (9.43 million)
Yi (8.7 million)
Tujia (8.35 million)
Tibetan (6.28 million)
Mongol (5.98 million)
Buyei (2.87 million)

Source: 2010 China census

Before the victory of the Qin dynasty in 221BC, China was divided into many different states. The process of its subsequent unification was the creation of an empire. But whereas all the other great empires of the world have long since broken up, China remains united. Why? In one word - the Han. The Han identity has served as the glue which has kept a geographically and demographically vast country together. Without that shared identity, China would long ago have fallen apart.

The China I have been talking about is the eastern half of present-day China, where more than 90% of the population lives. What then of the western half? This is a different story. It accounts for over half the territory of China but contains only about 6% of its population.
Whereas the eastern half of China dates back about two millennia, the western part is far more recent, having only been incorporated about 300 years ago.
From the mid-17th Century, large tracts of the western region were conquered by the Qing dynasty in a series of brutal wars. The inhabitants of these lands were not Han. With their different physical appearance, darker skin, distinctive customs and lower level of development, the Han saw them as the Other, as "barbarians".
Not surprisingly, the Chinese government, both imperial and communist, has long had a troubled relationship with parts of the western regions, notably Tibet and Xinjiang.

Tibetans protest against Chinese domination

If the strength of the Han identity is that it has held China together, its weakness, I would argue, has been its relative lack of respect for difference, an underlying assumption that the non-Han should become like the Han - indeed eventually be absorbed into the Han. This attitude is not difficult to understand, it is how the Han became almost, but not quite, synonymous with being Chinese, or, to put it another way, how China was created.
Ethnicity is a powerful determinant of how societies perceive others. So is China, as a global power, likely to view the rest of the world?
Just as with the US, China will naturally tend to see the world in its own image. An unusual feature of China, in this respect, is that its history is so atypical: a huge population who overwhelmingly consider themselves to share the same identity. This helps to explain why the Chinese have tended to think of Africa as one, just like China, rather than a complex mosaic of different ethnicities and cultures.
The fact that China has had little experience of, or exposure to, the rest of the world until very recently - the past 30 years to be exact - has served to reinforce a tendency to see other countries through a Chinese prism.

Bear in mind, too, that the Chinese have a deep pride in their own cultural achievements, many believing that, for understandable reasons, their civilisation, and their history, is greater than all others. Such an outlook also tends to accentuate a China-centric view of the world.
When I first got to know the Chinese, one of the things I most enjoyed about them was their powerful sense of who they were, their confidence in who they were. They did not defer to white people. I liked that and respected them for it. It was as if their remarkable history resided in each and every one of them and made them walk tall.
Despite the fact that for the best part of two centuries China came to suffer hugely at the hands of the West, and to lag badly behind the West, the Chinese never stopped believing in themselves. Such pride and confidence is to be admired. In my view, though, it can also have a downside - a tendency to look down on others. If the Chinese have always considered themselves to be at least the equal of white Westerners, a common, though by no means universal, attitude has been to regard those of darker skin as inferior.
My horrified student friend was a case in point.
But why is this? Its roots are deep. For many centuries, white has had positive connotations in Chinese culture and black negative ones. Perhaps the reason is that those who toiled all day in the fields became dark while the aristocratic elite, protected from the sun, remained pristine white. To this day, interestingly, skin whitening products are enormously popular amongst Chinese women, as they also are in Japan and Korea and elsewhere.

Didier Drogba helped up by Shanghai Shenhua goalkeeper Dong Guangxiang

Didier Drogba now plays in Shanghai

Over the past two centuries, the Chinese have been hugely aware of the fact that white societies around the globe have been dominant while those of colour, especially African, have been poorer and much less developed. Success breeds respect, failure can all too easily attract scorn. Remember, those of African descent, until the past few decades, have been remote and distant from the Chinese, far removed from their knowledge and experience, a situation which can foster ignorance and prejudice.
There are small signs of change.
Didier Drogba, the Ivory Coast footballer who now plays for Shanghai Shenhua, has spoken in glowing terms about how the Chinese have received him.
As China becomes increasingly familiar with the world - as is now happening in such a dramatic way, from Africa to Latin America, and South Asia to Central Asia - parochial if deep-seated prejudices will come under growing pressure.

Source

Saturday, October 20, 2012

A Point Of View: What kind of superpower could China be?

China is on course to becoming a superpower - but not in the way many expect, writes economist Martin Jacques.

Beijing these days is positively throbbing with debate. It may not have the trappings of a western-style democracy, but it is now home to the most important and interesting discussions in the world.
When I addressed an audience of young Chinese diplomats at their foreign ministry a year ago, it was abundantly clear that a fascinating debate is under way about what kind of foreign policy might be appropriate for the global power China is in the process of becoming.
What will China be like as a superpower? You might think it is already - it is not.
Its military power is puny compared with that of the US. While America has 11 aircraft carriers, China only commissioned its first last month - based on, of all things, a Ukrainian hull.

Find out more

Martin Jacques is an economist and author of When China Rules the World
A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST

And its global political influence is still extremely limited.

The only sense in which China is a superpower is economic - that is, its economy is already over half the size of the US economy and projected to overtake it around 2018, notwithstanding its reduced growth rate of 7%. But this is overwhelmingly a function of China's huge population. In terms of technology and living standards it lags far behind the US.
So when we speak of China as a superpower, we are talking about the future.
A common reaction to the idea of China as a superpower is that it will be like the US - except worse. Worse because it is not a democracy, it has a communist government and because its people are not like us. I guess that gives some the jitters.
In fact we should not expect China to behave in the manner of the US. It will be very different. And nor should we assume that it will necessarily be worse.
Why will it be different? Because its history is so different. Articles about China's growing involvement with Africa - in terms of trade and investment - often talk of the "new colonialism".
Beware historical ignorance. China has never colonised any overseas territories. Overseas empires were a European speciality, with Japan getting in on the act for a short while too.
China could have colonised South East Asia, for example, in the early 15th century. It had the resources, it had enormous ships, many times bigger than anything Europe possessed at the time. But it didn't.

China's first aircraft carrier is a former Soviet vessel, the Varyag

That is not to say China ignored its neighbours. On the contrary. For many, many centuries it dominated them - as a result of its sheer size and far more advanced level of development. China's relationship with them was based not on colonialism but what we now know as the tributary system. It neither ruled them nor occupied them. Rather, in return for access to the Chinese market and various forms of protection, the rulers of tribute states were required to give gifts - literally tribute - to the Emperor as a symbolic acknowledgement of China's superiority.
The tributary system comprised what we know today as East Asia, home to one-third of the world's population. It stretched from Japan and Korea to the Malay Peninsula and parts of Indonesia.
It proved remarkably stable, lasting for at least 2,000 years and only coming to an end around 1900.
The West and China share an important characteristic - they both believe they are universal, a model for all others. But the way they have interpreted this in practice has been entirely different. For Europe, and latterly the US, it meant projecting their power around the world, most spectacularly during the heyday of colonialism in the 19th and first half of the 20th Century, when a large part of the world found itself under European rule.
We governed from afar, exported our ways of doing things, imposed our languages, our education, our religion and much else besides.

Zheng He's statue looks across to the city of Nanjing

The Chinese, in contrast, preferred to stay at home. They believed the Middle Kingdom, the old name for China, literally meaning the centre of the world, was the highest form of civilisation. So why step outside into ever darkening shades of barbarianism?
The seven great voyages of Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 around the East and South China Seas and across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa left no permanent mark - they were about demonstrating the glory of the Middle Kingdom rather than a desire to conquer. Those who left China to settle in South East Asia were seen as leaving civilisation and deserving of no support or protection by the Emperor.
Compare that with the way in which Britain and France celebrated the heroes of their colonial expansion. Our cities are littered with statues and street names in their memory.
There is another reason why the Chinese have tended to stay at home. The country is huge, diverse - and extremely difficult to govern. The overwhelming preoccupation of its rulers down the ages has been how to maintain order and stability and thereby retain power. It remains just as true today.
Rather than look outwards, China's leaders look inwards. The exception was China's own continental land mass. Its expansion, rather than to the four corners of the world, was confined to its own continent.
The most dramatic example was the westward march of the Qing dynasty from the mid-17th Century which, in a series of bloody and brutal wars, doubled the physical size of China.
So what, you might ask, does all this history tell us about how China might behave as a great global power? A great deal.

Europe, I would argue, has historically been an extremely aggressive and expansionist continent. Its own history has been characterised by seemingly endless wars which were then transplanted onto a global stage during the era of colonial expansion and world war. Military might, the projection of power around the world, and the desire if necessary by force to impose our way of life on others, have been fundamental to the European story.
And it is not difficult to see how the US - itself the product of European overseas expansion and settlement - inherited these characteristics from us.
China won't be like this. It is not in its DNA. Its rulers will be far less interested in seeking to dominate the rest of the world and far more concerned with keeping themselves in power. That is what ruling a country containing a fifth of the world's population obliges. When Xi Jinping becomes Chinese leader next month, his in-tray, as with Hu Jintao before him, will be overwhelmingly filled with domestic rather than foreign issues.
In time China will certainly come to enjoy huge global power. It will be exercised, however, in a rather different way.
The iconic form of western power has been military. Extraordinarily, the US today accounts for around half of global defence expenditure. Before, European colonial expansion was only possible because its fighting capacity was massively superior to that of the rest of the world.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Tehrangeles: How Iranians made part of LA their own

By Shoku Amirani BBC Radio 4

In today's Magazine

Google maps recently recognised "Tehrangeles" as a neighbourhood of central Los Angeles. How did this upmarket part of LA become home to the largest community of Iranians outside Iran?

"We're on the map, I mean why shouldn't we be on the map?" says a girl at a hip Los Angeles cafe where young Iranians hang out.
"There's Koreatown, and Chinatown. Why shouldn't we have an area?"
Now they do.
Estimates show anywhere from 300,000 to over half a million Iranians in Southern California, with many living in Tehrangeles.
"Do not engage in any Iranian gossiping if you're not prepared to defend it," says Mahdis Keshavarz, who runs an LA PR agency. "Because everyone here speaks Farsi."

“Start Quote

They settled in LA because so much of it reminds them of Iran - the landscape, the car culture, the mountains”

Dr Reza Aslan California University

"The first time I came to LA as a student I was on campus and I heard Persian and I turned with that knee-jerk reaction, of 'Wow, cool, another Iranian,'" says Amy Malek, a PhD graduate at UCLA, who studies the Iranian diaspora.

"And the girl looked me up and down as if to say, 'Why are you staring at me, what's the big deal?'
"And that's when I realised, OK, you've got a lot of Iranians here."
The largest concentration of Iranians is around Westwood Boulevard, where most of the shop signs are in Persian and most of the voices you hear are speaking Farsi.

It is adjacent to the affluent Beverly Hills district where 22% of the population is of Iranian descent, and where Iranian "Jimmy" Jamshid Delshad was mayor in 2007 and 2010.
With almost 40% of the students at the renowned Beverly Hills High School said to be Iranian, studies show that Iranians are one of the best-educated immigrant groups in the US, and they are flourishing as entrepreneurs.

Tehrangeles facts

Also known as Little Persia
Located between Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles
Centred on the Westwood neighbourhood
A fifth of the population of Beverly Hills is of Iranian descent

Entrepreneurs, for example, like Farhad Mohit, who set up comparison-shopping website bizrate.com while he was still in business school and later sold it for millions of dollars.

Online giant e-Bay was founded by an Iranian and the current YouTube CEO is also Iranian.
In fact, plenty of non-Iranian residents of LA are signing up for Farsi lessons to make themselves attractive as potential employees to Iranian businessmen.
The first immigrants arrived in LA as students in the 1960s and prospered in the early 1970s, but the biggest wave came as people fled from the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah and ushered in an Islamic Republic.
Many never expected to stay long.
"We had a saying in our community, don't unpack your suitcase, we thought any day things would change and we would go back," says writer and broadcaster Homa Sarshar.
"But it's been 32 years and we are still here."

A tour of the Bijan shop in Tehrangeles, central LA

Many more followed to join families, to escape the Iran-Iraq war of the early 1980s, or simply in search of better opportunities.

“Start Quote

If you say, 'I'm Iranian,' people think you're enriching uranium in your garage!”

Sara Second-generation Iranian

The climate was also a factor.

"They settled in LA because so much of it reminds them of Iran - the landscape, the car culture, the mountains," says Dr Reza Aslan of California University.
But it has not all been plain sailing.
Iran-US relations sharply deteriorated in 1979, when 52 American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, and this had implications for Iranians newly arrived in LA.
"We would be playing on the drive way and neighbours would drive up to scare us and then drive away," says Sara, a child of Iranian immigrants.
Farhad Mohit, who arrived at the height of the hostage crisis, was called names at school.

Find out more

Listen to Iranian comedian Maz Jobrani's tour of Tehrangeles on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday 29th September at 10.30 BST
Or catch up here on BBC iPlayer (UK only)

Demonstrations by Americans against Iranians telling them to go back home were common.

"It wasn't a great time to be an Iranian, so when I went to university I changed my name to Fred," he says.
Iranians in the US have struggled to shake off the terrorist-fanatic image ever since.
"As a result of the prejudice Iranians would say they are Italian or Greek," says Amy Malek.
"Or they would refer to themselves as Persian rather than Iranian, as the identity that comes to mind with Persia is cats and rugs, but with Iran, the images are all negative."
"It's like if you say you're Persian, you're more cultured or posh," says Sara.
"But if you say, 'I'm Iranian,' people think you're enriching uranium in your garage!"
Every time new tensions arise between the two governments, the community fears the return of old prejudices.
"Americans are good people, they are just very uncomfortable with what they don't understand," says one young Iranian American who came to the US in the 1980s.
"You always realise that when you get out of California, but LA is like our safe haven."
But a generation on from the turmoil of 1979, most Tehrangeles residents feel completely comfortable with their dual identity.
Now in her thirties, Mahdis Kehsavarz says she no longer feels she has to choose between being Iranian or American.
"We're not going to be fully Iranian and we're not fully American, so let's keep out names and not change them and be proud of who we are."

Source

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Why male Japanese wage-earners have only 'pocket money'

By Mariko Oi BBC News, Tokyo

Mariko Oi reports on the 74% of Japanese household budgets that are controlled by women

The 15th of each month is a big day for 36-year-old Yoshihiro Nozawa: it is the day he gets paid.

But every month, he hands over his entire salary to his wife Masami.
She controls the household budget and gives him a monthly pocket money of 30,000 yen ($381; £243). Despite being the breadwinner, that is all the money he can spend on himself over the next 30 days.
"The last five days from the 10th of each month are usually the toughest," says Yoshihiro.
To put the amount of his pocket money into context, the Nozawa family of four could easily spend 30,000 yen at Tokyo Disneyland in a day.
Yoshihiro and Masami have two children, Rino aged 6 and Ren aged 8, and they are the reason his wife decided to put him on a fixed allowance.

“Start Quote

She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I cannot get more pocket money.”

Taisaku Kubo Businessman

"I started controlling the household budget when I became a housewife after having children," says Masami.

"Suddenly, there was only one income and their educations and private lessons cost a lot."
Under the thumb Yoshihiro nods but he says 30,000 yen doesn't go far in the world's most expensive city, Tokyo.
"She makes me a lunch box every morning so that helps a lot," he says as he eats his lunch alone in a nearby park from his office.
His only luxury is cigarettes, which he spends one third of his monthly allowance on.
"I think I may have to quit if the price goes up again," he says.
Yoshihiro may be eating his lunch alone but he is not unique.
According to a survey conducted by research firm Softbrain Field, 74% of Japanese household budgets are controlled by women and it is not just couples with young children.

Yoshihiro Nozawa: "Even if I get a pay rise, I'm not too hopeful that my pocket money will go up as well"

47-year-old Taisaku Kubo has been getting 50,000 yen a month from his wife Yuriko for the past 15 years.
He has tried to negotiate a pay rise each year but his wife makes a presentation to explain why it cannot be done.
"She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I cannot get more pocket money," says Taisaku.
On the hand drawn chart, his pocket money is stated as 8.8% of the monthly budget.
"The biggest expenditures are home loan and taxes," says his wife Yuriko. "We don't have children so I want to make sure that we'll have enough money after his retirement."
Just like that, Taisaku loses his argument for a pay rise.
"I've given up my car, motorbike and many expensive hobbies," he laughs.
Shrinking budget But his monthly allowance of 50,000 yen is in fact higher than the national average.
According to Shinsei Bank which has been researching the trend since 1979, the average monthly pocket money was 39,600 yen last year.
And to make things harder for the men, that compares with 76,000 yen in 1990 when people thought that Japan's economy was at its peak. That was two years after the nation's benchmark stock index, the Nikkei 225, reached a record high of 38,916.
But share prices fell sharply in the 1990s and have never since come close to that level.

A study shows that 74% of Japanese household budgets are controlled by women

And just as the performance of Japanese companies deteriorated, businessmen's pocket money fell with it.
So today, those whose wives don't make lunch boxes try to cap their daily lunch budget to one coin: 500 yen - about $6.50.
As in most cities, prices vary wildly according to location, decor and the standard of food and drink on offer.
But in many places 500 yen would barely be enough for a bowl of noodles or a McDonald's burger.
Their drinking budget has also shrunk to a record low.
On average, they only spend 2,860 yen on a night of drinking which is almost half of what they used to spend just three years ago.
That does not allow for a great many half litre bottles of Asahi - the average price is around 700 yen.
Double income So why don't men start controlling the household budgets themselves?
"I don't think many men hand over their entire salaries happily," says career consultant Takao Maekawa of FeelWorks.
"But they feel it's their obligation to earn money for the family even if it means they have to suffer themselves."
Traditionally, it was a combination of hardworking salarymen, as white-collar businessmen are called in Japan, and stay-at-home mothers or housewives which supported Japan's economic growth after World War II.
"He actually tried to handle the household budget once," says Masami Nozawa whose husband Yoshihiro lives on 30,000 yen a month.
"But he said it was too time consuming so returned the task back to me," she says.
Yoshihiro agrees: "I know how much I make and I now understand how difficult it is to allocate the money".
"Even if I get a pay rise at work, I am not too hopeful that my pocket money will go up."
Today, more families are seeking out a double income simply because they cannot afford not to.
But for now, Yoshihiro and Taisaku look for cheap enough bars where they can still have some drinks without blowing all of their monthly pocket money at once.

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Monday, September 24, 2012

10 things readers want in a history of the world

Comments (358)

Andrew Marr's History of the World is attempting to tell the story of civilisation in eight hour-long episodes. Last week he spoke of the difficulty of choosing what to include, and what to leave out.

Charlemagne didn't make the cut. Mughal emperor Aurangzeb did. And there had to be a host of other difficult omissions.
We asked for your suggestions for often overlooked moments in world history. Here are 10.

1. Industrial ammonia

"The work of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in 1909 is particularly important. They paved the way for a worldwide expansion in mechanised agriculture." Ade Jones, Lydney, Glos
In 1909 Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch created a way of producing huge amounts of fertiliser by artificially synthesising ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.

Fritz Haber

The fertiliser increased crop yields which allowed more food to be produced for a growing population. The process was described as conjuring "bread from air".

Without the Haber-Bosch process, about 40% of people - nearly three billion - would not be alive today because we could not produce the amount of food we need, says environmental expert Professor Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba.
"We have to eat and drink, everything else is optional. In that sense it's the most important scientific discovery. Organic agriculture would not provide enough food to feed the world."
But Haber's contribution to agriculture is often overshadowed by his work developing chemical weapons. During World War I, he developed the use of gas for warfare and his work was later used by the Nazis to poison Jews in the gas chambers.

Find out more

Andrew Marr's History of the World began Sunday 23 September on BBC One at 21:00 BST
Reveals the decisive moments that shaped the world we live in today

Of Jewish descent but "pardoned" because of his patriotic efforts in World War I, Haber was expelled from Germany after he refused to fire Jewish workers. He died of a heart attack one year later in 1934.

"We should remember his peaceful efforts before the Great War and recognise his contributions to science, useful for the whole of humanity to stave off possible famine," says Haber's godson, the historian Fritz Stern.
"He was a prime example of the complexities and contradictions of a scientist in wartime."

2. Andreas Hofer, rebel Austrian leader

"The story of Andreas Hofer deserves to be much more widely told." Dr Andrew Bellenkes, Pinswang, Austria

Napoleon and Austria

Two of Napoleon's most famous victories fought against the Austrians - at Ulm and Austerlitz
Arc de Triomphe in Paris built to commemorate Austerlitz victory
Treaty of Vienna (1814) carved up Europe after Napoleon's defeat, and was a diplomatic triumph for the Austrian statesman Metternich

In 1809 Andreas Hofer led a rural rebel army to fight against Napoleon's troops to try and claim back Tyrol, a region of Austria that had been given to the German state of Bavaria.

An innkeeper in the countryside, his army was made up mostly of peasant workers and farmers. They only had improvised weapons and primitive military tactics.
For a short period in 1809 he ruled the land, announced new laws and made his own coins. But his success was short lived, and less than a year later, in exile, he was betrayed and executed.
Today he is celebrated as a hero. He has museums, books, streets and hotels named after him, but not many outside of Austria know who he is.
"If you look to Europe during the Napoleonic era, Tyrol was not of economic importance, it was just keeping the traffic routes between the North and South open," says historian and director of the Tiroler Landesmuseen, Wolfgang Meighoerner.

3. Alhazen and his work on optics

"The great Arabic scientific work of the 10th Century, and in particular the life of men such as Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)." James, Bristol

Father of scientific method

Al-Haytham proved that we see because light enters our eyes
Many of his scientific discoveries were made while under a 10-year house arrest

The 'first true scientist', by Jim Al-Khalili

Ibn al-Haytham was born in about 965 in what is now Iraq, and is regarded by some by some as the real father of the scientific method, predating Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes in the 17th Century.

Al-Haytham was the first to disprove the theory that we see objects by rays of light emitted from our eyes, realising instead that we see because light enters our eyes.
No other scientist before him had used maths to prove this process, says Prof Jim Al-Khalili from the University of Surrey.
"When the great scientific revolution took place in Europe, science had advanced so much that people forgot it was built on previous knowledge."
Al-Haytham was part of the golden age of Arabic science, and while Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages, he filled the gap, says Al-Khalili.

4. Danube script

The Neolithic civilisation of central Europe (6000-3,500BC) and the enigmatic Danube script, which possibly influenced the first true writing." Jeremy Glover, Leighton Buzzard
The Danube script is a controversial subject among archaeologists, some of whom claim it is the earliest known form of writing in the world.
The early signs are found on Neolithic artefacts such as pottery and spindle whorls, concentrated in the Balkans and associated with the Vinca culture.
Some think tablets from Tartaria, in Romania, are exceptional as they "really look like 'writing'", notes James Mallory, professor of prehistoric archaeology at Queen's University in Belfast.
But he says no-one can tell for sure whether they are random symbols, a system of select magical symbols, or possibly some form of early writing.
There has also been a debate about whether they actually date to the Vinca period or were later insertions into the mound, he says.

5. Double-entry book-keeping

"Double-entry book-keeping, which revolutionised commerce first in Europe and then the world over." Philippa Sutton, Newcastle

Luca Pacioli, father of accounting

Born around 1447 in Tuscany, this Franciscan friar was friend of Leonardo da Vinci
His masterwork Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita set out principles of double-entry accounting
His motto: "No person should go to bed until the debits equal the credits"

Double-entry book-keeping, which is widely believed to have been introduced to Europe in the early 16th Century by the monk Luca Pacioli, is a financial accounting system. It recognises that all transactions have two aspects, a credit and a debit, and in a properly constituted set of books, the two sets of figures always balance.

Prof Christopher Napier from the Royal Holloway, University of London, says the system provided a standard structure for businesses and individuals to record transactions, and it helped entrepreneurs and investors to measure their capital, and the profits of their business.
Some people argue that double-entry prompted a shift in culture, Napier says, from a time when the goal was simply to earn a good living, to a culture where the goal was to maximise one's capital. But there are some historians of accounting who argue it's possible to overstate the influence of double-entry, Napier says.

6. Seven Years' War

"The Seven Years War was truly the first WORLD war and is overlooked in history." Cleggy, Northfleet, Kent
The Seven Years' War (1756-1763) involved all the great powers of Europe and saw France, Austria, Russia and Sweden on one side, and Britain, Prussia and Hanover on the other.

The Death of Wolfe

Benjamin West's 1770 painting is probably most famous image of Seven Years' War
James Wolfe died from his injuries while leading British troops in Battle of Quebec

Michael Ball, curator of Britain's National Army Museum, says the Seven Years' war could arguably be seen as the first world war, "not in the sense of the 20th Century wars, which saw entire nations mobilised for war, but in terms of geography".

"The battles affected North America, India, the Caribbean, the Philippines and large parts of central Europe," he says.
Prof Mark Knights, of the University of Warwick, says the Seven Years' War could also be seen as the first world war due to its "shockingly high" casualties.
"Estimates vary but it is likely that more than a million people died," he says.
The result of the fighting, which saw Britain acquire Canada from the French and control all of North America east of the Mississippi, was also "very significant", according to Ball, and ultimately led to the American war of Independence.
It also saw Britain become, arguably, the first world power, he says.

7. The Kingdom of Axum

"Civilisations are neglected. What about Axum?" Berhanu Tessema, Addis Ababa
The Kingdom of Axum (or Aksum) rose to prominence as a trading nation in the 1st Century, and at its height became the greatest market of north-eastern Africa.
Its most renowned surviving monuments are a group of memorial obelisks, or stelae.
There are many reasons for including Axum in any world history, says James Burns, author of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The kingdom represents a significant and highly innovative urban civilisation.
"Its economy was based on the cultivation of crops grown exclusively in the Ethiopian highlands, supplemented with cereals and technologies imported from Asia. It was one of Rome's great trading partners, and they rose and fell in close parallel," he says.
The kingdom was one of the earliest regions of Christian conversion in Africa. "The image of an isolated Christian kingdom captured the imagination of Christians in Europe throughout the Middle Ages", he says.

8. The law code of Hammurabi

"The law code of Hammurabi ought to be in too - the first time a ruler laid down a coherent set of laws which all his people must live by." Ben Gate, Pontypridd
A basalt stele (slab) protrudes into Paris' Louvre like a thumb. On it is the earliest truly extensive documented set of laws of the ancient world, written in Akkadian.
It is commonly referred to as the Law Code of Hammurabi, but some experts argue it's not really a law code at all. It does however provide an incomparable insight into life and justice during King Hammurabi's reign (1792-1750BC) as first ruler of the Babylonian Empire.
The stele sets out the famous principle of "an eye for an eye". But also included are familiar concepts of evidence-based justice and giving testimony under oath - even provisions for the maintenance of divorced wives.
There were precursors to Hammurabi's laws, explains Dr Frances Reynolds, Assyriology expert at Oxford University, but the stele and 130,000 clay tablet documents from the period establish the king as a "fantastic administrator".
It perhaps explains why he adorns the wall of the American Supreme Court, suggests Reynolds.

9. Rise of the Khmer empire and creation of Angkor Wat

"The Khmer Empire reaching its peak in the 12th Century and its influence on south-east Asia." Paul McShane, Edinburgh
Thousands of backpackers and awed holidaymakers have stood and gazed at the massive temple complex of Angkor Wat deep inside the Cambodian jungle.
The Angkor temples are legacies of the Khmer Empire, which dominated south-east Asia from the 9th Century.
"One of the first and certainly the most important classical civilisation of southeast Asia, it set the standards by which kingdoms and societies that came after measured themselves", says Dr Charney, an expert from SOAS.
Angkor became the "largest pre-industrial urban complex in the world", says Cambridge PhD student Mary Beth Day, featuring the "most sophisticated hydraulic engineering and water management system". The Khmer could collect and store water across 1,000 square km, channelling it directly to rice paddies.
Yet the empire's demise remains a "contentious issue", says Day, with many details shrouded in mystery.

10. The life of Simon Bolivar

"Simon Bolivar's liberation of five countries from the Spanish yoke." Luis Rodriguez, Leigh-on-Sea
Inspired by European enlightenment philosophy, Caracas-born Simon Bolivar helped liberate his people from the Spanish Empire, gaining independence for the modern-day nations of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.

Simon Bolivar

Born 1783 in Caracas, New Granada (now Venezuela), died 1830
Soldier and statesman who led revolutions against Spanish rule in Latin America
Bolivia named after him

More from Britannica Encyclopedia

His political rule was less successful. Unable to fend off factional enemies and increasingly dictatorial, Bolivar died awaiting exile in 1830, "disillusioned that he was unable to maintain the ideals of freedom, liberty and equality", says Dr Matthew Brown, a Latin America expert at Bristol University.

Bolivar's impact was nevertheless vast.
The "most significant figure" to emerge from Latin America, he was even "more important than [US President George] Washington", says Anthony McFarlane, emeritus professor at Warwick University.
He played a critical role in the decline of the Spanish Empire, which in turn marked a huge shift in global imperial relations. Bolivar's leadership also served as a "model" for later anti-colonialist movements, adds McFarlane.
Reporting by Tom Heyden, Vanessa Barford and Melissa Hogenboom

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Monday, September 10, 2012

Time for a Time Out: Why Are 40,000 Children So Harshly Disciplined in Public Schools?

If psychiatric facilities can eliminate the traumatic punishment techniques of isolation and restraint, why can't public schools?

By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz

Locked in cramped, windowless rooms, tied in body-restricting bags, denied food, water and bathroom access: all of this is happening not to patients in the overlooked back wards of state mental hospitals, but to children as young as 5 in American public schools.
In the 2009-10 school year, some 40,000 children were restrained or isolated as discipline for bad behavior — most of these students had physical, developmental or learning and behavioral needs — according to Department of Education data. That research was cited in a revealing op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times written by a father whose daughter was deeply traumatized by such treatment. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report also found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades,” in both public and private schools.
Practices of restraint and isolation were long used to control resistant patients in psychiatric facilities. But following decades of tragedy and trauma — including hundreds of deaths of patients who were subjected to such treatment — these tactics are now heavily regulated. Federal law requires that the least restrictive measures always be deployed and bans the use of isolation and restraint outright in cases where the patient poses no danger to his or herself or others. In psychiatric centers, using seclusion or restraint for punishment or discipline is illegal.
In fact, in much of Europe and in some U.S. psychiatric centers, restraints and isolation rooms have been eliminated entirely.
(MORE: How Childhood Trauma May Make the Brain Vulnerable to Addiction, Depression)
Yet there is no federal regulation, let alone an outright ban, of the disciplinary use of these tactics in U.S. public schools. Nor is there any requirement that educators be trained in the use of positive techniques; in many states, teachers may even add corporal punishment like beatings and paddling on top of restraint and isolation. These methods fail to change student behavior, and the result is a horrifyingly similar pattern of trauma, abuse and death among students that ultimately led psychiatry to strictly limit physical seclusion.
Investigative reporter Bill Lichtenstein described in the Times how he discovered the maltreatment of his 5-year-old daughter, Rose, who suffered from speech and language delays, but was otherwise characterized as a “model of age-appropriate behavior” by her preschool. In 2006, Rose’s kindergarten called her parents to come pick her up because she had taken off her clothing:

At school, her mother and I found Rose standing alone on the cement floor of a basement mop closet, illuminated by a single light bulb. There was nothing in the closet for a child — no chair, no books, no crayons, nothing but our daughter standing naked in a pool of urine, looking frightened as she tried to cover herself with her hands. On the floor lay her favorite purple-striped Hanna Andersson outfit and panties.
Rose got dressed and we removed her from the school. We later learned that Rose had been locked in the closet five times that morning. She said that during the last confinement, she needed to use the restroom but didn’t want to wet her outfit. So she disrobed. Rather than help her, the school called us and then covered the narrow door’s small window with a file folder, on which someone had written “Don’t touch!”
We were told that Rose had been in the closet almost daily for three months, for up to an hour at a time. At first, it was for behavior issues, but later for not following directions. Once in the closet, Rose would pound on the door, or scream for help, staff members said, and once her hand was slammed in the doorjamb while being locked inside.

(MORE: Human Rights Watch: Hundreds of Thousands Still Tortured in the Name of Drug Treatment)
Not only is there no government regulation of the use of isolation and restraint in schools, but there is also no requirement that parents be informed when it occurs. The use of these tactics has risen in public schools as children with developmental and learning disabilities have been increasingly included in mainstream classrooms. But sadly, their teachers are often not given enough training and support to use safer and more effective, positive disciplinary approaches.
These harsh methods have already resulted in death. In one case, described in testimony [PDF] given at Congressional hearings on the issue in 2009, foster mother Toni Price recounted the last day in the life of 14-year-old Cedric Napoleon. On the morning of March 7, 2002, as Cedric left for school, she said, her foster son had beamed, “You know I love you, Ma.”
Cedric had been abused and neglected from the beginning of his life: as a little child, he’d resorted to rummaging through the garbage to feed himself. And like many neglected children, he was slight and small for his age. Despite his size and history of starvation, however, his 8th-grade teacher found it acceptable to use food deprivation as a disciplinary tactic. He had never been aggressive or violent.
(MORE: Increasingly, Internet Activism Helps Shutter Abusive ‘Troubled Teen’ Boot Camps)
By 2:30 p.m., on the day Cedric died, he had been denied his lunch for more than two hours because he stopped working on his assignments. The boy stood up and tried to walk out of class, but his 230-lb. teacher threw him on the floor and sat on him when he resisted being forced back into his chair.
Panicked, Cedric said he couldn’t breathe. Price testified that the teacher “snapped, ‘If you can speak, you can breathe.’” Soon, the boy could do neither. By the time an ambulance was called, the Cedric was dead.
Over the centuries, psychiatrists learned that restraint and isolation are harmful and rarely necessary — and that simply allowing their widespread use is what what actually made these practices seem essential and important for discipline. But by prioritizing the effort to do away with them, facilities can often eliminate seclusion and restraint completely; many psychiatric institutions in the U.S. have now moved from restraining patients multiple times a week to using the tactic only once or twice a year. All such facilities report improvements in the health and morale of both patients and staff as a result: restraint and seclusion tend to traumatize not only the victims, but also those who must impose the punishment, as well as those who witness the related violence.
(MORE: Treating Addiction: A Top Doc Explains Why Kind Love Beats Tough Love)
If psychiatric centers can do without restraint or isolation, there’s no reason schools should need them. Congress should ban isolation rooms and the use of restraint tactics in all schools, public and private, including “troubled teen” boot camps and wilderness programs, whose disciplinary tactics are also unregulated and have caused children’s deaths. Corporal punishment is banned in institutions housing the elderly, criminals and psychiatric patients, so it should be banned in schools as well.
Moreover, all teachers should be trained in positive behavioral techniques that have been shown to improve behavior in students with or without special needs, and reduce the need for extreme measures. If children display ongoing behavior problems that are so severe that they don’t respond to positive approaches, they need to be helped by specialists, not secretly subjected to repeated and potentially traumatic punishment.
As your elementary school history teacher probably taught you, if you don’t learn from your past, you are condemned to repeat it. We can’t continue to allow schools to resurrect the torturous history of maltreatment in the mentally ill in our most vulnerable children.
MORE: ‘Shock’ School Trial: Where Is the Evidence that Abuse Helps Treat Autism?
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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Friday, August 31, 2012

Puppet experiment suggests humans are born to be fair

By Victoria Gill BBC reporter

Fairness experiment using a puppet (c) PLoS One

Using puppets allows scientists to test how much children would really share with their peers

It looks like a fairground game: a little girl and a puppet play together, using miniature fishing rods to hook tiny buckets of coins.

But this is actually a psychological experiment. Its aim is to measure a very complex human concept - fairness.
The game works like this: the puppet (with the aid of an adult puppeteer) and a three-year-old participant gather their hauls of little buckets. Then the child/puppet team is rewarded with stickers - one for each coin they have collected.

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We were very surprised to find sophisticated sharing behaviour already present in three-year-olds”

Patricia Kanngiesser University of Bristol

At this point the child has to decide how to share his or her prized stickers with their puppet partner.

This simple game revealed that, by the age of just three, children choose to reward their peers based on merit. The children gave the puppet more stickers if it had "worked harder" - gathering more coins.
Patricia Kanngiesser from the University of Bristol led the study, which was published in the journal PLoS One. She said she was amazed by the result.
"We were very surprised to find this sophisticated sharing behaviour already present in three-year-olds," said Ms Kanngiesser.
"Previous research has found that children don't really begin to share according to merit until they are six years of age and older."
Using puppets allowed the experimenters to carry out a controlled experiment whilst still revealing exactly how the children would behave towards peers in a real world situation.
Innate justice So, if young toddlers with almost no social experience give up more of their stickers to a deserving peer, does this mean that humans are hard-wired to treat others fairly?

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Co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour”

Susanne Shultz University of Manchester

Prof Felix Warneken from Harvard University, a co-author of this study, has been studying cooperative behaviour in children and in chimpanzees for almost a decade.

He said knowing where our concept of fairness comes from - whether it is learned or innate - is "the toughest question".
"We can only rule things out with our experiments," he explained. "So we can rule out that it needs formal education, or that it requires sophisticated reasoning about incentives.
"[Fairness] is something that emerges with children's earliest forms of working and interacting with peers."
Ms Kanngiesser said there was a "natural human predisposition" towards treating others fairly.
"It seems to be intuitive," she said. "People have found that even by 18 months of age, children have expectations about how things should be shared fairly."
And there are logical, human reasons for this natural bias towards fair play.
Dr Susanne Shultz, a researcher from the University of Manchester who specialises in social behaviour in primates, pointed out that fairness was central in long-term stable human relationships.
This and other similar studies, Dr Shultz said, demonstrated that "co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour".
"[This study] also reframes social intelligence in terms of cooperation rather than deception," she added. "I think that's really nice."
Deception has played a large part in the scientific study of fairness. While this experiment asked children to share the rewards with a partner after completing a shared task, many studies focus on whether humans, and other primates, choose to cheat a partner or to punish others for treating them unfairly.
A classic example of this type of test is known as the ultimatum game.
This is where one participant is tasked with making an offer to share something of value - for example, an amount of money - with a partner.
The partner then has the opportunity to either accept or reject this offer. And this is where the punishment comes in.
If the recipient decides to reject an apparently unfair offer, both participants receive nothing.
"[This new study] is a nice change from looking at social intelligence from a purely Machiavellian perspective," Dr Shultz said.
Uniquely human?

How do we differ from our primate cousins?

Many scientists believed they would find merit-based sharing among our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. But, in a 2007 study published in the journal Science, researchers using the ultimatum game found that chimps would take any reward - no matter what share they were offered
While children appear to be prepared to share with a new playmate, non-human primates seem to limit their altruism to close kin and mates. But it is not simply the case that the more intelligent the species the more altruistic they are. Recent research on sharing published in PNAS in social primates revealed that capuchins and marmosets were some of the most "giving" primates - commonly offering food rewards to other group members
Before we feel too superior to our primate cousins, our capacity to be spiteful appears to be ours alone. A 2007 published in PNAS study found chimpanzees, unlike humans, do not retaliate against personally harmful actions. Being spiteful is a human trait

In recent years there has been increased scientific interest in whether non-human primates are able to understand the concept of fair play.

As well as gaining an understanding of the complexities of animal behaviour, these studies are trying to unpick its evolutionary origins.
The first of these was published in Nature in 2003. Sarah Brosnan, currently at Georgia State University, found that capuchin monkeys reacted dramatically to being treated unfairly.
Dr Brosnan trained wild monkeys to work with human handlers on a simple task; the monkey would hand over a piece of rock and, in return, receive a food reward.
In the experiment, two monkeys sat side by side. The handlers either gave both monkeys an identical reward (a slice of cucumber) or gave just one of the monkeys the much preferred reward of a grape for completing exactly the same task.
As it was reported at the time by National Geographic: "Capuchins who witnessed unfair treatment and failed to benefit from it often refused to conduct future exchanges with human researchers, would not eat the cucumbers they received for their labours, and in some cases, hurled food rewards at human researchers."
Since then, several groups have tried to test fairness in our closer and apparently more intelligent cousins - the great apes.
But, Dr Shultz said, overall, "non-human primates, apes included, are not very good at solving fairness problems".
In one study published recently in Biology Letters, chimps and bonobos presented with a food-based ultimatum game would accept any food reward on offer - no matter how meagre their share was in comparison to their partner's.
The apes would also consistently steal food from one another during the task.
So is a sense of fairness; of treating others justly at our own expense, a uniquely human characteristic?
Dr Warneken explained that the scientific evidence pointed to a human-ape divide when it came to "recognising inequity".
"There's evidence that some non-human primates are averse to others receiving more than they receive," he said.
But, he added, there was very little evidence that they were averse to offers that were the other way around - where they received more than their fair share.
"That [latter scenario] is a more solid argument for a true understanding of fairness," he explained. "And it's currently something that has no equivalent in non-human primates."
Dr Kanngiessen concluded: "There is a huge debate about what makes us human: is it language, our ability to care about others."
"But even though animals show so many of these complex behaviours, when it comes to helping others and not receiving anything in return, that seems so far to be something [that's] unique to us."

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A Point Of View: China and multiculturalism

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Ethnic minorities in China

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A Point Of View: What kind of superpower could China be?

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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Tehrangeles: How Iranians made part of LA their own

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Tehrangeles facts

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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Why male Japanese wage-earners have only 'pocket money'

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Monday, September 24, 2012

10 things readers want in a history of the world

1. Industrial ammonia

Fritz Haber

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2. Andreas Hofer, rebel Austrian leader

Napoleon and Austria

3. Alhazen and his work on optics

Father of scientific method

4. Danube script

5. Double-entry book-keeping

Luca Pacioli, father of accounting

6. Seven Years' War

The Death of Wolfe

7. The Kingdom of Axum

8. The law code of Hammurabi

9. Rise of the Khmer empire and creation of Angkor Wat

10. The life of Simon Bolivar

Simon Bolivar

Monday, September 10, 2012

Time for a Time Out: Why Are 40,000 Children So Harshly Disciplined in Public Schools?

Friday, August 31, 2012

Puppet experiment suggests humans are born to be fair

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How do we differ from our primate cousins?