This is Improbable Too

by Marc Abrahams

  Aziz used a questionnaire based on psychological tests devised in the 1960s that claim to measure Machiavellianism by presenting statements and asking the test-taker to agree or disagree. The statements range from the goody-goody: ‘Most people who get ahead in the world lead clean, moral lives’, to the not-so-goody: ‘The biggest difference between most criminals and other people is that the criminals are stupid enough to get caught’.

  From ‘Relations of Machiavellian Behavior with Sales Performance of Stockbrokers’

  Aziz prepared similar questions.

  He got answers from 110 brokers who sell stocks on a commission basis. Aziz also wanted to know how good these stockbrokers were at their sales work, so he asked them to compare their own sales performance to that of their colleagues. Aziz would have preferred not to take the brokers’ word for this. But, he writes, ‘the company was not willing to disclose the actual amount of sales by individual stockbrokers’. After analysing what the stockbrokers told him, Aziz reports a strong association between the brokers’ ‘Machiavellian behaviour scale’ rank and how good they claim to be at selling.

  His conclusion: the stockbroker data support the ‘assumption of a positive relationship between Machiavellianism and sales performance’.

  Aziz then did a similar study of eighty car salespersons, all of whom work on commission. He asked them his Machiavellianism survey questions. He also asked each to tell him ‘(a) the number of cars sold during the previous year and (b) the income bracket that most closely matched their income during that year’. His conclusion: what the car salespersons told him provides ‘partial support for earlier findings’.

  Rounding out the Big Three, Aziz then talked with seventy-two estate agents who earn their money selling property on commission. The things they told him, Aziz says, ‘support earlier results from samples of stockbrokers and automobile salespersons’.

  A few other studies have cited Aziz’s work. One of the first was a Canadian report called ‘Psychopathy and the Detection of Faking on Self-Report Inventories of Personality’.

  Aziz, Abdul, Kim May and John C. Crotts (2002). ‘Relations of Machiavellian Behavior with Sales Performance of Stockbrokers’. Psychology Reports 90 (2): 451–60.

  Aziz, Abdul (2004). ‘Machiavellianism Scores and Self-Rated Performance of Automobile Salespersons’. Psychology Reports 94 (2): 464–6.

  — (2005). ‘Relationship between Machiavellianism Scores and Performance of Real Estate Salespersons’. Psychology Reports 96 (1): 235–8.

  Christie, R., and F.L. Geis (1970). Studies in Machiavellianism. Academic Press. Activity 9.3: Machiavellianism Scale is reproduced at http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0073381225/student_view0/chapter9/self-assessment_9_3.html.

  MacNeil, Bonnie M., and Ronald R. Holden (2006). ‘Psychopathy and the Detection of Faking on Self-Report Inventories of Personality’. Personality and Individual Differences 41 (4): 641–51.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Preconditioning an Audience for Mental Magic: An Informal Look’

  by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1980)

  Trinkaus tests out a simple magician’s trick, then asks: ‘Based on this limited inquiry, it appears that preconditioning of an audience by mentalists may well be effective. While this finding is interesting, perhaps of more interest are the implications associated with the use of this technique in situations other than mental magic. For example, is the seller’s use of this method in the marketplace, to influence buyer selection, ethical?’

  Diviner interference

  How do diviners divine? How do they achieve such dependable results? Barbara Tedlock, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, analysed the mystery. Her crystallized thoughts appear in a study published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness.

  In the report, Tedlock explains why other anthropologists were unwilling or unable to build what she has built – a ‘theory of practice for divination’. The other anthropologists made a mistake. To them, divination is just ‘the irrational weak sister of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine: a parasitic pseudoscience feeding on these more logical, rational sciences’. To Tedlock, it is more than that. The key was staring everyone in the face. ‘One must’, she writes, ‘take what diviners say and do seriously.’

  One must also be willing to study the findings of Stephen Hawking and other modern scientists. Given that scientists are now imagining gravity-bent light, faster-than-light particles, ‘and other strange concepts that defy common sense reality’, Tedlock says, ‘why should we not approach divination with the same conceptual openness?’

  Tedlock’s theory applies to most kinds of divination. These include ‘reading patterns of cracks in oracular bones, made from the shoulder blades of deer, sheep, pigs, and oxen, or the shells of turtles. Water-, crystal-, and star-gazing, dreaming, and the casting of lots. The taking of hallucinogenic drugs, and the contemplation of mystic spirals, amulets, labyrinths, mandalas, and thangkas. Reading natural signs such as the flight of birds or the road crossings of animals. Rod or pendulum dowsing. The Tarot, the Chinese I Ching, and the Yoruba Ifa readings, together with palmistry and geomancy. Contacting spirits to answer questions.’ These practices occurred in so many places that we must assume they work, Tedlock points out.

  Much of their value comes from shifting between being rational and being irrational. She gives this example: ‘The anthropologist Roy Willis narrated his experience of this latter divinatory shift, which he observed when he visited Jane Ridder-Patrick, a well-known British herbalist, astrologer, and author of A Handbook of Medical Astrology. When he asked her to do his astrological chart, he observed that she appeared rational at first but then, about two-thirds of the way through the hour-long reading, the atmosphere changed.’

  By injecting ancient, irrational practices with modern scientific analogies, Tedlock has brought anthropology to a new level of sophistication.

  The field has come a long way since 1983, when Nigel Barley of the University of Oxford published his book The Innocent Anthropologist. Here’s how Barley described his arrival in the Dowayo village of Kongle, in the Cameroons: ‘By now the silence was becoming very strained and I felt it incumbent upon me to say something. I have already said that one of the joys of fieldwork is that it allows one to make use of all sorts of expressions that otherwise are never used. “Take me to your leader”, I cried. This was duly translated and it was explained that the Chief was coming from his field.’

  Tedlock, Barbara (2006). ‘Toward a Theory of Divinatory Practice.’ Anthropology of Consciousness 17 (2): 62–77.

  Barley, Nigel (1982). The Innocent Anthropologist. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

  May we recommend

  ‘Modelling of Interaction between a Spatula and a Human Brain’

  by Kim V. Hansen, Lars Brix, Christian F. Pedersen, Jens P. Haase and Ole V. Larsen (published in Medical Image Analysis, 2004)

  The authors, who are at Aalborg University, Denmark, explain: ‘The idea is to provide surgeons with a tool which can teach them the correlation between deformation and applied force.’

  Copy wrongs

  Cheating, cheating was made the central theme of a special issue of the Journal of College and Character. Published in 2007, the issue featured two especially focused studies on the topic.

  One study looked at university honour codes, which are popular in the US and are sprouting in the UK and elsewhere. Rodney Arnold, of the College of the Ozarks, together with Barbara N. Martin, Michael Jinks and Linda Bigby, of the University of Central Missouri, surveyed students at six universities in the American Midwest. The study asks ‘Is there a difference in the level of academic dishonesty between colleges and universities that have incorporated an honor code system and those that have not?’

  The answer: no.

  But honour-coded students see things their own way. The authors report that ‘students from honor code inst
itutions perceived that the amount of academic dishonesty at their institutions was lower.’

  The three honour-code campuses in the study are no mere run-of-the-mill specimens. Each has been formally recognized by the John Templeton Foundation as a ‘character building’ college. The Templeton Foundation’s website (www.collegeandcharacter.org) celebrates these universities for ‘shaping the ideals and standards of personal and civic responsibility’. The foundation’s motto is ‘How Little We Know, How Eager to Learn’.

  The second study looked at that most literary form of cheating: plagiarism. Jean Liddell, a librarian at Auburn University in Alabama, and Valerie Fong, an adjunct professor at two small colleges in San Francisco, call their report ‘Faculty Perceptions of Plagiarism’. Liddell and Fong learned that professors vary widely in their perception of plagiarism.

  They surveyed teachers at Auburn University, asking each of them how bad the problem is. The answers spanned from never-see-it-in-my-classroom to about-three-quarters-of-my-students-do-it.

  Some responses posed a statistical challenge. Liddell and Fong say: ‘One faculty member responded that in his/her class, the percentage of plagiarism “cannot be estimated. I imagine it is quite [a bit] higher than any administrator would feel comfortable with”.’

  Nearly all the professors claimed that plagiarism was slightly worse nationwide than on their campus, slightly worse campus-wide than in their department, and slightly worse in the department than in just their own classes.

  Auburn University has an official definition of what constitutes plagiarism. However, the study finds that professors’ ‘personal definitions are often quite different’.

  One history professor put the whole matter into a fuller perspective. He or she explained that some supposedly deplorable actions are just peachy, but that plagiarism is a sin: ‘There is no problem publishing something that has no original thought. In History we do that all the time. But, and this is important, you must cite all the sources from which you borrowed those thoughts.’

  Arnold, Rodney, Barbara N. Martin, Michael Jinks, and Linda Bigby (2007). ‘Is There a Relationship Between Honor Codes and Academic Dishonesty?’. Journal of College and Character 8 (2): 1–12.

  Liddell, Jean, and Valerie Fong (2005). ‘Faculty Perceptions of Plagiarism’. Journal of College and Character 6 (2).

  In brief

  ‘Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess’

  by Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark (published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013)

  The authors, at Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm University, explain: ‘We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on high-level chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women’s strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent’.

  ‌Crime doesn’t pay much

  When economists train their sights on robbers, the point traditionally is to study those who loot on the grandest, most legal scale and who are called ‘financiers’, and also (if there be consulting fees) to assist those persons.

  Economists Barry Reilly, of the University of Sussex, and Neil Rickman and Robert Witt, of the University of Surrey, went against that tradition. They stole a hard look at the lowest class of bank robbers, the ones who physically go into bank branches, grab cash and literally leg it. Reilly, Rickman and Witt got access – exclusive and confidential access, they proudly confide – to data from the British Bankers’ Association about bank robberies. In 2012 they published a study called ‘Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much’.

  ‘Our research’, they say, ‘was concerned with the various factors that determine the proceeds from bank robberies; hence, we could work out (among other things) the economics (to the criminal) of attempting one, and the economics (to the banks) of trying to thwart it.’

  Several factors influence both the likely gains and likely costs of a typical bank robbery. Adding more henchmen can boost the size of the haul (‘Every extra member of the gang raises the expected value of the robbery proceeds by £9,033.20, on average, and other things being equal.’), but it also, of course, increases the total labour cost.

  Each unsuccessful robbery attempt yields £0, and thus lowers the average gross (and net) income. The economists point out that failures, on average, incur particular expenses: ‘The expected costs are the lengthy term in jail – converted into monetary terms at the robber’s own conversion rate – times the probability of serving that term – that is, of being caught and convicted.’

  Table 1 from ‘Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much’. The article teases: ‘With access to a unique data set’, the authors ‘give us the low-down on the economics’.

  They calculate that the average financial return on classical bank-robbing is ‘a very modest £12,706.60 per person per raid’, and that an industrious robber can expect, statistically, to work steadily at his trade for only about a year and a half before being caught and canned.

  Reilly, Rickman, and Witt report that fewer and fewer bank robberies are being attempted, in both the UK and the US. They explain that economics – specifically, the decreasing ‘expected value’ of a bank robbery – accounts for the decline.

  They offer small-time bank robbers an attractive alternative goal: ‘In the UK, robberies from security vans are on the increase. Security vans offer more attractive pickings. Our framework provides a way of thinking about this, [and] effectively introduces a competing product into the robbers’ “product space” and asks them to think about which will generate more proceeds.’

  Conclusions: ‘Why robbing banks is a bad idea’

  The study ends with what it says is a four-word ‘lesson’ – that ‘successful criminals study econometrics’. It does not state, but perhaps does imply, a more valuable suggestion: successful criminals can hire econometricians.

  Reilly, Barry, Neil Rickman and Robert Witt (2012). ‘Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much’. Significance 9 (3): 17–21.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Honesty at a Motor Vehicle Bureau: An Informal Look’

  by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1980)

  Trinkaus notes that he ‘Assessed the veracity of people taking vision tests at a district office of a motor vehicle bureau … Results suggest that, when given an option, a sizeable percentage of people may well elect a style of behavior that is neither completely honest nor dishonest.’

  To sleep, perchance to judge

  When a judge falls asleep in the courtroom, sometimes people are alert enough to notice – and then word gets out to the public. That’s happened often enough for two doctors to decide to do something. What they did was to gather news reports about slumbering judges, write a paper about those reports, and then submit it for publication in the medical journal Sleep.

  Dr Ronald Grunstein of the Royal Prince Alfred hospital in Sydney, Australia, and Dr Dev Banerjee of Birmingham Heartlands hospital in the UK saw their judge-filled-but-not-judgemental treatise appear in print in 2007. The headline was ‘The Case of “Judge Nodd” and Other Sleeping Judges: Media, Society, and Judicial Sleepiness’.

  Grunstein and Banerjee tell of fifteen cases – one in Australia, one in the UK, one in Canada, ten in that sometimes slumbering giant the US, and one at the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. The ‘Judge Nodd’ story comes from Australia’s New South Wales district court.

  Grunstein and Banerjee write that Judge Ian Dodd ‘had been reported to the State
Judicial Commission for allegedly repeatedly falling asleep while listening to witness testimony and legal argument’ in different cases over several years. The jury in a 2004 trial, they say, even ‘commented on Judge Dodd’s loud snoring’. The ‘Judge Nodd’ nickname arose the previous year, they let on, from jurors who had kept themselves awake to opportunities for self-amusement.

  Grunstein and Banerjee explain that ‘some months prior to any press reports about his sleepiness during trials, Judge Dodd … was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea, and was apparently treated effectively’. The news stories led to a ‘media frenzy’, which led to early retirement for Judge Dodd. All of this woke Grunstein and Banerjee up to the titillating yet consequential tangle of medical, legal and moral issues.

  Many judges are alert, quietly, to the undesirability of snoozing in court. Grunstein and Bannerjee point to a survey done by Professor Nancy J. King, a law professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. King asked 562 American judges about trials they had overseen recently: ‘69% of the judges reported cases in which jurors had fallen asleep’, she writes. ‘By judges’ estimates, this had happened in more than 2,300 cases.’

  King also asked, and learned, what those judges did to those sleepers: ‘Sleeping jurors were usually awakened and offered a break, or a chance to drink water, cola, or coffee, but not reprimanded. Many other judges stated that they left it up to the lawyers to take action when jurors dozed, some noting that after all it was the lawyers who had put them to sleep.’