Scientific studies of celebrity personalities are really hard to come by, but a new “first of its kind” survey study confirms what most people would expect, that celebrities are indeed more narcissistic than average. Erstwhile fans of the radio call-in show, Loveline (such as myself) will be familiar with the well-credentialed co-host Dr. Drew. He decided that his steady stream of celebrity guests would make a good research sample. He gave them, as well as a control group of MBA students, the 40-question Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) to fill out. The LA Times reports on the research and covers the main points, but the original article¹ has some fun details the Times missed. Some interesting results overall:

• Celebrity average NPI score was 17.8, compared with the US average of 15.3 (p<0.001).
• Among celebrities, reality TV personalities are the most narcissistic, followed by comedians, actors, then musicians. The Times notes that musicians, the most-skilled group, are least narcissistic, while reality TV stars, the least-skilled group, are most narcissistic. Young and Pinsky hint that the rampant narcissism of reality TV personalities may put upward pressure on the narcissism of the general public, if people take the behavior of those personalities to be normal.
• Female celebrities are more narcissistic than male celebrities, contrary to MBA students and the general population, where males are more narcissistic.
• MBA students (especially male MBA students) are more narcissistic than the general population (p<0.05).
• Narcissism did not vary with years of experience in the entertainment industry or with years of experience in the business world. This suggests that innately more narcissistic people choose the fields as opposed to people becoming more narcissistic as they work in them.

The Times also has an online version of the NPI. Somewhat to my surprise, I turned out to be less narcissistic than the general population. That may be related to the distinction between egotism and narcissism. The Times paraphrases the researchers: “Narcissistic people have low self-esteem and are compensating for it; egotists genuinely love themselves.”

1. S. Mark Young and Drew Pinsky. Narcissism and celebrity. Journal of Research in Personality. Volume 40, Issue 5 , October 2006, Pages 463-471. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2006.05.005 [↩]

I read about this article on How the World Works (one of my favorite blogs). It’s a working paper by Karl Ulrich at the Wharton business school. He argues, essentially, that while biking reduces transportation emissions, that is offset by emissions due to increasing longevity from exercise, and combined, the effects are a wash. The How the World Works commentary does a good job of pointing out the absurdity of this comparison and playfully pokes a couple of holes in the analysis, so I won’t spend too much time on that.

I’ll just say that even if Ulrich is right, he’s still found that biking is a social good.¹ Human life is a good thing, even though it may, in a sense, be bad for the environment. And indeed, much of what we do to protect the environment is ultimately about protecting human life.

It brings up a similar paradox that comes up when talking about energy efficiency and reducing consumption. One factor that Ulrich ignores that would work in his favor is that when money is saved by efficiency, it will get spent on something else. If I save on gasoline by bike-commuting, I have money to spend on something else that will generate emissions. I’ll be hard-pressed to spend it on something dirtier than driving a car (jet-skiing? helicopter tour?) but this will somewhat offset the initial energy savings. Similarly, if someone says increasing efficiency of electricity use by 10% is just as good as building 10% more power plants (which people often say), that’s not strictly correct. Consumers would spend less on their current electricity needs and then put the remainder toward other things which use some electricity. So maybe it’s like building 8% more power plants, or something.

Whenever you tell people to save resources by not to consuming something, you have to wonder what they’re going to spend the money on instead. Perhaps we ought to take a supply-side approach to controlling consumption. Of course, you could try reducing working hours and hence salary to reduce consumption. But beyond that, you could promote consumption of low-resource goods, like art, digital entertainment, expensive restaurant meals, hand-made and custom-made things. If you get people to spend enough money on high-cost, low-impact goods, they won’t have any left to spend on bigger houses and bigger SUV’s.

1. Though, interestingly, he’s saying that the good accrues to the bikers and not to society, whereas I had always figured it was mostly the other way around (i.e., other people aren’t dying because of my avoided emissions). [↩]

The Post-Gazette pointed me to this paper¹ examining the communication of sarcasm over email. The authors run five experiments with pairs of communicating college students, and compare success in detecting sarcasm face-to-face, by phone, and over email. Not surprisingly, participants were more accurate face-to-face and by phone, and not so much over email (emoticons were not allowed). The interesting finding was that senders didn’t predict a decrease in accuracy for email. Likewise, receivers expected to identify email sarcasm as well as by other media. So everyone was especially overconfident about email in particular. When the experimenters forced senders to read their own messages to themselves in a non-sarcastic tone, their confidence about transmitting the sarcasm dropped. So, the authors conclude, it’s ego-centrism — difficulty in hearing a voice other than your own — that causes the overconfidence.

With canned messages, sarcasm/not-sarcasm was correctly identified 75% of the time over the phone (versus a chance accuracy of 50%) and not significantly better than chance (56%) over email. But with the participant’s own messages, sarcasm over email was detected 84% of the time. So it’s hard to say how well sarcasm is detected over email in an absolute sense. But it’s less well than you think.

1. Kruger, Justin; Epley, Nicholas; Parker, Jason; Ng, Zhi-Wen. “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think? ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 89 (6), December 2005, pp. 925-936. [↩]

I’m generally pretty skeptical about corporate willingness to solve the problems they create. As a policy analyst I am a strong proponent of policy intervention when the profit motive fails to produce the best outcome for society. After reading Fast Food Nation and seeing Supersize Me, I became convinced that the practices of large corporations are important causes of the obesity epidemic. When schools started banning soda and junk food, it seemed like the appropriate response. Of course, it’s a tough battle to fight in every school district, since schools get a kickback from soda and junk food sales, and most schools are hard-up for cash.

But in a new twist, the three corporations responsible for more than 90% of soda sales in schools have agreed to stop selling it there, replacing sweetened drinks with bottled water and juice. Apparently all it took was smooth words from our old pal Bill Clinton and the threat of massive litigation. Read all about it in the Times.

The threat of a lawsuit is so often used against The People by corporations; it’s nice to see the tables turned now and then.

With the news that 2005 was the warmest year on record, I’m almost happy that it’s actually a little cold these days. Fortunately my preferences don’t influence the weather, because I’m not sure whether I would want 2006 to stay warm (for obvious reasons, and so that we continue getting stronger statistical evidence of climate change) or to get abnormally cold, to give all the poor ecosystems some relief (last year much of the arctic was 3 C° warmer than average(!) ).

Anyway, mostly that was a lead-up to show this picture:
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Viciousswackles passed this article on from BoingBoing. “Common cold transmission in commercial aircraft: Industry and passenger implications,” (Hocking and Foster, 2004) in the Journal of Environmental Health Research, reviews research on the number of passengers getting colds after flying. They reported that 20 percent of passengers who flew on a 2.5 hour flight (San Francisco to Denver) developed colds within a week, compared with a base rate of 3.5%. Depending on what you consider to be the period of infection related to flying, one is 5, 23, or 113 times more likely to get a cold when flying. The authors discount the conventional wisdom that infections result from recirculated air, but they contend that insufficient per-person flow of fresh air and extremely low relative humidity may be responsible.

Normally a layer of mucous in the nose and throat traps inhaled pathogens and cilia migrate them to the stomach to be destroyed by acid. But in very dry conditions the mucous lining dries out and this mechanism ceases, making one more suseptible to infection. The authors suggest that wearing a mask may help by increasing one’s local relative humidity. They also call for airlines to try increasing air flow and humidifying cabin air.

Consumer Reports has a good article on the benefits of buying organic. The section on chemical health risk describes new studies that show pesticide exposure through conventional foods is harmful and that an organic diet dramatically reduces exposure. A helpful summary of what and what not to buy organic notes the most pesticide-laden foods.

Some highlights from the article:

• “Apples, bell peppers, celery, cherries, imported grapes, nectarines, peaches, pears, potatoes, red raspberries, spinach, and strawberries” are the worst to buy conventional (best to buy organic).
• Organic foods are particularly important for expecting mothers and kids (stick to organic baby food).
• The “organic” label is meaningless on seafood.
• “Free Range”, “Free Roaming”, “Natural”, and “All Natural” as applied to, e.g., eggs and poultry, are meaningless labels, but “organic” does imply free-range for poultry, dairy, and eggs.

I’m reading pieces of the book “Feeding the World” by Vaclav Smil. Among other things, he compares the energy efficiencies of diary, eggs, and various meats and discusses potential improvements in production.

One of the most powerful points he makes is that, from the perspective of energy-efficiency, or land-efficiency, or maximizing the earth’s carrying capacity, there’s an optimal level of meat consumption that is probably less than the American per-capita average, but definitely nonzero.

The usual argument is that it takes 10 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, so we can feed more people by not raising beef. But not all livestock is grain fed. In particular, a lot of livestock grazes on pasture land, agricultural residues, and legumes planted in rotation with food species; these are not in competition with human food crops. Sea animals generally do not compete with human food crops either. The implication is that the best-managed food supply would involve some meat production, even if you use all the land possible for human crops.

One might extend this to decide that it’s (environmentally) ethical to have a diet that includes a small amount of meat. Smil also gives some evolutionary arguments for why eating some meat (say, a tenth of that in the American diet) is biologically adaptive for humans.

If one decides that some meat should be consumed, then there are more and less efficient animals to eat, and Smil presents a lot of quantitative data on this. On every measure, beef comes out the worst (e.g. 5-8% protein conversion efficiency). Eggs (30-40%), and particularly milk (30-40%), and salmon (40-45%) come out pretty good on conversion efficiency. Eggs and milk also do well on land use, chickens and eggs on water use. Pigs look good a number of measures, partly because they eat a lot of agricultural waste and they digest it efficiently, but I actually think Smil gets it wrong on the benefits of pigs because he’s ignoring the life cycle issues with hog waste (nasty water pollution).

Overall, I’d say there’s strong support for lactoovo vegetarianism. There’s also good support for eating, say, fish but not other meat, or poultry but not beef, from an energy-balance perspective. This is also a conclusion I drew from the life-cycle analyses of meats in The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices..