DENVER — Life on Earth got into the shell game more than 200 million years earlier than previously thought.
Fossilized eukaryotes — complex life-forms that include animals and plants — discovered in Canada are decked out in armorlike layers of mineral plates, paleobiologist Phoebe Cohen said September 27 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. At about 809 million years old, the find is the oldest evidence of organisms controlling the formation of minerals, a process called biomineralization. This new origin of biomineralization coincides with major changes that mark the end of a period known as the “boring billion” (SN: 11/14/15, p. 18), said Stanford University paleontologist Erik Sperling, who was not involved in the discovery. “There were big things going on with ocean chemistry,” he said. “It’s interesting to see the biological response.”
These ancient eukaryotes built their exoskeletons using a very different process from most modern shell-making microbes. That uniqueness offers insights into how the mineral-making ability first evolved, said Cohen, who studies ancient ecosystems at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
“We have been able to identify specific conditions that facilitated the evolution of the first eukaryote to biomineralize in Earth’s history,” she said. “It paints a beautiful picture of the ecology and evolution and environmental conditions that led to this dramatic innovation.”
Donning an exoskeleton of minerals protects microbes from predators and forms a crucial stage in the modern carbon cycle. The shells make marine microbes such as certain phytoplankton species sink faster after they die, removing carbon from the upper ocean. Previous clear evidence of eukaryote biomineralization dates back to around 560 million years ago in early corallike animals.
Odd fossils discovered in the late 1970s and covered in mineral plates shaped like circles, squares and “Honeycomb cereal” (as Cohen described them) hinted that the skill evolved much earlier, but the discovery raised many questions. Dating techniques then put the age of the fossils somewhere within a 100-million-year range from about 811 million to 717 million years ago, and scientists couldn’t rule out that the fossils’ scalelike minerals formed after the organisms died. Cohen and colleagues revisited these curious fossils. By accurately dating the organic-rich shale a few meters below the fossils in the rock record, the researchers pegged the fossils’ age at 809 million years old, give or take a few million years. An electron microscope let researchers see that each plate is a weave of elongated mineral fibers. This intricate, orderly design had to have been purposefully built by life manipulating mineral formation, Cohen said.
The mineral plates themselves are odd. Most modern microbes make shells out of calcium carbonate, but the ancient shells are made of calcium phosphate, the same crystal used in human teeth enamel. Today, phosphate is limited in the environment and most microbes avoid wasting it.
That may not have been as much of an issue in the marine basin where the eukaryotes lived, the researchers found. Analysis of rocks surrounding the fossils indicate that the amount of oxygen in the waters where the eukaryotes lived was inconsistent. Fluctuating oxygen levels pulled phosphate from underlying sediment into the water, where it was available for mineral making. These favorable conditions plus the need for protection from predation (SN: 11/28/15, p. 13) probably drove the first evolution of biomineralization, Cohen said. Eventually the environment changed, and these shell-making species died out.
When small lies snowball into blizzards of deception, the brain becomes numb to dishonesty. As people tell more and bigger lies, certain brain areas respond less to the whoppers, scientists report online October 24 in Nature Neuroscience. The results might help explain how small transgressions can ultimately set pants aflame.
The findings “have big implications for how lying can develop,” says developmental psychologist Victoria Talwar of McGill University in Montreal, who studies how dishonest behavior develops in children. “It starts to give us some idea about how lying escalates from small lies to bigger ones.” During the experiment, researchers from University College London and Duke University showed 80 participants a crisp, big picture of a glass jar of pennies. They were told that they needed to send an estimate of how much money was in the jar to an unseen partner who saw a smaller picture of the same jar. Each participant was serving as a “well-informed financial adviser tasked with advising a client who is less informed about what investments to make,” study coauthor Neil Garrett of University College London said October 20 during a news briefing. Researchers gave people varying incentives to lie. In some cases, for instance, intentionally overestimating the jar’s contents was rewarded with a bigger cut of the money.
As the experiment wore on, the fibs started flying. People lied the most when the lie would benefit both themselves and their unseen partner. But these “financial advisers” still told self-serving lies even when it would hurt their partner.
Twenty-five participants underwent fMRI scans while lying. When a person had previously lied, brain activity lessened in certain areas of the brain, most notably in the amygdala. A pair of almond-shaped brain structures nestled deep in the brain, the amygdalae are tightly linked to emotions. This diminished amygdala activity could even predict whether a person would lie on the next trial, results that suggest that the reduced brain activity is actually influencing the decision to lie.
The study design gets around a problem that confounds other lying experiments, says neuroscientist Bernd Weber of the University of Bonn in Germany. Many experiments are based on lies that people have been instructed to say, a situation that “hardly resembles real-world behavior,” he says. Here, the participants were self-motivated liars.
Without any negative consequences from their lies, participants weren’t afraid of being caught. That impunity might affect activity in the amygdala, Weber says. Further experiments are needed to reveal the effects of such fear. From Ponzi schemes to current politics, case studies abound of small lies spiraling into much bigger deceits, study coauthor Tali Sharot of the University College London said in the news briefing. “There are many reasons why this might happen, societal reasons, but we suspected that there might be a basic biological principle of how our brain works that contributes to this phenomenon,” she said.
The principle she had in mind is called emotional adaptation — the same phenomenon that explains why the scent of strong perfume becomes less noticeable over time. The first time you cheat on your taxes, you’d probably feel quite bad about it, Sharot said. That bad feeling is good, because it curbs your dishonesty. “The next time you cheat, you have already adapted,” she said. “There’s less negative reaction to hold you back so you might be lying more.”
Narwhals use highly targeted beams of sound to scan their environment for threats and food. In fact, the so-called unicorns of the sea (for their iconic head tusks) may produce the most refined sonar of any living animal.
A team of researchers set up 16 underwater microphones to eavesdrop on narwhal click vocalizations at 11 ice pack sites in Greenland’s Baffin Bay in 2013. The recordings show that narwhal clicks are extremely intense and directional — meaning they can widen and narrow the beam of sound to find prey over long and short distances. It’s the most directional sonar signal measured in a living species, the researchers report November 9 in PLOS ONE.
The sound beams are also asymmetrically narrow on top. That minimizes clutter from echoes bouncing off the sea surface or ice pack. Finally, narwhals scan vertically as they dive, which could help them find patches of open water where they can surface and breathe amid sea ice cover. All this means that narwhals employ pretty sophisticated sonar.
The audio data could help researchers tell the difference between narwhal vocalizations and those of neighboring beluga whales. It also provides a baseline for assessing the potential impact of noise pollution from increases in shipping traffic made possible by sea ice loss.
No paper or digital trails document ancient humans’ journey out of Africa to points around the globe. Fortunately, those intrepid travelers left a DNA trail. Genetic studies released in 2016 put a new molecular spin on humans’ long-ago migrations. These investigations also underscore the long trek ahead for scientists trying to reconstruct Stone Age road trips.
“I’m beginning to suspect that the ancient out-of-Africa process was complex, involving several migrations and subsequent extinctions,” says evolutionary geneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. Untangling those comings, goings and dead ends increasingly looks like a collaborative job for related lines of evolutionary research — comparisons of DNA differences across populations of present-day people, DNA samples retrieved from the bones of ancient hominids, archaeological evidence, fossil finds and studies of ancient climates. It’s still hard to say when the clouds will part and a clear picture of humankind’s journey out of Africa will appear. Consider four papers published in October that featured intriguing and sometimes contradictory results.
Three new studies expanded the list of present-day populations whose DNA has been analyzed. The results suggest that most non-Africans have inherited genes from people who left Africa in a single pulse between about 75,000 and 50,000 years ago (SN: 10/15/16, p. 6). One team, studying DNA from 142 distinct human populations, proposed that African migrants interbred with Neandertals in the Middle East before splitting into groups that headed into Europe or Asia. Other scientists whose dataset included 148 populations concluded that a big move out of Africa during that time period erased most genetic traces of a smaller exodus around 120,000 years ago. A third paper found that aboriginal Australians and New Guinea’s native Papuans descend from a distinctive mix of Eurasian populations that, like ancestors of other living non-Africans, trace back to Africans who left their homeland around 72,000 years ago.
The timing of those migrations may be off, however. A fourth study, based on climate and sea level data, identified the period from 72,000 to 60,000 years ago as a time when deserts largely blocked travel out of Africa. Computer models suggested several favorable periods for intercontinental travel, including one starting around 59,000 years ago. But archaeological finds suggest that humans had already spread across Asia by that time. Clashing estimates of when ancient people left Africa should come as no surprise. To gauge the timing of these migrations, scientists have to choose a rate at which changes in DNA accumulate over time. Evolutionary geneticist Swapan Mallick of Harvard Medical School and the other authors of one of the new genetics papers say that the actual mutation rate could be 30 percent higher or lower than the mutation rate they used. Undetermined levels of interbreeding with now-extinct hominid species other than Neandertals may also complicate efforts to retrace humankind’s genetic history (SN: 10/15/16, p. 22), as would mating between Africans and populations that made return trips. “This can be clarified, to some extent, with genetic data from ancient people involved in out-of-Africa migrations,” says Lalueza-Fox. So far, though, no such data exist.
The uncertainty highlights the need for more archaeological evidence. Though sites exist in Africa and Europe dating from more than 100,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, little is known about human excursions into the Arabian Peninsula and the rest of Asia. Uncovering more bones, tools and cultural objects will help fill in the picture of how humans traveled, and what key evolutionary transitions occurred along the way.
Mallick’s team has suggested, for example, that symbolic and ritual behavior mushroomed around 50,000 years ago, in the later part of the Stone Age, due to cultural changes rather than genetic changes. Some archaeologists have proposed that genetic changes must have enabled the flourishing of personal ornaments and artifacts that might have been used in rituals. But comparisons of present-day human DNA to that of Neandertals and extinct Asian hominids called Denisovans don’t support that idea. Instead, another camp argues, humans may have been capable of these behaviors some 200,000 years ago.
Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, approaches the findings cautiously. “I do not assume that interpretations of the genetic data are right,” he says. Such reconstructions have been revised and corrected many times over the last couple of decades, which is how “a healthy scientific field moves forward,” Conard adds. Collaborations connecting DNA findings to archaeological discoveries are most likely to produce unexpected insights into where we come from and who we are.
Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, a rich, powerful city stood in the jungle of what is now eastern Honduras. Then, suddenly, all of the residents vanished, and the abandoned city became a cursed place — anyone who entered risked death.
In a captivating real-life adventure tale, journalist and novelist Douglas Preston argues that the legend is not complete fiction. The Lost City of the Monkey God is his firsthand account of the expedition that uncovered the sites of at least two large cities, along with other settlements, that may form the basis of the “White City” myth. Even the curse might be rooted in reality. Stories of the White City, so named because it was supposedly built of white stone, trace back to the Spanish conquistadores of the 16th century, Preston explains. These stories enthralled filmmaker Steve Elkins, who set out in the mid-1990s to uncover the truth. Finding the ruins of an ancient culture in one of the most remote parts of Central America would require a combination of high-tech remote sensing, old-fashioned excavation and persistence.
Elkins enlisted the help of experts who used satellite images and lidar to find potential targets to explore. Lidar involves shooting laser pulses from above to sketch out the contours of a surface, even a thickly vegetated one. The resulting maps revealed outlines of human-made structures in several locations. Preston deftly explains the science behind this work and makes it exciting (being crammed into a small, rickety plane for hours on end requires its own kind of bravery). By 2015, archaeologists, accompanied by a film crew and Preston, hit the ground to investigate. They weren’t disappointed. The team uncovered an earthen pyramid, other large mounds, a plaza, terraces, canals, hundreds of ornate sculptures and vessels, and more. These discoveries are providing clues to the identity of the people who lived there and what happened to them. What’s clear is that they belonged to a culture distinct from their Maya neighbors. This culture probably prospered for several hundred years, perhaps longer, before vanishing around 1500. Drawing on historical evidence, Preston argues that disease brought by Europeans was the culture’s downfall. A series of epidemics, perhaps smallpox, may have prompted people to desert the area, inspiring the myth’s curse. The expedition did not escape this curse. Preston and others brought back a parasitic infection known as leishmaniasis. Preston devotes the last quarter of the book to detailing his and others’ struggle to deal with this potentially fatal disease.
The Lost City of the Monkey God is at its best when Preston recounts his time in the field. He presents an unglorified look at doing fieldwork in a rainforest, contending with poisonous snakes, hordes of biting pests and relentless rain and mud. He also offers a window into the politics of science, offering a frank appraisal of the criticism and skepticism this unconventional expedition (paid for by a filmmaker) faced.
Much of the book is a thrill to read, but by the end, it takes a more somber tone. The “White City” faces threats of looting and logging. And researchers who go there risk contracting disease. Some readers may wonder whether the discovery was worth it. Perhaps some mysteries are better left unsolved.
Life on Earth may have made its mark on the moon billions of years before Neil Armstrong’s famous first step.
Observations by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft suggest that oxygen atoms from Earth’s upper atmosphere bombard the moon’s surface for a few days each month. This oxygen onslaught began in earnest around 2.4 billion years ago when photosynthetic microbes first flourished (SN Online: 9/8/15), planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University in Japan and colleagues propose January 30 in Nature Astronomy.
The oxygen atoms begin their incredible journey in the upper atmosphere, where they are ionized by ultraviolet radiation, the researchers suggest. Electric fields or plasma waves accelerate the oxygen ions into the magnetic cocoon that envelops Earth. One side of that magnetosphere stretches away from the sun like a flag in the wind. For five days each lunar cycle, the moon passes through the magnetosphere and is barraged by earthly ions, including oxygen.
Based on Kaguya’s measurements of this space-traveling oxygen in 2008, Terada and colleagues estimate that at least 26,000 oxygen ions per second hit each square centimeter of the lunar surface during the five-day period. The uppermost lunar soil may, therefore, preserve bits of Earth’s ancient atmosphere, the researchers write, though determining which atoms blew over from Earth or the sun would be difficult.
The first sign that something was wrong was that the female hamsters were really active in their cages. These were European hamsters, a species that is endangered in France and thought to be on the decline in the rest of their Eurasian range. But in a lab at the University of Strasbourg in France, the hamsters were oddly aggressive, and they didn’t give birth in their nests.
Mathilde Tissier, a conservation biologist at the University of Strasbourg, remembers seeing the newly born pups alone, spread around in the cages, while their mothers ran about. Then, the mother hamsters would take their pups and put them in the piles of corn they had stored in the cage, Tissier says, and eat their babies alive.
“I had some really bad moments,” she says. “I thought I had done something wrong.”
Tissier and her colleagues had been looking into the effect of wheat- and corn-based diets in European hamsters because the rodent’s population in France was quickly disappearing. It now numbers only about 1,000 animals, most of which live in farm fields. The hamsters, being burrowers, are important for the local ecosystem and can promote soil health. But more than that, they’re an umbrella species, Tissier notes. Protect them, and their habitat, and there will be benefits for the many other farmland species that are declining.
A typical corn field is some seven times larger than the home range for a female hamster, so the animals that live in these agricultural areas eat mostly corn — or whatever other crop is growing in that field. But not all crops provide the same level of nutrition, and Tissier and her colleagues were curious about how that might affect the hamsters. Perhaps there would be differences in litter size or pup growth, they surmised. So they began an experiment, feeding hamsters wheat or corn in the lab, with either clover or earthworms to better reflect the animals’ normal, omnivorous diets.
“We thought [the diets] would create some [nutritional] deficiencies,” Tissier says. But instead, Tissier and her colleagues saw something very different. All the female hamsters were able to successfully reproduce, but those fed corn showed abnormal behaviors before giving birth. They then gave birth outside their nests and most ate their young on the first day after birth. Only one female weaned her pups, though that didn’t have a happy ending either — the two brothers ate their female siblings, Tissier and her colleagues report January 18 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Tissier spent a year trying to figure out what was going on. Hamsters and other rodents will eat their young, but it is usually when a baby has died and the mother hamster wants to keep her nest clean. They don’t normally eat healthy babies alive. The researchers reared more hamsters in the lab, this time supplementing their maize and earthworm diet with a solution of niacin. This time, the hamsters raised their young normally, and not as a snack.
Unlike wheat, corn lacks a number of micronutrients, including niacin. In people who subsist on a diet of mostly corn, that niacin deficiency can result in a disease called pellagra. The disease emerged in the 1700s in Europe after corn became a dietary staple. People with pellagra experienced horrible rashes, diarrhea and dementia. Until the disease’s cause was identified in the mid-20th century, millions of people suffered and thousands died. (The meso-Americans who domesticated corn largely did not have this problem because they processed corn with a technique called nixtamalization, which frees bound niacin in corn and makes it available as a nutrient. The Europeans who brought corn back to their home countries didn’t bring back this process.)
The European hamsters fed corn-based diets exhibited symptoms similar to pellagra, and this is probably happening in the wild, Tissier says. She notes that officials with the French National Office for Hunting and Wildlife have seen hamsters in the wild subsisting on mostly corn and eating their pups.
Tissier and her colleagues are now working to find ways to improve diversity in agricultural systems, so that hamsters — and other creatures — can eat a more well-balanced diet. “The idea is not only to protect the hamster,” she says, “but to protect the entire biodiversity and to restore good ecosystems, even in farmland.”
Computer engineers have dreamed of a machine that would translate speech into something that a vacuum tube or transistor could understand. Now at last, some promising hardware is being developed…. It is still a long way from the kind of science fiction computer that can understand sentences or long speeches. — Science News, March 4, 1967
Update That 1967 device knew the words one through nine. Earlier speech recognition devices sliced a word into segments and analyzed them for absolute loudness. But this machine, developed by Genung L. Clapper at IBM, identified the volume of a pitch segment compared with its neighbors to account for the variability of human speech. Today’s speech recognition goes much further, dividing words into distinct units of sound and syntax. The software decodes speech by applying pattern recognition and a statistical method called the hidden Markov model to the sounds. We rely on speech recognition to open an app to order groceries or to send a text to ask someone at home if we need more milk. Hello, Siri.
Nudges are a growth industry. Inspired by a popular line of psychological research and introduced in a best-selling book a decade ago, these inexpensive behavior changers are currently on a roll.
Policy makers throughout the world, guided by behavioral scientists, are devising ways to steer people toward decisions deemed to be in their best interests. These simple interventions don’t force, teach or openly encourage anyone to do anything. Instead, they nudge, exploiting for good — at least from the policy makers’ perspective — mental tendencies that can sometimes lead us astray.
But new research suggests that low-cost nudges aimed at helping the masses have drawbacks. Even simple interventions that work at first can lead to unintended complications, creating headaches for nudgers and nudgees alike.
Nudge proponents, an influential group of psychologists and economists known as behavioral economists, follow a philosophy they dub libertarian paternalism. This seemingly contradictory phrase refers to a paternalistic desire to promote certain decisions via tactics that preserve each person’s freedom of choice. Self-designated “choice architects” design nudges to protect us from inclinations that might not serve us well, such as overconfidence, limited attention, a focus on now rather than later, the tendency to be more motivated by losses than gains and intuitive flights of fancy.
University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein, now at Harvard University, triggered this policy movement with their 2008 book Nudge. Thaler and Sunstein argued that people think less like an economist’s vision of a coldly rational, self-advancing Homo economicus than like TV’s bumbling, doughnut-obsessed Homer Simpson. Choice architects like to prod with e-mail messages, for example, reminding a charity’s past donors that it’s time to give or telling tardy taxpayers that most of their neighbors or business peers have paid on time. To nudge healthier eating, these architects redesign cafeterias so that fruits and vegetables are easier to reach than junk food.
A popular nudge tactic consists of automatically enrolling people in organ-donation programs and retirement savings plans while allowing them to opt out if they want. Until recently, default choices for such programs left people out unless they took steps to join up. For organ donation, the nudge makes a difference: Rates of participation typically exceed 90 percent of adults in countries with opt-out policies and often fall below 15 percent in opt-in countries, which require explicit consent.
Promising results of dozens of nudge initiatives appear in two government reports issued last September. One came from the White House, which released the second annual report of its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. The other came from the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team. Created by the British government in 2010, the U.K. group is often referred to as the Nudge Unit.
In a September 20, 2016, Bloomberg View column, Sunstein said the new reports show that nudges work, but often increase by only a few percentage points the number of people who, say, receive government benefits or comply with tax laws. He called on choice architects to tackle bigger challenges, such as finding ways to nudge people out of poverty or into higher education.
Missing from Sunstein’s comments and from the government reports, however, was any mention of a growing conviction among some researchers that well-intentioned nudges can have negative as well as positive effects. Accepting automatic enrollment in a company’s savings plan, for example, can later lead to regret among people who change jobs frequently or who realize too late that a default savings rate was set too low for their retirement needs. E-mail reminders to donate to a charity may work at first, but annoy recipients into unsubscribing from the donor list.
“I don’t want to get rid of nudges, but we’ve been a bit too optimistic in applying them to public policy,” says behavioral economist Mette Trier Damgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark.
Nudges, like medications for physical ailments, require careful evaluation of intended and unintended effects before being approved, she says. Policy makers need to know when and with whom an intervention works well enough to justify its side effects.
Default downer That warning rings especially true for what is considered a shining star in the nudge universe — automatic enrollment of employees in retirement savings plans. The plans, called defaults, take effect unless workers decline to participate.
No one disputes that defaults raise participation rates in retirement programs compared with traditional plans that require employees to sign up on their own. But the power of opt-out plans to kick-start saving for retirement stayed under the radar until it was reported in the November 2001 Quarterly Journal of Economics.
When the company in the 2001 study — a health and financial services firm with more than 10,000 employees — switched from voluntary to automatic enrollment in a retirement savings account, employee participation rose from about 37 percent to nearly 86 percent.
Similar findings over the next few years led to passage of the U.S. Pension Protection Act of 2006, which encouraged employers to adopt automatic pension enrollment plans with increasing savings contributions over time.
But little is known about whether automatic enrollees are better or worse off as time passes and their personal situations change, says Harvard behavioral economist Brigitte Madrian. She coauthored the 2001 paper on the power of default savings plans.
Although automatic plans increase savings for those who otherwise would have squirreled away little or nothing, others may lose money because they would have contributed more to a self-directed retirement account, Madrian says. In some cases, having an automatic savings account may encourage irresponsible spending or early withdrawals of retirement money (with penalties) to cover debts. Such possibilities are plausible but have gone unstudied.
In line with Madrian’s concerns, mathematical models developed by finance professor Bruce Carlin of the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues suggest that people who default into retirement plans learn less about money matters, and share less financial information with family and friends, than those who join plans that require active investment choices.
Opt-out savings programs “have been oversimplified to the public and are being sold as a great way to change behavior without addressing their complexities,” Madrian says. Research needs to address how well these plans mesh with individuals’ personalities and decision-making styles, she recommends. Delay and regret By comparing procrastinators with more decisive folks in one large retirement system, economist Jeffrey Brown examined how individual differences influence whether people join and stay happy with opt-out savings programs. Procrastinators were not only more likely to end up in a default plan but also more apt to regret that turn of events down the road, says Brown, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Among state employees at the university who were offered any of three retirement plans, those who delayed making decisions were particularly likely to belong to a default plan and to want to switch to another plan, Brown and colleagues reported in September 2016 in the Journal of Financial Economics. These plans serve as a substitute for Social Security and often represent an employee’s largest financial asset. The default plan is generous toward those who stay long enough to retire from the state system but less so to those who leave early. A second plan allows for a larger cash refund upon leaving the system early. A third plan enables savers to direct contributions to any of a variety of investments. Being dumped into the default plan isn’t always the best option, especially because initial plan choices are permanent.
More than 6,000 employees who joined the retirement system in or after 1999 completed e-mail questionnaires in 2012. When asked what they would do if they could go back and redo their savings choice, 17 percent of defaulters reported a strong desire to change plans. Only about 7 percent of those who actively selected a plan and 8 percent of those who intentionally chose the default wanted to change.
The likelihood of having been assigned to the default plan and wanting to switch to another plan increased steadily as employees reported higher levels of procrastination. Implications of this finding are not entirely clear, Madrian says. Individuals in the default savings plan either by choice or procrastination may, for instance, regret lots of events in their lives. If so, they can’t easily be compared with less regretful folks who chose another plan.
Requiring people to make an active choice of a retirement plan, even if they’re procrastinators, might reduce regret down the road, Madrian suspects. But given a complex, high-stakes choice — such as that faced by Illinois university employees — “it may still make sense to set a default option even if some individuals who end up in the default will regret it later.”
Researchers need to determine how defaults and other nudges instigate behavior changes before unleashing them on the public, says philosopher of science Till Grüne-Yanoff of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Hidden costs Sometimes well-intentioned, up-front attempts to get people to do what seems right come back to bite nudgers on the bottom line.
Consider e-mail prompts and reminders. Although nudges were originally conceived to encourage people to accept an option unthinkingly, simple attempts to curb forgetfulness and explain procedures now get folded into the nudge repertoire. Short-term success stories abound for these inexpensive messages. The 2016 report of the U.S. Social and Behavioral Sciences Team cites a case in which e-mails sent by the Department of Education to student-loan recipients, which described how to apply for a federal repayment plan, led 6,000 additional borrowers to sign up for the plan in the following three months, relative to borrowers who did not receive the explanatory e-mail. Messages were tailored to borrowers’ circumstances, such as whether they previously expressed interest in the payback plan or had stopped making loan repayments.
The U.K. Behavioural Insights Team — now a global company with offices in Britain, North America, Australia and Singapore — also sees value in short, informational nudges.
One of the company’s projects produced an unexpected twist. Low-income New Orleans residents who hadn’t seen a primary care physician in more than two years — 21,442 of them — received one of three text messages to set up a free medical appointment. Telling people that they had been selected for a free appointment worked best, leading 1.4 percent of recipients to sign up, versus 1 percent of those who got an information-only text. But a text asking people to “take care of yourself so you can take care of the ones you love” backfired, resulting in only 0.7 percent of recipients making appointments. Uptake for all three groups was low, but the study suggested that nudges that unwittingly trigger bad feelings (guilt or shame) can easily go awry, Aarhus University’s Damgaard says. A case in point is a study submitted for publication by Damgaard and behavioral economist Christina Gravert of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. E-mailed donation reminders sent to people who had contributed to a Danish anti-poverty charity increased the number of donations in the short term, but also triggered an upturn in the number of people unsubscribing from the list.
People’s annoyance at receiving reminders perceived as too frequent or pushy cost the charity money over the long haul, Damgaard holds. Losses of list subscribers more than offset the financial gains from the temporary uptick in donations, she and Gravert conclude.
“Researchers have tended to overlook the hidden costs of nudging,” Damgaard says.
In one experiment, more than 17,000 previous donors to a Danish charity received an e-mail asking them to donate within 10 days. About half received an additional reminder one week later. Reminders yielded 46 donations, versus 30 donations from people sent only one e-mail. But over the next month, 318 reminded donors unsubscribed from the e-mail list, as opposed to 186 of those who received one e-mail. To Damgaard and Gravert, reminders were money losers — especially if sent more than once.
A second experiment examined more than 43,000 Danish charity donors split into three groups. The number of unsubscribers reached 71 among those sent an e-mail informing them that digital reminders would be sent every month. Among those receiving the same e-mail plus an announcement that only one reminder would be sent in the next three months, 44 people abandoned the mailing list. That’s what a digital sigh of relief looks like. An e-mail that combined a notice of monthly reminders with a promise of a donation from an anonymous sponsor for every mailing list donation slightly lowered annoyance at the prospect of monthly reminders — 52 unsubscribed.
The limits of nudge There are at least two ways to think about unintended drawbacks to nudges. Behavioral economists including Damgaard take an optimistic stance. They see value in determining how nudges work over the long haul, for better and worse. In that way, researchers can target people most likely to benefit from specific nudges. Few schemes to change behavior, including nudges, alter people’s lives for the better in a big and lasting way, cautions Harvard behavioral economist and nudge proponent Todd Rogers. “One of the most important questions in behavioral science right now is, how do we induce persistent behavior change?”
But those already critical of libertarian paternalism say that new findings back up their pessimistic view of what nudges can do. When past charity donors in Denmark fork over more money in response to an e-mail reminder and then bolt from the mailing list, as reported by Damgaard and Gravert, they’re demonstrating that even a small-scale nudge can trigger resistance, says political scientist Frank Mols of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “It verges on ridiculous to claim that nudges can change attitudes or behavior related to huge social problems, such as crime or climate change,” he says.
Nudges wrongly assume that each person makes decisions in isolation, Mols contends. People belong to various groups that frame the way they make sense of the world, he says. Rather than nudging, lasting behavior change entails persuasion techniques long exploited by advertisers: altering how people view their social identities. Coors beer, for instance, has long been marketed to small-town folks and city dwellers alike as the choice of rugged, outdoorsy individualists. In the noncommercial realm, Mols points to a successful 2006 campaign to reduce water use in Queensland during a severe drought. Average per capita water use dropped substantially and stayed lower after the drought broke in 2009. That’s because the campaign included advertisements targeting citizens’ view of themselves as “Queenslanders,” he says. A good Queenslander became redefined as a “water-wise” person who consumed as little of the resource as possible.
Queensland’s persuasive approach to water conservation avoided ethical concerns that dog nudges, Mols adds. Choice architects’ conviction that people possess biased minds in need of expert guidance to achieve good lives cuts off debate about what constitutes a good life, he argues.
Elspeth Kirkman, a policy implementation specialist who heads the U.K. Behavioural Insights Team’s North American office in New York City, sees no ethical problem with nudges that people can reject anytime they want. But she acknowledges that ethical gray areas exist. “It’s not always clear when an intervention is a nudge and when it’s coercive manipulation,” she says. Nudge carefully and monitor an intervention’s intended and unintended effects for as long as possible, Kirkman advises.
Even amid calls for caution, nudges are expanding their reach. With input from the Behavioural Insights Team, a U.K. law passed in March 2016 and slated to take effect in April 2018 imposes a soft drink tax that rises with increasing sugar content. The law aims to encourage soft drink companies to switch from high-sugar products to artificially sweetened and low-sugar beverages in an effort to reduce obesity. The U.K. soft drink firm Lucozade Ribena Suntory and the retail company Tesco announced last November plans to cut sugar in soft drinks by at least 50 percent to escape the looming tax.
The law might prod consumers to change too, if companies stand their ground but raise prices of high-sugar drinks due to the new tax, Kirkman predicts.
In nudges as in life, though, the best-laid plans can tank. Perhaps scientists will discover serious health risks in artificial sweeteners currently considered safe, reviving soda makers’ sugar dependence. Maybe a black market for old-school soda will pop up in Britain, sending soft drink lovers to back-alley Coke dealers for sugar fixes.
The law of unintended consequences is always taxing. This article appears in the March 18, 2017, issue of Science News with the headline, “Nudge Backlash: Steering people’s decisions with simple tactics can come with a downside.”
Large, detachable scales make a newly discovered species of gecko a tough catch. When a predator grabs hold, Madagascar’s Geckolepis megalepis strips down and slips away, looking more like slimy pink Silly Putty than a rugged lizard.
All species of Geckolepis geckos have tear-off scales that regrow within a few weeks, but G. megalepis boasts the largest. Some of its scales reach nearly 6 millimeters long. Mark Scherz, a herpetologist and taxonomist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and colleagues describe the new species February 7 in PeerJ.
The hardness and density of the oversized scales may help the gecko to escape being dinner, Scherz says. Attacking animals probably get their claws or teeth stuck on the scales while G. megalepis contracts its muscles, loosening the connection between the scales and the translucent tissue underneath. The predator is left with a mouthful of armor, but no meat. “It’s almost ridiculous,” Scherz says, “how easy it is for these geckos to lose their scales.”
