This week we look at how the stories we tell about ourselves shape the collective

Research Roundup

Risky Ideas

How do incentives affect innovation? They can drive us to look beyond ourselves.

The role of incentive is especially strong in encouraging engagement with “different” ideas. Men and women tend to engage with different sorts of ideas, but this changes dramatically when “incentives [encourage] engagement with female ideas”. If “decision-makers are predominantly male”, incentives to engage with ideas outside their norm substantially increase uptake of ideas coming from women. As a result, “women specializing in traditionally male-dominated fields are faring significantly better than their counterparts in female-dominated fields and even outperform their male peers”.

An meaningful area where this plays out is in patent awards. “85% of patent applications in the United States include no female inventors”, and one of the biggest reasons is that “applications from women are less likely to continue in the patent process after receiving an early rejection”. However, this gap is greatly reduced when firms have an explicit interest in the outcome of the patents.

In-words & Out-words

In my research on the neuroscience of trust I talk about ingroups and outgroups—it seems we might also talk about in-words and out-words.

The very words we use reinforce our differing perspective on the world. “When describing events, speakers tend to mention people who are more like them first”, which in turn makes the “perspectives of their own social groups” more salient. The phenomenon occurs across “speakers from multiple demographic groups, both English and Chinese speakers and both first- and second-language English speakers”. In the end the bias is implicit: 

“words that refer to in-group than out-group members” are simply more cognitively accessible.

What does this mean for our attitudes about others? In an analysis of “7.1 million implicit and explicit attitude tests” on sexuality, race, skin-tone, age, disability, and body-weight going back to 2007, “all explicit attitudes decreased in bias between 22% (age attitudes) and 98% (race attitudes).” However, “consistent across demographic groups” implicit attitudes have changed much less—sexuality (down 65%), race (26%), and skin-tone (25%)—or not at all—age, disability, and body-weight.

So, bias true has decreased over the last 20 years, but our word choices tell a different story than the one we tell ourselves.

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Weekly Indulgence

My team and I at The Human Trust contributed to a few different reports that were released last week. Please share broadly!

The World Economic Forum interviewed me for “ChatWTO: An Analysis of Generative Artificial Intelligence and International Trade 2024”

We also contributed some analytical power to Open for Business on “The Economic Case for LGBTQ+ Inclusion in Southeast Asia”.

They also show that “Anti-LGBTQ Laws Cost Uganda $1.6 Billion in 12 Months, Study Finds”, as covered here by Bloomberg.

And the Nobel Prizes

The Nobel Prize world moved right into my neighborhood, this year, and started buying up property. John Hopfield, who received the Physics award this year along with Geoffrey Hinton, is my grad advisor (once removed)—one of his students, Terry Sejnowski, was my undergraduate honors thesis advisor and the advisor to my own PhD advisor, Mike Lewicki. By contrast, I was only a grad student host to Hinton when he gave a talk on Deep Belief Networks at CMU in…2005…2006? (Too bad Rumelhart wasn't around to be honored.)

I know a few amazing people at Deep Mind. I respect the recipients of the Chemistry award this year, it seems like all of the Deep Mind team could have been included (like they often do for the Peace Prize).

Finally, the Economics award included Daron Acemoglu. I devote an entire chapter on “How to Robot-Proof Your Kids” to his work in collaboration with David Autor. I’m also a fan of the work honored by this award, on the value of institutions on economic growth and inclusion.

Stage & Screen

• October 23, Toronto: Let's spend the day together at Metropolitan University's Future of Work conference
• October 28-19, Rome: Are you as shocked as I that this is my first ever visit to Italy? I'll be talking AI and Humans for the UN.
• November 4, Copenhagen: Novo No
• December 7-8, London: Oxford International Speakers Panel: "What it means to be human in the age of AI"

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

On my flights to and from NYC I binged the 3rd season of The Legend of Vox Machina from the Critical Role team. I played AD&D back in the day of 18/00 strength, and it's just fun to get the vicarious experience of playing again. Since I didn't really watch the Critical Role's first campaign, I very much look forward to The Mighty Nein!

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming