This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164005

We find that supporters of the major parties (Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats) have substantively different personality traits. Moreover, we show that those not identifying with any party, who are close to holding the majority, are similar to those identifying with the Conservatives. We show that these results are robust to controlling for cognitive skills and parental party preferences, and to estimation on a subsample of siblings. The relationship between personality traits and party identification is stable across birth cohorts.

Table 2: Big Five Personality Traits: Predictions.
Figure 3: Relationship between personality traits and stable party identification

Conservative core supporters are antagonistic towards others (low Agreeableness), they are closed to new experiences (low Openness), they are energetic and enthusiastic (high Extraversion), they are goal-orientated (high Conscientiousness), and they are even-tempered (low Neuroticism).

In contrast, the core supporters of the Labour Party have a pro-social and communal attitude (high Agreeableness), they are open to new experiences and ideas (high Openness), but they are more anxious, tense and discontented (high Neuroticism) and less prone to goal-directed behavior (low Conscientiousness). The core supporters of the Liberal Democrats have similar traits to the typical Labour supporters with two exceptions. First, they do not show any particular tendency towards pro-social and communal attitudes (insignificant Agreeableness). Second, they are more reserved and introverted than the more extraverted supporters of either the Conservatives or Labour (low Extraversion).

Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.00119.pdf
We revisit the debate over the appeal of extremism in the U.S. context by comparing publicly available Twitter messages written by over 355,000 political extremist followers with messages written by non-extremist U.S. users. Analysis of text-based psychological indicators supports the moral foundation theory which identifies emotion as a critical factor in determining political orientation of individuals. Extremist followers also differ from others in four of the Big Five personality traits.

Fig. 2. Comparing psychological profiles of the followers of moderate and extremist single-issue groups, compared to random users.

Overall, the differences in psychological profile between followers of extremist and moderate groups is much larger for left-wing extremists (environmentalists) than right-wing (anti-abortion and anti-immigrant).

Fig. 3. Big Five Personality Profiles.

Results show that extremist followers (whether left or right) are less agreeable, less neurotic, and more open than nonextremists.

Ideology as Motivated Cultural Cognition: How Culture Translates Personality into Policy Preferences: https://www.psa.ac.uk/sites/default/files/conference/papers/2017/Ideology%20as%20Motivated%20Cultural%20Cognition.pdf
This paper summarises the results of a quantitative analysis testing the theory that culture acts as an intermediary in the relationship between individual perceptual tendencies and political orientation. Political psychologists have long observed that more “left-wing” individuals tend to be more comfortable than “right-wing” individuals with ambiguity, disorder, and uncertainty, to equivocate more readily between conflicting viewpoints, and to be more willing to change their opinions. These traits are often summarised under the blanket term of “open-mindedness”. A recent increase in cross-cultural studies, however, has indicated that these relationships are far less robust, and even reversed, in social contexts outside of North America and Western Europe. The sociological concept of culture may provide an answer to this inconsistency: emergent idea-networks, irreducible to individuals, which nonetheless condition psychological motivations, so that perceptual factors resulting in left-wing preferences in one culture may result in opposing preferences in another. The key is that open-mindedness leads individuals to attack the dominant ideas which they encounter: if prevailing orthodoxies happen to be left-wing, then open minded individuals may become right-wing in protest. Using conditional process analysis of the British Election Study, I find evidence for three specific mechanisms whereby culture interferes with perceptual influences on politics. Conformity to the locally dominant culture mediates these influences, in the sense that open-minded people in Britain are only more left-wing because they are less culturally conformal. This relationship is itself moderated both by cultural group membership and by Philip Converse’s notion of “constraint”, individual-level connectivity between ideas, such that the strength of perceptual influence differs significantly between cultural groups and between levels of constraint to the idea of the political spectrum. Overall, I find compelling evidence for the importance of culture in shaping perceptions of policy choices.

We focus on the results of a United Kingdom-wide examination, the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), which is administered at the end of compulsory education at age 16. GCSE scores were obtained for 13,306 twins at age 16, whom we also assessed contemporaneously on 83 scales that were condensed to nine broad psychological domains, including intelligence, self-efficacy, personality, well-being, and behavior problems. The mean of GCSE core subjects (English, mathematics, science) is more heritable (62%) than the nine predictor domains (35–58%). Each of the domains correlates significantly with GCSE results, and these correlations are largely mediated genetically. The main finding is that, although intelligence accounts for more of the heritability of GCSE than any other single domain, the other domains collectively account for about as much GCSE heritability as intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE. We conclude that the high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence.

Employing standard structural equation modeling techniques, we estimate that >40% of the variation in subjects' rejection behavior is explained by additive genetic effects. Our estimates also suggest a very modest role for common environment as a source of phenotypic variation.

- data: likes on facebook
- outperforms peer ratings (validated by self-other agreement) and self ratings (validated by correlation w/ objective life outcomes)

- Simon Baron-Cohen

- men had higher CRT scores
- higher CRT -> lower risk aversion for men, more patience for women

relevant thread (discussion of Matt Bruenig's passive income thing): https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/815644778641571842
other study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533005775196732

Our main finding is that risk aversion and impatience both vary systematically with cognitive ability. Individuals with higher cognitive ability are significantly more willing to take risks in the lottery experiments and are significantly more patient over the yearlong time horizon studied in the intertemporal choice experiment. The correlation between cognitive ability and risk aversion is present for both young and old, and for males and females, although the relationship is somewhat weaker for females and younger individuals.

predicts Big Five+"leadership", can use FB likes or writing sample

some missing venues: ITCS, QCRYPT, QIP, COLT (last has some big impact on the margins)