The Effects of Autobiographical Growth Narratives on Math Performance in Women

Women suffer from the negative stereotype that they are innately worse at math compared to men, which contributes to a gender gap in math fields (Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999). However, this stereotype has a greater negative impact on women with fixed mindsets, who believe that intelligence is inflexible and innate (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002). Mindset interventions thus far have sought to shift fixed mindset to growth mindset, characterized by the belief that effort can increase intelligence, through in-class workshops or lectures about the plasticity of the brain and the malleability of intelligence (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Dweck, 2000; Dweck, 2008). The current study improves upon existing mindset interventions through the inclusion of a writing task that asks participants to generate autobiographical narratives about growth experiences. This intervention should create an internalization of growth mindset that is longer lasting, less susceptible to counter-information, and more directive for behavior than existing interventions (Reich & Arkin, 2006; Wilson, 2011; Aronson, 1999). Participants’ theories of math intelligence were measured, and then participants were placed into a growth narrative condition, a growth article condition, or a high-point narrative condition, which served as a control. Participants then took a math assessment followed by measures of task involvement, enjoyment, and effort. Analyses showed no main effect of condition; there was no difference on math performance or task measures between participants who wrote about growth, read about growth, or wrote about a positive experience. However, there was a significant main effect of initial mindset on math performance, task involvement, enjoyment, and effort, such that initial growth mindset correlated with better performance and higher scores on all the task measures. Limitations and implications for the results are discussed

Is Self-interest at the Root of Political Behavior? An Examination of the Effects of Dark Personality and Demographics on Political Beliefs and Actions

Prediction of political behavior is of interest to scientists in the fields of psychology, sociology, and politics, as well as to the lay public. Previous research has connected personality to broad political leanings, but little if any published research has examined how personality relates to voting behavior. The current study built on earlier work by examining the connections among the Dark Triad of personality (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism), demographics, specific political beliefs, and political behaviors. We hypothesized that dark personality would relate to political beliefs such that those higher on the Dark Triad would show stronger support for policies that benefit their demographic groups, because the Dark Triad represents self-interested personality. We expected that self-interested political beliefs would in turn predict voting behavior. In a diverse community sample acquired online, our hypotheses were not broadly supported, in that the Dark Triad and demographics did not interact to predict political beliefs or behaviors. Rather, we found that the Dark Triad and political beliefs interacted to predict voting behavior in the 2016 presidential election such that among those with liberal beliefs, the Dark Triad had little effect, but among conservatives the effect was stronger. Specifically, conservatives higher on the Dark Triad were less likely to have voted for Donald Trump than those lower on the Dark Triad. We speculated that this result is due to the conformity component of the Dark Triad

Colleges Should Foster Growth in Young-Voter Turnout

In Virginia\u27s recent tight race for governor, the three candidates could not agree on much of anything, yet all found a common cause that brought them together at least momentarily. They all participated in a forum at Virginia Commonwealth University on how to court young voters across the state — a signal that politicians are recognizing young people as a new and important audience in Virginia politics. Ultimately, all three candidates promised to make up the state\u27s $340-million budget shortfall for higher education

Simplifying Activity-On-Edge Graphs

We formalize the simplification of activity-on-edge graphs used for visualizing project schedules, where the vertices of the graphs represent project milestones, and the edges represent either tasks of the project or timing constraints between milestones. In this framework, a timeline of the project can be constructed as a leveled drawing of the graph, where the levels of the vertices represent the time at which each milestone is scheduled to happen. We focus on the following problem: given an activity-on-edge graph representing a project, find an equivalent activity-on-edge graph (one with the same critical paths) that has the minimum possible number of milestone vertices among all equivalent activity-on-edge graphs. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm for solving this graph minimization problem

On the Treewidth of Hanoi Graphs

The objective of the well-known Towers of Hanoi puzzle is to move a set of disks one at a time from one of a set of pegs to another, while keeping the disks sorted on each peg. We propose an adversarial variation in which the first player forbids a set of states in the puzzle, and the second player must then convert one randomly-selected state to another without passing through forbidden states. Analyzing this version raises the question of the treewidth of Hanoi graphs. We find this number exactly for three-peg puzzles and provide nearly-tight asymptotic bounds for larger numbers of pegs

Improved Distributed Algorithms for Random Colorings

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a widely-used algorithmic tool for sampling from high-dimensional distributions, a notable example is the equilibirum distribution of graphical models. The Glauber dynamics, also known as the Gibbs sampler, is the simplest example of an MCMC algorithm; the transitions of the chain update the configuration at a randomly chosen coordinate at each step. Several works have studied distributed versions of the Glauber dynamics and we extend these efforts to a more general family of Markov chains. An important combinatorial problem in the study of MCMC algorithms is random colorings. Given a graph $G$ of maximum degree $\Delta$ and an integer $k\geq\Delta+1$, the goal is to generate a random proper vertex $k$-coloring of $G$. Jerrum (1995) proved that the Glauber dynamics has $O(n\log{n})$ mixing time when $k>2\Delta$. Fischer and Ghaffari (2018), and independently Feng, Hayes, and Yin (2018), presented a parallel and distributed version of the Glauber dynamics which converges in $O(\log{n})$ rounds for $k>(2+\varepsilon)\Delta$ for any $\varepsilon>0$. We improve this result to $k>(11/6-\delta)\Delta$ for a fixed $\delta>0$. This matches the state of the art for randomly sampling colorings of general graphs in the sequential setting. Whereas previous works focused on distributed variants of the Glauber dynamics, our work presents a parallel and distributed version of the more general flip dynamics presented by Vigoda (2000) (and refined by Chen, Delcourt, Moitra, Perarnau, and Postle (2019)), which recolors local maximal two-colored components in each step.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figure

Angles of Arc-Polygons and Lombardi Drawings of Cacti

We characterize the triples of interior angles that are possible in non-self-crossing triangles with circular-arc sides, and we prove that a given cyclic sequence of angles can be realized by a non-self-crossing polygon with circular-arc sides whenever all angles are at most pi. As a consequence of these results, we prove that every cactus has a planar Lombardi drawing (a drawing with edges depicted as circular arcs, meeting at equal angles at each vertex) for its natural embedding in which every cycle of the cactus is a face of the drawing. However, there exist planar embeddings of cacti that do not have planar Lombardi drawings.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. To be published in Proc. 33rd Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, 202

Validation and Verification Vignettes: More Results from an Empirical Study of Consumer Understanding of Debt Collection Validation Notices

The Federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act obliges debt collectors to provide certain notices to consumers from whom they are attempting to collect debts. This Article is our second to report findings from the first academic study of consumer understanding of one of those notices, commonly called the validation notice. We showed consumers different versions of collection letters and then asked questions to measure their understanding of the notices. This Article explores some issues not discussed in our first Article. For example, in this Article, we examine what consumers thought collectors would have to do in response to a request for validation. We found a gulf between what many of our respondents expect when requesting verification of a debt and what some courts say collectors must provide. We also attempted to determine whether consumers found the validation notice salient. Most respondents did not find the notice salient enough to mention when asked an open-ended question about the contents of the two-page collection letter they saw. Because some collectors sell disputed debts to other collectors after consumers dispute a debt, we also wondered whether consumers would repeatedly dispute debts. We found that significantly fewer respondents said they would dispute a debt with a second collector when they had already disputed it once, though most said they would dispute the debt a second time. That finding suggests that some consumers will surrender some rights simply because they grow tired of asserting them. We also report here findings building upon our earlier Article, which raised serious questions about consumer understanding of a commonly-used form of validation notice. This Article reports that a fifth of the respondents who said they would write a letter if told they needed to do so to dispute a debt they did not owe failed to realize that the letter they saw said that the collector would have to verify the debt if they wrote twenty-five days after receipt of the collector’s demand for payment—even though the demand letter had been approved by the Seventh Circuit. On the positive side, we found that seeing a validation notice made a difference on some questions, though not on others. After discussing these and other findings, the Article offers some recommendations to lawmakers for addressing the problems revealed in our study