Do Social Security Statements Affect Knowledge and Behavior?

Deciding when to retire and claim Social Security benefits is one of the most important financial decisions that workers face. Therefore, ensuring that they have easy access to clear and timely information about their benefit options is a key goal for policymakers. In 1995, the Social Security Administration introduced the “Statement,” a record of past earnings and a summary of estimated benefits at selected claiming ages that is designed to help workers plan for retirement. The Statement is now mailed annually to all workers age 25 and over. While the Statement has the potential to be a very valuable tool, little research has been done on its impact. A Gallup survey revealed that individuals who had received a Statement had a significant increase in their understanding of basic Social Security features. The most recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report on the Statement found that 66 percent of workers remember receiving a Statement and 90 percent of these workers say that they remember the amount of estimated Social Security benefits. These findings suggest that the Statement might improve knowledge, but provide no information about whether it changes behavior. Both topics are the subject of this brief. This brief is organized as follows. The first section explains the data and methodology used in the analysis. The second and third sections present the findings on how the Statement impacts knowledge and behavior, respectively. The final section concludes that the Statement does increase knowledge for individuals who were not inclined to seek the information on their own, but the Statement does not appear to change behavior.

Social Ethic Behavior Simulation Project

Ethics has usually been considered as the domain of the intrinsic personal belief. Some even claimed that no objective knowledge of ethics is possible. We propose a quite new way of approaching the problem. Although ethics as a part of the personal belief cannot be examined scientifically, the claim that it is not possible to study ethical rules as means of strategy choice is false. The model we bring forward handles the role of ethical rules from the perspective of evolutionary fitnes

Social support, social control and health behavior change in spouses

Our work on support processes in intimate relationships has focused on how partners in committed relationships help one another contend with personal difficulties, and how partners elicit and provide support in their day-to-day interactions. We are particularly interested in how these support skills relate to marital outcomes (Pasch & Bradbury, 1998; Pasch, Harris, Sullivan, & Bradbury, 2004; Sullivan, Pasch, Eldridge, & Bradbury, 1998) and how they relate to behavior change in spouses (Sullivan, Pasch, Johnson, & Bradbury, 2006), especially health behavior changes. In this chapter, we review research examining the effects of social support and social control on spouses\u27 health behaviors, propose a theory to account for discrepancies in these findings, and report initial data examining the usefulness of this theory in understanding the relationship between social support, social control, and partner health behavior

Rehabilitation and social behavior: Experiments in prison

Despite the economic and social significance of crime reduction and criminals’ rehabilitation, research evaluating the effects of incarceration on behavior is surprisingly scarce. We conduct an experiment with 105 prison inmates and complement it with administrative data in order to explore several aspects of their social behavior. We first perform a comprehensive analysis of behavior in three economic games, finding evidence of discrimination against a sample from outside prison. In addition, our regression analysis reveals that inmates generally become less pro-social towards this out-group the longer they remain incarcerated. Finally, we introduce and evaluate a priming intervention that asks inmates to reflect on their time spent in prison. This intervention has a very sizeable and significant impact, increasing pro-sociality towards the out-group. Hence, a simple, low-cost intervention of this sort can have desirable effects in promoting rehabilitation and integration into social and economic life after release

Social Image Concerns and Pro-Social Behavior

Using longitudinal data on the entire population of blood donors in an Italian town, we examine how donors respond to an award scheme which rewards them with “medals” when they reach certain donation quotas. Our results indicate that donors significantly increase the frequency of their donations immediately before reaching the thresholds for which the rewards are given, but only if the prizes are publicly announced in the local newspaper and awarded in a public ceremony. The results are robust to several specifications, sample definitions, and controls for observable and unobservable heterogeneity. Our findings are consistent with social image concerns being a primary motivator of pro-social behavior, and indicate that symbolic prizes are most effective as motivators when they are awarded publicly. Because we do not detect a reduction in donation frequency after the quotas are reached, this incentive based on social prestige leads to a net increase in the frequency of donations.incentives, awards, public good provision, pro-social behavior, public health, social prestige

Integrative Genomics Reveals the Genetics and Evolution of the Honey Bee’s Social Immune System

Social organisms combat pathogens through individual innate immune responses or through social immunity—behaviors among individuals that limit pathogen transmission within groups. Although we have a relatively detailed understanding of the genetics and evolution of the innate immune system of animals, we know little about social immunity. Addressing this knowledge gap is crucial for understanding how life-history traits influence immunity, and identifying if trade-offs exist between innate and social immunity. Hygienic behavior in the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, provides an excellent model for investigating the genetics and evolution of social immunity in animals. This heritable, colony-level behavior is performed by nurse bees when they detect and remove infected or dead brood from the colony. We sequenced 125 haploid genomes from two artificially selected highly hygienic populations and a baseline unselected population. Genomic contrasts allowed us to identify a minimum of 73 genes tentatively associated with hygienic behavior. Many genes were within previously discovered QTLs associated with hygienic behavior and were predictive of hygienic behavior within the unselected population. These genes were often involved in neuronal development and sensory perception in solitary insects. We found that genes associated with hygienic behavior have evidence of positive selection within honey bees (Apis), supporting the hypothesis that social immunity contributes to fitness. Our results indicate that genes influencing developmental neurobiology and behavior in solitary insects may have been co-opted to give rise to a novel and adaptive social immune phenotype in honey bees.York University Librarie

Coexistence of Social Norms based on In- and Out-group Interactions

The question how social norms can emerge from microscopic interactions between individuals is a key problem in social sciences to explain collective behavior. In this paper we propose an agent-based model to show that randomly distributed social behavior by way of local interaction converges to a state with a multimodal distribution of behavior. This can be interpreted as a coexistence of different social norms, a result that goes beyond previous investigations. The model is discrete in time and space, behavior is characterized in a continuous state space. The adaptation of social behavior by each agent is based on attractive and repulsive forces caused by friendly and adversary relations among agents. The model is analyzed both analytically and by means of spatio-temporal computer simulations. It provides conditions under which we find convergence towards a single norm, coexistence of two opposing norms, and coexistence of a multitude of norms. For the latter case, we also show the evolution of the spatio-temporal distribution of behavior

Social Skills Group Therapy For Children With Emotional And Behavioral Problems

The topic of this research was the utilization of social skills group therapy with children with poor social skills and emotional and behavioral problems. The literature explains that group therapy has many benefits to clients that are not available in individual work with clients. Social skills group therapy is theorized to be helpful for children with mental health disorders, especially children who are physically aggressive. In this type of group therapy, it is effective to teach children the phases of using social skills and using discussion and role-play to understand each social skill. A social skills therapy group was conducted for eight weeks with six clients between the ages of eight and nine years at Children’s Intensive Services (CIS) in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The hypothesis of this research was that the social skills group would increase the pro-social behavior of the clients and decrease the anti-social behavior, especially physical aggression. A qualitative analysis was conducted of the group process, as well as a quantitative analysis of a questionnaire sent to the teachers of the group members before and after the group was conducted. Most of the members of the therapy group did at least slightly increase in pro-social behavior and at least slightly decrease in anti-social behavior, although no statistically significant changes were shown. Qualitative reports for the CIS clinicians of the group members show that their social behavior did improve after the group had finished. Not only is educating children about social skills helpful to their social functioning, but it could be used to reduce violence in schools and on a societal level, such as gang violence