clair015

Has it ever struck you that in movies the villain is pretty much always ugly? Whether you take a James Bond film, a horror movie, or a Disney character, the bad guy is usually rather ‘esthetically challenged’, dotted with rather unsightly, coarse features. Well, it now appears that these film makers are rather more realistic in their portrayal of the bad guys than you might have guessed. Criminals – as research by professors Naci Mocan from Louisiana State and Erdal Tekin from Georgia State University showed – are often indeed pretty ugly. Naci and Erdal obtained data on 20,745 people, who were interviewed and rated at various points during their lives (in the period 1994 – 2002). A small army of independent interviewers rated the person’s level of attractiveness (ranging from very unattractive to very attractive). Subsequently, Naci and Erdal statistically compared this indicator of physical attractiveness with the incidence of the respondent having been involved in a crime, such as p...

Do family-friendly work practices – offering flexibility in case of unexpected childcare emergencies, job sharing schemes, subsidy for childcare, entitlement to work from home, switch to part-time work, etc. – enhance the performance of the firm that adopts them? Quite a bit of research suggests they do: Several studies have provided evidence that firms offering such practices have higher levels of employee retention, organizational citizenship behavior, and work attitudes. However, I also have to admit that I am a bit skeptical of such “evidence from research”… for several reasons: First, it is often clear that the researchers conducting these studies wanted to find such a positive relationship, and I cannot suppress a suspicion that there might be just as many studies conducted that fail to turn up the same heart-warming evidence but, as a result of this failure, therefore are not published, and hence we never hear about them. Second – and at least as important – even if we’d accept ...