Ershov, Daniel, and Matthew Mitchell. “The Effects of Advertising Disclosure Regulations on Social Media: Evidence From Instagram” (2021)(PDF)
Abstract: We study the effects of advertising disclosure regulations in social media markets. Theory generates ambiguous predictions about the effects of regulations on the equilibrium amount of advertising content, user engagement and welfare. Using data from a large sample of Instagram influencers in Germany and Spain and a difference-in-differences approach, we empirically evaluate the effects of German disclosure regulations on post content and follower engagement. We measure whether posts include suggested disclosure terms and use text-based approaches (keywords, machine learning) to assess whether a post is sponsored. We show a substantial adoption of disclosure after regulations, but also an increase in sponsored content including undisclosed sponsored content. We also find reductions in engagement, suggesting that followers were likely negatively affected.
Why on earth would someone have a slide with nothing but Kylie Jenner Instagram posts? Tune in to my VQMS talk on YouTube to find out… @M_ttM_https://t.co/SRi9Up1zCq
We show that advertising disclosure regulations on social media have real effects.
Influencers in Germany increase both the number of posts that are labelled as disclosed and disclosure rates of sponsored posts after regulation is introduced in late 2016.
Our difference-in-differences estimates show that disclosure regulations affect the type of content that influencers post online. Results from all classification methods show a statistically significant increase in the share of sponsored content posted by German influencers after regulations. The magnitude of changes is substantial relative to a baseline pre-regulation mean of between 15 and 30 percentage points. At a minimum, sponsored shares increase by approximately 3 percentage points (10%). At a maximum, sponsored shares increase by 7 percentage points (over 50%). The share increases are due to increases in the number of sponsored posts since the number of total posts per influencer does not change. Disclosure increases after regulation, but there is still a substantial number of posts that are not disclosed and the sponsorship rate among undisclosed posts increases. We also show changes in engagement in response to regulations. Both the mean number of likes and the mean number of comments that influencers in Germany receive falls after regulations are introduced. This is consistent with followers in social media markets disliking sponsored content.
Prior empirical literature has studied the impact of disclosure regulations on paid intermediariesfor example, in the market for insurance advice (Bhattacharya et al. 2019), and for financial advice (Anagol et al. 2017). In these markets, however, there is direct compensation between the intermediaries and consumers. Changing disclosure rules may then have different effects.
Our findings on increasing sponsorship, including increased hidden sponsorship suggest that forcing platforms to disclose advertising may in fact increase the amount of advertising that consumers are exposed to. This is a key concern for policy-makers and regulators.
Hi Wilte, thx for taking a close look!
re: increases in ads around xmas, you see this (to a lesser extent) in fig. A1. There's likely diffs in brands that advertise around xmas & not around xmas, explaining diffs in disclosure.
Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds (p5)
From Henrich’s previous book (Ch14) The Secret of Our Success
Sola scriptura (from Protestantism) ➡️ literacy ⬆️ ➡️ “psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and in the long run-greater eco nomic prosperity” (p15)
Part I: The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies
WEIRD; rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical
More individualistic countries are richer, more innovative, and more economically productive. They possess more effective governments, which more capably furnish public services and infrastructure, like roads, schools, electricity, and water (p30)
Evidence suggests WEIRD people suffer more severely from Cognitive Dissonance
Fundamental Attribution Error is not fundamental; it's WEIRD.
WEIRD people biased to attribute actions/behavioral patterns to what's "inside" others, relying on inferences about dispositional traits
Chapter 1 also draws on this paper, which I guess is also precursor to the book:
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
Evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire immense amount behavioral info; motivations, heuristics & beliefs that are central to survival & reproduction
we alone can accumulate increasingly complex bodies of cultural knowledge
By providing psychological anchors, our instincts for kin altruism, pair bonding, and incest aversion help explain why marriage and family have long been our most persistent institutions.
institutions rooted in the above-described instincts: kin-based institutions (p75)
As you've seen and will see again, cultural evolution has fashioned rituals, marriage systems, economic exchanges, and other institutions in order to activate, manipulate, and extend aspects of our interdependence psychology. (p82)
Key aspects about human nature:
1️⃣ Humans are a cultural species
2️⃣ Social norms are assembled into institutions by cultural evolution
3️⃣ Institutions usually remain inscrutable to those operating within them – like water to fish
Ch3
At the dawn of agriculture, all societies were built on institutions rooted in family ties, ritual bonds, and enduring interpersonal relationships
Social norms related kin-based institutions only became more complex and intensive as societies began to scale up (p88)
Thus, early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition. (p104)
How from premodern states to WEIRD societies?
No direct path, entirely different institutional foundation
Instead of intensive kinship up & down social strata, WEIRD have norms and beliefs, often backed by laws, that actively inhibit such kin-based institutions from forming
Chapter 4: The Gods Are Watching. Behave!
Religions fostered trade by increasing trust, legitimized political au thority, and expanded people's conceptions of their communities by shifting focus from their own clans or tribes to larger imagined communities like "all Muslims"
Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition, favored emergence/spread beliefs that endowed gods w/ power to punish & reward human actions
These beliefs evolved not because accurate representations of reality but because they help communities beat their competitors
p139
Hearing call to prayer in Moroccan souk influences shopkeeper behavior: During call, 100% give all to charity in modified dictator game, at other times: 59%
Women's greater religious faith in many populations may be a by-product of their superior capacity for empathy (p129)
If percentage of people who believe in hell (and heaven) increases by roughly 20 %-points (eg 40% ➡️60%) a country's economy grow by an extra 10 percent over the next decade (Barro & McCleary)
By contrast, the greater the percentage of people who believe in only heaven, the higher the murder rate.
That's right, believing only in heaven is associated with more murder. (p147)
five of the kinship traits that characterize WEIRD societies:
(1) bilateral descent
(2) little or no cousin marriage
(3) monogamous marriage only
(4) nuclear family households
(5) neolocal residence
The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in "figuring out" how to dismantle kin-based institutions (extreme package of prohibitions, prescriptions, and preferences surrounding marriage and the family)
while at the same time catalyzing its own spread
p161
Many religious groups competing, The Catholic Church was just the "lucky one" that bumbled across an effective recombination of supernatural beliefs and practices.
p176
The Western Church came to hold an extreme set of incest taboos, perceived to be rooted in their God's will, that had big downstream consequences and eventually opened the door to WEIRD psychology.
p178
Marriage & Family Planning (MFP) pattern in Western Europe (Eastern Orthodox is MFP-light)
1️⃣ Monogamous nuclear families with neolocal residence
2️⃣ Late marriage
3️⃣ Many women never marry
4️⃣ Smaller families and lower fertility
5️⃣ Premarital labor period
p189-190
Chapter 6 Psychological Differences, Families, and the Church
Strikingly, the stronger the historical MFP (Marriage & Family Planning) dosage for a population, the WEIRDer their psychology is today.
p194
Correlations w/ Kinship Intensity Index (KII) and w/ % of cousin marriage:
↗️ “tightness” (more social norms)
↗️ Asch conformity test
↗️ 🎲 =6
↘️ Individualism
↘️ Out-In Group trust
↘️ Universalism
↘️ Contribution Public Goods Game (PGG)
↘️ 🩸 donations
↘️ Analytical thinking
diplomats from countries with strong kin-based institutions ac cumulated many more unpaid parking tickets than diplomats from coun tries with weak kin-based institutions
Goal of Chapter 7: convince you that the broad patterns of global psychological variation are consistent with a causal pathway:
⛪️’s MFP (🤵👰♀️&👨👩👧👦) forms ➡️ kinship intensity ⬇️ ➡️ shift psychological patterns in WEIRD ways
Ok, real chapter 7 is Europe and Asia
European communities in regions that spent longer under the sway of the MFP are psychologically WEIRDer today
knowing the local MFP dosage allows us to explain ~75% of variation in rates of first cousin marriage across regions in 🇫🇷🇮🇹🇪🇸🇹🇳
Simply knowing the rate of cousin marriage allows us to explain between 36 percent (conformity obedience) and 70 percent (impersonal fairness) of the regional differences in our four psychological dimensions, from cosmopolitan France to the remotest parts of southeastern Turkey.
the percentage of wealth that households keep in cash goes from about 10 percent in Italian provinces with rates of cousin marriage near zero to over 40 percent in 🇮🇹provinces with high rates of cousin marriage (Figure 7.4B).
🇨🇳 (&🇮🇳) those from more intensive paddy rice regions revealed greater loyalty (or more cronyism) toward their friends
Those from regions less reliant on paddy rice treated strangers and friends more similarly (& were more inclined to think analytically)
Summary Ch7
🔹 The longer a population was exposed to the Western Church, the weaker its families and WEIRDer its psychological patterns are today
🔹 effect of kin-based institutions on people's psychology is culturally persistent
🔹similar patterns in 🇨🇳🇮🇳
Chapter 8
getting married and becoming a father lowers a man's testosterone. If he divorces, his T levels typically climb again
the men who were initially highest in testosterone were also the most likely to get married
Monogamous marriage changes men psychologically/hormonally & has downstream effects on societies
Advantage in intergroup competition
By suppressing male-male competition, monogamous marriage shifts men's psychology; reduce crime & zero-sum thinking, promoting broader trust
p283
Part III: New Insitutions, New Psychologies
Chapter 9: Of commerce and Cooperation
a sturdy and replicable correlation between market integration (eg % of purchased calories in diet) and impersonal fairness (%offered in Dictator game)
Impersonal markets can thus have dual effects on our social psychology.
They simultaneously reduce our interpersonal prosociality within our in-groups
and increase our impersonal prosociality with acquaintances and strangers.
p300
Chapter 10 Domesticating the Competition
psychologically, war tends to
1️⃣tighten our interdependent-network bonds
2️⃣strengthen our commitments to important social norms
3️⃣deepen our religious devotion.
For every 1,000 km closer a region is to core of earthquake zone, an active volcano, or storm center, % of people affirming supernatural beliefs ~+10 percentile points
Such effects can be found on every continent and in most major religions
p329
Social and psychological shifts induced by war exposure (& in context of Church’s MFP) would have catalyzed the formation of new formal organizations (voluntary social groups), laws, and governments built to fit a more individualistic and impersonal psychology (ie WEIRD)
p333
Banking regulation increased the intensity of intergroup competition, which in turn drove up impersonal trust
Accompanying the spread of clock-time psychology in Europe, an expanding middle class began working longer and harder.
This *Industrious Revolution*, as the economic historian Jan de Vries calls it, can be tracked back to at least 1650
(p367)
Intensive kinship, through strong normative obligations to web of distant relatives: pressures that disincentivize cultivation self-control or patience
Manage risk, retirement, collectively-through relationships-instead of via individual self-control and secure saving
p377
Did the Tsimane' (Bolivia) reveal the WEIRD-5?
No, not even close. The Tsimane' data reveal only two dimensions of personality: "interpersonal prosociality" and "industriousness".
Recap II & III
Psychological changes wrought by cultural evolution during Middle Ages;
Ch5-8 Demolition Europe's kin-based institutions
Ch 9 expansion impersonal markets
Ch 10 rise intergroup competition
Ch 11 growth of broad, mobile Europe & division of labor in urban centers
Part IV Birthing the Modern World
Ch 12 Law, Science, and Religion
WEIRDer psychology in preindustrial European populations favored the development and spread of certain kinds of laws, norms, and principles including those dealing w/both human relations and the physical world
An increasingly WEIRD psychology fostered development of more democratic and participatory forms of governance, and, once established, these formal institutions pushed WEIRD psychology further along
The WEIRDer your psychology, the less inclined you'll be to focus on relational ties, and the more motivated you'll be to start making up invisible properties, assigning them to individuals, and using them to justify universally applicable laws (p428)
Chapter 13: Escape Velocity
Why Industrial Revolution in Europe?
European masters (vs 🇨🇳🇮🇳) seeded their skills much more broadly across the population, thereby fueling more recombination and faster cumulative cultural evolution (p446-447)
Experiment: reproduce target image, get info from 1 or 5 predecessors
5-1 treatment (cf voluntary association): ~20% score in Generation 1; >85% in gen 10
No systematic improvement over generations in 1-1 treatment (cf parent-child transmission)
Dissolution of intensive kinship spurred urbanization in Europe & altered psychology
These psychological and social changes would have increased the interconnectedness of populations and fueled greater innovation
The competition among cities, states, religions, universities, and other voluntary associations helped keep Europe's collective brain humming.
Social & psychological shifts sparked by Church's dismantling of intensive kinship explain innovation-driven economic expansion of last centuries
7 contributors to Europe's collective brain:
1⃣apprenticeship institutions
2⃣urbanization &impersonal markets
3⃣transregional monastic orders
4⃣universities
5⃣Republic of Letters
6⃣knowledge societies
7⃣new pragmatic religious faiths that promoted schooling
cultural evolution in the wake of the transformation of European kinship and rising urbanization, expanded Christendom's collective brain and altered key aspects of people's psychology in ways that catalyzed innovation, suppressed fertil ity, and propelled economic growth.
Chapter 14
Outline of the main processes described in this book:
My account picks up the story of global inequality where Diamond's [biogeographic] explanation [on Eurasia] falls off -circa 1000 A.D. – and places the coevolution of institutions and psychology at center stage.
(p476)
When the effects of affluence do appear, they are typically small compared to the factors I've emphasized: religion, kin-based organizations, impersonal markets, and intergroup competition.
p479
If anything, natural selection would have been operating against a psychology adapted to dense populations, impersonal markets, individualism, specialized occupational niches, and anonymous interactions.
Any psychological or behavioral inclinations derived from genes that might have caused an individual to want to live in a city would have been selected against.
Cities have survived and prospered because culture has been winning over genes.
you can't truly understand psychology without considering how the minds of populations have been shaped by cultural evolution.
Psychologists treat Americans, and WEIRD people more generally, as a culture-free population; it's “culture” that makes everyone else deviant.
Hopefully, it's now clear that we are the WEIRD ones.
p487
However, policies-even when implemented perfectly- can have one effect in London or Zurich and very different effects in Baghdad or Mogadishu, because the people in each of these places are psychologically distinct.
Instead of ignoring psychological variation, policy analysts need to consider both how to tailor their efforts to particular populations and how new policies might alter people's psychology in the long run. p488
In closing, there's little doubt that our psychology will continue to evolve in the future, both culturally and, over millennia, genetically.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Great book, well written and very well-sourced. Full of wonderful information and arguments.
Compellingly shows “How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” (the subtitle of the book).
wilte 