Air Pollution Made Me Do It!

I don't think so....I would say the heaviest polluted cities are likely to have the highest concentration of blue collar workers that work at repetitive boring jobs which leads to substance abuse problems which has a destabilizing effect on families which leads to extreme poverty which leads to crime....

Correlation and causation are not the same thing.

Cities have higher pollution because of the higher population density. Crime is higher when there is higher population density, a higher concentration of perpetrators and a higher concentration of victims.

Higher crime and pollution have the same cause, population density. Correlation, not causation.

Come back and talk to me when you get done with the studies on Bejing and Mumbai.

American cities are paradises compared to them when discussing pollution.

Hooker

How do they provide proof for the research ? If air pollution was cut off tomorrow - pure clean air, how many people would have anxiety and unethical behavior ?

Interesting, maybe Dr. Lu will create a chart, of the world, indicating points where the highest concentration of rif-raf, scoundrels and scallywag's would be.

I've seen so many "studies, findings, discoveries, etc..." that concludes that reality is just an illusion or hallucination or simulation or something. What I have never seen, is research into why people value what they value. People's values themselves are more of a cause of those things, than the collateral effects of a previous existence of something else. In other words, the more you keep trying to get to the very first cause of anything (the source/beginning of a fact/phenomenon/river) attributed to human behavior, the more it involves their values themselves. Therefore, a study needs to be done on why people value what they value (both individual and collective). What came first, the chicken or the egg? What came first, people's collective values, or the helplessness felt by individuals within those collective values? Then what comes next, a seismic shift in People's collective values, or a seismic shift in their individual values? Either way, I predict an earthquake.

Friends,

I'm going to read the original article. After that, I'll share my opinions about the validity of their approach/methodology.

--JMM

First of all, no one in the article is claiming causation-- "This research reveals that air pollution may have potential ethical costs that go beyond its well-known toll on health and the environment,"

And secondly, I found some more info:

"To establish a direct, causal link between the experience of air pollution and unethical behavior, the researchers also conducted a series of experiments. Because they could not randomly assign participants to physically experience different levels of air pollution, the researchers manipulated whether participants imagined experiencing air pollution.

In one experiment, 256 participants saw a photo featuring either a polluted scene or a clean scene. They imagined living in that location and reflected on how they would feel as they walked around and breathed the air.

On a supposedly unrelated task, they saw a set of cue words (e.g., sore, shoulder, sweat) and had to identify another word that was linked with each of the cue words (e.g., cold); each correct answer earned them $0.50. Due to a supposed computer glitch, the correct answer popped up if the participants hovered their mouse over the answer box, which the researchers asked them not to do. Unbeknownst to the participants, the researchers recorded how many times the participants peeked at the answer.

The results showed that participants who thought about living in a polluted area cheated more often than did those who thought about living in a clean area.

In two additional experiments, participants saw photos of either polluted or clean scenes taken in the exact same locations in Beijing, and they wrote about what it would be like to live there. Independent coders rated the essays according to how much anxiety the participants expressed.

In one of the experiments conducted with university students in the US, the researchers measured how often participants cheated in reporting the outcome of a die roll; in the other experiment with adults in India, they measured participants' willingness to use unethical negotiation strategies.

Again, participants who wrote about living in a polluted location engaged in more unethical behavior than did those who wrote about living in a clean location; they also expressed more anxiety in their writing. As the researchers hypothesized, anxiety level mediated the link between imagining exposure to air pollution and unethical behavior.

Together, the archival and experimental findings suggest that exposure to air pollution, whether physical or mental, is linked with transgressive behavior through increased levels of anxiety."

<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180207151823.htm>

"Together, the archival and experimental findings suggest that exposure to air pollution, whether physical or mental, is linked with transgressive behavior through increased levels of anxiety."

Ok. But, why is that surprising? Why was a study needed to find that out? Whether real or fake, perceived problems create anxiety. And that anxiety creates reactions that manifest themselves outside of the persons who experience that anxiety (which is then observable). The relative level of that anxiety, determines whether that person can cope or not. On a scale between not-coping/coping, determines whether that person feels helpless or not. Which in turn, determines WHERE that person attributes the blame/fix. And that attribute will manifest itself somewhere between individual values and collective values. Happens all the time. Not just with air pollution. What's the point of this? I don't get it.

I posit that someone somehow(!) got grant money to study this dubious subject and has written a tome to "justify" the expenditure and get published.

But, take this for what you will. I'm a supreme skeptic about most everything studied (aka, wasted money on) in the last 15 or 20 years.

How many outlandish studies have been published recently that actually disprove the premise? There's where a quantitative study truly needs to be performed.

Hooker