Other NYT 2007 ideas

Decision making and game theory are apparently a big deal. Some other of 70 of the ideas that helped make 2007 what it was:

• Ambiguity Promotes Liking: People expected to like another person more when they knew less about that person--even though they thought they'd like people more when they knew more. I'm tempted to put this into the framework of ambiguity aversion (boy that Wikipedia article needs some fleshing out) but I don't think it fits. Is it just a matter of optimism? Or is it a kind of unawareness--it doesn't occur to you to think you won't like someone who's a rabid cricket fan?
  
• Jonathan Schaeffer has solved checkers. It's a tie.
• People are more generous in the Dictator game when they're primed to think about God. Or also when they're primed to think about getting arrested. I'm going to have to read this one (or two). It sounds weird, and it's striking that, "In the control group of Norenzayan’s study, the vast majority of participants kept everything or nearly everything". That often isn't the case in dictator games.
• Mankiw and Weinzierl suggested (as in "A Modest Proposal") a tax on height, since tall people earn more and yet are unlikely to take steps to shrink to avoid taxation. See also Mankiw's blog post with a link to the paper. This is another one I'll have to read because I anticipate finding fault with it, but shouldn't do so based on an NYT summary.
• Hope can Hurt: An interesting medical analysis of reference based preferences. People who had a colostomy and knew that there was no going back were happier than those who had one and thought they might recover.
• Lap dancers make more money when ovulating. Huh. OK, really hard to interpret. If it's worth following up at all, I'd like to see other sexy and unsexy jobs examined. Do phone sex workers make more when ovulating? Unsexy phonesalespeople? Factory piece-workers?
• Rock-Paper-Scissors shows up in nature. No surprise, but some examples including the sexual behavior of some male lizards. Two points of interest to me are that the behavior of a particular lizard is fixed--you're a sneaker, so you never invade, and that it's not a statics equilibrium, but a cycle with different strategies dominating in different years.