Are men and women's political views diverging?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Cultures in chimpanzees. In a classic article from 1999, Andrew Whiten and colleagues review the evidence concerning cultural variation among different communities of chimpanzees living in Africa. Analysing data from seven long-term studies, they document 39 different behaviour patterns that are absent in some communities but customary or habitual in others. These include numerous types of tool use.

Six out of seven sites had at least one unique behaviour pattern. Abbreviations across the top refer to different study sites.

A representative survey experiment of motivated climate change denial. Lasse Stoetzer and Florian Zimmermann examine whether denial of anthropogenic climate change is based on motivated reasoning (such as the need to justify CO₂-intensive lifestyle). Using a survey experiment on a large sample of US adults, they find no evidence for this: denial was no greater after subjects had been given the opportunity to take money from a climate charity.

The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market. David Deming examines trends in the importance of social skills in the US labour market. He finds that employment in jobs requiring math and social skills grew substantially between 1980 and 2012, while employment in jobs requiring math skills alone shrank. He also finds that the labour market returns to social skills was much higher in the 2000s than in the 1980s.