Do promiscuous women have lower self-esteem?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Twitter thread by Samuel Hammond. The author argues that religions can be modelled as providers of social insurance, and the author argues that the US is more religious than Europe due to its smaller welfare state. He notes that secularisation in the US is associated with prior Medicaid expansions at both the state and census tract level. This suggests that Medicaid crowded out religion as a provider of social insurance.

A Practical Significance Bias in Laypeople’s Evaluation of Scientific Findings. Audrey Michal and colleagues examine how much practical significance laypeople give to generic scientific findings. In two online experiments, they find that Americans who viewed interventions with unreported effect sizes were just as likely to endorse interventions as those who viewed interventions with large effect sizes.

Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. In a classic article from 1988, Auke Tellegen and colleagues compare personality similarity in twins reared together and apart. Based on 11 personality scales and 3 high-order scales, they estimate heritabilities ranging from .39 to .58. They also find that the contribution of the family environment is negligible for all but 2 out of 14 scales.