Voodoo Sports Science

The current issue of the British Medical Journal is chock full of papers slamming the makers and marketers of sports drinks for a lack of good science backing up their claims. David Tuller over at Mother Jones does an excellent summary of the studies. All I'll add is that many of these off-the-shelf performance boosters for athletes actually do seem to work ... just not due to the advertised mechanisms.

Athletes looking for an edge are extremely susceptible to placebo effects (See the recent $57 million legal settlement against the makers of Power Balance bracelets, for example. They sold millions of the $30 bracelets, and garnered endorsements from a small army of top-flight professional athletes, before some actual science with placebo controls called their bluff).

The All Drug Olympics

As the London Olympics approach, Saturday Night Live will no-doubt air a highlight-reel of their best sports sketches. And this classic from Dennis Miller's Weekend Update tenure had better be among them:



I thought of the All Drug Olympics when reading a feature in the most recent issue of Nature, called "Performance enhancement: Superhuman athletes." The writer sidesteps the ethical debate over the use by athletes of steroids and other performance boosters in order to engage in a speculative, "what if everything was permitted..." exploration of where current and near-future science might take human athletic performance.

For example, researchers have found that anabolic steroids can boost muscle strength by 38 percent in men and "potentially more in women." The advantages of human growth hormone are more nebulous, but the red-blood cell booster hormone EPO can increase stamina in endurance athletes by 34 percent (and apparently also boost their motivation to train).

The writer closes with a nod to performance boosters that aren't ingested, including prosthetic limbs that might leave natural arms and legs choking on their dust. We hear from Hugh Herr, a biomedical engineer at MIT who is working on a "bionic running leg" and is quoted in favor of devising new sports that treat high-performing prosthetic limbs as sports equipment and thereby create a new class of enhanced competitions. "Just like the invention of the bicycle led to the sport of cycling," Herr says, "What we will see is the emergence of all kinds of new sports."

The purist in me wants to object -- if we want to see people go faster around a track with the help of technology, we already have NASCAR. But the realist in me can totally see this happening. Without some help from chemistry, technology, or bio-engineering, the days of Faster, Higher, Stronger are numbered in many of the Olympics' marquee events.

MBA Ethics?

Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? This is the headline of an op-ed by Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, published today at Bloomberg.com. Zingales' argument (summarized below) invites some rumination on the expectations of social norms -- how much power do they wield over individual behavior? When and how are these norms established and changed?

Citing the latest round of corporate scandals at JPMorgan, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs, Zingales says the problem is more than too-big-to-fail-firms behaving badly. "We are dealing with a drop in ethical standards throughout the business world and our graduate schools are partly to blame," he writes. Zingales says current ethics courses in MBA programs are too often presented in morally-agnostic frames. After all, he notes, the market is meant to function via the invisible hand of cumulative, rational self-interests,  not via rigid moral commandments.

"Some [MBA ethics instructors] simply illustrate ethical dilemmas without taking a position on how people are expected to act," he writes. "Others hide behind the concept of corporate or social responsibility, suggesting that social obligations rest on firms, not on individuals."

Zingales' solution is to re-infuse business-school ethics with some old-fashioned bright lines of right and wrong and to give every course an ethics component, rather than teaching it separately. I would love to hear from people with more (any) business-school experience on this one. I remember similar opinion pieces popping up in the wake of Enron and WorldCom, etc, and then again in the wake of Bernie Madoff and Raj Rajaratnam, not to mention the fraud exposed in the mortgage industry post-bust. So, another call to revamp the teaching of business ethics seems warranted, but will it be effectual?

Is this really a worsening trend, or just a continuing one with more interconnectivity and higher stakes? Research shows that people often adjust their own moral standards based on their perceptions of how much these standards are valued and maintained by others. Can business school ethics courses, no matter how they're taught, make headway against certain corporate cultures or the anything-goes attitudes that often prevail in boom times? Shouldn't a person's moral compass be fairly well set before he or she enrolls in business school? 

On Goals and Temptations

You're at a restaurant looking over the dessert menu. What does it take to pass and pay your check rather than indulge? Willpower? Self denial? Or maybe your brain just needs a subtle reminder of some other rewards, such as the reward of reaching a goal of losing 5 pounds or the pleasure of feeling fit enough to join your friends on a long mountain hike? The shift in framing the choice is subtle, but powerful: rather than wanting versus denial, it's wanting versus other wanting.

This week, at the annual meeting of (wait for it) the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior, a Dutch social psychologist named Esther Papies presented the results of three studies in which people prompted by subtle "goal reminders" focused on diet and fitness at restaurants and grocery stores and restaurants made healthier choices than customers who encountered no such cues. In one field study, for example, the researchers set up shop at a local butcher on alternate days when a placard offering a low-calorie recipe was, or was not, displayed by the counter. Also on the counter, every day, was a tray of tempting "bite-sized meat snacks." One of the researchers surreptitiously observed how many snacks customers ate and another later asked each customer to fill out a quick survey indicating, among other things, whether they were trying to lose weight or get in shape. On days when the recipe poster was displayed, people with diet and fitness goals ate fewer snacks. You can read the particulars here. 

Bargaining with the Universe

If you've ever muttered, "what goes around comes around," or made a deal with God to get you out of a jam or to curry some personal good fortune, the latest research into "investing in karma" published in the new issue of Psychological Science is for you.

In a series of experiments,  the researchers led by University of Virginia psychologist Benjamin Converse, found that people are more likely to volunteer or donate to charity when prompted to think about something they really, really want that they also perceive to be largely out of their personal control (e.g. high school seniors awaiting the decision letters of their first-choice colleges).

What's more, subjects entered into a lottery for $100 were much more optimistic about their chances when they took the opportunity to complete a short survey that would add $50 to their prize to be donated to the charity of their choice. They'd made a karmic deposit and, if only implicitly, expected some dividends.

"We find that, rather than increasing selfishness, wanting can increase helping," the researchers conclude. "These karmic-investment behaviors suggest that people may not only pursue reciprocal exchanges interpersonally, but may also attempt to bargain with the universe."

The Experts Strike Back

This past weekend, David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, had a smart essay about who makes better predictions -- informed experts versus the collective wisdom of a market? As is often the case, the answer is: it depends on what you're trying to predict.