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The self‐sacrifice of suicide terrorists is subject to sophisticated models of altruistic sacrifice. Yet, a simpler account is that it reflects common suicidal tendencies. This paper offers new micro and macro evidence supportive of this hypothesis. At the micro level, the paper compares a sample of suicide and non‐suicide terrorists in the United States from 1948 to 2017. Results indicate that suicide terrorists are more likely to display various established suicidal risk factors including history of child abuse, absent parent/s, and relationship troubles. Results from Bayesian Model Averaging indicate that suicide risk factors outperform other individual factors (e.g., ideology and lone‐actor terrorism) in explaining suicide terrorism. At the macro level, the paper takes advantage of the cross‐national variations in suicidal tendencies to explain the incidence of suicide and non‐suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1991 to 2014. Results reveal that countries with higher share of deaths from suicide display higher incidences of suicide attacks but similar incidences of non‐suicide attacks. However, other contextual factors such as the share of Muslims also predict the incidence of suicide terrorism. The decision of some terrorists to sacrifice their life may well have been subject to over‐theorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have developed a vast empirical literature on how cultural traits like generalized trust affect economic output. Much of this literature finds a positive causal relationship between measures of generalized trust, as gathered by international surveys, and economic output. However, the trust literature commits five deadly empirical and theoretical sins that undermine many of its findings. From the quality of the survey questions and responses to the paucity of theoretical models used to explain how trust affects economic outcomes to the radically different results from experimental evidence and others, the trust literature is riven with poor methods and bad data. Even so, applying common methods used in the trust literature to regional level analysis in the United States during the 1972–2018 period reveals no statistically significant correlation between economic output and trust. Given our lack of findings at the subnational level, we find further evidence to be skeptical of the trust literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use new individual‐level data from MasterChef, a television show in the United States in order to objectively capture situations of fear of failure. We codify situations in which the contestants are on the verge of being eliminated from competition and situations where they explicitly express fear of failing. These new data have the distinct advantage of being purely objective. We cover ten seasons, from 2010 to 2020 and include nearly 200 observations to study the role of fear of failure on performance. Using ordinary least squares, we show that extreme fear of failure is associated with an increase of two to four positions in the final placement of the cooking competition. This positive link between fear of failure and performance tends to contradict the conventional wisdom in both psychology and behavioral economics that such a link tends to be negative. Our findings are robust to broad changes in specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]