Moving Day

By Richard Morin
Sunday, January 29, 2006

After 13 delightful years in the Outlook section, the Unconventional Wiz is relocating. My new address will be A2, which is the second page of the main news section.

It's more than merely a change of address: The column will run weekly and offer a few additional features, including an ongoing collaboration with Stanford University researcher Shanto Iyengar and washingtonpost.com that will allow you, my unconventionally wise readers, to participate in original online research studies.

Look for Unconventional Wisdom on A2 during the coming week.

Buzz Matters

Quality counts, business leaders are fond of saying. But when it comes to paying top salaries to freshly minted MBA grads, companies are swayed more by the prestige of their recruits' business schools than by the quality of the graduates.

The study by a University of Maryland research team found that companies award the highest salaries to graduates of business schools that corporate recruiters regard as the most prominent, rather than to the graduates of schools the recruiters believe have the best and brightest graduates. A total of 1,600 corporate recruiters completed an online survey rating the country's 107 largest business schools in terms of their overall prominence as well as on 13 indicators of the quality of their graduates, including their analytic skills, ability to think strategically, communication skills and leadership potential.

But aren't the schools that produce the highest-quality graduates also the most famous? Surprisingly, the answer is no, Ian O. Williamson and his research colleagues report in the latest Academy of Management Journal.

"Most schools that corporate recruiters rate in the top 50 for quality fail to make the top 50 in prominence -- and vice versa," said Williamson in a statement released with the study. "So, prominence and perceived quality are two quite distinct phenomena, with prominence having significantly more impact when it comes to salaries."

Williamson conducted the research with colleagues Violina P. Rindova and Antoaneta P. Petkova, and with Joy Marie Sever of Harris Interactive, which did the survey.

To illustrate how prominence trumps perceived quality, Williamson notes that graduates of schools that were better known than about 70 percent of the other schools had average starting salaries that were about $12,150 more than graduates who got their MBAs from schools of average prominence. But when the same comparisons were made in terms of quality, the difference was only about $5,260.

Unsafe Neighborhoods, Overweight Kids

Young children raised in dangerous neighborhoods are more likely to be obese than those growing up in relatively safer areas, according to researchers who examined whether where you live plays a role in how fat your kids are.

The study team, headed by behavioral pediatrician Julie C. Lumeng of the University of Michigan, first collected data from 768 children and their parents at 10 urban and rural locations around the country when the children were 4 and then again at age 7. Parents were asked various questions, including how safe and secure they thought their neighborhood was.

They found that children were about four times more likely to be overweight if they lived in a neighborhood that their parents ranked in the bottom quarter in terms of safety as opposed to those whose parents' ratings placed them in the top quarter, Lumeng reported in the latest issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.

The relationship held even after controlling for family characteristics that are known to be associated with childhood obesity, such as maternal marital status, education, race, ethnicity and symptoms of depression, as well as whether the child participated in structured after-school activities.

Why would fearful parents tend to raise obese children? Lumeng suspects the big reason is that parents of children in unsafe neighborhoods don't let their kids go out as much.

Lumeng and her colleagues noted that some urban planners have urged creative land use planning and zoning laws to redesign neighborhoods with an eye toward making them safer. That may not work unless parents' underlying fears are addressed.

"No matter how neighborhoods are redesigned to allow children to walk to school or the neighborhood store, parents must feel safe allowing their children to do so," they wrote.

Big Eyes

On April 17, 1953, Hall of Fame slugger Mickey Mantle hit a 565-foot home run to left-center field in the District's Griffith Stadium, and the New York Yankees went on to win 7-3 over the perennially hapless Washington Senators. It was the longest home run ever hit in the old park. "I just saw the ball as big as a grapefruit," Mantle told reporters after the game.

The Mick was on to something, according to two University of Virginia psychology researchers, who say they have found that hot hitters do perceive the ball to be bigger than it actually is, while those mired in a batting slump say that it's smaller.

Jessica K. Witt and Dennis R. Proffitt interviewed 47 softball players after their games in community recreational leagues around Charlottesville, where the university's campus is located. They showed them eight different-size circles on a board and asked them which represented the size of a regulation softball.

They found that those who'd had a good day at the plate picked circles that were larger than the actual size of the ball, while those who had done poorly chose circles that were smaller, they report in the December issue of Psychological Science. Moreover, the batters who had gotten a hit at least half of their times at bat picked the biggest circle. morinr@washpost.com