Social Science Bites

There's the always charming notion that "deep down we're all the same," suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions. Batja Mesquita , a social psychologist at Belgium's University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, begs to disagree. Based on her pioneering work into the field of cultural psychology, she theorizes that what ma...

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, "OK, Boomer." What do we make of this, and is it anything new? These are questions  Bobby Duffy , professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest...

Quite often the ideas of 'risk' and of 'uncertainty' get bandied about interchangeably, but there's a world of difference between them and it matters greatly when that distinction gets lost. That's a key message from  psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer , who has created an impressive case for both understanding the distinction and then acting appropriately based on the distinction. "A situation with ris...

"It's been said there are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can't count." So reads a sentence in the book Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers , published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The author of Innumeracy in the Wild is Ellen Peters , Philip H. Knight Chair and director of the Center for Science Communications Research at the...

The knowledge economy. Intellectual property. Software. Maybe even bitcoin. All pretty much intangible, and yet all clearly real and genuinely valuable. This is the realm where economist Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College London mints his own non-physical scholarship. "In the old days," relates the co-author of Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy , "the assets of compan...

Sheila Jasanoff, the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is a pioneer in the field of STS. That acronym can be unpacked as either 'science and technology studies' or 'science, technology and society.' Jasanoff -- who describes herself as a sociologist of knowledge and a constructivist, trained in law, working in the...

Any work in social and behavioral science presumably – but not necessarily immediately - tells us something about humans in the real world. To come up with those insights, research usually occurs in laboratory settings, where the researchers control the independent variables and which, in essence, rules out research 'in the wild.' Enter John List. "For years," he tells interviewer David Edmonds in...

Kathelijne Koops, a biological anthropologist at the University of Zurich, works to determine what makes us human. And she approaches this quest by intensely studying the use of tools by other species across sub-Saharan Africa. "Look at us now …" she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. "We are really the ultimate technological species. And the question is, 'How di...

The idea of walking a mile in someone else's shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. The act of imagining someone else's reactions may be hard, but based on the body of work by George Loewenstein, predicting how -- under varying circumstances -- we might walk in our own shoes may not be all that easier. Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economi...

"I tell my students, 'If somebody utters the sentence that starts with the words, "History teaches us" the rest of the sentence is probably wrong.' History has no direct lessons for almost anything. Our own age is sufficiently different, sufficiently unique, from what happened in the past that any facile lessons from history are more likely to mislead than to enlighten." That series of caveats com...

Verbal arts, explains Karin Barber, emeritus professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham, are "any form of words that have been composed in order to attract attention or invite interpretation which is intended to be repeatable in some way." They are, she continues, central to all sorts of social processes, "just as much a part of people's lives as kinship or economic...

COVID-19 has changed everything, including how we work (and to be more precise, are employed). But in order to best understand how things have changed, and hopefully to grapple with how they will be, it helps to have studied how they were. Enter Melanie Simms , professor of work and employment at the University of Glasgow 's Adam Smith Business School, and the author – in 2019 – of What Do We Know...

"Convict criminology," Jeffrey Ian Ross explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, is "a network, or platform, that's united in the perception that the convict voice has been either neglected or marginalized in scholarship or policy debates in the field of criminology in general, and corrections in particular." Ross , a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Baltimore...

Molefi Kete Asante , the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Philadelphia's Temple University, has long been at the forefront of developing the academic discipline of  Black studies and in founding the theory of Afrocentrism, "the centering of African people in their own stories." In this Social Science Bites podcast, Asante offers an insiders view of the growth of the Afrocentr...

There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person? This is one of the questions that Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University , studies. She has news -- bad news -- about bot...

The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the 'China virus' and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States. Columbia University sociologist  Jennifer Lee  has been answering many of those questions her entire academic career, and across four books, dozens of journal...

Despite being someone who doesn't "particularly enjoy the game," cognitive anthropologist Martha Newson is drawn to football. "Football is one of the most exciting games to watch as an anthropologist," she explains in this Social Science Bites podcast. "I'm not watching the ball go around the pitch – I'm watching the fans. I'm transfixed by them! You go through all the emotions in a single match."...

When human judgment enters the picture, so too will errors in human judgment. Think of this as "noise," just as you might think of a signal-to-noise ratio in an audio signal. And just as in listening to music, this noise is not a feature, but a flaw. In the context of human action, management professor at HEC Paris and former McKinsey senior partner Olivier Sibony defines "noise" as the unwanted v...

"That's such a hard question," Gina Neff, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, responds when asked what social science research or thinker most influenced her. "It's like a busman's holiday for an academic, because so many things have influenced my thinking." Her answer, by the way, was Ulrich Beck's concept of the risk society, as explained in this 1986 book . In this montage drawn fro...

When Jim Scott mentions 'resistance,' this recovering political scientist isn't usually talking about grand symbolic statements or large-scale synchronized actions by thousands or more battling an oppressive state. He's often referring to daily actions by average people, often not acting in concert and perhaps not even seeing themselves as 'resisting' at all. The 'problem' with political scientist...

The study of stigma, , says  Michèle Lamont ,  is a "booming field." That assessment can be both sad and hopeful, and in this Social Science Bites podcast the Harvard sociologist explains stigma's manifestations and ways to combat it, as well as what it takes for a researcher to actually study stigma.   Lamont defines stigma "as the negative characterization of any social attribute," and offers ex...

What we tell people about ourselves is not exclusively, or often not even majorly, what comes out of our mouths. A host of nonverbal messages emanate from us, many of them intentionally sent to create or reinforce a narrative for a recipient who is left trying to judge the veracity of the sum total of the information. The study of this signaling in the content of an asymmetry of information is kno...

Consider two different, but similar situations. In the first, children are asked to pull ropes together. Candy cascades down, but in unequal distribution – three for one child and one for the other. In the second situation, the children come across the sweets but without joint labor, and again find an uneven distribution. What usually happens next differs between the two situations. When the kids...

Forensic psychologist Belinda Winder , who founded and heads the Sexual Offences, Crime and Misconduct Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, wants society to understand one key aspect about pedophilia. "Many people understand pedophilia to be both a sexual attraction to children but  also  the act of committing abuse against children," she explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Soci...

There's an intuitive attraction to the idea that if we could just spend some quality time with someone from another group, we'd both come to appreciate, and maybe even like, the other person and perhaps even their group. Enormously simplified, that's the basis of contact theory, which Gordon Allport posited in the 1950s as the United States grappled with desegregating its public schools. If differ...