Social Science Bites

One of the promises of artificial intelligence is that it will mimic, and perhaps even improve, on human thinking. One of those hoped-for improvements was that AI would not exhibit human biases. Turns out that in one area, AI can indeed mimic human thinking, and it's in that field of bias. As Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji -- one of the creators of the widely used implicit bias test -- expla...

The human brain works very hard behind the scenes even in the most mundane aspects of daily life, like enjoying a nice day or determining the meaning of chit-chat with a friend. Ferreting out the basis and structures of our brain's labor is the domain of Daniel Yon , a psychologist and neuroscientists and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. In this Social Science Bit...

Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. "We're dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, 'Huh?' That's interesting." He adds, "At the same time, some of th...

This Social Science Bites podcast offers a dollop of good news and heaping helping of bad. The good news is that since the end of American Civil War the economic condition of Back Americans has improved, using as a comparison the presumed status quo population of white Americans. According to Princeton University economist Ellora Derenoncourt , this "wealth gap" has fallen from 60-to-one to six-to...

There is a value to shared knowledge that tends to go unrecognized because it's so ubiquitous. Nonetheless, experimental psychologist Steven Pinker explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, common knowledge underlies things like paper money, governance, and even coral reefs. And common knowledge, he makes clear to host David Edmonds, "does not have its ordinary sense of conventional wisdom or...

A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that -- at least in the India of that moment -- elections were sacred. This was not a religious epiphany but a cultural one; at the center was not a figure, religious or political, but an ideal - democracy. Banerjee has explored her insights in the years since in a variety or forma...

In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In the book, as in his career and in this Social Science Bites podcast, Bloom deconstructs what is popularly meant by empathy. "Everybody seems to have their own notion," he tells interviewer David Edmonds, "and that's totally fine, but we end up talking...

What does your accent – and yes, every speaker has one – say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that Devyani Sharma , a professor of language and communication at Oxford's Worcester College, asks every day, especially about the many English speakers around the world. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sharma takes a...

As a practical matter, how much effort do you put into pinning down the causes behind daily occurrences? To developmental psychologist Frank Keil, who studies causal thinking, that answer is likely along the lines of 'not enough.' A lack of causal thinking is both endemic, and, to an extent, hurtful these days, he argues, suggesting that lacking even simplified causal models makes things like the...

Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener for the young cultural anthropologist Setha Low. "I thought it was so cool that everybody was there together," she tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. "… Everybody was talking. Everybody knew their place. It was like a c...

As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at University College London, his research has taken him from excavations of the New Stone Age site at Çatalhöyük , Turkey to studies of the modern suburbs of London to examinations of life on -- and in service to -- the International Space Station. It is i...

Let's say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of the One Health Trust , would urgently suggest you include anti-microbial resistance near the top of that list. "We're really in the middle of a crisis right now," he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. "Every year,...

Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod , it can be a cardinal virtue in our mental health, too. How she came to that conclusion and how common rigid thinking can be are themes explored in her new book, The Ideological Brain . "I think that from all the research that I've done," she tells interviewer David Edmond...

When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual. In this Social Science Bites podca...

Are university students unhappy? We won't generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood noted. Being an experimental psychologist who teaches at the University of Bristol,  an opportunity presented itself. Why not start a course on the science of happiness, and while teaching it collect data from the students attending? The resulting course (created with advice from one his former st...

Let's cut to the chase: "The overwhelming majority of murders in the United States involve guns," says economist Jens Ludwig. "And in fact, most of the difference in overall murder rates between the United States and other countries are due to murders with guns." This may seem intuitively obvious to outside observers, but studying guns within the United States has long been a fraught endeavor , an...

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of 'internet famous' celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin , a professor at Australia's Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research covers influencers – both ad...

Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even if the way toward the goal is generally apparent. If you want to know how to do a better job hitting those marks, whether its walking 10,000 steps, learning Esperanto, or quitting smoking, a good person to consult would be Katy Milkman . Working at the nexus of economics and psyc...

There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens -- i.e. their nation's children -- are happy, healthy and productive, and that therefore governments have policies that work to achieve that. But good intentions never guarantee good policies. Here's where economist Janet Currie steps in. Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at...

As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as postdoctoral researcher at the  Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences  at the University of Oxford) she have been proscribed from doing - posing as a recruit to study violent extremist groups. That, as you might expect, gave her special insight...

The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that - relationships. And those relations generally start with essentially one-on-one encounters between law enforcement personnel and individuals, whether those individuals are suspects, victims or witnesses. When those relations get off on the wrong foot - or worse, as in the case of a number of high-profile...

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that's not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Tec...

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you'd expect. That's the conclusion that Iris Berent , a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research. She notes that her students, for example, are "astonished" at how much of human behavior and reactions are innate. " They think this is reall...

Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That's a big, and contentious, question. It's also almost an existential question for the disciplines involved. It's also a question that Megan Stevenson, a  professor of law and of economics  at the University of Virginia School of Law, grapples with as she explores how well randomized control trials can predict the re...