Social Science Bites

It's a scene you might recall from a music video or TV shows where a young alpha male goes to the club with his crew. They're parked at a table, order bottle service while flanked by a bevy of attractive if faceless young women, and after some overindulgence start spraying Cristal like dish soap in a squirt gun. That's life as Ashley Mears documents in a neat little ethnographic study just release...

Political violence aside, the 20th century saw great progress. Looking at health progress, as one example, Princeton University economist Anne Case notes it was a century of expanding lifetimes. "Just to take one particular group," she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, "if you look at people aged 45 to 54 in the U.S., back in 1900 the death rate was 1,500 per 10...

The current pandemic has and will continue to mutate the social landscape of the world, but amid the lost lives and spoiled economies in its wake has come a new appreciation of what science and scientists contribute. "You don't have to go back many months," says Hetan Shah , the chief executive of the British Academy, "for a period when politicians were relatively dismissive of experts – and then...

Depending on your views, far-right populism can represent a welcome return to the past , or a worrying one. The former, argues sociolinguist Ruth Wodak in this Social Science Bites podcast, is one of the hallmarks of far-right populism – a yearning for an often mythical past where the "true people" were ascendant and comfortable. She's termed this blurred look backward retrotopia , "a nostalgia fo...

ichard Layard remembers being a history student sitting in Oxford's Bodleian Library on a misty morning, reading philosopher Jeremy Bentham (he of the famed "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong"). As he recounts to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, he thought, "Oh yes, this is what it's all about." And while much...

With each new year comes a wave of good intentions as people aim to be better. They want to lose weight, exercise more, be nicer, drink less and smoke not at all. They want to change behavior, and as Susan Michie knows well, "behavior is related to absolutely everything in life." Michie is a clinical and health psychologist who leads the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London. Sh...

Henri Tajfel's early life – often awful in the living, exciting in the retelling – gave the pioneering social psychologist the fodder for his life's defining work: understanding the roots of prejudice. Born one hundred years ago into a Jewish family in the dawn of an independent Poland created from the detritus of three disintegrated empires, he left Poland to study chemistry in France in the late...

Living in a loosely regulated society, the very term "social norms" can be vaguely threatening, as if these norms are a threat to freedom always lurking on the periphery. But cultural psychologist Michele J. Gelfand says norms are not the enemy – they are one of our most important inventions. "Culture," she says, "is this set of values, norms, and assumptions about the world that we're socialized...

When a mother with minor children is imprisoned, she is far from the only one facing consequences. Their children can end up cared for in multiple placements, they're often unable to attend school and they're stigmatised. These effects on the children of the incarcerated, although predictable, have been poorly understood precisely because almost no one has done that. But Minson, who practiced both...

One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that you can't tell from the actions themselves why they have to be done that way – and that fascinates  anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse . By his own admission, what intrigues the statutory chair in social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford is that ritual is "behavior that is '...

In the most recent 12-month period for which is has data, the Trussell Trust – the largest foodbank trust in the United Kingdom – the trust passed out 1.6 million food parcels, with 500,000 of those going to children. More than 90 percent of the food donated came from the public, often though prompts seen supermarkets, and the remaining 10 percent came from corporations. Social scientist Kayleigh...

"I cannot count the number of people who've told me on Twitter, 'Of course immigrants increase British unemployment! Of course immigrants drive down wages. It's just the law of supply and demand.' And it's an almost infallible rule that people who say that do not understand basic economics and do not understand supply and demand, because immigration adds to both supply and demand." So recounts Jon...

Is education, by itself, the great equalizer? Will having the same education erase the benefit someone from a higher class has over someone from a lower class? "Education," says sociologist Sam Friedman, "doesn't wash away the effects of class background in terms of allocating opportunities. That's quite profound – I believe there are a lot of people who believe quite strongly that these sorts of...

Humanitarian aid organizations often find themselves torn by reasonable expectations – to address a pressing crisis and to show that what they are doing is actually helping. While these might not seem at odds, in practice, says Monika Krause, they often do. Krause, an assistant professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, is the author of The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and...

You and a body of like-minded people want to reform a wretched regime, or perhaps just break away from it and create an independent state. Are you more likely to achieve your goals by a campaign of bombings, assassinations and riots, or by mass protests which are avowedly peaceful? Erica Chenoweth , a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Profes...

Data about us as individuals is usually conceived of as something gathered about us, whether siphoned from our Facebook or requested by bureaucrats. But data collected and displayed by the tracking applications on our iPhones and Fitbits is material we collect by ourselves and for ourselves. Well, maybe, says sociologist Gina Neff , who with Dawn Nafus (a senior research scientist at Intel Labs) w...

Sociologists Les Back and Shamser Sinha spent a decade following 30 migrants in London, a study that forms the narrative in their new book, Migrant City . But the book, which includes the names of three of their subjects as additional co-authors, doesn't focus the lives of 30 characters, but 31. "In the end," Back tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, "Shamser Sinha...

Placing more nutritious food on a more visible shelf, informing lagging taxpayers that their neighbors have already paid up, or asking job seekers what they plan to do next week (instead of what they did – or didn't – do last week) – these are all well-known examples of behavioral spurs known as 'nudges.' Much of the reason such examples are known is because they emanate from the work of the Behav...

Metrics on the average living standards from the best-off countries in the world (say, Norway) to the worst-off (perhaps the Central African Republic) vary by a factor of 40 to 50. So notes James Robinson , the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict at the University of Chicago and author, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty...

Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. But apart from its propagandist provenance, misinformation and disinformation in our media diets is a genuine threat. Sociologist Nick Adams, in this Social Science Bites podcast, offers hope that a tool he's developed can improve the media literacy of the populace. That tool, known as...

Andrew Leigh would take a daily a multivitamin, he says, until he learned that a randomized controlled trial, or RCT, found no increase in lifespan linked to taking them. So he stopped. Leigh isn't a nutritionist, he's an economist. But more to the point, Leigh is also an unrepentant 'randomista,' which is what he calls researchers who use RCT's to tackle thorny issues of public concern. (Leigh is...

Diane Reay grew up in a council estate in a coal mining part of Derbyshire in England's East Midlands. Those working-class roots dogged her from the start of her formal schooling. "I had to fight not to be in the bottom set; I was told that girls like me don't go to university," Reay, now a renowned Cambridge University education professor, tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bi...

Explicit statements of prejudice are less common than in the past (even if they are still easily found). "I see that as a mark of progress," says social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji , the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. But peer a little below the surface, she adds, "even though you might reject an explicit bias, you actually have the implicit version of i...

While generally accepted that inequality is a bad thing, how exactly is that so? Beyond philosophical arguments, what is it about inequality that makes it bad? That's a question that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett examined at a societal scale in their 2009 book The Spirit Level and have continued at an individual level with their newest book, The Inner Level . The volume's subtitles help expla...

How did humans diverge so markedly from animals? Apart from physical things like our "physical peculiarities," as experimental psychologist Celia Heyes puts it, or our fine motor control, there's something even more fundamentally – and cognitively -- different. "I suppose at the broadest level," Heyes tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, "we differ from animals bec...