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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 into how these groups attract new blood, and on the basis of that work, as well as more traditional research for groups such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, she has been hosted by the United Nations, national legislators, intelligence agencies and Big Tech.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Ebner details some of the mechanics of her undercover research for host David Edmonds before discussing the prevalence and characteristics of violent extremist groups. Given the variety of ways governments tally these groups and the groups' own amorphousness in an online age, determining whether such groups are on the rise - which seems to be a perennial fear - proves devilishly difficult to determine. "I would say," Ebner concedes, "it often comes and goes in waves, but now we are seeing a very strong wave of very young people, including minors, radicalizing towards violence."
That radicalization proves remarkably similar regardless of ideology, Ebner notes. Plus, it's not straightforward determining who might be open to recruitment. "Based on my research, I would say that everyone is potentially susceptible to radicalization, especially in vulnerable moments in our lives, and everyone has them."
Ebner serves up that potential universality in a different context to close the podcast. It's what keeps her up at night: "I think the mainstreaming of some of the extreme concepts and ideas and language that I used to observe only in the darkest corners of the internet, but that is now being heard in parliaments, that is now being seen in large social media channels of influencers or voiced by politicians."
Given her journalistic chops, it is no surprise that Ebner has written extensively on extremism in a series of well received books. The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, received the Bruno Kreisky Award for the Political Book of the Year 2018; Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists was a Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 and Germany publishing's Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020 ("Science Book of the Year") Prise as well as the Dr Caspar Einem Prize from the Association of Social Democratic Academics; and Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over, was published in 2023.
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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 police killings in the United States attest to - the repercussions can resonate far away from where a traffic stop occurs. This is the field that social psychologist Nick Camp researches. As his website at the University of Michigan explains, Camps studies "the role routine police-citizen encounters play in undermining police-community trust, and how these disparities can be addressed."
As he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, "[O]ne of the things that we know from research and procedural justice is that when people don't view policing as legitimate, they're less likely to cooperate with police requests for assistance, for example. Until now, it’s hard to find experimental evidence for this, but one of the things we can use body cameras for is not just to look at disparities in these interactions, but their consequences."
In this episode, Camp cites research on body camera footage, traffic stops, and even first names to describe how anecdotal tropes about often poor police-citizen interactions, especially in the African-American community, are borne out by the reams of data modern recording devices provide. He also offers hopeful signs of improving these relationships with training based on this very same data, and suggests that artificial intelligence might be useful in mining this data for more insights.
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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 Technology and Prosperity. Combining a cogent historical analysis of past technological revolutions, he examines whether a groundbreaking new technology “augments” the status quo, as opposed to merely squeezing out human labor.
“[M]y favorite term is ‘creating new tasks’ because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It's not just making a worker more productive in tightening the screws, but it's really creating new jobs that didn't exist.” And so, he explains to those perhaps afraid that a bot is gunning for their livelihood, “Automation is not our enemy. Excessive automation is our enemy.”
This is not to depict Acemoglu as an apologist for our new silicon taskmasters. Current trends such as the consolidation of power among technology companies, a focus on shareholder returns at the expense of all else, a blind trust in companies to somehow muddle through to societal equilibrium, and a slavish drive to automate everything immediately all leave him cold: “I feel AI is going in the wrong direction and taking us down with it.”
His conversation doesn’t end there, thankfully, and he offers some hopeful words on how we might find that modus vivendi with AI, including (but by no means only relying on) “the soft hand of the state in tipping the scales one way or another.”
Acemoglu is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the academic-cum-policymaker group of economic movers and shakers known as the Group of 30.
Besides Power and Progress, his books include the popular bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty written with James Robinson. Acemoglu has received a number of prizes, including two inaugural awards in 2004, the T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago and the Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, as well as the Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006 and a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.
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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 really strange,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “They don't think that knowledge, beliefs, that all those epistemic states, could possibly be innate. It doesn't look like this is happening just because they reject innateness across the board.”
This rejection – which affects not only students but the general public and sometimes even social and behavioral scientists -- does have collateral damage.
So, too, is misinterpreting what the innateness of some human nature can mean. “[I]f you think that what's in the body is innate and immutable, then upon getting evidence that your depression has a physical basis, when people are educated, that psychiatric disorders are just diseases like all others, that actually makes them more pessimistic, it creates more stigma, because you think that your essence is different from my essence. … [Y]ou give them vignettes that actually underscore the biological origin of a problem, they are less likely to think that therapy is going to help, which is obviously false and really problematic”
Berent’s journey to studying intuitive knowledge was itself not intuitive. She received a bachelor’s in musicology from Tel-Aviv University and another in flute performance at The Rubin Academy of Music before earning master’s degrees in cognitive psychology and in music theory – from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1993, she received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Pittsburgh.
As a researcher, much of her investigation into the innate originated by looking at language, specifically using the study of phonology to determine how universal – and that includes in animals – principles of communication are. This work resulted in the 2013 book, The Phonological Mind. Her work specifically on innateness in turn led to her 2020 book for the Oxford University Press, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature.
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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 real-world efficacy of interventions in criminal justice. What she’s found so far in that particular niche has echoed across the research establishment.
As she writes in the abstract of an article she saw published in the Boston University Law Review:
"This Essay is built around a central empirical claim: that most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back towards the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context-dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another."In this Social Science Bites podcast, Stevenson tells interviewer David Edmonds that “the paper is not saying ‘nothing works ever.’ It’s saying nothing works among this subset of interventions, and interventions, as we talked about, are the type of interventions that get studied by randomized control trials tend to be pretty limited in scope. You can randomly allocate money, but you can’t randomly allocate class or socioeconomic status.”
Despite this cautionary finding in her research. Stevenson hasn’t despaired about her career choice or that of other social and behavioral scientists. “Many of us are in this line of work because we care about the world,” she notes. “We want to make the world a better place. We want to think about the best way to do it. And this is valuable information along that path. It’s valuable information in that it shuts some doors. … So keep trying other doors, keep experimenting.”
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Here's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's a lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money -- "get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible." You and I might prefer that, since we, of course, are reputable people and good stewards and understand our own particular needs. But what about, well, others?
Economist Tavneet Suri has done more than just think about that; her fieldwork includes handing out money across villages in two rural areas in Kenya to see what happens. Her experiments include giving out a lump sum of cash and also spreading out that same amount over time. The results she details for host David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast are, to be frank, heartening, although the mechanisms of disbursement definitely affect the outcomes.
Despite the good news, the idea of a universal basic income is by no means a settled remedy for helping the poor. For one thing, Suri says, "it's super, super expensive. It’s really expensive. And so, the question is, “Is that expense worth it?” And to understand that I think we need a few more years of understanding the benefits, understanding what people do with the incomes, understanding whether this can really kickstart these households out of poverty."
And perhaps the biggest question is whether the results of fieldwork in Kenya is generalizable. "I would love to do a study that replicates this in the West," she says. "The one thing about the West that I think is worth saying that's different is you wouldn't add it on top of existing programs. The idea is you would substitute existing programs with this. And that to me is the question: if you substituted it, what would happen?"
Suri is the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. She is an editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics; co-chair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL, at MIT; co-chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa; a member of the executive committee at J-PAL; and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that the part of the brain that activates when something contradictory is encountered in the amygdala - “that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. This is why confirmation can be so strong, it's so hardwired within us, we see evidence we don't like as being like attacked by a tiger.”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School and author of the just-released May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, reviews the persistence of confirmation bias -- even among professors of finance.
“So, what is confirmation bias?” he asks host David Edmonds. “This is the temptation to accept something uncritically because we'd like it to be true. On the flip side, to reject a study, even if it's really careful, because we don't like the conclusions.”
Edmans made his professional name studying social responsibility in corporations; his 2020 book Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit was a Financial Times Book of the Year. Yet he himself encountered the temptation to both quickly embrace findings, even flimsy ones, that support our thesis and to reject or even tear apart research, even robust results, that doesn’t.
While that might seem like an obviously critical thinking pitfall, surely knowing that it’s likely makes it easier to avoid. You might think so, but not necessarily. “So smart people can find things to nitpick with, even if the study is completely watertight,” Edmans details. “But then the same critical thinking facilities are suddenly switched off when they see something they like. So intelligence is, unfortunately, something deployed only selectively.”
Meanwhile, he views the glut of information and the accompanying glut of polarization as only making confirmation bias more prevalent, and not less.
Edmans, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Fulbright Scholar, was previously a tenured professor at the Wharton Business School and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He has spoken to policymakers at the World Economic Forum and UK Parliament, and given the TED talk “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World." He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.
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Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learning – fits in. Is it a victim, suffering from the conflict or perhaps a target of violence or repression? Maybe you see it as complicit in the violence, a perpetrator, so to speak. Or perhaps you see it as a liberator, offering a way out a system that is unjust in your opinion. Or just maybe, its role is as a peacebuilder.
Those scenarios are the framework in which Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Pherali discusses the various roles education takes in a world of violence.
“We tend to think about education as teaching and learning in mathematics and so forth,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds. “But numeracy and literacy are always about something, so when we talk about the content, then we begin to talk about power, who decides what content is relevant and important, and for what purpose?”
Pherali walks us through various cases outlining the above from locales as varied as Gaza, Northern Ireland and his native Nepal, and while seeing education as a perpetrator might seem a sad job, his overall work endorses the value and need for education in peace and in war.
He closes with a nod to the real heroes of education in these scenarios.
“No matter where you go to, teachers are the most inspirational actors in educational systems. Yet, when we talk about education in conflict and crisis, teachers are not prioritized. Their issues, their lack of incentives, their lack of career progression, their stability in their lives, all of those issues do not feature as the important priorities in these programs. This is my conviction that if we really want to mitigate the adverse effects of conflict and crisis on education of millions of children, we need to invest in teachers.”
A fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy, he is a co-research director of Education Research in Conflict and Crisis and chair of the British Association for International and Comparative Education.
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The work of human hands retains evidence of the humans who created the works. While this might seem obvious in the case of something like a painting, where the artist’s touch is the featured aspect, it’s much less obvious in things that aren’t supposed to betray their humanity. Take the algorithms that power search engines, which are expected to produce unvarnished and unbiased results, but which nonetheless reveal the thinking and implicit biases of their programmers.
While in an age where things like facial recognition or financial software algorithms are shown to uncannily reproduce the prejudices of their creators, this was much less obvious earlier in the century, when researchers like Safiya Umoja Noble were dissecting search engine results and revealing the sometimes appalling material they were highlighting.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Noble -- the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and professor of gender studies, African American studies, and information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles -- explains her findings, insights and recommendations for improvement with host David Edmonds.
And while we’ve presented this idea of residual digital bias as something somewhat intuitive, getting here was an uphill struggle, Noble reveals. “It was a bit like pushing a boulder up a mountain -- people really didn't believe that search engines could hold these kinds of really value-laden sensibilities that are programmed into the algorithm by the makers of these technologies. Even getting this idea that the search engine results hold values, and those values are biased or discriminatory or harmful, is probably the thrust of the contribution that I've made in a scholarly way.”
But through her academic work, such as directing the Center on Race & Digital Justice and co-directing of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and books like the 2018 title Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, the scale of the problem and the harm it leaves behind are becoming known. Noble’s own contributions have been recognized, too, such as being named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2021 and the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award winner in 2022.
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Most of us recognize the presence of ritual, whether in a religious observance, an athlete’s weird pre-competition tics, or even the cadence of our own morning ablutions. In general, most of these rituals are seen as harmless and probably a little unnecessary (or even silly). But according to cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, ritual often serves a positive purpose for individuals – synchronizing them with their communities or relieving their stress.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Xygalatas defines for host David Edmonds what his research considers ritual, citing two important characteristics of ritual: causal opacity (such as rain dances not actually creating precipitation) and that the ritual matters, often greatly, to the participants. What isn’t ritual, he notes, is habit – although habits can veer into ritual/
“Utilitarian actions can become ritualized,” Xygalatas says, “and to that extent, they can be considered as rituals. So .. because I am a very avid consumer of coffee, when I get up in the morning, I always have to make a cup of coffee – [and] it always has to be in the same cup.”
Xygalatas then describes fieldwork he’s done on “high-intensity” rituals, ranging from firewalking in Spain or an “excruciating” annual religious procession in Mauritius. These efforts – part ethnography and part lab experiment – have given him unique insight into the results of jointly experienced ritual, much of which he detailed in his recent book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. (In a blurb, Jane Goodall wrote the book shows “how and why our most irrational behaviors are a key driver of our success.”)
An associate professor in anthropology and psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut – where he heads the Experimental Anthropology Lab – Xygalatas also discusses the transdisciplinary scope of his work. This reflects his own roots in both anthropology and religious studies (he is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion).
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At the end of every interview that host David Edmonds conducts for the Social Science Bites podcast, he poses the same question: Whose work most influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the social and behavioral science enterprise itself.
In this, the fifth such montage, we offer the latest collection. Again, a wide spectrum of influences reveals itself, including nods to non-social-science figures like philosopher Derek Parfit and primatologist Jane Goodall, historical heavyweights like Adam Smith and the couple Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and two past guests on Social Science Bites itself, Nobel Prize laureates Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman.
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Is giving to a charitable cause essentially equivalent to any other economic decision made by a human being, bounded by the same rational and irrational inputs as any other expenditure? Based on research by psychologist Deborah Small and others working in the area of philanthropy and altruism, the answer is a resounding no.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Small, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of Marketing at Yale University, details some of the thought processes and outcomes that research provides about charitable giving. For example, she tells interviewer David Edmonds, that putting a face to the need – such as a specific hungry child or struggling parent – tends to be more successful at producing giving than does a statistic revealing that tens of thousands of children or mothers are similarly suffering.
This “identifiable victim effect,” as the phenomenon is dubbed, means that benefits of charity may be inequitably distributed and thus do less to provide succor than intended. “[T]he kind of paradox here,” Small explains, “is that we end up in many cases concentrating resources on one person or on certain causes that happened to be well represented by a single identifiable victim, when we could ultimately do a lot more good, or save a lot more lives, help a lot more people, if – psychologically -- we were more motivated to care for ‘statistical’ victims.”
That particular effect is one of several Small discusses in the conversation. Another is the “drop in the bucket effect,” in which the magnitude of a problem makes individuals throw up their arms and not contribute rather than do even a small part toward remedying it.
Another phenomenon is the “braggarts dilemma,” in which giving is perceived as a good thing, but the person who notes their giving is seen as less admirable than the person whose gift is made without fanfare. And yet, the fact that someone goes public about their good deed can influence others to join in.
“[O]ne of the big lessons in marketing,” Small details, “is that word of mouth is really powerful. So, it's much more effective if I tell you about a product that I really like than if the company tells you about the product, right? You trust me; I'm like you. And that's a very effective form of persuasion, and it works for charities, too.”
Small joined the Yale School of Management in 2022, moving from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where she had been the Laura and John J. Pomerantz Professor of Marketing since 2015. In 2018, she was a fellow of the American Psychological Society and a Marketing Science Institute Scholar.
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On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hershfield and interviewer Dave Edmonds discuss what that means in practice, whether in our finances or our families, and how humans can make better decisions. Hershfield’s new book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, offers a popular synthesis of these same questions.
Much of his research centers on this key observation: “humans have this unique ability to engage in what we call ‘mental time travel,’ the ability to project ourselves ahead and look back on the past and even project ourselves ahead and look back on the past while we're doing so. But despite this ability to engage in mental time travel, we don't always do it in a way that affords us the types of benefits that it could.”
Those benefits might include better health from future-looking medical decisions, better wealth thanks to future-looking spending and savings decisions, or greater contentment based on placing current events in a future-looking context. Which begs the question – when is the future?
“The people who think the future starts sooner,” Hershfield explains, “are the ones who are more likely to do things for that future, which in some ways makes sense. It's closer, it's a little more vivid. There's a sort of a clean break between now and it. That said, it is a pretty abstract question. And I think what you're asking about what counts in five years, 10 years, 20 years? That's a deeper question that also needs to be examined.”
Regardless of when someone thinks the future kicks off, people remain acutely aware that time is passing even if for many their actions belie that. Proof of this comes from studies of how individual react when made acutely aware of the advance of time, Hershfield notes. “People place special value on these milestone birthdays and almost use them as an excuse to perform sort of a meaningfulness audit. of their lives, … This is a common finding, we've actually found this in our research, that people are more likely to do these sorts of meaning-making activities as they confront these big milestones. But it's also to some degree represents a break between who you are now and some future person who you will become.”
Hershfield concludes the interview noting how his research has changed him, using the example of how he now makes time when he might be doing professional work to spend with his family. “I want my future self to look back and say, ‘You were there. You were present. You saw those things,’ and not have looked up and said, ‘Shoot, I missed out on that.’ I would say that's the main way that I've really started to shift my thinking from this work.”
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A common trope in America depicts a traditional family of a married husband and wife and their 2.5 (yes, 2.5) children as the norm, if not perhaps the ideal. Leaving aside the idea of a “traditional” coupling or what the right number of children might be, is there an advantage to growing up with married parents?
Definitely, argues Melissa Kearney, author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind and the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she reviews the long-term benefits of growing up in a two-parent household and details some of the reasons why such units have declined in the last four decades.
As befits her training, Kearney uses economics to analyze marriage. “Marriage,” she tells host David Edmonds, “is fundamentally an economic contract between two individuals—here, I'm gonna sound very unromantic—but it really is about two people making a long-term commitment to pool resources and consume and produce things together.”
In her own research, Kearney looks specifically at being legally married within the United States over the last 40 years and what that means when children are involved. Her findings both fascinate her and, she admits, worries her.
“We talk at length in this country about inequality as we should, but this divergence in family structure and access to two parents and all the resources that brings to kids and the benefits it gives kids in terms of having a leg up in sort of achieving things throughout their life—getting ahead economically, attaining higher levels of education—[well,] we will not close class gaps. without addressing this.”
She provides data showing that the percentage of young Americans living with married parents is indeed falling. In 2020, 63 percent of U.S. children lived with married parents, compared to 77 percent 40 years earlier. Meanwhile, 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents.
While these percentages are evenly distributed across the geography of the U.S., they are less so among the nation’s demographics. For example, children born to white or Asian, more educated or richer mothers are more likely to be born within wedlock.
“The mechanical drivers of this,” Kearney explains, “are a reduction in marriage and a reduction in the share of births being born inside of marital union, not a rise in divorce, not a rise in birth rates to young or teen moms.” But economics does seem to be a driver, Kearney said – especially among men.
As cultural tumult saw marriage itself growing less popular starting in the 1960s, non-college-educated men saw their economic prospects dimming. “We saw a reduction in male earnings or a reduction in male employment and a corresponding reduction in marriage and rise in the share of kids born outside of marital union. So, there is a causal effect here, economic shocks that have widened inequality hurt the economic security of non-college educated men, and this rising college gap and family structure.”
Over time, new social norms were established, so even when the economic prospects of non-college-educated men rise, there is not a corresponding increase in marriage and decrease in non-marital births. “Once a social norm has been established, where this insistence on sort of having and raising kids in a marital union is broken, then we get this response to economic shocks that we might not have gotten if the social norm towards two-parent households and married-parent households was tighter.”
In addition to her work at the University of Maryland, Kearney maintains a large footprint in the policy world. She is director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings; a scholar affiliate and member of the board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities; and a scholar affiliate of the MIT Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL.
So it’s no surprise that she closes her interview with some policy suggestions.
“[I]mproving the economic position of non-college educated men, I think, is necessary but won't be sufficient. We need more wage subsidies. We need a lot of investment in community colleges throughout the country—they train workers throughout the country—we need to be shoring up those institutions. We need to be stopping bottlenecks in the workforce that make it harder for people without a four-year college degree, or for people who have criminal past, right, criminal history—all of those things. We need to be removing barriers to employment, investing in training, investing in skills, investing in paths to families to sustaining employment.”
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While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-leader of the Digital Reskilling Lab there. Working through several managerial mega-projects she co-founded, Sadun can both identify traits of successful management and even put a quantitative value to what good management can bring to a firm (spoiler alert – as Sadun will explain, it’s a big number).
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sadun discusses her research findings with host David Edmonds, who open his inquiry with a very basic question: What, exactly, do we mean by ‘management’?
“It's a complicated answer,” Sadun replies. “I think that management is the consistent application of processes that relate to both the operations of the organization as well as the management of human resources. And at the end of the day, management is not that difficult. It’s being able to implement these processes and update them and sort of adapt them to the context of the organization.”
In a practical sense, that involves things like monitoring workers, solving problems and coordinating disparate activities, activities that ultimately require someone “to be in charge.” But not just anyone, Sadun details, and not just someone who happens to be higher up. “The most effective managers are the ones that are able to empower and get information and reliable information from their team, which is fundamentally a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach.”
If that sounds a little different from the adversarial relationship many expect between workers and managers, well, good management is a little different, she continues. “I can see how you can think of this as being a trade-off (profit versus well-being of workers), but if you look at the type of practices that we measure, as I said, they're not exploitations, but they are ways to get people engaged and empowered to sort of participate into the work. It’s always possible that there are organizations that push so much on one side of the equation that make people very unhappy. In my experience, these type of situations are not sustainable.”
Good people – the ones employers prize -- won’t put up with too much garbage. “Talented people are attracted--to the extent that they want to work for somebody else—they're attracted to places where their life is not miserable.”
Sadun came to her conclusions through projects like the World Management Survey, which she co-founded two decades ago. “We spoke with more than 20,000 managers to date—around 35 countries, [and ..] collected typically [by] talking with middle managers.” Other big projects include the Executive Time Use Study, and MOPS-H, the first large-scale management survey in hospitals and one conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau. In her native Italy, Sadun was an economic adviser to the Italian government in the early 2020s, earning the highest honor possible from the government, the Grande Ufficiale dell'Ordine "Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana." In the United States, serves as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group in Organizational Economics, and is faculty co-chair of the Harvard Project on the Workforce.
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“We have been evolving into a species that is super-cooperative: we work together with strangers, we can empathize with people, we are really an empathic flock,” begins Carsten de Dreu, a professor at Leiden University. “And at the same time, there is increasing evidence from archaeological excavations all around the world that already 10, 20 and 30 thousand years ago, people were actually violently killing each other.”
Trained as a social psychologist, de Dreu uses behavioral science, history, economics, archaeology, primatology and biology, among other disciplines to study the basis of conflict and cooperation among humans. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he discusses how conflict and violence – which he takes pains to note are not the same – mark our shared humanity and offers some suggestions on how our species might tamp down the violence.
“Violence,” de Dreu explains to host David Edmonds, “is not the same as conflict – you can’t have violence without conflict, but you can have conflict without violence.” Conflict, he continues, is a situation, while violence is a behavior. Conflict, he says, likely always will be with us, but resorting to violence need not be.
The psychologist says behavior has a biological basis, and various hormones may ‘support’ violent actions. For example, greater concentrations of oxytocin – which helps maintain in-group bonds and has been dubbed “the love hormone” -- is found in primate poo after groups fights. But, he cautions, that is not to say we are innately violent.
But when we do get violent, it’s worse when we’re in groups. Then, the potential for violence, as he put it, “to get out of hand,” increases, escalating faster and well beyond the violence seen between individuals (even if that one-on-one violence sometimes can be horrific).
“In an interpersonal fight, the only trigger is the antagonist. In intergroup violence, what we see is that people are sometimes blinded to the enemy – they might not even recognize who they were because they were so concerned with each other.”
What drives this violence is both obvious and not, de Dreu suggests. “Even among my colleagues, there is sometimes fierce debate - conflicts sometimes about what are conflicts! But if you zoom out, there are two core things that groups fight about:” resources and ideas.
Fighting over resources is not unique to humans – groups of primates are known to battle over land or mates. But fighting over ideas is uniquely human. And unlike resource conflicts, which have the potential to be negotiated, “for these truth conflicts ... there is no middle ground, no trade-off.” Regardless, he argues, values have value.
Citing recent work with colleagues, de Dreu says he thinks “these values, these truths, these worldviews that we have, that we share within our groups and our communities, within our countries sometimes, they are the ‘oil’ of the system. To work together so that we all can survive and prosper, we need certain rules, a certain shared view of how the world operates, what is good and bad, what is right and wrong. These are very important shared values we need to have in order to function as a complex social system.”
But “when these values get questioned, or attacked, or debunked, that’s threatening.” Depending on how severe the threat is seen, violence is deployed. And sometimes, as even a casual observer may divine, it’s not the direct quest for resources or to protect values that sparks violence, but what de Dreu terms “collateral damage” from leaders cynically weaponizing these drivers – or even inventing threats to them -- while actually pursuing their own goals.
But de Dreu ends the podcast on a (mostly) upbeat note. He says we can break the cycles of violence, even if there’s no neat linear trajectory to do so, and concludes by offering some rays of hope.
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In the Global North, media and political depictions of migration tend to be relentless images of little boats crossing bodies of water or crowds of people stacking up at a dotted line on a map. These depictions presume two things – that this is a generally comprehensive picture of migration and that, regardless of where you stand, the situation around migration is relatively dire.
Enter Heaven Crawley, who heads equitable development and migration at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. She also holds a chair in international migration at Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, and directs the South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub since 2019, a project supported by UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund. From her perch, spanning government, academe and field research, she says confidently in this Social Science Bites podcast that international migration “is not an entirely positive story, but neither is it an entirely negative one. What we’re lacking in the media conversation and in the political discussion is any nuance.”
Connecting nearly all the regional debates about migration “is the lack of an honest conversation about what migration is and what it has been historically. It has historically been the very thing that has developed the societies in which we live, and it is something on which the clock cannot be turned back.
“And none of us, frankly, if migration was to end tomorrow, would benefit from that.”
Trying to bring a clear eye to the debate, she explains to host David Edmonds that roughly 3.6 percent of the world’s population, or 280 million people, could be considered migrants. Of that, about 32 million fit under the rubric of “refugee.” And while the sheer number of Migrants is growing, the percentage of the world’s population involved has been “more or less the same” last three decades.
And while this might surprise European listeners, almost 40 percent of migration originates from Asia-- mostly India, Pakistan and Bangladesh -- followed by Mexico. There is a lot of migration from African countries, Crawley notes, which gibes with European media, but most of that migration isn’t to Europe, but within the African continent.
Who are these migrants? Overall, she says, most people who move are less than 45. Nonetheless, “the gender, the age really depends on the category you’re looking at and also the region you are looking at.” Generalizations about their qualifications can be fraught: low-skills migrants ready to fill so-called “dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs” and high-skill migrants draining out their country’s brains can often depart from the same nation.
Crawley agrees that migration currently is a politically potent wedge issue, but she notes it has been in the past, too. She suggests that migration per se isn’t even the issue in many migration debates. “A whole set of other things are going on in the world that people find very anxiety-producing” – rapid changes in society drawing from security, economy, demographics, and more, all against a backdrop of “migration simultaneously increasing (in the number of people on the move, not the proportion) and the variety of people also increasing.”
This creates an easy out for policymakers, she says. “Politicians know that if they’ve got problems going on in society, it’s very easy to blame migration, to blame migrants. It really is a very good distraction from lots of other problems they really don’t want to deal with.”
This is also why, she suggests, that responses such as deterrence are more popular than more successful interventions like addressing the inequalities that drive migration in the first place.
Crawley’s career saw her sit as head of asylum and migration research at the UK Home Office, serve three separate times as a specialist adviser to the UK Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee and Joint Committee on Human Rights, and be associate director at the Institute for Public Policy Research. In 2012, in recognition of her contribution to the social sciences and to evidence-based policymaking, she was named a fellow of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences.
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