Social Science Bites

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. 

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 parado

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

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 resourc

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

“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 with

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 negati

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Shinobu Kitayama was studying psychology at Kyoto University, Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attribution Theory were “really hot topics” that he found “intellectually interesting” ways of describing human behavior. “But when I came here [to the University of Michigan] and looked at my graduate students, colleagues, and friends, I realized that those ideas are really active elements of their mind in a way they were not to me as Japanese individual.” He continues, “obviously there are many cultural shocks – for example, I felt hesitant in speaking up in graduate seminar, but I got the impression that American friends end up saying a lot of things seemingly without thinking anything. That’s the kind of experience that made me feel that something more profound might be going on in terms of culture and its influence on psychological processes.” His own perch, he explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, helped focus his personal research into comparing people from East Asia

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet Robert Browning once opined, “or what’s a heaven for?” That’s not a very satisfying maxim for someone trying to lose weight, learn a language, or improve themselves in general on this earthly plane. But there are ways to maximize one’s grasping ability, and that’s an area where psychologist Ayelet Fishbach can help. Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, studies goals and motivations. It's work that saw her serve as president of the Society for the Science of Motivation and the International Social Cognition Network and to pen the 2022 book, Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she tells interviewer David Edmonds that one tip for setting goals is to make them concrete. So, for example, resolving to ‘being a good husband’ works, but ‘being happy’ does not. ‘Being happy’ is just too

In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds asks psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden what she could divine about his educational achievements if all she knew about him was his complete genome. “Based just on your genetic information,” she starts, “I would be able to guess about as well as I would be able to guess if I knew how much money your parents had made per year when you were growing up.” Based on current knowledge drawn from recent samples in the United States, Harden estimates an “educational attainment polygenetic score” accounts for 15 to 17 percent of the variance in educational attainment, which is defined by years of formal education. The strength of the relationship is similar to environmental factors such as that for family wealth and educational attainment, or between educational attainment and wages. Harden’s “guess” is as about as educated as someone in the realm could make – she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project at the Un

In the most innocent interpretation, suggesting someone should ‘do their own research’ is a reasonable bit of advice. But in the superheated world of social media discourse, #DoYourOwnResearch is a spicy rejoinder that essentially challenges someone to Google the subject since they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. But Googling, social psychologist David Dunning pointedly notes, is not research. “The beauty and the terror of the internet,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is that there’s a lot of terrific information, but there’s also a lot of misinformation and sometimes outright fraud. “People often don’t have the wherewithal to distinguish.” This distinguishing is an area where Dunning, a professor at the University of Michigan, does his own research. While doing your own internet sleuthing isn’t toxic on its face, Dunning suggests that often “you don’t know when you’re researching your way into a false conclusion, and … you don’t know when to stop. The

Historically and into the present day, female workers overall make less than men. Looking at college-educated women in the United States, Harvard University economic historian Claudia Goldin studies the origins, causes and persistence of that gap, which she discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Goldin, whose most recent book is Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity, details for host David Edmonds how the figures she uses are determined. Specifically, it’s the ratio of female-to-male weekly earnings for those working full-time and year-round, with the median woman compared to the median man. “Expressed in this way, there has been real progress” in the last century, she says. Today in the United States, where Goldin’s studies occur, that number is below 85 cents on the dollar. While that trend is good news, it’s not the whole story. “By expressing this gap in this single number we miss the really, really important dynamics, and that is that the gender earnings pay gap widens

Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We’re In, offers a state of the field report on the social sciences in this Social Science Bites podcast. Hutton, who was appointed in 2021 to a six-year term as president of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences, addresses various critiques of modern social science – especially in its British incarnations -- from host David Edmonds. As defined by the academy that he now heads, “social science is the understanding of society in all its dimensions,” and encompasses the societal, economic, behavioral and geospatial sciences. Despite that broad remit, the first question posed is whether social and behavioral sciences take a back seat to the natural sciences in the public imagination. Hutton, for his part, says no – although he does see them not always getting their due. He notes that in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, yeoman’s work was conducted by social and behavioral science. “It wasn’t called social science, but it

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 many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture. “We’re making these categories that obviously have things in common,” she acknowledges, “but they’re not a ‘thing’ that’s in your head. When you compare between cultures, the commonalities become fewer and fewer.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, she explains how this is so to interviewer David Edmonds. “In contrast to how many Western people think about emotions, there’s not a thing that you can see when you lift the skull – there’s not thing there for you to discover,” Mesquita says. “What we call emotions are

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 book, Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends. “My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it’s been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media ab

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 risk,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is one where you basically know everything. More precisely, you know everything that can happen in the future … you know the consequences and you know the probabilities.” It is, as Bayesian decision theorist Jimmie Savage called it, “a small world.” As an example, Gigerenzer takes us a spin on a roulette wheel – you may lose your money on a low-probability bet, but all the possible options were known in advance. Uncertainty, on the other hand, means that all future possible events aren’t known, nor are their probabilities or their consequence

“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 University of Oregon. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Peters – who started as an engineer and then became a psychologist – explains to interviewer David Edmonds that despite the light tone of the quote, innumeracy is a serious issue both in scale and in effect. As to scale, she notes that a survey from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found 29 percent of the US adult population (and 24 percent in the UK) can only do simple number-based processes, things like counting, sorting, simple arithmetic and simple percentages. “What it means,” she adds, “is that they probably can’t do things l

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 companies, the sort of secret sauce by which companies would generate their incomes and do their services for which they’re employed for, was very tangible-based. These would be companies with lots of machines, these would be companies with oil tankers, with buildings, with vehicles to transport things around. Nowadays, companies like Google, like Microsoft, like LinkedIn, just look very different.” And that difference, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, is knowledge. “What they have is knowledge,” says Haskel, “and it’s knowledge assets, these intangible assets, which these