Social Science Bites

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.”

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

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 Tho...

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 muc...

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 effi...

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 ...

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 c...

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, offer...

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 ...