Frank Keil on Causal Thinking
Social Science Bites
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 black box of artificial intelligence a potential problem. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Keil, , outlines for interviewer David Edmonds how causal thinking is a skill we seem to have at...
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Setha Low on Public Spaces
Social Science Bites
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 complete little world, a microcosm of Costa Rican society, and I hadn't seen anything like that in suburban Los Angeles.” That epiphany set Low, at the Graduate Center of the City...
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Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit
Social Science Bites
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 , Turkey to studies of the modern suburbs of London to examinations of life on -- and in service to -- the International Space Station. It is in that later role, as principal investigator for a European Research Council-funded research project on the that he visits the Social Science Bites podcast. He details for interviewer David Edmonds some of...
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Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use
Social Science Bites
Let’s say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, , 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, about 5 million people die of infections that are associated with antibiotic resistance -- 5 million. That's nearly twice the number of people who die of HIV, TB and malaria, put together -- put together. Antibiotic resistance and...
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Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain
Social Science Bites
Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to , 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, . “I think that from all the research that I've done,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “I feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination.” And while she...
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David Autor on the Labor Market
Social Science Bites
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 podcast, Autor, , examines two momentous changes to global economics and how they play out for individuals. He explains to interviewer David Edmonds how the rise of China’s manufacturing dominance...
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Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness
Social Science Bites
Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something 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 students, ) proved popular, and Hood last year published a book, . In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hood explains to interviewer David Edmonds the scientific basis of happiness, some details on how...
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Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence
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.” This may seem intuitively obvious to outside observers, but studying guns within the United States has long been , and the amount of research isn’t commensurate with the impact on U.S. society. That said, Ludwig has taken on exploring the roots of American gun violence, work that serves as grist for the Crime Lab he...
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Crystal Abidin on Influencers
Social Science Bites
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. , a and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research covers influencers – both adult and child and the general pop culture centered on social media, especially in the Asia Pacific region. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Abidin offers interviewer David Edmonds a metaphor to understand how her cyber-ethnography and digital...
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Katy Milkman on How to Change
Social Science Bites
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 . Working at the nexus of economics and psychology, Milkman – the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the at Penn – studies the almost alchemical process of turning good intentions into...
info_outlineIs 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.