Social Science Bites
Social Science Bites is a podcast series interviewing major figures in social science, made in association with SAGE
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Ariel Kalil on Parents’ Role in Child Development
08/03/2026
Ariel Kalil on Parents’ Role in Child Development
When discussing youngsters’ life outcomes, school is often the first place someone starts investigating. And yet school time is dwarfed by the amount of time kids spend with their parents or other adult caregivers. Recognizing this, developmental psychologist Ariel Kalil, , focuses her child development research on parenting. “My argument, in a nutshell,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is that we spend a lot of time investigating what happens to kids during the school hours and thinking of school as the site for child skill development, when in fact, it's the out-of-school time that dwarfs the amount of time that children will spend in school.’ And the academic kicker, she adds, is “we know much less about how to understand that time.” Kalil has been looking at questions around economic conditions, parents and child development for a long time. In 2003, for example, she was the first-ever recipient of the Society for Research in Child Development Award for Early Research Contributions, one of several awards or research opportunities centering on her work she has received. Kalil also directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at Chicago.
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Mahzarin Banaji on Social Cognition
07/01/2026
Mahzarin Banaji on Social Cognition
One of the promises of artificial intelligence is that it will mimic, and perhaps even improve, on human thinking. One of those hoped-for improvements was that AI would not exhibit human biases. Turns out that in one area, AI can indeed mimic human thinking, and it's in that field of bias. As Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji -- one of the creators of the widely used implicit bias test -- explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, AI platforms both mimic human bias and even amplify it. In on the podcast series, Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds that even she was surprised how overtly bias shows up in AI results. She recalls her jaw dropping after she queried a large language model about what biases it might have, and it replied "I am a white male," and then how, a month later when queried the same thing it came back with a lengthy 'correct' answer about how it could be biased. "[W]hat stunned me, and why I began to work on these LLMs, is because it became clear that the creators of these models were actually doing us a massive disservice by creating in these machines two kinds of thought: what the machine knows that it's learned, and now what the machine is going to say, which I'll just call LLM hypocrisy." Banaji is in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, a position she has held since 2002. She is also the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. A former president of the Association of Psychology Science (2010-11), she was named William James Fellow by the APS and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society for Experimental Psychologists, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Daniel Yon on the Brain as Scientist
06/01/2026
Daniel Yon on the Brain as Scientist
The human brain works very hard behind the scenes even in the most mundane aspects of daily life, like enjoying a nice day or determining the meaning of chit-chat with a friend. Ferreting out the basis and structures of our brain's labor is the domain of , a psychologist and neuroscientists and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Yon - author of the 2025 book -- details for interviewer David Edmonds why he feels that just as science itself represents a solid - but not "bullet-proof" way of interpreting the natural world, science also well describes how the brain itself does the same. "I think that at the heart of what I think science and the brain share is this preoccupation with building theories and models based on the data that you've gathered and using those theories to make sense of the world around you. That's a very powerful way to make sense of things," he explains, before adding the caveat, "but it also means that once you start to build your theories and paradigms, they can become the filter and the lens through which everything else gets seen." Yon's scholarship has earned him a number of honors, such as the Experimental Psychology Society's EPS Prize and the Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science. He has also been named a Rising Star by the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and received a mid-career fellowship by the British Academy.
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Tom Gilovich On the Spotlight Effect
05/04/2026
Tom Gilovich On the Spotlight Effect
Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “We're dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, ‘Huh?’ That's interesting.” He adds, “At the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences,” which means understanding how understandings come about also has great import. “A lot of the research on judgment and decision making is that there's a schism between the rational choice and the psychologically compelling choice,” Gilovich continues, “and that has provided fertile ground for psychologists like me to explore it: “OK, this is what the rational analysis suggests. Why don't we do that?” And there's often some interesting psychological answers to that. Doesn't make logical sense, but it makes lots of psychological sense.” In that spirit, Edmonds and Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the at Cornell University, run through what Edmonds calls “the greatest hits” of Gilovich’s research findings. These include the “spotlight effect,” which posits that individuals often assume others pay more attention to them than they are, and its cousin, “the illusion of transparency,” in which people assume others recognize their feelings and emotions accurately. They also look at regret, bias blind spots, and why third-place finishers are happier than second-place ones. Gilovich is the co-director of the . He’s written or co-written several books, ranging from the academic (the textbook written with Dacher Keitner, Serena Chen and Richard Nisbett), titles that bridge academia and the general public (2002’s written alongside Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman), and books that bring psychological insights directly to the public (such as 1999’s Why smart people make big money mistakes—and how to correct them: Lessons from the new science of behavioral economics with Gary Belsky and 2015’s with Lee Ross).
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Ellora Derenoncourt on the US Racial Wealth Gap
04/01/2026
Ellora Derenoncourt on the US Racial Wealth Gap
This Social Science Bites podcast offers a dollop of good news and heaping helping of bad. The good news is that since the end of American Civil War the economic condition of Back Americans has improved, using as a comparison the presumed status quo population of white Americans. According to Princeton University economist , this "wealth gap" has fallen from 60-to-one to six-to-one in the intervening 160 years. While that's heartening, as Derenoncourt details for interviewer David Edmonds, that six-to-one gap hasn't budged since the 1950s. The academic, the founder and faculty director for Princeton's , breaks down that stall , parsing out differences between classes and also discussing the difference between income and assets. "Income," she notes, "has its own growth process, and income between the two groups has been converging over the last 150 years, and savings from income helped Black Americans accumulate some wealth, driving the racial wealth gap down." But as incomes came closer, accumulated assets and the wealth derived from that have only inched closer, driven in part by generational wealth, especially in housing. "[F]or most Americans, housing is their wealth," she explains. "And we can keep going down the distribution to ask, '“'When is it the case that white Americans at this point in the distribution are mostly renters versus homeowners?'”' That's where we're going to start to see these dynamics of the wealth gap shift. Derenoncourt closes with some policy ideas that could accelerate closing the gap, including the politically hot topic of slavery reparations.
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Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge
03/02/2026
Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge
There is a value to shared knowledge that tends to go unrecognized because it’s so ubiquitous. Nonetheless, explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, common knowledge underlies things like paper money, governance, and even coral reefs. And common knowledge, he makes clear to host David Edmonds, “does not have its ordinary sense of conventional wisdom or an open secret or something that everyone knows, but rather something that everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and everyone knows that, and so on, ad infinitum.” Possing that shared knowledge – and the knowledge that others share that knowledge – creates the conditions for coordination, and thus action beyond what an individual could achieve. That’s the reason, he says, “that autocrats fear common knowledge of the regime's shortcomings is that no regime has the firepower to intimidate every last citizen.” Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, details his understanding of the virtues and vices of common knowledge in his most recent book, . The book, his 13th, continues his streak as one of the most publicly recognized of public intellectuals, including recognition as one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is also only the second (so far) returning guest to Social Science Bites, having in a 2012 podcast.
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Mukulika Banerjee on Indian Democracy
02/02/2026
Mukulika Banerjee on Indian Democracy
A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that -- at least in the India of that moment -- elections were sacred. This was not a religious epiphany but a cultural one; at the center was not a figure, religious or political, but an ideal - democracy. Banerjee has explored her insights in the years since in a variety or formats, but academic and popular, ranging from her written work like 2021's Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India or 2014's Why India Votes? to a 2009 radio documentary for the BBC specifically titled "Sacred Elections." In this Social Science Bites podcast, the reviews much of the underlying scholarship behind those works, then explores with host David Edmonds the de-sanctification of democracy in both India and the Global North in the years since. "I think what has happened ... in the US and in the UK," she explains, "is a complacency that regardless of whether you do your little bit, whether it is literally just turning up to vote or learning to organize and be informed politically, is going to happen regardless of whether you do it or not. And because of this complacency, is precisely why these degenerations of democracy have happened." Banerjee is the founding series editor of Routledge's and is also working on a grant from the Indo-European Networking Programme in the Social Sciences on Explanations of Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India. This year, courtesy of a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Fellowship, she is on a research sabbatical studying the nexus of democracy and taxation.
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Paul Bloom on Empathy
01/06/2026
Paul Bloom on Empathy
In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In the book, as in his career and in this Social Science Bites podcast, Bloom deconstructs what is popularly meant by empathy. "Everybody seems to have their own notion," he tells interviewer David Edmonds, "and that's totally fine, but we end up talking past each other unless we're clear about it." And so he outlines several widely used definitions -- think compassion, for example -- before offering several more scholarly ways of viewing empathy, such as "cognitive empathy" and "emotional empathy." A key to understanding his work is that Bloom is not actually against empathy, at least not in general, even though he tells Edmonds, "I think empathy is -- in some way -- a great cause for our worst behavior." But the use of what he terms "emotional empathy" concerns him because, as he explains, it's not evenly distributed or applied, and thus allows harm to occur under the guise of benevolence. "Empathy is sort of vulnerable to all the biases you would think about. This includes the traditional in-group, out-group biases -- race, nationality, religion. It includes attractiveness -- it's easier to feel empathic for somebody who's cute versus someone who's ugly." Bloom and Edmonds also discuss how empathy leaches into the realm of artificial intelligence, where what might be judged empathetic responses from AIs can devolve into a humanity-extracting feedback loop. In his work as at the University of Toronto, and as the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University, Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with, , "special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art." He is editor of the journal , and has written a number of public-facing books, including 2016's Against Empathy, , and .
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Devyani Sharma on Accents
12/01/2025
Devyani Sharma on Accents
What does your accent – and yes, every speaker has one – say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that , a professor of language and communication at Oxford’s Worcester College, asks every day, especially about the many English speakers around the world. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sharma takes a deep dive into the accents of Britain, where accents have famously been used as markers of social status for years. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, “the UK stands out as a country that's organized its whole social system around accent for a very long time.” While that’s been true historically, Sharma’s own research and public service – through projects like , , and the online resource – has helped reduce the negatives around that. As she details for Edmonds, “Interestingly, just a reminder that ‘you might be relying on accent as a shortcut and please don't’ was enough to change recruiters’ behavior. It doesn't always happen with gender and race anymore, and my sense is that's because the message has been saturated. People are annoyed to be reminded before doing a recruiting task, but they haven't thought as much about how much they use accent when judging people.”
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Frank Keil on Causal Thinking
11/03/2025
Frank Keil on Causal Thinking
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 an early age, but which diminishes as we grow up. “[K]ids, by the time they approach elementary school, are asking up to 200 ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions a day,” he explains. “Within a year or two up to starting school, they're down to two or three, often none.” Furthermore, Keil sees this diminishment continuing in society today – and this comes as a cost. “I think it's making kids today be pushed more towards surface understanding, being user interface understanders. I think it makes influences more influential. To just say ‘This is cool’ as opposed to ‘This is how it works.’ One of the negative consequences is that we can get fooled by misinformation more; one of the best ways to debunk an expert is to ask them to explain the mechanism.” At Yale, Keil directs . He has written several books, from academe-oriented books like , to more general reader titles like Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science. His awards include the from the American Psychological Association (Developmental Psychology), the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a at Stanford University, a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research.
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Setha Low on Public Spaces
10/01/2025
Setha Low on Public Spaces
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 University of New York, onto a journey filled with the exploration of public spaces and a desire to explain them to the rest of the world. This trek has resulted in more than a hundred scholarly articles and a number of books, most recently but including 2006’s with Neil Smith; 2005’s with S. Scheld and D. Taplin; 2004’s ; 2003’s with D. Lawrence-Zuniga; and 2000’s . Low is also director of the Graduate Center’s Public Space Research Group, and has received a Getty Fellowship, a fellow in the , a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States. She was president of the American Anthropological Association (from 2007 to 2009) and has worked on public space research in projects for the at Stanford and was cochair of the ’s Public Space and Diversity Network.
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Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit
09/02/2025
Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit
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 the things his team has learned from studying the teams -- both in space but more so those on Earth -- supporting the International Space Station. Buchli describes, for example, the "overview effect." The occurs when which people seeing the Earth without the dotted lines and map coordinates that usually color their perceptions. "When you look down," he explains, "you don't see borders, you just see the earth in its totality, in a sense that produces a new kind of universalism." He also reviews his own work on material culture, specifically examining how microgravity affects the creation of things. "It is the case within the social sciences, and particularly within anthropology, that gravity is just assumed. And so here we have an environment where suddenly this one single factor that controls absolutely everything that we do as humans on Earth is basically factored out. So how does that change our understanding of these human activities, these sorts of human institutions?" Buchli has written extensively on material culture, serving as managing editor of the , founding and managing editor of , and editor of 2002's and the five-volume . Other books he's written include 1995's , 1999's , and 2001's .
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Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use
08/04/2025
Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use
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 associated deaths are the third leading cause of death in the world, after heart disease and stroke. So you're talking about something that's really, really big, and this is not in the future. It is right now.” The underlying problem, simply put, is that humans are squandering perhaps the greatest health innovations in the last century by using antibiotics stupidly, allowing pathogens to develop resistance and thus rendering existing antibiotics worthless. For the last 30 years and in particular through One Health Trust and as director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Antimicrobial Resistance, Laxminarayan has labored to make both shine a light on anti-microbial resistance and push for policies to address it. This, he tells Edmonds, is a social science problem even more so than a medical science problem – but not the exclusive province of either. “I think one of the failures of economics,” he says, “in some ways, is that we don't take the trouble to understand the nitty gritty of the actual other field, especially when it deals with health economics or environmental economics.” In addition to his role as a senior research scholar at Princeton, Laxminarayan is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.
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Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain
07/01/2025
Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain
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 acknowledges there are times being unbending may be seen as an asset, “rigid thinking is rarely good for you at an individual level.” In this podcast, she details some of the work – both with social science experimentation and with brain imaging – that determines if people are flexible in their thinking, what are the real-life benefits of being flexible, if they can change, and how an ideological brain, i.e. a less flexible brain, affects politics and other realms of decision-making. “When you teach or when you try to impart flexible thinking, you're focusing on how people are thinking, not what they're thinking,” Zmigrod explains. “So it's not like you can have a curriculum of ‘like here is what you need to think in order to think flexibly,’ but it's about teaching how to think in that balanced way that is receptive to evidence, that is receptive to change, but also isn't so persuadable that any new authority can come and take hold of your thoughts.” Zmigrod was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University and won a winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College there. She has since held visiting fellowships at Stanford and Harvard universities, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. Amond many honors the young scholar received are the 2020 Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the in Cognitive Science by the Cognitive Science Society, . the Science Award and the and the by the American Political Science Association.
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David Autor on the Labor Market
06/02/2025
David Autor on the Labor Market
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 and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence likely are and will affect individual people accustomed to do specific tasks for pay. What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States. “[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it's hard to imagine Apple's growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that's not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs -- even in those places where those trade shock occurs -- but it's not really the same people doing them. It's not the people who lost manufacturing work.” Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million. “We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we're in, not the last war.” At MIT, Autor is co-director of the , while off campus he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness
05/01/2025
Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness
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 to measure it, and then some of those lessons for harvesting its benefits. Hood explains how scholarship has determined some genetic basis for happiness, how circumstances contribute to but don’t dictate happiness, and how individuals focus more on the negative than the positive, which clearly not the most nurturing environment for happiness. There is a bias towards negativity, he says, “So that's why we know the negative things more quickly and more loudly than the positive.” That sounds bad (see – negative). But there’s another bias at play, one that also favors optimism, that Hood attempts to harness. “So we tend to see the future as grim, and we have these distortions. But what's interesting, if you ask people, ‘Do you think to yourself individually you'll be better off in five years’ time?’ Then it seems to switch. People seem to say, ‘Yeah, I think I will be better.’ So, it's a kind of interesting paradox that we think the world's going to hell in a basket. And yet, as individuals, we think things can get better.” Hood’s research interests arose around the visual development of infants, and then evolved to include intuitive theories, self-identity, essentialism and the cognitive processes behind magical thinking in adults. It was in relation to those that Hood first appeared on Social Science Bites, addressing the human belief in the supernatural.
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Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence
04/01/2025
Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence
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 directs at the University of Chicago and for many of his books, including his latest, . What’s he’s found is that the folk wisdom around gun violence doesn’t rally hold up to the evidence. In this Social Science Bites episode, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds how – using insights about ‘system one’ and system two’ thinking developed by Daniel Kahneman – cognition in individuals has more explanatory power than traditional variables like poverty, education and environment. “I think system one plays an underappreciated role in all interpersonal violence, all of the issues, and this way of seeing what is driving violent behavior among people is equally true for knife violence in the UK and on and on,” Ludwig says. “So I think this is really a universal thing about people's behavior. This sort of frame on the problem helps make sense of a bunch of patterns in the data.” Ludwig is the , Pritzker Director of the Crime Lab and codirector of the Education Lab at that campus, and codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on the economics of crime. He and his labs are routinely recognized for their work. The Crime Lab in 2014, for example, received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, while eight years earlier Ludwig himself was awarded the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s David N. Kershaw Prize for Contributions to Public Policy by Age 40. Some of the books he’s co-authored or co-edited include 2000’s Gun Violence: The Real Costs, 2003’s Evaluating Gun Policy, and 2012’s Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs.
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Crystal Abidin on Influencers
03/03/2025
Crystal Abidin on Influencers
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 anthropology work in practice. “I often think of anthropologists as Mars rovers that you throw into these unknown planets, and slowly but surely, we roll around the planet looking for bits of data, bits of material that might be new or novel. We're not going for quantity and volume at this scale. We're looking for what's neglected, unseen, sidelined by the margins, not yet mainstream. And we're measuring how much of these things are characteristic of the planet and worthy of study. … [A]s an anthropologist, given that my fidelity is to people and their cultures, I don't always only go for the shiniest, most mainstream thing. I often look for what's left behind.” In this conversation, though, Abidin talks about something very shiny indeed – those professional internet celebrities known collectively as “influencers.” She explains how while the top influencers do generate the paydays seen in popular media, the ecosystem extends down to individuals who are spending their own money in hopes of someday making it big. She also draws a distinction between influencers and creators, and also between influencers and memes. Abidin also dives into regional differences in influencer culture, using her own detailed analysis of Asia Pacific influencer cultures, to explore regional differences that should be understood when assessing content on global platforms. “[I]f we were to discount the hegemony of American popular culture and their stronghold and a lot of social media, the palette is so diverse, the markets are so varied, that trends go in many different directions. So we need to sometimes think about who we are speaking about, what the superpower of the day is, and whenever we make these generalizations, what are the limitations? Who's not included in them?” In addition to her role at Curtin, Abidin founded the and is an affiliate researcher with the e at Jönköping University. She was named an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow for 2019 to 2024. Currently the editor-in-chief of , she has written or edited a number of books that bridge popular concerns with academic rigor, including 2018’s Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online and this year’s Influencer Marketing: Interdisciplinary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited with Lauren Gurrieri and Jenna Drenten),
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Katy Milkman on How to Change
02/03/2025
Katy Milkman on How to Change
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 solid actions. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she details for interviewer David Edmonds some of the biases and some of the critical thinking processes that both define and then overcome the obstacles to changing our behavior. These range from concepts with such academic names as present bias and temptation bundling to the more colloquial ‘what the hell effect’ and its antidote, the emergency reserve. But the point of her research – especially as it gets translated to the public through her podcast or her 2021 book – is to find practical ways to change yourself. For example, she explains that “it's important for goals to be measurable and achievable, although they should be a stretch. You know, if your goal is ‘exercise more,’ how can you measure that? How could you even set a commitment device, for instance? … It's also important to have a plan of, sort of, when will I do it, where will I do it, how will I get there. These are called “implementation intentions.” I think the most important part of them is they associate a cue with the action. So just like an actor needs a cue to know when to say their lines, we need to not forget to take action on our goals.” Her influence in turn is felt practically. Choiceology, for example, is sponsored by the brokerage house Charles Schwab, and Milkman has been a consultant for organizations ranging from the U.S. government and Walmart to 24 Hour Fitness and the American Red Cross. She is a former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. We'd love to hear your feedback on the Social Science Bites series. , and you'll be entered to win one of five free copies of the Social Science Bites book, Understanding Humans.
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Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures
01/06/2025
Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures
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. at Princeton University, where she co-directs, with Kate Ho, the . In this Social Science Bites podcast, the pioneer in assessing the nexus of policy and parenting explains to interviewer David Edmonds how programs like Head Start in the United States and Sure Start in the United Kingdom provide real benefits over time to both their young clients as youths and later on in life. After looking at a variety of programs and interventions, she details that "the general conclusion [is] that the programs that were spending more money directly on the children tended to have better outcomes." Her findings suggest this holds true even when similar approaches don't have the same effect on adults. "[I]n the United States," she says, "if you give health insurance to adults who didn't have health insurance, they use more services, and they are happier about that, that they get to use services. But it doesn't actually seem to save very much money. On the other hand, when you cover children from a young age, that is cost effective, that does save money, and in fact, the costs of the program probably pay for themselves in terms of the reduction in illness and disability going forward." In addition to her work at Princeton, Currie is also co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Program on Families and Children. She has been president of the American Economic Association for 2024 and has also served as president of the American Society of Health Economics, the Society of Labor Economics, the Eastern Economic Association, and the Western Economic Association. Two years ago, "for her foundational work on the influence of context such as policy decisions, environment, or health systems on child development."
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Joshua Greene on Effective Charities
12/02/2024
Joshua Greene on Effective Charities
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Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism
11/04/2024
Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism
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 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 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 ("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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Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
10/01/2024
Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
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 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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Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence
09/04/2024
Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence
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, 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 . Besides Power and Progress, his books include the popular bestseller 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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Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature
08/01/2024
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature
How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect. That’s the conclusion that , 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, . Her work specifically on innateness in turn led to her 2020 book for the Oxford University Press,
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Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work
07/01/2024
Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work
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 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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Rob Ford on Immigration
06/03/2024
Rob Ford on Immigration
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Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income
05/01/2024
Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income
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 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 , 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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Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias
04/02/2024
Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias
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 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 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 “." He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.
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Alison Gopnik on Care
03/04/2024
Alison Gopnik on Care
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