Social Science Bites, Author at Social Science Space: Recent Episodes
None
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 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 Behavior Change for Good Initiative 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 Choiceology or her 2021 book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be– 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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
Before we begin this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback on the Social Science Bites series. Please let us know your thoughts on Social Science Bites by taking our short survey, and you’ll be entered to win one of five free copies of the Social Science Bites book, Understanding Humans.
GIVE YOUR INPUT ON SOCIAL SCIENCE BITES. TAKE OUR SURVEY
David Edmonds: You want to exercise more. Simple, just do it. Unfortunately, it turns out that changing our behavior – even when we want to – is not straightforward. There are many psychological obstacles to change. But Katy milkman can help you. Professor Milkman teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and presents the podcast Choiceology. She is also the author of How to Change.
Katy Milkman, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Katy Milkman: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Edmonds: Today we’re talking about change. How to change, if we want to. Perhaps you can explain what forms of behavior we’re talking about. What sorts of things do people typically want to change in their lives?
Milkman: Yeah, well, for this, it’s, I think, easiest to think about new year’s resolutions. That’s a moment when a lot of people are thinking about this kind of change, trying to improve some aspect of their personal, their work, their spiritual life, their finances, right? Maybe people are thinking, I want to save more, or I want to run a marathon and get in shape, or maybe they have professional goals that have been unachieved. They want to climb the corporate ladder or become a serious academic and figure out how to complete a dissertation. So, whatever those goals are, they’re all aspirational goals of changing some aspect of your life through greater achievement.
Edmonds: So obviously there are lots of obstacles to change. Some of these obstacles are external; they’re things I can do nothing about. There might be laws against what I want to do. But what you’re talking about is understanding internal obstacles, psychological obstacles. These are the ones you’re mainly focused on, obstacles in the brain, in the mind.
Milkman: That’s right, yeah, there can be many, many external obstacles to change. Maybe you don’t have the financial wherewithal to make the changes that you dream about, or maybe your physical health is an obstacle. And I don’t study those obstacles. They’re very important, but they’re outside of my area of expertise. What I study is, even if you have everything lined up magically, which is very hard to do of course, in your external situation, there are still things inside you that can be barriers to change. A lot of people who have all of the resources you could imagine, still struggle to stay fit or to save sufficiently or to achieve their goals at work or their relationship goals. So, it’s really about understanding what can get in your way that’s inside you, and how can science help you overcome those barriers.
Edmonds: When I think of those psychological barriers, I’m principally thinking of weakness of the will. Part of my brain wants to diet. Another part loves chocolate. Is that the main mechanism preventing us from achieving our goals, or there are others?
Milkman: I don’t call it ‘weakness of the will,’ I’d call it ‘present bias,’ but that’s certainly a big one. Or you could call it impulsivity, and this is this very well studied challenge we have where we have long-term objectives and then we have short-term impulses, and they’re not often aligned. And specifically when it comes to thinking about the way our brain works, what present bias means is I overweight instant gratification over a long-term reward. So if I’m choosing between something that will be good for me now and something that will be good for me later, you might think that the balance would be even. I’d sort of weight those evenly. Or you might think that the balance would be tipped in one direction or other. Maybe I overweight the future because the future looms large. But that’s not what happens at all – I dramatically overweight the present. It looms much larger. It’s called present bias, and this can be a major challenge. You know, tomorrow I’ll go to the gym. Tomorrow I will get my finances in order. Tomorrow I will get back to all of the folks waiting for email replies and so on.
Edmonds: So that’s present bias. But that’s not the only obstacle.
Milkman: That’s right. Present bias is just one of many obstacles that can get in our way. Some of the others that I think are important are forgetfulness, which, of course, we tend to forget how much this can get in our way, but if something is not top of mind, we’re very unlikely ever to get around to it. So we have to find ways to keep things high on our level of attention. Habits are really critically important. I think of this barrier as having to do with our focus on efficiency. We look for shortcuts and sort of what’s the easiest way out.
In my book, I call this laziness, but I think some people take that as an insult, and so I’m describing it in a little more academic terms here. In general, our operating system is designed to prefer the easiest, shortest path to our goals, and that means we fall back on habits when there’s a little bit of friction that gets in our way, we are easily deterred, and so we have to overcome that feature of the way our mind works.
Some other barriers that aren’t always present, but can be present depending on the circumstances, are things like confidence. If you don’t believe you can achieve your goals, then it’s going to be very difficult for you to actually put your mind to it and put your effort towards goal achievement. And there are situations where confidence can be an obstacle. There are also plenty of situations where people have plenty of confidence and they still don’t succeed. But confidence is an important barrier to be on the lookout for in certain cases, and it can be particularly detrimental to groups that have faced negative stereotypes about their abilities to achieve.
Another barrier that bridges the internal and the external, but that social psychologists have thought a lot about, and so have behavioral economists, and so I think about it too, is social support. Do you have sort of the right people around you? And this is because we tend to conform to the behaviors of those around us, and they also signal to us what’s possible. And so, I think of it as an internal and an external barrier. It’s external in that you have to structure your social supports deliberately if you want to succeed, but it’s also internal because it reshapes the way we see ourselves and what we believe is possible.
Edmonds: OK, so let’s look at what might work to change behavior. This podcast will be posted in February, but we’re recording this conversation in January. You’ve already touched on this January the first is a date when people promise themselves that they’ll change. They have these new year resolutions, and it seems a rather arbitrary point, really. Why January the first and not January the second, or January the third? Or if it’s not New Year’s Day, people might choose a birthday from the age of 40, they’re going to give up smoking. They’re going to give up eating chocolate after supper. Do these kinds of commitments to oneself with these relatively arbitrary starting points, do they work?
Milkman: Often no. Absolutely there’s no magic in starting your commitment on January 1st or on any other special day. What I find interesting, and have studied about these dates is that they do propel many more of us to begin to pursue a goal than would on an arbitrary date. You still need the same set of strategies in place to overcome all the barriers to change, whether you start on January 1st or your birthday or an arbitrary date. So that’s the problem. And many, many people who set resolutions around a special date just think that that date and the motivation they feel in that moment will be sufficient to propel them to success. And that is a huge mistake, because we actually need to set up structures and systems in order to be successful.
I’d love to say a little bit about the psychology of fresh starts. This is one of the most interesting things I have studied, which is why it is that there are these moments in life when we are more motivated to set goals, and we see many more people setting goals and beginning goal pursuit. Whether they succeed isn’t, like I said, as sort of another matter, that’s where all the systems come in. And choosing a date doesn’t do anything beyond get you started, but we’ve studied this. This is work with Hengchen Dai of UCLA and Jason Reese, a former Wharton colleague. We looked at a series of moments. It’s not just New Year’s, as you alluded to, but any moment that feels like a new beginning in our life. So, this includes birthdays, it includes Mondays, it includes the start of a new month. For students, it’s the start of a new academic semester, or coming back from a school break. All of these dates, they give us the sense that we have a chapter break. And the way we think about our lives, the whole literature on autobiographical memory is not completely linear. We think about ourselves like we’re characters in a book. And these bookends that give us the sense that one era is coming to an end and a new one is beginning are very meaningful to us psychologically. They give us the sense of a disconnect. So on January 1st, we can feel more separated from who we were last year then we would feel that disconnect if it were January 5th, and we were looking back on January 4th, third, second and first. This disconnect actually ends up being really important. The reason it’s important is if we have had failures in the past, say, last year, you meant to quit smoking, but you didn’t manage to. Or last year you meant to get in shape, but you didn’t pull it off, you can say to yourself on January 1, “Well, that was the old me, but this is the new me, and the new me will be different.” And this sort of new me idea is around many other chapter breaks, right when you move to a new job or a new role, when you celebrate a birthday and you can say, “You know, in my 40s, it’s going to be different. It’s a new me.” All of those moments have the same psychology.
We also tend to step back and think big picture about our goals at these landmark moments, and so that’s what we find is propelling the “fresh start effect,” as we call it. And we’ve looked at lots of data sets, we just see these natural blips. We’ve looked at in terms of people showing up at the gym more frequently when they search for the term ‘diet’ on Google, which, for better or worse, is the most popular New Year’s resolution, and even when they set goals on a popular goal setting website about everything from their health to their finances to their education, all of these data sets show the same pattern where we see spikes in goal setting around these fresh start dates.
Edmonds: My favorite study that you cite in your work, I don’t think it’s your research, but this incredible data set they’ve uncovered distinguishing between baseball players who’ve been transferred within leagues and baseball players who’ve been transferred to another league. Can you explain what that study is and what it shows?
Milkman: Yeah, so this is work I supervised by my dissertation advisee, Hengchen Dai. I’m so proud of her. She’s amazing. She’s a tenured professor at UCLA now, but I vividly remember when she knocked on my office door and sort of started talking about this idea. And the idea was to turn what we’d already studied on fresh starts on its head a little bit. We’d been focused on the positive side of fresh starts exclusively, that they motivate people who are struggling to achieve a goal to begin this disconnect is psychologically beneficial. If you look back at your past and say, “Ugh, I haven’t gotten where I want to be, but now I have this fresh start.” And she wondered if, actually, it might be that fresh starts could also be harmful if you’ve been performing well, because then you don’t want to disconnect. You don’t want to feel separated from your past successes that could be very demotivating.
And so she found a really interesting way to study this. In addition to doing a bunch of clever laboratory experiments, she gathered data from professional baseball players, and it turns out that baseball has some really interesting facets of the way it works that allowed her to look at this question. So, players are often traded in the middle of a season to new teams, and some of those players have been having a great season, and some of them have been having a rockier season. Some are in the middle of the pack, of course. But there’s two different ways you can get traded across teams. Some trades are within league, and this is actually not nearly as big of a change. It’s not as much of a new beginning, because your season to date statistics all remain with you. They just keep tracking. But if you’re traded across leagues, you have a really big fresh start, because not only are you on a new team, but you’ve also got to begin again on all your season statistics, everything’s wiped clean. You have a clean slate there. And so what she looked at is what happens comparing players who are traded across leagues and get that pure fresh start. How do they compare with players who are performing equivalently but are traded within league? So it’s a tight comparison, and she looks at players who’ve had a great season to date and also players who’ve had a really weak season to date, and what she sees is that difference between the cross league and within league trade. It’s a really big positive for the people who’ve had a crummy season so far, they’re really well served by the pure fresh start. But it’s actually really bad news for the players who’ve been at the top of their game to end up with a cross-league trade as opposed to a within league trade.
And so the nice thing about this comparison is you don’t have to worry about things like regression to the mean driving this effect, because anyone who’s at an extreme is going to sort of revert to the mean, but she is able to take care of that by looking at the difference between equivalent players just as a function of whether their trade is across versus within league. And they’re very nice results combined with laboratory data showing this harmful effect of fresh starts for top performers.
Edmonds: As you mentioned, a fresh start is just the beginning. Then you’ve got to stay on the straight and narrow if you’re trying to change something in a positive way. And there are various tricks for achieving that. You’re well known for talking about something called “temptation bundling.” So explain to us what temptation bundling is.
Milkman: Yeah, temptation bundling is one of my favorite things I’ve studied, and I have to say it’s also “me-search,” because it’s something I did and do to help myself achieve goals. So this was the rare case where sort of a quirk from your own life can be turned into a science experiment. So let me tell you what I do, and then I’ll tell you about the science. This really started for me in graduate school. At the end of a long day of classes, I would find it very difficult to motivate myself to exercise. I am a former Division I athlete; exercise is critically important to me for many reasons, identity and also just truly mental health. I am a mess when I’m not physically active. But after a long day of classes, I just couldn’t get myself off the couch and to the gym, and all I wanted to do was sort of curl up with a cozy novel or binge watch TV. Hopefully this is relatable. And so I came up with a solution to get myself to the gym, and the solution was I only allowed myself to indulge in the entertainment I was craving at the end of that long day while I was at the gym. It was a gym-only treat. I started with audio books. I listened to the Harry Potter books this way. Now I do it with, I will admit, Netflix TV shows. Right now I’m actually binge watching the latest season of Bridgerton, but only when I’m on the elliptical.
And what that does for me is one at the end of a long day, instead of dreading going to the gym, I crave a trip because I can’t wait to find out what’s happening to all my favorite characters. When I get to the gym, time flies because I’m so engrossed in the entertainment, and finally, because I have this rule that I’m only allowed to indulge in that when I’m at the gym, I am really motivated. When I come home, I feel energized and ready to get my work done, instead of dying to procrastinate by binge watching TV shows or reading a novel. So it ends the sort of wasteful time. It gets me to the gym, and it changes the experience of the gym in this positive way.
So I’ve studied it. We call this temptation bundling, combining a chore that you dread with something you look forward to in order to make the experience more positive and one that you will crave instead of something you dread. We’ve run a couple of studies now. One was an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania’s gym with undergraduates and staff, and we randomly assigned some of them to condition where they were able to pick four audio books from a menu of 80 books that people said were really engrossing once they started listening. So these are books like The Da Vinci Code, The Hunger Games, the Twilight series. They put these on an audio device, then we brought them over to the gym, had them do a 30-minute workout while listening to the start of one of the books. And after they finished, we said, we hope you really enjoyed that if you want to hear what happens next, you’ll have to come back to the gym, because this device that we’ve loaded up with this book for you is going to be locked in a monitored locker you can only access when you’re here at the gym. And then we had a control group that also did a 30-minute workout, was also encouraged to exercise more regularly. They were also actually given a gift card to Barnes and Noble. So if they had the insight to temptation bundle, they would have the same resources to do so. So we wanted to hold gift exchange constant, but they didn’t get this idea from us to try to listen to audio books or enjoy some form of entertainment only at the gym. And then we measured gym attendance, and lo and behold, what we found was that the group that could only access these temptations that the gym exercised significantly more for the next seven weeks.
There’s another sort of fun twist in the study that I’ll mention too, which is in the very first project we did on temptation bundling. There was a holiday break – Thanksgiving break – after seven weeks in the semester, and this break lasted five days. The gym shut down, no one could access their audio books, and no one was on campus. And after that break, when people came back, the effect was completely wiped out, which I find really interesting and actually really aligned with what we just discussed regarding Hengchen’s research on how fresh starts are good when we have not been achieving our goals, but harmful when we are on a roll. And in fact, that insight is part of what led to Hangchen’s dissertation work, sort of talking about this study.
We’ve done other work with temptation bundling, showing that it can last up to months and months if there’s no such disruption. But it does highlight that when we are on a roll when we’ve built a habit that feels like it’s working, and then we have a period of disruption, we actually need to be quite deliberate about making sure we can sustain that habit and we have a strategy for sort of getting back on the horse after we return from a sickness, a vacation, whatever it might be.
Edmonds: Temptation bundling is a sort of reward that I give myself for going to the gym. What about punishment that I could inflict on myself if I fail to do so?
Milkman: Yeah, thanks for pointing out that there’s sort of the carrot and the stick approach, and of course, temptation bundling is tackling this present bias, making it more instantly gratifying. The flip side, if you’re worried about present bias getting in the way, is you could actually make it more painful to fail to do what’s good for you in the long run, and you could do that by, for instance, imposing monetary penalties on yourself and so on. And of course, this is the way parents, managers and companies and even the state often deal with present bias. So you might be assigned a deadline — teachers, I should say — so that you won’t procrastinate on your work, and you might be told you’ll get a fine if you are speeding, which might be very tempting to do, and that would sort of align present bias with the goals of your teacher, your boss, the state. What those all have in common, right, is they’re imposed on you by someone else. But what’s really interesting is it turns out, if you want to manage your own goals, you can also create constraints for yourself, and these are called “commitment devices.” And economists find them very bizarre, because it’s very counterintuitive to imagine finding yourself or constraining yourself in any way. Why would a human ever want to do that? But if you recognize that you may be tempted to do things that aren’t in your long-term best interest, in a moment of planning, you may actually decide you’re better off if you say, sign yourself up for one of these self-exclusion lists, that will mean you get kicked out. If you try to go to a casino. If you’re a gambling addict, you might recognize that that’s going to be a really good thing for you. And so you might say, you know, “I actually want to be constrained. I will choose to opt into that.”
There are also cash commitment devices, which are really quite interesting. This is where you put money on the line that you agree to forfeit if you fail to achieve some goal, and you define a referee or a way of evaluating whether you’re succeeding. So you might say, you know, “If I don’t go to the gym three times this week, I forfeit $10 I’m going to give it to a charity I hate to make it really sting!” And there are actually websites like beeminder.com, and stickK.com – which I have no affiliation with – that will let you set these things up formally and put a credit card in the line. She’s a referee, but you can also do it casually with a friend. And what the research shows is that this is extremely effective. So commitment devices help people sustain habits around exercise.
But most impressively, there’s a really nice, randomized, controlled trial run by Dean Karlan and collaborators, that shows smokers who are given the opportunity to put money in a commitment device account, an account where their money will disappear if they fail to pass a nicotine or cotinine urine test six months in the future. If smokers are given that opportunity, they are 30 percent more likely to quit than those in their randomized controlled trial who were just given standard smoking cessation tools. So that’s really powerful. Most of the change research I think about and talk about has nothing to do with addiction, because that’s a chemical dependency. It’s a totally different ball game. And a lot of these that are powerful enough to say, get me to the gym or make me a little more productive at work, can’t counter a chemical dependency, but commitment devices can, which I think is really noteworthy.
Edmonds: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Does it help to have very clear and rigid goals – “always run 20 minutes at the gym?” That seems like an obvious tactic. Is there research on that?
Milkman: Great question. Absolutely, 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? But if your goal is 10,000 steps a day, and you’ve got one of these little I’m going to show you my Fitbit now, I realize that listeners can’t see it, but you know, if you got one of these little things on your wrist, well now you can actually be held accountable for whether or not you achieve that goal. And by the way, the little jiggle I get at 10,000 steps is its own remarkable reward. There’s really fascinating graphs you can see of sort of the huge spike of people hitting just 10,000 because of that jiggle, because of that goal. The goal itself and the jiggle that comes with it are compelling enough to attract behavior change. So setting concrete, measurable goals where you can see, did I do it? That’s really important.
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. And so creating these implementation intentions, like 4 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays is when I’ll go for my workout, or 8 p.m. every weekday is when I practice Spanish on Duolingo for 15 minutes. Then when you see that moment, it triggers remembrance that you have to take this action and you can no longer procrastinate without recognizing, you know, it’s not sort of a vague intention, it’s a specific thing you’ve failed to do. And that is a much more momentous thing for us to ignore.
Edmonds: But I’m also wondering about the rigidity of it, because if I fail to meet that goal, that’s kind of depressing, and I might fall off the wagon altogether.
Milkman: Great. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There’s something in marketing called the “what-the-hell effect,” which I think is one of the funniest names and best names for any phenomenon in behavioral science. And the what-the-hell effect describes what happens psychologically and practically, when we have a goal and we fall down on the job. Actually, I think, was first used to describe dieters. And what happens when, you know, in the morning you go into work, you’re on this strict eating regimen, and somebody’s brought in the donuts for a birthday, you have one, and you go, “Shoot — so much for my calorie counting goal today. You know, what the hell I guess I might as well have pie for lunch and deep-dish pizza for dinner. Everything’s out the window.” So the what-the-hell effect is something we have to be very concerned about if we set these goals, if it could demotivate us from continuing.
There’s wonderful research by my Wharton colleague, Marissa Sharif, and also Cornell’s Suzanne Shu, that shows one strategy that can help us with the what-the-hell effect. We can give ourselves a little bit of wiggle room. They call it an emergency reserve. And I think the reference to emergencies actually is quite important, because it highlights we shouldn’t use these all the time, but it’s essentially a Get Out of Jail Free card. So Marissa does this in her own life, and that’s what inspired it. She’s a runner, and she found that if she set the stretch goal of running every day, that was great and motivating for her. But if something got in the way on Wednesday, maybe a friend was in from out of town, or she was a little sick and felt like she needed to take the day off, then she’d say, “What the hell,” and she wouldn’t even try to hit her seven days straight. She just sort of [say], “Next week I’ll restart.” And so she would have a very bad week with running, and she realized she could maybe counter that by aiming for seven days. But saying seven days is my goal, but I’m going to give myself two Get Out of Jail Free cards, or two emergency reserves. And then if I miss Wednesday because of these untoward circumstances, well I can still get to seven because I’ll just sort of use one of my emergency reserve cards, and we’ll call it even.
So they did these research studies where they showed that if we give people a goal of five days a week, a goal of seven days a week, or seven days a week with two emergency reserves, there’s a huge difference in performance. People, by far, do the best with the seven-day goal with two emergency reserves, because they’re aiming for the high goal, but they’re not experiencing the what-the-hell effect if they happen to slip up.
So we should be thinking about in all our goals, what’s the type of emergency reserve we want to give ourselves? It’s a little bit of slack, not so much that you get lazy, and it needs to be reserved for emergencies, right? It’s not an entitlement to take a day off. That’s a different thing. But if we can give ourselves a little bit of slack but still stretch and aim for these tough goals, that seems to be the best of both worlds.
Edmonds: Right. You’ve touched on habit already in this interview, but I think you cite somewhere a study about people who are paid to go to the gym. Some are paid to go many times, some only paid to go. I think once or twice I probably got the details. Well, can you expand on that?
Milkman: Yeah, this is wonderful work that was done by or Uri Gneezy of UCSD and Gary Charness, who recently passed but was a professor of economics at UCSB, Santa Barbara. And they did this very clever study published in 2009 where they invited people who wanted to exercise more to let them track their gym attendance, and they offered these very large payments to everyone for being in the study, $175. But the way the payments were constructed was a little different. Some people just got paid for being in the study and allowing gym attendance tracking, so that’s a pretty sweet deal. Some were paid 175 for visiting the gym once, and this was sort of just to make sure they literally knew where it was, and then some were paid $175 only if they visited the gym eight times in a month. Now the first part of the study is really boring and obvious, which is during that month, when some people were paid $175 for nothing, and some were paid $175 for eight gym visits, you see very, very different patterns of gym attendance. The people who have to go eight times to get $175 they go a lot more than the people who only have to go once, for instance, or the people who don’t have to go at all.
But that’s not what the researchers were interested in. What they wanted to see is what happened in the following months. Did the activity of going to the gym repeatedly leave any habit? Did it create a change? So now no one’s being paid, but people have had a different pattern of behavior for the prior month, and what they find is there’s a very large increase in subsequent gym attendance. The people who had been paid to go eight times continue to exercise because they’d formed a habit. I’ve personally replicated this result multiple times. It seems like there’s about a 30 percent, I would say, rough carry over. It’s not like you go as often as when you’re being paid really large amount to go regularly to the gym, but you get about 30 percent of the benefit you had carrying over, because we do form habits. The more we repeat a behavior when it’s rewarded. That’s exactly what leads to habit formation.
Edmonds: We’re rattling through these effects now, but I’m also interested in the ambition of a goal. My brother is trying to persuade us all to sign on to this app whereby we all have to walk two and a half million steps in the first six months of the year. And I’ve crunched the numbers, and that turns out to be 14,000 steps a day, something like that. So how do you compare those two goals? 14,000 steps a day, or two and a half million in six months?
Milkman: Well, the first thing I’d say is you were very clever to crunch the numbers. And interestingly, most people seem to maybe skip that step, or they’re not that focused on that step. Knowing what the goal is each day is really, really important. So we did this one experiment where we were working with an organization called Crisis Text Line, and this was led by Aneesh Rai of the University of Maryland. And Crisis Text Line is an organization that provides crisis counseling to people via text message when they need it, and it’s staffed entirely by volunteers who’ve been trained to deal with these crises. They rely on this volunteer army, and everyone goes through extensive training to become a qualified crisis counselor, and then they commit to 200 hours a year of volunteering. But many do not reach that goal. They get a lot of reminders from the organization. “Don’t forget, you committed to 200 hours a year. Please do a little every week. Please sign up for your hourly commitments this week.” And we looked at those messages, and we said, you know, a lot of people probably aren’t doing the division and recognizing what the concrete, near-term, bite-size goal is that they need to achieve to stay on track. And that really matters. People need to be able to see what’s the bite-size thing. What can I do today? What can I do this week? Not, what am I going to do all year?
So we just did an experiment, an A/B test where we tweaked the messages from that sort of, “do a little every week to reach your 200 hour yearly goal,” to say, “you know, do four hours of volunteering every week to reach your 200 hour yearly goal.” And what we see is about an 8 percent increase in volunteering when we’re clearer and give people that bite size, approachable goal. So I think that’s a really important thing to recognize when we have these big, ambitious, long-term goals/ It’s intuitive, but we don’t always say to ourselves, “What does that mean I need to do today?” Not just what does it mean, I sort of vaguely kind of need to do regularly more. We need to know how much more, and be precise.
Edmonds: The other aspect of my brother’s challenge is that there’s a kind of competition, there’s more than one person involved, and I guess that motivates us in some way.
Milkman: Absolutely social accountability and visibility and camaraderie are really important. We did an experiment about this that we actually published last year. I’m talking about a lot of gym studies. We do a lot of work at the gym when we’re studying habits, not because we’re only interested in the gym, but it turns out to be really easy to track behavior, so I think of it as like the fruit fly of habit research. So this was a gym study, and it was about social accountability and the benefits of sort of pursuing goals with others. So we randomly assigned people, and this was led by Rachel Gershon at UC Berkeley. Everybody signed up for our program with a friend. So everybody wanted to exercise more. Everybody signed up with a friend. But then we randomly assigned them to two different conditions. Some people were paid $1 every time they went to the gym, regardless of whether their friend showed up, and other people could only earn that dollar if they and their friend checked into the gym within a few minutes of each other. Economists would say the second incentive, where you are contingently paid, is inferior. If we’re just trying to maximize gym attendance, you always pay directly for what you want, which is showing up. Now we’ve made it harder to earn this dollar. But if you believe that social pressure and accountability and the camaraderie we build from pursuing goals with others could add value, you might have a different theory. And in fact, we did, and that’s what we found, people actually went to the gym 35 percent more when their payments for gym attendance were contingent on showing up with a friend.
When we surveyed them afterwards to try to sort of look under the hood, the key things that came out is this feeling of accountability and not wanting to let someone else down, as well as the fact that it was more fun to work out with someone else. That’s sort of like temptation bundling here. We’re not, you know, combining a steamy TV show, but instead an enjoyable conversation and interaction. So absolutely, there’s benefits to pursuing goals in tandem with our friends.
Edmonds: Related to this is the study that looks at classmates and which room you’re allocated when you first arrive at college.
Milkman: Yes, absolutely. So this is work by Scott Carell, and he and his collaborators looked at students at the Air Force Academy, and what was the group of cadets with whom they were randomly assigned to live as freshmen. Did that impact their own study habits? And what he showed, what he and his collaborators show, is that we’re very influenced academically by the habits, essentially, of the people around us. So first-year students who were randomly assigned to have fellow cadets who were sort of more studious – they had done better on their sort of verbal SATs – that ended up pulling up others’ performance. And if you ended up with a group of roommates, right, who were sort of less studious, your performance suffered. So we were shaped to some degree by those around us, which makes total sense, right? If your roommate is staying in on studying on Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays, you’re like, “Hey, I guess that’s the thing to do.” And if your roommate is going out and partying and trying to drag you with them on Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays, you’re gonna think, “Hey, I think that’s the thing to do.” And so it’s going to affect your performance.
And this is true in all parts of our life. We are shaped by the people around us, by their habits, by their attitudes. And this can be a challenge or it can be an opportunity, if we actually choose to craft relationships and groups of friends who inspire us and push us to achieve more.
Edmonds: Let me end with something personal. Tell us a goal that you’ve had, which, despite being a world expert on goals, you’ve been unable to achieve.
Milkman: Oh my gosh. Where to begin? I mean, I’m a parent, and I would say that’s been the hardest challenge in terms of so many goals. You know, “Never yell.” How many weeks can I say I got through the week and I didn’t yell at my child? Probably count it on one hand, unfortunately. So maybe that’s one. I have plenty of professional goals that I also haven’t achieved, one that I’m working on right now that I feel is a little more achievable. I’d really like to find more uses for AI in my research. I do not feel like I am using large language models optimally, and one of my goals is to try to find a new use of a large language model for my research each day this year, and I’m particularly concerned about the gender gap with large language models are so powerful, and I’m sort of afraid, am I conforming to gender norms by not relying on them and not developing expertise in them? Enough? So that’s a goal, I would say, for the coming year, and I have not achieved it yet. I do not feel that I am adept an expert with LLMs, but I hope to become so.
Edmonds: Katy Milkman, thank you very much indeed.
Milkman: Thank you very much for having me.
The post Katy Milkman on How to Change appeared first on Social Science Space.
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. Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she co-directs, with Pascaline Dupas, the Center for Health and Wellbeing. 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, she received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize “for her foundational work on the influence of context such as policy decisions, environment, or health systems on child development.”
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds:How much do socio-economic circumstances affect a child’s future life? Janet Currie teaches economics at Princeton and is a leading expert in the economic analysis of child development and the policies that are designed to boost prospects for the most disadvantaged.
Janet Currie, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Janet Currie: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here.
David Edmonds: What factors influence how children will do in the future? That’s our topic for today, and also whether and which interventions can make a difference. So can I start with a very basic question? If we want to judge how successful a child’s life becomes as an adult, what criteria should we use? Should we use future income, educational attainment, some kind of subjective levels of happiness or what?
Janet Currie: So I think the answer is all of the above. When people are evaluating programs, they tend to look at the measures that they have at hand, which might be something like income or education. But I also think it’s important to think about people’s happiness. In my own work, I’ve been doing increasing amount of research looking at mental health and how we can measure that as well.
David Edmonds: OK, we’ll come on to mental health later. Another definitional issue, I guess, is what counts as childhood when childhood ends, and that might vary a bit from place to place, from culture to culture. Is it generally the case that policies or interventions are more successful the younger the child?
Janet Currie: I think what we know is that there’s a lot of successful interventions for pregnant women. That is that they have healthier babies, and their babies do better after these interventions. There’s also a lot of evaluation of programs for very young children, say, preschool children, which have been very successful. I think we know less about successful programs for, say, adolescents, but we do know that there are some, and so that’s an area where there’s increasing research, realizing that childhood doesn’t end at age 5, and there are many other children out there who need help, and there’s things that we could do to help.
David Edmonds: You mentioned pregnant women, obviously an intervention on a child can’t get earlier than that. So what’s the evidence about what works?
Janet Currie: So that is a very well-researched topic. In fact, that might be the start of some of this research on children was observations that, especially bad things that happen during pregnancy, like starvation, famines, stressful events like natural disasters, seem to have long, lasting effects on children. And so then the kind of reverse of that is, well, if you make conditions better for women while they’re pregnant, say, through income support or nutritional supplements, does that have a positive effect on the child? And there’s a lot of evidence that that’s also the case, that you can make things better.
David Edmonds: How much better?
Janet Currie: So it’s not that difficult to get a 10 percent reduction in low birth weight, which is significant because low birth weight is related to all kinds of future cognitive issues, asthma, ADHD, and so if you can reduce that at birth, you give somebody a much better chance to have a healthy life.
David Edmonds: So one thing you’re known for especially is assessing the Head Start program. Not all listeners will know what that is. In the UK we’ve got something similar the Sure Start program. Can you tell us something about those programs and how you went about analyzing, calculating their effectiveness?
Janet Currie: Yes. So Sure Start was actually modeled to some extent after the Head Start program. So what Head Start is, is an early childhood program. It initially served 3- to 5-year-olds, and now it can serve even infants. And it’s sort of a manualized program. So there’s all kinds of different requirements that a program has to meet to be a Head Start program. It’s also kind of an interesting model, because the federal government puts up the money, but the local community has to do a lot of the thinking about how to develop the program within the guidelines, and I think that’s also true for Sure Start. So the idea is that it’s supposed to reflect community assets and community goals as well.
David Edmonds: Does it tend to be a universal program? In other words, can everybody access Head Start? Or is this a program for those below a certain threshold of income?
Janet Currie: So Head Start in the United States is for people who are below a certain income threshold. It’s also supposed to serve kids who are at risk for some reason, so somebody who is of a higher income but, say, had a disability or perhaps there’s some suspicion of maltreatment, might get referred to a Head Start program.
David Edmonds: You mentioned it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, state to state, city to city, but what sort of services are on offer through the Head Start program?
Janet Currie: So usually they have a curriculum, so they have set goals for things that they’re trying to accomplish, like maybe recognizing letters, recognizing colors, those kind of pre-kindergarten skills that you hope kids have. But they also do health checks. So all the kids are supposed to get the mandated health screenings. A lot of these kids are eligible for those screenings through other programs anyway, but the Head Start program actually helps them to get them. It provides healthy meals; it provides parent training; it provides home visiting often. So there’s a lot of different components of the program, beyond what people think of as, just say, preschool teaching.
David Edmonds: As a social scientist, it must be frustrating in a way, that it does vary from place to place, because that makes it very tricky for you to work out what’s working, or where it’s working, or why it’s working.
Janet Currie: So one thing I was able to do was to get information about the budgets of these programs, and then you could see where they actually spent money, and some of them spend more money on some things than others. And the general conclusion of that was that the programs that were spending more money directly on the children tended to have better outcomes.
David Edmonds: And governments are reluctant to spend money. Is there a good sort of cost benefit analysis of how much society gets back in return for each dollar it spends on these programs?
Janet Currie: Yes, there is actually. There are many such cost benefits, and they usually show that the benefits, no matter how you count them, whether you’re only counting them narrowly, as say, if we spend money on this program, will, as a government spend less money later? That’s kind of the narrowest definition. And then you could have a broader definition, where you actually try and count some of the benefits to the people, as well. And no matter how you cut it, these programs tend to be very cost effective. So then the question about why they aren’t being offered, or why they are being cut back, at least in the United States, I think, often comes down to politics. So unfortunately, there’s large constituencies that says they don’t care how successful the program is. They think government has no business providing these services. And so if, for ideological reasons, you believe that government should have the narrowest footprint possible, then you’re not going to be very favorable about all these programs doing all kinds of things for families.
Sort of related version, if you believe that the government should not interfere in people’s families at all, then you might also be very suspicious about these programs …
David Edmonds: … even though they might save everybody taxpayer dollars. It sounds like they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face really.
Janet Currie: Well, that’s kind of my view, but a lot of people do hold those opinions.
David Edmonds: How long does the effect last? If a child is supported through a Head Start program, can we see the effect throughout their life, and indeed, might even be passed on from generation to generation?
Janet Currie: Yes, that’s one of the really exciting developments in this type of research is that increasingly, there’s good enough data that you can follow people over long periods of time, so you can see people who were in Head Start and now they’re middle aged or even older, so you can see if they were in Head Start do they have higher incomes? Are they less likely to have been convicted of a crime? (Which turns out to be the case.) Are they more likely to have gotten college education? And all those things are benefits.
David Edmonds: You mentioned one ideological objection. Another ideological objection might be, not that one shouldn’t intervene at all in families, but that it’s paternalistic, and that maybe a better approach if we’re going to spend money on families in need would be to directly hand them, as it were, wads of cash for them to spend as they will, rather than direct it through educational programs or government agencies.
Janet Currie: So, I think that’s not an unreasonable argument, and that that could work for many families. I think there’s two issues with that. One is that it won’t benefit every child, because there are some families that are dysfunctional enough that giving them cash would not necessarily benefit the child. That may be a minority of families, but those are the most vulnerable children. So even a cash program, I think you still need some kind of safety net to catch those children.
The other main problem with cash subsidies for families is that we seem to be willing to give a lot more money in kind than in cash, and so when there are cash subsidies, at least in rich countries like the United States or the UK, they’re not really big enough to move the needle, even if you give somebody $3,000 per the year. What exactly do you expect to buy with that? It’s not going to greatly improve housing. It’s not going to allow people to get health insurance, which we have to buy here in the United States. It’s not going to pay for a quality preschool. So what exactly is it that you expect to get with a relatively small amount of cash? And I’m sure the family would like to have it, but it’s not clear what you’re going to get.
David Edmonds: So Head Start works. It means people are less likely to go to jail, they’ll get better educational qualifications. Can you put some kind of number on this so that we can see how big the effect is?
Janet Currie: Well, the number that gets bandied about a lot is that if you spend $1 on quality preschool programs, you get back $7. Now that’s for the Perry Preschool Program, which was a more intensive program, but it used the same curriculum as Head Start. And in work that I’ve done, it’s suggested that the benefits of Head Start were at least a third of the benefits of Perry Preschool. So that would be spending $1 gives you $2 or $3.
David Edmonds: And that’s measured because if people, once they’ve reached adult life, if they get better jobs, then there’s greater tax receipt but also the cost of keeping people in jail and so on is huge, so both those kinds of costs and benefits are included in that calculation?
Janet Currie: Well, that’s right. Reducing crime is huge, basically, because it not only costs a lot of money to keep people in jail, but it also inflicts costs on other people. Costs of crime are very high. Those include things like being afraid to go out at night because you might become the victim of a crime. So people change their behavior.
David Edmonds: You touched on the point that in the States, obviously not true. in the UK, you have to buy health insurance. Have you looked at whether widening health insurance to families in need also has an effect similar to that of Head Start?
Janet Currie: So that has been a huge success story in the United States that a lot of people don’t know about, which is that the government expanded health insurance to pregnant women and children in the late 80s and 90s, so that by 2000 like 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid. So children, by and large, can get health insurance. And that’s really changed a lot of things. For example, practitioners don’t really need to worry that they’re not going to get reimbursed, because they know that a kid that comes in who doesn’t have private health insurance is probably eligible for Medicaid. That’s been huge, and there’s lots of evidence that that’s had very positive effects on people’s health. Especially when people were covered from pregnancy and early infancy, they’re less likely to have disabilities when they grow up, which is one reason why they’re more likely to be employed. And then again, you’re less likely to have to pay for people to be on disability if they’re not disabled, which is a huge cost savings to society. And this is a place where we also have the best evidence that the effects are intergenerational, so if the mothers are healthy and better off at the time that they give birth, then their own infants are going to be healthier.
David Edmonds: And the one-to-three or the one-to-seven cost benefit analysis that you talked about with Head Start, has a similar calculation been made for health insurance, because health insurance is hugely expensive. So, have those numbers been crunched?
Janet Currie: Those numbers have been crunched. The experiment has been run in different ways in the United States, 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.
David Edmonds: Health insurance is a huge part of some people’s income. I guess an even bigger part will be accommodation, rent or mortgage. What about subsidizing housing?
Janet Currie: Yes, so there’s less evidence on that, although housing is becoming even bigger portion of people’s budget in the last little while with the run up in housing prices and rents. So there’s a lot more attention to that, and eviction, unfortunately, is a very common thing in the United States. So people have been looking at the consequences of eviction on children, which are, not surprisingly, negative, and also interventions to try and keep people in their home. So some work that I did was looking at a program to provide legal representation to tenants who are facing eviction, the idea being to kind of level the playing field, because landlords almost always have legal representation, but tenants seldom do, and so this program did reduce evictions. I’m also looking at the effect of homelessness on children’s mental health, and you can see — following the same child over time — from when they enter house in court, when their family gets a negative judgment, the child is more likely to have subsequent mental health conditions, also more likely to become homeless and so on.
David Edmonds: Mental health is wrapped up with all these other factors we’re talking about. I guess people are more likely to have mental health problems if they suffer poverty. Is mental health at an early age, very predictive of future outcomes?
Janet Currie: It is, and again, it’s predictive of a very wide range of outcomes, not finishing school, having problems with the criminal justice system. Also, there’s another dimension, which is people are less likely to form families, so then they have less social support as well. It’s thought that about half of the adults who have mental health problems develop them in childhood, and so this is also predictive of just if you have mental health problems in childhood, you’re more likely to have mental health problems as an adult, which has its own negative consequences. From an economic point of view, mental health problems are the leading cause of working days lost. The UK actually keeps good track of that, and so I think it’s three times more days lost from mental health conditions as from the next biggest category, which is musculoskeletal things like lower back pain.
David Edmonds: And we think that those people who take days off in employment because of mental health problems, the chances are they would have had mental health problems when they were kids?
Kanet Currie: Yes, if not from early childhood. At least a lot of those conditions seem to first manifest in adolescence. Also, when people do lose work because of mental health, they tend to be out for a long time compared to when they lose work for a physical health condition.
David Edmonds: So is the solution to tackle the mental health per se, or to tackle the root causes, which are poverty? How does one get at this problem?
Janet Currie: So ending poverty is a great goal, and there are lots of things that we could do to move towards that goal, but I think there are things that we could do to improve people’s mental health, even without ending poverty. I was saying that there were interventions for adolescents. Some of those have to do with mental health. So, for example, putting mental health counselors in schools seems to be an effective way to address people’s mental health problems. Especially since a lot of kids find school to be very stressful, not only academically, but because of issues like bullying and things like that. So having the counselors right in the school can be helpful.
Anti-bullying programs also can be effective. There are programs to teach kids principles of cognitive behavioral therapy so that they can address their own mental health problems or distorted thinking because of mental health problems. So those are some of the things that could be done.
David Edmonds: Do you have to run randomized control trials to work out the effect of those kinds of interventions?
Janet Currie: So it’s very difficult to run randomized control trials in a lot of these cases, so researchers often rely on other types of research designs. So, for example, one of the best studies I know of about the effect of having school-based mental health clinics is using a rollout design. So, you had a program which launched first in some schools and then later in other schools. And so then you can look at the before and after repeatedly, you know, say, “Well, okay, this school that was an early adopter, if we look before and after, do we see a positive effect on mental health? And then this other school that adopted at a different time, do we see the same benefit when they adopted?” And so that can be also a pretty compelling research design.
David Edmonds: You’ve mainly focused on US data. I know you’ve done a bit on the UK as well. But is there a reason to believe that the kinds of findings that you’ve discovered are not universalizable across the developed world?
Janet Currie: No, I think these findings are very generalizable, and in fact, there’s a lot of research that’s been done in other settings, less in the UK, maybe than one might hope, because it’s often difficult to get data in the UK, but a lot in Scandinavian countries, a little bit in places like France and Italy, Germany. The findings tend to be pretty consistent about what’s beneficial for children. And in some ways, it’s not rocket science, even though I’m doing this and like working hard to make it compelling to scientists, I think it’s pretty intuitive that if kids get enough to eat and have people to care for them and have a roof over their heads and get health care, that that’s going to be good for the kids.
David Edmonds: Let me ask you one final question. With speaking a month before Donald Trump becomes president, you’re working on interventions, and you’ve shown that many of these interventions are very cost effective. But is this approach ideologically out of favor? Do you find yourself not pushing at an open door, pushing very much at a closed door?
Janet Currie: Well, I’m not sure. The coming vice president, for example, has spoken in favor of child benefits. Both Republicans and Democrats have spoken in favor of increasing child benefits in the United States. So possibly that might happen. I think it’s also important to realize that a lot of these programs are conducted at the state level, or even at the local level — it’s not only the federal government that matters, although the federal government is important. I think what may happen is that there might be increasing divergence between states that are in favor of these programs and states that are less in favor of these programs, which would be unfortunate for people that live in the latter states, but I don’t think the programs will completely disappear.
David Edmonds: Janet Currie, thank you very much indeed.
Janet Currie: Thanks.
The post Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: Prevent is a UK government initiative to stop people from becoming violent extremists. Violent extremism is the area of research for Austrian-born Julia Ebner. Dr Ebner leads the Violent Extremism Lab, part of Oxford University Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion. But her background is in think tanks and in investigative journalism, in which role she infiltrated several extremist networks.
Julia Ebner, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Julia Ebner: Thank you for having me.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about violent extremism, your area of research. This podcast talks to leading social scientists, but I think you’re the first person we’ve interviewed who’s actually gone undercover in the course of undertaking their research. So tell us a little bit about that.
Ebner: Yeah, that was a few years ago for my research, which I did in my personal capacity, so outside of the academic setting, I don’t think any ethics committee would have approved of it. But I wrote a book called Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, for which I went undercover with a whole range of different extremist movements, for example, jihadist groups, but also neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements, misogynist and conspiracy theory movements.
And the purpose of this was to get a better understanding of the people involved in extremist movements, but also the people who would radicalize all the way towards violence. And I also wanted to understand better what is driving them, why are they staying in these movements?
And on a very human level, I was interested in understanding a bit better how to also prevent people from becoming radicalized in the first place.
Edmonds: What were the logistics of this? Did you have to create a whole new identity for yourself, a whole history so that they couldn’t do a quick Google search and realize that you were a fake or researcher or journalist or whatever?
Ebner: Yeah, that’s right. I had to set up different fake identities or avatar accounts online. I mean, online, this is, of course, quite easy to do. I had to create basically an entire persona around this. So I had to think very carefully about what is their past, their present, and their future, what have their lives looked [like] previously? Why are they now being recruited, or potential recruits of an extremist movement? I set myself, of course, also ethical boundaries, so I would never do anything to help support their cause or would help their recruitment efforts. I would not produce any type of propaganda or say anything hateful myself. But I would rather pretend to be a naive newcomer.
I was also interested in learning more about their tactics, and for example, I was able to join some of their strategy meetings, hearing more about how they are mobilizing followers, how they’re recruiting people, and so on.
Edmonds: But you had to create fake websites, fake blog posts, fake Twitter accounts, fill in the details.
Ebner: Yeah, I had to create a whole fake background. So I had to create fake online accounts, or sometimes on the big social media platforms. But of course, some of these extremist movements are also more active on some of the alternative, so called old tech platforms. So this was before the academic part of my career. It was when I was still very much involved in think tank work and policy advisory. So I was doing a lot of monitoring of these spaces. I knew the type of language that they spoke, I knew the type of insider references already. So that helped, because I could easily immerse myself in those subcultures and understand what they were talking about.
But I also had, to some extent, adopt some of these insider references and some of these subculture specific elements, and also when creating, for example, some of my own profiles, I would to some extent, also try to adhere to, without getting into the hateful territory, but still playing a little bit with the symbols or with the references that they would use.
Edmonds: And you mentioned that you would never get away with this in academia. It’s a drawback to academia, isn’t it, that you couldn’t pursue this line of research, because obviously it can uncover all sorts of interesting things that are of great use to researchers.
Ebner: It is, and it isn’t. I would say it did also come at a great personal cost, and there was definitely a security risk that I faced in the aftermath of this. I think there is a place for it, and that’s probably in the field of investigative journalism, or of course, that’s also what some of the intelligence communities or intelligence agencies are doing. And it’s important, because I think on a human level, it’s really important to understand the dynamics in these groups, including in the online groups, and also see sometimes what’s actually happening offline when these people meet. So that’s also why I joined some of their meetings in person. It did help also my academic research, I would say, in the sense that it shaped some of the questions, the research questions that I would then follow up more closely on with more analytical work. It helped me to understand also some of the human layers in the radicalization process that I would have probably otherwise only perceived as something very abstract, and in that sense, it was definitely helpful. But I would probably not advise anyone to go down the same path, and it did come, as I said, at a great personal risk where I had a lot of threats at the time, when my identity was then inevitably discovered or uncovered by some of these movements, and then I faced a lot of campaigns. It was, yeah, not something that I would recommend to everyone.
Edmonds: It does sound extremely frightening, scary. You had to take precautions. Then presumably, are you worried? Now, have all those threats passed?
Ebner: I mean, I still sometimes get worried, and I think there’s a lasting effect, in general, to being exposed to these types of extreme contents, which I still, to some extent am. I think they can create chronic trauma, even being exposed to violent content, and that is still, to some extent haunting me. But I don’t face the same types of threats anymore, precisely because I’ve changed direction in my own work and in my own research. But of course, I sometimes still get paranoid.
But I think it’s very important in general for researchers who are studying dark or difficult, tricky fields and difficult subjects or controversial subjects, that they do everything to protect themselves on the psychological level, but also, of course, on the physical level and on the cybersecurity level, from any potential backlash. Because now, increasingly, we are seeing campaigns that hit not just journalists and politicians, but also increasingly researchers who simply cover topics, such as far right extremism or extreme forms of misogyny or Islamist extremism, there is a very strong rise in these types of hate and harassment campaigns that are also hitting the academic community to some extent.
Edmonds: So a resurgence of these movements. Let’s get to the body of the research itself, the substance. Are there ways of measuring levels of violent extremism? What are the metrics that one should use?
Ebner: That’s a tricky question, because, of course, every country has statistics in terms of people who’ve been arrested for plotting violent attacks, and especially terrorist attacks. Also statistics on radicalization cases. In the UK, we have, of course, quite a sophisticated system with prevent actually, really giving quite a good overview in terms of statistics of the different demographic backgrounds and the different ideologies in extremists, or violent extremists who have been referred to Prevent and who have been confirmed as radicalization cases. But then every country uses its own metrics, and it’s very hard sometimes to compare, because even the definitions of extremism, violent extremism and terrorism, vary to a very strong degree across different countries.
And then what also makes it quite hard is the online world, where you often don’t know where people who join a certain movement are based. Also overlapping memberships — so some people might be members of various different movements at the same time. Actually, that’s very often the case now, and it’s very difficult to assess who is actually a member, a full-time member, of an extremist or violent extremist group, and who is just loosely affiliated with them, perhaps following their content.
And in general, there is now a trend towards more loosely organized forms of extremist movements which are no longer hierarchically structured or locally rooted, which no longer follow the traditional structures of extremist groups that we used to have maybe a decade or two decades ago.
Edmonds: So I was going to ask you about how these movements are evolving in the modern world. But to return to my previous question, do we think that violent extremism is on the rise?
Ebner: Violent extremism is on the rise in some population segments and in some countries, I would say. But in the past, we’ve seen that there have been waves of high levels of mobilization in different violent extremist communities. So of course, we had the wave of ISIS-inspired violent extremism, even terrorism, terrorist attacks. Then we had a wave of far-right extremism, which we’re now seeing a resurgence of. And we also had a wave of conspiracy, myth inspired extremist mobilization, including violence, the use of violence. So I would say 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. And that’s something that is very new. ISIS previously also recruited some very young members or from very young population segments, and to some extent it pioneered these youth culture focused propaganda tactics, focusing very strongly on gamification of their propaganda and on pop culture references. [This] now has been increasingly used, also by far right white nationalist and also conspiracy myth movements who are recruiting younger members.
Edmonds: So these different extremist groups, far-right groups, Islamist groups, they sound like they’ve got completely different ideologies, but they use the same methods of recruitment.
Ebner: Absolutely. They also tap into very similar audiences or similar vulnerabilities. We see very similar patterns in the people who do join, whether that’s jihadist movements or far-right movements or other types of extremist movements. There is no real profile in terms of demographic background. People come from all types of age groups, from different socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. But what we do see is that most of them face some type of identity crisis that extremists can very skillfully tap into, and where they can exploit these difficult moments in an individual’s time to radicalize them to fit the personal grievance to their collective narrative. And that often provides a cognitive opening where people then are very susceptible to radicalization.
It’s also interesting, because whether we look at jihadist movements such as ISIS or white supremacist movements or other types of extremist groups, very often the radicalization is not primarily about the ideological indoctrination. But the much more important process is the social dynamic, the social process of becoming part of an exclusive subculture. [It’s] a very strong type of group cohesion, which I’m also researching here in Oxford, which is called Identity fusion, where you start to perceive your in-group as kin like, or as family like very often, these social aspects are much more important than the ideological indoctrination.
Edmonds: We’ve done an interview on Social Science Bites about identity fusion, and are those people who suffer an identity crisis, are they a particular personality type, or is everybody potentially susceptible to this kind of manipulation?
Ebner: 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. Sooner or later, there is a moment of weakness or of personal struggle. There is nonetheless. psychologists have shown, for example, in studies, that there is something called a conspiracy mentality, where some personality types and some people might be more prone to buying into conspiracy myths specifically. And of course, conspiracy myths often form part of extremist ideologies, but not necessarily. But that personality type with conspiracy mentality, these people, once you start believing in one conspiracy myth, even if that’s a very benign one or one that isn’t very harmful, like, for example, Flat Earthers, it’s the strongest predictor of susceptibility for additional conspiracy myths is if you already believe in one of them. So once you start going down the rabbit hole, basically, you’re much more open to adopting more and more layers to a conspiracy myth, or new conspiracy myths.
Edmonds: Because that might work two ways. It might be causal, or it might be correlation. So it might be that you’re more likely to believe the second conspiracy theory because that’s the sort of person you are, or it might be that the first conspiracy theory leads you down the route to the second conspiracy theory. Which is it?
Ebner: I don’t think there is a conclusive answer to that. I don’t think any study has been able to show which one of the two it is, but there is certainly a correlation. The question is, if it’s a gradual thing, where you move down the rabbit hole, or if it’s something that is indeed more rooted in the personality structure.
Edmonds: And gamification you mentioned earlier as a way of recruiting into these groups. How does that work?
Ebner: It’s a really strong trend at the moment. Gamification means just adopting a very playful way of communication, recruitment, propaganda, to some degree now we even see forms of gamified violence, gamified terrorism. If you think about the Christchurch attack that happened in New Zealand in 2019, that was probably the first case of what I would call gamified terrorism, where the terrorist attacker killed over 50 Muslims in two consecutive mosque attacks, and he put on this first-person “ego shooter” angle type of camera, and live streamed it to his followers using very gamified language, using all these insider jokes and references to gaming culture. There were then very soon, gaming scoring boards that were developed off the back of this live stream, where people also gave points for each target that he hit, and deducted ammunition, and turned it into almost video game, like propaganda materials. This is a very extreme but very representative example of how terrorism works today. In many, many of the cases that we’ve seen, we then saw several copycat attacks that were inspired by this attack that also used these methods of gamification.
And on a less violent level, but also dangerous level, we see gamification in, for example, the outreach activities of different extremist movements when they try to recruit especially very young followers. So for example, the British white nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, has used, for example, video game tournaments to learn in very young people, including school-age children who write into the chat groups, “I have to go to school tomorrow,” but also use an avatar that is named after Adolf Hitler, or that uses symbols referring to the Nazis. So this is often used as an entry gate because it offers a social dynamic, that you are exclusive subculture, that you can be a part of. It also offers an antidote to boredom. It’s an entertainment factor in itself now.
Edmonds: This seems pretty obvious, but social media and the internet must have totally transformed the recruitment process.
Ebner: It has and it hasn’t. [It] certainly changed the speed at which people can be recruited, mobilized, radicalized, and it’s also changed the international networking factor, where it’s much easier now to recruit from the other side of the world, to have people from the US join a group that also has members in the UK, in Germany. So we see that a lot, that there’s a lot more international networking with like-minded people, where otherwise these people would have never been able to connect, and probably would have never had the same impact, because they would have been smaller in numbers.
But of course, the patterns in those subcultures and in the social dynamics, they often stay the same. And what I spoke about earlier in terms of this very strong social cohesion factor and this identity fusion, and also this exclusive offer that extremist groups make, that is also not just on an ideological level, but very much on this more subcultural or social level. That is really a pattern that we’ve also seen previously, of course, before the age of social media.
Edmonds: For the police and for the security forces, these internet networks must at least be an area of vulnerability that they can penetrate.
Ebner: Yes, it’s a double-edged sword, because, on the one hand, it’s very hard for them nowadays to find the needle in the haystack, because the internet has, of course, given rise to a huge, massive ocean of death threats, threats of violence, threats of even terrorist attacks or plots that they would need to investigate where they don’t have to human resources or the capacity to do so for all of the threats that they would have to monitor. But at the same time, it also has given them a potential route for investigating people’s backgrounds, especially when people don’t know exactly how to protect their own identities. Some of the members of extremist groups have become very skillful at also really covering up their identities, at using VPNs and proxies and using everything to be completely anonymous, but it is often also an entry gate into being able to get to more information than without the internet and without social media.
But it also is extremely hard these days for them to understand, for example, the difference between an empty threat and the credible threat. That’s also what a lot of my research has focused on, building a risk assessment tool that is based on psycholinguistic analysis, where I analyzed patterns in the speech or in the writings of terrorist attackers, and I used a control group of nonviolent authors of political, even extreme, manifestos, also non-extreme manifestos. I designed this framework to help security services and the intelligence community better understand the difference between people who actually are at risk of committing an act of violence on a psychological level, and how that is expressed in language, how that can be traced in language, and people who might just use empty words, empty threats, but who might not pose a significant risk.
Edmonds: How fascinating! Is it the way the threat is made? Is it the amounts of threats that are made?
Ebner: It’s the combination of various risk factors that can be traced in language. There is a cocktail of four really statistically significant factors that when they come together, the risk is significantly higher. These ingredients are identity fusion, which I mentioned earlier, which is when the personal identity becomes one with the group identity, and people are much more willing to commit extreme acts of violence, even self-sacrificial acts of violence on behalf of their group to basically protect your in group from a perceived threat from the outside.
And that’s already the second factor — a perceived threat from an external group — and the third factor is the systematic dehumanization and/or demonization of that out-group, so essentially out-group othering. And the fourth factor is violence, condoning norms within the in group. So you can essentially split it up into very strong love or group coherence with the in-group and very strong hatred of the out-group. But in essence, those four factors, or those two bigger overall categories, make the threat significantly higher than if some of these aren’t present. You can trace that in language. For example, identity fusion often shows up in kinship language that is used for fellow members of a group who are then perceived as family. So, for example, people would say my fellow white brothers or my fellow European Christian sisters, my fellow jihadi family or my QAnon siblings. But they might also talk about metaphors of shared blood or shared essence. So it’s all about because of this fusion of personal and group identity. It’s showing up often in this type of language, and when that is combined with this idea of an existential threat to this new family, metaphorical family, from a demonized or dehumanized outgroup, and violence is condoned, then it becomes really dangerous and toxic.
Edmonds: In a way, this is spotting the problem at the wrong end, when people have already become radicalized. Are there means to deradicalize people at the root before they get to the stage where they become a threat?
Ebner: Well, you can now dissect these different factors, and we can, of course, try and prevent the emergence of any of these four ingredients. So I would say that identity fusion, you can try to defuse people when they become fused with their peers or with other people of the in group. Fusion usually arises from shared dysphoric, really personally transformative experiences like trauma that is shared with the group, for example. And you could try and prevent people from fusing, or defusing them, if something like that has happened. But fusion in itself, just on its own, is not yet dangerous, so it’s really only when it’s combined with these other factors. So you could, of course, also try and start with trying to prevent dehumanization or demonization of out-groups, for example, by creating more empathy for outgroups by rehumanizing perceived enemies.
The problem with all of these things is that these are deeply, often subconscious psychological processes that are happening and sometimes are not being observed by family members or by people who are in the immediate surrounding of these people, because often people who radicalize are socially isolated or are going through very difficult phases. So yeah, there’s definitely a difficulty here.
Edmonds: What keeps you up at night?
Ebner: 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. I think that is something that I find hugely worrying. So the successes of, for example, far-right populist parties across Europe, but also, of course, politicians like Trump in the US, and how radical some of that rhetoric is and how it’s flirting with some very extreme concepts and audiences. Yeah, that’s probably one of my biggest worries at the moment.
Edmonds: Julia Ebner, thank you very much indeed.
Ebner: Thank you.
The post Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: You don’t need a criminology PhD to know that African Americans are more distrustful of the police and the justice system than white Americans. Why? Of course, there are many reasons, but they include some that have been revealed in fascinating research by Nick Camp, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. Nick Camp, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Nick Camp: Thank you for having me.
Edmonds: We’re going to concentrate today on trust in the criminal justice system, and in particular how it differs between Black and white citizens in the United States. It’s not a new phenomena, of course, and a defining episode was the killing of George Floyd. Perhaps you can remind us of that incident and tell us what impact it had on attitudes to the police and to the law.
Camp: Yeah. So you know, the environment of distrust and even violence between Black Americans and law enforcement is nothing new. You can go back to the 60s. I got involved in this research in 2014 after the killing of Michael Brown, but perhaps the most recent event that we’re familiar with is the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin in 2020. George Floyd was a 46-year-old African-American man who allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill to pay for an item in Minneapolis. Derek Chauvin and three other police officers show up and essentially suffocated George Floyd. And so that killing sparked protests, not just in Minneapolis and the United States, but around the world, and really brought out the fraught relationship between law enforcement and communities of color.
Edmonds: As you say, it was nothing new. Was there something particular about this episode that sparked off these demonstrations? Was it just the straw that broke the camel’s back?
Camp: Well, there’s two ways of looking at it. Certainly, the entirety of this interaction was caught on bystanders’ cell phones and also it happened in a context where there was body-camera footage, so more people were exposed to the entirety and the intensity of this interaction. Another way of looking at it is a lot of times these precipitating events, these kinds of sparks, occur in a context where there’s already a fraught relationship, there’s already strained history of interactions. You can really interpret this event in either of those lenses.
Edmonds: So you’ve been involved in various interesting research projects. Let’s get into the weeds of that a little. One is on name bias in the courtroom. Tell us about that.
Camp: Yeah, so I think the common thread through a lot of my work is a lot of times we tend to think of racism or bias as being one person being prejudiced against another person from a different group. But that isn’t really the way that a lot of inequities are perpetuated the criminal justice system. This is work led by Toni Kenthirarajah, looking at maybe an underappreciated cue in these inequities, and that’s legal defendants’ names. So in this research, we looked at sentencing disparities among African American defendants in Florida just based off of how stereotypically Black their name was perceived to be. So we compared sentencing decisions from people named like Jamal, which [is a] stereotypically African American name, to a name like Mark, which has fewer of those associations. And what we found is that even after you account for the severity of the crime the defendant was accused of, even if you count for age and a lot of these other potential confounds, just that stereotypicality of the name had an influence on how severe the punishment was, how severe the sentencing was.
Edmonds: Is it possible to put a number on it by how many years, by how much of an increase in the fine did this name make a difference?
Camp: Yeah, on average, a name that’s one standard deviation more stereotypical resulted in a sentence of about 409 days longer. So that’s an additional year behind bars for just a name. And I’ll also add that in this study, all of the defendants were African-American men. So I think this is a really kind of pernicious form of racism, right? Because it doesn’t fit that model of distinguishing between white defendants and Black defendants. Really, this is about those racial stereotypes influencing decisions among African-American men.
Edmonds: And is this an example of what people call unconscious bias?
Camp: It’s hard to say how to suss out how much is conscious and how much is unconscious. I will say that this is a cue that most of us are not really attending to, because we think of names as something that individuates people, that sets people apart, right? I’m Nick, that’s what sets me apart from other people in the classroom. But this is a case where names are leading people to fall back on biases and fall back on these stereotypical associations. So you know, how much of this is conscious and how much is not, at the end of the day, it still has an impact on one of the most high-stakes decisions that could be made about one’s life.
Edmonds: And you found the impact both in reality in the courtroom, but also you followed it up with an online experiment in which participants were asked to carry out the sentencings themselves.
Camp: That’s right. And so this was a context where we could give people the exact same circumstances and only change the defendant’s name, and then we replicated these results that we saw in the courtroom.
Edmonds: So that’s a remarkable and scary discovery. Something else you’ve looked into is evidence from body cameras. I guess that’s a very new source of data. What did you do exactly with the body camera data?
Camp: Yeah, so body cameras, by this point, they’ve been in circulation in the US for about 10 years. I think the first ones were deployed in the UK in like 2005 actually, in officers’ hats. But what’s new is a lot of times we think about this footage as evidence, either for criminal cases or for cases of officer misconduct, but we haven’t really considered it as a source of data. And what that means is that the vast majority of these thousands and thousands of interactions are being caught on camera and never get looked at, and that’s really a missed opportunity to understand parts of policing that we can’t otherwise have access to, to understand their consequences and, most importantly, understand how to change them.
Edmonds: So you looked at just routine exchanges between police and those they’d stopped. What did you discover?
Camp: Right, we looked at traffic stops from one month of stops in Oakland, California. And what we did was we created basically a script of these interactions and looked at officers’ language when they were talking to white or Black drivers. And first thing we noticed is that most things that officers say to most people are pretty neutral to positive. But when you kind of zoom out and look at these large numbers of interactions, we observe these disparities where officers are expressing more respect towards white drivers than African American drivers, and this is true once you account for where traffic stops took place, things like the officer’s race or the driver’s gender. And we can also use this footage to really zoom in and see that these disparities occur in the very first moments of traffic stops and accumulate over the course of the interaction.
Edmonds: So it was equally true when the police officer was Black?
Camp: That’s right, it could be a function of just the number of officers in our, in our sample, but that was something that surprised us, that this really seemed to be something about speech directed towards white and Black drivers, and not speech coming from white or Black officers.
Edmonds: And you talk about there was just less respect in the interchange. Who’s to judge what counts as respect?
Camp: So we’ve replicated this study a few different ways. We’ve had Stanford undergraduates look at just brief kind of text snippets of these conversations. We’ve had folks listen to audio clips. We’ve had community members from the Department of Motor Vehicles office. And these participants are all blind to the race of the person the officer is talking to, but they still pick up on these differences. So officers are more likely to express concern for white drivers, so saying things like, “I just want you to be safe” or “be careful out there.” They’re more likely to use respectful titles like sir, ma’am, and they’re also more likely to end the stop by telling the driver to be safer, to show concern.
Edmonds: Right, I’ve never been stopped by the police in the UK, and I get the feeling that pulling people over in their cars may be more common in the US. What’s the legal situation? Do the police need a valid excuse to do this?
Camp: So the traffic stop is the most common way in which people in the US come in contact with law enforcement, and the legal threshold for conducting a traffic stop is that there’s reasonable suspicion that you’ve committed any kind of traffic offense. So that can be anything from broken tail light, expired registration, to speeding while on your cell phone, going the wrong way on a one-way road. So there’s really a wide swath of reasons why people can be stopped by the police.
Edmonds: I’m assuming they’re not legally allowed to stop people on the basis of their race. But is there any evidence that African Americans are more likely to be stopped when police officers identify the race of the driver?
Camp: There’s some great research from Sharad Goel and Emma Pierson, which uses a data set of millions and millions of traffic stops across the United States. And specifically, they zoom in on daylight savings time. So it’s the same time of day, the only difference is that a couple of times a year, it’ll be light on one day and dark on another day at the same time. And by zooming in on these days as kind of like a natural experiment, they find that Black drivers are stopped disproportionate rates when it’s light outside, and the officers can distinguish the race. So we know from these kinds of studies that there’s evidence for this kind of profiling. One of the perspectives I take in my research is that a lot of times we kind of really hone in on the question about are officers biased or not, but we don’t really think about what those decisions mean for the drivers in those interactions. And what it means is that if you’re a driver of color stopped for something like a broken taillight, you have more reason to kind of question whether that’s the actual reason for the stop or not, and that really changes how that interaction is experienced.
Edmonds: Does that mean that you might observe or hear more aggression on behalf of the driver, the driver’s language because they are suspicious about the motive for why they were stopped?
Camp: That’s a great question. There’s some challenges in analyzing the driver’s speech. First, police officers tend to direct most of the conversations, so most of the things that drivers say are in response to the police. But we do have some data looking at traffic stops that ended in an arrest, search or handcuffing, versus those that didn’t, and we can distinguish between these based off of how the officers lead off those interactions. But most of the time, the drivers aren’t really saying much at all in the beginning. So to the best of our knowledge, this isn’t something driven by drivers, it’s something driven by officers. I’ll also add that from our analysis of police officers’ language, those racial disparities and respect emerge in the very first moment, so even before the driver says a word.
Edmonds: Why might the officers stop cars? I mean, that sounds like a naive question, but what’s their incentive?
Camp: Well, I think that’s one of the things that kind of ambiguates these interactions for the drivers, because there’s really a range of reasons why an officer can stop you. An officer might have concern for the state of your vehicle, you know if you’re driving on the cracked windshield, that poses a risk to you. An officer might have directives from within the department to focus on a certain type of enforcement. So every now and then, officers really hone in on cell phone use, or they might be more vigilant around the holidays to make sure that folks aren’t driving while impaired. But another element which adds this ambiguity is that officers in the US are empowered and encouraged to use traffic offenses for the purpose of investigation. So the idea here is, if you suspect that a driver might be committing a more serious offense than a traffic violation, you can use an expired registration tag to stop them, and then, you know, ask them questions about what they’re doing in the neighborhood, to see what’s in plain view [in the vehicle]. And so a lot of times, these routine traffic stops can be a vehicle for investigation.
Edmonds: And in some ways those all sound like reasonably legitimate reasons to stop people, I guess. But are there also financial incentives for the police to pull people over and fine them?
Camp: That’s true. So you know another way in which I think we’ve kind of put blinders on and just thinking about our officers’ bias or not is, I think that type of question downplays the role that organizations and institutions play in these behaviors. As I mentioned, a lot of times these investigatory stops are lauded as being true policing or active policing, and it’s also the case that departments might tie advancement in those organizations to enforcement as a sign of productivity. And so another lesson that I think this example teaches us is that a lot of times the data that’s available is what gets used, incentivized by the organization, and one of our hopes with body cameras is maybe they can capture some of those elements of policing that we know are important, building trust, interacting respectfully with the public, and make those visible in a way that enforcement decisions usually aren’t.
Edmonds: Because what’s the overall impact of this lack of trust between, in particular, African Americans and police? And I guess for many people, it might be a one off, but they’re also hearing about their friends, their members of the family, facing the same kinds of interactions. Is it possible to measure how damaging it is across a whole community?
Camp: That’s right, it’s not a one-off decision from an officer, it’s a relationship, right? And over time, these relationships have consequences. So one 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.
So one of the studies that my colleagues and I ran, we looked at another cue, not officers’ verbiage, but just their tone of voice. And not only did we replicate these disparities, officers used more respectful tone of voice with white versus Black drivers, but we also exposed participants to repeated interactions of officers communicating with white or Black drivers and measured their effects for trust. And we found two things. First, we found that even though our participants didn’t know the race of the person the officer was talking to, when they were exposed to repeated interactions with Black drivers, they reported less trust in the broader police department, they’re more skeptical that it cared about members of the community. And alongside these causal effects of officer communication, we found that participants who entered the study with a higher level of trust in law enforcement just view those interactions more positively than those who are more skeptical.
So to me what this shows is how these routine interactions over time can build or erode trust where there’s differences in respect, there’s respect change how people relate to those institutions, and then those beliefs shape how folks experience subsequent interactions. And like you said, it’s not just my encounters with law enforcement, it’s my friends, my family, other people in my community, too. So there’s really these, kind of snowballing of consequences once we zoom out from specific officer decisions.
Edmonds: So you’ve laid out the problem. What’s the solution? You mentioned that it’s unclear how much of this is due to conscious, how much is due to unconscious bias, but we do know through lots of studies now that unconscious bias training is not very effective. What can one do?
Camp: That’s right, it’s not very effective with undergraduates, and there’s evidence coming out that it’s not very effective with law enforcement, at least not in changing stop-and-search behavior. The lesson I take away from the work that we’ve done is there’s a lot to gain from focusing on interactions and relationships. And so one of the things that my colleagues and I have looked at is what happens if you use some of these tools that we’ve used to diagnose issues with police community interactions to intervene on them. We’ve recently evaluated basically a program really zooming in on some of these communication techniques, and we’ve used body camera footage to evaluate that training to see whether officers are actually using the techniques that the trainings teach them, and the results suggest that they are. So for me, one of the takeaways from our research is that let’s not just focus on officer decision making, let’s not just focus on officer attitudes, but let’s really try to focus on officer relationships.
Edmonds: That’s a very comforting result. Have you been able to tell how long the result lasts? I mean, I’m just wondering whether, if you’ve had the training and you’re sent off into the field, you might be inoculated for a short period, and then it will wear off.
Camp: That’s right. So, in our study, I think we looked up to 90 days post-training. There’s a real question with any kind of intervention and any kind of training, just how durable are the effects. So I don’t have that data now, but one of the things that excites me about body camera footage is that it’s always being accumulated, right? So there’s an opportunity not just to measure change at one point, but to really chart these interactions over time, and that’s something that I’m optimistic these tools can be built to help kind of monitor the durability these effects.
Edmonds: So let me ask you a slightly left field question. I’m wondering whether AI will help in the future. You’ve got these enormous data sets now from these body cameras and presumably artificial intelligence might help identify patterns that humans miss.
Camp: So yeah, I think this is one of the most exciting parts of thinking about this footage as data, and for thinking specifically about officers’ language and how much it communicates. In our work on language, we’ve used natural language processing to kind of scale up from these human judgments to larger number of stops. This is something that various companies and platforms are getting into. I think there’s great promise. I think there’s also- it raises questions about what are these models designed to do and who has access to them? So some of the platforms that are out there advertise a like virtual press assistant, which specifically screens interactions for positive language and selects them so that they might be shared with the public. What I’m really hoping platforms and police departments use this technology and use this data for isn’t just to look good, but to really ask and answer these tough questions. So I think there’s a lot of promise in the future. You know to realize that promise, I think we have to use this footage as data to get at these tough questions.
Edmonds: And where does your research go next?
Camp: So a few different questions that we’re exploring. One of the things that I’m looking at right now is, how do Black and white Americans experience these interactions differently physiologically? When we ask people in surveys about how stressed out they’d feel in these interactions, people say one thing, but we’re actually looking at people’s heart rate and physiological stress to see whether the impacts of police disrespect might diverge across white and Black Americans. I think there’s also just a lot of exciting work that we’re doing on body camera footage and training and using as a tool to evaluate those. So I think that once you have new types of data, and once you have new ways of thinking about it, it just kind of builds up these questions.
Edmonds: We’ll have to come back to you in a couple of years to find out the results. But Nick Camp, thank you very much indeed.
Camp: Thank you.
The post Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: According to the doomsters, artificial intelligence is going to wipe out most of our jobs: Social Science Bites will be brought to you by an advanced chat bot. But Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Power and Progress, and a professor of economics at MIT, says such an AI dystopia is not inevitable. Daron Acemoglu, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Daron Acemoglu: Thank you. It’s my great pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about the economic impact of artificial intelligence. But before we get there, let’s take a step back and talk about technology more generally. There’s a common view that, despite worker resistance to technologies throughout history – most famously, one thinks of the Luddites – that in the end, technology benefits almost everyone. Is that how technology works? Is it true that it’s almost always advantageous to all of us?
Acemoglu: Yeah, I think you’re right about the common belief, and probably journalists, economists and technologists are equally to blame for this view. I think the world we live in is, comparatively speaking, a fortunate one. We are much more prosperous, healthier, comfortable than those who lived 300 years ago, and we are surrounded by technology, and there is a general techno optimism around us. And all of that implies a particularly strong default position for most people, that technology is an amazingly useful tool, and just let it rip, and everybody will ultimately benefit, and that ultimately means something different to different people. And yes, indeed, that’s why ‘Luddite,’ for a while, and even today, has been used as a term of abuse. So, if you are questioning technology, you’re a Luddite, and it’s not a good thing to be.
So, at the risk of sounding like a neo-Luddite, which I’m not, I do see the benefits of technology. But I would also say that who benefits from technology is always up for grabs, and there is no guarantee that technologies in general will benefit humanity. I mean, think of the knowledge to make much, much more powerful bombs or much, much more deadly biological weapons. That’s knowledge; it expands what we can do. But on the whole, it wouldn’t help humanity greatly. And there are many technologies in the age of Luddites, like exactly the weaving machines that the Luddites were exercised about, which tend to be good for business owners, factory owners, but not so good for workers whose wages are cut. So, it’s all up for grabs.
Edmonds: But the Luddites objected to these mechanized looms, and as a result, we all have cheap clothing. You’re not suggesting that it would be better if clothes were made by hand?
Acemoglu: No, absolutely, I’m not suggesting that clothes should be made by hand, nor that we should give up diggers and excavators and go on using shovels. But some of the Luddites may have had the view that, yes, break all the machines and let’s keep on doing things the way we have been for ages. By the way, which is also not quite correct, because the weavers were doing so much better in the early 19th century, precisely because spinning had been mechanized, and that had increased the demand for weaving. But that’s a different story.) But there were others within the broad Luddite tent that were saying, “No, let’s try to find a way of introducing the new technology, but in a way that’s good for workers as well.” And I think that’s the emphasis that is very important and sometimes gets lost.
Edmonds: It’s difficult to imagine what that would mean in terms of the mechanized looms, other than perhaps introducing it more slowly so that workers have time to adapt.
Acemoglu: Yeah, I think that’s one possibility, but that’s not the one that I am actually about. That’s not the right perspective. The right perspective is: can we also do other things with technology at the same time so that we introduce new tasks, new capabilities for workers? So, the world would be a very different one in the early 19th century if, instead of just rapidly throwing out weavers because the power looms took their jobs, at the same time you also introduced other technologies that could re-employ these workers, especially re-employ them at relatively high wages.
And if you look at periods in which the UK economy or the American economy have generated rapid, robust wage growth, such as, for example, the three decades that followed World War II, those weren’t characterized by lack of automation. In fact, automation was quite rapid. There were a lot of machines, just like the power looms, that took tasks that workers used to perform. But what the secret sauce of these periods was that at the same time as that automation was going on, employers also introduced new technologies that increased the contribution of workers to the production process, and that’s why they were actually willing to hire the workers and pay them high wages.
Edmonds: And you talk about three decades after World War II, something happens at around 1980, late 1970s, where the benefits of technology stop being evenly distributed. Can you tell me how dramatic a phenomenon that is and exactly what explains it?
Acemoglu: Absolutely, that’s right, and nobody knows the exact date, but sometime in the late 70s, around 1980. And it’s a little more than what you just said, because again, in line with my emphasis a second ago, there are really two aspects to this beast. One is that the institutional structure that is about sharing of the benefits from technology change so that the sharing of those benefits alters. But even more importantly from my point of view, the direction of technology changes, that we start putting all of our eggs in the basket of computers and digital processes that automate work and sideline workers. So, it’s the combination of these two that’s very important. We shouldn’t just focus on unions and deregulation. Those are very important, they have to be a central part of the story, but it’s not just them.
Edmonds: And this is the distinction you make between augmenting and replacing technologies.
Acemoglu: Correct, and my favorite term is ‘creating new tasks’ because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of. 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 if you look at it today, the majority of the jobs around you are actually things that did not exist 80 years ago. Even what blue collar workers do, if you go to a factory floor, you’ll see that about 50 percent of what they do didn’t exist 80 years ago, because the technical knowledge that they bring to the work process could not have been done with machines of the sort that were available in the 1900s or 1920s. So, it’s this combination of new technologies, workers upgrading their skills and their capabilities and their tasks, and at the same time, we have an institutional structure that doesn’t let the largest firms and the most pernicious managers get away with taking all the money for themselves or a few shareholders.
Edmonds: Give me an example of a technology that’s been augmenting, that has sort of helped workers become more productive and hasn’t put them out of jobs, and a technology that’s been replacing.
Acemoglu: Well, I think, and I don’t want to create the sort of very sharp dichotomy. First of all, even automating, replacing technologies could be very important and very welcome, provided that they are combined with other things. So, I’m not against the automation at all. In fact, automation has been going on for 300 years, and hopefully will go on for another 300 years.
And secondly, even the most augmenting technology might actually do a few displacing things on the side. I think a very good example of a technology that really expanded what workers could do was the railways. So, the railways created a much better communication and transportation structure and led to many new tasks for workers: conductors, mechanics, new repair people, new engineers. So those workers were absolutely critical for the functioning of the earlier railways. But even beyond that, railways expanded what regular workers could do, because now they could get more varied forms of inputs for their businesses, and their output could be sold more widely.
So that’s the kind of thing that expands the capabilities, both for workers and often for firms as well. The quintessential examples of pure automating technologies are the ones like what we have just discussed. Power looms that start mimicking what skilled weavers were doing in the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s. Robots that can now do assembly, painting, welding tasks that previously required workers. And software systems that have taken over many of the office tasks that people used to do. And in all of these cases, again, good riddance to some of those. Some of the ones that have been replaced by machines were pure drudgery. It’s good to see them go, but only if we can replace them with something. So actually go to workers on the factory floor and ask them, would you want to do the things that robots do now? They would say, “No, we’re quite happy because robots are doing the most dangerous, physically most demanding things that now we don’t have to do.” But ask the workers who have been laid off because of robots, and they say, “Yes, of course, we want those jobs back, they used to pay very high wages.”
So, it’s really that we want to do the automation, but not let all of those people go out in the call try to find ways of using technology in order to create new tasks and new jobs for these workers as well.
Edmonds: But those workers would have been trained for the factory floor. It’s not obvious how they would necessarily find work in a much more enhanced technological world.
Acemoglu: That’s a good point, and some of that may not work seamlessly. So, there might be transition problems, but at least their children would have opportunities.
But moreover, the work that’s available in many places is multifaceted. So if you are a low skilled blue-collar worker, but we at the same time introduce lots of other high-tech blue-collar work, some workers would take those, and others may go into construction work, because once you are in a booming economy because you’re introducing new work, you will need more construction services as well.
So, in fact you see this exact same pattern in the – by and large – very successful transition that the US had out of agriculture. Half of the US labor force was in agriculture in the second half of the 19th century. In the course of about 60 years, that went down to 10, 15 perent and then down to 2 percent. So that’s a huge displacement of workers. And how did it happen? It happened because combined harvesters, later tractors and better machinery started taking over the manual tasks that workers produced to perform in agriculture.
So, imagine an economy in which we just do that and nothing else that would have been a disaster. In fact, we’ve seen that because there was large unemployment of agricultural workers in some parts of the economy. But fortunately, not out of benevolent planning, but just things worked out, the US economy at the same time also invested in new manufacturing technologies. That’s the period in which manufacturing boomed, and it became much more sophisticated. It started hiring clerical workers. It started hiring more technical workers.
Now it is true exactly like you said, many of the agricultural workers, which were the least skilled employees at the time, didn’t then go and become clerks doing inventory control in modern factories, but they could find other jobs, and their children could actually take those jobs. And again, there was something amazing at the time in the US economy, fortuitously. There was the high school movement, which meant that there was plenty of investment in high schools, so even children of people from low-income background could actually get a high school degree, which was necessary for doing many of these more sophisticated tasks.
Edmonds: But essentially, in the example you’ve just given, the market eventually sorted this out.
Acemoglu: Right.
Edmonds: Companies care about shareholder value in the capitalist world we live in. Do we leave it to the market and hope that these new jobs will emerge? Or is there a role for the state here?
Acemoglu: No, I don’t think that we should blindly leave it to the market.
But I would also say that I am not very sympathetic to the general statements like capitalism does this, or the market does that, because there are many, many more ways of skinning this cat than just one. There are many different ways in which the market can function. There are many different forms of capitalism. The world in which businesses shared some of the gains with their workers, and in the process also introduced new technologies that increased worker productivity, is a market. And so is the one that’s dominated by the tech giants, where they take over everything, that’s a market. They are very different. Milton Friedman’s world of – the only thing companies should care about is their shareholders and forget the rest – is a market. But so is the ideas of welfare capitalism that people were articulating in the first half of the 20th century, where market economy works better when there is a more cooperative relationship between workers and their employers.
Edmonds: Let’s move on to AI. What are your worries about AI? Do you think AI may be augmenting, replacing? Is there something we can do to ensure that it’s more augmenting than replacing?
Acemoglu: Well first of all, AI, or the suite of technologies that we refer to [as] AI, has a lot of promise. So, I am not an AI denier. But all of the concerns that we have talked about, multiply them by 10, and that’s the AI world that we are being offered right now. The problem with the market that we were talking about that I wouldn’t want to trust much is when it is under the control of a few companies. I’d much rather take the market when there is competition than when Standard Oil owns everything. Well, today we’re dealing with tech companies that are more powerful than Standard Oil.
Also, I contrasted Milton Friedman’s view of how corporations should work, which, by the way, is what our leading managers are taught every day in business schools and by management consultants, so it’s not just one academic’s view. That is very different from the welfare capitalism. So, if we believe that what companies should do is to just help shareholders and nobody else, that’s going to lead to a very different process. And AI today is driven by a belief that’s even more exaggerated than the Friedman view. Let AI destroy everything, and it’s OK if just a few companies collect all of the data and control everything, because they ultimately will know what to do, and then there will be some sort of trickle-down process for the rest of us.
And AI research has become obsessed with artificial general intelligence and automation, so it’s actually leaving a lot of low-hanging fruit about how it could be helpful to workers and to citizens and to consumers. And all of those are the reasons why I feel AI is going in the wrong direction and taking us down with it.
Edmonds: And when you say that the effect of AI could be 10 times the impact of technology in the past, what do you mean?
Acemoglu: Let me put it this way. Henry Ford would have been delighted if somebody offered him a technology that said you don’t need any workers, you can do everything with machines. But that wasn’t the technology he had available. And in fact, Henry Ford was a pioneer in not just electrifying the factory, reorganizing the factory assembly line, interchangeable parts, but he was a pioneer in introducing a lot of new tasks for workers. The things that workers did in the Ford factory floors multiplied, and he was a leader of introducing all this engineering, and many engineers playing more of an important role on the shop floor. So, all of these things were because he was dealing with a technology that did not permit what he may have been tempted to do, which is sideline all the workers.
The same thing is true of robots. You know, robots are amazing. They really cut costs in a few tasks, but they can only do a few things.
Now with AI, at least the ambition is a machine that can do everything, or at least pervasively. So, you will hear from tech titans about how AI can take over all of its jobs. AI can be integrated with robots and then start taking more blue-collar tasks, self-driving cars and AI, all the transport sector. So, the ambition is to do something that previous automation technologies could not even aspire to do.
Edmonds: It sounds like you believe there are two levers to a rosier world. One is a market lever, that’s more competition, and one is a state lever, which is more control in some ways. Can you say a bit about both of those? If I’ve got that interpretation right.
Acemoglu: Right, I would say competition, definitely. But I would also say a more balanced distribution of power in workplaces as well. I don’t think we’re going to go to a better future unless workers are represented and can bargain collectively. And, critically, I don’t think we’re going to go to a better, rosier future unless we undertake a fundamental redirection of technology. And it is in that context that the state comes in.
The market could do a recalibration of technology, but I think the current incentives provided by the market, especially with the largest tech companies having reached such domineering positions, is not very likely. So therefore, a better regulatory system, as well as some sort of state leadership in the agenda for technology may be necessary.
But let me be clear, I do not ever advocate state control. By state control what I mean is that the state decides what we do. So for instance, the state says this is the good technology, this is the one you should adopt. No, I don’t think that ever works, and it wouldn’t be feasible in the context of the digital technologies that we’re working with or we’re thinking about. What is necessary is the soft hand of the state in tipping the scales one way or another. So, if there is a problem with fossil fuels, which there is, we are emitting a lot of carbon and frying the planet, what the state should do isn’t decide exactly how you should run the energy sector but introduce two sorts of policies. One is market-based policies such as carbon taxes, that’s going to be very useful. But that’s not going to be enough, so the state should tip the scales for innovation as well. So provide funding subsidies, new possibilities for green innovations, and not for fossil fuels, right.
Now, actually, you know, and again, it’s not like we start from a situation which is pure laissez faire, à la the French physiocrats, or Adam Smith. It’s already a very heavily regulated economy. In that regulated economy, actually the US government and some European governments heavily subsidized fossil fuel companies. So, what would be necessary is change that. Look at it in the US context now. Actually, the US government heavily subsidizes automation. How does it do that? Well, the tax system in the United States favors introducing machinery instead of people. If you hire people, you pay 30 percent tax. If you hire machinery, you pay zero tax. These are the kinds of things that we can easily change in order to alter the direction of research, the direction of innovation in the market economy.
Edmonds: So, you disincentivize technology that replaces labor, effectively?
Acemoglu: Well, I would say I would get rid of the excessive incentives for replacing labor, such as through the one in the tax system, and I would create new incentives for blue-sky technologies that can create new tasks, new competencies. But again, I want to emphasize you don’t want to completely disincentivize automation, because what you want for the future is a balanced portfolio of automation and new tasks. Automation is not our enemy. Excessive automation is our enemy.
Edmonds: How does that work in a global world, when the Chinese companies are possibly replacing all labor and competing with US companies who are perhaps keeping labor which is more expensive than technology?
Acemoglu: Well, first of all, US has a tremendous leadership position in many technologies. So, where it leads, others will follow. It’s not a unilateral decision. You know, European decisions, European regulations really matter, and Chinese ones do matter. But US has a lot of leeway.
Second, US is the one who’s behind in terms of regulation. The Chinese government, I do not like their policies, I do not like their objectives, I do not like their heavy-handed approach. But China shows how you can regulate AI. The AI sector is quite vibrant in China, but it’s very, very heavily regulated. The government decides who can play games at what time, the government is the main purchaser of AI technologies, and AI investment is booming in China. So I’m not advocating any of that, but I’m just pointing that out to say that the argument, well, the moment you do the smallest amount of regulation, China is going to surge ahead, is complete bogus.
And then the third point is that China has the fastest demographic transition world ever seen. Of course they’re going to introduce robots. Of course they’re going to introduce AI to automate things. And they should, given how quickly their workforce is dwindling. But that’s not an advantage, it’s a disadvantage. Their labor is becoming very expensive, very fast. So, you know, we are the odd one out in the United States, and to some extent in the UK, where there is plenty of labor that’s clamoring to get into good jobs, but we’re not leveraging the technology to create those good jobs.
Edmonds: The tech billionaires have a lot of power, particularly in the US, and they’re going to try and lobby and sway decisions in their own favor. Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the future you would like to see?
Acemoglu: I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but I retain a small degree of hope. Humans are extremely versatile, changeable, adaptable and creative. I don’t think anybody who lived in the last decade of the 19th century or the first decade of the 20th century in the United States would have said that, you know, reforming that system was a walk in the park. It was extremely unequal. Companies in the railway sector, in the financial sector, such as JP Morgan, steel, Standard Oil, were hugely influential. And they had their own senators, you know, senators were in the pockets of many of these companies, especially because there were no direct elections for the US Senate. The federal government had no tools of regulation. They did not have a federal income tax. And the media was controlled by the robber barons as well.
But in that environment, it turned out to be a very, very powerful force to reveal the kind of abuses that these companies were committing, and it led to the coalescing of the populist movement together with a more urban middle class movement into the progressive movement. And that then completely remade politics in the United States, you know, influencing what at least three presidents did, and leading to many landmark legislations.
So, what was done then can be done now, but it’s not easy. So, I wouldn’t say I’ll put money that within the next five years, we’re going to have a landmark legislation in the United States. And indeed, the tech sector has real tight control, not just because they are the biggest or one of the biggest lobbyers in Washington, DC, but the tech sector completely controls media in the United States. Journalists are largely allied with the tech sector for a variety of reasons. They’re mesmerized by them; they get funding from them. Newspapers themselves have turned into social media companies to some degree. So, it really is very difficult to shift the balance against the tech companies in the United States. But you’re seeing the beginnings of that at the moment, actually, despite that difficulty.
Edmonds: Let me get a prediction from you. What do you think the unemployment rate will be in the United States in 10, 15 years’ time?
Acemoglu: Well, I wouldn’t want to make that prediction, because I think, as with many other things, it is not predetermined. It will fundamentally depend on what we do with technology. If we continue to use AI and other digital technologies to automate work and not create new tasks, I think there’s going to be a shortage of work, and that’s going to show itself via lower labor force participation, people doing more menial, meaningless jobs. And a variety of other things, low wages as well. On the other hand, I think AI has the capacity to create these new tasks, augment labor, and if we go down that path, there is no reason for future unemployment to be just like today. You know, around 3, 4, 5 percent, as long as the economy is functioning well. I think there is no shortage of potential work, potential good work that humans can do. It’s just a question of us investing in it.
Edmonds: Daron Acemoglu, thank you very much indeed.
Acemoglu: Thank you, David. My pleasure.
Edmonds: Social Science Bites is made in association with Sage Publishing. For more interviews, go to socialsciencespace.com.
The post Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: There are aspects of our human nature that we seem to resist, that we seem to find difficult to believe, at least according to Iris Berent, who teaches psychology at Northeastern University and is the author of The Blind Storyteller. The reason for our blindness, she says, lies in human nature itself. Iris Berent, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Iris Berent: Hi, David. Nice to be with you.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about human nature, human nature from a kind of meta perspective. Is it fair to sum up your theory that inherent in our human nature are dispositions that confuse us about aspects of our human nature?
Berent: Exactly. I think that those dispositions themselves are likely rooted in human nature. So, our troubles with human nature are in our nature, or as Lila Gleitman, the famous child psychologist, said, empiricism is innate.
Edmonds: OK, so let’s see how we get there. A crucial question in all this research is the nature/ nurture distinction. Are some of our beliefs and skills innate? Do you have a working definition of innateness?
Berent: Right, so here I would follow Richard Samuels, the philosopher, and suggest the following two conditions. One is typicality, so innate traits are ones that emerge naturally and spontaneously in the course of development. The other is that when we’re talking about psychological traits, innate psychological traits are psychological primitives in the sense that they do not arise from other psychological mechanisms, most importantly, learning. So innate psychological traits are not learned.
Edmonds: Let’s go through various aspects of innateness, and perhaps we can start with innate knowledge of objects or the physical world. Is there evidence that we are born with a disposition to understand how the physical world operates?
Berent: Yeah, a large literature of infant cognition has shown just that. It’s the work of Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Carey showing that infants, and indeed, non-human animals, are born with certain expectations about what objects are. For example, they expect objects to only move by contact, immediately after contact, rather than after delay. So if they see violations of that, say, two objects interact, and the object moves only after a while they are demonstrably surprised. You can detect it in their looking at this display.
Edmonds: So they have some kind of instinctive grasp of the laws of nature?
Berent: They are not exactly accurate. So intuitive physics is not the same as real physics, for example, because you expect force to only apply by contact; gravity is going to really surprise you. But it only puts the rudimentary understanding of how the physical world works.
Edmonds: So that’s the physical world. What about innate knowledge of other people, other minds? Humans, unlike objects, have goals, they have intentions. Is there research suggesting that knowledge of other people, of other people’s minds, is innate?
Berent: Yeah so there is evidence that young infants, when they see a hand, for example, moving towards an object, suggesting that there is an agent behind it, they would expect the hand to follow where the object is. So if you change the position of the object, it will go to where the original object is, even if the position has changed, so the goal is assumed to follow the object. If instead of a hand, you would see a physical object moving, say, a rod moving, they would not make the same expectation. So for agent, you expect actions to be driven by mental states, by goals, by beliefs and so forth. Even though we are physical entities, right? Even though we’re physical bodies that ought to follow the laws of physics, people expect agents to be driven by the mental states for the most part.
Edmonds: Do judgments about other people fit in here about whether other people are good or bad at the most crude level?
Berent: So there is evidence that infants also prefer creatures that help others to ones that hinder others. You see it at three months old, infants suggesting that this rudimentary sense of morality is probably innate.
Edmonds: Tell me how that is demonstrated.
Berent: So here you see a creature with eyes, an animated creature, say, a triangle that has eyes trying to reach up a hill. And there is another, say, square that comes and either pushes the triangle up the hill where it’s presumably trying to go, or pushes it in the opposite direction. Infants prefer looking at the helper than the hinderer. When they are older, they would grab the helper rather than hinderer when presented a choice, suggesting that they have very early understanding of this distinction, possibly one that’s innate.
Edmonds: So we’ve talked a bit about innateness of inanimate objects, I guess, in the physical world, and also innateness of our understanding of other minds, other people. Let me ask you whether there’s also innateness about ideas. And here I’m thinking about mathematics, for example, or logic, or language.
Berent: So each of those domains that we have just named, intuitive physics and intuitive understanding of people constitutes innate ideas in so far that your understanding of what object is as an idea. Say, objects are cohesive, that’s an idea. What agents are, they follow their goal, that’s an idea. They’re also understanding of a sense of number, of addition and subtraction. So we know that newborn infants, in fact, have an understanding of, say, three, the numerosity of three in general. So if they see three lights and three sounds, they are sensitive to the congruence in numerosity and distinguish it, say, from three sounds and nine lights, for instance. You see the same in non-human animals as well. So even fish show understanding of numerosity.
Edmonds: So it sounds like there’s an enormous body of research which suggests that innateness is very real across a whole range of domains. How do people react when they’re told about this?
Berent: With astonishment. I teach it to students when I start teaching psychology of language, and I tell people about [Noam] Chomsky and his ideas of universal grammar, innate knowledge of language, people don’t really get it. They think this is really strange, 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. When you ask people about innate emotions, for instance, people have absolutely no trouble accepting that emotions are innate. In fact, they make predictions that are demonstrably wrong. But the point being that people are completely happy to assume that, say, newborn infants prefer happy faces to angry faces, even if, in reality, they don’t. It is for ideas selectively that people do not think that innateness makes sense.
Edmonds: So the question is, why? And I think here we probably need to introduce two more concepts. The first is dualism, and the second is essentialism. Let’s tackle those one by one. So, what is dualism to start with?
Berent: So dualism is the intuitive belief – we’re not talking philosophy, but intuitions of laypeople, of young children – that the mind is ethereal, distinct from the physical body.
Edmonds: And are people natural dualists?
Berent: People seem to be natural dualists. You see those intuitions in young children. So young children think that what an agent knows, so if you have a creature that you know your name, the creature’s name, knowledge of that trait will remain in the afterlife after the person dies. But if you would say, copy the body of the creature, then knowledge would not transfer to the copy. So that suggests that those psychological traits are considered ethereal and distinct from the body. So what you know, your epistemic states are not part of the body. That’s how a dualist think.
Edmonds: And I guess almost everybody who’s a religious believer is a dualist, because they think that somehow, when their physical body dies, they, as people, persist in some way, I don’t know, through the soul or through some other means.
Berent: Those who are religious and those who are not religious. So Jesse Bering, the psychologist, did some really interesting experiments in which he asked people in advance, what are their explicit beliefs about the afterlife. Some people were straight extinctivists; they thought that when you die, that’s it. Nothing happens. And yet, when he presented them with vignettes that asked them to reason about the person who died and ask, “OK, so will the person still remember what he did in the morning of his death?” It took them a little longer to say, “No, it won’t.” It was a little harder. My lab finds the same, that even people who say they completely deny the afterlife, they still show evidence for dualism when you see them implicitly. So I know it’s very tempting to think that dualism arises from religion, but I think the evidence suggests the opposite relationship, namely that religion could very well be the consequence of dualism rather than its cause.
Edmonds: So we all find it very easy to draw this distinction between mind and body, and that is our dualism. I mentioned essentialism as well. Can you tell me what essentialism is?
Berent: Essentialism is a belief about the innate origins of biological kinds. So what makes a dog brown like its mother. And kids will tell you, well, the dog got from its biological parents some little piece of matter that lies in its body, it’s unchanging, and that’s what makes it what it is. So critically, what’s innate in us is a trait that is inherited and it lies in the body.
Edmonds: Explain that a bit further. Kids say that the reason they’ve got the same color hair as their parents, or the same color eyes as their parents, is that a bit of their mother or their father physically is actually inside them? Is that what they believe?
Berent: Yeah, that there is some physical entity that lies in the inside of the body. So they think that the inside, the physical aspects of the body, sometimes they think it’s like a certain substance, like blood, something that lies in the body, this tiny little bit, it’s there, it’s hiding there, and that’s what gives you your biological, innate biological properties.
Edmonds: At what age are they telling you this?
Berent: School-aged children, so 7, 8. You don’t see that actually in younger children, but this is something that you see in school-aged children.
Edmonds: So tie this all together for us. We began by talking about innateness. Many of us have difficulty believing in innateness, and then we talked about dualism and essentialism. What’s the link between all those things?
Berent: So the tension between dualism and essentialism is what causes our troubles with innateness. As an essentialist, you’d say that what’s innate lies in the body, it has to be in the body for this trait to be innate. The problem is that you’re also dualist, and you believe that knowledge isn’t in the body, it’s some ethereal property that’s outside the body. And that renders knowledge impossible in principle of being innate, because it’s simply in the wrong place for being innate.
Edmonds: So these different instincts that we have about the world lead us to making this systemic error about innateness?
Berent: Right. It’s really a syllogistic type of reasoning, right? You believe that knowledge is ethereal. There is indeed evidence that people think that those epistemic traits are not in the body. People think that’s what innate must be in the body. We have shown evidence for that as well, and in fact, we have shown evidence linking these two principles to our empiricist intuitions.
Edmonds: Now the people who are making these mistakes are ordinary folk. They’re not scientists like you. Does it matter that most people find it very difficult to grasp the truth?
Berent: Well, it could matter for scientists, too, insofar, the scientists are only people. They could very well be subject to the same biases. But it also matters for laypeople as well. Empiricist intuitions, for example, lead us to have troubles when we reason about neuroscience, to expect that knowledge cannot possibly be in the brain, and that for when we see that acquiring knowledge actually changes the brain, people are completely surprised, as if there was an alternative.
It creates a lot of misconceptions about, say, psychiatric disorders, right? So if 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 you know your essence is different from my essence.
So it is really problematic. What’s horrible here, it’s not just laypeople that give you intuitions. Psychotherapists and psychiatrists give the same intuitions. So as you emphasize, you 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.
Edmonds: Once research is presented to people about innateness, can they not overcome these intuitions?
Berent: We don’t know. I think that’s a really good suggestion that we would like to follow up. So once you understand the mechanism, the question is whether making people aware of what they are doing could actually help them overcome that. We don’t know.
Edmonds: But presumably you’d think, in your case, it has. I mean, you don’t share the prejudices of everybody else.
Berent: Yes and no. So when I put [on] my scientist’s hat, and I think real hard, and I’m trying to overcome it. In my everyday life, I’m a dualist all the time. So to what extent it happens when I’m not attending to it, I don’t know.
Edmonds: Are there other areas of human nature that you would like to investigate where you think there might be a similar systemic problem about how we understand ourselves?
Berent: Yeah, so I’m really interested in exploring the implications of these ideas to psychiatric disorders. So one question is whether dualism could actually play some adaptive role, for example, in understanding our emotions. Could it shed light on how we reason about our identities, say our sex and gender? So these are all areas of research that we are working on right now.
Edmonds: Iris Berent, thank you very much indeed.
Berent: Thank you, David. It was fun talking to you.
.
The post Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.”
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: This podcast has now been running for many years. Over that time, we’ve heard from a number of social scientists about interventions designed to solve various problems. For example, one of the early Social Science Bites was with Lawrence Sherman, well known for his experimental work in criminology. In that interview, he told us how randomized control trials had helped make some important discoveries; hot spot policing, which concentrates police resources in a small number of places, could be highly effective in reducing crime, or so we were told.
Recently, a new paper by Megan Stevenson, who teaches in the law school at the University of Virginia, has cast doubt on the idea that any such interventions actually work. Not surprisingly, her paper has caused a huge storm in the world of social science. Megan Stevenson, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Megan Stevenson: Thank you so much. Lovely to be here.
Edmonds: Today’s topic, why interventions in the criminal justice system don’t work. So, my first question, what do you mean by intervention? What interventions are we talking about?
Stevenson: Well, in specific, we’re talking about interventions studied with randomized control trials. So randomized control trials, or RCTs, as we call them for short, are a way of evaluating how effective something is. You’re probably most familiar with them from the medical setting. You know it’s how we figured out that vaccines work and don’t have terrible side effects.
Used in the social science space, in particular in criminal justice, RCTs are a way of evaluating programs or interventions like intensive probation, like hot spots policing, that’s when you send police to a hot spot at a corner where there’s a lot of crime to see how much you can reduce crime. Programs like tough on crime, Scared Straight programs where you take a bunch of kids into prison, get them really scared about it, boot camps, things like cognitive behavioral therapy, so on and so forth. So, it’s any sort of program or policy that governments do, that NGOs do, to try and reduce crime or help people that have been involved in the justice system get on a better path.
Edmonds: So potentially multiple interventions. You recently wrote a paper which caused, I think it’s fair to say, a huge stir in the social science world. It was called “Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World.” Tell us what you set out to do in that paper.
Stevenson: Well, this paper reviews 50 or 60 years of RCTs in the criminal justice space, and what it finds is that when you take a really broad bird’s eye view of the literature, you find that very, very few interventions, when evaluated with this kind of gold standard method, are found to achieve what they set out to achieve, and the ones that do tend not to replicate when tried again in another time or another place.
Edmonds: I guess, in retrospect, examining these multiple studies to see whether any intervention works, it was a pretty obvious thing to do, but nobody had done it before. Was there something that triggered the thought that this was potentially a fertile area of research?
Stevenson: Well, that’s sort of, you know, how I describe the study, but the way that it came about is kind of the opposite way. So I’m an economist. I’ve been studying the criminal justice space for 10 or 15 years, which means I do applied statistical research to see what works and what doesn’t, what’s going on right now with the criminal justice system, mostly in the United States. Honestly, this is just something that I started noticing over the years. It’s something that I think most people know in the back of their minds. Sometimes people talk about but rarely gets acknowledged. The research that people hear about, that people talk about, is the rare case of success.
You know, as social scientists, we’re programmed, or, you know, we’re incentivized to try and find the successful intervention. That’s what gets published. That’s what’s going to build our career, give your tenure, so on and so forth. And so I think I’d entered this field very hopeful, like, I’m going to be able to figure out these important key areas where if you intervene, you’re going to be able to have a large and lasting effect, tipping points, I guess, to use, like, kind of the popular vernacular, where if you fix this thing at just this right spot, it’s going to have very long trickle out effects and, and I wasn’t finding it, and other people weren’t really finding it either. And then when we think we find one, then there’s a bunch of research trying to replicate it, and it generally doesn’t replicate.
This had just been kind of like a growing realization for me over the years, and at some point, I just thought, like, “God, this is so interesting. This is not a failure. I mean, sure what? From one perspective, it’s a failure, but, like, it’s not really a failure. This is what science is. This is how you learn, and we’ve learned something really interesting about the structure of the social world by doing these randomized control trials for so many years.” That’s where I wrote the paper.
Edmonds: And you’ve mentioned randomized control trials a few times, RCTs, and we’ve covered them many times in this podcast, but just give me an example of how a randomized control trial might be set up in the criminal justice system in any one of the many interventions that you talked about?
Stevenson: Sure, so maybe there’s a program within a prison, you know, it’s some sort of program that is designed to help people get on their feet when they’re released, and it entails some job training, some group therapy type stuff some maybe it extends even after you’re released and gives some subsidized employment to help you get on your feet. People, they’re excited about this program, but there’s more demand than there’s space for and so how do they decide who’s allowed in? They randomly choose people. They take a bunch of applicants, and they randomly say, “OK, well, you can come in,” and, “I’m sorry, but we don’t have space.” And so you have this group of people that were randomly allocated to either be within the program or to not receive the program. So, because they’re randomly allocated, on average across these two groups, they’re going to look very similar. You know, it was just pure luck that put them in the program or put them out of the program. And so, when you follow them up over the years and see, you know, are they committing crime at the same rates? Are they getting arrested at the same rates? Are they employed at the same rates or not? You can attribute any potential differences to the fact that one group was in the program and the other group was not.
Edmonds: One of the most surprising failures to me was the risk assessment that you mentioned in the paper. There’s been all sorts of hype, I think partly because of artificial intelligence that would be able to predict who was going to commit future crimes and so who was safer to release. It amazes me that you suggest even that hasn’t worked.
Stevenson: Yeah, that’s one of the subjects that led me to this paper, because this is something I’ve studied a lot, and risk assessment is very much cited as number one on the kind of evidence-based type practices that can be adopted in the criminal justice space. Just for people that don’t know. Risk Assessments are just statistical tools for predicting who’s going to commit crime in the future. And when I started studying their adoption in different settings and found, wow, they really don’t bring about a whole lot, you know? And that’s a combination of judges don’t use them intensively. They do use them. They do respond to them, but there’s a lot of also ignoring them and overruling them, and maybe the fact that the tools aren’t bringing as much gain and information as people want. Or, you know, judges are following these different agendas. They have different goals. You know, their goal is not solely do we, to incarcerate those at highest risk of crime. Because if you did that, honestly, what you’d be doing is you’d be locking up all teenage boys and not letting them out until, you know, their hormonal mix sets up a little bit.
So yeah, so risk assessment is an example of something that seems really effective. It seems like it would be really effective. And it’s not the only one. There’s lots of them, you know, kind of depending on your predisposition. There’s lots and lots and lots that people were excited about for various reasons and strong theoretical reasons that in reality, didn’t have the impact people hoped for.
Edmonds: It sounds like you weren’t too surprised by your result. It was very surprising to me, but it sounds like you kind of expected it. But it just seems very depressing.
Stevenson: Well, like I said, it was a slow process of transformation for me. I think the moment that was my ‘aha!’ moment was when I saw a presentation about job training programs for recently released prisoners, and that seems like such an important place to intervene, to like, get somebody on their feet when they’re just released from prison, get them employed. That could be really pivotal in terms of future arrests and restabilizing their lives at one of those tipping points, like I talked about earlier. And it didn’t have lasting effects. You know, it had short term effects, but nothing that lasted and, you know, much beyond when the program was over.
It’s been a slow process of change for me. So no, I wasn’t really surprised. This is what I’ve come to expect when I evaluate things. I don’t know that I find it depressing anymore. I think when I started in this career path, I was much more interested in this idea of being a social engineer. And that’s something, you know, that many people share for good or for evil right, but my case, I was hoping it was for good.
What I’ve come to realize is that I think there is naivete and some, I’ll almost say, some egotism to the thought that you could be the one to step in and solve other people’s problems like just that easily with just this one single program or intervention. 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. You know, like there’s so much more than money that differentiates the haves and the have nots in this world.
I think change is still achievable. It’s something we should still aspire towards, but we need to think in different terms than you know, like we’re going to come in with this one great intervention that is going to change everything.
Edmonds: Well, let’s come on to what might work in a moment. But I hadn’t realized you were trained as an economist, but you’re writing here about legal interventions, interventions in the legal system. But obviously there are interventionist policies in numerous areas. In education, for example, there’s a question about whether reducing class size works, or does giving teachers extra pay incentivize them to do a better job? Is there any reason to think that your findings in the criminology area can’t be extrapolated to all these other domains.
Stevenson: So I personally think, at least in broad strokes, that what I learned in the criminal justice space is similar phenomena to what’s going on in education and healthcare in a variety of different domains. I say that for a couple reasons. Part of it is theoretical, you know, like, when I think about this kind of, like, failure to, to find successful interventions in criminal justice, it comes down to the fact that I think people are already trying to build the best lives they can given their circumstances. So that’s why it’s, it’s so hard to change them, because people are already out there trying to do the best they can.
I’m going to slip into econ speak. So, apologies here. But, like, they’ve already kind of, like, maximized their utility subject to constraints. And I think that’s broadly true across people. Like, obviously, when you move away from the population studied in criminal justice and look at wealthier people or more advantaged people, you know, their constraints are different. Maybe they’re less, but they’ve already kind of maximized what they can given what they’re facing. And the remaining constraints in the world tend to be, they’re sticky, you know, they’re systemic. They’re things that change slowly over time, or maybe rapidly over time, given, you know, in the rare case of a real kind of moment of social revolution or technological revolution, I guess. But they’re not something that you can just do, like an NGO, can just implement a policy and, like, fix it or something.
So that’s part of it is theoretical. The other part of it is, you know, my understanding of the research in these areas. You know, there’s a tend to be a fairly similar finding in terms of RCTs, that at least when it comes to these sort of like interventions that have kind of indirect, multi-step causal pathways, or supposed causal pathways, that they don’t tend to be very successful, or once again, once somebody’s found an initial success in one place, it tends not to replicate when they try to expand it or scale it up.
This is not saying nothing works in the entire sphere of anything in the world. This is saying when it comes to these type of limited-scope interventions, when you’re not looking at the direct effect of something, you’re looking at sort of like the indirect effects, the long-term effects, effects that require, like, a few kind of steps down a causal pathway that tends to be very, very hard to predict and manipulate.
Edmonds: I think that the key sentence, tell me, if you disagree, the key sentence in your article is this, “the primary goal of this article is to build and support the claim that when it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluated by RCTs, randomized control trials, the social world is full of stabilizing forces that resist change.” And there’s that phrase, “stabilizing forces that resist change.” Just explain what you mean by that.
Stevenson: It’s like what I was talking about earlier, that when it comes to the remaining constraints that limit people from what they want to achieve, to limit them from kind of a better life, that these tend to be deep, hard to move, sticky structural forces. And part of the goal of the paper is to just re-articulate this claim that when you evaluate things with RCTs, they tend not to work in a slightly more abstract sense. The term of stabilizing forces was an abstraction that really felt powerful. It felt like I was able to see something kind of important about the way the world works. And I don’t know if that metaphor will be helpful for other people in the same way it was for me. But the idea of stabilizing forces and the other idea there was the idea of cascades, which is just a term that I use for this idea of, like, the holy grail of you find the tipping point intervention that has, like, cumulative, huge bang for your buck kind of thing.
Edmonds: OK, let’s talk a bit about what might work. Suppose somebody came along and said, “I think crime is driven by poverty,” a perfectly plausible claim, and “what we need to do is redistribute money from the rich to the poor, and that will reduce crime rates.” Now that obviously is not something that can be analyzed, well, not very easily, I wouldn’t have thought by a randomized control trial. So what can we say about that kind of claim?
Stevenson: So, let’s kind of break that down. I mean, you can look at large shocks to wealth, like you can look at lottery winners, for instance, and see how their crime behavior may or may not change. I want to call that a limited-scope intervention. Some people argue it’s not limited scope, but it’s very different from a systemic change where, instead of just kind of impacting one person’s life, you’re impacting the entire structure of society by engaging in a kind of a large-scale wealth distribution towards the poor. That’s the sort of thing you can’t study with a randomized control trial.
And in fact, like our social science tools, the causal inference methods that we might hope to use to answer such a question, they all follow a fairly similar structure to a randomized control trial. They’re called natural experiments. We kind of like hope to stumble upon them in real life. The core of the idea is this idea of holding all else constant but changing this one thing, this intervention, so you can evaluate just the impact of that intervention, as opposed to all the other whole things you’re holding constant. You can’t hold societies constant while also completely reforming them with a massive wealth redistribution policy. It’s not something that you can kind of study and predict and use the standard tools of science to be able to say something about what the impact is.
Edmonds: So where does that leave the social scientists? Because it does sound like a plausible claim that redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor would have an effect on crime rates, but you’re saying that there’s no evidence one could adduce one way or the other to test that hypothesis.
Stevenson: I mean, I’m saying that we can’t approach it with the same level of confidence, you know, that you might hope for right? You want to know is this going to work before you try. You don’t ever really have that. I mean, it’s not that you approach it with no knowledge. Obviously, we have theory. We can look at instances in which countries have engaged in some sort of policy, and obviously, to become a country that engages in massive wealth redistribution, there’s a lot that changes, you know, like that’s not something the US or the UK is about to do tomorrow. You have to think about it within this context, within all of the systemic changes that would bring you even to the point where you could even consider such a policy.
I’m not trying to say we know nothing in this world, but there is a tendency in the reform space right now to be very focused on evidence-based change, evidence-based interventions, on piloting some sort of thing before you scale it up, of best practices, things that work, and so forth. And I think that paradigm is just way too unrealistic in terms of knowing in advance the impact of the types of change that are on that scale.
Edmonds: Can I ask you what kind of response you’ve had from social scientists to the article?
Stevenson: They’ve been largely pretty positive, I think. A lot of people have reached out to me to say how much they appreciated it and that it impacted their thinking, or expressed some stuff that they had been feeling for a while but hadn’t fully articulated. And so that was really gratifying. You know, there are some people who, I think ignored it because it didn’t fully fit into their agenda. I think they see the literature in broad strokes as similar, but they’re more optimistic about our ability to use this toolkit to identify: “Yeah, most things don’t work, but there are a few things that work and that replicate and that scale up, and we just need to keep plugging away to try and find.” I think that’s kind of the strongest critique that I have heard.
Edmonds: Because potentially it is quite threatening to a lot of social science, because a lot of social science is devoted to tinkering around with systems and then testing it with randomized control trials. And you’re suggesting that’s all going down a blind alley.
Stevenson: I mean, the paper is actually built on that evidence. I wouldn’t say it’s on a blind alley. I say we’ve learned a ton from it. It’s just not what people kind of set out to learn. You set out to learn like which lever to pull to make the engine run better. But what we learn is it’s not really about the levers. I still love this methodology. I love the research people do. I’m a total nerd for econometrics. I mean, I’m working on a project right now that’s using similar causal inference methods to look at the impact of incarceration on wealth. I don’t want people to stop doing it. I feel like there’s, there hasn’t been much introspection, and there has been some claims that are kind of, forward-making claims that are just not supported by the evidence. And I think when you take a look at these claims, you think about social change in a different way. So I think it’s kind of important. Many of us are in this line of work because we care about the world. 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. It’s like we tried those doors. The secret is not behind that door. So keep trying other doors, keep experimenting. Like, what’s the next step?
Edmonds: I’m a bit puzzled by that, because you say that you don’t want people to stop trying with this micro interventionist stuff when you’ve presented compelling evidence that it doesn’t work, that they’re wasting their time and their resources and grant money and all the rest of it. Why shouldn’t they stop trying?
Stevenson: OK, so let me rephrase that. I don’t want people to stop trying to figure out how to make the world a better place. That endeavor extends way beyond randomized control trials and has for a long time. There’s a particular set of methodology that I’ve been trained in, the econometrics methodology. I just kind of love it, and I don’t want it to end this. And there’s a separate set of questions that are sort of outside of the scope of this paper, but are really important questions which are like, we know this thing is going to have an impact because it’s sort of a direct mechanical impact, but we just don’t know how big it is. Those questions are really important and fascinating, and that is a different set of questions you can answer with the same toolkit. It’s not just like, what is the indirect lasting if this ball hits that ball, hits that ball, hits that ball, kind of impact of an intervention.
You know, in this example that I’m talking about the impact of incarceration on wealth. You know taking somebody out of society for a couple of years is going to stop their accumulation of wealth. That’s in the category of pretty much direct impact. You cannot work for two years. You cannot pull in money to pay your mortgage for a couple years. It’s going to impact your wealth. How big is it? And so, using these tools to kind of answer these questions, they’re not like I found this amazing tipping point that’s going to change the world type questions. It’s the practical, nitty gritty aspect of doing science, the kind of more basic measurement that I think is important, interesting.
Edmonds: Thank God, so there’s still a role for the social scientist. Megan Stevenson, thank you very much indeed.
Stevenson: Thank you. Take care.
The post Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work appeared first on Social Science Space.
Opinions on immigration are not set in stone, suggests Rob Ford – but they may be set in generations. Zeroing in on the experience of the United Kingdom since the end of World War II, Ford – a political scientist at the University of Manchester – explains how this generation’s ‘other’ becomes the next generation’s ‘neighbor’ – “a very remarkable transformation.”
“And so,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “we’ve definitely got a situation now where there’s just so many more people who, if you say immigrants, they don’t just hear an alien other, they hear or can see in their mind’s eye, a relative or a friend, or a child, spouse or whatever it might be.”
Although there are clearly other factors at play, he acknowledges and discusses, nonetheless “generational change is one of the most underestimated forces in politics and society.”
Those other factors include race, how someone arrives on a foreign shore, how closely a new community has contact with the existing communities, and levels of polarization among natives. “[O]ne of the things I’ve learned is the story is always complicated,” the 2022 fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences admitted. “It’s one of the things that makes communicating social science research both challenging and rewarding is how do you tell a complicated story clearly, but without losing that vital nuance. But however well you do it, what gets heard, is out of your control.”
Ford has told his story – focusing on public opinion, electoral choice and party politics – in a series of well-received books and edited collections. His first book, Revolt on the Right, written with Matthew Goodwin, detailed the rise of the UK Independence Party and was named 2015 Political Book of the Year by Paddypower, while a book written with Maria Sobolewska, Brexitland, received the 2022 WJM Mackenzie Book Prize from the Political Studies Association (which also gave Ford a special recognition prize in 2017). Ford also edited two volumes of short essays, Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box and More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box, aimed at a general audience.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: “As I look ahead, I’m filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber, foaming with much blood.” So said the conservative politician Enoch Powell, in an explosive speech in 1968, warning about the effect of mass immigration. We’re nearly six decades on, yet immigration remains a political football in the UK – where an election was announced shortly after this interview was recorded. In 2023 it’s thought that well over a million people migrated into the UK. And that net migration — that’s those who immigrated minus those who emigrated — was nearly 700,000. Yet there’s been a surprising trend in attitudes to immigration, as Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, explains.
Rob Ford, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Rob Ford: Delighted to be here.
Edmonds: Immigration is what we’re talking about today, in particular attitudes to immigration. The UK, I think was a reasonably homogenous country before World War II. Can you describe what happens to the numbers of immigrants after that?
Ford: Yes, well, the big turning point, the first big turning point in the story of post-war immigration in the UK, is 1948, when the Labour government passes the British Nationality Act, which wasn’t actually supposed to be about immigration at all. It was supposed to be about maintaining good relations with the Commonwealth. If you look at the parliamentary debates on it, they don’t mention immigration from what we ended up calling the new Commonwealth even once. But what it did was confer what was called Commonwealth citizenship on all of the people of the current and former colonies of the British Empire, which, of course, is an awful lot of places and an awful lot of people, the whole Indian subcontinent, many of the islands of the West Indies, much of Africa.
And so, all of those people from that day, had the right, unrestricted, to migrate to Britain, to work in Britain, once they lived here, to vote in British elections, a right they still retain incidentally. And what rapidly took the government by surprise as we move from the 1940s into the 1950s, is that growing numbers of people began to exercise that right. First of all, tens of thousands, then, by the end of the 50s, early 1960s, we’re looking at hundreds of thousands. This is the period where what we now call the kind of big ethnic minority communities in Britain first start to form in our big cities.
Edmonds: They’re coming mainly from the subcontinent, India, from Pakistan, and from the West Indies.
Ford: That’s right. The West Indians were the first to arrive, hence, we now have the great symbol of the Empire, Windrush that was, I think, a former cruise ship that was repurposed, and was one of the first tranches of workers coming from Jamaica to come and work in London. The numbers from South Asia start to pick up a bit more in the early 1960s, particularly parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh, there are parts of Bangladesh that had connections to the British Navy, and much of what we now call Indian cuisine in Britain has actually Bangladeshi chefs from the Navy, who came and settled here and founded Indian restaurants, and a part of Pakistan called Mirpur, where the government built a huge dam and displaced an awful lot of people who then came in large numbers, often to Birmingham in the northern mill towns, and then that would set up chain migration. So you can often have whole communities over here, who can trace their roots back to the same cluster of villages in that particular bit of Pakistan.
Edmonds: So large numbers coming from South Asia and from the Caribbean. And then there’s another big wave a couple of decades after Britain joins the European Union. Explain what happens then.
Ford: Yes, so Britain joined the, as it was then, the EEC [European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union], in 1973. From the beginning, one of the founding principles of the EEC was the free movement of goods and labor across borders, the so-called single market, it wasn’t particularly a big issue in terms of immigration early on, because most of the countries in the EEC were sort of similar levels of prosperity. There was some anxiety when Greece, Portugal, Spain joined in the 1980s. And there was a lot of migration from those countries, but mainly to their neighbors, mainly to France, some to Germany as well. But then in the 2000s, you had the post-communist societies, the so-called Accession Eight — Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia and so on — joining and there was a great, big, long discussion at EU level about on what terms they will be brought into the single market. And Tony Blair, who was very keen to make new friends in Europe and also this is one of the examples of his more idealistic streak, he said Britain would accept migrants from these new countries without any kind of transitional controls. So the EU negotiated this deal where you could have some controls on who could come in for up to seven years. He did that thinking that most of the other big countries in Europe would be similarly benevolent and generous, particularly Germany, which obviously is right next door to Poland.
And that didn’t happen. Everyone else except us, Ireland and Sweden, imposed transitional controls. So between that, a booming economy in the 2000s and the popularity of the English language, we rapidly became the most popular destination for migrants from these new EU member states. In fact, more people arrived in the first month than the government had been projecting would arrive in the first year.
Edmonds: That’s amazing. What numbers are we talking about?
Ford: We’re talking about millions. In fact, the numbers have recently been revised up by the Office for National Statistics. One of the great scandals was instantly in the politics and policy of migration is the appalling quality of most of our statistics about this, we really don’t know very well who’s coming and going. At the time, the main survey we had to capture who was coming into Britain was called the International Passenger Survey, which as the name suggests, is flights arriving. But it mainly conducted its surveys, you’d have the clipboard people in the big airports, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and so on, and very few in the smaller regional airports, and course none at the coach stations or anything like that. And how were the Poles arriving? Often on overnight coaches, often to the smaller airports, which Ryanair will give you cheap flights to and everything, so lots of them are just missed when they arrived. It’s now estimated that at its peak, we were talking about 300,000+ arriving every year. And we know now from the post-Brexit settlement register, that there are at least 6 million EU citizens who have a right to remain here who came to Britain under freedom of movement. The Polish are now the second largest foreign-born community in Britain. And there was only a very small Polish population here before that migration began.
Edmonds: So, let’s talk about attitudes to immigration. I’m too young to remember Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech in the late 1960s. But I do remember going to football matches in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And there was an extraordinary amount of overt racism and hostility to immigration. Was that a kind of low point of attitudes towards immigration?
Ford: Yeah, I mean, Powell’s speech is kind of totemic in this story. In fact, when I first started researching the politics of immigration, initially, my thinking was, “Why are people getting so worked up about this when it doesn’t really seem to directly impact their lives an awful lot?” So it seemed like a puzzle to me. And it was a real kind of jaw-to-the-floor moment, when I watched, there’s not actually footage of Powell reading the whole speech out, but you get footage of an actor reading it out. And I just thought, my goodness, this is some really potent, heated stuff.
And that’s when I realized that what we’re talking about, especially with the first wave of postwar migration, it’s a story about far more than just people coming and going. It’s a story about identity. It’s a story about race. It’s a story about empire. There’s the famous line about Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind. In terms of mass public attitudes, this was definitely true. Even though we’ve ruled over this huge empire, the average British person did not consider anybody who had a different skin color or a different country of birth to be British automatically and often they would say these people can never ever be British. So, the Britishness, Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness, all of them were very racialized: you’re white, you’re born here, you’re British. If you aren’t those things, you are not. And right from the beginning, even when the numbers arriving were quite small, the reaction amongst part of the public was viscerally, viscerally hostile.
Edmonds: So that was a very common attitude, I think, in the 60s, early 70s. What’s happened to attitude to immigrants since then?
Ford: Attitudes on immigration and on race have seen a very remarkable transformation. And this was another one of the sort of penny-dropping moments in my career, I find that generational change is one of the most underestimated forces in politics, and society. All of us, I think, imagine that the kinds of attitudes that are prevalent amongst our peers and in our cohort are just normal. That’s what we’re exposed to most of the time, most of our lives. And as a result, we miss how much you get changes from one generation to the next.
Edmonds: So it’s not young people becoming more liberal as they become older. It’s a different generation with a different set of attitudes.
Ford: That is one of the biggest drivers. Yeah, I mean, it’s a difficult thing to measure, for example, racial prejudice, because it’s a socially sensitive topic, a lot of people don’t want to admit to it. So, I’d say quite a lot of people do. But if you want an accurate measure, you want to try and come at it slightly obliquely. So one question that was used for a long time was, would you mind if a close relative of yours married someone from a different ethnic group, because intermarriage has always been one of the most sort of electric topics and this is a good way of capturing how this has changed over time. And if you look over the period from, say, when the migration began in the 1950s, take people who were like 20 in the 1950s, that my dad was, and then people are 20 today. You go from a situation where something like three quarters or four fifths would say that they minded, something close to majority who say they would mind a lot about the idea of racial intermarriage. Now you’re down to sort of 5 percent to 10 percent maximum. So, it’s completely disappeared as a form of hostility over the course of three or four generations.
Edmonds: So that’s attitude to interracial relationships. What about things like attitudes to their contribution, I don’t know, to the culture or to the economy?
Ford: Yeah, there the change, I think it’s a little bit more recent, because I think this stuff is a little bit like layers of an onion. So, one of the reasons that racial attitudes have changed an awful lot is that people have grown up. So, from the 1970s onwards, certainly from the 1980s and 1990s onwards. The idea of Britain as a multiethnic society that there are people here have grown up here, the same accents as you, the same cultural experiences as you, but they have different ethnic racial heritage, that’s just totally normal for these generations. So, they have become part of us.
But migrants, by definition are people who have grown up somewhere else. So, there’s an additional barrier there, they are newer arrivals, they are starting in some respects as “them,” and so there you saw attitudes remain negative for longer. But more recently, in the last 15 or 20 years, what you’re starting to see is both generational, but actually also across the board, across all the generations and social groups, a growing positivity about the impact that immigration has – it’s good for our economy, it’s good for our culture. So it’s kind of like a staged thing. We’ve gone from a society that was very inward looking and very ethnically homogenous, to then one that was diverse, and more comfortable with that, but with still a kind of wall around the border, to one that is diverse, comfortable with diversity, and increasingly happy to be open for people to come and go.
Edmonds: So it sounds like your explanation for why we’re more liberal, more progressive about attitudes to immigration, is that we’ve just got used to being a multicultural society.
Ford: I certainly think that is a big part of it. I think I would go further, I would say it’s not just that we’ve got used to it, it’s that for a growing portion of the public, this is something they value about the society. Normalization, I think is a tremendously important force in society. Things that become seen as normal, the default attitude then just becomes much more liberal to those sorts of things. So for example, children out of wedlock, homosexuality, that’s another one where if you look at the British social attitudes from the 1970s, versus today, these are not things that people are very intolerant about, because they’re just seen as normal parts of everyday life, people will like that, that’s fine. It took longer for that to happen with immigration, but it is happening. But also, there’s a kind of set of values that says, to be able to move around, to cross borders, to experience diverse cultures, to come and go as you please, to welcome people in, these are all valuable things. There’s a set of social values associated with this. And it’s not just the kind of society we do have, it is the kind of society we want.
Edmonds: But it’s also because you talked about the millions coming in since World War II, it becomes a question not just of people talking about them, but as you’ve suggested, them talking about us, in that so many people now must have a grandparent or great grandparent who was not born in the UK.
Ford: Yes. And this is, of course, one of the other big changes that we see. And it’s kind of a natural lag to this, you know, people arrived for the first time in a country that hasn’t had a lot of experience for immigration, then a generation or two down the line, they’re going to have a whole lot of descendants, you’re going to have a whole lot of people who grew up with them on the playground. So it’s not just parents and grandparents, it’s cousins and sisters -in-law and brothers-in-law and close friends and everything like that. So the share of people who have direct social contact with people who’ve come here from other countries just goes up really fast a couple of decades after you start to experience mass migration. And one of the most consistent findings in all of social psychology is the best way to improve attitudes towards any group is regular, positive social contact with someone with that group because that, it puts a human face on a group that might otherwise be characterized by stereotypes or feelings of threat. And so, we’ve definitely got a situation now where there’s just so many more people who, if you say immigrants, they don’t just hear an alien other, they hear or can see in their mind’s eye, a relative or a friend, or a child, spouse or whatever it might be.
Edmonds: Age, you’ve already touched on as a factor which seems to be correlated with attitudes to immigration. What about other demographic factors like sex or class?
Ford: Well, there isn’t that much of a gender divide in immigration attitudes, but the big, strong predictor is education. University graduates are very much more liberal on basically every immigration question we ask about and on all the identity questions, too. That seems to be partly a matter of graduates being more prone to these kinds of liberal open values that I’m talking about. But it’s also to do with voters who have the lowest levels of formal education. And I’m gonna be very careful, I talk about this, because if you use the term uneducated, that’s just wrong. This isn’t a matter of ignorance, it’s very important point, it is a matter of values. So voters who left school have less formal education, they’re much more prone to have kind of smaller social worlds, they’re much more prone to be still living in the places where they grew up. And they’re much more attracted to values that are about stability, and continuity, and homogeneity and stuff like this. And they see immigration as a threat to those kinds of values.
Edmonds: So, education is not a causal factor, it correlates with these values.
Ford: Yes, exactly. Education itself is not the causal factor. This isn’t, like I say, this is one of the sources of the heat that you get in debates. If we’re talking about class divides in politics, I think there’s a kind of established understanding that both sides have legitimate interests and legitimate values, and so on. With these newer education divides, there is a tendency, I think, amongst those in the kind of liberal graduate high education group to dismiss the other group as motivated by ignorance, or by fear or by bigotry. So, there isn’t the kind of mutual legitimacy. You know, the working class has interests that are different to the middle class, we accept that. If you say my interests are legitimate, your interests are the product of ignorance and bigotry, it’s not surprising that the latter group gets quite defensive and quite angry. What we need is to recognize that actually, there is a clash of values here, that isn’t just a matter of prejudices. I’m not saying there aren’t prejudices, we talked about that already. There clearly were and still are. But there’s a lot of other things going on here. I think people can quite legitimately say, change makes me anxious, stability is something I value. And immigration is a driver of change. All of those things are true and legitimate views to hold.
Edmonds: We can’t have a discussion about attitudes to immigration without talking about Brexit. And the puzzle about Brexit is you talk about this gradual change in attitudes to immigrants. And yet, Brexit, which wasn’t that long ago, 2016, the slogan that won the Brexiteers, the campaign, was “take back control.” And I take that slogan to mean in particular, take back control of immigration. Is that a fair summary of what happened in the Brexit campaign? And how does that square with this story you’re telling about us becoming increasingly liberal?
Ford: It is a fair, if partial, summary. Take back control, it was a piece of political marketing genius, I would say because in three words, it managed to capture and epitomize a huge amount of intuit resentment out there in the public. And if you look at it statistically, then people’s views about immigration are the strongest predictor, then, of leave voting, but they’re not the only predictor. So, people’s views about national identity and sovereignty and social change, their views about political trust and the establishment and so on. These things kind of mix together. So, what does it mean, take back control? Society is changing in ways that we’re not happy with, we seem to have no control over that, we’re not being listened to, and immigration kind of epitomizes all of this. It’s a change that’s being imposed upon us that we weren’t consulted over, and we want to reassert control.
Your question is, then, well why did this happen if attitudes were becoming more liberal at the same time? It’s because first of all, because they started from a very liberal place. So if we’d have had this campaign 20 years earlier, and if everyone had voted the same way, as they did in the 2016 referendum, if we lined up all the races in terms of their attitudes on various things, then the lead majority would have been bigger than and if we did it now, 10 years later, it’s quite likely that just through demographic change and attitude change alone, it would be a substantial remain majority. So, it happens to be that we held that referendum right at the point where the majority in favor of these more sort of anti-immigration, nationalistic or liberal views was fading, but still there. It was one of those kinds of accidents of history. Five years later, it could have been different. But also, different groups move at different rates, which can create misperceptions about how far this change has gone. If David Cameron had looked in his own sort of social network, he wouldn’t have seen many Lee Andersons.
Edmonds: David Cameron being the prime minister at the time, Lee Anderson, being well, a person who’s constantly changing party and is currently now a member of the Reform UK, which has a very anti-immigration agenda.
Ford: That’s right. And at this point in time, Lee Anderson was actually a Labour councilor, which shows you some of the changes that this sort of set in train. But the point is, if you’re a university graduate, socially liberal person like David Cameron, you wouldn’t see many of these kinds of people, the leave people, in your social networks, so you would underestimate their presence in the electorate. So, leave won, even though society was becoming more liberal, because A: it started in a very liberal place. And the change took a long while to run, and B: the people who triggered the whole referendum process didn’t have a good awareness of quite how much of this sentiment was really out there and how potent it was.
Edmonds: And we’ve become more liberal since Brexit, is that because we’ve taken back control?
Ford: I mean, it has been one of the biggest surprises I would say, of my career as a researcher. I thought that the consequence of the referendum would be a kind of legitimation of that more nationalistic anti-immigration view and that that we kind of entrenched those views, particularly until the thing was done, because of course, nothing changed on that day in June, it was then a long and arduous process to get to any kind of substantive policy change. Immigration policy didn’t change until 2021. Instead, what happened very quickly, and very broadly, was people started reporting more liberal views about immigration, across the board. The share who said they were worried about it as a problem dropped like a stone, the share who said it was economically harmful, dropped like a stone, the share who worried about its impact on culture dropped like a stone, leave and remain voters alike.
I think we’re still unpicking why that happened. There are probably different things for the different sides of the debate. So, for leave voters, I do think what this highlights is that symbols and prospects and directions of travel are as important as the now. The reassurance that we have spoken, and control will be reasserted, serve to reassure people that this will be a process that was very much more under national control in the future and that made them more relaxed about what’s happening in the now.
Also, I think it highlights that opposition to immigration is not context-free and inflexible. So if people think the government is pulling a lever and deciding to let these people in on this basis, and we see when we asked about specific immigrant groups as well, you ask about immigration to the NHS, everyone’s very happy with it, because they see it as very beneficial, see the argument for it, and they know that these visas are being issued by the government. You ask about small boat migration at the other end of the spectrum, very unhappy a majority about that, because it feels like and is a form of migration that’s out of the government’s control and there’s a kind of failure of policy rather than an outcome of policy. So, the control thing was one thing.
There’s always been an asymmetry in immigration, the people who don’t like it are much more vocal than the people who do. What changed with the referendum is that people who were like pro, the free movement, EU status quo realized that all of that can be taken away, that they weren’t necessarily going to get their way and all of this, and that kind of reinforced their commitment to their values. So, then they were like, doubling down on immigration is a valuable thing for society and something I want to see maintained because for the first time, in a very long time, they were faced with the prospect of their sort of values being sort of infringed upon in that way.
Edmonds: This track that we’ve been on since World War II, where we’re becoming ever more progressive, you see that continuing into the future?
Ford: I think it is a very dangerous thing to do to project any change into the future forever. A lot of social science has come to grief for this because turning points are hard to spot. These things have a lot of kind of demographic momentum. So there’s a kind of default argument for they’re likely to continue and do they have since 2016, for example. So if we were having this conversation in 2016, I would say to you, well, by 2024, we’re going to have more graduates, the youngest cohort coming through seems to be a good deal more liberal than their parents or grandparents, are going to have more people with migrant heritage and ethnic minority, all of that suggests a continued drift in the liberal direction. And that’s what’s happened.
But sometimes you can get reversals. So one of the things I’ve been very interested in, in the last couple of years is that the evidence, for example, that socially conservative ethnic minorities in the US might be a lot keener on Donald Trump than we would imagine them to be given the nature of the politician that he is. And when you look at, for example, ethnic minority voters in Britain, they’re a lot more religious, they’re a lot more family oriented, they’re very economically right wing, and they’re very socially conservative and a lot of the hot button social issues that have come up in recent years. So they, for example, could become a group that end up shifting to the right, but if that happens, something will have had to trigger it to happen, and we couldn’t predict it. So on the one hand, we have demography. I think of it like continental drift, this kind of powerful, slow force. But on the other hand, we have things that are happening in politics and society, which are more like the climate and the weather, they’re more changeable, they’re more short term, and they can pull against that longer term pressure.
Edmonds: We’re speaking in mid-2024, when the Conservative Party has a flagship policy, as they call it, which is to send asylum seekers to Africa, to Rwanda. If we are becoming more progressive, how do you explain this? They must believe it’s a vote winner.
Ford: This is true. But then if I may add another observation on to this and the fact that this is never or very seldom picked up upon, it tells its own story, I think it is our first ever ethnic minority prime minister promoting this flagship policy. And our first three ever ethnic minority home secretaries, three in a row, who have been charged with implementing it. So, on the one hand, you have a policy which looks straightforwardly like a kind of lightning rod for intolerance against outsiders. On the other hand, you have a series of politicians from groups who, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, would have been marginalized as outsiders now at the very center of the establishment. So, you get two very different stories there about identity and social change.
But why Rwanda? And why do they think it’s a vote winner? Well, again, this comes back to the question of, what is it that immigration symbolizes rather than what is the direct effect? If you look at, say, immigration into the NHS, immigration into the universities, these are much, much larger flows of migration, and people are quite happy with them, because they see this as a process that’s under the government’s control, that’s delivering for the country. It’s a kind of win-win, it’s a win-win for the migrants coming here to make better lives themselves. It’s a win for us.
What a lot of people see when they see people arriving on the beaches in Dover, is they see chaos and criminality and exploitation of the generosity of our asylum arrangements. Now we can debate whether or not that’s a fair judgment to make about any of these things, but it is for a lot of people their kind of immediate and emotive reaction to this. This is not a system, it’s a system failure, and that’s why policies that are designed symbolically to reassert control often poll very well.
Edmonds: Much of Western Europe is now multicultural, like Britain. How do British attitudes on immigration compare to attitudes in France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere?
Ford: We could do a whole other podcast on this, this is a fascinating topic. The first thing to note is the liberal shift I talked about — these generational liberal shifts values is that you see them in most Western European countries with large migrant populations, because you’ve got very similar dynamics going on. Minority communities growing up, lots more social contacts, education levels rising, liberal values rising and so on. What you see in relative terms is that 15, 20 years ago, roundabout the time of the accession countries joining in 2004, in the 1990s, Britain had some of the most negative attitudes in Western Europe. Since then, Britain has changed faster than most of its Western European peer nations. So, it’s moved from bottom of the pack, to sort of middle, top half of the pack. So, we’re still not like the most liberal on immigration, Nordic countries tend to be more liberal as well. But we’ve moved towards the liberal end of the list.
The other thing that’s also worth noting is that we score very highly on another measure, which is probably less good in a political sense, which is polarization. So if you look at the variation in attitudes between groups, Britain, along with I think Sweden, are some of the most divided countries, liberal groups, like university graduates are really, really pro, and then older school leavers, older socially conservative voters are really, really, anti. That can make the politics of this just much more emotive, much more high voltage because the division is just much bigger.
Edmonds: Let me ask you one final question. Most social scientists are of the left, lean soft left, sometimes more left than soft left. This is an interesting area because there are some right-wing academics who look at immigration and attitudes to immigration. But it strikes me as an area in which motivated reasoning or motivated argument is a real danger in that you can cherry pick the data to produce the conclusions that you want. Are you aware of that in your own case? And do you do something to mitigate it?
Ford: Oh, yeah. I mean, if I’m honest, I think one of the reasons I wanted to research this and then go on to research the radical right is I wanted to challenge my preconceptions. I didn’t want to just adopt a kind of lazy, liberal graduate stereotype about people who clearly thought very differently to me, I wanted to sort of try and unpick it. But one of the things I’ve learned is, the story is always complicated. It’s one of the things that makes communicating social science research both challenging and rewarding is how do you tell a complicated story clearly, but without losing that vital nuance. But however well you do it, what gets heard, is out of your control.
And so when I started researching, for example, changes in attitudes to race, was one of the first articles I wrote, and I said, well, basically, there’s been this extraordinary shift, attitudes used to be really, really negative, and then much less negative now. And the message is basically things are still not good, but they used to be a hell of a lot worse.
And that message seems to manage to annoy everybody, so that the very liberal people would be like, how dare you focus on an improvement, you should be emphasizing how bad things are, not that they’ve improved, that undermines the fight against racism or whatever. Whereas more conservative people would say, how dare you say things are so bad and downplay this improvement?
You know, kind of up to the point about reflection, I feel like you’ve almost got to aim for the situation where you’re getting canon from both sides. And the sort of most firebrand people on both sides. If they’re both finding something to dislike in what you’re saying, you’ve probably arrived at a good balance. But I think it is a really, really difficult area, because you always have to be conscious and this is such a hard thing to do, of the water you’re swimming in, in terms of the people you’re around, the people you habitually communicate with.
I think it was easier when I was younger, because I could go back and see my family and I’ve got lots of family who’ve got working-class backgrounds. But my dad was a doctor, I’m sort of a classic middle-class boy, but lots of my cousins and stuff like that, that would help to keep me grounded. Whereas now I’m a bit older, less time with family, more time circulating around in university campus crowds, so you’ve got to be constantly on your guard. These people are very nice people, but they’re not the only people out there.
Edmonds: Rob Ford, Thank you very much indeed.
Ford: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
The post Rob Ford on Immigration appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.”
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: How about we give everyone a guaranteed minimum income, no strings attached? It’s a proposal that’s been around for a long time, but it’s always had its detractors. Would it really help lift people out of poverty? Isn’t there a danger? Some people would just fritter the money away. Paul Niehaus, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger and today’s interviewee, Tavneet Suri, have cooperated in a research project to test this involving a unique experiment in East Africa. Tavneet Suri, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Tavneet Suri: Thanks so much for having me on, David, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Edmonds: We’re going to discuss aid and the developing world today, and in particular, a rather extraordinary experiment. So can you start off by telling us a bit about GiveDirectly, the charity you’ve been researching? Who are they? And what do they do?
Suri: So GiveDirectly is a charity that gives unconditional cash to the poorest households in the world. And they do this in probably about 14 different countries close to over a million, I think, recipients reached globally, probably more, maybe one and a half, and the aim is to try and get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible. Put no real conditions around it and just be able to do a bit of this support to the poorest.
Edmonds: And the money comes from where – from individuals from foundations, where did they get their money from?
Suri: I think it’s all over. A lot of individuals, a lot of foundations, all sorts of stuff.
Edmonds: How do they transfer the money from the wealthy West to some of the poorest parts of the world?
Suri: Yes, that’s a great question. I’m working on their Africa programs and there, it’s all digitally done through something we call mobile money. You can deliver it directly to people’s phones onto a digital wallet they have on their phones called mobile money.
Edmonds: So, tell us about the project that you yourself researched.
Suri: So, we’ve been working with GiveDirectly for a while. And the aim of what we’re doing is trying to understand whether a universal basic income can be a pathway out of poverty for people. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this concept of a universal basic income, but the idea is you would give a very basic income that covers basic needs to most people and an income that comes in a stream of payments, right, like once a month as you would get your salary or income. We work with GiveDirectly to build a large study around universal basic income.
Edmonds: You identified a particular village in Kenya. Is that correct?
Suri: Not a particular village. We have two sub-counties we’re working in, in Kenya, in two different parts of the country. It’s in poorer counties in the country. And in those we identified about close to 300, 295 villages, to be part of the experiment. So it’s not one village, it’s several hundred villages.
Edmonds: Have you been to some of these villages in Kenya? And can you describe them to me?
Suri: Yeah, absolutely. I’m actually Kenyan, by the way. So I was born and raised there, which is why I do research there. But yes, I’ve been to them several times. In fact, I was just there, I was there in February. Yeah. I mean, they’re not rich people, right? This is rural Kenya. They’re pretty poor. They’re mostly growing and eating maize. That’s the main staple of the whole country. A lot of them might not eat much meat a year, maybe at Christmas.
Edmonds: They’re living in huts? They’re living in shacks? What are their living conditions like?
Suri: So not really huts mostly, think of mixing a bunch of stuff to make walls, it has some concrete, but it’s not concrete walls. It’s like, you know, some mud, wood, some concrete, hold it together, there’s often a metal roof on top, a metal sheet roof. Sometimes you’ll get some houses with tile depending on who’s rich and who’s poor. So, there’s a distribution, of course, within the village. You know, a bit of furniture, of course, furniture is important. People like having a room they entertain in; they might cook mostly outside.
Edmonds: So let’s get back to the experiment. How much were these villages given?
Suri: Yeah, so let me tell you a bit more about the experiment before I do that. We kind of decided we not only wanted to study this idea of a universal basic income, but we wanted to also think about the universal basic income piece we’re studying that particular set of villages are getting a basic income, I’ll tell you amounts in a second, but for 12 years. So it’s the equivalent in PPP dollars, which is sort of accounts for purchasing power. So purchasing power parity dollars, it’s about $1.88 per adult per day, OK, and we committed to give it to them for 12 years, which is quite a long time.
So we were thinking, you know, universal across people and universal somewhat across time, but not quite universal across time because 12 years is not forever, but it’s still a large chunk of time and we want to go commit to a long experiment. This ends up being quite expensive as you can imagine. If I had to scale this up across the country, it’s going to cost a ton. And so we said, “Well, what’s the right benchmark? The right benchmark is not nothing.” The right benchmark is maybe cheaper alternatives. And so we thought we would see how much better the 12-year does relative to a two-year. So imagine getting the same amount per day, everybody gets it in the village, but just for two years’ time bound. A lot of the World Bank’s cash transfer programs kind of have that flavor – they’re short-term kind of two year’s time-bound approximately, and then they go on to move to another poor community and do it there.
The other comparison we did was we can do a comparison to the two-year that’s a monthly payment, we could also do a comparison where we take the two-year amount and give it to you upfront lump sum, right? If you’re really poor, then maybe you can’t borrow, you can’t invest because you don’t have access to financial markets, maybe a lump sum would be quite useful. So, every adult has their own phone and receives their own income. So, if you have a husband, a wife, and an adult son in the household, there’s three people getting the UBI.
Edmonds: So there are these three categories. There’s the villages who get the lump sum, the villages who get the basic income over a 12-year period, and there are the villagers who get this income, but only over a two-year period. And then there’s the control group who get nothing at all.
Suri: Correct.
Edmonds: Can I ask you whether there was a problem about this experiment being distorted in that the Kenyan authorities might have thought, if those villagers are getting money for 12 years, we don’t need to prioritize them when it comes to building the well or fulfilling their infrastructure needs, or whatever it might be? Was that a problem with designing the experiment?
Suri: Yeah, great question, David. To be honest, the government is not doing very much in any case. So, you know, we can’t sort of wait around for them. That’s one not great answer.
The second answer is, we want to know if that happens. It’s not even just the government. Imagine there’s a nonprofit working there and says, “Actually, these guys are now doing fine, we’ll go somewhere else, because we’re wanted somewhere else.” So, we actually measure this. So, the results we have out are at the two-year mark. So just to think of what the two-year mark in this experiment means, it means everybody who’s in one of those groups has gotten the same amount of money, right? The difference is one got it lump sum, one knows it’s about to end, and one knows I’ve still got 10 years more of income coming, but they still gotten the same amount of money at two years. So, we actually in our two-year surveys, try to measure everything humanly possible, unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case might be. Unfortunately, for my field staff, maybe fortunately for us, right. So, we actually measured whether NGOs were present, whether they were getting benefits from NGOs, from the government, all of this to see wait, are we seeing people retreat out? And we want to account for that, because imagine we didn’t see effects? It might be because it just completely substituted what was already there.
We actually don’t see any evidence of that. You know, the NGOs that are in these places are doing very targeted things to very specific parts of the population, who might still need it, like, you know, there’s a bunch of health NGOs doing HIV stuff or things like that. So, we don’t see actually much evidence of that happening.
Edmonds: That’s very good news for your data, I guess. And so, it suggests there’s no distorting element. Tell us what the results were between, well, these four groups.
Suri: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we’re gonna see all groups do better than the control. First, let me just be upfront, that’s in terms of something we measure called consumption, what you spend and consume in total over the past year, right? Imagine I could sit down and document everything you spent; we use that to measure poverty. When we do poverty rates, it’s all based on this measure of consumption. So, we measure consumption, we see improvements in consumption and wealth. A lot of dimensions improve across the board across groups. The comparison across the groups is also interesting, not just relative to the control, right. So they all do better than the control for sure. The big change that we see that’s probably the most surprising part of this is we do see an increase in private enterprises. We see people start businesses.
Now I don’t want you to think I’m going to start Apple, right? This is rural Kenya, it’s not going to be some big, massive 2000 employee business, right? It’s going to be a small store selling something or you buy a motorbike, and you use that as a taxi, but these small-scale businesses. We do see increases in businesses, and those are quite substantive, actually. We see a pretty large increase in the number of enterprises that show up in these villages in their revenues and in their net revenues. We see those mostly in the lump-sum arm and the long-term UBI arm. There we’re seeing about a 35 to 40 percent increase in the number of businesses; we’re seeing almost a doubling of revenues; and almost a doubling of basically a measure of profits. We’re seeing very little on that front in the short-term arm, it’s very small increases in the number of enterprises, not big changes in revenues and profits.
Edmonds: So, the number of enterprises is going up quite dramatically for the villagers who are getting lump sums, and for the villages who are guaranteed a 12-year period, but not so much, for those who are only going to get the money for a two-year period. Tell me why you think that is.
Suri: So basically, the lump sum, you can understand why. They get a big lump sum, it’s quite a large sum of money, if you think of two years’ worth it’s per person about 500-ish dollars per adult in PPP values. And there’s more than one adult per household, right? So, think this will multiply by the number of adults in the household. So, you can imagine for starting a business, I need some capital to start a business and the lump sum is helping you do that, that seems very intuitive to me.
In the long term, it’s actually pretty cool. They use this financial tool that we call an RSCA, a rotating savings and credit association. Let me explain what that is. So I get together with a bunch of my friends, and we meet, let’s say, weekly, we all bring some money to the table, whatever our monthly was that month, maybe from the UBI, which is about 22-ish dollars, lets say, so I bring it to the table, we all put some money in and every week, someone draws a straw, and that person takes the whole pot. Of course, I don’t get two shots at it right until everybody’s had a go. But basically, you go through this group of people and get a lump sum out of it, even though you bring money to the table every week.
Edmonds: So it’s not a lottery because everybody wins eventually.
Suri: Correct. It’s not a lottery. Everybody wins eventually but it’s a way of taking a stream of payments and converting them into a lump sum by using your friends in the village to put in their stream and then one week someone gets a lump sum.
Edmonds: Does that mean we see as much entrepreneurial activity amongst that group as we do amongst those who get the lump sum?
Suri: Yes, we see about the same sized effects. Exactly.
Edmonds: I guess one concern that you might have had beforehand, is that if you give away a lump sum, there’ll be a number of people who go and blow it in the first week. There’s no Vegas in Kenya, but the equivalent and go and consume dramatically in the first week or two and lose their entire lump sum without saving and without investing.
Suri: Yeah, that’s a worry that lots of people have, it turns out not to be true. No one does that. Like when you’re poor, that is not what you do. We don’t see any evidence of that, we don’t see a ton of consumption of crazy things. We see people buy assets, they buy a cow, they put a new roof on their house, they do all these things. Not everybody starts a business, some start a business, but the others seem to be doing other investments.
Edmonds: Can I ask you a logistical question? How are you going around measuring this? Are there people with clipboards who are asking the villagers, “How much did you consume this week? What did you spend your money on?” And so on?
Suri: Maybe not clipboards! But I have a team of surveyors, we train them, we write an instrument, we write a survey instrument. We had for this data collection about 300 surveyors trained and then they have tablets, we put it on tablets.
Edmonds: Have you noticed any health benefits all the way down the scale from minor illnesses to more significant diseases and illnesses?
Suri: Yeah, we don’t see very much of that. Also, because it’s only been two years.
One thing we do see, which is kind of cool is we see big improvements in mental health almost immediately. And that’s because you can imagine, like, you know, a lot of poor people have to think about how I’m putting food on the table tomorrow. And when you don’t have to think about that, it turns out, you’re just much happier and less depressed, right? So we see big improvements in mental health, everybody does better than the control.
But the long term UBI does much better than the lump sum. And now that could be for two reasons. One is the lump sum came two years ago, and I don’t have a continuing source of income. Two, a bunch of people started businesses, and those might be stressful because they’re riskier. And so, we don’t know why exactly, again, do better than the control, but not as well as the long term UBI.
Edmonds: The results seem to suggest that if there’s a preferred way of distributing this money, it’s a regular payment over a long period of time. Is that a fair summary?
Suri: No, I wouldn’t actually go that far just yet, David. Here’s why. I would say, if you’re going to do something short-term, a lump sum does better than the stream. The short-term arm doesn’t do as well as the lump-sum on any dimension at two years. It does better than the control, so it’s better than doing nothing. But if I can take the same amount of money and give it as a lump sum, it does better than the stream by a lot. For the long term, I think the issue is this, it’s going to cost six times more. The benefits right now at two years look like the lump-sum. The question is, do those benefits keep growing, keep persisting? Does the lump sum decline over time because they aren’t getting any more? So, I think before I can answer that question, we need to go back to the field and collect another round of data to look at how this does over the long term, right.
Edmonds: $64 million question: What are the implications of this experiment, for charities, generally, and for universal benefits more widely and how we understand them?
Suri: Yeah, that is indeed the $64 million question, maybe even more than 64 million, David. For charities, there’s one broad point, which is trying to understand the impact you’re having is really important. I’m not sure I would have predicted these results, given what they are. And so studying them has led us to interesting insights.
So for example, do you think of the two-year arm and the lump-sum arm, they have the same amount of money just structured differently, and the structure differently has a huge difference in the impacts right? So I would really want to understand those sorts of things, because I could take the same money and have a much larger impact for that same pot of money. And so I think this idea of trying to be creative to understand the impact you’re having, and how even small changes in how you think about distribution systems can matter. So I think that’s one.
I think the second would be, you know, for universal benefits, I think we still don’t know that costly, that is going to be the biggest sort of downside of them. You know, we tried to measure a bunch of downsides, the one you mentioned about NGOs and government leaving, one we really worried about was that political elites in the villages would come to you and say, “This came because of me, you need to give me some money back,” right? We wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. It didn’t. We were worried about crime rates going up, because there’s lots of money around, that didn’t happen. So we did a good job of trying to understand all the downsides of these universal benefits like labor, everybody who’s worried about the lazy welfare recipient, right? People will stop working. We don’t see that at all. If anything, labor supply actually goes up a tiny bit, but we don’t see a reduction, we see people switch what they do, they switch out of not-great wage jobs into starting a business.
So, the only downside we’re left with is 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 I think we need to get more data to do that.
Edmonds: It will be much more expensive if it was applied in the UK or the US. Do we have any idea whether we can replicate this in the West?
Suri: Yeah, I would love to do a study that replicates this in the West. 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, right? It’s exactly your first question on this project. You know, are we substituting something? It turns out, we’re not because there’s not a lot of welfare in poor countries, there’s just not a lot of distribution. There’s nothing really big going on. So, you don’t end up substituting. But here in the West, you would do that. So, it’s going to cost less than you would think if you were just adding it on top.
The other issue, I think, is we don’t know the impact it would have; we haven’t really thought through that. And so, I think the best way is to experiment. We need to experiment a little in the West with this and see what happens before we try to decide we’re going to spend billions on this, right? So, I’d like to see some of that happening and I hope it will.
Edmonds: One of the key findings that I love about your result is that charities traditionally are quite paternalistic. If we’re distributing money from the West to Sub-Saharan Africa or some other parts of the developing world, it’s the charities that determine how this money is spent. And what’s nice about GiveDirectly and the experiment that you’ve been conducting, is that it passes the money over to people to spend as they want. And it turns out, they do quite well with that money.
Suri: Yeah, absolutely. That’s correct. You know, one of the benefits people get of UBI is that it lets you do what you’ve always wanted to do. Right? It gives you a freedom, a complete freedom to do what you’ve always wanted to do. And that’s kind of one of the nice sides of it is you can say, “Look, I’ll give people freedom and see what happens,” and it turns out most of them use it in ways that helps them at least try to use it in ways that help them right, you can start a business and might fail but you at least give it a shot. Right? So I think a lot of the common like, you know, “It’s going to get spent on this” or “It is going to get wasted,” or “They’re not going to work.” We just don’t see much evidence of any of that in general.
Edmonds: And is the Kenyan government monitoring your experiment very closely? And do you think they’ll adopt the lump sum proposal that seems to be implicit in your results?
Suri: Yeah, good question. I mean, I hope so. We do talk to policymakers, we do try to get information out, even if it’s not them hunting us down. And not just Kenya, we present to other places too, who are interested. Some of our work was used in the South Africa COVID response actually, to say, “Oh, maybe we need to do something like this in COVID response.” So, we do see our results being used, and hopefully more, as much as we can.
Edmonds: And you’ve got another 10 years of data to collect.
Suri: Absolutely. And maybe even more. I joke that people think about leaving wills for their money. I think about leaving a will for my project, because you know, people are going to want to know when you stop at the 12 years, do the effects disappear? Is there a crash? Right? You hit a cliff and then people fall off this cliff? You know, that’s now at 20 years. So, forget 10 years, David, I’m at 20 years and now I need to write a will for my project.
Edmonds: Tavneet Suri, thank you very much indeed.
Suri: You’re very welcome. Pleasure talking to you, David.
The post Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: What do you think about Social Science Bites? Obviously, that it’s the world’s most interesting podcast on social science. Now, suppose you were to read an article that purported to back that up with evidence. Well, given your prior belief, you might be more inclined to believe it, and more inclined to dismiss an article that came to the opposite view. This is confirmation bias, and Alex Edmans of the London Business School has become so concerned about this and other biases that he’s written a book about it, May Contain Lies. Alex Edmans, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Alex Edmans: Thanks, David. It’s great to be here.
Edmonds: The topic we’re talking about today is confirmation bias. This is part of your research on misinformation. But this entire research project seems to be a departure for you. You’re a professor of finance, and I think it’s fair to say that most of your research has been so far on corporate governance.
Edmans: And that’s correct. So I never set out to be a professor of misinformation. So most of my work is on social responsibility. It comes under different names like ESG, or sustainable finance and I believe I was one of the early pioneers of the idea that companies that are good for society also deliver higher shareholder returns. So one of my early papers found that companies that treat their workers well create a great corporate culture, they do better than their peers, and that’s how I got into the idea of sustainable finance.
Edmonds: So treating their workers well means what? Just having a nice atmosphere at work, paying them better than the market rate? What counts as treating your employees well?
Edmans: So, what I measured was inclusion in the list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America. So that is a list compiled after surveying 250 to 5,000 employees at all levels, and asking them 57 questions on issues such as credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. So certainly quantitative factors, like pay and benefits will affect that, but also qualitative factors such as, does the boss treat you as an individual rather than a factor of production? Do they give you opportunities to step up and to develop within the organization? So all of those intangible factors also matter, and what I found was that companies that did treat their workers well, they did outperform. So it’s not that they’re being fluffy or woke, they are being commercially sensible investing in the most important asset, their people.
Edmonds: That’s a lovely result. That’s the result we want to hear. We want to believe that companies that treat their employees well, treat the planet well, do better. Is it also true that diversity of employment helps, having different ethnic groups represented on the board is good for the company? Because I know some people have done some research on that claim that that is the case.
Edmans: Yeah, so that’s how I got into the topic of misinformation. So being seen as one of the early pioneers on sustainable finance with that paper, then I learned of other papers, which also seem to give similar results that if you do good stuff, then you do better as a company. And one of the things which is good stuff is to be a diverse company. And that’s something that I would love to believe, as somebody who believes in the importance of sustainability. Personally, maybe you don’t get this on the podcast, but I’m an ethnic minority, so I have personal reasons to want that to be true. And there’s tons of studies out there by luminary organizations such as McKinsey, or BlackRock, even a regulator like the Financial Reporting Council, claiming there’s a clear link between board diversity and financial performance. But when you look at those papers, there’s a huge amount of flimsiness to this, the evidence does not at all support the conclusions. And just to give you an example of one study, it claimed to find a strong result — it did 90 different tests. None of those tests gave a positive result. But they just lied in the executive summary, they claimed a result that just wasn’t there. And people just accepted it without checking the tables at the back of the report, because they wanted it to be true.
Edmonds: Lied is a very strong term. So it wasn’t just that they wanted to believe it like all those who read the report, it was actually that they were deceiving their readers.
Edmans: And that’s correct. So they misrepresented the results. So you might think there’s different forms of misinformation. One form you might think is you just conducted the test in a sloppy way, you found a positive result, claimed a positive result, and that result was sloppy. Here, there is actually no result to begin with. So, the results did not find a positive result and they claimed to have found that and so that is a different level of misinformation. And this highlights how misinformation is such a strong issue. Yes, we can quibble about whether the methodology is correct, did you measure diversity the correct way? But actual representation of your own results is something that people might be deceiving the readers with.
Edmonds: But this piece of research was so compelling because so many people wanted to think it was true.
Edmans: That’s correct. And this is the big issue of confirmation bias. So, what is confirmation bias? 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. So, this study, this idea that diversity improves performance, there are lots of well-meaning people who thought, ‘Yeah, that is just intuitively true. Well, a diverse team makes better decisions and so in this report by this famous organization finds this conclusion, it must be true. I don’t even need to look at the table. I’ll believe them. I’ll shout it from the rooftops. I’ll write headlines myself.’ And some, again, some respected organizations wrote headlines about the study. Those headlines were wrong. They spread misinformation. Why? They wanted the result to be true.
Edmonds: You cite various pieces of evidence to show that confirmation bias exists. One piece of evidence is neuroscientific. Tell us about that.
Edmans: Yeah, so this is a great set of studies done by some neuroscientists. And so, what they did is they took some students, so they hook them up to an MRI scanner to scan what happens in terms of brain activity. So, what they did is they first gave them some statements, which were nonpolitical, such as Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, and then they came up with some evidence to contradict that. And then nothing really happened to the brain, there wasn’t so much activity, nothing to write home about. But then, when they gave a political statement, which they knew the student agreed with, such as the death penalty should be abolished. And then they gave some evidence to contradict that, then the brain did light up. And the part of the brain that lit up was the amygdala, that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. So 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 and that’s why people get defensive on social media, they might retaliate and take something personally, if somebody presents a different viewpoint.
Edmonds: Does it help tackle confirmation bias to be presented with different sources of information? If I think Brexit was a disaster — and I come across newspaper articles suggesting that actually the economy has done much better than expected — does that help counter my bias?
Edmans: You might think so because you think the issue is misinformation. Why don’t I just gather more information? But the idea of confirmation bias suggests it’s more difficult than that, because what matters isn’t just having information, but whether you take that information seriously, or do you accept it uncritically?
And so there’s another interesting study where some other researchers, they took some different set of students who had views on the death penalty. And they gave them two studies, one of them supported the death penalty, and another opposed it and by supported or opposed, because they looked at what happened to crime after the death penalty was introduced. And so they asked the students to rate the accuracy of those studies. And if you were a death penalty supporter, then the pro death penalty study, you would just accept it and say, ‘This is a great methodology,’ and the one that opposed it, you were trying to pick every single hole within it. And importantly, those studies were exactly the same quality. How did the research know it because they were randomized, they took the same study, and they just presented one set of studies to a death penalty supporter, the same pair of studies to a death penalty opponent. And so how all the reactions were depending on was entirely your prior viewpoint, not the study’s quality, because those were the same studies in both cases.
And so what this led to was something called belief polarization. So you might think if we put all the facts on the table, we all see the same information, then you, a Brexiter, and me, a Remainer, we will agree. But it’s actually the opposite, because I will find the information that is pro remain, and I will latch on to that. And you’re going to find the information that’s pro Brexit, and you’ll lap that up. So actually, more information can lead us to being less informed if we’re not aware of our biases, because more information just allows us to find something that supports our viewpoint.
Edmonds: I love the study that you cite about gun control. Can you just explain that and it’s very relevant in the age of the internet, when we can quickly find pieces of information or facts to back up our argument or reject an alternative view.
Edmans: Thanks for bringing that up, David, because the types of confirmation bias we’ve discussed so far, is what I call biased interpretation. Once you have information, you interpret it in a biased way, I latch on to something I agree with and I reject something I disagree with.
But there’s a second type of confirmation bias which is biased search. What types of information do we go out and actively search for to begin with? So this study took again some undergraduates and they had undergrads with strong beliefs about gun control, and they gave them different types of information that they could obtain in order to research the issue. Now importantly, they were told to research it in an even-handed way so that they could explain the gun control issue to other people. But what they found was that the information that they chose to search for was strongly correlated with their prior views on the issue. So there was some information from citizens against handguns, and also some other information from the National Rifle Association. Now, if you’re a gun-control supporter, guess which one you’re going to look at. You’ll look at Citizens Against Handguns, and you won’t even bother to hear what the National Rifle Association has to say. And David, you’re absolutely right, this is relevant right now, because we’ve got so many sources of information out there, but we also know which information will trigger our amygdala and which information will make us happy and calm. So if I’m a right-winger, I might look at Fox News, and I’m not going to read The Guardian. And if I’m highly liberal, then I will do the opposite.
Edmonds: So a range of sources of information doesn’t help. Let me try something else. What about expertise? Suppose that you are an expert in Brexit, you have a PhD in Brexit? Will that help reduce your confirmation bias if you see arguments that oppose the position that you’ve taken?
Edmans: Unfortunately, that might not help either. So there were further studies which look at the effect of intelligence on whether you’re likely to respond to information in a correct way. You might think, well, if you’re intelligent, don’t you learn at university you need to consider both sides. But actually, there’s a twist, the more intelligent you are, the greater your ability to poke holes in an argument that you don’t like. So smart people can find things to nitpick with, even if the study is completely watertight. 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.
And I see this myself, because I’m quite active on LinkedIn, I share lots of studies on sustainable finance. That’s my field. And importantly, I try to share studies which support the idea of sustainable finance, and also those that oppose it, even though that opposes my own types of research, because what matters to me is, is the research good? Now have I posted a study, which has an inconvenient truth, like diversity doesn’t lead to better performance? You have no shortage of people trying to poke holes in it. Is this correlation? Or is this causation? Is the time period too short? Was the measure of performance, exactly the one that they should have used? But do I see the same critical thinking faculties applied when I posted a study that people liked the sound of? No, they just lap it up, uncritically.
Edmonds: It sounds like you’re suggesting that your expertise or expertise of people genuinely far from not helping, might actually make confirmation bias worse
Edmans: It can do if you’re not wary of your biases yourself. Because if you think you’re an expert, you might think that anybody who contradicts you, they just don’t have the same level of expertise as you, and therefore you might dismiss them and we see this in some large organizations, often as a CEO, you’ve risen to the top, there might be people who are suggesting there’s concerns with the strategies you’re pursuing. And you just say, ‘Well, you don’t know as much as me.’ You might know the book, The Big Short, where they talk about a Morgan Stanley head of proprietary credit, who allegedly led to $9 billion of losses and when somebody disagreed with him, he would allegedly say, ‘Get the hell out of my office.’ Why? Because he thought he knew everything. He was a great bond trader and if people were expressing concerns about his risk position, he would not believe that his own instincts were wrong.
Edmonds: Now, you might not be able to answer this. I don’t know if there’s any data on it. But do you think our susceptibility to confirmation bias has got worse over time?
Edmans: I do think so for a couple of reasons. So number one, we have so many sources of information right now it’s easy to handpick whatever source confirms our viewpoint. In the past, like when I was young, you knew what the sources of information were. I had to trek out to the library, look up in the encyclopedia, and that was seen as the authority, and it would be people who know that topic who write in the encyclopedia. Right now, anybody can post something on LinkedIn, there’s some really best-selling books written by people who might not have expertise in that topic but because those books give messages that people want to hear, they are books, which are our laptops, so it’s really easy to find something that you like.
Another issue that I see is just more polarization. So now, what people believe might not just be what they think is true based on the evidence, but what they would like to be seen as standing for. So if you’re somebody who wants to be seen as a pro-diversity person, that does get you quite a lot of friends, and it does get you a lot of followers. And so if you want to be this pro-diversity person, you want to only believe in evidence which supports your viewpoint, any sort of equivocation might seem to be something which is weak. We often hear about politicians who do U-turns and that is said to be a bad thing. To me, a U-turn is responding to evidence and changing your view when evidence changes. But this idea of being nuanced is seen as flip flopping, it’s seen as weak, so just having a very strong position is something that can get you to the top.
Edmonds: I’ve made various suggestions about what might combat confirmation bias, and you’ve ruthlessly knocked each and every one of them back. So what does work?
Edmans: I think the first thing that works is just to be aware of confirmation bias to begin with. So when people think about issues such as, say, addiction, they say, first, recognize that you have a problem. That’s the first way in order to try to address this. And I think for me, myself, I know that I suffered from confirmation bias. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book and why I looked into the topic is I recognize that these are things that I need to try to address myself.
And then after recognizing that this is an issue, then we want to see well every bit of information. Are we responding to this because we like it or dislike it? Or is it based on the actual quality of the results? And so one question that I encourage people to ask is if they find a study, and they really want to believe it, imagine it found the opposite results. And you would want to take it apart. What questions would you ask? So I found a study showing that diversity worsens performance, I might say, ‘Well, actually, that study was only based on two years of data, we need to look at 10 years. ‘ Or maybe they measured performance looking at profitability. But that’s not a good measure because that could be very short term as I want to look at long term returns or something like that. And then once we see the holes that we would poke if we didn’t like the result, do those concerns also still apply, even though the result is something we would like and that would make sure that we are not responding just based on the result, but based on the methodology itself?
Edmonds: You mentioned you might suffer from confirmation bias when it comes to governance. What other areas are you susceptible to falling for confirmation bias?
Edmans: I think any types of research which might support the research that I’ve done, so if there was research suggesting that employee satisfaction improves performance given that’s linked to my own work, I might be willing to believe that other research suggesting that corporate governance improves performance. Similarly, in the Brexit/Remainer referendum several years ago, I was a strong Remainer, and so I would like to believe that any argument for Brexit was based on misinformation, was believing the back of a bus. And so how did I try to combat that? I tried to actively seek the viewpoints of Brexiters, who I think I would respect. So there was a talk given by Roger Bootle, who was a supporter of Brexit, also a very respected economist, he runs Capital Economics, an economics consultancy. And he was giving a talk and luckily for me, this was hosted by Merton College, Oxford, where I’m an alum. This was an alumni event. And I went along. Yeah, partly because it was the Merton alum event and there was going to be some free canapés and champagne. But also, I thought, ‘Well let me listen to this open mindedly,’ and I was shocked that I thought his arguments were really well put together. And I didn’t agree with every single thing that he said, but at least I saw there was a logic behind it. It wasn’t just xenophobia, or misinformation, which people like me had been led to believe about the other side. And then when I got home, I researched on the points first, and I thought, ‘Yeah, this actually seems to stack up.’ And to me, this was the most eye-opening talk that I’ve ever seen in my life. I then wrote up on my blog, the case for Brexit. So I had both, I had the case for Brexit and the case for remain. But I wanted the readers of my blog to see that there are actually two sides in an argument that people like me had previously wanted to portray was only one sided.
Edmonds: If you were to study on confirmation bias showing that it was a great problem and getting worse, would you be more likely to believe it?
Edmans: I probably would, because that’s what I believe and that’s what I’ve suggested in my answers. So then what would I have to do? I’d have to ask the same questions myself. I’d have to look at, well, is this something where they looked at correlation versus causation? Have they got a good control group? And this is why in the studies that we’ve mentioned so far on this chat, I do believe that they have good data where we have the studies on death penalty, where they took exactly the same studies and presented the same pair of studies to do different people. So any differences in the interpretation were due to people’s biases, rather than the studies being of inherently different quality.
Edmonds: Alex Edmans, thank you very much indeed.
Edmans: Thank you so much, David. It was great to be here.
The post Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias appeared first on Social Science Space.
Caring helps makes us human.
This is one of the strongest ideas one could infer from the work that developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik is discovering in her work on child development, cognitive economics and caregiving.
As she explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, caring “is one of the things that’s most characteristically human. And one of the things that I think has been the greatest engine of our thriving and success and to the extent that we can scale it up beyond just these close relationships, to our relationships to the world in general, say, our relationships to the natural world or our relationships to people who are on the other side of the planet, or our relationships to non-human animals.”
Gopnik, a distinguished professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Psychology Graduate School and affiliate professor of philosophy at Berkeley, reviews several aspects of “care” in the interview, including a comparison of paid and unpaid caregiving, how to square the existence of care with some understandings of evolutionary biology, and how caring is good not just for the cared-for but for the carer.
Her work on caring is the focus of a three-year-old multi-disciplinary project, The Social Science of Caregiving, based at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and operating .in collaboration with research at Gopnik’s UC Berkeley lab, the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab.
Gopnik writes widely on psychological research for both academic and general audiences, such as through books like 2016’s The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children and 2009’s The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life or through the Mind and Matter column she pens for the Wall Street Journal.
Last year, the Cognitive Science Society awarded Gopnik the David Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science. A fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: Academics should care a bit more about care. That’s the view of renowned psychologist Alison Gopnik. Caring for children, caring for elderly parents, this can take up a fair chunk of our time. It’s exhausting. It’s also fulfilling. But given how central it is the most of our lives, it’s strange that care has received so little scholarly attention. Alison Gopnik, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Alison Gopnik: Glad to be here.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about care. What is care?
Gopnik: Well, that’s a good question. It’s something that is incredibly important and deep for all of us. But it’s very odd from the perspective of most theories of economics and politics and philosophy and social science, because what happens in care is that someone who has more resources gives them away to try to help someone who has fewer resources. And they do that exactly because the other person has fewer resources. And they do it even though in some sense, especially, because the other person is not going to reciprocate. And that makes it something that’s really deep and important if you ask people. There’s a recent social psychology study that asked people what’s the most important thing in your life? What motivates you more than anything else? And sure enough, it turns out that what people say first is the way that I need to care for the people around me,
Edmonds: When you use the term resources, that sounds like money, care means money, but presumably we’re talking about not just financial care, but activities, changing that piece, and so on.
Gopnik: Right. It’s resources in the broadest sense. And in some important ways we give up our lives for the people that we care for. It isn’t just that we give them resources in the sense of giving them financial resources, or giving them chocolate chip cookies and tuna fish sandwiches, but we also give up our time.
And one way that you could think about it is that when we care for people, their goals become our goals, or certainly we subordinate our goals to their goals, especially if you think about cases like a baby. It’s not just that we sort of are feeding the baby, because otherwise the baby will cry, and it will be irritating. The baby’s hunger, the baby’s need, is overwhelming to us, more so than our own need. And that’s true even in less dramatic cases where we have someone who depends on us and their needs, in some important sense become our needs.
Edmonds: Should we draw a distinction between the paid and the unpaid sector because obviously, in the private sector and the public sector, there are people who are paid to be carers, and we call them carers, people who work in old age homes, people who work in hospitals, nurses and doctors. They’re carers of a kind.
Gopnik: Yeah, they absolutely are. And one of the things that’s very interesting that we’ve been thinking about and working on is that care has both the sides. So there’s a side to it that is being served by markets and states, like all the other kinds of economic activities that we engage in. And there’s a very large group of people who are paid to care.
But probably most of the work and care is actually not done in the context of that paid, priced economic system. It’s done by parents and children and older siblings and even close friends. It’s done in this kind of informal way. And one of the real challenges is what’s the relationship between that paid-to-care economy and that unpaid economy. And one idea that people have had, again, this kind of irony is that everyone feels as if care is incredibly important, but the people who actually do it are characteristically underpaid. So they’re almost always women, [and] very often in the United States, and I think in Britain as well, very often immigrants, very often not treated with great respect and certainly not paid very well. And there’s an interesting argument that in some ways, the non-economic benefits of care mean that the economic benefits are underpriced. So when you talk to people who are doing this care work, what they’ll say is, “Well, I do it because it’s really intrinsically satisfying. And it’s important and I care about those particular people.”
The example that always strikes me as being particularly vivid and painful is when they were doing interviews with eldercare workers during COVID. Literally, these people were risking their lives going into nursing homes to take care of people with COVID. And they were not getting paid or particularly well treated in order to do this. And what they would say is, “Well, look, it’s Mr. Jones, right. I can’t just turn around and leave Mr. Jones to get sick. Of course, I have to take care of him.” There’s a really interesting interaction between these very spontaneous, unpaid relationships of care and motivations of care, and what happens in the paid professional carers, too.
Edmonds: Is it fair to say that you’re more interested in the unpaid than the paid sector?
Gopnik: Well, what I’m interested in is, what is it that makes care such a strong motivation outside of pay. And that’s true obviously in the unpaid sector. So it’s a real paradox from a kind of classical economic point of view. Why are people investing all this work doing all this time when they’re not apparently getting any reward for it? But it applies to the care economy in general and I think an idea that lots of people have had is part of the reason why there’s a sort of crisis of care, we feel as if there just isn’t enough of it and it’s not being done very well, is exactly because it’s in this strange zone between what we think of as being paid work and what we think of as being unpaid work.
Edmonds: At least the paid work, talk about it being underpaid, but at least it’s captured by GDP figures, whereas the unpaid work that the mother or father was doing with the kids doesn’t show up at all in the stats.
Gopnik: That’s right. I mean, it’s completely invisible and it’s invisible in the statistics and it’s, it’s invisible in the conversation in economics, or political science or philosophy for thousands of years. Even though it’s so fundamental and important to people, there just hasn’t been very much attention paid to it, it’s treated as if it’s off in that little private, domestic woman’s universe. And that has consequences. That’s part of the reason why we — especially in a large industrial economy — we don’t do a very good job of implementing it. Our usual way of solving problems is either we have some kind of market solution, or we have some kind of state solution. And neither market solutions nor state solutions seem to be the best way of solving problems of care, or at least not as they’re classically formulated.
Edmonds: So let me ask you the most basic question, why do people care? It looks like with kids, at least, there might be a simple evolutionary explanation, we want our genes to survive.
Gopnik: Yeah, so I think there’s at least a potential evolutionary story about this, that’s very interesting, which is, it seems like the behaviors and the neuroscience and the activities of care start out with mammalian mothers, and for mammalian mothers, for mouse mothers, there’s a perfectly straightforward evolutionary explanation of it. But it’s still kind of paradoxical, right? I mean, if you think about it, it’s remarkable. Any mammalian mother is literally giving up calories that could be feeding her as an organism and giving them to another organism. That’s a very unusual thing to do and we can think of an evolutionary story about how it happens in mammalian mothers, because babies need to mature for longer and in order for them to survive, you need to provide them with resources.
But the story is, once you get the cognitive and the neural and hormonal apparatus available to be able to do that — so now we know something about the kinds of genes that are activated in mammalian mothers, the kind of hormones like oxytocin that are involved in this care — then that can get used in other contexts. So we know, for example, that pair bonding, which is extremely unusual among mammals, so when fathers are caring for babies, and also caring for their spouses, when that starts, you see it in animals, like some species evolves, it sort of takes that same hormones, takes the same brain activation patterns, takes the same behavior. But now, instead of the mother doing it for the baby, it’s the mate doing it for the other mate. So now you get a different kind of context now, but you get the same kind of behaviors and you even get the same neurological underpinnings. And there’s various kinds of evolutionary explanations you could have about why that’s a good thing and beneficial for that species.
Then what happens is, as species get more and more complex, it turns out that this mechanism can be used for all sorts of other kinds of altruism and cooperation. So if you’re talking about wolves, for example, or carnivores, who have very complicated social structures, now it can be a way of putting together the members of the group. And by the time you get to humans, it’s something that’s so abstract, that we can think about caring for the dead, or we could think about a God that cares for all humans, or we could think about being a bodhisattva, that cares for all sentient beings. And it’s kind of completely gotten divorced now from the mammalian babies who have to continue to exist, but it’s real, right? And it gives us a way of thinking about other people and organisms that lets us thrive, that lets us do things that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.
Edmonds: Caring for the dead doesn’t sound like it has an evolutionary explanation, but you’re saying that it does, that somehow, it feeds into success for individuals and groups in some weird way?
Gopnik: Well, I think it’s more like a kind of case of what biologists call something being abstracted. So it starts out being about evolutionary success, but I think what happens is that then, and this is true about humans all the time, then we can take this abstract structure and apply it in cases where it wouldn’t necessarily be directly related to reproductive success.
More broadly, I think one of the things that’s really interesting about care is it has this quality of operating over long timescales. We care for babies and we grow up and then we become elders and then we care for elders. And not only that, but we care for our ancestors, the people who came before us, and we care for and care about people who are to come, even though there’s no possible way in which we could have reciprocal relationships either with our ancestors or with our descendants. That’s a very distinctively human characteristic that we have this sense of our lives extending over time, not only over our particular lifespan, but extending over cultural time. And I think that our impulse to care is very closely connected to that aspect of what we’re like as humans.
Edmonds: So care for the elderly, how would that fit into the system you’ve just been explaining? Because, again, that doesn’t look like it’s got a straightforward evolutionary explanation unless you think that it’s very useful having wise elders populating the planet.
Gopnik: Yeah, it’s fascinating, because one of the things that we know about humans is that we have a much longer childhood than any of our close primate relatives, an exceptionally long childhood and an exceptionally long, immature, needy childhood. And we have many more people who are invested in caring for children than other species do. But we also, in parallel, have this long period of elderhood. Famously, humans have postmenopausal grandmothers and that’s rather puzzling, like, why is it that we’re living for 20 years after we no longer are fertile? A common explanation for that is that those grandmothers and grandfathers, too, can pass on cultural information. And again, it’s part of this picture of humans as extending over time. We’re a uniquely cultural species and our relationship with the people who had information before us, and the people who are going to pass the information on to, is really important.
So from that perspective, what you might think of as the kind of normal elders, the elders between, you know, 55, and 80, and people have been living till 80 for as long as there’s been people, not as many as live now, but there’s definitely people who are in that age range in forager cultures, and historically, in lots of cultures. Now, lots of people die before they get there but if you get there, then you can live until 80 and you can be prosperously living until about 80. Now, part of what’s happened now is that we have an extra 20 years that is the result of having modern medicine, and so forth, but the parts, it’s sort of 55 to 80, that just seems to be part of the human developmental trajectory.
And that raises a really interesting question. We have some good evidence, I think that people in that kind of elderhood phase of life are just like children and have quite different motivations and different kinds of capacities than they do earlier on. There’s quite good evidence that as you get into that phase of life, you become more altruistic, you start caring more about other people, you care more about transmitting information to the next generation rather than trying to get goods for yourself. And the fact that there’s a group of people who have a lot of knowledge and information that they can pass on to the new generation, that’s another really important part of human success. So in that sense, caring for elders, at least caring for that group of elders, is a sensible thing for humans to do.
Edmonds: They’ve had plenty of time to pass on that information over the past few decades. You’re saying they’ve only got the motivation to do so once they reach this phase of life, or maybe they’re passing on to their grandchildren?
Gopnik: There’s really some really fascinating anthropological evidence about this. So Michael Gurvin, who’s an anthropologist at Santa Barbara, looked at hunting across many, many different kinds of groups and cultures. And hunting is really hard, you don’t really get to be expert at it until you’re in your mid-30s. And what he discovered was that there’s an interesting kind of paradox, which is that you need to have someone really teaching you to be able to be a good hunter, like these great hunters when you’re 35. But guess what? Actually having a bunch of little kids trailing after you when you’re hunting and trying to teach them is not a good way to be an effective hunter. And what he discovered was that if you looked across a lot of the cultures, the 35-year-olds who are both strong and knowledgeable and expert would go off by themselves, and they would get the biggest yields. And then the 50-year-olds who aren’t as strong anymore, who can’t, aren’t as capable, but who know more, and the 14-year-olds were going off and hunting together. So it was actually the elders who were passing on the information and the knowledge to the younger ones. I used to describe this by saying, “Oh, the 35-year-olds think so highly of themselves, they think they’re the whole center of the story, right? They’re out there, getting resources and finding mates and fighting off predators. And they really think they’re the center.” But really, when you think about it, the babies and children who are learning and the elders who are teaching, they’re the ones who are doing the really good, important human work.
Now, with my own children being adult, I feel like oh, those poor 35-year-olds, the grandmothers and the kids get to do all the fun human stuff. And then they have to do all the stuff about actually going out and getting resources. But exactly because the typical adult is so involved in doing things like getting resources, they don’t have the spare capacity to pass on information. So the thought is that taking care of elders is valuable, because there’s this kind of tradeoff between their physical increasing fragility, but their knowledge and expertise.
Edmonds: So it sounds like it could be very good news that societies across the world are aging.
Gopnik: Well, it’s an interesting question. So I think the first reaction that people have had to it is it’s a terrible demographic problem. What are we going to do with all of these old people? But I think you could make the argument the other way around. What it means is that there’s many more people available to take care of young people who are very well designed to take care of young people. So there might actually be an advantage to thinking about children having all of their grandparents alive, for example, which is something that’s happening now that hasn’t happened before in human history.
Edmonds: One of the things that’s happening in technology is that some of this care is now being subcontracted to robots. Is that a proper substitute for human-to-human care?
Gopnik: I don’t think anyone really thinks it is and one of the curious things about AI is that robots are really terrible. Robots are still having a really hard time even doing things like picking things up and putting them somewhere else, let alone being in these kinds of close relationships of care. And one of the things that’s interesting about care is that it seems to take place in the context of these particular close relationships with other people. So robots, I don’t think are going to be able to even begin to replace that. On the other hand, there is a lot of physical work that’s involved in caring, especially say caring for elders and children. And you can imagine, just as you know, having dishwashers means that you can use bottles in a way that you couldn’t before. Having robots could mean that you could take care of some of that work, but I think it’s very unlikely that robots are actually going to be able to do the work of care.
Edmonds: You’ve got this very striking phrase, let me read it to you. “We don’t care for others because we love them. We love them because we care for them.” That seems very counterintuitive to me. What’s the empirical evidence to back that up?
Gopnik: Well, one thing is that, as I said, we humans have a much wider range of carers than any other species. So one of the things that we really know about people is that not just biological mothers, but fathers and grandparents and siblings and other members of the community, everyone can potentially be involved in caring for somebody else.
And I think one of the practical challenges is that we don’t have very good ways of institutionalizing that care beyond say, just the care of parents, for children, or children for elderly parents. But there’s actually some interesting data about this. If you look at the brain activation patterns that you see, say classically in pregnant women after their babies are born, there’s some very distinctive hormonal and brain patterns that show up. And a lovely, kind of natural experiment, if you look at gay men who’ve adopted babies, you see exactly the same changes. So you see that gay men — this relatively new phenomenon of gay men who are raising babies together — you see the same kinds of brain changes for them just as a result of holding the baby and taking care of the baby. And you see something like this with fathers as well. It’s sort of more dramatic if you think about the case of the gay adoptive parents. But that’s a really nice vivid example of how the act of being engaged in and caring for someone else actually seems to change the way that you function in a way that leads you to feel the bond and affection and love for them.
Edmonds: So far from seeing care as a burden, care is kind of good for us.
Gopnik: Well, there’s this kind of funny paradox because in one sense, what we’re doing when we’re caring for other people is giving up our own goals, giving up our own resources, giving up what we want to do for the sake of the other person. And what makes it even more interesting and complicated is, it isn’t just that we’re trying to accomplish someone else’s goals, we’re trying to put them in a position where they can have new goals of their own. So what we’re trying to do, and this is part of what makes caring so cognitively, intellectually challenging, is that we have to figure out how do I have the person I’m caring for still be autonomous, still be able to do the things that they want, not the things that I want. And that’s a big challenge, both with caring for children, and with say, caring for the elderly, or caring for a student if you’re a teacher, or caring for a patient if you’re a therapist. It’s a kind of constant, distinctive feature of the way that care works.
But on the other hand, it’s one of the things that’s most characteristically human. And one of the things that I think has been the greatest engine of our thriving and success and to the extent that we can scale it up beyond just these close relationships, to our relationships to the world in general, say, our relationships to the natural world or our relationships to people who are on the other side of the planet, or our relationships to non-human animals. Those are all things that seemed like obvious extensions of our moral world and often the way that people think about scaling up our moral sentiments, they think about it in the context of sort of a social contract. So I’m going to do something for you because you do something else for me and that’s true and thinking that way has genuinely scaled up our moral concern across the planet.
But I think an idea that goes back to the philosopher Mengzi, that Confucian philosopher is that we could also think about how can we scale up those close relationships of care which are challenging but incredibly satisfying the thing that makes life meaningful? How can we scale those up to say, the scale of a planet?
Edmonds: “Satisfying” — that’s an interesting word. So I was thinking of precisely that, the connection between being a carer and wellbeing. That is empirically grounded, is it?
Gopnik: Yeah as I say, it’s a kind of interesting paradox. And it’s something that people have found in looking at the wellbeing literature about having children. If you sort of look moment by moment, it’s stressful and difficult and people will say, “Oh, no, I’ve had this really difficult day.” But if you ask people to look back and say what was meaningful and satisfying in your day, they’ll tell you something about their care, either for children or for elders. And there’s quite good empirical evidence that things like taking care of other people actually makes you feel better. You know, if you’re in a terrible state, you’re better off going and helping someone than you are even, you know, eating a piece of chocolate cake. And that, again, suggests that this is a very deep part of who we are.
Edmonds: It seems to me, you’re more interested in the perspective of what it’s like to be a carer. But are there interesting questions also to be asked about what it’s like to be cared for?
Gopnik: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question.
We know from the developmental psychology literature, which is where I come from, has put a lot of emphasis on the degree to which having care is deeply important for children’s development. That rather remarkably, over the past 20 years or so, there’s a giant literature that shows that what are called “adverse childhood experiences,” which basically means not having care, end up having consistent and very long-term effects that were affecting, like, how likely you are to get cancer when you’re 50. So it’s clear that being cared for is really centrally important for children and I think centrally important for human beings in general.
But we’ve only really started thinking about the other side, about the role that caring for other people plays for the people who are actually doing the caring. And part of what I’ve been thinking about recently is we have all sorts of good psychological accounts of how we understand other people’s minds, like the kind of theory of mind work that I’ve done, how we understand other social arrangements, how we know about who’s in our in group or not, we don’t know very much about what children or adults or anybody thinks about care, about how care works, about who’s an appropriate caregiver, about what the obligations and pains and joys of it actually are.
Edmonds: So give me a research agenda for care.
Gopnik: So what we’re actually doing at the moment, the first piece of it, is just very simple, is asking people questions like, “Suppose someone’s sitting in the park with mom, will that make the child more likely to explore or less likely to explore?” That’s a good example of something that you might imagine it would kind of go either way. But you might also think that one of the advantages of care is that it allows exploration so we can ask kids, what do you think? We can ask kids, “Here’s a list of people, a mom, or grandma or an older sibling, a friend. Which one of those is most likely to go and take care of someone when they’re in distress?” Part of what we’re doing is looking across cultures and different groups with different kinds of people to see if those answers might be different in different places and at different times.
Edmonds: It’s extraordinary given how central care is to our lives that these questions haven’t been asked already.
Gopnik: Isn’t it amazing? I think this is the most striking thing that we’ve all realized in this project. It’s an interdisciplinary project funded by the Sloan Foundation, is that even though if you just ask someone, “What’s the most important moral decision that you’ve ever had to make in your life?” Or, “What’s the thing that makes your life meaningful? What’s the thing that has the most significance to you?” People will talk about relationships, about care. But it’s pretty much invisible in the psychological and philosophical and political and economic literature. So in terms of moral psychology, for instance, people in moral psychology have talked about all these different kinds of moral relationships you could have. You could have relationships of harm, or you could have ideas about justice, or you could have ideas about exchange, and this very basic thing about why is it that I’m responsible for my elderly parent, even at cost to myself, is not in the list of the things that count is being basic pieces of moral psychology. And if you look at accounts of altruism, they’re all about, well, I might look as if I’m being altruistic, but really, it’s because in the long run, I’m going to expect something from you. And care just isn’t like that. So it’s, it’s at the same time, one of the most foundational things about us and about our lives, and the most paradoxical from the perspective of something like, like homo economicus, which is the way that we often think about how we make decisions and do things so it makes it a wonderful subject to investigate.
Edmonds: Alison Gopnik, thank you very much indeed.
Gopnik: Thanks very much. Always happy to be in conversation.
The post Alison Gopnik on Care appeared first on Social Science Space.
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 of 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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: A large-scale research program is currently underway examining the connection between two things, education and conflict. Tejendra Pherali teaches at University College London, and is co-director of ERICC, Education Research in Conflict and Crisis. Tejendra Pherali, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Tejendra Pherali: Thank you very much for having me, David.
Edmonds: Today’s focus is on the link between education and conflict. They’re not obvious bedfellows. How did you get interested in the connection between the two?
Pherali: I think there are two responses to your question. The first one is more personal and the second one is more academic, I think. The personal response to that is that I originally come from Nepal, which was hugely affected by violent conflict and Maoist insurgency in the late 1990s and until 2006. Having lived in a conflict-affected context and having seen the violence and clashes between the military and rebels affecting school education, and schools were directly targeted for violent attacks and students were kidnapped for political indoctrination by the rebels. But also teachers were detained and tortured and taken away and forcefully recruited in insurgencies, as well as the state also persecuted teachers who were suspected of collaborating with the rebels. So having seen that, I was quite interested in trying to understand the impact of violent conflict on education. So that was kind of a personal motivation.
More academic motivation was that in 2000, when the global declaration on universal access to primary education was convened, a lot of international organizations came together in Dakar in Senegal, to launch the education for all goals. Quite a lot of these organizations working in conflict-affected contexts, realize that violent conflicts were one of the major barriers to enabling universal access to primary education and therefore, governments, international agencies needed to develop a different kind of more tailored approach mechanism and funding strategies in order to mitigate those barriers to education in those contexts. And therefore, Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies was set up. Clearly, people who are trained in education, trained well about teaching methods, curriculum development, education, financing, and policies, found themselves suddenly in extremely violent situations where schools were being attacked by militants, or children were being kidnapped or killed on the way to and from school. Textbooks were burned or teachers were taken away while they were teaching in the classrooms. So there was a lot more in there to understand for educationists, which actually justified the advent of the subfield of education and conflict.
Edmonds: I want to come back to the actual impact on education of conflict. But before we get there, can education predict conflict? Are there education patterns or factors that you can identify which lead one to suspect that conflict might be around the corner?
Pherali: I think yes. One of the crucial issues relating to the potential of education to predict violent conflict is a distribution of education and the political motives that underpin the educational processes, whether it is education policies, pedagogies, the educational workforce, or access to education more broadly. These kinds of processes can create educational inequalities, which predict inequalities in social, political, and economic outcomes in the society. That leads to forms of grievances for those who can’t actually benefit from education and other domains.
Edmonds: You mean one group having much better resourced schools than another group, for example.
Pherali: So that’s one of those. For example, certain social and cultural groups have better levels of access to education, and therefore outcomes. I can actually think about an example from my own native Nepal, where high-cost Hill-based ethnic groups had better access to education. The whole processes of nation building historically, have been monopolized by privileged social and ethnic groups. And educational processes have been influenced by those characteristics and aspirations of those groups in a very ethnically diverse society, where there are different kinds of ethnic groups, Indigenous populations, different linguistic groups and cultural groups. They were very much excluded, and were not able to benefit from the opportunity of education as much as the people who actually represented the groups that education actually was characterized by. So that led to unequal participation in political structures, economic inequalities, a whole range of discriminations in social spaces, which actually fueled the insurgency that we saw.
Edmonds: In some places, it might not be a question of resources. Different groups might choose to send their offspring to different schools or universities for, let’s say, religious reasons, or maybe the function of housing segregation. One example would be Northern Ireland, where even to this day, many Protestants and many Catholics go to schools that are predominantly populated by people of their own denomination. Does that kind of segregation in education predict conflict as well?
Pherali: I think it does. There are several colleagues based in Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Ulster, who’ve done quite a lot of work actually on how divided schooling can reproduce social and political divisions in Northern Ireland. And I think that’s probably because of that very divided social environment. Government schools and Catholic schools exist, and they thrive in their own communities and that’s why, I suppose, little appetite for integrated education, which tends to bring communities from across dividing lines together.
There’s also another factor that the political groups or political parties in many contexts tend to get support from their divided communities. It is in the interest of the political groups to keep the social segregation so that their political base is intact. What that does is basically [it] educates different religious groups or cultural groups differently and it actually reduces their chance of coming together in order to engage in dialogue and understand the problems in their society and so forth. So as a result, divided schooling contributes to reproduction of the existing divisions, sometimes actually even exacerbates those divisions through unequal distribution of the outcomes in people’s lives.
Edmonds: And do teaching materials play a part in this? I imagine that in Gaza, and in Tel Aviv, kids were exposed to very different textbooks. Intuitively, that feels like that may be predictive of future conflict as well.
Pherali: Oh, absolutely. I think that’s where education is hugely political. We tend to think about education as teaching and learning in mathematics and so forth. 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? Education contributes to promote a particular kind of national identity and aspirations and obviously, in contexts where populations are trying to reclaim their identity, or national identity it could be, education plays an important role. So unsurprisingly, in Palestinian educational provisions, being proud of the Palestinian history, aspiration to establish independent or free Palestine, is vital, and equally in Israel, education is designed in such a way that it glorifies Israeli history and its aspirations.
When you have opposing communities living next to each other that are educating their populations to promote self-glorification, and sometimes also to promote hatred against the other, then I think education there directly plays the role as a perpetrator of violence rather than as a peace builder.
Edmonds: You touched on schools in conflict earlier. When education is disrupted during conflict, does that tend to be as a result of collateral damage, conflict going on around the school, around the area? Or is it the case that schools and universities often directly targeted?
Pherali: I think it’s both. But increasingly, what we’ve seen is educational infrastructure, and educational actors are directly targeted for violence.
Edmonds: Give us an example.
Pherali: So for example, in northern Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is a militant group, disagrees with the approach to education that is being promoted by the Nigerian government. So teaching about science, English, and mathematics, and more kind of global dimensions, are seen as a threat to their societal security for Islamic communities that the Boko Haram claims to represent. Education is seen as a process of cultural repression, and therefore, these educational infrastructure and institutions are directly attacked by the Boko Haram militant groups. So that’s an example. Another example could be from Afghanistan, and in many other places where schools are also the places of resistance to authorities, and therefore, state security forces directly attack schools in order to eliminate that kind of political opposition that is being bred in those spaces.
Edmonds: Is this a growing phenomenon? The attack on educational establishments for ideological reasons? Or is that always been with us during conflict?
Pherali: I think it has always been with us, but perhaps it is increasingly so. For example, in Myanmar, there are several ethnic regions where ethnic armed organizations protect their provisions of education. Because these are culturally, historically, and linguistically different societies, where the central government is trying to assimilate these diverse identities through centralized educational policies, these parallel education provisions resist the dominance of the central education. So when they try to do that, the central authority tends to directly attack these educational institutions.
Edmonds: If it is a growing global phenomenon, do you have an explanation for why that might be the case?
Pherali: That goes back to the question of how education is part of the political ambitions in almost all societies.
Edmonds: But that’s always been the case. Why would this phenomenon of education being a direct target of attack? Why would that be increasing?
Pherali: I think that’s an interesting question and I think it relates to this issue of how the nature of violent conflict after 1990s has changed. For example, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the majority of violent conflicts across the world are intra-state civil wars. They take place within the national boundaries, often between the state security forces and the rebel forces, even though there are, you know, some examples of international conflicts, like Ukraine and Russia being one, but mostly these conflicts are within the national boundaries, and they are hugely political. Most of them are due driven by disagreements around the kind of societies that they want to create, and that diversity not being recognized and different cultural social groups being repressed, and basically, inequalities play an important role. And educational processes are influenced heavily by these political and economic policies which do not recognize the significance of identities, freedom, rights, and, and so forth. So, education is directly implicated in the global, political, and economic landscapes. That might be the reason why education becomes a direct target for violence.
Edmonds: Let’s talk a bit about the impact of this. This is perhaps a stupid question. Obviously, if you disrupt the education of kids, it’s going to have a detrimental effect. But tell me a bit about the most harmful effects of education being disrupted.
Pherali: I think education is pretty much the only hope for people who have been displaced, and many of them who’ve been living in refugee settings. Lack of access to education means their ability to cope with the impact of violence, their ability to imagine a future that they value, and their ability to develop social-emotional skills are at risk. I think education is incredibly important in enabling these very important livelihood skills. Education is significant in enabling the sense of hope, a sense of confidence, and also ability to appreciate the social, economic, and cultural conditions where people live in and to create possibilities to change those difficulties that they’re living in. An absence of those abilities because of the war is going to enormously impact adversely, obviously, on these populations.
Edmonds: That sounds obviously common-sensical. Is there a way of empirically getting at this?
Pherali: I think there’s growing evidence around how education can create better outcomes. But I think you’re right, that there’s been a lack of investment in research around how education can create value specifically for the populations who have been affected by violent conflict. How can we actually deliver access quality and continuity of education in conflict in crisis? So FCDO, Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom, has invested in education research, and the program is called Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis, which I co-direct, is an ambitious program that is being implemented in seven different countries: Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Nigeria, Bangladesh, particularly looking at the context of Rohingya refugees, Myanmar, South Sudan. The objective of this large research program is to generate evidence that is directly relevant for policies and programming in these contexts. So I think there is that opportunity for our field to demonstrate empirically how education can save lives, but also how it can mitigate these adverse structural conditions in which people live in.
Edmonds: How are you going to do that? How are you going to be able to identify that education is a crucial part of the causal chain rather than displacement or malnourishment or any of a dozen other factors that could be explaining various bad outcomes?
Pherali: I think that’s an important methodological question. We have the opportunity to carry out individual case studies specifically looking at the research questions which have been prioritized and developed by the local stakeholders, but also we would be collecting large-scale data sets at a global level across these countries, which would enable us to capture the empirical evidence of the positive outcomes that education can produce. And we hope that there would be positive outcomes of education. But we will see.
Edmonds: Are you conducting randomized control trials and introducing various pilot programs in different places?
Pherali: So randomized control trial hasn’t started yet. But obviously from the policymakers and funders, there is an aspiration to, to see randomized, controlled trial to demonstrate the evidence. But I think educational research cannot be entirely relied on randomized control trial. A randomized control trial, RCT’s have values, but they have a lot of limitations as well. But I think a lot of surveys and also exploratory studies, and also analysis of the effects of educational programs. So that’s the kind of evidence that we are trying to generate, which can inform policies.
Edmonds: Are you also looking at the impact on disparate groups? I’m wondering whether girls might be perhaps more affected in conflict situations than boys? I’m wondering whether the well-off find ways of educating their kids in a way that less well-off people can’t. Is that something you might look at as well?
Pherali: Yes I think that’s a very interesting question and our interest is around that. So we are finalizing our global research agenda for the field of education in conflict and crisis. There are a number of research themes that we have identified through rigorous analysis, and consultation with education and conflict specialists globally, that we hope to implement, as research projects moving on. I think it’s much bigger than what our program can achieve, but the idea is that we set out the research agenda for our fields so that other agencies and scholars and organizations can all pick up those research agenda and carry out research.
Edmonds: We’ve talked about education as a cause of conflict. We’ve talked a bit about education during conflict. Let me ask you about education post-conflict. What is the role of education in sustaining peace if a peace deal can be agreed between the warring parties and keeping the cap on a fragile situation? How can education help?
Pherali: So when I was talking about how education can be complicit in reproducing or even exacerbating conditions of conflict. So one of the opportunities for post-war reconstruction is how education can be transformed from being a perpetrator of violence to a peace builder. I have developed a very simple framework of analysis, which I call a VPLP framework, which is, education is a victim: how education can be a victim during conflict and crisis. Then also education is a perpetrator, how education, for example, promoting biased history, lack of critical reflection, and indoctrination through educational processes. And for example, now, there are reports around Russian military occupation and those areas, children, as many as 200,000 in Ukraine have been put into reeducation camps where there is a rigorous ideological indoctrination happening. So how education is being forced to serve as a reproducer of forms of divisions and violence.
So that’s the idea of how education can become a perpetrator. But also we know that education can create critical consciousness awareness about inequalities, injustices, understanding the causes of social divisions, and and so forth, and enabling populations and learning communities to be able to address some of those root causes. So in that process, education plays a role as a liberator. And finally, I think education is a peacebuilder, which is the question that you’re asking me now. We need to look at not just what happens within schools or learning institutions, but we need to look at how education is influenced by broader political structures in the society. Yes, education can help bring people from across dividing lines together through peace education, through multicultural education, and imagining a better future — all of that can happen within the curriculum. But if access, quality, and right to education, these are not guaranteed at a political level, that might not be possible.
Edmonds: Can you point me to a positive case study where education has played a role in sustaining peace or reducing conflict?
Pherali: I think there’s a lot of evidence around more non-formal educational initiatives, rather than in formal education initiatives. So for example, in South America, we conducted a research project on social movements in Colombia, where what we observed in local communities is local peasants, Indigenous, populations and Black communities, were actually coming together to develop their own understanding of the problems and solutions that are required to tackle the challenges that they were facing in their communities — whether it is about their land being grabbed by multinational companies, or neoliberal policies impacting on their farming and local trade, or various armed groups attacking their communities. So these communities were coming together to promote human rights, life with dignity, reclaiming Indigenous knowledge to survive and sustain their epistemic traditions, and so forth. So there was this very powerful community-based educational process. But in formal education, this is more challenging, because formal education is controlled by the political authority that has particular kinds of interest. So it doesn’t necessarily liberate learners from political control. So the examples can be found in more non-formal settings and social movements, because we need to understand education not only as what happens in schools.
Edmonds: You’ve obviously traveled a great deal with your research. When you go to all these different places are you more struck by the particular individual cases that you come across, the factors that seem unique to this place? Or are you more struck by the universalizable themes that emerge? Do you think, ah, “I’ve seen something in Sudan, that is equally the case in Bangladesh, or Nepal?”
Pherali: I think I am actually more struck by one particular issue, which is related to teachers. 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 and I think that’s what is the most striking thing that comes across which I think all stakeholders including national governments and international agencies should prioritize on.
Edmonds: Tejendra Pherali, thank you very much indeed.
Pherali: Thank you very much for having me and talking to me about education and conflict.
The post Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: Type ‘social science podcasts’ into Google, and I’m pleased to say that Social Science Bites appears on the front page, evidence surely that Google is a search engine to be trusted. But Safiya Noble, who teaches at UCLA, is not so sure. She’s the author of Algorithms of Oppression. Safiya Noble, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Safiya Noble: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure and an honor to be here, I’m so grateful.
Edmonds: This interview is going to focus on search engines and bias. By a search engine, we mean what exactly?
Noble: Well, you know, a search engine is really, and I think for those who are listening who remember the internet before the search engine, we will remember that there were lots of websites, web addresses, all over. The way we organized information on the internet was to build complex directories, they were often built by librarians or subject matter experts. These were curated heavily by communities of practice we could say, or hobbyists, or people who knew a lot about different kinds of things. To find information, you’d need to know a web address.
And then the search engine comes along and it’s a kind of artificial intelligence or a set of algorithms that start to index all of these links all over the web and try to cohere, or make sense of them, in some type of rank order. You can figure out, allegedly, the kind of the good stuff from the junk. And the way that the dominant search engine that most of us use, which is probably Google in the Western world — or for sure in the United States — would be to their crawlers. Their web crawlers would look and see which sites were pointing to other sites. And of course, this was the process called hyperlinking. So you had a blog, or you had a website, and then you would have links to other people’s information or websites or web addresses.
And the process of hyperlinking was kind of allegedly like a credibility factor. It kind of says, “Well, if I’m pointing to David Edmonds’ web site, then you know you can trust it, if you trust what I have to say.” And of course, now it’s so much more sophisticated, because we have these things we called ‘search engine optimization’ cottage industries, where you can purchase keywords to help optimize and help make sure that the algorithm finds your website out of millions of potential websites that are using the same kinds of words that you’re using on your site. So now we have a huge industry, an SEO industry. But I think for everyday people, we open up a browser, there’s a plain white screen with a box, we type in some words, and we get back what we think is the very best kinds of things that you can get back. And that’s really the way people experience search engines.
Edmonds: And do we know what kinds of searches are the most common? Is there data on that? What are people looking for generally? Or is that impossible to say?
Noble: No, I don’t think that’s impossible to say. I mean, the last time I looked at what Google was reporting out (in my work, I kind of focus on Google just because they’re the largest) the most frequent kinds of information and research are health information. I know this is probably hard for you to believe, but in the United States where we don’t have a nationalized health care system, that health care is extremely precarious for most people, even if you have insurance. You find that people really use search to diagnose themselves or get medical advice or help. And that’s one of the most prevalent series of search terms that are looked for.
Edmonds: Right, how fascinating. Now, obviously, when you do a Google search, you get dozens, even hundreds of links. How many of these links do people typically scroll through? Do they get beyond the first page of search results typically?
Noble: No, the majority of people who use search engines — we know this from search engine use studies that are conducted by Pew Research, for example, they periodically do the search engine, user studies — and we know the majority of people do not go past the first page. So what happens on the first page of search results is extremely important. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the place to look and study because that’s where most people are.
Edmonds: OK, so most of your research is on search engines and bias. Give us a couple of examples of the kinds of bias that search engines throw up.
Noble: Yeah well, let me just say that even the notion of search engines being biased is probably something that I helped introduce into our lexicon [from work] a handful of us who studied search engines more than a decade ago. I will say that now it’s kind of more of a common sense understanding that search engines favor, let’s say, companies that pay them the most money in the ad words system that Google in particular, but other search engines also use. So they certainly favor larger companies over smaller businesses, unless you know the keywords to search to find that small business, like you know the name of that business. So they’re always going to kind of favor the people who paid them to be made more visible.
In my work, you know, I conducted this study over a decade ago now that was really the first look at how people, especially racialized people, or ethnic minorities, racial minorities, and women, girls, were profoundly misrepresented in search engines. I took the U.S. Census, and all of the categories, racial and ethnic categories there, and I took the gender categories available then and I just kind of crossed them and did a lot of search, you know, dozens and dozens of searches. And what I found was that Black girls, Latina girls, Asian girls, in the U.S. were almost exclusively misrepresented as pornography, or as sexual commodities.
And, of course, this opened up for me a pathway to talking about what happens when we rely upon something like a search engine to tell us about other people, other communities, ourselves. And in this way, I was arguing that these are profoundly biased toward the interests of the most powerful industries, which of course, the most powerful industry over determining what women and girls of color seem like on the internet is the porn industry. And how unfair is that? That women and girls be misrepresented so profoundly even that conceptualizing that I will tell you, 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 engines 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.
Edmonds: So one types in ‘Black girls’ into Google, and one gets what, a whole bunch of links to pornographic sites?
Noble: Yeah, in the first pre-study that I did before kind of a more formal study, and this would have been in 2010, was ‘hotblackpussy.com.’ That was the first thing you got when you’d Google ‘Black girls.’ And then shortly thereafter, that got moved out, and it was ‘sugaryblackpussy.com.’ So very graphic websites.
I wrote about this in 2012, because I wanted to show that even when you were looking for things, and this was like a small article in this feminist magazine called Bitch magazine, even when you looked for, let’s say, women athletes, the first things that would come up on the first page of search results would be ‘the 50 Sexiest Women Athletes,’ you know, so this like hyper sexualized way. And of course, the sexualized commodified version of us is actually what’s profitable. And that over time is actually quite dangerous in holding up stereotypes and people act upon the stereotypes that they are subtly socialized by, without even really realizing it.
Edmonds: It sounds like though it’s not exactly intentional. There’s an algorithm which links to all sorts of other sites, and maybe it’s driven by some kind of business criteria? But it’s not like Google or the other search engines are doing it deliberately to spike traffic, or have I got that wrong?
Noble: Well, it’s really hard to think about the intention of programmers. I mean, I’m not really interested in their intention, whether they meant to or didn’t mean to. You know, we always want to look at the outcome. That’s a more powerful place to actually then solve from, rather than knowing the hearts and minds of people. But I will say that the incredible lack of diversity in Silicon Valley makes it unsurprising that you would get these kinds of results and you still have a lot of problems with search, but I will just say, if you have 3 percent of your workforce is Black and Latino, and you have very few women or women leave the tech industry from just the constant bullying and harassment and terrible working conditions for them, then I think we should expect that the kinds of questions the kinds of testing, the kinds of curiosities about the product are just not going to happen.
Edmonds: So that explains why they might be indifferent to this phenomena. But do you think they actually benefit from it in an economic sense?
Noble: Oh, for sure. I mean, there’s no question that if you decide that the shortcut to Black girls or Latina girls or Asian girls, this is a good example. I mean, you’re imagining who your primary customer or let’s say, user, not even a customer, it’s really a user, because the relationship between the user of the product which is an everyday person, and the customers, which are the porn industry, who pay the bill to Google who paid the fees, if you look at it from that vantage point, then they have a sense of who they imagine is using their product. And that majority, so to speak, is going to win in terms of how they model their products.
So if you are part of a racialized or ethnic minority, well, you’re going to lose on the democracy like, you know, ‘majority wins’ kind of paradigm. So that’s not a helpful way of developing a product. That’s for an imagined majority, when the people themselves who are misrepresented, who might be in a minority would never really have the same amount of money to shift the results, like certain industries, or political actors or political action committees or other kinds of groups that are deeply moneyed.
Edmonds: So one thing I’ve never understood, and perhaps you can clear it up for me, if I type ‘Black girls’ into my Google search engine on my laptop, and you type ‘Black girls’ into your search engine, on your laptop, will we get the same list of searches as a result?
Noble: Well, you know, this is a great question. And when I was writing my book, and doing these studies, I was thinking about these digital traces that we leave and how much they influence what we find, because of course we know that every time we’re moving through the world, with a smartphone in our pocket that’s linked to, you know, it’s a signed into a big platform, whether it’s Facebook, or Google or YouTube, there’s going to be trackers about where we are in the world, how we move what we’re doing, there’s going to be all the previous searching that we’ve done, if our history is logged, which the majority of people it is. So there’s definitely a sense that the results are hyper custom to you. I mean, this is really what the public generally believes.
But the truth is, and there was this great study done by Matthew Fuller et al, where they did a mass study of thousands of searches, so they had thousands of people doing searches, and they wanted to compare, did they get the same thing or not? How much were the digital traces affecting? And what they found was that for the most part, overwhelmingly, people got the same set of results, but they might have been in different order. So there might have been a few things that were unique. But really, what’s happening when we think about customization, or personalization in search, which is kind of like a buzzword that was very popular about six or seven years ago, this was really about a message intended for the customers or the paying clients of big tech companies that we could customize and personalize. And really what they’re doing is they’re kind of aggregating people who have similar interests, and doing better targeted marketing for those paying customers to better defined groups, rather than just kind of like scattershot. So that’s about as personalized as it gets.
I will say that if you get into social media companies, I think they do a much, much more targeted kind of marketing and outreach to people than a search company really can do.
Edmonds: That’s interesting, because I think I really want my search engines not to be customized, because I would feel that if they were customized just for me, I was being manipulated in some way. Whereas if everybody else is getting the same results, then somehow I can trust the search engine more.
Noble: Yeah, I mean, I think that the kinds of if we’re gonna call it customization or grouping that we fall into, we take for granted and we don’t even think about and we think of as just like normal. So for example, if I do a search for pizza near me, it’s going to be pizza near me. It’s not going to be the universe of pizza. Like it’s not pizza in London. Do you know? So I think those kinds of geographic bundles, let’s say that we live in people take for granted as completely normal and want that. So it’s a little bit of a tension.
There’s kind of two things happening. If you look for something extremely specific, and many computer programmers who are listening know what I’m talking about, let’s say you put in a big string of code into a search engine, it’s going to show you where the code is broken. And a lot of programmers especially in the early days, really use search in that way to go like, let me just see, like someone has already fixed this. So if you’re looking for like a passage of literature, and you put that paragraph in, it’s going to point you to the book that it came from right or the source material.
So on one hand, if you’re very specific, and you have a lot of information, you’re going to really get something probably quite accurate. But if you are very general, then you’re much more likely to be under the influence of who has optimized for you to see them. And the thing we know from the information retrieval literature, now I’m just being a complete nerd when I say that, but there are scholars who just look at how people retrieve information, many people really just use the fewest keywords possible, because they also believe that that’s going to give them a bigger universe of things.
Edmonds: Right. So a Black woman who’s interested in athletics, and a white male, or a male who’s interested in pornography, they type in Black athletes, and they will get a similar result.
Noble: Well, if they type in Black athletes, they are for sure gonna get mostly men, because athletes, like many words, is always qualified by gender, the default of the noun will always be male. But if you type in Black women athletes, you are likely to get I believe, you may or may not. It’s interesting, I’m pausing, because so much of my work has been kind of attended to around Black women and girls at Google. I mean, people actually know that I’m out here talking about this. And so let’s say if you typed in Latina athletes, you’re probably gonna get sexualized kinds of commodified…
Edmonds: Whoever you are.
Noble: Yeah, whoever you are, yeah.
Edmonds: This is probably a stupid question. But talk me through the harms that this produces, it probably doesn’t need spelling out. But is there any evidence that it actually entrenches stereotypes and caricatures and so on?
Noble: Yes, we do know. We know from the work of researchers who study mass media, for example, that people who are exposed to stereotypic images, especially kind of racist stereotypes and sexist stereotypes, are more likely to be desensitized toward those groups. They act as a dehumanizing factor that allows for people to be less empathetic, sympathetic. We also know from the research and here we have people like Oscar Gandy, Jr., Herman Gray, people writing about race and media images, that when stereotypes are invoked in a society, and people live and are raised and reared under constant exposure to stereotypes, racist stereotypes, that that actually also affects the political climate of resource distribution.
So of course, this is one of the things we know powerfully all over the world, that when you dehumanize a community of people, you are more willing to accept their degradation and harm against those communities. This is one of the reasons why to me, it was extremely important. Because if you have people who have low contact and exposure to people that are different than them, and use these kinds of technologies as just like, “Let me just go find something out. Let me just learn something here about this group of people,” if those representations are misrepresentative, that will do damage. And I really believe that this is one of the reasons why we’re so passionate about talking about this.
And then more broadly, kind of what does that open up? And what does that mean? That we use advertising technology companies, like fact checkers, like knowledge machines, like a replacement for the library or other kinds of learning, because we will be susceptible. And I will tell you, there’s never been a time in more than a decade of talking to people that people have not scratched their head and said, “I never thought about what I got in a search engine as being biased in any particular way.” Because it’s so banal, in the majority of ways that we use it. Going back to the pizza. I used it gave me the pizza joint by me, you know, I used it and it gave me the truth, or the right thing or the thing I was looking for the majority of the time. So then, when I come up against stereotypes that I may not even know are stereotypes, I don’t really think twice about it, I don’t really question it. And that, to me, is what’s so dangerous.
Edmonds: Is there evidence on trust because, as you say, I know if I type into Google, best restaurants in London, or best places to stay in Budapest, and the first page come up, I trust it. I kind of assume that those links provide me with the best restaurants to eat in all the best places to stay in Budapest. What evidence is there that people are skeptical or that they have blind trust in their search engines?
Noble: People have a high degree of trust. In the last search engine study that I looked at by Pew, over 70 percent of people believe that search engines are trustworthy sources of information. And if you were to contrast that with something like social media companies, they would have more trust in a search engine than even in social media. Because since things like Cambridge Analytica, since the kind of political upheavals in the US and other places, the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg being in front of Congress, people really understand there have been so many whistleblowers and leakages about behavioral manipulation. And even just on the face of it, people know, “I’m in the world of just the people I’m connected to, I know that that’s just gonna give me a point of view.” By contrast, that then makes search engines feel much more trustworthy and one of the ways that we know this is because we see people, especially in political contexts, like electoral politics, they turn to search engines, like fact checkers, to help them figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction. And of course, we know that search engines are highly susceptible to manipulation by political action committees and others, again, other parties that can spend a lot to optimize certain kinds of stories and messages to the front page.
Edmonds: So $64 million question, what can be done about it?
Noble: Ah, well, you know, I’ve always felt that, just like my feeling about speech, and let’s say, hate speech and other kinds of damaging speech, that you meet speech with more speech, we need more search engines, we need to disambiguate what these products are, so that if we want to shop for the best deals, we know to go to Google. I mean, listen, I use Google Flights, because I know it’s just scouring through all of the airline sales. Putting these search engines in perspective, then we would have things like if librarians and scholars and teachers were curating certain kinds of search engines, that would be something very different, it wouldn’t be commingled with advertising. So we need more search engines that have a specific use, so that we can, I think, disambiguate the advertising from the trustworthy information. Right now, what we have is something called indexing everything from propaganda to evidence-based research. It’s unhealthy for democracy, it’s unhealthy for people, it doesn’t help us get the best to use the knowledge that we need for the future. And I think if you think about overlays, new forms of search that are coming into play now, like ChatGPT, were going in the wrong direction. It’s making it even harder to do that disambiguation.
Edmonds: So that’s one solution, more search engines, but that’s obviously a long-term solution and Google has a dominant place in the market. Couldn’t Google just change their algorithm? How complicated could that be? To make sure that when you type in ‘Black girls,’ you don’t get the results that you’re talking about?
Noble: Well, it does do that. Now, in 2024, if you use type ‘Black girls,’ you’re not going to get all the porn. But the way that that has happened has been through the work of me and others who critique these systems. Our work just gets taken up by the companies, and then they just go and start fixing things or downranking things. Or let’s say there’s political pressure from governments, they’ll downrank information, so they kind of hand curate and solve these problems. And I have feelings about that because, you know, I’m a state worker, I’m a public servant, as a professor at UCLA. And we do the kind of cleanup, if you will, raising the alarm about our concerns and the things we see. And the companies do sometimes respond. But structurally, you’re not going to undo an ad tech business and turn it into a consortia of thousands of libraries, and scholars and deep thinkers who are going to try to surface the very best knowledge and information for you as librarians, you’re just not going to turn it’s a different thing. It’s an ad tech company.
Edmonds: “Don’t be evil” was Google’s former motto. You obviously don’t think it’s a motto that it’s lived up to.
Noble: Well, they don’t think it’s a motto that they lived up to because they changed it! They got rid of it. So that’s not really on me that’s on them.
I really try to not talk about these things purely like in a moral sense of bad or good. I’m just pointing to the evidence and saying, what do we do with this. What I’m most worried about is an over reliance upon YouTube, and search and social media to understand our world. And the many worlds we live in: TikTok, Instagram, I mean, I could really name a number of products. Of course, we need regulation, we have a lot of evidence of harm. Now, when we have evidence of harm in any other industry, pharmaceutical, automotive, you name it, we have regulations, we have fines, penalties, sometimes those products have to come off the market, they come off the shelves. The tech industry has been very, very effective at not having their projects seen as products that can be harmful in society. And therefore they are not subject to the kind of scrutiny that we put on consumer protection from harm. But I think it’s very important that we think of them in that way and stop using just words like “innovation” and “the future” around them, because those are marketing words that they use to eschew responsibility.
You know, I say, if Exxon has an oil spill here off the coast of California, they’re absolutely responsible for the cleanup. And they have to restore back to a state better than they found it. I mean, this is really, really important. If you think about the kind of propaganda that moves through our information ecosystems and the impact that it’s having on everything, really, there has to be accountability for that. And of course, we know that many of these companies, their products are directly implicated in the rise of authoritarian regimes, anti-democratic politics, many Silicon Valley and other Silicon Corridor leaders don’t even believe in democracy. They believe in the technocracy, [where] the whims of billionaires are actually much more important than the messy project of democracy. That’s frightening. And I think we have to come to terms with that and do something about it.
Edmonds: Safiya Noble, thank you very much indeed.
Noble: Thank you so much for inviting me.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Safiya Noble on Search Engines appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO DIMITRIS XYGALATAS NOW!
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).
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
TRANSCRIPTDavid Edmonds: Tennis player Rafael Nadal takes a freezing cold shower shortly before a match, carries one racket onto the court with five in his bag, carefully places two drinking bottles just to the left of him, one behind the other, jumps at the net during the coin toss, and has numerous other rituals. It seems bizarre. Why does he do it?
Rituals are what Dimitris Xygalatas investigates. He’s an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut and author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. Dimitris Xygalatas, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Dimitris Xygalatas: Hi there. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about rituals. Tell me what is a ritual? Can you give us some examples of rituals?
Xygalatas: Of course, it’s important to define ritual, because this is a word that we use in everyday life, and a lot of the time we tend to use it very loosely. In my book, figuratively and literally, I define ritual on the basis of two key characteristics There are other structural characteristics of ritual that we can talk about, but there are two features, I think that are central to my definition. One of them is causal opacity. That means that ritual actions are different than utilitarian actions, because there is no clear connection between the actions that we undertake, and the goals that they mean to achieve — if there is a goal to begin with. Because a lot of the time, when you ask people why they perform the rituals, they just shrug and they go, “I don’t know, that’s just what we do.” But even if they do state some purpose, let’s say, “We perform this ritual to bring about rain,” then there is no causal relationship between my dancing around and water falling from the sky.
Another characteristic of ritual that is useful to distinguish it from things that we call habits, is that rituals tend to demarcate the domain of the sacred. And that means that ritual actions are important, they matter to us. And if somebody interrupts our rituals, we then get stressed, we then get upset. So they seem to be very meaningful, very important.
Edmonds: Give us some examples. When I think about rituals, I think about ones that are associated with major life events like birth, adulthood, marriage, death.
Xygalatas: There are certainly a wide range of rituals in all human societies that are associated with these key life stages. Obviously, birth and marriage and the end of life but also in, in all of our secular institutions. When we graduate from university, there’s typically a ceremony when people retire, they might throw a big party, or birthday celebrations. There are lots of rituals associated with other kinds of state functions, in the courtroom, for example, or the inauguration of a new president or prime minister, or the coronation of a king, and so on, so forth.
But there are also the kinds of rituals that we perform in our individual life. For some people, those can be culturally informed rituals, things like praying at home. For others, those can be simpler and more idiosyncratic actions. And those are the kinds of things that we sometimes call superstition, although that’s not a good term, in my opinion, because superstition is just a value-laden term that means whatever the dominant religious establishment does not approve of. But basically, when we look at individual rituals of that kind, those are things that, for example, we might perform under duress. And you see a lot of those rituals performed by athletes, by gamblers, and by all of us when we feel stressed, perhaps when we knock on wood, or we start engaging in sequences of actions that we just have to perform compulsively for no particular reason.
Edmonds: I want to come on to the athlete example later, but it’s interesting. You mentioned how vital it is that they are sacred. Every morning, I have a cup of coffee. And I guess it’s a habit, but it feels like a ritual to me. I can’t really start working until I’ve had my coffee. I enjoy the coffee, so it does have a function. But it seems like there’s a ritualistic element to my coffee drinking. Where would you categorize that?
Xygalatas: Yes. And coffee is something that commonly comes up in my discussions with people because it is a good example of how these categories — ritual and habit — can be blurred. So in my view, drinking a cup of coffee just because you do it every morning, does not in itself constitute a ritual. That will be a habit, because the direct function of that is to keep you caffeinated to boost your energy or to give you some level of nutrition if it includes milk or whatever.
But in many cases, those things become ritualized. So utilitarian actions can become ritualized, and to that extent, they can be considered as rituals. So, in my example, 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. It always has to be in the same cup. This is the cup you’re looking at right now, our listeners will not be able to see that. But it has to be this cup.
Edmonds: Beautiful cup.
Xygalatas: Of course, the aesthetic aspect of ritual is also very important. And I think what makes it a ritual for me is that I feel compelled to make this coffee, even if I don’t have time to drink it. So, I will make it and leave it on my countertop, and then drive to work if I’m in a hurry, but I will always stop to make this coffee. Interestingly enough, my three-and-a-half-year-old son’s children are very prone to ritualization. They love conforming and reenacting the rituals of adults — he has picked up on this. And if I drive him to school, in rare occasions where I might forget to make my coffee, he will remind me he will complain, he will say, “Daddy, cafe,” which is the Greek name for coffee.
Edmonds: So one element of your coffee drinking is that you do it every day. Does the frequency matter in a ritual?
Xygalatas: Yeah, so I mentioned at the beginning that there are other kinds of structural elements to ritual. And one of those elements that seems to be pervasive in most rituals is repetition. And repetition can happen at many levels. Most rituals are repetitive, both internally that is, they might involve the same action being done again, and again, and again. For example, when chanting on in certain Asian traditions, you might repeat this 108 times. But there’s also external repetition. And this can be sometimes very frequent. Let’s say every morning, you have your coffee ritual. Sometimes it can be as infrequent as once per generation, let’s say an annunciation ceremony, or a graduation, or a wedding, or a funeral. There’s always this element of repetition to ritual.
Edmonds: What happens if your son held a gun to your head and said, “You will drink this every morning?” I’m wondering whether it matters that most rituals are voluntarily engaged in is that a necessary component of a ritual? Or could there be rituals which are compulsory to participate in?
Xygalatas: There are a lot of rituals that are compulsory, usually not with the sense that somebody holds a gun to your head, but in the sense that they are culturally normative. And perhaps most of our cultural rituals are like that. We don’t tend to think about this very much. But for the vast majority of individuals, the first time they engage, let’s say, in a religious ceremony, or in a state ceremony, a secular one, it’s not because they’re motivated by the ideological framework that surrounds it. So, when you’re 6, it’s not because you’re a Christian, that you go to Mass, it’s because your parents take you to Mass by doing this ritual over and over and over and over again, you begin to attribute importance to this. A lot of the time, we might rebel against this. And for me, for example, growing up in Greece, we had mandatory morning prayer every day, and I was always trying to escape to get out of it. But in many contexts, this repetition, unless it becomes really imposed on you, it might bring a sense of community, the action itself might reinforce the sense of motivation in your mind.
Edmonds: So that touches upon something I wanted to get on. We’ve described some of the elements of what a ritual is, and I want to move on to what the function of rituals are. We’ve recorded one other interview on rituals with Harvey Whitehouse at Oxford, and people can listen to that — it’s available on the website. And he talks about how rituals help bond people together, help them cohere. And you found the same effect. Can you tell us a bit about your Mauritius fieldwork?
Xygalatas: Yes. So, the reason I went to Mauritius, and as a matter of fact, Harvey Whitehouse, whom you mentioned, was my doctoral advisor. And the reason I went at the time to Belfast to study with him was because we had a shared interest in high-intensity rituals. So, my interest in high-intensity rituals after having studied firewalking rituals in Europe, for my doctoral work, I began looking for a place where I could find even more intense rituals. And I ended up doing fieldwork in Mauritius where I’ve been working for the last 15 years. And I was precisely interested in that question that he brought up: Do rituals, indeed, promote social cohesion.
I had done some research before going to Mauritius that showed, for example, that when people get together in these highly arousing collective ceremonies, their effective responses begin to align. That means that in that context, their heart rates began to synchronize. So, this was some indication to me that that feeling that people describe that when they come together to enact those rituals, they feel like one that there was some truth to that, and there was a component to that, that we could actually measure experimentally.
And after doing this, I began to wonder, OK, does that translate into any kind of behavioral outcomes? Can we see that these people become more prosocial? Other than what they’re feeling inside their bodies? And that’s the question that brought me to Mauritius. And in that context, I built my study around a ritual that was that I felt provided all these naturally occurring conditions to study this. This is one of the most extraordinary rituals that I’ve ever witnessed. It is one of the most painful rituals in the world. And it’s also one of the most widespread because it’s practiced wherever you have members of the Tamil diaspora and by other Hindus all around the world. And what happens to this ritual is that people embark in this very long procession that in Mauritius happens to be the middle of the summer on a tropical island. So it’s excruciatingly hot. And on that procession, they carry these very large structures. They’re miniature strains, and they’re decorated with flowers and peacock feathers, and they are connected to mythological narratives about the Lord Murugan. And they will carry these structures for the better part of a day. And while they do that their body is pierced with needles and hooks and skewers. And some of those hooks they drag these chariots, by the skin of their back. We measured the number of needles in their bodies, and some people can have up to 600. It’s an excruciating festival. Some of them have skewers the size of broomsticks through their cheeks, so their peers by whom they are pierced by their family members, and the priests who are helping them prepare for this ritual.
And eventually, after all these hardships, they reach the temple of Murugan, which in that context is located on top of a hill. So, they have to climb 242 steps to get there carrying those large structures. It’s really an extraordinary feat of endurance taking part in this ritual.
So, in that context, we were able to compare members of the same community who worshiped at the same temple and took place at the same festival at different times. We could look at people when they took part in the kavadi ritual, and compare that to when they were taking part in a collective prayer at the same temple that involve very low levels of physiological arousal. And we also compared this to people outside of any ritual context. And what we did is that we set up a charity task, a charity to the local community, and we had Mauritian research assistants administer that task. So, people didn’t know that it was us suggesting that they donate money to the charity, and we monitor 30 levels. And we found that after taking part in this ritual, people were three times more likely to give money to charity, participating in the low-key ritual also increased donations, but participating in the high arousal, the very painful one was off the charts. And in fact, we found a linear relationship between the pain they experienced and the amount of money they donated.
Edmonds: What about onlookers to that. Was it just the people who had the needles and had to carry this extraordinary edifice who ended up giving more to charity? Or was it people just observing them?
Xygalatas: This was one of the most interesting parts of the study for me, because in the Spanish study, the heart rate study that I mentioned, that was in the context of a Spanish firewalking ritual, we found that people’s heart rates were synchronized, and that spread beyond the active firewalkers to the other members of their community. And the closer they were to somebody socially or genetically, the greater that synchrony. So, outsiders who would come towards us curious tourists didn’t experience that effect. And that same finding translated at the behavioral level into the Mauritian study, because there we found that on the day of kavadi, even the family members of these people who joined the procession and walked alongside them — so they suffered vicariously because they had no needles in their bodies, that were not carrying these large objects. And they were able to drink water, and so on, so forth — they too saw the same effects on pro-social behavior. So there to give three times as much similar levels to that of the people who suffer.
Edmonds: And you think that occurs through a sense of community that people feel when they participate or observe these extraordinary rituals.
Xygalatas: It does. I, in fact, in that context, and Mauritius, this is something that as an ethnographer, I could see this with my own eyes. So, from my observations, that’s what I could see. So, on the day of kavadi, which is a national holiday, people go out in the streets, and they offer fruits and water to everybody walking along the procession, and they bring pots of water or hoses, and they, they help the pilgrims soothe their feet, because they’re walking barefoot on the burning asphalt. And then later, people volunteer at the temple, they volunteer with their time and their money, they bring food and they cook and they share their meals with everybody. So, you can really see that on that day, people become more pro-social, but for me, it was more of a question of OK, can we quantify this? And can we measure this in any kind of systematic way?
Edmonds: So that’s the effect of rituals on bonding, social cohesion. Your work has focused on another beneficial aspects of ritual, which is on reducing stress. Tell us how it might do that.
Xygalatas: That was a very important aspect of ritual that I think also speaks to its evolutionary origins, because in order for us to engage in those group cultural rituals, ritual has to be appealing to us as individuals. And to understand this we have to look at the origins of ritualization. This is something we share with many other species, ritual is pervasive throughout the animal kingdom. And in many contexts, it’s been hypothesized that it helps the organism deal with anxiety.
The first person to translate this into an anthropological argument that is typically attributed to an anthropologist called Bronislaw Malinowski, who did his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in the Southwest Pacific. He noticed that the local fishermen, when they went out to fish in the open sea — which was very dangerous, and they had small, flimsy canoes, and there were sharks, and there were in waves, and you never knew if we were going to bring anything back, or if you’re going to come back — they performed a great number of rituals associated with the building of canoes, the preparation for fishing, the fishing itself, and coming back and everything else. But the same people when they went fishing into the shallow waters of the lagoon, there, they used a poisonous route to stun the fish and then scoop them up. So it was very easy. And it was not an overwhelming task, but it was perfectly safe. And there were no rituals when they were doing this.
So he proposed that these rituals might serve a function for these people to help them deal with anxiety. But for a very long time, this had not been tested experimentally. So, my colleagues and I were among the first teams to do that. Then we did this in a series of studies. For example, in the laboratory, we brought people in, and we stretch them up, and we measure their anxiety and their physiology, as well as their self-reports.
Edmonds: You stressed them how?
Xygalatas: So one of the most stressful things you can get people to do is engage in public speaking, especially when they’re unprepared. And that’s exactly the task we set up for them, we told them, they would have to deliver a speech on an object in front of a panel of art critics that really stresses people up, we could see this in their heart rates, we could see it in their self-reports. And then we use motion sensors to look at their behavior. And this was associated with cleaning that object of art. And what we saw is that the more stressed they were, the more ritualistic their behaviors became. That means that they were more repetitive, and more rigid, and more patterned, which is similar to what we see in all kinds of rituals.
So starting from this finding, we now went to the field to Mauritius again. And we looked at a group of women as they were going into the temple to perform their usual prayers, we had random assignment, but this was in a real-life context. So, either they went into the temple, or they went into another room, which was not associated with any kind of religion, it was essentially a lab a place that we had rented. And in one case, they performed rituals. And in the other case, they just sat down for the equivalent amount of time. And we found that after performing those rituals, their heart rate variability increased, which means that they were better able to cope with anxiety. And once more, we see this both in their self reports, they feel less stressed. And we see in their bodies.
Edmonds: You mentioned athletes earlier, you’ve got this wonderful example, in your work of rituals that athletes perform. And you mentioned the tennis player, Rafael Nadal who has an incredible number of rituals.
Xygalatas: Yes, and here’s what the only one. Nadal was an interesting case to describe. I think in my book, I dedicate a whole page on the ritual that he does before and during his game. But he’s in no way unique in that. And in fact, there are studies that show that elite athletes tend to have more rituals. From a naïve perspective, you might think that the better you are, the more you can rely on your own skills, and the less you would have to rely on rituals, but in fact, we’re seeing the opposite. And I believe that’s because elite athletes face higher stakes. And this is something we see in other domains. For example, among gamblers, the higher the stakes, the more ritual as they gamble. In fact, gamblers are notorious for developing all of these elaborate rituals and superstitions.
Edmonds: So Nadal bounces the ball a certain number of times … Except he has many rituals. Suppose he were to do away with those rituals Do you think his performance would suffer?
Xygalatas: I think it would disturb him, I think he would feel annoyed, stressed by this. And as a result, his performance might suffer. In fact, there are some studies that looked at baseball and basketball players. And they did exactly that. They disturbed them from performing their usual rituals. And they did find that performance dropped.
And we can explain this in two ways. So first of all, when you perform a ritual, you get a sense of control. This is related to how our brain processes the world around us. Our brain constantly makes predictions all the time, even before I finished my sentence, your brain has a prediction about what my next word is going to be. And if it’s not what it expects, we can see that in in the brain that we feel surprised. As a result of that when we have low predictive capacities, when there’s uncertainty, in other words, we feel stressed. Think of situations like expecting the results of a medical test that might show something terrible, or being in a war zone where you don’t know when the next one was going to drop, or for that matter competing in a high stakes sporting event or the casino. So uncertainty creates anxiety. And one way of coping with anxiety is to engage in patterns that are very repetitive, and that makes them very predictable. So if ritual is anything, it is structure, it is predictability. When I engage in a ritual, I know exactly what to do, I know exactly when and how to do it. And that gives my brain a sense of control.
And it doesn’t really matter whether this control does not translate into other domains. All that matters is that it helps me reduce anxiety and get back to work, essentially. And that’s what we’re seeing with these athletes.
Edmonds: It’s a way of dealing with an uncertain world.
Xygalatas: Yes.
Edmonds: You describe yourself as an anthropologist, but it seems to me you could equally call yourself a psychologist. What makes you one rather than the other?
Xygalatas: That’s a good question. And in fact, at the University of Connecticut, I’m affiliated with two departments, anthropology and psychology, as well as the cognitive science program. Typically, we think of what makes you one over the other is probably the methods that they use. And this is something that since I was a graduate student, I found it disturbing that we get so used to the kinds of methods that we were taught, we see everything around us, you know, as the saying goes as a nail, because all we have is a hammer. But not all problems can be solved by nailing and hammering.
Very often in the social sciences, we’ll see that we ask the exact same questions between disciplines. But we go about trying to answer those questions in very different ways. Either we’re accustomed to bringing people into a lab and doing experiments where we have a very high degree of control, or we go into a field situation, a field setting, and we engage in participant observation, and we provide qualitative findings.
And both of these parts of the story are very important. But it’s very rare that the same individuals or even the same teams of individuals, try to combine the two. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, what my research tries to do. The idea is that, instead of taking people out of context and moving them into a sterilized lab, for some things, it’s perfectly fine. But when you’re looking at things that are surrounded by meaning and have to be performed in specific locations, and with large groups of people, you can no longer do that. Instead of doing that, I decided to bring the lab into the field. So to try to go into real-life situations that temples and football stadiums and wherever life happens, and bringing some level of measurement to corroborate my more qualitative findings.
Edmonds: So both psychology and anthropology can speak to each other. In that regard. Are there other social sciences, that you could co-opt in your work?
Xygalatas: Oh, yes, absolutely. So a lot of my work draws from the biological sciences. So I look into people’s physiology, I look into people hormones, some of the inspiration from my work has come from sociological theories, like those of Emile Durkheim. Obviously, as anthropologists, we also draw from the historical sciences in order to explain some of the current cultural arrangements that we see in our fields, and so on and so forth.
Edmonds: I take it from what we’ve been talking about so far that you recommend that humans adopt and cultivate rituals. Beyond the daily cup of coffee you have, are there any particular rituals that you have that you would like to share with us?
Xygalatas: Through my studies of rituals, I have become more conscious about implementing those rituals. There are a lot of things that I’ve tried to do. For example, in my lab, we have a series of rituals. And we always start and finish with those rituals. So we start by talking about everyone’s highlights over the past week, we typically end with coffee. During the holiday period … so growing up, I never felt the need to have a Christmas tree. My wife and I never had a Christmas tree up. But now that we have a young child, we’ve decided that we want him to feel that he’s part of some family tradition. And it doesn’t have to be a Christian tradition. It’s just a holiday tradition. The flamboyance of the Christmas tree is one of the most common ways that we highlight those family traditions with colors and bells and whistles. And although I’m not an American, since I moved to this country, unless I’m traveling on Thanksgiving, I will embrace those rituals. I will cook that turkey I will spend the entire day. And sometimes we might during COVID, for example, we would have virtual celebrations with our families. My family is in Greece, my wife’s family is in Spain. So we bring them together virtually to celebrate those same traditions, and so on so forth.
Edmonds: Dimistris Xygalatas, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.
Xygalatas: Thank you very much indeed. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
The post Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
LISTEN TO THE MONTAGE NOW!
This is the fifth collection in this series. Links to the other montages appear below.
To download this latest montage, right click HERE and ‘save.’
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 4: A Social Science Bites Retrospective
Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 3
Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 2
Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 1
A transcript of this episode appears below.
TRANSCRIPTDavid Edmonds: After I’ve interviewed social scientists for Social Science Bites, I try to remember to ask each of them a simple question: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or influenced them? Here’s the latest montage.
Carsten de Dreu: So I’m Carsten de Dreu, and I’m a professor at Leiden University and I study conflict. The most influential paper, and I have been running around for now almost 30 years, so I take a paper that appeared, I think, about 15 years ago in Science magazine by a colleague of mine, Samuel Bowles. And he showed in that paper that throughout our evolution, humans were very cooperative together to fight outsiders. And he had a mathematical model and he had archaeological data. And as a psychologist, I looked at it and I thought, could this be true? But if that’s true, we should see this also in our hormones, in our brains, in our hearts and minds. And that triggered for me a line of work that I’m still busy with these days. So yeah, that was perhaps a defining paper for me and my career. Absolutely.
Karin Barber: I’m Karin Barber, emeritus professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham. I think of two books that I really love, and they made me think that anthropology was a humanities as well as a social science subject. One is called Feeling Arts, a book about, I think, religion and philosophy. And the other is Alfred Gell’s book, Art and Agency. It is just mind-expanding, highly original, fascinating book. Art and Agency made me think that art forms could be thought of in a different way from the standard Western categories of art being something you contemplate and put in a museum and so on. Alfred Gell conceptualized it as a kind of extension of the person, how people deposit elements of themselves in the environments, and how they do this in order to dazzle and to change other people.
Bobby Duffy: I’m Bobby Duffy, I’m director of the policy institute at King’s College London. I think it’s Bob Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. The thing that really attracted me about it was the very strong data analysis and very clear revelation of patterns that I hadn’t seen before in such a simple way, and it was looking at cohorts over time, and how that actually proved some elements of his thesis about how we’ve seen a real shift that people were living lives very differently. And you could see this laid out in lines. It was just whole life stories of a changing society, just in a few lines in a chart that had real implications for policy, and practice on a key aspect that was already of interest to me about how connected or disconnected we were becoming as a society. So a lovely piece of clear work, data driven, but then woven into life stories that had real world implications around how we connect.
Heaven Crawley: Okay, I’m Heaven Crawley, I’m director of the migration for development and equality hub, and I’m also head of equitable development and migration at the UN University’s Center for Policy Research in New York. It’s a very easy question, because Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was a book that I read in the first year of my undergraduate degree in the African and Asian Studies part of the University of Sussex. So in the late 1980s, and it absolutely transformed how I understood the things that I had taken for granted. I was very young, of course, I hadn’t read that much. But, you know, Walter Rodney was a fantastic Guyanan scholar, who unfortunately died very young, but who left a legacy of research, really talking about how Europe’s involvement in Africa through colonialism, and through all the things that have happened subsequently, have really shaped the direction of travel for the continent. And it’s shaped how I think about everything, but it’s also my go-to when I get asked questions like this.
David Dunning: I’m David Dunning. I’m a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in the United States. The answer I would give, if you could find it, would be [Richard] Nisbett and [Lee] Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcoming in Human Reasoning. It was published in 1980 and it’s the reason why I’m a professor of psychology, because it basically asked the question, how good are people as scientists doing the type of reasoning that scientists do? And it found that there were systematic ways in which people diverged from being scientists in their everyday lives that led to errors and costs and calamities. And it was just an eye-opening book. It made me think, OK, not only am I going to go into psychology, I’m going to work with one of these guys and I did. I worked with Lee Ross.
Ayelet Fishbach: I am Ayelet Fishbach. I’m a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. When I finished my dissertation, I finished my PhD at Tel Aviv University, I came to work with Arie Kruglanski at University of Maryland. And what I heard Lansky was, was interested in studying was how people pursue multiple goals. So basically understanding what he referred to as goal systems and the idea that there are many goals in each of these causes connected to a means of attainment and like these means they can inhibit some calls and facilitate other calls. There is a whole body of knowledge out there and things can get really complicated pretty quickly. But it kind of really opened my eyes. So at that point in my life, I was studying self-control conflicts, and it was always like two things that are in opposition, I realize that there is many more than two things. They don’t always compete with each other, they can support each other, they can be neutral to each other. And just understanding that the complexity and thinking about how people navigate their many goals in life and connections between these goals that just inspired so many new hypotheses that I will probably need to have more than one career and one lifetime to study. It is really one of the inspirations for my research, the work of Arie Kruglanski.
Diego Gambetta: I’m Diego Gambetta. I’m currently the Carlo Alberto Chair in Social Sciences at the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin. There are similar candidates on the same level of importance. Probably, the writings of Thomas Schelling, they have been very influential for me. The writing of Jon Elster, he wrote a book called Ulysses and the Sirens, which appeared when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, Cambridge. There is a particular chapter in which he makes a distinction between different explanation in the social sciences, which was very important for me. It distinguished between explanation in which what does the trick is something that attracts you to, so your pull from the front, and is something you want to achieve, and an explanation, which pushes you from behind. This can be conscious explanation, like when you respect a norm simply because a norm must be respected, not because you want to achieve anything, or push you from behind because the constituting cognitive biases. So drew some distinction that in 1979, in the chaotic analytical mess in which the social sciences were swimming at the time, were really illuminating.
Gerd Gigerenzer: I’m Gerd Gigerenzer and study decision-making under uncertainty. So one thing that really has had a big impact on my thinking is Herbert Simon‘s work on bounded rationality. And this bounded rationality he made more than what’s now has become bounded rationality, in the errors know, he was going for a revolution, meaning study how people make decisions in a world that is uncertain That’s fundamentally uncertainty over we cannot calculate the probabilities.
Claudia Goldin: I am Claudia Goldin. I am the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. So I would say everything and anything that was written by Gary Becker. And the reason is that when I was a graduate student, I had never heard an economist who could model and think about human interactions, and Gary did, and that just set off light bulbs in my head.
Kathryn Paige Harden: I’m Kathryn Paige Harden. I’m a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where I lead the developmental behavior genetics lab. Angus Deaton’s work on The Great Escape and then Deaths of Despair, which he did with Anne Case, has been incredibly influential for me because it highlights that education is not just something that matters for the classroom. It’s not something that just matters for how much money you make but can be literally a matter of life and death. Health and education are entwined and increasingly entwined. So I think Angus Deaton’s work has shown us a bright spotlight on who’s being left behind in American society. That should be a wakeup call for social scientists.
Jonathan Haskel: I’m Jonathan Haskel, economics professor at Imperial College Business School, and an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. I think my most influential article is an article by Carol Corrado, Chuck Hulten, and Dan Sichel, about intangible investment. It was a short article, which recast the measurement of GDP for the intangible age, and it brought into GDP all the things which my friends were doing. They were doing intangible activities, like designers, software writers, developing artistic originals, marketing schemes, contract lawyers, and bringing in all of those activities made much more sense to me than the endless articles that I kept on reading about manufacturing. I didn’t know anybody who was in manufacturing.
Hal Hershfield: I’m Hal Hershfield. I’m a professor of marketing behavioral decision-making in psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. All right, Dave, I’m gonna buck the trend a little bit here and say, a philosopher, not necessarily a piece of social science research, Derek Parfit. His writing and thinking about identity has been hugely influential to me to help me understand the way that people might think of themselves over time as either changing or remaining stable.
Sheila Jasanoff: So I’m Sheila Jasanoff and I’m professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, which is Harvard’s school of public policy. I think the one that has influenced me the most is probably Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. That is a book in political science, but it asks the question, what makes people hang together informations that you couldn’t have predicted? And I think one can look at knowledge communities in the same way as political communities, so transporting that idea from international relations and politics into the domain of science and technology was a very significant move for me.
Melissa Kearney: I’m Melissa Kearney. I’m a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. I have an answer. I remember where I was, as an undergraduate college student, when I read Arthur Okun’s equity and efficiency book. And in that book, he basically talks about there’s sometimes a tradeoff between economic efficiency and transferring money and having a more equal society. That framework of equity versus efficiency has stayed with me for the 30 years that I’ve been thinking about economic policy in the US. And of course, the really beautiful thing is when you find ways to increase both equity and efficiency at the same time, but then when you find programs that might reduce one at the expense of the other, then we think we have to make hard decisions. And I think that framework is really powerful and disciplining, and it’s been a huge influence on my own thinking.
Kathelijne Koops: Hi, my name is Kathelijne Koops. I’m a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zurich. And I’m the leader of the ape behavior and ecology group. The most influential piece of work for me, it’s more of a person than one piece of work specifically, would be Jane Goodall. I think without her, I might not have even ended up where I am now. She already when, when I was, I don’t know, my mom tells me 5 or 6 years old, I saw Jane Goodall on telly and I was blown away that that is something you can do as a job. You can watch chimpanzees and study them and that’s actually something that one can do. The last time I met her, it was a true honor because I got to present some of my work with Jane Goodall in the audience. So that was kind of like completely coming full circle. And we had great chats about research and fieldwork afterwards.
John List: I’m John List. I’m a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and I’m the Chief Economist at Walmart. Absolutely, without a doubt, it’s Adam Smith, and its Wealth of Nations. And the reason why is not because it’s easy to read. It’s not. It’s very difficult to make it all the way through. But if you’re careful with your reading of Smith in various parts, it’s one part brilliant, and one part crystal clear in the explanations for example, on specialization in different economic concepts that really gives you some ingredients and some belief that you’re really learning from him and he’s talking to you. So that’s a book that really talked directly to me, in part because of the content, but also in part because of how it was elucidated.
George Loewenstein: I’m George Loewenstein. I’m a behavioral economist, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. I would say that recently, I’ve been going over some of the work of Roy Baumeister, who is one of the most prolific and influential psychologists and in the last few years, I’ve sort of been mining some of his insights and finding them enormously useful in my own research.
Ellen Peters: I’m Ellen Peters. I’m Philip H. Knight Chair and director of the Center for Science Communication Research at the University of Oregon. I’m also a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication as well as in the psychology department. The piece of social science research that’s probably been most influential on me was some work that was done by Paul Slovic on what he calls the psychometric paradigm. The psychometric paradigm has to do with risk perception. So a lot of my research is in risk perceptions, and this is older work so this is back from the 1980s,
probably maybe the late 70s even. It turns out that people’s risk perceptions are influenced by numbers. They’re influenced by the numeric risks that they know about that come from experts. So they’re influenced by mortality and morbidity. But they’re also influenced by more subjective factors that have to do with their feelings of dread about the risk, they’re influenced by its catastrophic potential, whether it’s going to affect future generations. And the reason that it influenced me so much is because it really reflects the grand importance of expert assessments of risk. It also highlights the importance of the individual person and the values and emotions that they bring to situations. And that balance of more numeric information and more emotion and emotion-related kinds of information is one that I always keep in mind combined with the way that Paul Slovic described it, about just the importance of those factors above and beyond expert assessments. That risk isn’t just about the experts, it’s also about the individuals who are affected and how they’re affected by hazards. I was very much affected by that, and still am for that matter.
Petter Johansson: Hi. So I’m Petter Johansson, I’m an associate professor in cognitive science at Lund University. And I do research on choice blindness and preference change in attitude formation. We would be the books of Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained and Intentional Stance. That’s been the bedrock of all my thinking over the years. The main idea of intentional stance theory is to think of how we understand other people is similar to how we understand ourselves. There’s no fundamental difference. So I have a lot of data about myself and then I use that to interpret why I do things and who I am. And then I construct a narrative based on this interpretation. It’s not that I can look into myself and have perfect access to everything that drives me and my behavior and my emotions and my attitudes. I have a relationship with myself, which is quite similar to the relationship I have with close other people.
Jennifer Richeson: Hi, my name is Jennifer Richeson. I’m a professor of social psychology at Yale. OK, so probably, Gordon Allport’s 1954 The Nature of Prejudice is probably the most influential, mostly because he said a lot. And there’s so many opportunities to test his brilliant insights.
Raffaela Sadun: I’m Raffaella Sadun, and I’m a professor at Harvard Business School. For me, it’s been super helpful to read Peter Drucker‘s book. And I came into his work later in my career, not as a PhD student when I was already in a business school. And the reason why I think it’s important is because it’s insightful. This is a person that was close to managers, so he couldn’t see what they were doing and the challenges that they were having. But he was able to abstract the problem in a way that an economist would do. And so for me, he was the bridge between what I was studying in models and in the data and the reality of managing that. That’s why I found it so interesting and useful.
Shinobu Kitayama: I’m Shinobu Kitayama. I’m a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. There are many obviously, but one piece that influenced me most is a book about cultural practices by Pierre Bourdieu, French anthropologist/philosopher. He basically argued that cultural practices shape agency. And as this agency become autonomous, it regenerates the culture from which it was derived. And after 20 or 30 years of having read his book, I seem to be following his footsteps with neuroscience, all sorts of fancy stuff. But conceptually, fundamental point of society, and the self are mutually interacting and mutually forming each other. That very insight was a very simple paragraph somewhere in his extremely dense book. To me, that was the biggest influence.
Olivier Sibony: I’m Olivier Sibony. I’m a professor of strategy at ACC in Paris, and I’m the coauthor of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. It’s not going to be a very original answer but I’d have to say it’s the original 1974 “Heuristics and Biases” paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Like so many other people, I was under the impression that human beings should conform to a rational model. And it just blew my mind to discover that there was a way to think about how people make decisions that did not conform to that rational model. And that did not assume that any deviation from the rational model was just a rounding error that could be ignored.
Melanie Simms: I’m Melanie Simms, I’m a professor of work and employment at the University of Glasgow. And I have particular interest in worker voice and skills, and how managers plan and train for skills in the future. I think the answer is the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were social scientists back in the late 1800s. Very much the forefather and foremother of my broad field of study industrial relations, founders of the London School of Economics. And I think if I had to pick one piece of their writing it’s a book called Industrial Democracy. And what they did in that book was lay out the basis of how we can think about work and employment, the imbalance of power in the relationship, the employment relationship. And think about why it’s so important that workers have a voice in that process of making decisions about what happens to them, in the at least eight hours a day that many of us spend in this crazy activity that we call employment. And they really helped us think carefully and clearly about that, and what the opportunities were for challenging employers who behaved badly, but also giving the state a clear role and saying the state has responsibility in this space for setting the rules of the game. And not just making sure that our employers don’t kill us when we’re at work but setting a set of rules about employment that integrate ideas about fairness, over the decisions that affect all of us when we’re in our employment.
Deborah Small: Hi I’m Deborah Small. I am a professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management. OK, so I’ve been quite influenced by Peter Singer’s thought experiments, particularly the shallow-pond thought experiment. It motivated me to think about the ways in which people value human life differently across contexts. I thought it was a really useful way to point out to people the inconsistencies in the way in which they value life.
Edmonds: Hope you enjoyed that montage.
The post Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO DEBORAH SMALL NOW!
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.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
TRANSCRIPTDavid Edmonds: Profit-focused companies and charities have entirely different objectives – but certain things in common. Companies want to persuade customers to purchase their products. Charities want to persuade potential donors to give them money for the good causes they fund. Deborah Small is a professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management and has studied what motivates people to be altruistic. Deborah Small, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Deborah Small: Thanks so much for having me.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about charitable giving. Why do people give to charity? What works in persuading them to open their wallets? Now, I don’t normally ask interviewees why they’ve ended up in a particular discipline. But this is such a specific area, so I’m interested in what first attracted you to philanthropy as a research topic.
Small: A little bit of happenstance, I didn’t intend to study philanthropy, I was getting my PhD in judgment and decision-making. And so I was interested in biases in the way we make all sorts of judgments. And I was interested in public policy. And the first area of bias that kind of drew me in was bias in the value of human life. For a long time, I didn’t even think of myself as someone who studied philanthropy, and then that kind of brand was thrust upon me, I really thought of myself as studying questions around distortions and altruism and self-interest and how that affects our decision making. But, of course, the real-world analog of that is philanthropy. And it’s very practically important and useful for taking research into practice for teaching and basically being in the real world.
Edmonds: Let’s talk a bit about some of the research you’ve conducted, starting with what’s called the ‘identifiable victim effect.’ Before you tell us the findings of this research, you’d better define what the identifiable victim effect is.
Small: That term came from Thomas Schelling, who wrote about this, I think, very relatable tendency, we tend to focus our attention, our sympathy, and behavioral responses, oftentimes giving money when we learn about a specific identified victim. And yet, there’s evidently thousands, millions, of needy people around the world, who remain hidden to us, Schelling refers to them as statistical victims or statistical lives, that don’t move us in the same way.
And the kind of paradox here is that we end up in many cases concentrating resources on one person or on to 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.
Edmonds: So that’s the definition of it.
Small: Yes.
Edmonds: What did you do to test it?
Smalls: We and other researchers have tested it in a variety of different ways. And in hindsight, now, sometimes I think this gets a bit confusing, because sometimes it’s operationalized by contrasting helping towards one victim versus helping towards some larger set of victims. And that’s certainly part of it.
Other times, it’s tested, including some my own work, by showing a picture of a particular victim in one case, versus statistics. In another case — perhaps the cleanest lab-based experimental test of this, which is also the most experimentally cleanest, which means it’s the most unnatural and most different from the real world way, is in a lab-based experiment — we have participants playing a version of the Dictator Game, where some participants are randomly assigned to get some sum of money, and then they’re matched with another anonymous person, they don’t meet this person, are never going to meet this person, they’re matched with someone else. And they’re given an option to give away any of the money for which they’ve just been endowed to this other anonymous person. And the way that we sought out to kind of cleanly test for identifiability was we enabled in one condition, so for some randomly determined set of participants, they drew the number of the person for whom they were matched before they made their decision. And then the other condition, the others flip a coin, those who flip tails instead of heads, they don’t learn the number of the person they’re matched with until after they’ve already made their decision of how much to give.
Now, in both of these cases, the number is meaningless because they know that that number can be any of the other people, they’re never going to find out who it is or anything like that. Nonetheless, when say imagine you draw number six, right before you made your decision, that person has now been determined. It is a specific certain person. It’s an anonymous person, but it’s a certain determined person.
And just that subtle manipulation affects how much people give in this Dictator Game. We used to call this determinateness. We think it’s kind of the most stripped-down part of the identifiable victim effect. You know, in the real world, being identifiable often means you learn information about a person and you see their picture, and maybe they’re attractive, maybe they’re unattractive. Maybe you relate to some of the content in the appeal, or you don’t. It’s very difficult to tease out whether any effect is driven by one of those characteristics or by identifiability itself. And so this was an aim to subtract out all that other information. And it seems to matter.
Edmonds: And what’s amazing about that is how little it takes to trigger this effect, you just have a number which you know, is linked to a determinate individual, you don’t know a name, you haven’t seen a face, you don’t know where they live. And the number alone is enough to increase the amount of donations that person receives.
Small: Exactly.
Edmonds: And in the real world, we have much more than that. So, in the real world, it means that when we see an image of somebody on a leaflet, we’re much more likely to support that charity than if we’re presented with bold statistics, about thousands of people are affected by this particular disease, or illness, or whatever it happens to be.
Small: Exactly. In fact, we’re recording in mid-October, Israel was recently attacked by Hamas, and I just a few minutes ago, walked by a number of signs, with images of children who have been kidnapped, and then hostages of Hamas. So, leveraging this exact psychology to try to raise support for their side.
Edmonds: This seems to be a finding in a way that academics have uncovered but the charities have always understood implicitly. And that’s why they do exactly that they put a picture of a single child on their leaflets.
Smalls: Totally, yeah. They knew it before us, and not just them. I think journalists, maybe you can relate to this. journalists understand this, too. So oftentimes, even in a pretty dense, heavy news article about some misfortune, that does eventually get into lots of statistics and details. They don’t start with that, they don’t lead with that. They lead with a story of a particular person.
Edmonds: We’ve heard about a replication crisis in psychology over the past decade or so, often, these studies are based on small samples. Are you confident of the result?
Smalls: I’m confident of that key effect. We haven’t even gotten into all of the many, many, many publications about this now. And many of them show specific moderator effects you get it if it’s one versus many, in-group, out-group, all these kinds of things. I think I’m less confident about all of those. But you mentioned that this is based on lab data. There is pretty good field-based evidence field experiments, and also just observational field data.
Again, as I mentioned before, there’s a lot of different features of the identifiable that can affect but certainly it’s consistent with a preference to help smaller numbers, like one or two as opposed to larger numbers.
Edmonds: And do you think that part of the reason that most of us give away so little to good causes you would talked about the numbers is that the problem just seems too vast in so many cases that there were just too many millions of people who need help, and it’s overwhelming for us.
Small: I think that’s part of it. What you described is sometimes known as “the drop in the bucket effect” where we feel like we can’t really have that much impact when the problem is so vast. Paul Slovic has this nice quote, when talking about what we might do to deal with those vast large problems. He says, “We need to put tears on the statistics.” That could be by using an identifiable victim, as a poster child, it could be other ways of humanizing large numbers or making them more emotional in some way.
Edmonds: Right. Another point about the identifiable victim effect is that if we’re looking at the impact of poverty, and we hear about one person dying from malnutrition, and then there’s another report, which talks about two people dying of malnutrition, well, that seems obviously twice as bad to us. But if I hear about an earthquake on the other side of the world, I can’t really grasp the distinction between 17,100 people dying, or 18,300 people dying.
Small: Yes, we don’t perceive numbers linearly. So big numbers, there’s, you know, diminishing marginal utility. So first of all, there’s I think numeracy challenges with just even comprehending large numbers, but also the difference between how one and two feels. We perceive it as much larger than the difference between you know, 9,000,871 and 9,000,872. We barely perceive any difference between those two numbers.
Edmonds: The single identifiable victim effect — what are the lessons for charities in all this is it to concentrate on narrative basically.
Small: I think that’s the main takeaway. I think that’s one aspect of what they need to do, which is to make it more emotional, tug at our heartstrings, make it more personal for people. And so when you see a person, you can almost imagine having a relationship with them, right? I think relationships really matter for charitable giving to.
I think another related set of findings looks at how personal experiences affect charitable giving. For instance, if you had somebody that you loved and lost, like, say someone in your family who died of, say, lung cancer, you’re going to be much more likely to support lung cancer causes in the future than someone who hasn’t had that personal experience. And so, this is separate from the identifiable victim effect. But it’s something that people’s attention tends to narrow in on things that they can relate to things that tug at their heartstrings. It’s another approach.
Edmonds: Most people, at least in the developed world give some percentage of their money to charity. How do we perceive generosity? How do we perceive our own generosity? And how do we perceive the generosity of others?
Smalls: That’s a great question. I think that people tend to rely a lot on what I call motive inferences. We observe others behavior, and we learn about them through their behavior. So if I see you donate to charity, or help a homeless person, or help in some way, that action alone affects my impression of you. But it’s not the only thing that affects my impression of you. I tend to then question, ‘Well, what was David’s motives there? Did he actually care? Or did he only act that way, because he knew I was watching, or because he expected some reciprocity or some benefit from that action?’ And so people tend to rely heavily on motives in general and assessing our behavior and others’ behavior. But I think it’s particularly important aspect of human judgment, social judgment, when it comes to altruism, because there’s such a strong expectation that altruism needs to be pure, free of or devoid of any sort of self-interest. And so, people get pretty irritated, pretty cynical, pretty upset by what they perceive as insincere, inauthentic forms of altruism.
Edmonds: But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I don’t know whether giving to a very rich institution like Yale counts as altruism. But if you go to Yale or Princeton, and you hear about people who’ve donated. Well, the reason you hear about them is their names are plastered on the corridors, or the libraries, or the buildings in some way, that doesn’t look like a very pure form of giving.
Small: Totally Yes, I’m fascinated by this. I actually live across the street from a museum that built an addition about five years ago, and we waited for months for all this construction to end. And then the grand finale. Finally, we weren’t hearing the noise of construction workers outside anymore. And but instead, they slapped on the new edition the name of the donor. So now I see it on my window.
And this is ubiquitous as university campuses and hospitals. We call this the “Braggarts Dilemma.” The braggarts dilemma is the idea that it helps to get the word out about our generous actions, and helps our reputation. I can be the most generous person in the world. But if no one finds out about it, then I don’t get any credit at all. And so, I think that motivates people to want their names on buildings.
Also, people’s sometimes it’s known as virtue signaling, but posting online about actions they do that might be perceived as generous by others. So, there’s this motive to get the word out. But at the same time, when we get the word out, we risk appearing as insincere as braggarts. And so that’s the dilemma.
Edmonds: Right? So, the tension for a charity, like Oxfam, or Save the Children, is that they want you to boast about your giving, because that encourages others to give. But you yourself are reluctant to do that, because that reflects very badly on you.
Small: Totally, yeah. So I teach marketing courses. And you know, one of the big lessons in marketing 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.
But as you described, donors are often reluctant to talk about their charitable giving, because they want to seem to others and perhaps also want to feel themselves like they are being generous for purely altruistic reasons, rather than to get social credit.
We actually ran a field experiment with an organization that was struggling to get donors to share talk about their charity. So with this organization, when you donate online, there’s a pop-up window that appears thanking you for donating. And then it there’s some links to Twitter and other social media and email. And they say thank you for donating, please share about this cause online and very few people do. And so we ran a field experiment with them, where we change the wording of that message. So rather than just thanking them and asking them to share about it online, we pointed out to donors, that sharing is a way to do more good and magnify your impact. And it worked. I mean, it didn’t get everybody to share it, sharing rates are still pretty low, but it raised sharing rates by about a percent.
Edmonds: So, it raised a number of people who shared but I guess the crucial question is, did it increase the number of donations? Did it?
Smalls: Yeah. So, what was cool about this data, because this was all digital, was that when you share through this pop-up window, we can observe what people post on their own private social media. But there’s a unique traceable link that gets shared. And so then we could trace any subsequent donations back to the person that shared and we know what message they saw whether they saw the standard message, or the one encouraging them to share as a way to have more impact. And so, we ran our experiment just for a few weeks, but kind of a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the impact of this message was that it ought to raise about $170,000 more per year just by changing that word.
So, it’s not like millions of dollars or anything like that. Most people are still quite reluctant to share about charity online. Even after doing this research, I still cringe and cannot bring myself to post on social media about my donations. Even though I advocate for it, I think it’s a good thing. But maybe I’m not quite generous enough to sacrifice my reputation in that way.
Edmonds: Some of these phenomena, we’ve been talking about the identifiable victim effect, and so on, do you regard them as biases, irrational responses that just are difficult to overcome because they’re such a deep part of our psychological makeup?
Smalls: I’m so hesitant to use irrationality language. So, what we were just discussing, for instance, I think there is some good reason to care about motives, I don’t think it’s completely wrong to care about motives in assessing other people’s altruism, and perhaps even for ourselves, this we live in a social world, we have to interact with people repeatedly. And so we want to try to figure out who’s truly good. Motives are pretty good signal. Like I want to know not just whether you behave generously, whether you behave generously consistently, absent other incentives to do so. Right. And so, it’s a useful social process.
What fascinates me is when that comes into conflict, or when there’s a tension between that and doing the most good in the world. And so, if we take social utility maximization as a normative model — not everybody agrees with that, of course — but if we say that that’s the definition of have rationality than certainly the identifiable victim effect, but also our attention to motives in say, decisions of whether to share about charity seem to be a bias, right? They’re limiting the amount of good we can do in the world because of our psychology.
Edmonds: Right. So where does that leave you, as an academic who’s studied philanthropy, you say you’re reluctant to boast about your charitable giving. But are you able to put most of these other effects aside and think, you know what, I’m just going to donate to the charity that does the greatest good for the greatest number.
Smalls: I do do that. I tend to read the research provided by effective altruists and make my decisions of where to give based on those recommendations, which are, as you know, designed to maximize impact. So that part I think I’m semi-rational about.
I still sometimes give to other causes, too. But my way of rationalizing that is, in my mental budgeting, I treat that as personal consumption. So, if for instance, I know someone who’s passed away and their family asked for donations to their favorite charity, I don’t mentally encode that as my charitable giving, that’s more my personal consumption or being a loyal friend or something like that.
Edmonds: You’ve persuaded yourself that that’s a reasonable approach because after all, as well as your obligations to strangers at the far end of the world, you’ve also got obligations to your friend who’s got a special cause.
Small: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it, it would seem less rational if I took from my charitable giving budget. So, if I gave less to effective causes, but if I can do both the opportunity cost of me giving to my friends, charity is less lattes or vacation or more work or something like that. I’m OK with that.
Edmonds: Deborah Small, thank you very much indeed.
The post Deborah Small on Charitable Giving appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO HAL HERSHFIELD NOW!
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.”
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
TRANSCRIPTDave Edmonds: Do you think about what your life will be like in five, 10, 20 years? Are you good at imagining your future? Hal Hershfield is a psychologist at UCLA Anderson School of Management and has a very specific research interest. He investigates how people perceive the passage of time, how they view their future selves, and what impact this has on their decisions. Hal Hershfield, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Hal Hershfield: Thanks so much, Dave. I’ve been looking forward to this.
Edmonds: So, an unusual subject today we’re talking about time, in particular, how humans perceive themselves as changing through time, and how this shapes their decisions. So we’ll explain more about that in a moment. But perhaps you could sketch out very generally the issue at stake here, because I guess one thing that makes humans distinct as a species, is that we have a quite finely grained ability to think about both the past and the future.
Hershfield: Yeah, that’s right. So, I would say if I can sort of sketch it out briefly, 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. And so, a lot of my research focuses on when we make, quote unquote, mistakes with our decisions, projecting ourselves ahead in time.
Edmonds: OK, when I was 20, I don’t think I could imagine myself very clearly being my current age. And I find it tricky to imagine what I’ll be like, at night, if I survive that long, inshallah, how much do people vary in their ability to imagine their future selves?
Hershfield: Right. So there’s a good degree of variability here. Some people can really clearly imagine the person that they’ll be in five years, 10 years’ time. Some people have a very difficult time with it, vividness in the mind’s eye tends to be something that’s has a lot of individual differences. That being said, the further out we go in time, essentially everybody starts showing a weakened ability to do this, because it’s harder and harder, and there’s more uncertainty, and so on and so on.
Edmonds: So this variability, how have you established that? Have you established that some people are good at it, and some people are bad at it?
Hershfield: Right? So there are a variety of different questionnaires. Look, I’m a psychologist. So I deploy these questionnaires, we ask people about how much they feel a sense of connection with their future selves, which is a little different than sort of vividness. And we’ve used sort of pictures to do this. We show people circles that go from gradually not overlapping to almost all the way overlapping. They’re called Euler circles. That’s one way to measure how much you feel connected or similar or related to your future self. But you can also ask people, ‘How vivid does the image of your future self seem?’ you know, and this is one-to-seven scale and you continue to seven is a perfectly clear image, no problem at all. One is vague and abstract, and I can’t even conjure it up. That’s mainly the way we do it.
Edmonds: Is there any new scientific research or physiological research on this? You have conducted experiments with MRI scanners, for example?
Hershfield: Yes, to some degree. One of the studies that I’ve done, we’ve put people into MRI scanners, just as you said, and we’ve asked them to make judgments about themselves now and themselves in the future, as well as another person now and another person in the future. Now, what we find there is that the neural activity pattern that comes about when people think of their future selves, looks a lot like the neural activity pattern that comes about when people think about another person. Now that’s not quite the same as looking at vividness, right? This is just saying, the way we sort of conceptualize the future self in the mind’s eye in our brain is on par with the way that we conceptualize another person, the vividness question, though, that’s a deeper one that we haven’t yet explored, but totally worth doing.
Edmonds: Talk me through some of the implications of these findings. Suppose I’m one of those people who thinks that the person who will exist in 25 years will be very close to me. How will my behavior differ from a person who imagines their future self as someone entirely alien to them?
Hershfield: Right. So, one way to think about this, Dave, is to consider how would you treat somebody today, somebody else today who you are very close to, versus somebody who is relatively foreign, alien to you. My bet is that someone very close to you would engender your sympathy and compassion and your time and your sacrifices. But somebody who you don’t know, I mean, you might know they exist, but you’re not close to them at all, they’re not going to make you do things for them. Like, you’re not going to necessarily say, I’ll give up my weekend to help you out stranger. Now apply that to our future selves. If your future self is someone with whom you share a close connection, you feel a sense of sort of relatedness to them and overlap, if you will. What the research suggests is that you’ll be more likely to do things for their benefit, you know, whether that’s eating healthier, exercising, saving money, etc. But also you may be considering their interests and their time and whatnot, compared to if you feel no sense of overlap, if your future self almost feels, I love the way that you put it alien to you.
Edmonds: Is this something you’ve tested in the laboratory? Or does it have real world effects?
Hershfield: Yes, so both right, so we have examined people’s sense of connection to their future selves in the sort of, you know, very sterile lab settings, where we ask the questions very directly, and measure things like their decisions on tasks where they have to choose between a small amount of money now and a large amount of money later. But in other research, we’ve worked with large surveys of adults sort of across the United States, finding that the people who are more connected, they have higher financial well-being they save more, they experience more life satisfaction, they have higher self-reported health and so on. So don’t think this is just sort of specific to kind of lab settings, but it really does extend beyond and I should say, those relationships are still there, even when you take into account things like age, and education, and income and gender are the things that you think might also matter here, the third variables, if you will.
Edmonds: So that’s really fascinating. Lots of governments are worried about people not saving enough, right, for their future. And they think that people weren’t able to survive on the state pension. And they want to encourage us to save more. So you’ve spotted this link? Are there interventions that work other ways of getting people to care more about their future selves?
Hershfield: Sure. So the economist would say, ‘Change the system. Make people automatically enrolled in saving.’ The psychologist in me would say, ‘Well, if you want an intervention to get people to care more about their future self, one way to determine what to do is to think about what techniques might we use to get you to care more about someone else in your life?’ Charities do this very well, they don’t give you a list of statistics. What they do is tell you a story, and they make a given recipient, emotional, right, and they make them vivid. And so one thing that we can do to try to get people to take better care of their future selves, is to make those future selves more provocative, more vivid, more emotional, right?
So I mean, we can literally show you what you’ll look like, you know, an age progressive version of yourself. And there’s some caveats there. How do you do that? The joke is I just look in the mirror nowadays, but there’s great technology to do this. Look, in some ways, the FBI, and other sorts of police agencies have been doing age progression for decades. Now, when I started working on this, we had to hire graphic artists. Now anybody can do this, you know, if you download a 99 cent app, you can do this on face app, or Snapchat or Tik Tok, and the process is quite good. It basically just mimics the aging process on your face. Now, that’s the type of thing that can work in certain situations where I am being shown, you know, an aged image and also given the opportunity to save. If I were to just put up an aged image of you, I wouldn’t expect that next week, you would finally sit down and take care of your pension your your savings, because, well, there’s too much time in between. But the idea here is to make that future self more vivid, because a vivid self is emotional, and emotions are the types of things that can drive that sense of closeness, and that sort of desire to take action.
Edmonds: So, you can show people an elderly version of themselves, then present them immediately with some kind of decision process. And you’ll discover that they’re more likely to take decisions that benefit that elderly person.
Hershfield: That’s right. So for instance, we just ran a study, or rather we just published a study, where these were the 50,000 customers of a bank in Mexico, half of them received this sort of standard message, it’s important to save half of them also got that message and the opportunity to see you know, their age selfie, I think we call it and those who did, were 16 percent more likely to make a contribution to their personal pension. Now you know, I should emphasize these are not magic bullets. There’s so many different factors that impact the likelihood deceive, or the likelihood to exercise the likelihood to do anything that represents taking care of our future selves. This is just one intervention that we can deploy.
Edmonds: But also, although that produces a kind of brilliant result, that’s not really a practical solution, is it? Because we can’t do that to everyone, the government can’t go around showing? Or maybe it can an aging selfie, to everybody who is investing in the private pension?
Hershfield: Well, it’s funny that you say that there’s two things. So on the one hand, I agree with you, I don’t think it’s the best solution at scale. On the other hand, we did it with 50,000 customers, and it’s very easy. A lot of these people already have a mobile phone, they upload a photo and then press a button and it comes back to them like that. Now, could a government project that to you? Well, they have your driver’s license photo, they have your passport photo, it’s not crazy. I’m setting aside the ethical issue and the privacy issues. It’s not crazy to think that they could.
That said, there’s other strategies that we could use, you know, so we know psychologically, that when people make these quote, unquote, trade offs between now and later, part of the calculus is that there’s a sacrifice made right now, for a benefit later. That’s a sort of asymmetry. And so one thing we can do is to try to make that sacrifice right now feel easier to undertake, just in terms of saving, and we can talk about this in other spaces, too.
In one of my recent studies, we just reframed saving. We said to some people, ‘Do you want to save $150 a month?’ and to other people, we said, ‘Do you want to save $5 a day?’ which feels almost overly simplistic, it’s the same amount of money — $5 a day, feels easier. There’s lots of things in that category that we spend $5 in a day, there’s not as many that we spend $150 on a month, and we had four times as many people sign up for a savings account, right? So one way to think about this is how can we make that sacrifice feel easier to make? Now,
Edmonds: I was gonna ask you a related question about that, because we’ve been talking about the future as though the concept of what counts as the future is uncontentious. But if you ask me, ‘Dave, are you planning for the future?’ I’ll assume that you mean, am I planning for events? I don’t know. Ten years from now? No? Am I planning what to do at the weekend? Yeah. Do people vary about what they count as the future? And does this make any difference to their behavior?
Hershfield: Oh, yeah. It’s a fascinating question. And we can obviously, very quickly get into kind of heady territory, what counts of the future and what doesn’t actually have some research with my collaborator, Sam Maglio, where we ask people these sort of abstract questions of when do you think the future starts? When do you think the present ends? This is a little different than what you’re asking, which is, you know, do I think five years is the future? Or is that the present? And there is some variability there that that’s not necessarily what we ask. But the thing that we do find if I can make it sort of concise and concrete is that the people who think that the future starts sooner? Again, this is a very abstract, but if we just asked you without any events in mind, but just does the future, where does it start? You know, draw it out on a line? Is it right now? Is it way in the future?
The people who think the future starts sooner 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.
Edmonds: Right. Another thing that I think about when I think about my life is like, think about my life, in sort of arbitrary milestone, I’ve got a horrible milestone coming up next year. And a few decades ago, I would have thought that milestone meant I was entering old age. Now. I think it’s the beginning of middle age. But is that relevant to these issues? Do people think in terms of milestones? And is that relevant for how they plan?
Hershfield: So, you’re about to turn 40? I assume, correct? Well, you’re absolutely right, there is something arbitrary about what we call milestone birthdays, the day you wake up and turn 40 or 50, or 60, or whatever it is, is not really any different from the prior day when you were in an earlier decade. But we’re on a base 10 system, we assign a lot of value to these milestone birthdays. And one of the things that my colleagues and I have found out (Adam Alter namely) is that 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, it’s a time to sort of say, have I been doing what I’ve wanted to do? What more do I want to accomplish, we sort of naturally do this, if you’ve ever heard of somebody saying, you know,’ I’m gonna run the marathon’ or the triathlon or something insane like that, you know, I’m about to turn 40, 50, whatever, who wants to join me. 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.
Edmonds: Is that a tool that politicians and policymakers can also manipulate? Obviously, your pension kicks in at a certain time, and you’re in this country, your free bus pass or your free, Underground pass kicks in at a certain age. But can policymakers manipulate these psychological milestones?
Hershfield: I’ll rephrase that to ‘use them to help citizens,’ but …
Edmonds: I don’t mean manipulate in a bad way. I mean, in a way that’s for benefit …
Hershfield: I know, I know. I know. In fact, research that’s led by Hengchen Dai, who’s a professor at UCLA as well, has found that if you ask people to make an you know, an increased contribution to their retirement accounts, you have better luck doing so in advance of a birthday, these represent fresh starts. And I don’t know that she and her colleagues have done this specifically for the sort of big milestone birthdays. But presumably, that would also be a good time, if you’re trying to get someone to make a change, whether it’s to sign up for a will or extra health insurance, or whatever it may be, these can be good times to do it, because it feels like a natural time to sort of take stock of our lives, and do the changes that we need to in order to sort of live more to the ideal we’ve set for ourselves, if you will.
Edmonds: Right. I’ve been asking you about the future because we live our lives in a forward direction. Is there anything to be said about the past? And how we view our past selves? And I don’t know that might be linked to shame or guilt about past actions? Have you done any work on that? Any research on that?
Hershfield: Well, it’s a such an interesting question. I do have a former student Elicia John, who I’ve been working with, to look at how people conceptualize their past selves, specifically in terms of maintaining a goal. So she’s really interested in weight loss maintenance, it turns out, you know, a lot of people can lose weight, but then keeping the weight off is the most difficult part of the process. Now, one of the things that she’s found is that the way that we think of our past self matters for our likelihood to maintain the weight. And the basic idea is that we need to keep that past self vivid in mind, right? But not feel too emotionally close to them, we want to almost feel distant from them. Like, that’s not me. Now. That’s the earlier me, who snapped at night and ate too many donuts or whatever, whatever the thing is. But that is one way to look at it. Now you had asked about shame and guilt, I am curious whether or not having a closer relationship with my past self, might actually make it easier for me to deal with regrets, you know, if I can sort of step into the shoes of the person I once was, maybe I’ll have a better appreciation for the context of my decisions and what I was feeling and thinking and not be so hard on me myself.
Edmonds: That’s interesting because I would have thought the opposite. I would have thought the more distant you are from your past self, the easier it would be to apologize or do whatever was required.
Hershfield: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. I mean, this sets it up to be like a brilliant experimental investigation, right? Maybe it depends on what we’re focusing on here. Because if it’s a matter of being more compassionate with myself, well, maybe a sense of closeness matters. If it’s a matter of apologizing to others, or making right our past wrongs, maybe I do want to really separate from that person and say, That’s not me. That’s a totally different person.
Edmonds: Do that study!
Hershfield: Absolutely. I’ll keep you posted.
Edmonds: Now, you’re very unusual in that your work has been influenced principally not by another psychologist, but by a philosopher. And as it happens, a philosopher who taught me and whose biography I’ve written and whom I’m very interested in. Tell us why Derek Parfit was such an inspiration for you.
Hershfield: So, to some extent, on the psychology side, I know I’m unique in being influenced by philosophers, but then when you look at Parfit’s work, and how many other people he’s influenced, all of a sudden, I’m not so unique. He, I think more than anyone, has done such great work, trying to think about the problems with identity, what makes us you know, quote, unquote, the same over time, what makes us connected or not connected to our future selves and the concept that maybe we aren’t one sort of single self but rather sort of a collection of selves, and maybe the thing that unites those selves is strands of continuity. That idea — and I’m wildly oversimplifying this here, of course — but the basic notion behind this idea there made it so easy for me to try to figure out why people have such a hard time making decisions today that benefit themselves in the future. And once you start considering the idea of different selves over time, and that, you know, what may matter is this sort of sense of continuity, and we’ve run with that idea and like to find continuity and some of the similar ways that he has and also in different ways. But that idea has been enormously helpful in trying to understand the decisions that people make, and then also how to help them make, quote, unquote, better ones. And by that I mean, ones that they say that they want to make, but have a difficult time doing.
Edmonds: Because his central, I guess, insight into personal identity is that there’s no essence of us. We’re constantly evolving. I’m interested how you were exposed to Parfit, presumably not in a psychology class.
Hershfield: Let’s see, I think the original exposure I had to him was first with a question of why aren’t Americans saving at a rate that they quote unquote, should be saving for, and then trying to dig into the concept of, you know, long term decision making, and then I came across work by Shane Frederick, who’s also a business school professor, also a psychologist at Yale, who works very closely with George Lowenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon. And in their paper, this is now 20 years old, they cite Parfitt. They use it as a building block for understanding what psychologists and economists called temporal discounting the idea that we downplay the value of future rewards. It was like the old-school version of finding a YouTube video and then going down a YouTube rabbit hole. This was like finding a philosophy article and then going down the philosophy rabbit hole of personal identity.
Edmonds: I did not know that. George Levenstein is another victim of Social Science Bites, he’s a previous interviewee. So let me ask you one final question has the research that you’ve undertaken, has it shifted your approach either to your future self or to your past self?
Hershfield: You know, if anything, I think it’s probably shifted my approach to my present self. And what I mean by that is, I probably have been someone who has been almost overly future-concerned. And when I talk about relationships between current and future selves, it doesn’t mean that the current self should always sacrifice for the future self. What it means is that there should be a relationship there.
When I really got deep into this research, one of the things that I examined myself was whether or not I was doing enough to, I’ll say, to live for today or be present. This sounds kind of like buzzwords, but what that’s meant for me is I’ve tried to loosen up a little bit in how I spend my time. And it’s so easy to say, ‘I really need to be protective of my time and be working hard. And I can’t make it to this thing with friends or my kids or whatever.’ And this particular quarter, I’m leaving work a little early on Tuesdays and Wednesdays so I can take my son to his T-ball class, and then also a ballet class, and I’m shifting off with my wife, too, of course. But there’s a time in my life when I would have said, ‘We’ve got to figure this out otherwise, because I work during the day. And that’s when I need to be doing my work.’ And I realized, well, maybe I could also do some work at night and make it to these things because my kid is not going to be a kid for that long. And I want to look back, 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.
Edmonds: I’m pleased you’ve been able to be very present for this interview. Hal Hershfield Thanks very much indeed.
Hershfield: Dave, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
The post Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO MELISSA KEARNEY NOW!
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.”
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
TRANSCRIPTDavid Edmonds: Fewer kids in the United States are being brought up in households with married parents. Does that matter? Melissa Kearney argues that it matters a lot. She’s an economist at the University of Maryland and author of The Two-Parent Privilege. Melissa Kearney, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Melissa Kearney: Thank you so much for having me.
Edmonds: The topic we’re talking about today is marriage. So, within the social sciences, you might think that marriage would be of interest to sociologists. It’s a much more unusual subject for an economist. Why would an economist care?
Kearney: Marriage 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. That’s how we model marriage. But once you recognize how important economics is to marriage, and marriage is to economics, it’s impossible not to see the married unit as a really important economic unit in society,
Edmonds: We should be clear that what you study is the legal recognition of a marriage union, between a man and a woman. We’re not talking about civil partnerships, which are now available for same sex couples, and at least in the UK, also for opposite sex couples.
Kearney: So, that’s an important question. In my work, what I really do is look at first how marriage impacts or predicts whether a household is headed by two adults, and then look at the impact that that has on kids outcomes and household outcomes. And so, in my data work, and very clear as to whether what I see in a particular data set, is whether somebody is legally married, or whether they’re living with an another adult partner. in the US marriage, and two parent households are very, very, very tightly correlated. So, we don’t have in the US sort of these very long-term stable commitments outside marriage the way some European countries do.
Edmonds: Let’s have some facts and figures. Your focus is primarily on the United States. And it’s common knowledge that marriage has been in decline, actually, across the developed world. But give us some hard stats. There are two important components, I guess, to this: first, whether people are getting married in the first place, and second, whether they’re staying married. So, what’s the data on that?
Kearney: The trends that I’m particularly interested in and frankly, worried about, is the decline in marriage among parents. So, if I look at kids in the US, what’s happened to their living arrangements over the past 40 years: in 2020, only 63 percent of U.S. kids lived with married parents. That’s a huge drop from just 40 years ago. In 1980, it was 77 percent. And this timing is important because this timing is posed the social cultural changes of the 60s and 70s. So, the real big decline in marriage from the perspective of kids, right, the decline in marriage among their parents has happened post 1980. So, 63 percent of kids are living with married parents.
If instead we just think about how many kids are living with two parents, just add a couple more percentage points to it. Because like I said, in the US, that’s not really that large of a share. Importantly, marriage is what’s driving this change, because what’s happened in the US is really—and this is, by the way, happening in the UK, and increasingly in other European countries as well—there’s been a decoupling, a debundling of marriage from having and raising kids. You refer to staying married; this is not being driven by divorce. In fact, now in the US, if we look at non partnered mothers, so mothers who have no other not a spouse, or an unmarried partner, whether another man or woman, they consider a partner in their house, the small majority of them have gotten there by never being married. So, marriages are actually more stable than they used to be, because fewer people are getting married, the bar to getting married is higher. But what’s happened is really this decline in marriage among adults overall, and then also among adults who have children together.
Edmonds: So just to be clear, the big increase in the number of kids who are now in households with just one parent is a result of their mother, and I guess more rarely their father never getting married in the first place.
Kearney: Exactly. Forty percent of kids in the US now are born to unmarried parents. And again, this is consequential to how they wind up being raised in their living family, because not many of those parents will actually then live together in a long-term situation.
Edmonds: Can we unpick those figures a bit further? Are there interesting notable race or class or regional differences to unpack?
Kearney: One hundred percent. So, I’m really focused on the fact that what’s happened over the past 40 years is the emergence of a very wide socio-economic class gap in this. Kids born to the highest educated parents are still overwhelmingly being raised in two-parent, married-parent homes at similar rates in the past, but kids born to less-educated parents, and now, not just the least educated, but the middle group, the majority of kids’ moms do not have a four-year college degree. And what’s happened over the past 40 years is that the share of them living with married parents has converged down—single parenthood used to really just be concentrated among the least economically advantaged the lowest education groups. That’s not happening anymore.
So let me put numbers on this. So, now in the US, 84 percent of kids whose moms have a four-year college degree live with married parents, as compared to less than 60 percent of kids whose parents don’t have a college degree. That’s a 24-percentage point gap. That’s huge. And that has emerged entirely over the past 40 years.
You also asked about race differences. In the US, starting in the 60s and 70s, we saw an emergence of a black/white gap in two-parent families. Those level differences have persisted and taken on this class gap dimension as well. Among kids of white moms, among kids of black moms, among kids of Hispanic moms—what’s happened over the past 40 years is this huge class gap. So again, let’s put some numbers on this. Among white children in the US, or children of white moms, 80 percent of those whose moms have a four-year college degree live in a married parent home, as compared to 69 or 60 percent of moms with only a high school degree or less. There’s also a huge class gap, education class gap, among kids of black moms. Sixty percent of those whose moms have a four-year college degree live with married parents, as compared to only 30 percent of black children whose moms don’t have a four-year college degree. An interesting exception is the racial ethnic group of Asian Americans. So there, we see uniformly high rates of two parent households throughout the education distribution. There’s really not this drop off outside the college educated class.
Edmonds: So elsewhere, though, a huge correlation between the gap and class and race. And I asked about regional differences as well. I was wondering whether this might be a north/south thing or an urban/rural phenomenon.
Kearney: I wondered about that, too. And really, interestingly, the data showed that this widening class gap, this reduction in kids being raised in two-parent homes, married parent homes outside the college educated class has happened in almost equal proportion throughout the regions of the US. It’s also happened in nearly equal proportion in urban and rural areas.
Edmonds: There’s obviously multiple explanations for this trend, but is it possible to identify one or two major causes?
Kearney: Sure. So, let’s just reiterate: the mechanical drivers of this 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. OK, so why is that? Well, my read of the data, and the evidence is that there’s been an interaction of economic shocks that have hit primarily outside the college-educated class and a change in social norms that has really led to this decoupling of marriage and raising kids. So like we said, already, there were these major social-cultural changes in the 60s and 70s, the share of adults getting married sort of fell in rough proportion among all education groups, and then what happened in the 80s and 90s—a whole bunch of economic changes that really sort of eroded the economic position, both in a level sense and a relative sense compared to women, of non-college-educated men. So we saw a loss in manufacturing jobs, we saw a loss in middle skilled well-paying jobs for certain segments of the population: non college educated men living in particular places that were hit by things like import competition, the adoption of industrial robots, these sort of economic changes. And in those places, in those population groups that were more impacted, 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. Again, college educated adults have done quite well, and they’ve continued to get married.
Edmonds: So I still don’t quite understand the cause of it. So, you have men who’ve been hit economically, particularly working-class men. And that means what? That they’re just less attractive as a catch for women? How does that work?
Kearney: So, who’s making this decision, whether it’s men or women, I can’t tease out in this sort of aggregate course data and methods I use as an economist. My sense of this—I’ll use economic terms for a second here—we get into this equilibrium, where there’s less marriage among these populations. And whether it’s being driven by women deciding, “You know what, these men, they’re not stable financial contributors, they’re in and out of work. We know when people are in and out of work, particularly men, there’s other struggles, right? So they’re not going to be a good partner, to me, meanwhile, this is a good thing, I can make it on my own a bit, I’m still economically insecure. But I’d rather try to do this by myself, then have that guy in and out of our house in and out of work,” or whether it’s men saying, “I don’t want this responsibility, I’m not sure I’m going to have a family supporting wage for the next 30 years, I don’t want to be tied down to have to pay for a wife and kids,” whichever side is driving it, it’s probably some of both, we see this happening.
But I want to emphasize two things about the role of social norms here. 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. And I actually have some work, like, looking at this. I was looking for a reverse marriageable men story. So let me quickly describe this study I did with my colleague, Riley Wilson. The fracking boom in the US in the 2000s was actually a really good economic shock for non-college educated men, it increased employment opportunities in various sectors where these communities had fracking. What I expected to see, what I hypothesized, was, “Oh, now college educated men, their economic stability opportunities has increased, we’ll see an increase in marriage and a reduction in the non marital birthshare.” The data don’t show that at all. What happens in those communities is people did have more kids. And there’s lots of work showing that actually, when people get more income, one of the things they do is use the money to have more kids, we see an increase in kids. But it’s an equal proportion to unmarried and married parents. We don’t see an increase in marriage. When you look at a very similar economic shock in the 70s and 80s, you see an increase in marriage, a reduction in the non marital birthshare. So this sort of supports this idea that how people respond to economics depends on the social context are living in.
Edmonds: The norm with no marriage has now been established as it were. And it’s almost impossible to reverse.
Kearney: I hesitate to say impossible, because I think that this really has been a damaging trend for children, in particular, for parents who are struggling to do all this on their own, for society more broadly, because this has widened inequality and undermines social mobility. So, I’d hate to give up on it. But I think it will be very hard to reverse because you have this baked in now.
Edmonds: OK, so you’ve touched on the implications there. Let’s talk a bit about why this matters. We’ve got this big increase in kids being brought up with parents who are unmarried, mostly living in single parent households. Why does this matter?
Kearney: Let’s first start at a sort of a micro level of household level. It is undeniable that households with one parent have fewer resources than households with two parents. And of course, right, the astute social scientist is going to say, well, one parent households are much more common among lower income groups. But even conditional on that, let’s take moms with just a high school degree, those who are raising kids by themselves and those who are raising kids with a married or unmarried partner in the household have different levels of resources. Why? Because a household with two adults is much more likely to have two adults bringing income into the household. So at a very basic level, this is a really important mechanism that can’t be dismissed. Households with two adults have higher levels of income. So even conditional on mother’s education level, age or race or where she lives, households with two adults are less likely to live in poverty, the kids are more likely to have access to more resources.
Income is a big part of the story, but it’s not the only mechanism. If you look at time use, we see that married parents both separately and collectively have more time to spend on their kids. Again, this isn’t rocket science. If there’s another adult in the household, right, either you go to work, or you mow the lawn, or you cook dinner while I read to the kid—it’s not surprising that kids and married parent households get more time with their parents. And the third thing that researchers have shown, both economist, development psychologists, sociologists, is that there’s less stress, there’s more emotional bandwidth in married parent households, for parents to parent the way development psychologists say is helpful for kids. And all of this we see translates into better outcomes for kids. So again, conditional and baseline differences between moms, we see that kids who have the benefit, or what I call on my title, the privilege of growing up in a two-parent, married-parent households, they’re less likely to live in poverty, they’re more likely to graduate high school, they’re more likely to go to college and graduate; their outcomes are better.
Edmonds: I assume that most of the kids living with just single parents are living with their moms. And I assume also, but correct me if I’m wrong, that it must make a vast difference. Whether the dad is, as it were, not under the same roof, but on the scene, helping out with resources, we’ve taken the kids to soccer club or whatever. Is that the case?
Kearney: Yes. So here’s again why it matters that more kids have sort of found themselves or moms have found themselves in this position by never being married, then being divorced, because children whose parents are divorced are more likely to have child support from the, you know, the second parent, typically, the dad coming into the household, they’re more likely to see and engage with their dad. And so even the sort of status of how parents got to this position of being unmarried really matters for the resources that kids have exposure to. Again, just looking aggregately, descriptively in the data, kids whose parents have been divorced and remarried, kids outcomes are sort of in between those growing up with single parents and those growing up with stably married parents. And this sort of supports your intuition: those kids have some type of resource access that’s in the middle of what you’d have if you had stably married parents versus just a single mom and no sort of engagement from the second parent.
Edmonds: Good. And as a matter of interest, is single parenthood worse for girls or boys? Or does it make no difference?
Kearney: This is a good question. And a lot of really compelling recent research has shown that actually growing up without a dad in the household is particularly problematic for boys. So let me describe one important study on this that worked really hard to get at causal effects and mechanisms. It’s a study by The Economist, Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pong. They have access to tons of nationally representative data on kids, and they look at the gender gap and outcomes. So, actually, boys are doing observably worse than girls on a lot of dimensions, now. They’re more likely to get in trouble in school, they’re more likely to get in trouble with the criminal justice system, they’re less likely to go to college. And what these authors sort of unpack is how much of that can be explained by what we know has happened over this time, which is that kids are less likely to grow up with a dad in their house. And what they show very convincingly is that the gender gap in kids’ outcomes, so the relative disadvantage of boys compared to girls, compared to their sisters, is larger in households headed by single moms. Like, let me be very clear, this is not to denigrate single moms at all. Raising kids is hard, and raising kids by yourself is even harder. And so what they show is that in these households, boys do have relatively less nurturing from their mother, they have less time with their mother as compared to their peers in married parent homes. But what’s really interesting in their research is they show that boys are particularly responsive to these inputs. And so when boys get less parenting attention, they are more likely to get themselves in trouble than girls.
Edmonds: Right. One interesting fact I learned from your research is that this inequality rather depressingly cascades through multiple generations in various ways. So, for example, if you’re raised in a single parent household, you yourself are much more likely to end up as a single parent.
Kearney: This is why I think it is really critical that we address this issue, this widening family gap in the US, the rising incidence of kids being raised without two parents in their home outside the college educated class, because this is a huge impediment to upward mobility, social mobility. 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—we will not close class gaps. without addressing this,
Edmonds: Can we turn to the policy implications? It would seem that the most obvious policy implication is that we should try and reverse the trend in the rise in single parent families. But you were just telling me early on in this conversation that that’s almost impossible to do. So, where we left, what are the implications of this?
Kearney: Yeah, so really, what I’m hoping to accomplish with this work is getting us to recognize that strengthening families and addressing the rise in single parent families has to be considered a policy priority. And it’s not, and a lot of people don’t want to talk about it, or a lot of people want to say, sure that’s happening, but it’s all about income, we just have to get more income to single mother households, right? So we have to recognize this as a policy priority. And then we also have to recognize this is really not going to be solved by just making our welfare system more generous to single parents.
And to be clear, I absolutely think we should have a stronger safety net. In particular, in the in the US. I absolutely think we need to have a stronger safety net, even if it leads—somewhat paradoxically to everything else I’ve been saying—even if that leads to an incremental increase in the share of single parent homes. I just refuse to accept that we let so many millions of kids in this country sort of languish inmaterial deprivation that hinders their human capital, their health and education, development and wellbeing. But we also have to meet families where they are. So, it’s really not helpful to say, just get married, more people need to get married, right? That’s just not helpful. Because we have to understand why are so many couples who have children together, not getting married, what are the barriers to them establishing healthy long term committed relationships. And here’s where an emphasis on programming aimed at building up families, not just trying to make up for the deficits of family life by more school counselors in school, more childcare subsidies—I’m all for those things, but we actually have to help families achieve stable, healthy, long term, two-parent situations for kids. And that means experimenting, and testing and investing in programming that does that.
The larger challenge is to try and reverse the decline in marriage in the sense of again, not just wagging our fingers telling people to get married, but figuring out why has the value proposition of marriage outside the college educated class declined. And that speaks to like, we need to do all the things to improve the economic stability, security of non college educated men in particular.
Edmonds: OK, but be specific, is there one or two policy proposals that you might have—you’ve said it would be very difficult to reverse the trend—but something that might stop the trend and possibly help reverse it?
Kearney: Sure. So, let’s start with, again, recognizing that improving 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.
Now, let me go to something that, you know, is more directly investing in families. Our Department of Health and Human Services has an Administration for Children and Families. 1% of their budget is spent on programs that are dedicated towards family strengthening as compared to 15% on foster care. You know, we’re committed to getting kids out of negligent or abusive family situations. But then in this country, we do very little to then help the family itself improve. We spent $85 million on strengthening families, that number needs to have a B instead of an M, right? We need to be really, really investing in these programs that are targeted at strengthening families.
Edmonds: Now, when I asked some social scientists, whether they have a normative agenda, some will say yes, some will say no. It seems to me that your findings are likely to be given a warmer reception by Republicans than by Democrats. It fits with a conservative view about the importance of the family. In that sense, this research feels intrinsically normative. Is that fair?
Kearney: It’s really interesting because when I talk to people in the social science field they know and they’ll say, “Are you sure you want to be out there saying this? You sound socially conservative,” which is not the in group among academic social scientists. When I tell people about my ideas that are not in this world at all, they’re like, “Oh, OK, so we just need to convince Republicans to spend more money on families.” And like, funny you should say that. Because there’s actually this like cultural war in the social scientists that I think surprises some people out because it feels like. “Wait, who would deny that two-parent homes are beneficial for kids? And who would say we shouldn’t spend more money on families,” right? So, there is something here for both social conservatives and progressives to like and not like. My research and my impetus for writing this book was not normative, it was positive in the sense of, I’m looking at the data, I’m looking at the evidence, it is overwhelming. If we really are serious about inequality in this country and improving kids’ wellbeing, we have got to support the family and recognize that the decline in the two-parent family has been bad for kids. There’s where I draw my normative conclusion. My normative conclusion: is we cannot give up on the two-parent family for kids, we have to reinforce that norm, and that norm and that goal should guide our policy and programming. And then here’s where I’m going to lean more into progressive instincts of, “We need to be spending more money helping low-income families.”
Edmonds: Melissa Kearney, thank you very much indeed.
Kearney: Thanks for having me.
–
The post Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children appeared first on Social Science Space.
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 ...
The post Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management appeared first on Social Science Space.
Trained as a social psychologist, Leiden University social psychologist Carsten de Dreu uses behavioral science, history, economics, archaeology, primatology and biology, among other disciplines to study the basis of conflict and cooperation among humans.
The post Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight appeared first on Social Science Space.
Heaven Crawley, who heads equitable development and migration at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, discusses how the current Western picture of migration is incomplete and lacks nuance, both of which harm efforts to address the issue.
The post Heaven Crawley on International Migration appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO SHINOBU KITAYAM NOW!
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, such as Japan, China, and the Philippines, with people in America. His research ranges from simple exercises involving redrawing a line within a box to brain-scanning technology (“culture gets under the skin,” he jokes before adding, “I find neuroscience indispensable”) and examinations of subsistence agriculture. The Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at Michigan since 2011 now runs the Culture & Cognition Lab at the school’s Psychology Department.
He starts his conversation with interviewer David Edmonds offering a description of a prominent cultural difference between East Asia and Anglo-America – the idea of ‘independence’ and ‘interdependence.’
“In some cultures, particularly in Western traditions, ‘self’ is believed to be the independent entity that is composed of internal attributes, maybe your attitudes, maybe your personality traits and aspirations, which guide your behavior. Social relationships come out of those individual preferences.
“In many other cultures, the conception of the person is much more social and relational. There’s a fundamental belief that humans are humans because they are connected to formal social relationships.”
Kitayama offers some examples of these differences. “Americans tend to believe that what you hear somebody say must be what this person believes. If somebody says ‘yes,’ he must mean yes. But in many countries, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ carry very different meanings, depending on the context.” While someone from, say, the West may realize this on an intellectual level, in practice they often forget and assume a yes, means, well, yes. “We found this fundamental attribution error,” he concludes, “is much less, and often even nonexistent, in East Asian, and particularly Japanese, contexts.”
Or take happiness.
“Oftentimes, we believe that happiness is happiness. If Americans are happy, it must be in the way that Japanese are happy. We try to challenge this conception to see what people might mean when they claim they are happy. One easy way to do this is to ask people to write down what they mean by happiness, reasons for happiness, conditions in which happiness happens. Core elements of happiness, like elation, relaxation, feeling of excitement, are fairly common between U.S. and Japan.”
But what leads to those states are quite different, with Japanese respondents often citing social harmony while Americans cite personal achievement.
In the interview, Kitayama touches on why these differences might have arisen, including one idea that the cultivation of mainstay grains across thousands of years helped create the conditions that led to the cultural traits. The Asian staple of rice, for example, requires a more collective effort – “tight social coordination,” as Kitayama puts it — to raise and harvest. Meanwhile, the Western staple of wheat requires less collaboration. These underlying agrarian requirements for supremely important foodstuffs may in turn, he says, “promote very different ideologies and social structures and institutions which then lay the ground for contemporary culture.”
Kitayama has published widely in English and in Japanese and served as editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies of Behavioral Science at Stanford in 1995 and in 2007, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, inducted as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and served as president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2020.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO PETTER JOHANSSON NOW!
Everyone, it is said, is allowed their own opinion. But what if someone’s own opinion was in fact one foisted on them by someone else, and yet the original opinion holder in turn holds the changeling opinion as their own?
Unlikely? Actually, not so unlikely, as the research of Petter Johansson and Lars Hall into ‘choice blindness’ shows. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Johansson – who with Hall runs the Choice Blindness Laboratory at Sweden’s Lund University – reveals some of the unexpected aspects of self-interpretation and how there’s been a very large natural example in the United States of this blindness in action.
We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” he has determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc.
Johansson starts his discussion with host David Edmonds by giving his and Hall’s first forays into the study of “how we come to know our own minds.” Their work built on others’ research into something called “change blindness,” which describes not noticing a change – even a major one – that occurs before your eyes.
(Inattentional bias – such as the famous gorilla basketball video – is when we miss something obvious but unexpected right before us because we’re focusing on something else in the tableau. “I’ve seen this at conferences on monster-sized screens, when it is practically King Kong walking in the background, but still people miss this.”)
Johansson describes how the research partners ‘magically’ morphed this line of inquiry into studies of what they call “choice blindness” using a card trick. “When you have the appearance of free choice,” he says, “when you have the magician say, ‘Pick a card, any card you want,’ the only thing you know is that the choice is no longer free. This was the aspect we wanted to incorporate into our experiments.”
In the initial experiment, subjects were shown pairs of faces on cards, and asked to choose which they found more attractive. The researcher then handed them that card and asked why they chose it over the other. But sometimes, using sleight of hand, the researcher handed the subject the card with the other face, and asked again why they chose that face.
“Even when the faces were drastically dissimilar, and the [subjects] could look at the cards for as long as they want, only 25 to 30 percent of the participants detect that the switch has been made,” Johansson reveals. “But it’s not only that they pick it up – they then must start constructing reasons why they picked this face,” justifying a choice they didn’t make.
Subsequent experimentation found that opinions on taste, smell, consumer choice, and more could be subject to such blindness. The researchers, for example, set up a tasting station at a local supermarket, and after having the ol’ switcheroo played on their choice of jam, the subjects came up with “similar types of elaborate explanations” for why the jam they didn’t choose was in fact the better one. The researchers also worked with pairs of people, asking them who they might choose to flat with. And here the resulting confabulation was collective.
The researchers also found choice blindness in politics (especially when the other opinion had a reasonable case that could be made). People on the street were asked to participate in survey about a policy position, and the interviewer would respond with “you clearly believe …” in a position they didn’t choose. And as you now will expect, the subjects defended their ‘new’ stance.
“This says something about what a belief is, or an attitude is,” Johansson says. The source of the opinion matters: if you think it comes from you – even when it in fact did not – there must be good reason to hold the opinion. “People don’t like being told what’s right or wrong. But if you can tell yourself what’s right or wrong, it’s much more likely to stick.”
And this can also be outsourced when your “team” makes a call, and partisans “quickly change their own attitudes to match.”
Which brings us to former U.S. President Donald Trump. Under Trump, Johansson says, “It felt like there was four years of showing this point almost every day. Trump would change the policies or long-held beliefs almost every day and Fox and Friends and all these voters would just fall in line and quickly construct arguments why this was the right view all along.”
While this might seem a dour outcome with opinion chameleons calling the shots, Johansson sees a brightside. “It does show we are probably more flexible than we think. We have the ability to change.”
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO AYELET FISHBACH NOW!
“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 abstract. “You need to get to the level of abstractness that is motivating … but not too abstract that it is no longer connected to an action,” Fishbach explains, adding that there must be “a clear connection between the goal and the means.”
However, she continues, research suggests that people — while focused on the ends — tend to scrimp on the means. Fishbach notes research on MBA students found they were willing to pay $23 for a particular book – but only willing to pay $11 for a tote bag that they knew also contained the book. The value of the bag, which was negligible but still extra step to getting the book, was therefore negative. “Which makes no sense,” she acknowledges, “but it illustrates the point.”
Goals, she says, should be things we can “do,” what we can achieve, as opposed to prohibitions on actions, those “do nots” that describe what we should avoid. “Do” prompts, she continues, “are more intrinsically motivating. You are more excited about them. It feels good and right.” Plus, focusing on what we’re avoiding puts that thing in front of mind – which makes it harder to ignore.
Fishbach calls for measuring your “do” activities, setting targets. She cites a study that saw marathon running times in the United States were not being evenly distributed, but clumped around just-before milestone times like three-and-a-half or four hours, suggesting runners pushed themselves to hit their personal targets.
And where there are targets, there can be rewards. “Rewards work better than punishments,” she says, “but they don’t always work in the way they were intended to work.” If we incentivize the wrong things, behavior bends toward the incentive rather than the underlying goal.
Oddly enough, “uncertain incentives seem to work better than known ones.” Fishbach was part of a research team that saw people would work harder for a $1 or $2 prize, with the amount determined by a coin flip, than they were for a $2 guaranteed prize. “The excitement of resolving uncertainty is always better than the reward you are getting.”
Other topics Fishbach addresses in this episode include internal motivations (immediate returns trumped longer-term rewards), how to sustain motivation, and whether we truly learn more from failure than success.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Ayelet Fishbach on Goals and Motivation appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO KATHRYN PAIGE HARDEN NOW!
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 University of Texas. Her first book was 2021’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.
One thing she stresses is that genetic influence on human behavior is not the single-factor ideal youngsters learn about in their first brush with Gregor Mendel and his pea plants.
“Almost nothing we study as psychologists is monogenetic, influenced by one gene. It’s all polygenetic, meaning that there are thousands of genetic variants, each of which has a tiny probabilistic effect. If you add up all of that information, all of that genetic difference, it ends up making a difference for people’s likelihood of developing schizophrenia or doing better on intelligence test scores or having an autism spectrum disorder – but none of these things are influenced by just one gene.”
Plus, that “polygenetic score” varies based on environmental factors, such as whether you were raised in an authoritarian state. “If I had my exact DNA that I have now,” she details, “but I was raised in 1850s France compared to 1980s America, my educational output would be different, obviously, because my gender would have been interacting with those opportunity structures in a different way.”
As those structures evolve into ladders instead of roadblocks, the more utility we can derive from knowing the role of genetics.
“The more we ‘level the playing field,’ the more that people have environments that are rich and conducive to their individual flourishing, the more we should expect to see, and the more in empirical practice we do see, the role of genetic differences in people.”
In the shadow of eugenics and other genetics-based pseudo-sciences legacy, is harnessing that genetic influence for policy use good or bad? As Harden has experienced since her book published, “you can’t really talk about genes and education without fairly quickly running into some contested issues about fairness and equality.”
In fact, she argues that much of her on heritability doesn’t so much answer social science questions as much as it “poses a problem for the social sciences.”
In the podcast Harden discusses the Genome-wide Association Study, which she describes with a laugh as “a giant fishing expedition” in which researchers measure the DNA – genotype – from thousands or even millions of individuals and then measure that across the genome, for what comes down to “ a giant correlational exercise. Which genes are more common in people who are high on a trait versus low on a trait, or who have a disease versus don’t have a disease?”
Harden also addresses the reasons she studies identical twins in her research, the cooption of genetic tropes to advance toxic worldviews, and how race – which she rejects as a proxy for genetic differences — plays out in the real world as opposed to the lab.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics and Educational Attainment appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO DAVID DUNNING NOW!
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 real hard problem with DYOR is when do you know when to stop: you go and you look at a couple of web pages, and ‘Well, you’ve learned something! Terrific!’ But you don’t know how much there is behind it that you still need to learn.”
For the poets in the room, it’s reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s observation:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.”
One driver of DYOR, Dunning adds, is the idea that gaining (and deploying) knowledge is one’s own responsibility, which pretty much runs counter to science, which sees gaining knowledge as a collective enterprise.
One piece of collective effort in which Dunning has made a very public mark is in describing what’s come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for Dunning and fellow social psychologist Justin Kruger of New York University, after work they originally described two decades ago in “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The popular definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect, Dunning explains, is that “people who are incompetent or unskilled or not expert in a field lack expertise to recognize that they lack expertise. So they come to conclusions, decisions, opinions that they think are just fine when they’re, well, wrong.”
Dunning and Kruger’s initial research was based on simple tests – of grammar, logical thinking, classical psychology quizzes, even sense of humor – asking subjects how well they think they’re doing relative to everyone else. They found that the bottom 25 percent of participants tended to think they were doing above average. “But no.”
“To know what you don’t know,” he offers, “you need to know what you need to know to realize that your thinking diverges from that.”
It’s not true in every endeavor, he adds. “I’m a terrible golfer,” Dunning says. “And I’m fully aware that I‘m a terrible golfer!” The effect tends to show up when the skill of assessing outcomes is roughly similar to the skill of achieving outcomes. So when your golf ball flies into the nearby body of water, you don’t need special skills to know that’s bad.
Becoming an expert in everything is out of the question; the real skill will be in identifying who is a legitimate expert and drawing on their insights. (And the right expert, Dunning notes “is the right experts. With an S on the end.”)
For the record, the pair – who just received the 2023 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for their Dunning-Kruger effect work – did not name the concept after themselves, although, as Dunning says, they’re “tickled pink that our names will forever be associated with the nincompoops, incompetent ignorant cranks, if you will.”
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect appeared first on Social Science Space.
Harvard University economic historian Claudia Goldin studies the origins, causes and persistence of te gender pay gap in the United States, which she discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast.
The post Claudia Goldin on the Gender Pay Gap appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
The post Will Hutton on the State of Social Science appeared first on Social Science Space.
Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture.
The post Batja Mesquita on Culture and Emotion appeared first on Social Science Space.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Bobby Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends.
The post Bobby Duffy on Generation Myths appeared first on Social Science Space.
Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them. That’s a key message from psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer.
The post Gerd Gigerenzer on Decision Making appeared first on Social Science Space.
A lack of ability of numbers is a serious issue in the world, in particular in the developed world, says Ellen Peters. And she's trying to do something about that.
The post Ellen Peters on Numeracy appeared first on Social Science Space.
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.
The post Jonathan Haskel on Intangibles appeared first on Social Science Space.
Sheila Jasanoff is a pioneer in the field of STS. That acronym can be unpacked as either ‘science and technology studies’ or ‘science, technology and society.’ Jasanoff -- who describes herself as a sociologist of knowledge and a constructivist, trained in law, working in the tradition of the interpretive social sciences – is content with either use.
The post Sheila Jasanoff on Science and Technology Studies appeared first on Social Science Space.
Behavioral economist John List talks about his work on field experiments and how research done in the natural world can lead to insights that otherwise might be hard to tease out in a lab.
The post John List on Economic Field Experiments appeared first on Social Science Space.
Kathelijne Koops, a biological anthropologist at the University of Zurich, works to determine what makes us human. And she approaches this quest by intensely studying the use of tools by other species across sub-Saharan Africa.
The post Kathelijne Koops on Chimps and Tools appeared first on Social Science Space.
The idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. […]
The post George Loewenstein on Hot and Cold Affect appeared first on Social Science Space.
In this podcast, Northwestern University's Joel , Mokyr tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, “I use economics to understand history, and I use history to understand economics.”
The post Joel Mokyr on Economic Lessons from the Past appeared first on Social Science Space.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, social anthropologist Karin Barber offers a specific case study of the application of the verbal arts by examining in depth some of the genres common in the Yoruba-speaking areas of Western Africa.
The post Karin Barber on Verbal Arts appeared first on Social Science Space.
COVID-19 has changed everything, including how we work (and to be more precise, are employed). But in order to best […]
The post Melanie Simms on Work appeared first on Social Science Space.
Jeffrey Ian Ross, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Baltimore, is one of the originators of the concept of 'convict criminology.'
The post Jeffrey Ian Ross on Convict Criminology appeared first on Social Science Space.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Molefi Kete Asante offers an insiders view of the growth of the Afrocentric paradigm, from the founding of the Journal of Black Studies a half century ago to the debates over critical race theory today.
The post Molefi Kete Asante on Afrocentrism appeared first on Social Science Space.
There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person?
The post Jennifer Richeson on Perceptions of Racial Inequality appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO JENNIFER LEE NOW!
The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the ‘China virus’ and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States.
Columbia University sociologist Jennifer Lee has been answering many of those questions her entire academic career, and across four books, dozens of journal articles and untold media appearances. One of the first questions she answers in this Social Science Bites podcast is who are ‘Asian Americans’? As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, “No one comes to the United States and identifies as an Asian American.” Instead, if asked, they are likely to identify with national origin or ethnicity – say Chinese, or Japanese, or Filipino – rather than with the umbrella construct of Asian American.
“’Asian American,’” Lee explains, “was originally conceived as a political identity by student activists at Berkeley in the 1960s who coined the term as a unifying pan-ethnic identity to advocate for Asian American studies in university curricula and to build coalitions with other marginalized groups.” Since then, it evolved into a demographic category, and in 1997 the U.S. Census Bureau grouped together people from East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia under the classification of ‘Asian.’ (Those regions, of course, don’t include everyone from the continent of Asia – where are the Kazakhs and the Uzbeks, for example – and does include people from the islands adjacent to the land mass – Japanese, Malaysians, Filipinos.)
“These are groups don’t have a whole lot in common in terms of language, culture, religion, history,” Lee notes, but they are bound by various forms of exclusion in the U.S. But their presence in the United States is growing rapidly. Combined, Asians are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S.; their population is up 27 percent in the last decade to about 23 million people, or 7 percent of the total U.S. population.
Immigration is a key component of that growth, notes Lee, who herself emigrated to the U.S. with her Korean parents when she was 3. Some two out of three current Asian Americans are foreign-born (four out of five among Asian American adults), she explains, and continuing immigration replenishes the cohort of ‘new’ Asian Americans. That, she suggests, will keep the category of Asian American alive for some time.
Immigration also contributes to the trope – a trope Lee rejects – that “‘Asians have some set of values that make them successful.” Instead, she argues that due to who has emigrated, America “legally engineered this idea that Asians are successful.”
Asian immigrants coming to the United States are not just a random sample of the population in their countries of origin; they are extremely educated, more likely to hold a B.A. than those who don’t immigrate, and they’re also more likely to have a college degree than the U.S. mean. It’s this ‘hyper selectivity’ that largely accounts for educational and economic accomplishments of America’s Asians, she argues here and in her latest award-winning book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, written with Min Zhou.
Lee offers several data points during the podcast to buttress the idea that innate cultural values are not driving success. For one thing, the distribution of Asian American accomplishments are not evenly distributed: Indian Americans have exceptionally high educational achievements while Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong Americans have relatively low graduation rates. Plus, Lee says, if ‘values’ drove the success, we’d see the same successes in the immigrants’ Asian countries of origin or in other areas where Asian diasporas are represented – and we don’t.
Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia, past president of the Eastern Sociological Society, and this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to the Field Award from the American Sociological Association’s Asia and American Section. She is or has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Fulbright Scholar to Japan. She will join the board of trustees for the Russell Sage Foundation this fall.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Jennifer Lee on Asian Americans appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO MARTHA NEWSON NOW!
Despite being someone who doesn’t “particularly enjoy the game,” cognitive anthropologist Martha Newson is drawn to football. “Football is one of the most exciting games to watch as an anthropologist,” she explains in this Social Science Bites podcast. “I’m not watching the ball go around the pitch – I’m watching the fans. I’m transfixed by them! You go through all the emotions in a single match.”
Newson, linked to the universities of Oxford and Kent, describes for interviewer David Edmonds how fans of football often fuse their own identities into a tightly bonded group (even as they retain their individuality). This “identity fusion,” in which fans feel completely immersed in their group, is widely seen outside of sports. Some obvious venues are national identity, religion, or family group, places where individuals will go to extreme ends to defend or protect our group. “The research has expanded to look at how we can fuse to a value or an idea,” Newson notes.
But studying football (or soccer) offers some pragmatic advantages to the researcher. For one, the bonding is very public and very passionate. Fused fans will tattoo themselves, for example, an indelible statement that demonstrates they’re much easier to access and observe than say a terrorist cell or secretive political group.
And football fandom is diverse culturally and geographically. One study Newson is working on currently taps into fanbases in Indonesia, Australian, Britain, Brazil and Spain. While there are differences in each country, “the love of the fans is quite consistent.” (And it is also love for the fans, Newson says, since it seems to be fusion to their fellow fans, and not necessarily the team or town, that’s the real driving force of cohesion.)
Newson has taken an innovative and interdisciplinary approach in her research, conducting surveys of fans, measuring their physiological responses and even drawing on existing and disparate databases like police records of fan violence.
And while violence or hostility may be linked in the popular imagination with extreme fandom, Newson’s research offers a more nuanced view. When someone feels their group is being threatened, like a mother bear they may wade in to defend their group. But when things are pleasant, like that same bear, so are they. “Fused fans preferred to be cooperative and altruistic to their rivals over being hostile toward them,” Newson has found. “The more fused you are, you are more likely to be violent than the less-fused fans,” she adds, “but that’s only because you’re looking out for your group in some way.”
Identity fusion research also finds that having bonded is a lifetime commitment, regardless of losses (and perhaps abetted by them!). “Once you are fused, you don’t unfuse – fusion really sticks,” Newson explains, adding that the primacy of the bond may wax and wane over time.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Martha Newson on Identity Fusion appeared first on Social Science Space.
LISTEN TO OLIVIER SIBONY NOW!
When human judgment enters the picture, so too will errors in human judgment. Think of this as “noise,” just as you might think of a signal-to-noise ratio in an audio signal. And just as in listening to music, this noise is not a feature, but a flaw.
In the context of human action, management professor at HEC Paris and former McKinsey senior partner Olivier Sibony defines “noise” as the unwanted variability in human judgment. “When you look at how people make a professional judgment, there is an average error … and that is what has traditionally been called bias in statistics and in the study of judgment. But when you have already identified bias, there is something left, and that is the unwanted variability of errors, that is noise.”
In a new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, by psychologist and Bites alumnus Daniel Kahneman, Sibony, and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein (author of Nudge), the trio look at the lottery that noise creates in social outcomes, and discuss ways to practice better “decision hygiene” to prevent noise from infecting important outcomes. Sibony spoke with interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast about noise as a concept, the types of noise, why acknowledging it matters, and what we can do to avoid it. This is an area of great interest for Sibony, whose own research centers on reducing the impact of behavioral bias.
“Bias and noise,” Sibony explains, “are mathematically equivalent in the effect they have on error. Noise causes exactly as much error as bias does for the same quantity of noise or bias.
“And so, if you can reduce noise, you can reduce error.” Or put another way, make better decisions.
He gives the example of insurance claims adjusters. “When you look at how two of these people judge the same case, what price they set on the same insurance policy or the price they set on the same claim, and you ask them how much they expect to disagree, they say, ‘Of course we’re not going to be in perfect agreement; it’s a matter of judgment. But hey! We are all highly qualified, competent people, so we are more or less interchangeable depending on who is available.’”
If you ask the adjusters, or their bosses, about how much variability they expect, the answers come back around 10 percent. And if you ask business executives in general what they would expect the difference to be – and Sibony talked to hundreds — the answers came back at 10 to 15 percent.
In real life, he reveals, the differences vary by as much as 55 percent.
This isn’t just some peculiarity of insurance. “This was,” Sibony said, “something we found everywhere we looked!” He offers many examples: assessments by financial professionals, x-rays read by skilled doctors, professors grading essays, and many more. What he terms “big differences” appeared repeatedly
“More worrisome, perhaps, if you look at how judges sentence people who have been found guilty of a crime … [W]hen the average sentence is seven years in prison, the average difference, the mean difference between two judges is three-and-a-half.” And so, as Sibony notes, when appearing before two judges, you’ve already been sentenced to five years, or to nine years, “just based on the luck of the draw.”
This variability in outcomes, matters for several reasons: fairness (“when similarly located people are not treated similarly, it is unfair”); credibility of the underlying institutions; and because we’re routinely making bad (or at least not the best) decisions.
In addition to teaching strategy, decision making and problem solving at HEC Paris, Sibony is an associate fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. His book Vous Allez Commettre Une Terrible Erreur ! (published in English as You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!) was awarded the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize in 2019 for best management book. He is also a knight in the French Order of the Légion d’Honneur.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
The post Olivier Sibony on Decision-Making appeared first on Social Science Space.