Social Science Bites

Metrics on the average living standards from the best-off countries in the world (say, Norway) to the worst-off (perhaps the Central African Republic) vary by a factor of 40 to 50. So notes James Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict at the University of Chicago and author, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

What explains the living-standards gap?

In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds posits -- and Robinson rebuts -- several traditional explanations for this inequality.

While raw data shows that countries closer to the equator do more poorly than countries further away, Robinson acknowledges, that correlation doesn’t extend to causation. “We try to show in our research in many different ways that things like geography or climate or temperature don’t really predict patterns of economic development.” Instead, institutional factors like colonialism or the slave trade are more likely to be culprits.

Cultural factors? Robinson, the institute director for the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, suggests that’s wrong on its face. Drawing on his experience researching and teaching in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he hasn’t seen cultures that reward indolence. “People work pretty hard in Zimbabwe,” he offers as an example. ”They get up early and it’s a struggle to make ends meet in a place like that when there’s so many impediments to prosperity and so many blocks to incentives and opportunity.” He adds that incentives to wealth creation matter, so knowing “some elites are going to expropriate the fruits of your labor” serves as a huge disincentive.

Certainly having natural resources must play a role. “This is sort of an accounting relationship,” Robinson counters. “Yes, it’s true that Kuwait is sitting on a big pile of oil, but I guess the relevant question would be is, ‘How rich will Kuwait be when the oil disappears?’”

What does make a difference, Robinson insists, are institutions. Looking at a natural experiment like the Korean Peninsula, where a geographically, culturally and linguistically homogeneous population was walled off into two separate nations, supports his view that institutions are the key to understanding the uneven outcomes.

But that creates the question of how to define what an ‘institution’ is. “Our view is that you have to take a pretty broad view of what institutions are. ... When we talk about institutions, we mean rules that humans create, which structure their interactions and incentives and opportunities. But I think those rules can be kind of informal – almost like social norms – not just written down in the constitution.”

And the institutions best at creating economic success, he continues, are the most inclusive ones. “Inclusivity is about harnessing all that latent talent, giving people opportunities, allowing them to get loans, enforce contracts.” Given his belief in the importance of inclusive institutions, Robinson tells Edmonds nonetheless that his goal remains more to describe the world rather than to change it (a “morally fraught” undertaking). But that description, he adds, includes a possible route forward – a route signposted for those in the less-rich world to take, amend or reject on their own accord.

Trained as an economist who “deprogrammed” himself from thinking as an economist, Robinson obtained his PhD from Yale University, his master’s at the University of Warwick, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before coming to Chicago, he was the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government at Harvard University and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In addition to Why Nations Fail, Robinson and Acemoglu wrote Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and in 2013 Robinson was named one of the “World Thinkers 2013” by Prospect magazine.

Direct download: Robinson_MixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:38pm PDT

Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. But apart from its propagandist provenance, misinformation and disinformation in our media diets is a genuine threat. Sociologist Nick Adams, in this Social Science Bites podcast, offers hope that a tool he’s developed can improve the media literacy of the populace.

That tool, known as Public Editor, allows trained volunteers to do one of seven assessment tasks within 15 minutes of looking at passages from a news article. Several volunteers will answer a series of questions based on the passage that’s meant to elicit information about the passage’s logical accuracy and critical thinking, and a ‘credibility score’ to be posted on the article results.

Public Editor, Adams tells interview David Edmonds, will display “article labels that will show and point out for a news reader, as they are reading, inferential mistakes, argumentative fallacies, psychological biases.” And because this will all be done within 30 minutes of the article arriving at Public Editor – and hence before readers can allow their biases to cement around what they’ve read -- “this is going to change how people read the news and raise their media literacy.”

While there will be naysayers, Adams defends Public Editor’s intent and structure. “This whole endeavor is about building legitimacy, building trust, through a social process. We’ve codified that social process, and substantiated it, in code, in software, in a way that’s totally transparent.”

Adams’ wider interests dovetail with Public Editor – his interest in social science technology and on social issues. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, where he founded the Computational Text Analysis Working Group at the university’s D-Lab and the interdisciplinary Text Across Domains initiative at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is currently the CEO of Thusly, Inc, which developed TagWorks, a web-based content analysis software for researchers.

“Right now,” he tells Edmonds, “we have more words to analyze than we’ve ever had in the history of history. That’s because we’re generating so many every single day but also because we’re digitizing ancient records going back millennia. As a social scientist,” he adds, “I’m really excited to get my hands on that data and get rich information out of it.”

Explaining that “rich data” can – but doesn’t have to be – “big data,” Adams drew an example from his own work.

“So I might be looking at something like trying to understand police and protester interactions by looking at the Occupy movement. And I can look at 8,000 news articles, which is not very much – it’s not even going to tax your laptop to process that amount of data. But when you start to put sociological concepts into the data as labels that you can count and then put into time series, multi-level models, you’re starting to talk about very rich data that afford you the ability to understand social processes like we couldn’t before.”

Direct download: AdamsMixSesMMixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:21pm PDT

Andrew Leigh would take a daily a multivitamin, he says, until he learned that a randomized controlled trial, or RCT, found no increase in lifespan linked to taking them. So he stopped. Leigh isn’t a nutritionist, he’s an economist. But more to the point, Leigh is also an unrepentant ‘randomista,’ which is what he calls researchers who use RCT’s to tackle thorny issues of public concern. (Leigh is also a politician, 2010 sitting since as the member of Australia’s Parliament for the Division of Fenner, a Canberra suburb.)

The word ‘randomista,’ Leigh tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcasts, was coined by Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (also a Bites alumnus)  “as “a term almost of abuse – but I’ve turned it into a compliment!” (It’s also the title of his new book, Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World.)

“Deaton had noticed that there were randomized trials proliferating across development economics,” Leigh explains, “and felt that in some areas they were becoming almost theory-free. I think it’s perhaps a reasonable criticism in some parts of development economics, but certainly for most questions, I think we’re doing too few randomized trials instead of too many.”

For Leigh, the proper definition of a randomista is “someone who believes we can find answers to important questions by tossing a coin and putting people into a treatment and control group, comparing the outcome, and then using the randomization to get a true causal effect.”

Randomized controlled trials have been used for years in drug testing, but are increasingly being used in business, crime prevention, education and social science. The origin of RCTs is a matter of some dispute, but Leigh uses the scurvy trials of James Lind, whose apples-to-apples comparison of various anti-scorbutic therapies in vogue in the 18th century allowed the Royal Navy to beat its most deadly enemy – yes Bonaparte, but in reality scurvy itself.

These days, RCTs are used as much to kill bad policies as they are to save lives. Leigh offers a litany of popular social programs that actual research demonstrated had the opposite effect of what they intended. For example, trials showed the Scared Straight program not only didn’t keep nonserious juvenile offenders from committing more serious crimes, it may have increased the odds they would. Other RCTs showed that while microcredit has some benefits, it doesn’t seem to improve household income, keep kids in school or improve women’s lot in life.

“Randomized trials are where scientific literacy meets modesty,” Leigh quips.

There are, of course, success stories, too, and Leigh cites drug courts and restorative justice as two public safety wins endorsed by RCTs. Leigh even used an RCT himself in naming his book, buying ads with various titles on Google to fine which resonated most. Total cost? About $50 and an hour of effort.

“I am aware that I look a little bit like a man with a hammer ranging around hoping to find nails. If you want to know about the impact of denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, a randomized trial is probably not your best way of working it out. But there are surprising areas in which you can figure things out.”

Before Leigh ran for Parliament Leigh was a professor at the Australian National University. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. His books include Disconnected (2010), Battlers and Billionaires (2013), The Economics of Just About Everything (2014), The Luck of Politics (2015), and Choosing Openness: Why Global Engagement is Best for Australia (2017).

 

Direct download: LeighMixSesW_Mixdown_M.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:25pm PDT

Diane Reay grew up in a council estate in a coal mining part of Derbyshire in England’s East Midlands. Those working-class roots dogged her from the start of her formal schooling.

“I had to fight not to be in the bottom set; I was told that girls like me don’t go to university,” Reay, now a renowned Cambridge University education professor, tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “I think that spurred a strong interest in class inequalities and I became, like many working-class girls of my age, a primary school teacher.”

She in turn taught working-class children. Her primary motivation “was to make things better for them than it had been for me as a school pupil.”

To which, she adds, “and I failed. I failed for a whole lot of reasons, but mainly to do with poor policy and an increasing focus on performativity and competition rather than fulfilling a child’s potential.”

Those experiences in turn had a big influence on her research interests into educational inequality and embrace of social justice. Some of her specific investigations have looked at boys' underachievement, supplementary schooling of black students, access to higher education, female management in schools, and pupil peer group cultures.

One thing has become clear to her across this research - “It’s primarily working-class children who turn out to be losers in the educational system.” Whether it’s through the worst-funded schools, least-qualified teachers, most-temporary teaching arrangements or narrowest curricula, students from working class backgrounds in the United Kingdom (and the United States) draw the shortest educational straws.

Reay, under the banner of Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council, is currently directing a project explores choice in education and how that affects white, middle-class identity. Her research is qualitative, albeit at a large scale (she tells Edmonds she’s done 1,170 interviews). “I recognize that qualitative research can’t tell us the entire story in toto. That’s why I’m always very keen to use statistical data and quantitative research to support my qualitative analysis.” Using that statistical material serves a check, too, on confirmation bias she might bring to a research question.

That said, she adds, “Some very important things can’t actually be counted. They can’t be enumerated. And they’re about the quality of the learning experience, the quality of the child’s engagement with peers in the classroom, and with curriculum. I think this focus on counting means we have a very reductive curriculum.”

That policymakers see education as solely a means of preparing young people for the labor market, and not as an end in itself, as “inherently problematic.” The perceived need to measure all outputs all the time and to focus on making future employees instead of future citizens are pernicious, Reay says, but there are policy-based remedies. She suggests, for example, mixed ability teaching, delaying assessment until children reach 16, collaborative learning and teaching critical thinking skills as counteracting some of the worst problems of the current system.

This year, Policy Press published Reay’s book Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes, which draws from 500 of those interviews and a healthy heaping of statistical evidence supporting her conclusions. Reay is also an executive editor of British Journal of Sociology of Education, and is on the editorial boards of Cultural Sociology and the Journal of Education Policy.

Direct download: ReayMixSes_M.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:00am PDT

Explicit statements of prejudice are less common than in the past (even if they are still easily found). “I see that as a mark of progress,” says social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. But peer a little below the surface, she adds, “even though you might reject an explicit bias, you actually have the implicit version of it.”

“The brain is an association-seeking machine,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It puts things together that repeatedly get paired in our experience. Implicit bias is just another word for capturing what those are when they concern social groups.

“So, when I see that my mom puts out butter when she puts out bread, the two are associated in some way. But I also see other things in the world. I see as I walk down the street who the poor people are and who the rich people are, and where the one lives and where the other lives.”

Banaji explains her work on implicit bias and the efforts she and her colleagues made in creating the widely recognized implicit association test, or IAT, which helps ferret out this "thumbprint of the culture on our brain.” (See and take the test here.)

That thumb imprints on Banaji herself. She relates a time when she was scheduled for surgery and just assumed the young woman next to her wouldn’t be her anesthesiologist and must instead be a nurse – even though Banaji if asked would readily say that young women absolutely could be any sort of doctor. Still, she asked the “nurse” to relay a message to the anesthesiologist, only to learn the “nurse” was the anesthesiologist. “As I always tell my students when I came back from surgery, these stereotypes are not good for us: you do not want to be in surgery with an angry anesthesiologist working on you!”

She credits the genesis of the IAT with a “stroke of genius” by her colleague Anthony Greenwald (with whom she wrote 2013’s Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People). “It’s based on the idea that two things that are routinely thought of as linked together will be easier to pair as a result, while things that aren’t commonly – or ever -- linked will require longer to pair them. The pairing in the initial implicit association test was with a deck of cards that include four suites – two with sets of faces, dark- and light-skinned, and two with words, positive and negative. In the classic result, test-takers can pair the white faces with positive words faster, as they can the peoples of color faces with negative words. Switch it up – people of color with good words, say – and there’s a measurable delay. It’s also been applied to many societal concerns, such as biases related to gender, body size, age, sexuality, and others.

The IAT has shown some predictive power about how biases translate into action in individuals, but it’s no ‘test for racism,’ she stresses.

“I would be the first to say that you can never use the IAT and say, ‘Well, we’re going to use it to hire somebody,’ or ‘We’re going to use it to put someone on the jury.’ One can have these implicit biases and also have a big fat prefrontal cortex that makes us behave in ways that are opposed to the bias.”

Banaji’s contributions to society have been widely recognized in a number of notable fellowships, such as the Society for Experimental Psychologists, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and in 2016, the Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) William James Fellow Award for lifetime contributions to the basic science of psychology. (She was president of APS in 2010-11.)

 

Direct download: BanajiMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:53pm PDT

While generally accepted that inequality is a bad thing, how exactly is that so? Beyond philosophical arguments, what is it about inequality that makes it bad? That’s a question that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett examined at a societal scale in their 2009 book The Spirit Level and have continued at an individual level with their newest book, The Inner Level. The volume’s subtitles help explain the evolution; Spirit’s is “Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger” while Inner’s is “How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing.”

In this Social Science Bites podcast, social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson lays out the case that inequality should be fought specifically because it fosters a litany of ill effects. (In 2013, his partner Pickett laid out the case for equality in her own Bites podcast.)

“In The Spirit Level,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds, “we showed that in more-unequal countries, with bigger income gaps between rich and poor, there is more of a whole range of health and social problems. Life expectancy tends to be lower, more obesity, higher homicide rate, more people in prison, more drug problems, more mental illness. Basically what we showed was that all the problems that have what we call social gradients, problems that are more common down on the social ladder, get worse when you increase the status differences between us.”

What’s surprising, he adds, is that these negatives don’t just punch down – while the effects are stronger among the poor in fact they affect broad swathes of the population. Being well off does not inoculate you from the malign effects of inequality.

Knowing that, Wilkinson and Pickett, armed with additional research that’s taken place in the last eight years, started to look at how that occurs. Wilkinson said at the time Spirit published they didn’t feel they had enough details to lay out the cause, but their hunch was that it revolved around status, “how inequality creates, or strengthens, feelings of superiority and inferiority.”

As he explains here, based on massive and repeated questionnaires, we know that status anxiety – and its ill effects such as worsening health -- affects everyone, the super-rich and the dirt-poor, in the most unequal countries. Status anxiety, he suggests becomes an ironic unifying characteristic across an unequal landscape, which in turn leads him to speculate that if this were recognized it could an earlier step toward creating a more equal society.

The podcast concludes with Wilkinson offering advice on creating that society by addressing income inequality by developing “economic democracy,” since an egalitarian society reduces these negative effects described above and makes us happier and healthier overall.

Wilkinson is professor emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, an honorary professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and visiting professor at University of York. He co-founded The Equality Trust, with support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and remains a member if the trust’s board.

 

Direct download: RichardWilkindsonMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:45am PDT

How did humans diverge so markedly from animals? Apart from physical things like our “physical peculiarities,” as experimental psychologist Celia Heyes puts it, or our fine motor control, there’s something even more fundamentally – and cognitively -- different.

“I suppose at the broadest level,” Heyes tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “we differ from animals because we are so ultra-social, so intensely cooperative. And as a result, we’ve transformed our environments, for good or ill, more radically than any other species through things like agriculture, technology, science, but also, law, trade to the point of economies and finance, fine arts, sports, all of these things.”

Heyes, a senior research fellow in theoretical life sciences at All Souls College, University of Oxford, argues that we’ve evolved those differences, or “innate modules.” That may sound like evolutionary psychology, which suggests that many of these traits are pre-coded into humans -- “we get them for free,” as Heyes translates -- and therefore are minimally dependent on what we experience in childhood. While Heyes appreciates the evolutionary aspect of natural selection and agrees there is some sort of genetic starter kit,” but she says the locus of evolution is not genetic but cultural.

She points to things like cross-cultural differences in beliefs and behavior or the ability to read, which hasn’t had time to be genetically encoded (even if it can be observed lighting up only certain parts of the brain) but it can have evolved culturally.

Heyes’ research and theories place her all over the academic map, but she describes herself as “part biologist, part philosopher, but I am first and foremost a psychologist.” A fellow of the British Academy and president of the Experimental Psychology Society, her latest book is the brand new Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking from Harvard University Press.

 

Direct download: HeyesMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

In determining what makes a successful prison, where would you place ‘trust’? Alison Liebling, a criminologist at the University of Cambridge and the director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre, would place it at the top spot. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, she believes what makes a prison good is the existence and the practice of trust.

As this recording makes clear, these aren’t starry-eyed recommendations from a novice observer. Liebling has years of going into dozens of individual lockups, and believes that good prisons are possible. “A good prison,” she details, “is one where prisoners feel safe and the environment is not threatening – and therefore they can concentrate on their own personal development.” That environment means inmates are “reasonably decently treated, not worried about getting from A to B, the regime works in a fairly predictable and clear way, and the staff are approachable,” among other things.  

While she has met with ‘why bother?’-type resistance from hard-boiled staff and prisoners surrounding her research, her retort is quick and usually effective: “There isn’t any better method than research for authentically describing this invisible world.”

The best prisons, she says, are the ones that “see prisoners as people first.” This isn’t a prescription to be naïve, and she subscribes to what Onora O’Neill describes as “intelligent trust” in dealing with prisoners. Good corrections officers already intuit the concept, she adds: they are “subtle readers of human behavior ... making fine judgements about gradations of trust.”

For her research, Liebling has adopted “appreciative inquiry,” which she came too almost accidentally while trying to discover a way to describe what works in a prison and how do prisons differ from each other.  (“It wasn’t a research tool, or at least it wasn’t until I corrupted it!” she jokes.) Just as plants follow the sun, appreciative inquiry also follows the heliotropic principle, trying to identify and then support what gives life energy to people or organizations. “So instead of telling me about your offending,” she would ask, “tell me something you’re most proud of.”

Talk about working in the prison environment (“I always felt really at home”), the idea that prisoners themselves my feel vulnerable, how to build trust, and how prison policies have improved over Liebling’s career – and how that improvement has stalled

Liebling has published several books on these topics, such as 1992’s Suicides in Prison, 2004’s Prisons and their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life and The Effects of Imprisonment with Shadd Maruna in 2005, and Legitimacy and Criminal Justice, an edited volume with Justice Tankebe, in 2013.

Direct download: LieblingMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:52pm PDT

While they aren’t as unpopular as politicians or journalists, people who work with statistics come in for their share of abuse. “Figures lie and liars figure,” goes one maxim. And don’t forget, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

But some people are the good guys, doing their best to combat the flawed or dishonest use of numbers. One of those good guys is David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk in the Statistical Laboratory in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and current president of the Royal Statistical Society. Spiegelhalter, the subject of this Social Science Bites podcast, even cops to being a bit of an “evidence policeman” because on occasion even he spends some of his time “going around telling people off for bad behavior.”

There is bad behavior to police. “There’s always been the use of statistics and numbers and facts as rhetorical devices to try and get people’s opinion across, and to in a sense manipulate our emotions and feelings on things,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds. “People might still think that statistics and numbers are cold, hard facts but they’re soft, fluffy things. They can be manipulated and changed, made to look big, made to look small, all depending on the story that someone wants to tell.”

Asked at one point if he even accepts that there are ‘facts,’ Spiegelhalter gives a nuanced yes. “I’m not going to get into the whole discussion about ‘what is truth,’ although it’s amazing how quick you do go down that line. No, there are facts, and I really value them.”

Despite that policing role, Spiegelhalter explain, his methods are less prescriptive and more educational, working to get others to ask key questions such as “What am I not being told?” and “Why I am hearing this?” The goal is less to track down every bit of fake news in the world, and more to inoculate others against its influence.

One part of that, for example, is determining what communicators and organizations to trust. Spiegelhalter, acknowledging his debt to Onora O'Neill, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, argues that organizations themselves shouldn’t strive to be trusted, but to show trustworthy attributes. This goes beyond things like “fishbowl transparency,” where you lard your website with every imaginable factoid, but actively making sure people can get to your information, understand it and they can assess how reliable it is.

That ‘understanding’ part of the process is what Spigelhalter pursues as part of chairing the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, which is dedicated to improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society. In that role he’s become a public face of honest use of numbers, as evidenced by his role as presenter of the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance and Climate Change by Numbers. His own research focuses on health-related use of statistics and statistical methods, and while that might include Bayesian inference using Gibbs samplinig, it can also encompass the focus of his 2015 book, Sex by Numbers.

Direct download: SpiegelhalterMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

 

Use social media for any amount of time and eventually you will come across something that’s designed to both appeal to the angels of your better nature and asking to make a (small) effort to support or propagate this appeal. The prime example of recent years is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

When these charitable appeals take off, that’s when social psychologist Sander van der Linden perks up. He studies ‘viral altruism,’ and in this Social Science Bites podcast he details to host David Edmonds how he studies this phenomenon.

“The idea,” van der Linden says, “is that you can ‘catch’ altruism in a behavioral way. When someone acts altruistically online, you catch that behavior as a social contagion, which then causes you to adopt that behavior and encourage other people in your network to also engage in that behavior, which then spreads quickly and rapidly.”

Van der Linden observes and describes the mechanics of these processes using something he calls SMArT, breaking down the online altruistic efforts by their social influence, moral imperative, affective reactions and translational impact.

This yardstick allows van der Linden to draw conclusions from what can be a smallish data set of unique events. SMArT allows van der Linden to find shared similarities that create body of data and which can be tracked. For example, van der Linden, is currently looking at the #MeToo movement to see if it fits into his scope of inquiry.

Van der Linden is a social psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge where he directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a Fellow in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Churchill College, Cambridge and an affiliated researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University.

 

 

Direct download: SanderMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:15pm PDT

The Western feud over “nature vs. nurture” dates back at least to an essay by John Locke in 1690. The idea that it’s an absolute binary – that our actions are determined solely by one or the other – is thankfully passé. And yet, in an academic setting, with scholars safe in their silos, the tension continues in practice if not in conversation.

For a bit of anecdotal evidence, look at Melinda Mills, the head of department and Nuffield Professor of Sociology at Oxford University. She studied the sociology and demography of families and family formation – things like when to choose to have a child, what a women’s age is when she first gives birth, or the number of children someone might have. “I was,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “looking at them in a very socially deterministic way. I was looking at things such as childcare institutions or gender equality or the kind of jobs that women and men have, and was childcare available and affordable and ... I was using those as explanations and predictors.

“And then I met some biologists and geneticists.”

Over drinks that day, these fellow researchers made fun of Mills: “This is Melinda and she studies fertility, but she doesn’t think it has any biological basis.” Much hilarity ensued. But the gibes bore a pleasant fruit – Mills broke free of the limits on her scholarship with which she had shackled herself. Her studies and collaborations now combined social science and molecular genetics; she now studies ‘sociogenomics,’ with a particular emphasis on how these interplay in the areas of inequality and life course. In that vein, she is the principal investigator of the SOCIOGENOME project and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods SOCGEN project.

She notes that each part of the triad – social scientists, biologists and geneticists bring their real science to the table. “Wellbeing, depression, reproductive choice – [social scientist] are very good at measuring that. We then work with biologists and geneticists, who determine genetic loci, and then with biologists, who determine the biological function of those genes.

“As social scientists, we then create a score, your ‘reproductive score,’ and we add those to our statistical models together with the social science variables  -- the usual suspects lie your family background or your partner or educational level – and we add those together with the genetic data and we look at the interaction between those.” And, as you’ll learn, there can be surprises for all concerned. Geneticists, for example, might assume that genetic loci are universal ... but are they?

The effort also harnesses the big data of genetics technology, tapping into databases like the UK Bio Bank or the direct-to-consumer testing services like 23andMe.

In addition to her sociogenomics projects, Mills is a leader of the Working Package on Childlessness and Assisted Reproductive Technology in the European Families And Societies network, editor-in-chief of the European Sociological Review, and a fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.

Direct download: MillsMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

That some people are just naturally gifted at mathematics is pretty well accepted as conventional wisdom. With enlightened teaching we can all become adequate at math, or maths, and should set expectations accordingly. That, says Jo Boaler, who is a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University, is hogwash. Although she uses the more refined terminology of calling such thinking “a myth.”

“The neuroscience is showing us petty clearly that there’s no such thing as a maths brain, even though so many people believe that, particularly in the Western culture,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. She doesn’t fully reject the notion about enlightened teaching, though, only the bit about merely being adequate: “If you were taught the right way ... you could excel at all levels of maths in school.”

She describes how brain pathways are formed when we learn something, and the agglomeration of those pathways are what makes one adept, and not some inherent expertise. “This isn’t to say everyone is born with the same brain,” Boaler explains, “but experiences we have much more potential to shape brains than anything we’re born with. What we’re born with is really eclipsed by the millions of experiences we have.”

Her own experiences. Apart from once having been a mathematics teacher in London comprehensive schools, include following hundreds of students over many years in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Some of those students sitting in rows in traditional classrooms, others actively exploring mathematical concepts while untethered from desks. This research has enabled to bust a number of maths myths, such as that boys are better at math than girls – turns out that boys do better at testing, but not in school performance. Boaler notes that mindset plays a key role in learning, and those afraid of making a mistake don’t benefit from one of the most productive ways of learning, which is making a mistake.

In this podcast, she also details how timed tests actually inhibit the brain from working, and that even adults use (virtual) finger in mathematics, which plays out positively for musicians.

In addition to her role at Stanford, Boaler is the faculty director of the math teaching incubator youcubed and the author of the first ‘massive open online course’ on mathematics teaching and learning. She was also the Marie Curie Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Sussex, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and has written nine books, including the 2015 bestseller Mathematical Mindsets.

Direct download: BaolerMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:00am PDT

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