Social Science Bites

Here's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's a lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money -- "get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible." You and I might prefer that, since we, of course, are reputable people and good stewards and understand our own particular needs. But what about, well, others? Economist 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.

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.  

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 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.

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. 

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).

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. 

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.

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.”

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.”