This illustration is part of a series of Social Science Bites illustrations by scientific illustrator Alex Cagan. We’ve looked through our archives and chosen some of our favorite episodes from over the years, which Alex has brought to life in these visualizations. We’ll be unveiling new illustrations in this series through August 2020 on our Twitter page. Catch each new illustration as it’s released at the hashtag #SSBillustrated and click here to view all the illustrations so far.
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.
For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
Welcome to the blog for the Social Science Bites podcast: a series of interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode explores an aspect of our social world. You can access all audio and the transcripts from each interview here. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @socialscibites.
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 Social Science Bites podcast, Deborah 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.
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?”
Alison really understands how a prisoner feels and should be treated. I truly admire a person like Alison. I totally agree on “see prisoners as people first”. Prisoners deserve to be treated equally.
Alison is a perfect example of a criminologist. She saw goodness in every prisoner. They should be treated as a person. If I’m a prisoner, I can easily trust Alison.
Solicitations are now being sought for the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, and in an unheralded […]
What are the three biggest challenges Australia faces in the next five to ten years? What role will the social sciences play in resolving these challenges? The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia asked these questions in a discussion paper earlier this year. The backdrop to this review is cuts to social science disciplines around the country, with teaching taking priority over research.
While fundraising is time-consuming and entails costs, entrepreneurs might be tempted to “test the water” by simply soliciting investors’ interest before going through the lengthy process. Digitalization of finance has made it possible for small business to run equity crowdfunding campaigns, but also to initiate a TTW process online and quite easily.
Three awards are available through Sage’s Concept Grant program, which is designed to support innovative products and tools aimed at enhancing social science education and research.
Kaye Husbands Fealing, an economist who has done pioneering work in the “science of broadening participation,” has been named the new leader of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
Sage (the parent of Social Science Space) and the Surviving Society podcast have launched a collaborative podcast series, Social Science for Social […]
The Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences has launched the Big Thinking Podcast, a show series that features leading researchers in the humanities and social sciences in conversation about the most important and interesting issues of our time.
A new report from Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences argues that the key to success for physical science and technology research is a healthy helping of relevant social science.
The new president of the American Sociological Association spent more than 10 years interviewing over 200 Black workers in a variety of roles – from the gig economy to the C-suite. I found that many of the problems they face come down to organizational culture. Too often, companies elevate diversity as a concept but overlook the internal processes that disadvantage Black workers.
Dr. Tracy L. Tuten explores the power of social learning in teaching marketing, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, resource sharing, and the use of platforms like Perusall to foster a sense of community and enhance the educational experience, based on an online reading group of her book ‘Principles of Marketing for a Digital Age.’
‘What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Irish Border?’ is a new book from Katy Hayward that applies social science to the existing issues and what they portend.
Brexit seems likely to extend the hostility of the UK immigration system to scholars from European Union countries — unless a significant change of migration politics and prevalent public attitudes towards immigration politics took place in the UK. There are no indications that the latter will happen anytime soon.
A new report from the Royal Society about the effects on Brexit on science in the United Kingdom has our peripatetic Daniel Nehring mulling the changes that will occur in higher education and academic productivity.
In this article, Sonja Avlijaš, Pavle Medić, and Kori Udovički reflect on foreign direct investment (FDI) and the way it impacts the development of political economies.
practice. Career decision-making is a process that is difficult to analyze because it is much more complex than selecting the best option in a one-off choice.
Political theorist and public intellectual Achille Mbembe, among the most read and cited scholars from the African continent, has been awarded the 2024 Holberg Prize.
Eddie Webster, sociologist and emeritus professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, died on March 5, 2024, at age 82.
Political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, the tokenizer of the term ‘institutional racism,’ an apostle of the Black Power movement, and at times deemed both too radical and too deferential in how to fight for racial equity, died on November 18, 2023. He was 94.
The National Academies’ Committee on National Statistics seeks nominations for members of an ad hoc consensus study panel — sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau — to review and evaluate the quality of the 2020 Census.
The processes of mainstreaming and normalization of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far right.
Retractions are generally framed as a negative: as science not working properly, as an embarrassment for the institutions involved, or as a flaw in the peer review process. They can be all those things. But they can also be part of a story of science working the right way: finding and correcting errors, and publicly acknowledging when information turns out to be incorrect.
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.
Based on a study of how research is cited in national and local media sources, Andy Tattersall shows how research is often poorly represented in the media and suggests better community standards around linking to original research could improve trust in mainstream media.
Commenting on the trend for the politically motivated forensic scrutiny of the research records of academics, Till Bruckner argues that singling out individuals in this way has a chilling effect on academic freedom and distracts from efforts to address more important systemic issues in research integrity.
In the following Q&A, Roger J. Kreuz, a psychology professor who is working on a manuscript about the history and psychology of plagiarism, explains the nature and prevalence of plagiarism and the challenges associated with detecting it in the age of AI.
Ellen Hutti and Jenine Harris have quantified the extent to which female authors are represented in assigned course readings. In this blog post, they emphasize that more equal exposure to experts with whom they can identify will better serve our students and foster the growth, diversity and potential of this future workforce. They also present one repository currently being built for readings by underrepresented authors that are Black, Indigenous or people of color.
In the UK, out of 164 university vice-chancellors, only two are Black. Professor David Mba was recently appointed as the first Black vice-chancellor […]
Commenting on the trend for the politically motivated forensic scrutiny of the research records of academics, Till Bruckner argues that singling out individuals in this way has a chilling effect on academic freedom and distracts from efforts to address more important systemic issues in research integrity.
Community-based work and building and maintaining relationships with nations whose land we live upon is at the heart of what Indigenizing is. It is not simply hiring more faculty, or putting the titles “decolonizing” and “Indigenizing” on anything that might connect to Indigenous peoples.
Norman B. Anderson, a clinical psychologist whose work as both a researcher and an administrator saw him serve as the inaugural director of the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and as chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association, died on March 1.
Sage (the parent of Social Science Space) and the Surviving Society podcast have launched a collaborative podcast series, Social Science for Social […]
Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric and Overton and currently Overton’s managing director, answers questions about the outsized impact that SBS makes on policy and his work creating tools to connect the scholarly and policy worlds.
Based on a study of how research is cited in national and local media sources, Andy Tattersall shows how research is often poorly represented in the media and suggests better community standards around linking to original research could improve trust in mainstream media.
The word censorship might bring to mind authoritarian regimes, book-banning, and restrictions on a free press, but Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at […]
Political theorist and public intellectual Achille Mbembe, among the most read and cited scholars from the African continent, has been awarded the 2024 Holberg Prize.
Eddie Webster, sociologist and emeritus professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, died on March 5, 2024, at age 82.
A new collaboration between the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the U.S. National Science Foundation has founded the Graduate Research Fellowship […]
Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric and Overton and currently Overton’s managing director, answers questions about the outsized impact that SBS makes on policy and his work creating tools to connect the scholarly and policy worlds.
David Canter reviews his experience of filling in automated forms online for the same thing but getting very different answers, revealing the value systems built into these supposedly neutral processes.
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s new Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDoT) program supports research, implementation, and educational projects for multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams
Caring 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.
The processes of mainstreaming and normalization of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far right.
As he stands down from a two-year stint as the president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, or FABBS, Social Science Space took the opportunity to download a fraction of the experiences of cognitive psychologist Philip Rubin, especially his experiences connecting science and policy.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is seeking suggestions for experts interested in its Committee on Law and Justice (CLAJ) […]
David Canter reviews his experience of filling in automated forms online for the same thing but getting very different answers, revealing the value systems built into these supposedly neutral processes.
Community-based work and building and maintaining relationships with nations whose land we live upon is at the heart of what Indigenizing is. It is not simply hiring more faculty, or putting the titles “decolonizing” and “Indigenizing” on anything that might connect to Indigenous peoples.
The word censorship might bring to mind authoritarian regimes, book-banning, and restrictions on a free press, but Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at […]
Overton spoke with Jonathan Breckon to learn about knowledge brokerage, influencing policy and the potential for technology and data to streamline the research-policy interface.
Social Science Space’s sister site, Methods Space, explored the broad topic of Social Good this past October, with guest Interviewee Dr. Benson Hong. Here Janet Salmons and him talk about the Academy of Management Perspectives journal article.
Funding for the U.S. National Science Foundation would fall by a half billion dollars in this fiscal year if a proposed budget the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee takes effect – the first cut to the agency’s budget in several years.
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s new Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDoT) program supports research, implementation, and educational projects for multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams
A new report from Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences argues that the key to success for physical science and technology research is a healthy helping of relevant social science.
The negative consequences of relying too heavily on metrics to assess research quality are well known, potentially fostering practices harmful to scientific research such as p-hacking, salami science, or selective reporting. To address this systemic problem, Florian Naudet, and collegues present six principles for assessing scientists for hiring, promotion, and tenure.
Candace Jones, Mark Lorenzen, Jonathan Sapsed , eds.: The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 576 pp. $170.00, […]
Political theorist and public intellectual Achille Mbembe, among the most read and cited scholars from the African continent, has been awarded the 2024 Holberg Prize.
This March, the Sage Politics team launches its first Politics Webinar Week. These webinars are free to access and will be delivered by contemporary politics experts —drawn from Sage’s team of authors and editors— who range from practitioners to instructors.
The U.S. National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have teamed up present a 90-minute online session examining how to balance public access to federally funded research results with an equitable publishing environment.
Five organizations representing knowledge networks, research libraries, and publishing platforms joined the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences to review the present and the future of open access — in policy and in practice – in Canada
In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.
As the U.S. Congress debates the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, a new paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences urges lawmakers to focus on provisions aimed at increasing the numbers of black and Latinx teachers.
To help in decisions surrounding the effects and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the the journal ‘Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ offers this collection of articles as a free resource.
Psychologist Susan Fiske was the founding editor of the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In trying to reach a lay audience with research findings that matter, she counsels stepping a bit outside your academic comfort zone.
SAGE Publishing — the parent of Social Science Space – will hold its Third Annual Critical Thinking Bootcamp on August 9. Leaning more and register here
On May 13, the American Academy of Political and Social Science hosted an online seminar, co-sponsored by SAGE Publishing, that featured presentations […]
On Friday, April 23rd, join the Population Association of America and the Association of Population Centers for a virtual congressional briefing. The […]
The author’s team is developing ways to connect policymakers with university-based researchers – and studying what happens when these academics become the trusted sources, rather than those with special interests who stand to gain financially from various initiatives.
As he stands down from a two-year stint as the president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, or FABBS, Social Science Space took the opportunity to download a fraction of the experiences of cognitive psychologist Philip Rubin, especially his experiences connecting science and policy.
Political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, the tokenizer of the term ‘institutional racism,’ an apostle of the Black Power movement, and at times deemed both too radical and too deferential in how to fight for racial equity, died on November 18, 2023. He was 94.
The processes of mainstreaming and normalization of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far right.
Thanks to a partnership between the SSRC and the US Department of the Treasury, two new research opportunities in program evaluation – the Homeowner Assistance Fund Project and the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds Project – have opened.
Kaye Husbands Fealing, an economist who has done pioneering work in the “science of broadening participation,” has been named the new leader of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
Annie Pilote, dean of the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies at the Université Laval, was named chair of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences at its 2023 virtual annual meeting last month. Members also elected Debra Thompson as a new director on the board.
Political theorist and public intellectual Achille Mbembe, among the most read and cited scholars from the African continent, has been awarded the 2024 Holberg Prize.
To address racial and ethnic inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine just released “Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice and Policy.”
The ECPR-IPSA World of Political Science Survey 2023 assesses political science scholar’s viewpoints on the global status of the discipline and the challenges it faces, specifically targeting the phenomena of cancel culture, self-censorship and threats to academic freedom of expression.
With research-based evidence increasingly being seen in policy, we should acknowledge that there are risks that the research or ‘evidence’ used isn’t suitable or can be accidentally misused for a variety of reasons.
Over a 10-year period Carol Tenopir of DataONE and her team conducted a global survey of scientists, managers and government workers involved in broad environmental science activities about their willingness to share data and their opinion of the resources available to do so (Tenopir et al., 2011, 2015, 2018, 2020). Comparing the responses over that time shows a general increase in the willingness to share data (and thus engage in Open Science).
As a math professor who teaches students to use data to make informed decisions, I am familiar with common mistakes people make when dealing with numbers. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that the least skilled people overestimate their abilities more than anyone else. This sounds convincing on the surface and makes for excellent comedy. But in a recent paper, my colleagues and I suggest that the mathematical approach used to show this effect may be incorrect.
Based on a study of how research is cited in national and local media sources, Andy Tattersall shows how research is often poorly represented in the media and suggests better community standards around linking to original research could improve trust in mainstream media.
The word censorship might bring to mind authoritarian regimes, book-banning, and restrictions on a free press, but Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at […]
The double-blind review process, adopted by many publishers and funding agencies, plays a vital role in maintaining fairness and unbiasedness by concealing the identities of authors and reviewers. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, a pressing question arises: can an author’s identity be deduced even from an anonymized paper (in cases where the authors do not advertise their submitted article on social media)?
The claim that academics hype their research is not news. The use of subjective or emotive words that glamorize, publicize, embellish or exaggerate results and promote the merits of studies has been noted for some time and has drawn criticism from researchers themselves. Some argue hyping practices have reached a level where objectivity has been replaced by sensationalism and manufactured excitement. By exaggerating the importance of findings, writers are seen to undermine the impartiality of science, fuel skepticism and alienate readers.
Jasper Knight identifies five key issues that underlie working with human subjects in research and which transcend institutional or disciplinary differences.
Modern-day approaches to understanding the quality of research and the careers of researchers are often outdated and filled with inequalities. These approaches […]
Three awards are available through Sage’s Concept Grant program, which is designed to support innovative products and tools aimed at enhancing social science education and research.
Sage (the parent of Social Science Space) and the Surviving Society podcast have launched a collaborative podcast series, Social Science for Social […]
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s new Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDoT) program supports research, implementation, and educational projects for multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams
The historic Hippocrates has become an iconic figure in the creation myths of medicine. What can the body of thought attributed to him tell us about modern responses to COVID?
A new report from Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences argues that the key to success for physical science and technology research is a healthy helping of relevant social science.
Caring 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.
Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict around the world.
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.
Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict around the world.
Gamification—the use of video game elements such as achievements, badges, ranking boards, avatars, adventures, and customized goals in non-game contexts—is certainly not a new thing.
Who will use AI-assisted writing tools — and what will they use them for? The short answer, says Katie Metzler, is everyone and for almost every task that involves typing.
In the first post from a series of bulletins on public data that social and behavioral scientists might be interested in, Gary Price links to an analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The next in SAGE Publishing’s How to Get Published webinar series focuses on promoting your writing after publication. The free webinar is set for November 16 at 4 p.m. BT/11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT.
At a time when there are so many concerns being raised about always-on work cultures and our right to disconnect, email is the bane of many of our working lives.
Modern-day approaches to understanding the quality of research and the careers of researchers are often outdated and filled with inequalities. These approaches […]
The European Research Center is funding the Global Contentious Politics Dataset, or GLOCON, a state-of-the-art automated database curating information on political events — including confrontations, political turbulence, strikes, rallies, and protests
Kathryn Oliver discusses the recent launch of the United Kingdom’s Areas of Research Interest Database. A new tool that promises to provide a mechanism to link researchers, funders and policymakers more effectively collaboratively and transparently.
This March, the Sage Politics team launches its first Politics Webinar Week. These webinars are free to access and will be delivered by contemporary politics experts —drawn from Sage’s team of authors and editors— who range from practitioners to instructors.
The U.S. National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have teamed up present a 90-minute online session examining how to balance public access to federally funded research results with an equitable publishing environment.
Alison really understands how a prisoner feels and should be treated. I truly admire a person like Alison. I totally agree on “see prisoners as people first”. Prisoners deserve to be treated equally.
Alison is a perfect example of a criminologist. She saw goodness in every prisoner. They should be treated as a person. If I’m a prisoner, I can easily trust Alison.