Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Social Science Bites
The Social Science Bites podcast hosts bite-size interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode offers a unique perspective on how our social world is created, and how social science can help us understand people and how they behave.
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Social Science Bites is now available as a book. Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems compiles the best episodes of the podcast in a pocket-size volume, with sections on identity, learning, human behavior, social change, and the unexpected.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book covers topics such as racial inequality, moral psychology, the pandemic, the prison system, and more. Contributors include Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology at LSE, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex, and Jennifer Richeson, Professor of Psychology at Yale University.
Past guests on the podcast include President Biden’s former deputy director for science and society, Alondra Nelson, world renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Nobel laureates Angus Deaton and Al Roth, pioneering geographer Doreen Massey, and Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy. Guiding us through these conversations is interviewer David Edmonds, a distinguished research fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and the author of 14 books.
Social Science Bites was launched and is produced in association with Sage – an independent, mission-driven academic publisher committed to supporting the dispersion of key ideas in the social sciences both within and beyond the academic sphere.
Celebrating the First 50 Social Science Bites Podcasts
Social Science Bites, a series of interviews with leading social scientists, reached a milestone with its 50th podcast — Gary King on Big Data Analysis — in March 2017. This Storify of tweets presents a memorable quote from each of those first 50 interviews.
Mary Bosworth on Border Criminology
Border criminology, Mary Bosworth details in this Social Science Bites podcast, is trying to understand both things that are happening at the border but also things that are happening in our criminal justice system.
Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 3
Ask a number of influential social scientists who in turn influenced them, and you’d likely get a blue-ribbon primer on the classics in social science. And so it as we present the third and final series of answers to that question drawn from the first 50 guests on the Social Science Bites podcast series.
Chris Grey on Organizations
What is an “organization?” According to Chris Grey, the guest in this Social Science Bites podcast, in many ways it’s a moment in time. “An organization,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is also a momentary crystallization of an ongoing process of organizing.”
Scott Atran on Sacred Values
In this Social Science Bites podcast, anthropologist Scott Atran describes how ‘sacred values’ prove remarkably immune to negotiation and can empower vicious terrorism or victorious revolution.
Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 2
During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the 50th Bites podcast to air, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages. The second appears here, with answers – presented alphabetically – from Bites’ guests ranging from Sarah Franklin to Angela MacRobbie.
An Archive to Be Proud Of: Social Science Bites Reaches 50 Podcasts
On the occasion of the posting of the 50th Social Science Bites podcast, we’ve turned the tables and interviewed the interviewer, Dave Edmonds, about the series, empiricism, and even Jaffa cakes.
Gary King on Big Data Analysis
When looking at big data, says computational social scientist Gary King, “The data itself isn’t likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, he explains more about the importance of data analysis.
Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective
In this first of three of montages from past Social Science Bites podcasts, 15 renowned social scientists reveal their pick for “Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you?”
Michelle Baddeley on the Herd
People tend to herd together, whether it’s following the crowd or determining what news to accept. UCL economist Michelle Baddeley has studied this behavior and discusses what she’s learned in this latest Social Science Bites podcast.
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Year
Every guest on the Social Science Bites podcast is queried about their area of expertise, and hence the questions tend to differ […]
In 2024, Sage surveyed social and behavioral science (SBS) researchers from 96 countries to better understand their motivation, if any, to conduct […]
Jürgen Habermas, a globally known social theorist whose explorations of democracy, validity and communication have gained new prominence in the current moment, […]
Until recently, AI’s role in research felt like having a useful assistant. It could summarize a paper, clean up a dataset or […]
David Canter considers informal places where people socialize, suggesting they’re an arena ChatGPT and other LLMs can’no’t replicate. As someone who lives […]
It’s become cliche since Clive Humbly coined it in 2006, but data is indeed the new oil. It’s a mantra repeated by […]
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Impact
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 6: A Social Science Bites Retrospective
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Watch the Webinar: Empowering Social and Behavioral Science Researchers
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Jürgen Habermas, 1929-2026: Exponent of the Public Sphere
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Innovation
What Does It Mean Now That AI Is Creating Academic Papers?
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Reaching Parts to Which AI Has No Access
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Andrea Medina-Smith on Making Research Data More FAIR
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Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual
In this Social Science Bites podcast, cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas details how ritual often serves a positive purpose for individuals – synchronizing them with their communities or relieving their stress.
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective
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.
Deborah Small on Charitable Giving
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.
Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves
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?”
Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children
In this Social Science Bites podcast, economist Melissa Kearney 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.
Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management
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 …
Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight
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.
Heaven Crawley on International Migration
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.
Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology
Psychologist Shinobu Kitayama explores the cultural differences between Asia and America, the possible origins of those differences, and how the brain and body may reflect those differences.
Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness
We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” Petter Johansson and his partner Lars Hall have determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc.
Ayelet Fishbach on Goals and Motivation
“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 […]
Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics and Educational Attainment
Kathryn Paige Harden, director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project at the University of Texas, discusses how much influence our DNA has on our PhD.
David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, explains David Dunning, comes when “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.”