Social Science Space

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.

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 …

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, 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.

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.

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.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet Robert Browning once opined, “or what’s a heaven for?” […]

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.

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.”

Harvard University economic historian Claudia Goldin studies the origins, causes and persistence of the gender pay gap in the United States, which she discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast.

Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We’re In, offers a state-of-the-field report on the social sciences in this Social Science Bites podcast.

Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture.