A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social and behavioral scientists
When Jim Scott mentions ‘resistance,’ this recovering political scientist isn’t usually talking about grand symbolic statements or large-scale synchronized actions by thousands or more battling an oppressive state. He’s often referring to daily actions by average people, often not acting in concert and perhaps not even seeing themselves as ‘resisting’ at all.
The study of stigma, is, says Michèle Lamont, a “booming field.” That assessment can be both sad and hopeful, and in this Social Science Bites podcast the Harvard sociologist explains stigma’s manifestations and ways to combat it, as well as what it takes a for a researcher to actually study stigma.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Diego Gambetta, a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence, discussing his research around signaling theory and the applications of his work, whether addressing courtship, organized crime of hailing a cab.
Psychologist Mike Tomasello details how, while higher primates may be quite like humans in many respects, the ability to work together on projects is not one of them.
Forensic psychologist Belinda Winder wants society to understand one key aspect things about pedophilia. “Many people understand pedophilia to be both a sexual attraction to children but also the act of committing abuse against children,” she explains. “And that’s wrong.”
If differing groups could be brought together cooperatively – not competitively – in a manner endorsed by both groups and where each side met on an equal footing, perhaps we could, as Salma Mousa puts it in this Social Science Bites podcast, “unlock tolerance on both sides and reduce prejudice.”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, sociologist Alondra Nelson describes her particular interest in those root seekers whose antecedents were “stolen from African” in the slave trade who make up so much of the African diaspora.
As the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic increased, polling suggests counter-intuitively that resistance to a future vaccine has also risen. Anthropologist Heidi J. Larson identified several likely drivers of this, including scientists themselves.
Epidemiologist Sherman James outlines the hypothesis behind John Henryism – the idea that high-effort coping with expectations of achievement amid poverty or segregation can result in serious damage to the striver’s health.
Since its debut in 2012, the Social Science Bites podcast series every month has brought the voices of the world’s top social and behavioral researchers to the wider world. Looking over that body of work, we realized that mating sound with vision made excellent sense, and so enlisted scientific illustrator Alex Cagan to bring a select number of our podcasts to life via his pen.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Gurminder K. Bhambra discusses with interviewer David Edmonds why we should speak about the Haitian revolution in the same breath as the contemporaneous American and French revolutions, how former empires conveniently forget the contributions of their colonies now that those empires have downgraded to mere ‘nations,’ and what lessons we should draw from the current iconoclastic impulse toward imperial statuary.
Ashley Mears describes modern jet-setting club life at the VIP level and the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption, its “ritualized squandering” in Mears words, that is its hallmark.
