Social Science Space

The World Health Organization’s Outbreak Communications Planning Guide suggests behavior changes can reduce the spread or a viral disease by as much as 80 percent. This can mean the difference between healthcare sectors being overwhelmed or continuing to function.

A lot of people have been posting on social media saying they have been feeling tired earlier than usual while […]

COVID-19 is a threat to the health and safety of us all, but as the congressional debate of the federal stimulus package revealed, it may also present an opportunity to rethink how to best protect workers, the economy, and indeed all the members of our society.

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.

‘Policy has clearly outpaced science’ in the United States on the issue of legalizing marijuana for either medical or recreational use, say two researchers from Harvard University and McLean Hospital

Teacher observations are both costly and time intensive, but perhaps it’s time to invest in better teacher evaluation to get better student results. So argues Robert Pianta, who has personally helped develop some measures that might achieve such high hopes, in a an article in the journal PIBBS..

When does a modern young person become an ‘adult’? Age 13? 16? 18? 21? Legal definitions aside, young people in the developed world are feeling they’ve become independent operators much later in life than ever before.

Remember when Barbie made the stereotypical ‘Math is hard!’ comment? That sentiment is real, and unchecked it can be contagious. Luckily, however, math anxiety can be cured.

Putting down your phone is merely the first step in banishing distractions while you drive, according to research in the journal ‘Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.’ In fact, asking Siri to do something at a remove is pretty darned dangerous, too.

Gendered language shapes how we think about the appropriate roles for men and women, especially when we are children and just beginning to form our understanding of the world. That might not sound like a problem, but it can reinforce stereotypes we are trying to tear down.

Remember the admonition to ‘show your work’ in math class? Focusing on where you went wrong – instead of hurrying to what is right – may be a great way to actually learn something, so it’s a shame more teachers don’t do that.

There’s a lot of handwringing over the STEM gap in US education, and new paper in the ‘Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ finds that how STEM is taught underlies some of the challenges. But cognitive science may offer some help