Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
September 10, 2015
Fairer Funding in Social Sciences Masks Gender Imbalance
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We Found Only a Third of Top-Drawer Psych Studies Reliable
A small but vocal contingent of researchers has maintained that many, perhaps most, published studies are wrong. But how bad is this problem, exactly? And what features make a study more or less likely to turn out to be true? A team of 270 researchers asked the question of published psychology studies.
Life Itself is One Big Exercise of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
The professor whose use of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ in his class went viral here explains how that same piece of game theory can help bridge liberal and conservative differences.
Restoring Self-Worth Encourages Healthy Behaviors
How can we convince people to heed warning labels and other public health campaigns? A paper in the journal ‘Policy Insights from the Brain and Behavioral Sciences’ suggests we focus on self-affirmation.
Beware! Big Data Is Not Free of Discrimination
Math can be immoral. too. Algorithms rarely come equipped with an explanation for why they behave the way they do, notes mathematician Jeremy Kun, and the easy (and dangerous) course of action is not to ask questions.
Giving Euroscepticism an Honest Hearing
A remarkably prescient special issue of the journal ‘International Political Science Review’ examines Euroscepticism’s migration ‘from the margins to the mainstream.’ Social Science Space talks to one of the issue’s guest editors.
Seeing Others as Fully Human
Although ‘dehumanizing the other’ may seem like something for, umm, others to do, the action is common from fantasy football to Homo economicus finds a paper in the journal ‘Policy Insights from the Brain and Behavioral Sciences.’
Information Wants to Be Free. Help in the National Archives Jailbreak
The U.S. National Archives has set itself the gargantuan goal of digitizing its full collection. Social scientists can now weigh in on what documents should go to the head of the line.
Ebola: WHO and the Consequences of Ignoring Social Science
A new report from the World Health Organization on the response to the African Ebola outbreak backs up what our Robert Dingwall has been writing all along — by downplaying social science lives have been lost. The question now is whether a new WHO can improve.
