Social Science Bites

In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds asks psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden what she could divine about his educational achievements if all she knew about him was his complete genome. “Based just on your genetic information,” she starts, “I would be able to guess about as well as I would be able to guess if I knew how much money your parents had made per year when you were growing up.” Based on current knowledge drawn from recent samples in the United States, Harden estimates an “educational attainment polygenetic score” accounts for 15 to 17 percent of the variance in educational attainment, which is defined by years of formal education. The strength of the relationship is similar to environmental factors such as that for family wealth and educational attainment, or between educational attainment and wages. Harden’s “guess” is as about as educated as someone in the realm could make – she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project at the University of Texas. Her first book was 2021’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. One thing she stresses is that genetic influence on human behavior is not the single-factor ideal youngsters learn about in their first brush with Gregor Mendel and his pea plants. “Almost nothing we study as psychologists is monogenetic, influenced by one gene. It’s all polygenetic, meaning that there are thousands of genetic variants, each of which has a tiny probabilistic effect. If you add up all of that information, all of that genetic difference, it ends up making a difference for people’s likelihood of developing schizophrenia or doing better on intelligence test scores or having an autism spectrum disorder – but none of these things are influenced by just one gene.” Plus, that “polygenetic score” varies based on environmental factors, such as whether you were raised in an authoritarian state. “If I had my exact DNA that I have now,” she details, “but I was raised in 1850s France compared to 1980s America, my educational output would be different, obviously, because my gender would have been interacting with those opportunity structures in a different way.” As those structures evolve into ladders instead of roadblocks, the more utility we can derive from knowing the role of genetics. “The more we ‘level the playing field,’ the more that people have environments that are rich and conducive to their individual flourishing, the more we should expect to see, and the more in empirical practice we do see, the role of genetic differences in people.” In the shadow of eugenics and other genetics-based pseudo-sciences legacy, is harnessing that genetic influence for policy use good or bad? As Harden has experienced since her book published, “you can’t really talk about genes and education without fairly quickly running into some contested issues about fairness and equality.” In fact, she argues that much of her on heritability doesn’t so much answer social science questions as much as it “poses a problem for the social sciences.” In the podcast Harden discusses the Genome-wide Association Study, which she describes with a laugh as “a giant fishing expedition” in which researchers measure the DNA – genotype – from thousands or even millions of individuals and then measure that across the genome, for what comes down to “ a giant correlational exercise. Which genes are more common in people who are high on a trait versus low on a trait, or who have a disease versus don’t have a disease?” Harden also addresses the reasons she studies identical twins in her research, the cooption of genetic tropes to advance toxic worldviews, and how race – which she rejects as a proxy for genetic differences — plays out in the real world as opposed to the lab.

In the most innocent interpretation, suggesting someone should ‘do their own research’ is a reasonable bit of advice. But in the superheated world of social media discourse, #DoYourOwnResearch is a spicy rejoinder that essentially challenges someone to Google the subject since they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. But Googling, social psychologist David Dunning pointedly notes, is not research. “The beauty and the terror of the internet,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is that there’s a lot of terrific information, but there’s also a lot of misinformation and sometimes outright fraud. “People often don’t have the wherewithal to distinguish.” This distinguishing is an area where Dunning, a professor at the University of Michigan, does his own research. While doing your own internet sleuthing isn’t toxic on its face, Dunning suggests that often “you don’t know when you’re researching your way into a false conclusion, and … you don’t know when to stop. The real hard problem with DYOR is when do you know when to stop: you go and you look at a couple of web pages, and ‘Well, you’ve learned something! Terrific!’ But you don’t know how much there is behind it that you still need to learn.” One driver of DYOR, Dunning adds, is the idea that gaining (and deploying) knowledge is one’s own responsibility, which pretty much runs counter to science, which sees gaining knowledge as a collective enterprise. One piece of collective effort in which Dunning has made a very public mark is in describing what’s come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for Dunning and fellow social psychologist Justin Kruger of New York University, after work they originally described two decades ago in “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The popular definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect, Dunning explains, is that “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.” Dunning and Kruger’s initial research was based on simple tests – of grammar, logical thinking, classical psychology quizzes, even sense of humor – asking subjects how well they think they’re doing relative to everyone else. They found that the bottom 25 percent of participants tended to think they were doing above average. “But no.” “To know what you don’t know,” he offers, “you need to know what you need to know to realize that your thinking diverges from that.” It’s not true in every endeavor, he adds. “I’m a terrible golfer,” Dunning says. “And I’m fully aware that I‘m a terrible golfer!” The effect tends to show up when the skill of assessing outcomes is roughly similar to the skill of achieving outcomes. So when your golf ball flies into the nearby body of water, you don’t need special skills to know that’s bad. Becoming an expert in everything is out of the question; the real skill will be in identifying who is a legitimate expert and drawing on their insights. (And the right expert, Dunning notes “is the right experts. With an S on the end.”) For the record, the pair – who just received the 2023 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for their Dunning-Kruger effect work - did not name the concept after themselves, although, as Dunning says, they’re “tickled pink that our names will forever be associated with the nincompoops, incompetent ignorant cranks, if you will.”

Historically and into the present day, female workers overall make less than men. Looking at college-educated women in the United States, Harvard University economic historian Claudia Goldin studies the origins, causes and persistence of that gap, which she discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Goldin, whose most recent book is Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity, details for host David Edmonds how the figures she uses are determined. Specifically, it’s the ratio of female-to-male weekly earnings for those working full-time and year-round, with the median woman compared to the median man. “Expressed in this way, there has been real progress” in the last century, she says. Today in the United States, where Goldin’s studies occur, that number is below 85 cents on the dollar. While that trend is good news, it’s not the whole story. “By expressing this gap in this single number we miss the really, really important dynamics, and that is that the gender earnings pay gap widens a lot with age and it widens a lot with [having] children, and it widens in the corporate, banking and finance, and law sectors.” And while the gap may have narrowed, it shows no evidence it’s about to close. Acknowledging the “persistent frustration” about the pay gap’s durability, Goldin pointed a finger at structural inequities, bias and sexual harassment, but she also argues that “greedy work” was a major factor. Greedy work “is a job that pays a disproportionately more on a per hour basis when someone works a greater number of hours or has less control over those hours.” Hence, the gap persists “not so much [because] men and women go into completely different occupations,” she explains, but that women are financially “penalized” for choosing work that allows flexibility within that occupation. “The important point,” she adds, “is that both lose. Men are able to have the family and step up because women step back in terms of their jobs, but both are deprived. Men forgo time with their family and women often forgo their career.” But losers can win – eventually. The more that workers say to their supervisors that “we want our own time” the more the labor market will change, she explains by pointing to current trends. One caveat, though, is that the situation is worse among women without college educations. Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and was the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017. She is a co-director of the NBER's Gender in the Economy group. She was president of the American Economic Association in 2013 and was president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists (which awarded her its Mincer Prize for life-time contributions in 2009), the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society. She received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2016, the 2019 BBVA Frontiers in Knowledge award, and the 2020 Nemmers award, the latter two both in economics.

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. Hutton, who was appointed in 2021 to a six-year term as president of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences, addresses various critiques of modern social science – especially in its British incarnations -- from host David Edmonds. As defined by the academy that he now heads, “social science is the understanding of society in all its dimensions,” and encompasses the societal, economic, behavioral and geospatial sciences. Despite that broad remit, the first question posed is whether social and behavioral sciences take a back seat to the natural sciences in the public imagination. Hutton, for his part, says no – although he does see them not always getting their due. He notes that in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, yeoman’s work was conducted by social and behavioral science. “It wasn’t called social science, but it was driven by social science.” The same, he continues, is happening as Britain confronts its economic demons. “Academic prowess is a kind of team,” he details. “You need your humanities, you need your physical scientists, your natural scientists, your medical scientists and your social scientists on the pitch. Sometime the ball falls to their feet and you look to them to make the killer pass.” One thing that might help in achieving that overdue recognition, he explains later, would be if the social sciences themselves shared their commonality as opposed to denying it. “[T]he Academy of Social Science was established 40 years ago, because we felt that good as the British Academy is, it couldn’t represent humanities and social science co-equally. Social science needed its own voice. Four decades on, I would say that social science’s standing in the world is higher than it was 40 years ago. But if [a score of] 100 is what you want to get to, we probably haven’t gotten beyond 20 or 30.” Impacting society, meanwhile, is how the sciences must improve their score (although Hutton acknowledges the vagaries of what impact looks like by saying “I’m not willing to castigate people if it looks as if what they are immediately doing is not impactful or having an impact.”) Asked what he sees as the “most fundamental issue” social science should tackle straightaway, Hutton offers four broad avenues to move down: Economics, governance, change behavior to keep the planet in good shape, and constructing a civil society of institutions that serve both individual and community needs.  Among those, he concludes, “I think combining ‘the we and the I’ is the most important thing that social science can do.” Hutton’s wide-ranging answers follow from a wide-ranging career. He served as editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper, was chief executive of the then Industrial Society, was principal of Hertford College, Oxford from 2011 to 2020, and has authored a number of bestsellers since The State We’re In: Why Britain Is in Crisis and How to Overcome It. Those books include 2008’s The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, 2011’s Them and Us, 2015’s How Good We Can Be, and 2018’s Saving Britain: How We Can Prosper in a New European Future (written with Andrew Adonis).

Batja Mesquita, social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven, challenges the notion of universal emotions. She explains how emotions are culturally determined, highlighting the differences in anger and parental love across cultures. The podcast explores the implications of cultural differences in emotional interactions and discusses the speaker's inspirations, influences, and personal background in psychological research.

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new? These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest book, Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends. “My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it’s been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media about these various differences between generations. My task is not to say whether it’s all nonsense or it’s all true; it’s really to separate the myth from reality so we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.” One thing he’s learned is that the template for generational conflict is fairly standard over time, even if the specifics of what’s being contested are not. “The issues change,” he explains, “but the gap between young and old at any one point in time is actually pretty constant. … We’re not living through a time of particularly ‘snowflake,’ ‘social justice warrior’ young people vs. a very reactionary older group – it’s just the issues have changed. The pattern is the same, but the issues have changed.” Taking a look at climate change, for example, he notes that there’s a narrative that caring young people are fighting a careless cadre of oldsters unwilling to sacrifice for the future good. Not so fast, Duffy says: “The myth that only young people care about climate is a myth. We are unthinkingly encouraging an ageism within climate campaigning that is not only incorrect, but it is self-destructive.” That example, he notes, adds evidence to his contention that “the fake generational battles we have set up between the generations are just that – they are fake.” In the podcast, Duffy outlines the breakdowns his book (and in general larger society) uses to identify cohorts of living generations: Pre-war generation, those born before the end of World War II in 1945. Duffy says this could be broken down further – the so-called Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, for example – but for 2022 purposes the larger grouping serves well. Baby Boomers, born from 1945 to 1965 Generation X, 1966 to 1979 (This is Duffy’s own generation, and so, with tongue in cheek, he calls it “the best generation”!) Millennials, 1980 to around 1995 And Gen Z, ending around 2012 He notes that people are already talking about Generation Alpha, but given that generation’s youth it’s hard to make good generalizations about them. These generation-based groupings are identity groups that only some people freely adopt. “We’re not as clearly defined by these types of groupings as we are by, say, our age or educational status or our gender or our ethnicity.” His research finds between a third and half of people do identify with their generation, and the only one with “a real demographic reality” (as opposed to a solely cultural one) is the Baby Boomers, who in two blasts really did create a demographic bulge. Duffy, in addition to his work at King’s College London, is currently the chair of the Campaign for Social Science, the advocacy arm of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences. Over a 30-year career in policy research and evaluation, he has worked across most public policy areas, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Before joining KCL he was global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute. His first book, 2018’s The Perils of Perception – Why we’re wrong about nearly everything, draws on Ipsos’s own Perils of Perception studies to examine how people misperceive key social realities.

Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them and it matters greatly when that distinction gets lost. That’s a key message from psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who has created an impressive case for both understanding the distinction and then acting appropriately based on the distinction. “A situation with risk,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is one where you basically know everything. More precisely, you know everything that can happen in the future … you know the consequences and you know the probabilities.” It is, as Bayesian decision theorist Jimmie Savage called it, “a small world.” As an example, Gigerenzer takes us a spin on a roulette wheel – you may lose your money on a low-probability bet, but all the possible options were known in advance. Uncertainty, on the other hand, means that all future possible events aren’t known, nor are their probabilities or their consequences. Rounding back to the roulette wheel, under risk all possibilities are constrained to the ball landing on a number between 1 and 36. “Under uncertainty, 37 can happen,” he jokes. “Most situations in which we make decisions,” says Gigerenzer, “involve some sort of uncertainty.” Dealing with risk versus dealing with uncertainty requires different approaches. With risk, all you need is calculation. With uncertainty, “calculation may help you to some degree, but there is no way to calculate the optimal situation.” Humans nonetheless have tools to address uncertainty. Four he identifies are heuristics, intuition, finding people to trust, and adopting narratives to sustain you. In this podcast, he focuses on heuristics, those mental shortcuts and rules of thumb that often get a bad rap. “Social science,” he says, “should take uncertainty seriously, and heuristics seriously, and then we have a key to the real world.” When asked, Gigerenzer lauds Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky for putting “the concept of heuristics back on the table.” But he disagrees with their fast-slow thinking model that gives quick, so-called System 1 thinking less primacy than more deliberative thinking. “We have in the social sciences a kind of rhetoric that heuristics are always second best and maximizing would be always better. That’s wrong. It is only true in a world of risk; it is not correct in a world of uncertainty, where by definition you can’t find the best solution simply because you don’t know the future.” Researchers, he concludes, should “take uncertainty seriously and ask the question, ‘In what situations do these heuristics that people use (and experts use) actually work?’ and not just say, ‘They must be wrong because they are a heuristic.’” Gigerenzer is the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam and partner at Simply Rational – The Institute for Decisions. Before that he directed the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research. His books include general titles like Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, and Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, as well as academic books such as Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Rationality for Mortals, Simply Rational, and Bounded Rationality. Awards for his work include the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research for the best article in the behavioral sciences in 1991, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences for The probabilistic revolution, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. He was a 2014 fellow at the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind University of California, Santa Barbara (SAGE Publishing is the parent of Social Science Space) and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2008.

“It’s been said there are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can’t count.” So reads a sentence in the book Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The author of Innumeracy in the Wild is Ellen Peters, Philip H. Knight Chair and director of the Center for Science Communications Research at the University of Oregon. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Peters – who started as an engineer and then became a psychologist – explains to interviewer David Edmonds that despite the light tone of the quote, innumeracy is a serious issue both in scale and in effect. As to scale, she notes that a survey from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found 29 percent of the US adult population (and 24 percent in the UK) can only do simple number-based processes, things like counting, sorting, simple arithmetic and simple percentages. “What it means,” she adds, “is that they probably can’t do things like select a health plan; they probably can’t figure out credit card debt,” much less understand the figures swirling around vaccination or climate change. Peters groups numeracy into three (a real three this time) categories: Objective numeracy, the ability to navigate numbers that can be measured with a math test; subjective numeracy, which is “not your actual ability, but your confidence in your ability to understand numbers and to use numeric kinds of concepts;” and intuitive or evolutionary numeracy, a human being’s natural ability to do things like quickly determine if a quantity is bigger or smaller than another quantity. That middle type of numeracy, the subjective, is measured by self-reporting. “The original reasons for developing some of these subjective numeracy scales had to do with them just being a proxy for objective numeracy,” says Peters. “But what’s really interesting is that having numeric confidence seems to free people to be able to use their numeric ability.” While freedom is generally reckoned to be good – and objective results back this up – that’s not the case for those confident about their abilities but actually bad with numbers. Similarly, those who have high ability but are underconfident also do poorly compared to high ability and high confidence individuals. “There are some very deep psychological habits that people who are very good with numbers have that people who are not as good with numbers don’t have,” Peters explains. “It is the case that people who are highly numerate are better at calculations, but they also just simply have a better, more developed set of habits with numbers.” Less numerate people “are kind of stuck” with the numeric information as presented to them, rather than transforming the information into something that might better guide their decisions. Peters offered the example of a person with a serious disease being told that a life-saving treatment still has a 10 percent chance of killing them. Highly numerate people recognize that that means it has a 90 percent survival rate, but the less numerate might just fixate on the 10 percent chance of dying. Closing out the podcast, Peters offers some tips for addressing societal innumeracy. This matters because, she notes, research shows that despite high rates of innumeracy, providing numbers helps people make better decisions, with benefits for both their health and their wealth.

Economist Jonathan Haskel discusses the rise of intangible assets in the knowledge economy, emphasizing the shift from tangible to intangible investments in companies like Google and Microsoft. He highlights the unique properties of intangible assets, such as scalability and sunk costs, and explores the challenges of measuring intangible productivity. The podcast delves into the impact of intangibles on economic growth, the need for policy adjustments, and the transition to an intangible economy.

Sheila Jasanoff discusses the dual focus of Science and Technology Studies, evolution of the discipline, and the societal impact of scientific knowledge dissemination. The podcast explores the complexity of scientific knowledge, challenges in scientific communication, and the relationship between technology and society. It also highlights the importance of proactive governance mechanisms in adapting to technological advancements.