Social Science Space

No one can ensure total safety… We must fight pandemic of FEAR

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 15:31:09 GMT

Just about 12 months ago, the Sunday Express first approached me to comment on a mystery virus that was reported to be infecting people in Wuhan in China. At the time I was contemplating my approaching 70th birthday. How could I run down my professional commitments and spend more time with my garden and my small grandchildren? How our dreams get dashed! At the beginning of 2020 UK scientific advisers were confident that the Chinese government would control this virus. They had done a good job with SARS in 2003 and we thought the new coronavirus would be as easy to manage.

Unfortunately it was not. SARS is only infectious when its, very obvious, symptoms appear. Covid-19 is infectious before symptoms emerge.

When compared with SARS, it does not usually require hospital treatment or result in death. About three per cent of SARS patients died, while Covid-19 is fatal in less than one per cent of cases.

The scale of infection without symptoms or with only mild symptoms – the World Health Organisation estimates that this is at least 80 per cent of cases – meant Covid-19 was well-established and circulating before anyone could get a grip on it.

As we have discovered, pandemics challenge a whole society, not just its health services or its scientists. One of the things we have struggled with most is understanding that the response needs to be similarly broad.

A classic sociological study of pandemics was published in 1990. The author, PM Strong from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was researching the management of the HIV/Aids pandemic during the 1980s.

He compared this to other pandemics going right back to the Black Death in the 14th century. He found that every bacterial or viral invasion was accompanied by three societal pandemics: of fear, suspicion and stigmatisation; of explanation and moralisation; and of action.

The pandemic of fear was a rational response to a new disease which might be an existential threat to humanity: the Black Death probably killed 30 to 50 per cent of the population of Europe.

When Covid-19 first appeared, no-one knew what kind of a threat it might be.

The only thing to do was try to freeze its transmission by isolating people from each other as far as possible. That isolation encouraged a climate of suspicion and fear which led to the stigmatisation of individuals and groups who were not following “the rules”.

The pandemic of explanation tried to make sense of this unexpected disruption to people’s lives. Where had this disease come from? Why here? Why now?

Some of this competition went on among scientists, as we might expect.

However, other groups became involved: was the crossover of an animal virus to humans revenge for the pressures we were placing on wild spaces, for example?

The pandemic of action was the demand that “something must be done”, even if there was no evidence it would actually work.

Governments were faced with an unprecedented challenge, with populations demanding protection from it, preferably at minimum cost and inconvenience.

The result has been a rash of unco-ordinated measures that have lacked credibility but have allowed governments to be seen to respond. All three of these societal pandemics have ripped through the developed world over the past 12 months.

But they have not been brought under control, as Strong predicted.

Previous pandemics became matters of government routine.

When bubonic plague returned in centuries after the Black Death, officials took a manual off the shelf, lined up quarantines, body collectors and mass graves – and everyday life continued.

It was an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.

Why hasn’t this happened with Covid-19? With this pandemic fear amplification has been policy, based on the advice of a particular group of behavioural scientists advising government. And fear is spread through social media and the images on our TV screens.

No-one should make light of the suffering that has come with Covid-19. But this cannot be a basis for public policy.

No-one can make all human lives completely safe. The zero-Covid agenda presents a fantasy of immortality that more reflective medics know is impossible. As vaccination rolls out and treatments improve, the risk of serious illness or death is falling rapidly.

We can live with a new endemic infection, but this will only happen if we fight the fear and recognise that the pictures on our screens do not represent the mass experience of Covid-19, now and in the years to come.

Robert Dingwall is Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University and a member of several government advisory groups. He is writing in a personal capacity.

First published in the Sunday Express January 17, 2021

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Start Talking Now About Life After Jabs Make COVID Less Deadly Than the Flu

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 15:07:09 GMT

The reports from Britain’s hospitals in the last few days have been truly worrying. No one should doubt the reality of what they are facing, or the suffering of gravely ill patients and their families.

Yet troubling infection rates and daily death counts, although impossible to ignore, are not the only way to understand this pandemic and our attempts to defeat it. After all, there is real hope for the future thanks to the creation of new vaccines.

But we still need clear heads if we want to phase out the restrictions crippling normal life. Above all, we must dispel the current mood of fear and the arguments of those who thrive upon that fear.

COVID-19 is not a conspiracy, neither is it a hoax. We were right to be anxious in the spring of 2020. Now we must start to put that behind us and demand a plan to dismantle the current Government controls in step with the vaccination programme now under way.

The first thing we need is perspective. While the shortage of beds and staff distress are all too real, what hospital doctors and nurses see on the wards does not reflect the average experience of COVID-19.

Footage from intensive care units looks dramatic on television, but most people go through the infection and recover quietly in the community, not on wards. Distressed and angry voices from hospitals appeal to our emotions but they must not dominate the way we think. Crisis management is not the same as planning.

Then, look at the vaccination programme and what it can achieve. My medical colleagues expect that the population’s average risk of death from COVID-19 will fall to something like that of a healthy person aged 16-60. In other words, very low indeed.

All this can be done quickly. Around 80 per cent of the drop in risk will be gained by vaccinating the first four priority groups in the country, which means all those aged 70 and above, approximately 13 million people. The Government hopes to accomplish this by the middle of next month.

It is a game changer. In a vaccinated population, COVID-19 will mostly mean a few days off work and will very rarely result in serious illness. It will sometimes go completely unnoticed.

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, points out that we already expect 7,000 to 10,000 deaths from influenza in an average year. On any reasonable calculation, the vaccination programme should take COVID deaths below this level, and make COVID less deadly than flu.

Most of us would get it from time to time but we would shrug it off and get on with our lives. There would certainly be no point in the sort of restrictions we see now.

We do not lock society down for common colds, seasonal influenza or other respiratory viruses because we accept the occasional inconvenience of infection as the price of living our lives the way we choose and enjoying the benefits of an open society.

In the same way, a vaccinated population will not need Test, Trace and Isolate, or vaccine passports or special border controls. We can make a bonfire of face masks and embrace whoever we want.

And this is a choice that starts to become available to us from next month. The only question is how quickly we choose to grasp it.

Why, then, do the restrictions and lock downs seem never ending? In part, it is the result of misunderstandings, including confusion between COVID and the fear of COVID. There is also pressure from commercial and other interests that have developed to take advantage of the pandemic, and which now have a stake in perpetuating alarm and anxiety.

Most of all, however, we are unable to think beyond a world of lockdown because the focus on hospitalization and death has completely distorted our understanding of what COVID means as an infection in the future.

Our anxiety levels have been pumped up high, partly as a deliberate act of public policy and partly by the constant drip feed of bad news stories. And this is a major threat to our future and our ability to grasp it.

When we have vaccinated all the highest risk people, sometime in late February, what precautions can we stop taking? Which restrictions will be lifted? And when we have completed Phase 1 by vaccinating all the people with above average risk in late March or April, what will we stop doing then?

These are important questions but as yet, there are no answers. And, make no mistake, we will only see a timetable of this sort laid out if there is active pressure to achieve it.

Even the Chief Medical Officer has hinted that a number of restrictions and controls might continue for a longer period, perhaps even into next winter.

His main concern seems to be managing winter demand for the NHS (although I believe this can be managed with increased investment in the health service and a modest improvement in the current surveillance systems for respiratory infections.)

Remember this, too – many groups are doing well out of the controls and will want to see them maintained for as long as possible.
Some of these groups are obvious, including the suppliers of masks, sanitisers, visors, screens and other equipment used in controls and the people whose jobs are wrapped up in them.

Closing Test and Trace would be a big deal for some businesses, including those that supply the chemicals and services involved. COVID has its medical winners and losers, too, as different specialisms compete for their share of NHS resources. This has been a good time for those in virology, epidemiology and mathematical modelling, for example.

For many areas of science, COVID research funds have been an important hedge against the uncertainty of future funding from European research programmes. Research groups are like small businesses and cash flow is crucial to sustaining colleagues’ jobs.

Yes, Long COVID is a concern, but it should not be confused with the promotion of Long COVID anxiety to sustain funding.

More chilling is the zero-COVID faction, those who believe we must keep the pressure on the virus until it is completely eliminated. Their campaign programme often spills over into demands for permanent restrictions and controls to ensure that, in future, no one suffers a respiratory infection from which they might die.

Such people are really in the immortality business, a trade for hucksters, not scientists. Although relatively few are vocal in this aim, their objectives are tacitly shared by many well-meaning people who have not thought through the implications of defending lockdowns, restrictions and controls beyond their justification.

As Dr Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organisation Emergencies Programme, has noted, societies would do better to focus on recovery than chasing ‘the moonshot of eradication’.

In the end, this is a question of democracy. Chris Whitty has rightly challenged the country to think about what level of deaths might be tolerable in exchange for a return to the lives we led in 2019.

That is not a matter for any group of experts – scientific, medical, ethical or even sociological. If citizens are to debate this properly, though, we must get beyond emotions stirred up by fear to understand the real – but modest – risks that go with an open society and a thriving economy.

Robert Dingwall is a professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University and a member of several UK Government advisory groups. He is writing in a personal capacity.

First published in the Mail on Sunday on January 10, 2021.

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Let’s Incite Subversively Responsible Management Practices!

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 11:00:45 GMT

Employees at Greyston Bakery in New York are brought on via a system known as Open Hiring. (Photo: Greyston Bakery)

I believe many of us have the feeling that we are living in times characterized by turmoil. We are living through COVID. We feel the first outliers of impacts of global warming. There is a looming biodiversity collapse and and and and and ,… It is easy to get into a gloom-and-doom mode.

However, at the same time it seems as if there are also very, very big moves towards reTHINKING the very principles of management, managing, ethically, responsibly, and sustainably. But is it something that we are actually DOING in our daily jobs, when we are working ourselves? Is this something our students will be doing once they start working?

I don’t think so. While we should be rocking the boat, what we are really doing is very busily rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is not radical or drastic enough. My somewhat idealistic hope, therefore, is to incite some subversively responsible management practices.

More information about Principles of Management: Practicing Ethics, Responsibility, Sustainability (2^nd ed.) and the cases is available here.

Mind the Mundane Practices of Management!

You might find it somewhat surprising that I suggest we focus on practices. Practices are mundane, aren’t they? We are doing them on a daily basis and we don’t even think about them anymore.

Let’s consider a historic practice. Without the practice of factory production, we wouldn’t live our convenient middle-class lives. We would neither have comfortable wages nor affordable products. Conversely, we wouldn’t have most of the environmental problems that threaten to wipe us off the planet either. There would be no global income inequality in the way we experience it now.

Let’s also think about a more recent example. The practice of subprime lending pre-2007 had been unquestioned and normal for a long time. Then, apparently out of the blue, it causes a crisis that turns the social and economic fabric of the world upside down.

So, we have to mind the management practices that make and potentially break our world even if, and especially if they seem so mundane and ‘normal.’

Watch out for the Positively Subversive Practices!

If we want to rock the boat, we have to foster positively disruptive management practices. Here are four brief examples:

First, think about a practice like that of Open Hiring at Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, close to New York City. Open Hiring contradicts the ‘normal’ strategic hiring paradigm: Get the best people, screen them, and out of 100 pick the one who is the most valuable for your company. No, at Greyston they hire anybody who walks through the door. They don’t look at any CVs, nor do they do background checks. They don’t hire people to bake brownies, but instead bake brownies in order to hire people who urgently need a job.

Next, think about management at Yash Pakka. They practice a radical version of ‘flat’ employee self-management in an Indian society that is characterized by societal hierarchies frequently attributed to the caste system.

Then, think about the company Good-Ark in Suzhou, China, which centers its business model and much of their daily activities on humanistic development of their employees. Imagine how paying this level of attention to the spiritual and human well-being of your people contradicts the normal human ‘resources’ paradigm in.

Finally, think about the example of Allsafe in southern Germany close to Lake Constance. Allsafe, an automotive and aerospace manufacturing company, practices ‘eye level management,’ meaning that they have largely abandoned control systems, and instead give employees freedom. They trust that employees in turn will act responsibly. Imagine about how such practices challenge the dominant paradigm in an industry where everything is about Six Sigma, not making mistakes, and not deviating from the norm.

Making Unrealistic Management Practices Real, One Classroom at a Time

If we want to see management to become a positive force for change towards sustainability, responsibility, and ethics, one thing that seems crucial. We have to incite, to make real this kind of subversively responsible management practices — even though, and especially because, they feel unreal(istic). There is a new normal, a new reality of management on the horizon, where what still seems unrealistic is likely to be(come) the new normal.

Our textbook, Principles of Management: Practicing Ethics, Responsibility, Sustainability (2^nd ed.), while discussing all the ‘normal’ management frameworks and practices, moves such innovative management practices to the front and center. As a textbook for introductory management and business courses, Principles of Management has been written to co-construct this new normal, and to instigate such subversive practices, one classroom at a time.

Note: This text is an adapted version of a keynote speech originally delivered at Responsible Leadership after the crisis: 9th International Humboldt Conference on Sustainability and Responsibility 2020.

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Controlling the COVID-19 Pandemic Hinges on Behavior

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 18:25:50 GMT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused extraordinary devastation, claiming millions of lives and disrupting the economy and daily life across the globe. From the beginning, the course of the pandemic has depended on behavior – for example, whether people would engage in recommended public health actions like mask wearing and social distancing. Currently, the success of vaccination also hinges on behavior. While the successful development of vaccines is an incredibly important scientific breakthrough and their distribution and accessibility is critical, ultimately, the public’s willingness to get vaccinated will determine whether we bring this pandemic under control. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can help ensure that efforts to encourage vaccination and address hesitancy succeed.

“Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can help ensure that efforts to encourage vaccination and address hesitancy succeed.”

The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wanted to assist the public health community’s communication efforts to foster confidence in COVID-19 vaccines. To identify evidence-informed strategies for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines, we formed a trans-NIH working group consisting of behavioral and social science specialists across the NIH. On November 5th, 2020, the trans-NIH working group convened a multidisciplinary expert panel featuring 15 leading experts in public health and social science (e.g., communication, psychology, behavioral economics, health disparities, and anthropology). The expert panel was charged with identifying effective approaches for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines and suggesting ways these approaches could be tailored, targeted, and delivered to address the unique needs of diverse populations. The expert panel discussion formed the basis for recommendations about how government entities, such as U.S. federal agencies and partners at the state and local levels, could most effectively communicate vaccine-related information to a variety of constituents.

This article by Caitlin E. Burgdorf, Ph.D., Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, Ph.D., M.P.H., Anna Gaysynsky, M.P.H., and Christine M. Hunter, Ph.D. originally appeared on Why Social Science? as “Because Controlling the COVID-19 Pandemic Depends on Vaccine Uptake“.

These recommendations are outlined in a report titled “COVID-19 Vaccination Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence” and a user-friendly tip sheet of dos and don’ts. The report relies on a few foundational practices for effective health communication, namely coordinated and consistent messaging, trust building through partnerships, consideration of different health literacy levels in the population, and prioritizing equity in all aspects of communication. The recommended communication strategies, based on these foundational principles, are organized around three critical and interrelated strategic considerations for planning and implementing communication around COVID-19 vaccines: 1) What is being communicated, 2) Who is the target of the message, and 3) How is the message communicated.

The first step is defining the specific goals of the communication effort and determining what needs to be communicated. Establishing top-line messages around vaccine safety and efficacy, the collective and individual benefits of vaccination, and the importance of a two-dose regimen are key to ensuring consistency in communication efforts. However, in addition to conveying these top-line messages, it is important to consider and address underlying reasons for vaccine hesitancy in order to instill trust. For example, for those who have concerns about the accelerated vaccine development timeline, explaining the safeguards in the vaccine development, review, monitoring, and distribution process may help ease fears. Importantly, communicating in an empathic way, free of judgement and overly directive language, is crucial to avoid alienating those who have concerns. Monitoring the spread of both general and COVID-19-specific vaccine misinformation, and taking steps to mitigate its impact, will also be critical for successfully addressing vaccine hesitancy.

It is well documented that the COVID-19 pandemic is having a disproportionate impact on communities already experiencing health and social disadvantages by virtue of their race, ethnicity, health status, age, access to health care, occupation, and socioeconomic conditions. To develop the most effective, trustworthy, and equitable communication strategies, the needs and perspectives of the intended audience—including concerns, motivations, values, and information needs—must be considered. Listening to the concerns of different audiences will create better understanding of the different reasons behind vaccine hesitancy in diverse communities, which can be incorporated in vaccination communication efforts, for example through value-concordant approaches. The report highlights some of the unique challenges and factors associated with vaccine hesitancy in specific populations and describes methods that may help increase vaccine confidence in these communities.

Photo Credit: CDC.gov

“To develop the most effective, trustworthy, and equitable communication strategies, the needs and perspectives of the intended audience—including concerns, motivations, values, and information needs—must be considered.”

Once communication goals have been defined and the needs of the target population are understood, effective strategies for creating and disseminating messages to the intended audience must be employed. For example, to ensure that messages are aligned with the values and priorities of the audience, vaccination messages should be co-developed and co-disseminated with individuals and organizations that are trusted within the community. However, regardless of the target audience, messages must always be accurate, transparent, and truthful and neither exaggerate nor minimize the vaccine benefits or risks. Messaging that elicits positive emotions and uses creative and compelling formats, such as personal narratives or simple graphics, could also increase the impact of the communication effort. Additionally, strategies that make vaccination decisions more visible (e.g., “I got the shot” stickers or social media badges) may help establish COVID-19 vaccination as a social norm and frame the vaccine as an apolitical health decision. Other behavioral tactics such as modifying the choice architecture in ways that make vaccination the easy and convenient action (for example, by asking people to opt out of rather than opt into vaccination at health care appointments) could also increase the likelihood of vaccination uptake, while still preserving autonomy in decision making.

This report is informed by best practices in fields across the social and behavioral sciences. Vaccine availability alone is not enough to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control: applying insights from the behavioral and social sciences can have a substantial impact on vaccine confidence as well as other important preventive behaviors necessary to bring this pandemic to an end.

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When Ignorance is Anything But Bliss

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 11:00:00 GMT

An anti-vaccination protest from the last pandemic. This one, sponsored by the the Anti-Vaccination League of Canada, took place in Toronto in 1919.

Fundamentalist Trump supporters and vaccine deniers are textbook examples of how ignorance can be the basis of distorted thinking, leading to otherwise apparently sane and thoughtful people making dreadful mistakes. Errors of understanding that led to death in the assault on the U.S. Capitol and is leading to deaths from COVID-19.

A recent U.K. survey by the pollsters Savanta ComRes revealed that a large minority of people were not clear what an ‘epidemic’ was, didn’t understand what it meant to ‘flatten the curve,’ what an ‘antibody’ is, or what is ‘contact tracing’ or how it works. I’ve not been able to find a similar survey in the U.S., but I would be surprised if they understood the information from the authorities any better. Of course, in the Trump era this ignorance was aggravated by a president who understood so little he could advocate ingesting poison as a cure for a virus. The ignorance of this minority lays the foundations for psychological defenses and cognitive biases which bolster dangerous actions.

This means that even when the politicians are listening to the experts and making the right decisions there will be an important minority in the population who do just not comprehend what they are being told. It is not their doubts about the veracity of the information on offer, or their beliefs about the biases of the authorities that is the basis for their dismissal of what they are told. Often people who do not understand what is being said do not realize they have misunderstood. Instead, they fabricate an explanation for themselves and their associates that is biased to being less threatening, more comfortable, more in accord with how they would prefer the world to be.

Our ability to seek out possibilities that fit what we already think is, or want to be, the case, is a well-recognized cognitive bias. If you don’t want to believe that a U.S. president incited an insurgency then you believe it was not Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol but some anti-Trump mob wanting to denigrate him. If you are afraid of a virus (and not really sure what it is) then the easiest psychological defense is to claim it does not exist. Quite bizarrely, this has given rise to hoards of protesters outside U.K. hospitals calling the staff liars as the come off duty from busy wards treating many COVID-19 patients.

Those who communicate with the public need to be more aware of how their comments may often fall on confused ears. In the U.K. there have been regular public briefings in which a series of graphs have been shown and quite subtle arguments about developments in the disease and rates of spread are presented. I have wondered how many in the general audience, when they do not even know what epidemiology is or how it operates, have been able to absorb these accounts?

I think part of the problem is the desire by politicians to let people know why they are being instructed to act in particular ways, ‘isolate,’ ‘stay within a support bubble’ and so on. When I studied the alarm systems that were being introduced to tell people what to do in emergencies, I was surprised to find that people just wanted to know clearly and precisely what they should do. They did not want the background information as to why they should do that.

As long as those giving the instructions have authority and clarity people will respond appropriately. If they have authority but ambiguity those who do not understand anything of what they are told will interpret the situation to fit what they want. That small minority can create a belief system amongst their associates which much more comfortable than the reality they would rather was not there.

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Instagram Redesigns for Shopping

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 19:25:07 GMT

Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a Shop tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign said that the change will support small businesses and connect people with their favorite brands and creators.

This made me pause. As a researcher who studies social media, people and society, I’m concerned about the effects of surveillance capitalism. This includes social media companies profiting from collecting user data, making algorithmic inferences about people’s preferences and using this information to target people with advertising.

Features like Instagram’s Shop tab facilitate surveillance capitalism, so it’s important to look at their consequences. Many people use Instagram to share their lives with other people, but the redesign is shifting the nature of the social media platform toward online commerce. This shift opens people to highly targeted advertising and makes them vulnerable to advertising that exploits their emotional experiences.

This article by Nazanin Andalibi originally appeared on The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Instagram’s redesign shifts toward shopping – here’s how that can be harmful”

Shift to shopping

Research, including my own, shows that people use Instagram to record their big and mundane moments, find community, exchange social support, express identities and keep in touch with friends.

In 2017, colleagues and I showed how ad hoc communities form around the tag #depression on the platform, and how much of the discourse is to make sense of the experience of depression, record it, share it with others and exchange support with other people dealing with depression. I argued that it is important for the platform to recognize the value users find in these communities and support them, rather than ban or nudge them to go elsewhere, when they come to the platform to express themselves and build solidarity.

The notification button, represented as a heart icon, brings up a screen that indicates the interactions people have had with your Instagram presence – for example, who has liked your posts and comments. It’s likely that the notification button was the most frequently clicked tab. When people interact with technology, they form habits. I am probably not the only one clicking the new Shop tab when I mean to click the notification button. It’s possible that the company did this simply to ensure that Instagram users encounter the new feature, but there are other ways to accomplish that.

Photo Credit: Katka Pavlickova on Unsplash

By choosing to make the Shop tab central to its platform, Instagram is sending its users a message: This platform is a business, and interactions on this platform are going to be commodified.

Though some people may come to Instagram to find things to buy, many don’t. App designers can provide an unneeded feature and create a need for it over time. This is not without precedence in the context of social media and shopping. For example, when Facebook, which owns Instagram, relaunched Facebook Marketplace in 2016, the Marketplace product manager, Bowen Pan, said: “We show you the most relevant items for you, even if you don’t know what you want.”

Potential harms

People share all kinds of personal information on Instagram, such as mental health, physical health, traumatic events, pregnancy, loss, infertility, becoming new parents and getting married. Social media companies’ access to such sensitive information is a concern, for how the companies could exploit the information and the risk of third-party access to the data.

Instagram can use computational techniques to infer people’s affective states – their emotions and moods – based on many signals available to the platform. These include what content users view and post. There is substantial evidence that emotions and affective states play a key role in advertising. While capitalizing on emotions and emotional personal experiences for profit is not unique to social media or algorithms, the data-driven, opaque and hyperpersonalized approaches boost the scale of potential harm.

Presumably, what people see in Instagram’s Shop is personalized based on what the platform’s recommendation algorithm determines they would like and be inclined to purchase. How does the inferred socioeconomic, gender, age, race and other attributes shape what the platform recommends to users in the Shop tab? What shops get to be recommended and visible? Instagram users can be as young as 13, the age required to open an account. How does personalization work for children? How does this feature affect the experience of individuals with low socioeconomic status? What principles and values is the platform adhering to in designing these recommendation algorithms, Staff Picks and other means of presenting products?

A major consideration is when people get recommendations to purchase items during vulnerable moments. Sharing or seeking information about a difficult, personal experience on a social media platform and then having the platform capitalize on an algorithmic understanding of the experience – which might or might not be accurate – is problematic.

What are the implications for impulsive buyers who may turn to Instagram as a space for community and peer support to resist impulsive purchasing, but who are instead confronted with things to purchase and have no way of opting out? How about for someone who is on the platform to find support while coping with a substance use disorder, but instead encounters recommendations to purchase items related to drinking? What happens if a person posting about experiences with pregnancy loss begins seeing ads for baby clothes? This last scenario has happened.

In recent and upcoming studies, I observed that, to varying degrees, people find social media platforms capitalizing on their personal, intimate experiences – especially those associated with negative emotions – manipulative and harmful. Social media platform designers and decision-makers should consider ways to address potential harms preemptively rather than retroactively.

The Instagram blog post announcing the Shop feature states that there are marketers and influencers on the platform and young people who want to purchase the same products their favorite creators use. This might be a need for some Instagram users, but not all. If Instagram is determined to emphasize shopping, and if opting in is not possible, I believe the company should allow users to opt out of the Shop feature.

Losing personal connections

Recent research has shown that people share less and less personal information on Facebook, which has had its Marketplace feature since 2016, and use platforms like Instagram to engage in more personal, intimate discourse. This is due in part to site features and whom people are connected to on each platform. By moving away from a focus on people and their connections, and by commodifying and potentially manipulating users to purchase items on the platform, Instagram could go down the road that Facebook did – fewer personal connections and less personal, meaningful content.

Photo Credit: Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

Instagram’s website states that it is “bringing you closer to the people and things you love.” But people and things are different phenomena, and the ways people feel closer to each other are different from the ways they are drawn to things, businesses and brands. By wanting to do both, or perhaps by using the former to benefit the latter, the company may be missing the mark on how to bring people closer together.

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Trying to lock down until Covid is eradicated would be dangerous folly

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 16:43:39 GMT

I learned an important thing from working with Jonathan Van Tam, the UK Deputy Chief Medical Officer: “Never begin an intervention,” he used to say, “unless you are sure how and when to end it.” A big problem of Covid-19 management in the UK has been its lack of clarity about precisely this: when do we stop lockdowns, face coverings and social distancing, and dial our lives back to 2019?

As the vaccination programme rolls out, the average risk of serious illness or death for anyone in the UK is falling very rapidly. This process is being accelerated by the introduction of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and the decision to give first doses to as many people as possible.

No current vaccine has been shown to stop transmission of the infection, which is why vaccination passports are pointless. If you do get infected, though, vaccination means that you are very unlikely to need hospitalisation and even less likely to die.

Well before the end of Phase 1 – sometime hopefully in late March or April – vaccinated people will have little more risk of serious illness or death than a healthy 16 to 60-year old. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been fewer than 400 deaths in that group.

The risk of “Long Covid” is real but should not be exaggerated. Many reported cases can be explained in one of two ways. First, the easy availability of antibiotics over the last 70 years has led us to forget how long recovery can take from any infection that has a big impact on the immune system. Viral infections cannot be treated with antibiotics and “post-viral syndrome” is well recognised.

Second, the physical consequences of any prolonged period under sedation in intensive care can be confused with the impact of Covid-19. Muscles deteriorate very quickly and psychological distress is common. Thankfully, the vaccine programme will greatly reduce the numbers of people who have to experience intensive care.

The challenge that faces us as a society now is to decide between two views of the future. Are we going to try to pursue the elimination of Covid-19 within the UK, regardless of the social and economic cost, or are we going to decide on what we consider to be a tolerable level of deaths in order to enable a return to the life we considered normal before 2020? With the extension of the tier system across much of the country yesterday and warnings that schools could be closed until February, with a disastrous effect on children, it is clear that this is a debate that needs to be had urgently. The sooner we can begin to dismantle restrictions, the better.

The Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, pressed the need for such a debate during evidence he gave to the science and technology select committee on December 9. “At a certain point, society, through political leaders, elected ministers and Parliament,” he said, would have to decide on what is an appropriate level of risk, “just as we accept that in an average year 7,000 die of flu and in a bad flu year 20,000 people die of flu”. He also recognised that it was “very unlikely that we will get to a zero level of risk”, and that deciding the level of Covid we are willing to accept relative to the damage that is being done to society and the economy is ultimately a political question and not one that could or should be left to medics and doctors.

He is far from alone in holding such a view. Dr Michael Ryan, head of the World Health Organisation Emergencies Programme, agreed, in an end of year message, that societies would do better to focus on getting back to full strength, rather than on the “moonshot of eradication”.

Unfortunately, a significant faction of medics and scientists do not seem to agree. Their goal is to eliminate respiratory infections – even one as trivial as Covid-19 will be in a post-vaccine world. It is possible that we could abolish this cause of death by continuing the restrictions of 2020 indefinitely – the problem, of course, is that we would simply die from something else.

The scientists who support such a strategy are genuinely trying to make the world a better place according to their ideals. But their vision is of a future where people walk every day in fear for their lives. The rest of us should not accept this.

The experienced clinicians that I have been lucky to work with over the last 50 years share Prof Whitty’s more balanced view. They know that they cannot deliver immortality and that quantity of life should not be confused with quality. I suspect many citizens will share that view. But if we want to turn the clock back to 2019, we cannot assume that this will happen unless our representatives demand that democracy prevails over iatocracy – rule by medics.

At some point, the Government has to say to some of its pandemic advisers: “Thank you for your service to the country – but it is time to go home.”

Robert Dingwall is Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University and a member of government advisory groups. He is writing here in a personal capacity.

This article first appeared in the Daily Telegraph on January 1, 2021

The post Trying to lock down until Covid is eradicated would be dangerous folly appeared first on Social Science Space.

Anti-Racist Research in the Social Sciences

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 13:00:00 GMT

W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903 and the oldest volume on this list, was foundational both for anti-racist thought and sociology itself. (Photo: Cornelius Marion)

In an attempt to uncover and highlight anti-racist research in the social sciences, SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space) sent out a survey last month asking social scientists to share what they believed to be the most impactful anti-racist research in their field. The results have been diverse and illuminating. In a series of posts, we will share the results here on Social Science Space and organizing them by discipline.

Looking over the results, however, we noticed that a number of answers were pointing out the lack of sufficient research around how racism could be combatted in particular fields. We found that quite a few respondents had relied on more general texts on structural racism. Those are the ones we are going to be highlighting in this post. Even though these texts are not specialized, they provide an excellent foundational understanding of racial difference and discrimination and provide a good starting point for understanding and discussing anti-racist research in the future.

Here is what your peers have been reading:

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins | Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and activists, and “provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.”

Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century by Francisco Bethencourt | In this comprehensive history of racism, “Bethencourt shows that racism preceded any theories of race and must be viewed within the prism and context of social hierarchies and local conditions.”

Racism: A Short History by George M. Fredrickson | This “work is the first to treat racism across such a sweep of history and geography. It is distinguished by its original comparison of modern racism’s two most significant varieties―white supremacy and antisemitism.”

Race Matters by Cornel West | In this book, West “addresses a range of issues, from the crisis in black leadership and the myths surrounding black sexuality to affirmative action, the new black conservatism, and the strained relations between Jews and African Americans.”

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi | “Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism.”

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo | “Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. […] In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.”

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander | An “account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.”

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson | “Linking historical flashpoints – from the post-Civil War Black Codes and Jim Crow to expressions of white rage after the election of America’s first black president – Carol Anderson renders visible the long lineage of white rage and the different names under which it hides.”

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva | “documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, there lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities.”

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois | “a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. […] Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology.”

Can the Subaltern Speak by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | “A critical analysis of Spivak’s classic 1988 postcolonial studies essay, in which [editor Rosalind Morris] argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share of society’s goods.”

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon | “Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other.”

The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills | “Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged “contract” has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence “whites” and “non-whites,” full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence.”

What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views by Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer | “Presents competing views on race from four prominent philosophers and race theorists and cutting-edge theories that draw on and engage philosophy, the social and biological sciences, and race theory.”

There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack by Paul Gilroy | “Gilroy demonstrates the enormous complexity of racial politics in England today. He challenges current sociological approaches to racism as well as the ethnocentric bias of British cultural studies.”

The post Anti-Racist Research in the Social Sciences appeared first on Social Science Space.

Contact Tracing, Privacy, Magical Thinking – and Trust!

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:00:00 GMT

The saga of the UK’s contact tracing app(s) should be an object lesson in how not to approach the use of technology in public policy – and why politicians in particular need to step back and rethink their approach to technology, and in particular to privacy. It illustrates some of the key issues discussed in my book What Do We Know And What Should We Do About Internet Privacy. It is the misunderstanding both of the tech and of privacy that lies behind its failure. That failure is abject – it has been a waste of money, time and expertise that could have been put to far better use in addressing the huge problems of the Coronavirus pandemic. It was a distraction, it reduced trust both in tech and in government, as well as being a creator of confusion, frustration and anger. And, so far as we can tell, it has had an almost negligible impact on the pandemic itself.

This post is adapted from a May 2020 post on Paul Bernal’s Blog:
Privacy, Human Rights, Law, The Internet, Politics and more.

Problems From the Start

The app was fraught with problems from the beginning. Technical problems were just the start. The first version of the app barely worked on iPhones, for example, and communication between iPhones requires someone with an Android phone to be in close proximity – whilst the second one, brought in after the first one was finally abandoned, has had its own issues from false alerts to bugs and worst. Legal problems are another issue – the first version of the app stretched data protection law to its limits – and may well have played a key role in its eventual demise. Then there are practical problems – will the app record you as having contact with people from whom you are blocked by a wall, for example – and the huge issue of getting enough people to download it when many don’t have smartphones, many weren’t savvy enough to get it going, and many more, it seems likely, didn’t trust the app enough to use it.

That’s not even to go into the more fundamental problems with the app – problems that lie behind why the app has seemingly disappeared from pubic view. First of all, it was always unlikely to do what people want it to do – though even what is wanted is unclear, a problem which I will get back to. Secondly, it rode roughshod over privacy in not just a legal but a practical way, and despite what many might suggest people do care about privacy enough to make decisions on its basis.

This piece is not about the technical details of the app – in either its first or its final form – but rather about the underlying problems that have beset this project from the start: misunderstanding privacy, magical thinking, and failure to grasp the nature of trust.

These three issues together meant that the project was always likely to fail, do damage, and distract from genuine ways to help deal with the coronavirus crisis, and the best thing people could have done was not download or use the app, so that the authorities are forced into a rethink and into a better way forward. That people mostly did that was what shifted the government first away from their original, data-centralised app and then to making the app far less critical to the overall approach to the pandemic. Nudging the government from their original and deeply misguided ideas has been one of the defining characteristics of the pandemic.

Misunderstanding Privacy – Part 1

Although people often underplay it – particularly in relation to other people – privacy is important to everyone. Members of Parliament, for example, will fiercely guard their own privacy whilst passing the most intrusive of surveillance laws. Journalists will fight to protect the privacy of their sources even whilst invading the privacy of the subjects of their investigations. Undercover police officers will resist even legal challenges to reveal their identities after investigations go wrong.

This is for one simple reason: privacy matters to people when things are important.

That is particularly relevant here, because the contact tracing app hits at three of the most important parts of our privacy: our health, our location, and our social interactions. Health and location data, as I detail in What Do We Know And What Should We Do About Internet Privacy, are two of the key areas of the current data world, in part because we care a lot about them and in part because they can be immensely valuable in both positive and negative ways. We care about them because they’re intensely personal and private – but that’s also why they can be valuable to those who wish to exploit or harm us. Health data, for example, can be used to discriminate – something the contact tracing app might well enable, as it could force people to self-isolate whilst others are free to move, or even act as an enabler for the ‘immunity passports’ that are still being mooted but are fraught with even more problems than the contact tracing app.

Location data is another matter and something worthy of much more extensive discussion – but suffice it to say that there’s a reason we don’t like the idea of being watched and followed at all times, and that reason is real. If people know where you are or where you have been, they can learn a great deal about you – and know where you are not (if you’re not at home, you might be more vulnerable to burglars) as well as where you might be going. Authoritarian states can find dissidents. Abusive spouses can find their victims and so forth. More ‘benignly,’ it can be used to advertise and sell local and relevant products – and in the aggregate can be used to ‘manage’ populations.

Relationship data – who you know, how well you know them, what you do with them and so forth – is in online terms one of the things that makes Facebook so successful and at the same time so intrusive. What a contact tracing system can do is translate that into the offline world. Indeed, that’s the essence of it: to gather data about who you come into contact with, or at least in proximity to, by getting your phone to communicate with all the phones close to you in the real world.

This is something we do and should care about, and could and should be protective over. Whilst it makes sense in relation to protecting against the spread of an infection, the potential for misuse of this kind of data is perhaps even greater than that of health and location data. Authoritarian states know this – it’s been standard practice for spies for centuries. The Stasi’s files were full of details of who had met whom and when, and for how long – this is precisely the kind of data that a contact tracing system has the potential to gather. This is also why we should be hugely wary of establishing systems that enable it to be done easily, remotely and at scale. This isn’t just privacy as some kind of luxury – this is real concern about things that are done in the real world and have been for many, many years, just not with the speed, efficiency and cheapness of installing an app on people’s phones.

Some of this people ‘instinctively’ know – they feel that the intrusions on their privacy are ‘creepy’ – and hence resist. Businesses and government often underestimate how much they care and how much they resist – and how able they are to resist. In my work I have seen this again and again. Perhaps the most relevant here was the dramatic nine-day failure that was the Samaritans Radar app, which scanned people’s tweets to detect whether they might be feeling vulnerable and even suicidal, but didn’t understand that even this scanning would be seen as intrusive by the very people it was supposed to protect. They rebelled, and the app was abandoned almost immediately it had started. The NHS’s own ‘care.data’ scheme, far bigger and grander, collapsed for similar reasons – it wanted to suck up data from GP practices into a great big central database, but didn’t get either the legal or the practical consent from enough people to make it work. Resistance was not futile – it was effective.

This resistance seemed to happen relation to the contact tracing app too – particularly with the first version of the app – and not least because resistance grows spectacularly when there is little trust in the people behind a project. And, as we shall see, the government did almost everything in its power to make people distrust their project.

Magical Thinking

The second part of the problem is what can loosely be called ‘magical thinking’. This is another thing that is all too common in what might loosely be called the ‘digital age’. Broadly speaking, it means treating technology as magical, and thinking that you can solve complex, nuanced and multifaceted problems with a wave of a technological wand. It is this kind of magic that Brexiters believed would ‘solve’ the Irish border problems (it won’t) and led anti-porn campaigners to think that ‘age verification’ systems online would stop kids (and often adults) from accessing porn (it won’t).

If you watched Matt Hancock launch the app at the daily Downing Street press conference – something that seems like an age ago – you could have seen how this works. He enthused about the app like a child with a new toy – and suggested that it was the key to solving all the problems. Even with the best will in the world, a contact tracing app could only be a very small part of a much bigger operation, and only make a small contribution to solving whatever problems they want it to solve (more of which later). Magical thinking, however, makes it the key, the silver bullet, the magic spell that needs just to be spoken to transform Cinderella into a beautiful princess. It was never going to be that, and the more it was thought of in those terms the less chance it had of working in any way at all. This kind of magical thinking means that the real work that needs to go on is relegated to the background or eliminated at all, replaced only by the magic of tech.

Here, the app seemed to be designed to replace the need for a proper and painstaking testing and tracing regime – something that even now, after many, many months and billions of pounds spent, we don’t have that. In its first form, it was based on self-reporting of symptoms, rather than testing. A person self-reports, and then the system alerts anyone who it thinks has been in contact with that person that they might be at risk. Regardless of the technological safeguards, that leaves the system at the mercy of hypochondriacs who will report the slightest cough or headache, thus alerting anyone they’ve been close to, or malicious self-reporters who either just want to cause mischief (scare your friends for a laugh) or who actually want to cause damage – go into a shop run by a rival, then later self-report and get all the workers in the shop worried into self-isolation.

These were just a couple of the possibilities. There are more – many of which apply even when the system was changed in the second version of the app and worked with testing rather than self-reporting. Stoics, who have symptoms but don’t take it seriously and don’t get tested – or people afraid to report their tests because it might get them into trouble with work or friends. Others who don’t even recognise the symptoms enough to get tested. Asymptomatic people who don’t get tested and can go around freely infecting people and not get triggered on the system at all. The magical thinking that suggests the app can do everything doesn’t take human nature into account – let alone malicious actors. History shows that whenever a technological system is developed the people who wish to find and exploit flaws in it – or different ways to use it – are ready to take advantage.

Magical thinking also means not thinking anything will go wrong – whether it be the malicious actors already mentioned or some kind of technical flaw that has not been anticipated (and there were many). It also means that all these problems must be soluble by a little bit of techy cleverness, because the techies are so clever. Of course they are clever – but there are many problems that tech alone can’t solve

The Issue of Trust

One of those is trust. Tech can’t make people trust you – indeed, many people are distinctly distrustful of technology. The NHS on the other hand does generate trust, and those behind the app may well have assumed that they could ride on the coattails of that trust – but that itself may have been wishful thinking, because they have done almost none of the things that generate real trust – and the app depends hugely on trust, because without it people won’t download and won’t use the app.

How could they have generated that trust? The first point, and perhaps the hardest, was to be trustworthy. The NHS generates trust but politicians do the opposite. These particular politicians have been demonstrably and dramatically untrustworthy, noted for their lies – Boris Johnson having been sacked from more than one job for having lied. Further, their tech people have a particularly dishonourable record – Dominic Cummings was hardly seen as a paragon of virtue even by his own side, one of the reasons for the lack of lamenting when he finally left – whilst the social media manipulative tactics of the leave campaign were remarkable for their effectiveness and their dishonesty.

In those circumstances, that means you have to work hard to generate trust. There are a few keys here. The first is to distance yourself from the least trustworthy people – the vote leave campaigners should not have been let near this with a barge pole, for example. The second is to follow systems and procedures in an exemplary way, building in checks and balances at all times, and being as transparent as possible.

Here, they did the opposite. It was been almost impossible to find out what was going to until the programme was actually already in pilot stage. Parliament – through its committee system – was not given oversight until the pilot was already under way, and the report of the Human Rights Committee was deeply critical. There appeared to have been no Data Protection Impact Assessment done in advance of the pilot – which is almost certainly in breach of the GDPR.

Further, it is still not really clear what the purpose of the project is – and this is also something crucial for the generation of trust. We needed to know precisely what the aims were – and how they were to be measured, so that it could be possible to ascertain whether it was a success or not. We needed to know the duration, what would happen on completion – to the project, to the data gathered and to the data derived from the data gathered. We needed to know how the project would deal with the many, many problems that have already been discussed – and we needed to know that before the project went into its pilot stage. As it was, even almost a year later we still don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

Being presented with a ‘fait accompli’ and being told to accept it is one way to reduce trust, not to gain it. All these processes needed to take place whilst there is still a chance to change the project, and change it significantly – because all the signs were that a significant change would be needed, as I and many others said at the time. As we predicted, the app did not do anything very useful, and it had significant and damaging side effects.

Misunderstanding Privacy – Part 2

…which brings us back to privacy. One of the most common misunderstandings of privacy is the idea that it’s about hiding something away – hence the facetious and false ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear’ argument that is made all the time. In practice, privacy is complex and nuanced and more about controlling – or at least influencing – what kind of information about you is made available to whom.

This last part is the key. Privacy is relational. You need privacy from someone or something else, and you need it in different ways. Privacy scholars are often asked ‘who do you worry about most, governments or corporations?’ Are you more worried about Facebook or GCHQ. It’s a bit of a false question – because you should be (and probably are) worried about them in different ways, just as you’re worried about privacy from your boss, your parents, your kids, your friends in different ways. You might tell your doctor the most intimate details about your health, but you probably wouldn’t tell your boss or a bloke you meet in the pub.

With the coronavirus contact tracing app, this is also the key. Who gets access to our data, who gets to know about our health, our location, our movements and our contacts? If we know this information is going to be kept properly confidential, we might be more willing to share it. Do we trust our doctors to keep it confidential? Probably. Would we trust the politicians to keep it confidential? Far less likely. How can we be sure who will get access to it?

Without getting into too much technical detail, this is where the key current argument is over the app. When people talk about a centralised system, they mean that the data (or rather some of the data) is uploaded to a central server when you report symptoms. A decentralised system does not do that – the data is only communicated between phones, and doesn’t get stored in a central database. This is much more privacy-friendly, but does not build up a big central database for later use and analysis. This is why privacy people much preferred the idea of a decentralised system – and why the government eventually had to shift to one – because, amongst other things, it keeps the data out of the hands of people that we cannot and should not trust. Out of the hands of the people we need privacy from.

The government did not seem to see this. They were keen to stress how well the data is protected in ‘security’ terms – protected from hackers and so forth – without realising (or perhaps admitting) that the people we really want privacy from, the people who present the biggest risk to the users, are the government themselves. We don’t trust this government – and we should not really trust any government, but build in safeguards and protections from those governments, and remember that what we build now will be available not just to this government but to successors, which may be even worse, however difficult that might be to imagine.

Doomed From the Start?

I could well be accused of being ‘Captain Hindsight’ for suggesting that this project was doomed from the start – but the original version of this blog post, which predicted this failure, was written and posted in May 2020 on my personal blog. I was far from alone in predicting that failure – because scholar and other ‘experts’ (the kind Britain has had enough of) do understand these things, and seemingly much better than governments. This is where my book What Do We Know And What Should We Do About Internet Privacy comes in. It’s intended to help explain these issues and why misunderstanding them is not just bad for the people who are the victims but unlikely to help you to achieve your objectives. It can help projects to be better shaped and more likely to succeed. Learning lessons is hard without making mistakes – but we can and should do better at doing it.

The post Contact Tracing, Privacy, Magical Thinking – and Trust! appeared first on Social Science Space.

Does the Cost Point Influence Your Idea of the Larger Point of University Itself ?

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:52:32 GMT

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the university sector under greater scrutiny. In some cases, this has prompted new conversations about the purpose of higher education. These have included the extent to which universities are upholding their commitment to public service, and whether the current institutional adjustments in universities will change the way higher education is delivered.

But what do students themselves think about what university is for? In 2017-18, my colleagues and I asked 295 students across six European countries – Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain – about what they believed to be the purpose of university study. Their responses shed light on the possible future of higher education in Europe.

This article by Achala Gupta originally appeared on The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “What’s the purpose of university? Your answer may depend on how much it costs you”

This research, which forms part of the Eurostudents project, investigates how undergraduate students understand the purpose of higher education. We found that for many students, it serves three particular functions: to gain decent employment, to achieve personal growth, and to contribute to improvement in society.

But there were interesting variations in students’ views, which often corresponded to how much they had to pay for their studies.

The career ladder

The most common purpose of higher education that students spoke about was to prepare themselves for the labour market. Some students stated that a degree was essential to avoid having to take up a low-skilled job. However, many students believed that an undergraduate degree was insufficient for highly skilled or professional employment.

Here, we see a shift from a conception of higher education as an investment to help move up a social class to viewing it as insurance against downward social mobility.

As a student in England said:

“I don’t really think there’s much of an option. If you want to get a decent job these days, you’ve got to go to university because people won’t look at you if you haven’t been.”

There were some differences across countries. Emphasis on the purpose of university education being preparation for the job market was strongest in the three countries in our sample where students had to make greater personal financial contributions: England, Ireland and Spain.

Personal growth

The students in our study also discussed ideas of personal growth and enrichment. This was the case in all six countries, including in England where the higher education sector is highly marketized. This means it is set up as a competitive market, where students pay tuition fees and are protected by consumer rights legislation, while metrics such as league tables encourage competition among institutions.

Some students emphasized how they were “growing” through the knowledge they were gaining. Others placed more emphasis on aspects of wider learning that they had experienced since embarking upon their degree. This included interacting with a more diverse group of people than they had previously, and having to be more independent.

Students in Denmark, Germany and Poland talked about this kind of growth – which happened outside formal classes – more frequently than students in the other three nations. Notably, in these countries, students make less of a personal financial contribution to the cost of their university study. When this purpose was mentioned by English students, it was associated particularly with learning how to live independently.

Societal development

Students in all six countries talked about how higher education could improve society. This was brought up most frequently in Denmark, Germany and Poland – where students receive greater support from the government and make less of a personal financial investment to their university education than in the other countries in our sample.

Students tended to talk about their contribution to society by attending university in one of three ways: by contributing to a more enlightened society, by creating a more critical and reflective society, and by helping their country to be viewed more competitively worldwide.

A Polish student said:

“[University education is critical to] shaping a responsible and wise society … one which is not blind, which will do as it is told.”

Meanwhile, a Danish student commented:

“We’re such a small country, we have to do well … we have to do better because there are so many people around the world … we have to work even harder to compete with them.”

Only Danish and Irish students spoke about national competitiveness in this way. This is likely to be linked to specific geo-political and economic factors, particularly the relatively small size of both nations when compared to some of their European neighbors and the structure of their labor markets.

It is unsurprising to find that many students across Europe believe that a key purpose of university study is to equip them for the job market, as this is often the common message given by governments.

Nevertheless, as shown here, many students have broader views. They see the value of higher education in promoting democratic and critical engagement, while also furthering collective, rather than solely individual, ends.

The national variation we found also suggests that the enduring differences in funding across the continent may affect on how higher education is understood by students.

This post draws on the author’s co-authored article, “Students’ views about the purpose of higher education: a comparative analysis of six European countries,” published in Higher Education Research and Development.

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Biden Makes Quick Moves to Get Social Science In Administration

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:21:57 GMT

In the lead-up and first days of his administration, the new U.S. president has made – or been presented – several moves that support social and behavioral science, including creating the nation’s highest ever advisory position with a specifically social science portfolio.

The most overtly pro-social science move – and pro-science in general – was the pre-inauguration announcement of Joe Biden’s science team and the elevation of its head to the Cabinet level. Biden on January 16 introduced his proposed leadership for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, proposing geneticist Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, as its director. Lander co-chaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) from 2009-17, and as head of OSTP will serve as the president’s top adviser on science.

In naming the team, Biden also raised its profile. “For the first time in history,” he said, “I’m going to be elevating the presidential science adviser to a Cabinet rank, because we think it’s that important.”

Alondra Nelson

While the or OSTP didn’t go away under the Donald Trump administration, its impact was clearly less than during the earlier Obama Administration or seen in similar groups in most industrialized countries. For example, meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, the departing head of the OSTP, was not nominated until a year and half into Trump’s four-year term of office, and not approved until the last few hours of the 115^th Congress on January 2, 2019.

Biden is also enhancing the role of social science specifically via OSTP. He proposed sociologist Alondra Nelson, currently the president of the Social Science Research Council and Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, for a newly created position: Deputy Director for Science and Society. The Consortium of Social Science Associations reports that while “details about the scope of this role are not yet available,” the new position like is broader and more senior than the role of assistant director for social, behavioral and economic sciences, a position last filled under Obama.

“For an academic whose work stands at the intersection of technology, science and our social fabric, there is no mistaking the power and meaning of the moment we are living through today,” Nelson said in the announcement event (skip to 21:30 in the video above to view). “Of course, science and technology have permeated nearly every aspect of our lives throughout the course of human history, but perhaps never before in living memory have the connections between our scientific world and our social world been quite so stark as they are today.”

Many of Nelson’s peers and former students were quick to praise Nelson’s appointment. “I’m especially excited because of Dr. @alondra’s intersectional expertise in ethics, social science, and technical sciences,” tweeted science communications expert Niveen Abi Ghannam. “Could not think of a better person to lead national efforts to steer and apply science for the public good.”

While Nelson’s role at the Social Science Research Council put a premium on her leadership skills, she has a strong background in research. As detailed in last October’s Social Science Bites podcast, she’s also spent close to two decades unraveling the story of consumer genetic testing, accounts of which resulted in two of her books, Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History and The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome.

“[I] can’t say strongly enough what a relief it is to be able to genuinely say “you know the incoming official on this topic? she’s written many landmark works on this stuff that you should read”. god. what a relief,” tweeted anthropologist Ali Alkhatib.

Nelson also acknowledged a focus on diversity and equality in the sciences (a focus made sharper after criticism that arose when Lander, a white male, was named director). “As a Back woman researcher, I am keenly aware of those who are missing from these rooms,” she said. “I believe we have a responsibility to work together to make sure that our science and technology reflect us and when it does it truly reflects all of us, that it reflects who we truly are together. This too is a breakthrough; this too is an innovation that advances our lives. We have an incredible window of opportunity ahead of us to approach our science and technology policy in ways that are honest and inclusive, to bring the full strength of our communities, our experiences, our concerns and our aspirations as we think through emergent forms of science and technology. There has never been a more important moment to get scientific development right or to situate that development in our values of equality, accountability, justice and trustworthiness.”

Other key members of the advisory team named by Biden are Frances H. Arnold and Maria Zuber, external co-chairs of PCAST; Kei Koizumi, chief of staff; and Narda Jones as legislative affairs director.

Census changes

Biden also moved to address outstanding issues from the 2020 Census, which has been tripped up by the twin plagues of politics and the pandemic. One of the flurry of executive orders he signed on his first day in office addressed the battered decennial count. His order revokes a Trump executive order and memorandum that would collect information about noncitizens in the U.S. and then exclude people from apportionment counts based on their immigration status. The order re-affirmed the traditional reading of the Constitutional mandate to count “whole persons,” and also called for ensuring that the data in the census “is accurate and complies with all applicable laws.”

While those may seem anodyne goals, all seemed challenged during the Trump administration’s oversight of the Census Bureau. One of the enablers of that oversight made a quick departure from his role this week.

On the same day in 2019 that the Senate approved Droegemeier as Trump’s head of the OSTP, the Senate also confirmed Steven Dillingham as director of the U.S. Census Bureau – a position that had already been vacant for a year. His term as head was marked by an unprecedented politicization of the Census Bureau, initially over using the census as a tool for immigration control and later over concerns that the 2020 Census would not count the “whole persons” required by its constitutional mandate. While Dillingham is a career civil servant, he was increasingly seen as a vessel for Trump’s political maneuvering.

Ultimately, the immigration issue – specifically, pressuring Census staff to produce a technical report on undocumented persons in the United States –seems to have proved Dillingham’s undoing. He announced on January 18 that he would step on January 20, 11 months before the end of his official term. Dillingham did not cite the report, or the investigation into the what has been called a “statistically indefensible” document, in his departure message.

Ron Jarmin, the Census Bureau’s deputy director, will resume his role as acting director of the bureau until a permanent replacement is confirmed.

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New Year Honours List 2021 Celebrates Many in Social Science

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 17:46:55 GMT

The named recipients of the Queen’s High Honors: Carol Propper (top left), Karin Barber (right), and Richard James Atkins (bottom left)

An anthropologist expert in African languages, economists working on policies to address the effects of the COVID pandemic, and an award-winning college president were among those with social science affiliations receiving high honors in Britian’s New Year Honours list released on December 30. The New Year Honours are presented by the reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, and recognize the achievements of a wide range of extraordinary people across the United Kingdom.

Queen Elizabeth II.

All told, 30 individuals received high honors — Companion of Honour, Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, Dame Commander of the Order of the Empire, or Knights Bachelor this year – while some 1,239 names made the list.

This year’s 2021 New Year Honour List is the most ethnically diverse yet, with 14.2 percent of recipients coming from Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, while of the 1,123 candidates selected, 603 (49 percent) are women. 6.9 percent of the successful candidates consider themselves to have a disability (under the Equality Act 2010) and 4 percent identified as being members of the LGBT+ community. Several of those recognized this year came from a social sciences background.

Professor Karin Barber CBE FBA | Dame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire

An anthropologist, Karin Barber has pioneered the study of African popular culture and developed new approaches to the study of oral and written texts in African languages. She was Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham from 1999-2017, and thereafter Emeritus Professor. In 2018, she became the Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Since her CBE in 2012, she continues to open new lines of enquiry into everyday African culture. In 2018 she received the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association, and in 2019 the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Rachel Susan Griffith CBE FBA | Dame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire

Rachel Griffith has used her preeminent position to support the development of UK Government economic policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was the Royal Economics Society’s first female president in over 35 years and only the second woman to hold the post in its 129-year history. She has broken down institutional barriers and has brought together public, private and academic economists in the pursuit of a single national goal. She established the Economics Observatory whose purpose is to answer questions from policy-makers and the public about the economics of the COVID-19 crisis and the recovery.

Professor Carol Propper CBE FBA | Dame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire

Carol Propper is a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She was elected as a fellow of the British Academy in 2014 and as an International Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine in 2018. From 2005-2009, she was both a Council Member for UK Research and Innovation’s Economic and Social Research Council, and Chair of their Research Grants Board. As president of the Royal Economics Society, she has demonstrated exceptional leadership that has directly supported the economic and public health policy responses of the UK against COVID-19.

Richard James Atkins CBE | Knights Bachelor

Richard Atkins spent 21 years as a college principal, including seven at Yeovil College and 14 at Exeter College. Under his leadership, Exeter was rated Outstanding in 2014 and won national awards, including TES College of the Year in 2012. Atkins oversaw the creation of one of the first Mats Free Schools. He held high-profile national positions such as Association of Colleges President and was the Further Education Commissioner from 2016-2021. He has been a pro-chancellor of Exeter University since 2017 and served on the board of Ofsted in 2016.

Robert William Chote | Knights Bachelor

Robert Chote has been instrumental in enhancing the public understanding of economics and the public finances across his 30-year career. This has culminated in a ten-year stewardship of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), in which his leadership has cemented the organisation as an integral and trusted part of the UK’s institutional architecture, as well as a reliable and independent source of information on the economy and public finances for Parliament, the press and the general public. He is also a visiting professor at King’s College London, chair of the Royal Statistical Society’s advisory group on public data literacy, a member of the Policy Committee of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and the Council of Westcott House Theological College in Cambridge. He is a governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR).

Since 1890, these awards have named new members into the honor system by orders of chivalry and other official honors. The system celebrates the breadth of service given by people from all backgrounds across the UK. This year, the list of recipients highlighted the extraordinary public service executed by hundreds of public sector and community works throughout 2020 and into the new year.

Social Sciences in the 2021 New Year Honor List:

Knights Bachelor

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen | Professor of Autism Research, University of Cambridge

Professor Dieter Robin-Helm CBE | Professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford, and fellow in economics at New College, Oxford

Professor Francis Gerard McCormac FRSE | Principal and vice-chancellor, University of Stirling

Commanders of the Order of the British Empire

Professor Bashabi Fraser | Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University

Professor Edward William Peck | Vice-Chancellor, Nottingham Trent University

Professor Andrew Stuart Thompson | Former executive chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Professor Petra Wend FRSE | Former principal and vice-chancellor, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh

Professor Shearer Carroll West | Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham

David Roydon Nightingale | Senior deputy vice-chancellor, University of Kent

Simon Keith Pirotte | Principal, Bridgend College

Professor Adele Diana Jones | Professor of social work, University of Huddersfield

Professor Kathleen Mary Linn Stock | Professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex

Kelly Ann Vere | Director of technical skills and strategy, University of Nottingham

Professor Michael David Wood | For services to Public History and to Broadcasting

Medallists of the Order of the British Empire

Professor Dawn June Brooker | Professor, Association for Dementia Studies, University of Worcester

Professor Christopher John Stratford Hodges | Professor of justice systems and head of CMS Research Programme

Professor Lorraine Sherr | Professor of clinical and health psychology, UCL, London

Professor Alexander Toogood | South East Thames Regional Health Authority Special Development Team

Helen Catherine Mortimer Whitehouse | Deputy director of museums and cultural property, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Individuals named here showcase only a fraction of the achievements celebrated in the full Honour List. Of those receiving an award, 65 percent are recognized for their community work, including those involved in the social sciences. Culture and heritage, anthropology, law, higher education and environmental preservation were only some of the subjects specifically tackled by award recipients. Regardless of their subject of focus, together, the Honour List demonstrates the collaboration and communication that occurred across a host of disciplines in response to the global pandemic. As Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “The outstanding efforts of those receiving honors today are a welcome reminder of the strength of human spirit, and of what can be achieved through courage and compassion.”

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Video: Improving the Response to COVID-19

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 23:17:37 GMT

In order to address the issues surrounding COVID-19 and its collateral effects, Social Science Space is presenting free downloads of the book Together Apart: the Psychology of COVID-19. To download an uncorrected proof version of the book, click here.

When it comes to COVID-19, we’re all in it together. That statement, while obvious, is not always how people react. Why is that, and what does that mean to everyone else? How would understanding this improve our response to the pandemic?

Near what we now know to be the lengthy saga of the COVID-19 pandemic, four psychologists collaborating remotely put together the edited volume Together Apart: The Psychology of COVID-19 in record time for SAGE Publishing (which released the entire book for free download on Social Science Space in May).

Those authors –Jolanda Jetten, professor of social psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland; Stephen Reicher, Wardlaw Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews; S. Alexander Haslam, professor of psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland; and Tegan Cruwys, senior research fellow at the Australian National University – were working at warp speed for a serious academic endeavor.

Now, in the dawn of 2021, they are revisiting their work and that of their contributors in a series of seven videos in which they talk with the academics who wrote edited volume’s various chapters. In this second video, Jetten is joined by Jack Dovidio, professor of psychology and public health at Yale University, whose chapter on a common identity closes the book.

Here, Dovidio answers questions about how the us-versus-them dynamic affects the response to COVID-19, why having a common identity matters in fighting the spread of the disease, and why it’s proving so hard to develop that sense of common identity.

“When you think about somebody as an in-group member, your trust them more, have more empathy, you care about them …,” Dovidio explains. “Many of the things we do to protect against the spread of COVID has an altruistic aspect to it. I wear a mask, in part to protect me, but to protect other people. I’m going to be more likely to engage in these communal behaviors that will benefit other people if I think of them as members of my own group.”

Further videos in the series will appear on Wednesdays for the next five weeks.

The series so far:

Social influence during COVID-19 | Alex Haslam, Nik Steffens, Matthew Hornsey and Frank Mols

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To Share Research More Widely, Knock Down University Barriers

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 22:21:43 GMT

Academics are increasingly expected to share their research widely beyond academia. However, our recent study of academics in Australia and Japan suggests Australian universities are still very much focused on supporting the production of scholarly outputs. They offer relatively limited support for researchers’ efforts to engage with the many non-academics who can benefit from our research.

One reason engagement is expected is that government, industry and philanthropic sources fund research. And when academics share their research with the public, industry and policymakers, this engagement is good for the university’s reputation. It can also lead to other benefits such as research funding.

This article by Margaret Kristin Merga and Shannon Mason originally appeared on The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Unis want research shared widely. So why don’t they properly back academics to do it?”

But the work involved in sharing our ideas beyond academia can be diverse and substantial. For example, when we write for The Conversation, it takes time to find credible sources, adopt an appropriate tone, communicate often complex ideas simply and clearly, and respond to editor feedback. We also need to be able to speak to the media about our findings, and respond to public comments when the piece comes out.

Unis don’t allow for the time it takes

However, as one respondent said in explaining why they were not sharing research with end users beyond academia:

It’s not recognised by uni. So, when it is not recognised, it means that I don’t have any workload for that, and obviously I’m work-loaded for other stuff, and that means that I don’t actually have enough time to do this.

Sharing our findings beyond academia isn’t typically seen as part of our academic workload. This is problematic for academics who are already struggling to find time to do all the things their complex workload requires of them.

In our research, time and workload constraints were the most often-cited barriers to sharing research beyond academia. One respondent said they saw lots of opportunities to build partnerships with practitioners in their field, but added:

[I] just cannot do that, because I’m doing other things that, in my work, are a priority.

When we spend our time sharing our research with academic readers through journal articles, conference papers and academic books, our employers clearly value and expect these scholarly publications. These works, and how the scholarly community receives them, have more weight in evaluation of our performance. Last year an Australian academic nearly lost her job for failing to meet a target for scholarly publications.

Our research found Japan-based academics feel a greater weight of expectations than their Australian counterparts to engage with diverse audiences beyond academia. Universities clearly expect this engagement. Yet they often don’t back it up with support such as workload recognition, resourcing and training.

Universities need to offer better support if they wish to increase academics’ engagement with diverse audiences. They should also consider both the benefits and risks of this engagement.

Academics see the benefits of sharing research

The academics we spoke with valued the benefits of engaging with diverse audiences. They were pleased to see others putting their research to use. Sharing research often helped to secure funding.

They also saw engagement as an opportunity to learn from end users. This helped ensure their research was responding to real-world needs.

Even very early in their careers, many researchers look to engage with audiences beyond academia. In previous research, we found doctoral candidates may opt for a thesis by publication rather than a traditional thesis approach due to their desire to share findings.

What other problems do researchers face?

The early-career researchers we interviewed noted other barriers and risks in sharing their work with diverse audiences. Universities often did not help with these issues.

They described communication skill gaps when seeking to tailor research content for diverse audiences. For example, the way research is communicated to industry experts needs to be different to how it is shared with governments or the general public.

Researchers may need to learn to communicate their ideas in many different forms. They may have to be skilled in producing industry reports, doing television or radio interviews or presenting their findings in professional forums.

Some encountered frustrations when sharing research via the bureaucratic processes of government. For example, a respondent explained:

There’s still that much back and forth because there’s three or four different government departments that are involved in the process and it goes to different people. Some people don’t want it to be changed because they’re vested in the old way of doing things, and then they’ve got to bring ministers up to speed, and then all of a sudden you’re got a new state government that comes in, so that all changes.

Many felt unprepared to deal with the media.

One respondent described being cautious about overstating the impact of their research. In their field, they saw messages claiming: “This is the be all and end all. This will cure cancer.” They were “wary of accidentally going down that path and making a claim bigger than is true.”

Respondents also described risks in sharing controversial and sensitive research beyond academia.

What can universities do?

For respondents in both Australia and Japan, demanding and diverse workloads crowded out opportunities to share findings. Universities cannot just expect engagement responsibilities to be absorbed into an already swollen workload.

If universities are serious about supporting the sharing of research beyond academia, they need to recognize these contributions in meaningful ways. For example, Australian academics usually must meet teaching, research and service requirements in their workloads. If sharing research with audiences beyond academia were counted toward service, academics could have this work properly taken into account in performance management and when seeking promotion.

Universities can do better at supporting academics to share their research with the public, industry and government. Improving access to training and mentoring to communicate research findings both in academia and beyond would be an important step forward.

Margaret Kristin Merga, Senior Lecturer in Education, Edith Cowan University and Shannon Mason, Assistant Professor, Education, Nagasaki University

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On the Persistence of Motivated Ignorance

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 11:00:22 GMT

(Image: 愚木混株 Cdd20/ Pixabay)

Successful decision-making within a democracy depends on an informed electorate. It is both depressing and alarming, then, that studies of political knowledge among the general population reveal a consistent lesson: The public is often ignorant and misinformed when it comes to basic matters of fact and issues of scientific consensus.

Of course, this problem is not new. Plato famously claimed that the ignorance and irrationality that accompany democracies will inevitably push them towards tyranny. Few people today are this pessimistic, but the problem cannot be brushed aside or minimized: Collective decision-making based on ignorance and illusion can be extremely costly and sometimes catastrophic.

It is tempting to search for simple answers to this problem. If people are ignorant, the solution is to provide them with more information. If people are misinformed, the solution is to combat this with accurate information and rational persuasion.

studies of political knowledge among the general population reveal a consistent lesson: The public is often ignorant and misinformed when it comes to basic matters of fact and issues of scientific consensus.

Such solutions are of limited effectiveness. Although collective ignorance can be highly damaging at the societal level, from the perspective of individual citizens it is often a strategic response to unfortunate but common incentives that place knowledge and rational self-interest in conflict.

This article by Daniel Williams originally appeared on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog as “To communicate scientific research, we need to confront motivated ignorance” and is reposted under the Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0).

One manifestation of this concerns the costs of acquiring knowledge. For a typical citizen in a modern democracy with one vote among millions, the benefits of being informed are meagre. By contrast, the costs of becoming informed are significant, especially when compared to spending time and energy on things that are more enjoyable or impactful. As a consequence, people remain rationally ignorant.

This explanation has limited applicability, however. Rational ignorance can explain cases in which people remain ignorant because of a lack of interest in politics, but many people are deeply interested in the political process and awash in relevant information. Despite this, data show that such people are nevertheless often grossly misinformed, holding confident but unfounded opinions at odds with well-established knowledge and widely accessible evidence. The recent riot at Capitol Hill is just one illustration – albeit a horrifying one – of such misinformation and its potential consequences.

To understand this, we must turn to rational motivated ignorance: that is, ignorance motivated by the costs of being informed, not becoming informed. For a typical citizen, political knowledge is just as often a liability as a source of power. Ignorance protects us from painful truths, insulates us from responsibility for our actions, and sustains the relationships that we depend upon for meaning and belonging. To understand and address societal ignorance, we must come to terms with such benefits.

Sometimes the benefits of ignorance are purely personal. For example, it is distressing to reflect upon one’s flaws, a desperate situation, or a dark future, and we like to think of ourselves as good people in control of our lives whose advantages were justly earned. When knowledge drives us towards uncomfortable truths or conflicts with our moral self-image, we therefore often opt for ignorance.

More importantly, ignorance is frequently a strategic response to social incentives. In many communities, beliefs come to function as signals of ingroup identity and solidarity. To abandon such beliefs in the light of new evidence is not merely to change one’s mind but to lose one’s position within a valued community. Such incentives push us towards socially adaptive beliefs wrapped up with our identity and pride. When – as is often the case – such beliefs are unfounded, knowledge constitutes an active threat to this social adaptation.

Consider climate change, for example. The scientific consensus is overwhelming: The planet is warming as a result of human activity. If we do not act decisively, the likely costs range from severe to catastrophic. And yet many people do not heed this warning. Some are in outright denial. Others pay lip service to the scientific consensus but have not fully integrated it into their worldview.

The problems caused by such collective ignorance are widely advertised. The individual benefits of ignorance receive less attention. The existence of climate change presents a vision of the future that generates anxiety, despair, and feelings of powerlessness. Further, for many people denying or downplaying climate change functions as a cherished badge of cultural and political identity. For still others, the obvious government-based solutions to global warming are so repugnant that they are motivated to deny or downplay its existence, a form of solution aversion that mirrors how drug addicts often deny or downplay their drug problem due to an aversion to the obvious solution to such a problem.

When societal ignorance is rational motivated ignorance, the solution cannot be ordinary forms of knowledge dissemination

Similar points could be made about vaccines. Vaccines have saved millions of lives and must play a central role in combating the current pandemic. And yet many people are “anti-Vaxxers”, decrying the harms of vaccinations and linking vaccination efforts to insidious attempts at social control and profit maximization. It is tempting to view such people as paranoid and gullible. No doubt some are. Such explanations lose sight of the individual incentives that often underpin such ignorance, however.

For many anti-vaxxers, anti-vaccination is not an emotionally neutral hypothesis. It is a signal of ingroup allegiance, made all the more credible by the collective persecution, ridicule, and stigma often endured by this subculture. Further, it is an intoxicating display of distrust towards and contempt of an out-of-touch elite. Finally, as with many conspiracy theories, it is bound up with a satisfying narrative in which a heroic David fights back against a demonic but all-powerful Goliath.

Of course, drawing attention to the benefits of such ignorance is not intended to excuse it. The aim is rather to understand it. And the lessons are crucial: When societal ignorance is rational motivated ignorance, the solution cannot be ordinary forms of knowledge dissemination, persuasion, and fact checkers. Instead, our solutions must be much be more targeted towards the interests and incentives that make knowledge costly for individuals.

Most importantly, motivated ignorance draws our attention to a fundamental dilemma at the heart of all democracies: Although we would all benefit as a collective from an informed electorate, we frequently benefit as individuals from burying our heads in the sand. To understand ignorance in contemporary democracies, we must come to terms with this tragedy of the epistemic commons.

This post draws on the author’s article, “Motivated ignorance, rationality, and democratic politics,” published in Synthese.

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Martin Luther King’s Jr. Advice to Social and Behavioral Scientists

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 23:16:08 GMT

[Ed. note. – January 15, 1929, was the birthdate of Martin Luther King Jr. We take the opportunity of what would have been the civil rights leader’s 92nd birthday to recall his address before many of the leading American social nd behavioral scientists of his day.]

“Negroes want the social scientist to address the white community and ‘tell it like it is.'”

“Social scientists, in the main, are fortunate to be able to extirpate evil, not to invent it.” This message, with its implied mandate that social and behavioral scientists must not shirk before this ability, formed the backbone of an address by Martin Luther King Jr. at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on September 1, 1967.

But King’s speech didn’t end with the call to action, but a reflection that was in fact a role social science had already – and in 1967 often continued – to shirk.

Science should have been employed more fully to warn us that the Negro, after 350 years of handicaps, mired in an intricate network of contemporary barriers, could not be ushered into equality by tentative and superficial changes.

While the tile of King’s invited distinguished address was “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” the first section of the speech, as printed after King’s death seven months later, was “The Civil Rights Movement Needs the help of Social Scientists.” King immediately makes this mandate of allyship explicit. “”It is the historic mission of the social sciences to enable mankind to take possession of society,” he wrote, quoting from a then current textbook, Applied Sociology, by S. M. Miller and Alvin Gouldner. “It follows,” he continued, in his own words, “that for Negroes who substantially are excluded from society this science is needed even more desperately than for any other group in the population.”

But they aren’t the only ones, King said to a hall which in 1967 would have been filled overwhelmingly with white men.

If the Negro needs social sciences for direction and for self-understanding, the white society is in even more urgent need. White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions – the Negro himself.
White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro’s desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come.
Negroes want the social scientist to address the white community and ‘tell it like it is.’ White America has an appalling lack of knowledge concerning the reality of Negro life. One reason some advances were made in the South during the past decade was the discovery by northern whites of the brutal facts of southern segregated life. It was the Negro who educated the nation by dramatizing the evils through nonviolent protest. The social scientist played little or no role in disclosing truth. The Negro action movement with raw courage did it virtually alone. When the majority of the country could not live with the extremes of brutality they witnessed, political remedies were enacted and customs were altered.

King’s speech recognized how the civil rights movement and its emphasis on civil disobedience (“mass nonviolent protests [is] a social invention of Negroes”) nonetheless was woven into other pressing concerns – urban violence, the Vietnam War, Black unemployment. And, he added, “there are many roles for social scientists in meeting these problems.”

He offered three specific recommendations for social scientists on what King considered “urgent” issues in the American Black community:

The lack of leadership within the Black community. “Social science should be able to suggest mechanisms to create a wholesome black unity and a sense of peoplehood while the process of integration proceeds.”
Harnessing the latent power of Black political participation and determining if the massive investment in obtaining and exercising the vote – the focus of people like Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins and King himself — has been worth it. “The time is short for social science to illuminate this critically important area,” King said, although the question remains alive today. “If the main thrust of Negro effort has been, and remains, substantially irrelevant, we may be facing an agonizing crisis of tactical theory.”
Identifying the place of African Americans in modern America based on their own ideology, and not a reflection of the ideology of the White majority. “What has penetrated substantially all strata of Negro life is the revolutionary idea that the philosophy and morals of the dominant white society are not holy or sacred but in all too many respects are degenerate and profane. … Social science is needed to explain where this development is going to take us. Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction.”

While King’s message of investigation seems, in 2021, like a majority view, and his calls for activism well within the scope of scholarly consideration, in 1967, even within the ‘liberal’ academy, there were powerful voices of complacent inaction, or even active reaction. In his speech, King called out Charles P. Loomis, who as the president of the American Sociological Association had delivered an address at the ASA convention two days before calling for relocating Black malcontents to South America. “The valleys of the Andes Mountains would be an ideal place for American Negroes to build a second Israel.” This “ideal settlement,” Loomis stressed, “is only for those who cannot come to terms with the United States after that Point is reached where all that can be done has been done to bring about social justice.”

“Answering MLK Jr.’s wake-up call“ | Prominent psychologists reflecting on King’s message on its 50th anniversary in 2017

“I feel,” King said, “that it is rather absurd and appalling that a leading social scientist today would suggest to black people, that after all these years of suffering an exploitation as well as investment in the American dream, that we should turn around and run at this point in history. I say that we will not run!”

King closed with an upbeat message, aimed not at his audience but as his compatriots – whoever that self-selected band might be: “I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.”

A little over seven months after this speech, on April 4, 1968, King would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

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NSF Seeks Social and Behavioral Proposals on Future of Work

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 23:42:21 GMT

(Image: Nicolle Rager Fuller/NSF)

In 2016, the National Science Foundation unveiled its “Big Ideas,” 10 long-term research and process ideas that identify areas for future investment at the frontiers of science and engineering. Through the Big Ideas, NSF aimed to use convergence research to help position the United States at the cutting edge of global science and engineering leadership well into the future.

One of those 10 ideas was titled “Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier,” which the NSF describes as “understanding how constantly evolving technologies are actively shaping the lives of workers and how people in turn can shape those technologies, especially in the world of work.” On Thursday, the NSF asked researchers across the social, behavioral and economic sciences are encouraged to submit proposals to the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier: Core Research solicitation by March 23, 2021.

“Researchers in the social, behavioral and economic sciences play an essential role in understanding and anticipating a vast array of issues that impact the effective development of future workplace activities and technologies,” the announcement expanding the initial solicitation quotes NSF Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Division Director Marc Sebrechts, “We urge our scientific community to come together with their colleagues in other disciplines to develop research proposals that focus on understanding the future of work in ways that will benefit individuals and communities across the U.S.”

It’s worth noting that the Future of Work idea was born well before the arrival of the unique coronavirus dramatically changed the ‘present’ of work for so many.

Convergence research, by its definition, addresses complex problems focusing on societal needs and It entails integrating knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines, but it’s understandable why NSF would make a specific appeal to the social and behavioral community. Many of the NSF’s Big Ideas show a predilection for physical science, such as Navigating the New Arctic, Windows on the Universe, or Quantum Leap, which may have social and behavioral dimensions but which on their face address a STEM concern. Other Big Ideas, such as Harnessing the Data Revolution or the NSF’s diversity, equity and inclusion idea, NSF INCLUDES, have social and behavioral implications on their face but could also be interpreted STEM-focused, especially since proposals are submitted to the Directorate for Engineering Office of Emerging Frontiers and Multidisciplinary Activities. (To be clear, though, once received, proposals are managed by a cross-disciplinary team of NSF program directors.)

The Future of Work effort specifically takes a multidisciplinary approach by supporting research at the intersection of people, society and technology, while aiming to increase opportunities for workers and spur innovations that benefit the U.S. economy. It is a collaborative effort with NSF’s directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Education and Human Resources, Engineering, and the Office of Integrative Activities.

Proposals to the new solicitation should describe multidisciplinary research investigating the evolving technological, human and societal aspects of work. Researchers from the social, behavioral and economic sciences should collaborate with researchers in computer science, engineering and learning sciences to investigate the potential impacts of technological innovations and disruptions. The solicitation invites proposals for planning grants and research grants, as well as new and larger transition-to-scale awards that can create a novel and extended knowledge base applicable to future workplaces. Proposals must also address inclusion and equity in a meaningful way, including potential inequalities in future workplaces or occupations. Proposals should include methods to mitigate those inequalities, such as new approaches to learning or technologies that support accessibility and inclusion.

For full details and guidance on award types, amounts and other questions, see Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier: Core Research.

The post NSF Seeks Social and Behavioral Proposals on Future of Work appeared first on Social Science Space.

Words Matter: Shamelessly Normalizing Big Lies And Alternative Facts

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 17:53:51 GMT

(Photo: TapTheForwardAssist/CC BY-SA 4.0)

After Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump for U.S. president, reinforced by Democrats Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock winning the two Senate seats in Georgia and thus securing a Democratic majority not only in the Senate but also in the Congress, we are currently – and not surprisingly – confronted with disappointment and much anger from many of Trump’s loyal followers. This was strategically fueled by “the big lie,” i.e. Trump’s and GOP’s continuous repetition that the election had been “stolen” by the Democrats and that, therefore, Trump was the “actual” winner of the 2020 election.

In fact, since his inauguration on January 20, 2017, Trump has never stopped circulating and disseminating falsehoods (so-called “alternative facts”): Trump and his followers intentionally constructed a second reality, i.e. “myths” in Roland Barthes’ sense, defined as naturalized semiological systems or worldviews. In other words, opinions, lies and fantasies were propagated as “truth” and “facts,” a strategy reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” the place where lies are manufactured. Oddly enough, Republicans played along (with few exceptions). The old saying, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” has once again proved to be true.

Via Twitter, Facebook and other social media, disinformation was spread locally and globally at enormous speed, assisted by conservative right-wing media such as Fox News and platforms such as Breitbart. The “alternative facts” became normalized; simultaneously, facts were systematically and shamelessly transformed to so-called “fake news.” In my recently published monograph The Politics of Fear, I define “shameless normalization” as the process through which “[T]he boundaries of the ‘sayable’ are being shifted, and ‘anything goes’.” (2021, 6). Conventions and norms, rules governing dialogues, negotiations, and debates are violated through continuous provocations, disseminated via the media, supported by mainstream conservatives — and thus normalized.

The strategy of spreading a “big lie” and creating a second reality is hardly unique to Trump, to the era or to the United States. German sociologist Leo Löwenthal described a similar scheme of lies while analyzing Nazism and Hitler’s (and Goebbel’s) propaganda machine during Löwenthal’s forced exile in the United States during the 1940s. In his seminal treatise, translated as Prophets of Deceit (1982 [1949]), Löwenthal distinguishes between “agitators,” on one hand, and “reformers” or “revolutionaries,” on the other He argues that “[W]hile the reformer as well as the revolutionary employ their own energies to elevate the thoughts and emotions of their audience to a higher level of consciousness, the agitator strives to exaggerate and intensify the irrational elements of the original accusation.” (1982 [1949], 22).

Such exaggeration and intensification necessarily leads to violence as predicted by some commentators, historians and political scientists. On January 6, 2021, the whole world was able to watch how Trump’s ardent followers (amongst them military veterans, so-called “proud boys,” neo-Nazis, and so forth) – after having been explicitly incited to insurrection by Trump and his lawyer Rudi Guliani –invaded the Capitol during the session certifying Biden’s victory. Unfortunately, there were not enough police officers present to defend the American symbol of democracy; the rioters were able to enter the building. Five people died as a result of this attempted coup.

This incident triggers memories of the infamous Reichtagsbrand in Berlin 1933, which was instrumentalized by the Nazi-Party to suspend fundamental rights and subsequently paved the way for Hitler’s seizure of power. Much more recently, on August 31, 2020, followers of various extreme-right groups stormed the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s parliament (Bundestag) during a demonstration against the Coronavirus measures of the government. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke about an “unacceptable attack on the heart of our democracy.” Even the far-right populist party AfD [Aktion for Deutschland] distanced itself from such attacks. Currently, many governments are debating how to better protect their core institutions from similar assaults.

In spite of many observations and even explicit warnings by foreign politicians, journalists and scholars during Trump’s presidency that his rhetoric, staging, Twitter-politics and policies were dangerous and salient indicators of authoritarianism, some people continued to trivialize Trumpism. After January 6, commentators agreed that the attempted coup had transgressed and violated constitutive democratic norms. They argued that Trump was actually unfit as politician; indeed, that his discursive and material practices did not count as “politics” and that his tendency to lie was exceptional.

I believe that these arguments are wrong. Trumpism implies a different kind of political logic, namely undemocratic and authoritarian politics. Ever since Trump declared that he wanted to “make America great again,” it was obvious that he was determined to change American politics and policies to a status quo ante. MAGA implied a nostalgia for an America which existed before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, an America where patriarchy was intact and where ethnic minorities had fewer rights than the white population. His offensive rhetoric frequently served as strategic distraction from his political aims and implemented policies (“dead cat strategy”). As U.S. historian Timothy Snyder recently maintained, “this has everything to do with race from top to bottom.”

Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump at the White House in 2019

This imaginary “turning the clock back” is not unique to Trumpism. Far-right leaders in Europe, India, Brazil, the Philippines and so forth endorse similar nativist ideologies. Thus, it is not surprising that far-right populist Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orbán was the first European leader to congratulate Trump to his victory 2016. Trump reciprocated, immediately congratulating Orbán after his electoral victory in 2018. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) was also among the first to congratulate Trump on November 9, 2016. Austria’s national-conservative chancellor Sebastian Kurz expressed hope the same day that Trump would have to seek compromises because “not all Republicans shared his opinions” (unfortunately, one has to admit, this wish was not fulfilled); on February 20, 2019, after his visit to the White House, Kurz emphasized that he had had a very successful meeting with Trump in spite of some disagreements. Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s national-conservative prime minister, copied Trump’s (and Orbán’s) attacks on press freedom; Orbán and Morawiecki continue to spread “alternative facts,” i.e. disinformation.

Thus, in spite of some critique and disagreements, Trump and Trumpism were accepted on the global political stage. Only a few politicians, such as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel and French President Emanuel Macron, as well as the former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, openly disagreed with Trump on many occasions and explicitly kept their distance. Simultaneously, Trump’s abrasive racist and misogynist rhetoric, his lies, his hate-incitement on many occasions and his trivialization of extreme-right and white-supremacist ideologies were eventually normalized. Trump had predicted this: on January 23, 2016, while speaking at a pre-election campaign rally in Iowa to his loyal followers, he famously said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Perhaps the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, was a step too far — Le Pen, Kurz, and Morawiecki quickly condemned Trump. Orbán, however, has remained silent.

President-elect Joe Biden’s first reaction during the attempted coup was that “this is not who we are.” He repeated and strongly emphasized what he had already said in 2018 when criticizing Trump’s asylum and migration policies, which often saw small children separated from their parents at the Mexican border. In a Facebook posting, Biden wrote that “[W]e must remind this Administration of the core values that beat in the heart of this country. We must send the clearest possible signal to the rest of the world that America still represents the best of humanity — not the worst.” However, nothing changed. Obviously, these exclusionary policies characterized what many Americans deemed legitimate and right.

Some of the tweets on July 14, 2019 from Donald Trump’s now suspended Twitter account.

In the summer of 2019 during a House hearing, the so-called “squad” of four progressive Democratic congresswomen — Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar –vehemently criticized conditions in a migrant detention center they had visited — mistreatment happening “under American flags.” In turn, they were viciously insulted by Trump on Twitter. As is typical, Trump did not justify or explain his policies — he turned the tables and attacked his political opponents. But the policies challenge Biden’s (and other’s) benign view of “core values.” Only NGOs continued to report the massive human rights violations at the Mexican borders, while similar inhumane treatment of refugees, especially of unaccompanied children and adolescents, stranded on the Greek islands such as Lesbos, has seen most EU leaders keep silent. The violation of the Human Rights convention, the Geneva convention and the Children Rights convention has become shamelessly normalized, not only in the US but also in the European Union.

Therefore, it would make sense to revise the slogan “This is not what we are” to “This is not what all of us are” or “This is not what we should (want to) be”….

January 6, 2021 might yet have a cathartic effect at least for some Republicans, some of Trump’s followers, and some other far-right populists. They might understand that hate-incitement, polarizing and discriminatory rhetoric and the scheme of lies facilitate and legitimize violence and set the stage for authoritarian regimes. Evidently, the far right can never really succeed if they are not supported by conservative parties. Accordingly, it is imperative to resist the temptation to jump on the far-right populist bandwagon out of fear of losing voters. Rules still apply, even when demagogues and populists are in power. What’s more, transgressions and discursive shifts happen slowly, frequently unnoticed. But words lead to deeds! Therefore, it is salient to oppose such neo-authoritarian, law-and-order politics, from the very outset, and not to be opportunistic and remain silent because of possible power gain.

The post Words Matter: Shamelessly Normalizing Big Lies And Alternative Facts appeared first on Social Science Space.

‘Bukavu Series’ Addresses Power Dynamics in Fieldwork

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:31:59 GMT

Many researchers from the global North engage research assistants in their geographical field of research. (Photo: Axel Fassio/Flickr)

Many researchers from the global North (Europe and North America) who do fieldwork in the global South engage research assistants and associates in the geographical field of research.

At best, their contribution is mentioned in a footnote of the articles or reports. At worst, they are kept invisible.

Yet these contributors are key actors in the research process. They forge access to difficult zones and find people to take part in research efforts. They are important in the collection of data, production of research reports and dissemination of results. Eventually, they help to orient, shape and produce knowledge.

Research shows that their role is seldom made visible in research outputs. In addition, they aren’t invited to be part of the research design process. And their role isn’t recognised in the institutional field of research, which is guided by publishing records.

This article by An Ansoms, Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Godefroid Muzalia, and Koen Vlassenroot originally appeared on The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Power dynamics with researchers on the ground needs a reset”

This is problematic because of the way unequal power relations – and power abuse – determine the conditions in which knowledge is produced. Also, there’s a loss of expertise in the hands of these research associates and assistants.

Concerns over research associates and assistants in the production of knowledge aren’t new. They connect to a rich literature on research ethics which emerged within different disciplines as early as the 1960s. This research highlighted the importance of research associates and assistants in the production of knowledge, and the importance of locally embedded expertise – though often without giving them a voice.

To shed light on what’s needed to correct this, we – a group of academics from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Europe – have initiated the “Bukavu Series” – a series of blog posts and a new online cartoon exhibit.

Written by research collaborators and research assistants in the Democratic Republic of Congo, over 30 blog posts discuss how power relations in knowledge production are skewed. They give first-hand accounts of the role of research assistants and associates, their challenges and their responsibilities.

We don’t want to pretend that the Bukavu Series can solve the problem of invisibility of research associates and assistants. But this is a step in making their voices heard.

Bukavu Series

The contributions in the Bukavu Series cover a number of ethical and emotional challenges that research associates and assistants face.

They discuss the incompatibility between research projects’ expectations and field complications. These include difficulties in getting access to “the field.” They are often embedded within the methodological set-up of research projects. Resolving these complications can be difficult because of time pressures and limited budgets.

Another challenge is related to the associates’ interactions with people in contexts of violence, conflict or economic hardship. As some blog posts tell us, they often struggle with people’s expectations to be financially compensated for participating in research. But these resources are usually not provided, and associates’ struggles with respondents’ expectations often remain unacknowledged.

Research collaborators and assistants also struggle with questions around the communication of research results to their respondents and society at large. People expect to get an insight into the outcomes of the research in which they participated. But again, this is often not foreseen in the research design.

Besides the inherent ethical issues, this complicates any potential return to areas as part of future research activities.

Similarly, there’s little recognition about how doing research in conflict-affected environments can have profound effects on the mental well-being of researchers. Various posts reflect on researchers’ entanglements and traumas, shed light on strategies that might reduce these risks, and point at the lack of support by those commissioning research activities.

And there’s the challenge of visibility. Several contributors claimed the right to be recognised as full partners in research projects. Some bloggers argued that the role of research associates was almost automatically confined to that of “research assistants”, pushing them into a position of subordination.

What must change

To change this, there are a few principles that should urgently be adopted. This is not only a moral obligation but also a necessary step in the transformation of the production of knowledge and academia at large. These steps include:

Acknowledgement upfront of the key role played by research associates and assistants alongside the lead researcher(s) right from the start of the research cycle;
Equal participation between lead researchers, collaborators and assistants in the design of project cycles;
Equal ownership over the generated data;
Recognition in the final outputs of research.

More generally, contemporary problems of knowledge production cannot be detached from the broader inequalities, nor can they be considered separated from existing power relations defining academia. The relations of domination – at the root of these inequalities and ingrained in a historical trajectory – explain to a large extent the unequal representations in the production of knowledge.

There’s a need to call into question the tendency in academic circles to consider institutions located in the global North as “the” valid reference points for the production and validation of knowledge. More prominence should be given to institutions – and scholars – located in the global South in all the dimensions of knowledge production and by all those involved in the generation of knowledge.

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Video: Social Influence in the Age of COVID

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 11:00:46 GMT

Near what we now know to be the lengthy saga of the COVID-19 pandemic, four psychologists collaborating remotely put together the edited volume Together Apart: The Psychology of COVID-19 in record time for SAGE Publishing (which released the entire book for free download on Social Science Space in May).

Now, in the dawn of 2021, they are revisiting their work and that of their contributors in a series of seven videos in which they ask the academics behind the various chapters how their contributions have held up, how the analysis in the book has held up, and what they have learned since finishing up the book in March 2020.

In this first video, Haslam asks the authors of the section on “social influence” about their particular piece of the puzzle – Matthew Hornsey about conspiracy theories, Niklas Stevens on compliance, and Frank Mols about behavior change. The three, all researchers at the University of Queensland, were upbeat about their scholarship is a bit downbeat on many of the behaviors they’ve (correctly) predicted in the public.

“The evidence that has comes out subsequently has reinforced the points rather than undermined them,” Haslam summarizes here, adding that if the researchers were writing the book today the biggest change would be that the avalanche of additional data likely supports and strengthens their views.

Further videos in the series will appear on Wednesdays for the next six weeks.

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