Author Anders Broström discusses the ways in which sustainability plays a part in publishing partnerships based on the article “Legitimation work in sustainable entrepreneurship: Sustainability ventures’ journey towards the establishment of major partnerships,” published in The International Small Business Journal.

The impulse for this research came from conversations with food industry firms about how their efforts to tackle the issue of food waste involved different types of partnerships with small entrepreneurial firms. While investigating this phenomenon, we were unsure about how to think about it. On the one hand, efforts to reduce food waste can be thought of as an efficiency problem. On the other hand, food waste is a sustainability concern. There are a number of interesting studies suggesting that in environments where more than one logic co-exists, organizations face difficult trade-offs in legitimizing themselves. Yet these types of problems were not very evident in our initial data. This observation made us want to dig deeper into exactly how entrepreneurial firms in this setting did manage to convince large industry incumbents to enter into partnerships with them.

Our research shows that the entrepreneurial firms present themselves as either a competent business partner, much like any knowledge-intensive service firm markets itself, or as champions of sustainable development. We argue that this finding reflects significant logic incompatibility, in combination with differences in the founding logic of the entrepreneurial firms.

On the surface, it may seem as if entrepreneurs offering incumbents support in reducing food waste could benefit from drawing on a combination of arguments relating to commercial and environmental/social logics. After all, don’t all entrepreneurs today have an argument up their sleeve about how their venture will contribute to sustainable development? Our analysis, however, suggests that the entreprenur may be better off anchoring her sales pitch firmly in either one of those logics.

But our study draws on experiences from the formation of the first major partnership of a new venture. We believe it is highly interesting to ask what may happen over time. Perhaps sustainability entrepreneurs can and will engage in a more complex type of legitimation work, where commercial arguments and sustainability arguments are combined and intertwined in new ways. This is something that needs to be addressed in further research, in order to further promote our understanding of this type of entrepreneurial activity.

The post Competent Partner, Champion of Sustainability–Can Entrepreneurs Play Out Both Cards at the Same Time? appeared first on Social Science Space.

Two high-profile University of Auckland academics raised important questions about academic freedom with their complaint to New Zealand’s Employment Relations Authority (ERA) that their employer had failed its duty of care to them.

Associate professor Siouxsie Wiles and professor Shaun Hendy have become well known for their work explaining the science behind COVID-19 and guiding the public and government response.

But not everyone has agreed with that response or valued their contribution, and the academics have been threatened by what they have called “a small but venomous sector of the public.” They argued the university had not adequately responded to their safety concerns and requests for protection.

The case has now been referred to the Employment Court and the outcome for all parties remains unknown.

My focus is on the initial determination by the ERA, which referred to a letter from the university to Wiles and Hendy in August 2021 that urged them “to keep their public commentary to a minimum and suggested they take paid leave to enable them ‘to minimise any social media comments at present.’”

According to the ERA, this advice was “apparently given after [the university] received recommendations from its legal advisors to amend its policies so as to ‘not require’ its employees to provide public commentary, in order to limit its potential liability for online harassment.”

The ERA also noted the university “says that the applicants are not ‘expected’ or required to provide public commentary on COVID-19 as part of their employment or roles with the respondent, but it acknowledges they are entitled to do so.”

This issue is central to my concerns about academic freedom.

Freedom and risk

The academics argued that the university is statutorily required to “accept a role as critic and conscience of society” – as is set out under section 268 of the Education and Training Act 2020.

Universities routinely fulfil this role when academic staff and students state controversial or unpopular opinions and the results of their independent scholarship. Asking academics to step back from those roles to avoid risk seems to acknowledge that the threat derives from them doing their work.

I also fail to see how it would mitigate risk. An electrician who tried to mitigate the risk of electrocution by spending less time around wires hasn’t actually reduced the risk of electrocution when doing their job. They’ve just reduced the amount of time they are doing their job.

The Auckland academics are not the first to receive threats because of their “critic and conscience” activities. In the US, my former boss Dr Anthony Fauci says he, too, has received death threats from members of the public because of his work on the pandemic.

Less visible but still damaging threats or derogatory comments can come from within the university community, too. Systemic discrimination based on gender and race is well documented in academia. And increasingly, there are conflicts arising out of commercial interests in public research organisations.

Elsewhere it can be even more dangerous, such as the state-sponsored attacks on academics reported in Turkey. As a fellow scientist, I empathise with colleagues forced into the spotlight by virtue of their expertise or conscience.

Uses and limits of institutional power

Universities provide an important protection of academic freedom by not using their power as employers to stifle opinion. But it’s not enough. Universities should be more active in enabling academics to fulfil their role as critic and conscience of society so that, as expected by parliament, academic freedom is “preserved and enhanced”.

But there are also limits. No university in Aotearoa New Zealand has the scale to protect its students and staff from the concerted actions of a hostile country, a multi-billion dollar multinational company, or even the whispers of co-conspirators at coffee breaks during the ranking of grants.

What universities should do cannot exceed what they can do.

A coalition of government, universities, unions, staff and students needs to work together to redefine what can be done.

The government could reaffirm its commitment to critic-and-conscience activities by creating or re-purposing funding explicitly for these. Accountability will follow because universities would be required to expose that activity to public oversight.

The expectations of the university and the government to preserve and enhance academic freedom should become a normal conversation.

The risk is governments might want to influence what does and does not constitute being a critic and conscience of society, and use funding to stifle criticism of its policies. While this risk exists already, the temptation to constrain academic freedom could become stronger.

But balance would be provided by using the United Nations’ higher education declaration as a benchmark, through the transparency of the funding accountability exercise, and the declared precondition the funding allocation process be subject to ongoing and open scrutiny by university staff and students.

Accepting risk with freedom

Universities would be expected to use their additional resources to enable students and staff, as safely as possible, to use their academic freedom for public service.

Jurisdictional responsibilities could be negotiated between universities and government so that, where appropriate, a threat requiring more than campus security would be covered by the country’s police or defence resources.

But students and staff have some responsibilities, too. The university community cannot and should not leave its own protection to others. It needs to take a greater role in self-policing prejudice, privilege and conflicts of interest within the academic community itself.

Confronting the ultimate holders of power within their own academies and professional bodies will be the most painful action for members. But it would be worse for the community to fail in this and therefore do less as the critic and conscience of society.

If the use of academic freedom did not create risk, parliament would not have needed to legislate for its protection. But that risk should not be shouldered by Wiles and Hendy, or anyone else, alone.

The post Does Protecting ‘Academic Freedom’ Include Protecting Academics? appeared first on Social Science Space.

When I joined academia from industry in 2013, I noticed that the discipline of marketing was mainly informed by theory with little practice. Working as a head of social media for a London agency in the late 2000s and in digital marketing in the early 2010s, I found there were discrepancies between marketing in practice and what was being taught at business schools. As part of my academic role, I set the goal to better equip students for marketing jobs by bringing practice into the classroom. I hoped this would help close the digital skills gap and feed the talent pipeline of my former industry.

While digital marketing is now much better represented in academia compared to 2013, through monitoring job ads and direct conversations I had noticed an increasing industry demand for data and digital analytics skills. This spurred me on to find out what knowledge and skills our graduates needed for an entry-level marketing role that required analytics. I was also interested in whether business schools’ current approaches to teaching marketing analytics was effective in preparing students for these jobs.

To answer these questions, my co-author Justina Setkute of Technological University Dublin and I decided to look at this issue through the eyes of practice. We compared marketing analytics theory with its use in marketing practice, and analyzed practitioner views from academic and large-scale industry sources. What we found was compelling: Yes, there is a body of research and theory on analytics in marketing, and the subject is taught in some institutions. However, there is a lack of coherence, with multiple terms and definitions, and little consensus on whether current approaches to teaching it are effective.

This opened a gap to explore the knowledge and skills required for analytics in marketing practice. Our review confirmed that digital marketing was now the main discipline, and we built a practice-informed model to help educators build analytics capability into their marketing curriculum. A surprising finding of our analysis is that this requires soft skills alongside technical skills and knowledge, because data needs to be communicated effectively to become actionable. The resulting digital marketing analytics capability model is shown below.

This model should be used holistically when building a learning activity because each component is needed to build the capability. For example, marketing communications and measurement & evaluation (knowledge) could be combined with web analytics (technical) and Google Analytics (tool) in a live client project, where students practice communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills (soft) to share their findings with an external client.

We wanted to create something practical and visual, so that busy educators can more easily expose their students to the key practices of the modern marketing industry while building students’ (and their own) digital analytics capability.

We hope that our paper, “Analytics Capability in Marketing Education: A Practice-Informed Model,” published in the Journal of Marketing Education, helps educators integrate their teaching of marketing analytics in a way that is applied and practical. We also hope our research helps business schools better develop work-ready graduates and meet the needs of its students and the marketing industry.

The post Why Are Marketing Analytics Skills Vital, and How Can Business Schools Teach It? appeared first on Social Science Space.

Engineer and psychologist Carlotta M. Arthur, currently director of the Henry Luce Foundation’s Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM, has been named the new executive director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Arthur, who replaces the retiring Mary Ellen O’Connell in the role, will take charge on February 14.

DBASSE, as the division is known, is one of seven major programs at the National Academies. While they operate under a congressional charter signed by President Lincoln in 1963, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine.

During her tenure at the Clara Boothe Luce Program, Arthur expanded its national and global profile the program and of the larger Luce Foundation’s activities to transform STEM systems and structures through the lens of equity and inclusion. The program provides support for women in science, mathematics, and engineering in higher education and has made more than $200 million in grants since its inception. Under Arthur’s leadership, the Luce Foundation was a sponsor of the National Academies’ study on Sexual Harassment of Women in Academia. Prior to her time at the Luce Foundation, Arthur served as director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and as program officer of diversity initiatives at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“Dr. Arthur’s national and global relationships with women scholars, passion for a wide range of issues at the intersection of people and technology, and extensive experience with the full cycle of philanthropic funding as both a sponsor and a grantee, will be extremely valuable for the National Academies,” said Gregory Symmes, chief program officer of the National Academies.

Trained as an engineer and after working 10 years in the private sector, Arthur earned a doctorate in clinical psychology and is a licensed psychologist in New York. She held an assistant professor position at Meharry Medical College, an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Smith College, and an adjunct assistant professor position at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Helene Fuld College of Nursing, a 75-year-old nursing college in Harlem, and an advisory board member for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center for Invention and Innovation. Over the last 13 years, Arthur has consulted with the World Health Organization’s Pan American Health Organization and private clients on issues related to education leadership; equity, diversity, and inclusion; behavioral health; and psychology.

Arthur was the first African American woman to earn a B.S. in metallurgical engineering from Purdue University. She completed her M.A. in psychology and Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with an emphasis on psychophysiology/health psychology, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Arthur was a member of the inaugural cohort of W.K. Kellogg Scholars in Health Disparities at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The post Engineer and Psychologist Carlotta Arthur to Head DBASSE appeared first on Social Science Space.

Cognitive scientist Philip E. Rubin, whose extensive resume includes leadership roles at the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is the new president of the board of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The Washington, D.C.-based federation, known as FABBS, is a coalition of scientific societies and university departments that share a commitment to advancing the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior.

“Dr. Rubin brings extensive experience as a researcher and as a federal policymaker and administrator to this role at a time of tremendous interest and need for insights from FABBS scientists,” said Juliane Baron, FABBS’ executive director.

As president, Rubin follows Roxane Cohen Silver, who served as president of FABBS during 2020 and 2021, steering the organization through uncertain times amid a global pandemic. Silver, a psychologist and vice provost of academic planning and institutional research at the University of California Irvine, will continue to lend her expertise and guidance for two additional years in her role as past-president.

Rubin is the chief executive officer emeritus and a former senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories (a private research institute with the tagline “the science of the spoken and written word”), where he is currently a member of the board of directors. His research combines computational, engineering, linguistic, physiological, and psychological approaches to study, primarily, the biological bases of speech and language. Rubin is a professor adjunct in the Department of Surgery, Otolaryngology, at the Yale University School of Medicine, a research affiliate in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, a Fellow at Yale’s Trumbull College, and a trustee of the University of Connecticut.

At FABBS, he said, “I hope to raise awareness of the importance of the behavioral and brain sciences in confronting societal challenges and foster and advance efforts to increase inclusivity in our organization and the disciplines it represents.”

He received his undergraduate degree from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Connecticut. From 2000-2003, Rubin served as the director of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at the National Science Foundation. From 2012-2015, he worked in President Barack Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, first as assistant director for social, behavioral, and economic sciences and later as principal assistant director for science. During that time, Rubin also led the White House neuroscience initiative, co-chaired the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Science, and served as a senior adviser to the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

The post FABBS Welcomes Philip Rubin as New Board President appeared first on Social Science Space.

To train the next generation of researchers, science educators at the university level need to help students achieve advanced scientific literacy. Accomplishing this requires teaching students to read the primary sources of their field, i.e. academic journal articles. These primary sources are, however, written for an audience of highly specialized experts, and as a consequence, learning to understand them requires a lot of time and effort from students and educators alike.

It makes sense then to start exposing students to these articles early in their university careers, which presents a longstanding conundrum: the material is frequently so difficult that many students fail to gain even a basic functional understanding of the articles during their first attempts. This experience can be demoralizing and stressful for students, leading to poor learning outcomes, which can push capable future scientists away from the field.

To solve this problem, Steve Joordens’ Advanced Learning Technologies Lab (ALT) at the University of Toronto Scarborough examined whether having scientists give accessible — but substantive — explanations of their research, via video as a potentially ideal way to bridge the gap between students’ ability and the expert-level knowledge they need to access. Done right, this should help students contextualize the information they need, while also humanizing research and researchers to help students connect with the field on a more personal level.

That said, to advance the practice of pedagogy, it is essential to differentiate between methods that seem good in theory and methods that are good in practice. So, with a shared commitment to giving students demonstrably effective educational experiences, the ALT Lab, where I am a postdoctoral researcher and was principal investigator for this particular effort, and SAGE Publishing [the parent of Social Science Space] partnering in a project to put theory to the test. This was done in a rigorously designed experiment conducted in the naturalistic context of an in-class writing assignment at a large (1,200 students) online psychology class at the University of Toronto Scarborough. We received support from Mitacs, a Canadian-based international not-for-profit organization that aims to solve business challenges with research solutions from academic institutions.

In this study, learning outcomes were measured for students who have access to the video ‘primers’ and for a control group of students who receive the standard instruction and supports – i.e. no video — for the course. Learning outcomes we measured included a students’ ability to apply the information and their ability to remember core concepts from the research papers at a later date. Additionally, students provided feedback to the researchers throughout the writing assignment about their emotional and practical experiences.

This project draws from the library of case-study videos in the by SAGE Research Methods Video series. Videos in this library provide viewers with an accessible explanation of a study’s core concepts from the scientist who conducted the research, along with insights into their decision-making. By watching these videos, students get a first-hand account of how and why research is done.

Our preliminary analyses are already underway, and so far the results are promising. Drawing from data that is currently being written up as a research report that will be submitted to an international, peer-reviewed journal, five weeks after completing the writing assignment, students with access to the video explanations showed a 12 percent advantage on a knowledge and understanding quiz. This difference is both substantial and statistically significant, providing compelling evidence that the videos enhanced the learning experience in a meaningful way. And in keeping with the idea that video can unlock complex research ideas for the uninitiated, here’s a video discussion about our research between myself and Michael Carmichael, the director of visual media for SAGE:

In terms of video use and attitudes, 93 percent of students in the control group said they ‘would’ or ‘might’ use extra explanatory resources for understanding the research articles if they were available, and with students in the video group, this was mirrored by 91 percent reporting that they watched the video explanation for their article. Of the students who saw a video, 90 percent reported watching most or all of it, suggesting that they found it useful and/or engaging in the context of the assignment.

Further, 55 percent of students reported watching both the video for their topic article, as well as the video for the unused alternative article. In sum, these early results show that students overwhelmingly choose to engage with video explainers that assist their first forays into reading academic articles, and that this voluntary engagement allows them to get more out of the experience.

The post Can Video Unlock the Mysteries of Journal Articles for Prospective Future Scientists? appeared first on Social Science Space.

Cameron Truong at Monash University reflects on his co-authored article, “Winning the Australasian Reporting Awards: An Analysis of Economic Outcomes,” published in the Australian Journal of Management. The other authors were Christofer Adrian, Ka Wai (Stanley) Choi, and Mukesh Garg.

This study focuses its empirical examination on the Australasian Reporting Awards (ARA), which are conferred for excellence in annual reporting benchmarked against the world’s best practices. The ARA association assesses firms’ financial statements on an annual basis, and a panel of independent judges decide ARA winners based on a metric of ad-hoc reporting quality evaluation.

In this study, we investigate whether the ARA assessment criteria reliably reflect the observable quality of financial reporting. We also ask the question of whether winning the ARA reflects firm performance or contains information that is not yet incorporated in the security prices of the winners. Our main findings suggest that judges of the ARA might not decide winners based on earnings quality, financial performance, or market-based perceptions, but possibly based on other aspects of the firms that are not directly related to academic metrics of financial reporting quality or financial performance. Employing textual analysis, we, however, find that award-winning firms exhibit higher readability in their annual reports.

We also find that ARA winners exhibit good corporate governance practices. Next, our event study analysis shows no clear market response to award announcements of the ARA winners, which suggests that the capital market does not perceive the announcements of the ARA favorably. Last, we document inferior future stock return performance for a portfolio formed based on award-winning firms. Collectively, users of the ARA outcomes should also be cautious with the immediate interpretation of the ARA as signals of superior corporate performance.

One of the primary contributions of our exploratory study is that we raise the question of whether the criteria used in the ARA’s assessment of reporting quality are consistent with the common measures of reporting quality employed in academic research. In this space, our findings show that they are largely inconsistent.

This contribution is relevant to accounting practices in light of the remark made by professor Shiva Rajgopal of the Columbia Business School, who has earnestly called for better integration between accounting research and practice in the recent 65th anniversary conference of Management Science. Particularly, he urges accounting researchers to apply rigorous academic methods to solve and understand problems relevant to policy and practice. Our study points out that it is still unclear what constitutes ‘good reporting quality.’ However, it must be recognized that this is only the first study in what is an important area for financial reporting quality and the Australian capital market.

We encourage future research to explore and contribute to the development of alternative reporting quality measures and, in particular, in the attributes of financial reporting quality identified as being value-relevant to investors.

The post Winning the Australasian Reporting Awards: Does It Matter? appeared first on Social Science Space.

During the nearly two-year stretch of many seasons and variants of COVID-19, central topics that are still at the core of news stories and conversations with colleagues and family members are how public health information is created, communicated, and applied. While most scholars and clinical experts are often quick to admit the challenges still in front of them, it is worth noting how the social and behavioral science community has remarkably stepped up to help disseminate and build on the medical research community.

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) Global Collaboration on COVID-19 brought experts together to assess how their field has contributed to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and identify possibilities for new research to answer unanswered questions.

These questions anchor the discussions of each working group:

• How has psychological science been used to inform solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How could psychological science research have been better integrated into the COVID-19 response, and how could it be better used to address future public health challenges?
• What scientific knowledge gaps must be addressed through new research?

I had the opportunity to ask Andy DeSoto, APS’s director of government relations, how the initiative came about and their goals for project. DeSoto is an MA and PhD graduate of Memory Lab of Henry L. Roediger, III, at Washington University in St. Louis’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. Our question-and-answer session appears below:

Maxine Terry: Apart from the pandemic itself, what spurred the “Global Collaboration on COVID-19?”

Andy DeSoto: The APS Global Collaboration on COVID-19 arose from concerns that psychological science—and the behavioral and social sciences broadly—weren’t at the table during COVID-19 response planning occurring around the world. Frankly, we’re still not at the table to the degree we believe we ought to be. Our hope was that mobilizing the psychological science community would help illustrate to the public and policymakers the many ways human behavior is central to pandemic prevention and response and strengthen our ability to provide needed psychological science insights and guidance.

We think our concerns may be catching on. Last month Francis Collins, the newly retired head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, observed in an interview with NPR, “Boy, there are things about human behavior that I don’t think we had invested enough into understanding.” APS agrees, and we hope that the collaboration will also help identify future targets for broadened investment by NIH and the world’s other science funders.

MT: Can you talk about the process of getting buy-in from scientists and institutions on the project?

AD: We are in awe of how generous APS members and others in the field have been in committing their time to this collaboration!  Dozens of psychological scientists have already stepped forward to lead or participate in the project’s working groups, and hundreds more have volunteered their expertise. This engagement continues despite the many professional and personal challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants. We have taken a flexible approach to organizing the project and have mainly let the effort’s scientific leaders decide on what sorts of projects or outputs are most important in the domains for which they are working.

There’s been strong scientific community interest in the work of the collaboration. Participants from 29 different countries attended a recent webinar stemming from the collaboration titled “Mental Health in a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned From Psychological Science.” You can read more about this event and watch a recording by clicking here.

MT: What are your goals for the “Global Collaboration on COVID-19” project? Is the audience mostly the APS community, or broader?

AD: To answer the second part of the question first, we see three main audiences for the collaboration—the scientific community broadly, policymakers, and the public. While we certainly hope other psychological scientists will participate, this effort is concerned with making sure that what we know and are learning scientifically is reaching the audiences that would most benefit from this knowledge.

We hope that the collaboration will help inspire among scientists of other disciplines new ideas for partnership with psychological scientists and related experts. We view psychology as a hub science with the potential to collaborate with and contribute to many other fields. Hearing about the ongoing work of psychological scientists in this arena will highlight to others the fundamental insights about mind, brain, and behavior that members of our community can provide. Plus, psychological scientists are also seasoned in methodological and statistical techniques that are critically relevant to these pressing questions; they can be valuable leaders or collaborators on interdisciplinary teams.

Additionally, we hope that those who make challenging decisions on behalf of the world’s many countries see the value of the study of human behavior and its application. Likewise, we hope that policymakers will help members of our field understand how to improve their scientific communication, better connect fundamental science and practice, and grasp what pressing policy needs are and how psychological scientists can better serve the public.

We hope too that members of our communities who are not scientists can learn more about what psychological science is and how it is relevant to so many societal challenges, pandemic included. In a sense, we’ve all had to become citizen behavior scientists amid COVID-19’s threat. How do we make decisions and judge risk? How do we foster social relationships amid unexpected circumstances? How can we maintain our mental health in the face of trauma and loss? How does the remote or otherwise changing nature of our jobs affect our work? These are questions many of us are facing daily. Psychological science can help answer them.

MT: Are there any plans to tie-in with non-psychology fields on some of these questions the project is exploring?

AD: Absolutely. Some of the working groups focused on different aspects of psychology and COVID have brought onboard members from other scientific fields such as gerontology, education, epidemiology and public health; others are connecting with policymakers, members of the media, and more in their work. APS is a member of different coalitions that bridge different scientific fields. We’re making sure that our colleagues from these fields know about the collaboration, public events, and recommendations or other outcomes as they arise.

Our eagerness to integrate other scientific fields is part of one of APS’s guiding principles, which is that removing disciplinary barriers and promoting integrative, interdisciplinary science is key to advancing knowledge.

What are your plans to consider future implications, as in the broader impacts of the pandemic and social and behavioral science (as opposed to looking backwards or narrowly on infectious disease)?

We’ve asked our working groups to tackle three big questions. Two are a bit retrospective: How has psychological science been used to combat the pandemic? How has our field not been applied in ways it perhaps should have been? The answers to these questions will prove useful as they should help to identify future research, education, and training priorities. The third question is completely forward-looking. It asks: What does psychological science need to do so that we are prepared, as a field, for the next pandemic or future public health crisis?

The post Collaboration Tackles COVID Through Psychological Science appeared first on Social Science Space.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation has accused university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices of spreading anti-Semitism on campuses, but its recently  issued report does not back up the claim. Although Heritage touts the study, titled Inclusion Delusion: The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities, as revealing that “an overwhelming number of DEI hires are spewing antisemitic views about Israel on social media,” it is actually an instance of selective data presentation in support of a conservative cause.

The study’s authors claim that DEI offices not only fail to protect the interests of Jewish student, but instead “foment” anti-Semitism and “may be contributing to an increase in anti-Jewish hatred.” While certain DEI advocates have been inexcusably dismissive of Jewish students and faculty, sometimes veering into negative stereotypes and even overt hostility, the study’s methodology does not begin to establish its overheated assertion that “political activism of DEI staff may help explain the rising frequency of antisemitic incidents” on campuses.

The Heritage study began by identifying 2,933 DEI personnel at 65 major U.S. universities, of whom 741 had publicly accessible Twitter accounts. Those accounts were then searched for tweets, retweets, and likes that evinced, as the report put it, “anti-Israel attitudes that are so out of proportion and imbalanced as to constitute antisemitism.”

The researchers ultimately found 605 tweets with extraordinarily harsh statements about Israel, a phenomenon that may indeed coincide with anti-Semitism. Many such tweets threw down a new twist on an ancient blood libel, as in “israel (sic) has a particular loathing for children. they target them with violence specifically and intentionally every single day.”

Another charged,

Y’all love to add the word liberal in front of the most evil things and it’s unhingedddd. Wtf is a liberal Zionist? What’s next? Liberal Nazi? Liberal colonizer? Liberal murderer? Liberal imperialist? Liberal fascist?

And a third threatened, “‘from the river to the sea’ means that we will decolonize every block and every grain of sand in palestine (sic).”

In contrast to all that condemnation, there were only 28 tweets favorable to Israel, some of them only mildly so. But the imbalance does not tell the whole story, because the most important information is strangely missing from the report.

In a study of anti-Semitism among DEI personal, the most significant figure would be the number or proportion of biased staffers, not the ratio of nasty tweets. And yet, as I have explained in The Forward, the Heritage report never tells us whether the 605 troubling tweets were generated by a single person tweeting almost 600 times, by 30 DEI officers tweeting 20 times apiece, or by 300 personnel tweeting only twice each.

Although the Heritage website claims to have documented an “overwhelming pattern” of anti-Semitism – a conclusion repeated in media reports – there may well be no pattern at all. If it turns out that only a handful of DEI personnel were responsible for nearly all of the Israel bashing – which can hardly be ruled out, given the profound enmity toward Israel of some progressives – the modal number of angry tweets per staffer could easily be zero.

The authors of the Heritage Report – Jay Greene, a Harvard PhD, and James Paul, a doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas – have not been forthcoming about the glaring omission in their report. They did not respond to my repeated requests for the number of unique accounts responsible for the anti-Israel tweets identified in their study. Nor have they posted their underlying data, which would have been routine for a published academic paper.

In a recent webinar, Dr. Greene was asked twice about whether the hostile tweets might have been concentrated in a few accounts. He was evasive both times, saying first that the question indicated a “failure to grasp sampling techniques,” comparing his study to a public opinion poll, and later claiming that the number of tweeters was not relevant, as opposed to the “percentage of tweets.”

Neither explanation holds up. Samples in public opinion polls are carefully randomized and controlled for demographics. The number of individuals in each category is not only relevant but essential.

It is obvious that Greene and Paul could have reported the actual number of hostile tweeters if it had indeed been “overwhelming.” Greene acknowledged at the webinar that they had collected the names and titles of every tweeter, as well as their university affiliations, so it would have taken nothing more than counting to provide the needed figure.

In social science, it is called “data dredging” – considered methodologically improper – when researchers publish only favorable results and suppress everything else. In litigation, an “adverse inference” can be drawn against a party who fails to produce material evidence that is under its control.

Absent a credible explanation for the conspicuous omission – and there is no explanation at all in the report – the most logical conclusion is that a full account of the findings would undermine or refute the Heritage Foundation’s accusations against DEI programs.

The report does make one interesting comparison, contrasting tweets about China and Israel. It turns out that China was named in only about one third as many tweets as Israel during the study’s time frame, which is not specified in the report. Most of those comments (133 out of 216) were positive toward China, notwithstanding the anti-democracy crackdown in Hong Kong and ongoing repression of Uighurs, among other depredations. This disparity was offered as “evidence of a double-standard with respect to the Jewish state.”

It is a huge leap, however, to infer antipathy toward Israel, let alone anti-Semitism, from silence on China. If the study occurred in the shadow of the 2020 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump was regularly inveighing against the “China virus,” such forbearance might indicate only an intention to avoid stoking then-rampant anti-Asian prejudice.

I have never hesitated to call out anti-Semitism, often masquerading as anti-Zionism, among progressives. It is equally important, however, to avoid unsupported accusations, especially when made in pursuit of unrelated political objectives.

The Heritage Foundation is bluntly engaged in an all-out campaign to defund university DEI programs, calling them a “Diversity-Industrial Complex” driven by “watered down Marxism,” as is exemplified by the Twitter study’s conclusion: “It is clear that DEI staff at universities actually function as political activists, articulating and enforcing a narrow and radical ideological agenda.”

Perhaps that passes for clarity in some quarters, but the anti-Semitism angle just muddies it up.

Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. His most recent book is The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship.

The post There Is No Proof of Rampant Anti-Semitism in University Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Offices appeared first on Social Science Space.

Over half a century ago I obtained a computer program called ELIZA. It was a piece of software, probably what today we’d call an algorithm, or even a ‘chatbot,’ that emulated a non-directive, Rogerian therapist. Developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, it was essentially an early exploration of natural language processing by a computer. Weizenbaum claimed his purpose was to show how superficial is the communication between people and machines. I suspect he also wanted to show the limitations of Rogerian therapy and its mechanical distancing of the relationship between the patient and the therapist.

A typical conversation would be something like

In my research group we regarded it as an amusing game. Trying to see of we could trip ELIZA up or get ‘her’ to say something weird. But many people were convinced ELIZA was a real, if rather boring, person. Weizenbaum’s joke almost backfired in opening the way to ever more sophisticated forms or natural language human/computer interaction. You can’t get help from most websites these days without first going through some sort of ‘chat’ with an automated system. Voice recognition is now so sophisticated that spoken communication with machines is rather taken for granted.

The most powerful motor (to use an old-fashioned implicit metaphor) for these developments is what software engineers have very cleverly called ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ The anthropomorphic association couched within this label gives it a humanoid patina that ignores what it means for a human being to be intelligent. This has become apparent when it emerged that diagnostic health algorithms had built in biases present in the provision of health care. People from some ethnic groups, who suffer from limited health care support, were further disadvantaged by the data on which the software was built. That software simply enshrined what was already happening rather than making an ‘intelligent’ decision.

What is most ignored by computer scientists and software engineers in their promotion of automated systems and robots to replace human activities and endeavor is that who we are, what we think and believe and feel, as people, is integrated with our beings as living bodies that have grown up in contact with other humans. From the earliest days of phenomenology the emphasis has been on what one of that philosophy’s founders, Merleau-Ponty, called ‘embodiment.’ Our being as a physical organism, with all the constraints and possibilities that facilitates. Most importantly the consequence of interacting with other people who also experience the world in similar ways.

The COVID pandemic has served to highlight the importance of person-to-person contact. The rapid spread of the disease is a powerful illustration of how important it is for people to mix with others around the world. The profound loss people have felt when not being able to be freely face to face with others is a further illustration of how crucial this is for sane survival.

Intelligence goes far beyond ‘if-then’ algorithms and patterns in huge data sets. It comes from knowing what it is to be hurt and how to ease the pain of others. It is more that the ability to feign an understanding of natural language. It is to be a person.

The post The Robot Will See You Now appeared first on Social Science Space.

During his lifetime Martin Luther King Jr. would address social and behavioral scientists directly, calling them out for their existing racism and encouraging them to be allies of the Civil Rights Movement. He would offer, for example, three specific recommendations for scholarship in a 1967 speech to the American Psychological Association. The scientists, or at least many of them, took up his crusade in the years since King’s assassination the same year as the APA address. Below, in celebration of his birth on January 15, 1929, we offer a selection of scholarship from the social science community that directly cites King’s message as a subject or the nexus of the paper. Click on the article titles below to read the paper.

“The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Church in Action” by Coretta Scott King | Theology Today

The late Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr. and a national civil rights leader in her own right, delivered this address on March 11, 1970, to inaugurate the Annual Martin Luther King Lectureship at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. The address includes a number of excerpts from King Jr. that remind us that his first profession was as a Christian pastor: “My husband healed more broken souls and bodies with his direct fighting message than thousands of his colleagues accomplished with pallid sermons addressed to half-empty pews. Jesus,” Coretta King notes, “preached in the streets, especially to the poor and the slaves.”

“Toward Achieving the ‘Beloved Community’ in the Workplace Lessons for Applied Business Research and Practice From the Teachings of Martin Luther King Jr.” by James R. Jones, David C. Wilson, Peggy Jones | Business & Society

This paper from 2008 analyzes data from a Gallup Organization public opinion poll commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to illustrate how businesses might incorporate King’s social justice themes of belongingness and camaraderie in the workplace.

“American Public Policy and Full Employment: The Imperative of Martin Luther King’s Political Economy in the 21st Century” by Jeffrey Sommers, Rachel Hegland, Patrick Delices | SAGE Open

While King’s focus on civil rights is often the only message that is retold these days, MLK during his lifetime campaigned on what he saw as complementary topics like peace and economic empowerment. (The authors note that in addition to his Bible (King James Version I believe?), the other text King had on his person in the Birmingham, Alabama jail cell was John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.) This paper looks at prescriptions endorsed by King for things like a guaranteed basic income, building generational wealth and government job creation, and argues that “it is precisely on this less discussed terrain of King’s economic policy where a national debate should presently be centered.”

“Race and the ‘I Have a Dream’ Legacy: Exploring Predictors of Positive Civil Rights Attitudes” by Antwan Jones | Journal of Black Studies

Drawing on the 2002 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, sociologist Jones finds that a positive relationship between racial attitudes toward Blacks and attitudes toward civil rights. He writes that, “Civil rights attitudes have changed drastically from the pre1960s when essentially race was the strongest predictor of positive civil rights attitudes.” The model also suggests a positive relationship between ideological proximity, or how close one feels to Black Americans, and attitudes toward civil rights. Political party identification, age, education, gender, racial identification, and region of residence are all significant predictors of positive civil rights attitudes.  

“Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement: A Comparative Analysis of Two Social Movements in the United States” by Dewey M. Clayton | Journal of Black Studies

Clayton, a political scientist at the University of Louisville, conducted a content analysis of the New York Times to compare and contrast the framing of the Black Lives Matter (BLM ) movement from 2014 to 2016 and the U.S. Civil Rights movement during 1960 to 1962. Among his conclusions are that BLM, while probably a more inclusive movement than the civil rights movement, had not found the messaging to show that universally. “[T]the genius of the civil rights movement is that they were able to elaborate these values into a master frame that made the civil rights problem an American problem,” Clayton wrote. “Today, Black Lives Matter does not utilize the same framing—it has yet to appeal to mainstream America and convince them that its concerns are part of the national identity.” And as part of his own messaging, Clayton wrote a public-facing precis of his findings for LSE Phelan US Centre, “What Black Lives Matter can learn from the 1960s struggle for Civil Rights.”

Also on Social Science Space

“Martin Luther King’s Jr. Advice to Social and Behavioral Scientists” by Social Science Space

“In Search of Today’s Fannie Lou Hamers and Martin Luther Kings” by Vincent Adejumo

“Policing the Klan 50 Years Ago Has Lessons for Dismantling White Supremacist Groups Today” by Vincent Cunningham

“This Moment, And the Next Steps for Social Change” by Patricia Reid-Merritt

“Erica Chenoweth on Nonviolent Resistance” a Social Science Bites podcast

The post MLK and His Impact on Social Science Scholarship appeared first on Social Science Space.

A year ago, we in the UK were approaching Christmas and New Year with quiet optimism as the first Covid vaccines rolled out into the NHS. Light was appearing at the end of a long dark tunnel. Sadly, that hope was extinguished by the emergence of Covid variants, first alpha and later delta. Much of the year was spent in a race between these variants and the vaccination programme. Today, we can see the benefits in the wall of immunity that has been created by the combination of vaccination and infection. Over 98 per cent of the UK population have a measurable degree of antibodies that should resist the new omicron variant, according to the Office of National Statistics.

This should give us renewed hope for the coming year. Scientists may not yet be able to agree on whether omicron is inherently milder or whether it is being defeated by the level of population immunity. It is not, though, causing either hospitalizations or deaths on the scale of last January. Omicron may even be increasing immunity as it infects those who, for one reason or another, have yet to be fully vaccinated. It becomes harder to imagine another variant sweeping through in the same way, unless there is an even more radical mutation than any yet seen.

Optimism is reinforced by the new anti-viral drugs that can offer effective treatments to those whose illness threatens to lead to hospitalization. New generations of vaccines, targeting different parts of the Covid virus, will provide better protection against potential variants.

The light is coming back, in England at least, as many people decide that the future risks of Covid are tolerable. We do not have to accept a ‘new normal’, where scientific, medical or political elites decide how everyone should lead their lives.

The remaining barriers are social more than scientific. There are at least five to tackle this year.

The most important are psychological, driven by the levels of fear and anxiety created in the population. In previous pandemics, these subsided of their own accord. Events like the Black Death, which killed 30-50 per cent of the European population, are incredibly rare. As early as April 2020, it was clear that Covid would never lead to deaths on that scale. But fear was too useful a tool. The traditional partnership between public health medicine and the people it served was sacrificed to the quick fix of intimidation. It will be hard to rebuild the goodwill on which public health practice has rested for a hundred years.

Social barriers are created by the people and groups who have grabbed the opportunity to micro-manage other people’s lives. They often claim to serve some higher moral purpose, like fighting climate change. But is that purpose really moral when it rests on laws and punishments rather than information and consent?

Biosecurity has created vested economic interests though the money to be made out of pandemic management. The scams accompanying UK government procurement of PPE for health and social care workers are being exposed but similar stories could be told about the contractors running the national Test and Trace programme for contact tracing and about the software behind Covid passports. The strongest advocates of endless booster vaccinations are some of the manufacturers. Profits from lateral flow tests disappear into US companies with invisible owners. Ventilation and air filtration offer similar opportunities to loot the public purse.

Nationalist sentiment in Scotland and Wales has driven a political agenda. The emphasis on doing things differently from the English will no doubt feature strongly in future referendum campaigns, although there is actually little to show for it in terms of outcomes like infections, hospitalizations or deaths.

Finally, there is cultural damage from the influence, particularly in Scotland, of people who think the aim of medicine should be to control every virus or bacteria rather than trying to mitigate the worst ones. Do we really need a pill for every ailment? Is every death a defeat for medicine or a natural part of the human condition? Do aggressive medical interventions at the end of life get in the way of care and compassion? Anyone who has spent time in the US will recognize that the drive to impose medical control on nature comes with huge social and economic costs.

We will also have to grit our teeth and be ready to commit more resources to remedying the threadbare state of the National Health Service. The pandemic has revealed the consequences of a decade of fragmentation and under-investment. We have a more efficient system than most comparable countries but austerity has pushed this too far. There are important issues about organization and co-ordination to ensure that new money is well spent but the need for additional funding seems inescapable.

We can reach the end of the tunnel in 2022 but there are still a lot of rock falls to clear.

The post (Belated) New Year Thoughts on the Barriers to Ending the Pandemic appeared first on Social Science Space.

Science and politics intersect on many levels. Many scientists depend on public funding to conduct their research — an inherently political process — and political leaders depend on scientists to inform their policy decisions. As well, the ethical ramifications of scientific research bear directly on ordinary citizens, who depend on governments to determine what lines of scientific inquiry are supported.

But Zeynep Pamuk, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, feels the interplay between these two worlds — science and politics — has only begun to be properly explored. Pamuk’s interest in this relationship began early in her career, when she started to examine the discourse surrounding climate change. “I realized that there was great scholarship on climate change, but it didn’t get a lot of uptake,” Pamuk told Undark. “So I became interested in why that was the case. What is it about the intersection about science and politics that’s become so pathological?” She eventually saw that “there wasn’t as much scholarship on that question, especially from within political science.”

In her new book, Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society, Pamuk outlines new directions that she believes the relationship between science and politics might take, rooted in the understanding that scientific knowledge is tentative and uncertain. Among her proposals is the resurrection of the idea of a science court, an idea first put forward in the 1960s.

The interview was conducted over Zoom and has been edited for length and clarity.

Undark: Much has been written on the importance of scientific literacy, and, especially in the last few years, on the problem of science denial and on the trust, or lack thereof, in science and scientists. But you frame your investigation very differently. What was your starting point?

Zeynep Pamuk: There’s a lot of discussion about denial of science, why citizens are so ignorant, why they don’t understand science. And I wanted to change the conversation, by understanding how the way science is done, how scientific research is conducted, how the choices that scientists and science administrators make — at far earlier stages of the research process — shaped the uptake and framing of the debate. So I think the contours of the debate were too narrow.

Undark: In your book, you talk about the idea of scientists taking responsibility for their research. That’s an idea with a long history — one thinks of the atomic bomb, for example, and genetic engineering. How do you see this issue of responsibility for scientists?

ZP: I’m interested in the question from the perspective of how a democratic society deals with the presence within it of this knowledge-producing but fairly autonomous community of scientists. So when I say that scientists need to take responsibility, I don’t mean it in the way that a lot of people said about the atomic scientists — that they could be held morally responsible.

Sure, I don’t disagree with that. But I was more interested in what society could do to regulate these kinds of high-risk scientific endeavors. And I didn’t think that the answer that scientists have to be morally responsible, to examine themselves and restrain themselves — the idea that they self-monitor, that they can be trusted to do that — was a sufficient answer.

Undark: Are you saying that science requires more regulation or oversight?

ZP: In certain kinds of very high-risk scientific research, these decisions should be made collectively, or at least by authorized political representatives. They should have more public debate around them. The Obama administration at one point put a moratorium on lethal pathogen research. There’s some coverage, not a huge amount of discussion; and then it reversed its decision three years later. It’s very difficult to find any paper trail about what happened. What was the discussion? What was the reasoning? Did they decide it was now safe?

It’s very hard to know what happened. And it seems like this is hugely consequential on a global, planetary level. So there has to be more discussion around it. This kind just kind of risk decision should not be left purely to scientists. We can assign them responsibility — but it doesn’t mean that they should they alone should be responsible for making this very consequential decision.

Undark: Should governments be able to tell scientists that certain lines of inquiry are off-limits?

ZP: I think the answer is yes. I’m not going to say this area should be restricted or that area — I think this is a collective decision. My opinions are my personal opinions as a citizen of a democratic society. But I think more debate is appropriate. And in certain cases, there might be a lot of support for undertaking risky research, because people imagine that it will bring a better world — but in other cases, there are no conceivable benefits. I’m thinking maybe of killer robots, as one example. Or maybe that the benefits don’t justify the risks. So it’s something that would come out of debate. But I think there can certainly be areas where limits should be placed on research.

Undark: One very interesting idea in your book is the notion of a science court. What exactly is a science court? How would it work, and what would its purpose be?

ZP: I stumbled upon this idea as I was looking at debates around science in the 1970s. This was a period where there was a lot of debate, because scientists were very influential; the glow of the World War II victory was around them. They had direct influence over politics. And but of course, they disagreed among themselves. And a scientist called Arthur Kantrowitz suggested a science court, basically to adjudicate between disagreeing scientists, so that the public confusion that this caused would just come to a stop.

But he had a strict division of facts and values: This would be the factual stage, and then the values would be discussed later. And for the reasons I just mentioned, I didn’t think that that would make sense. You can’t debate the science independently from the context of policy context or the context of use. And also, I thought this was a fairly elitist institution, with only scientists participating.

Undark: But you feel there was something of value in Kantrowitz’s idea?

ZP: I wanted to reimagine it. I took his structure, with different, disagreeing scientists making a case for their own views; but I wanted to have citizens there, and I want it to be a more overtly policy-oriented institution. So the way I imagine it, there would be a scientifically-informed policy debate — like, for example, should we have strict lockdowns, or a less strict Covid-19 policy?

So it would have two clear sides — and then scientists for both sides would defend their views. They would ask each other questions that would help reveal the uncertainty of their views, the evidence that they’re marshalling. And then the citizen jury would be randomly selected. They would bring their own political beliefs, they would listen to the scientists, and they would make a policy proposal, selecting one of the two positions.

Undark: But scientists and politicians already argue a great deal. How would a science court be an improvement on the current system, in which there’s already a lot of debate?

ZP: It’s true that scientists constantly argue among themselves, but I’m not sure the scientists have unmediated arguments in front of a public audience. I think that is discouraged within current advisory systems. Maybe the climate experience led to this. But even before that, in the ’70s and ’80s, there was this norm that scientists argue behind closed doors within scientific advisory committees, but then they present a united front when they give advice.

So there’s one authoritative scientific advisory body, and that basically gives a consensus recommendation. So publicly-oriented scientific disagreement is seen to be something that undermines trust in science — that emphasizing the uncertainty will mean anything goes, that scientists don’t know anything. And I wanted to push back against that. I thought a properly organized institution, where scientists are facing one another directly, and not necessarily mediated by politicians who have their own agenda, and who just want to cherry-pick the science that serves it — that could have healthy effects for clarifying the factual basis of this political decision making for the citizenry.

Undark: When we think of scientists struggling to present a united front on a topic of great public interest, the current coronavirus pandemic certainly comes to mind. But you argue that a lot of those disagreements were hidden from view?

ZP: We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the masking advice in the U.S. It was initially presented as, “This is our position: masks do not help; do not wear them.” Fauci said this, the Surgeon General said this, [former White House adviser] Deborah Birx said this — they were unanimous in this. And we did not hear from anybody within the scientific community.

And of course, debates were happening within the scientific community about the evidence for the benefits of masks, but we did not hear the opposing side: people saying ‘Oh, masks are probably very effective,’ or at least, ‘We don’t know that masks are effective, and this is our level of uncertainty.’ We didn’t hear the opposing view at all.

And I think that hurt the case, because it made the reversal very difficult; it made people not trust the masking advisory when it came in, in April 2020. So that was a good example of the kind of thing where a science court would have helped.

Undark: But on the other hand, if the public had a greater window onto scientific arguments as they unfolded, maybe they just wouldn’t listen to scientists at all. As you suggested, they might think, “Oh, look — they can’t even agree among themselves.”

ZP: Yeah, I think that’s true. That’s the risk. If people see disagreement, they might think scientists can’t agree. But that usually is the case. But the one thing I will say is, that when you see scientists disagreeing, you also see the scope of disagreement. For example, you don’t see scientists saying “vaccines are ineffective,” or “vaccines are hugely dangerous.” So you see what sorts of things they’re disagreeing on, and that gives you a sense of where the debate is at.

If you overstate what scientists know, where the consensus lies, then there is a chance — and this happens all the time — that it will turn out to be wrong. And I think that undermines public trust even more than a candid admission that, at this point in time, scientists are disagreeing on a certain point.

Undark: But, wouldn’t having ordinary citizens act as arbiters in scientific disagreements bring us back to the issue of scientific literacy? For example, if some members of the public don’t understand the difference between a virus and bacteria, then they’re in a very poor position to evaluate strategies for fighting infectious disease — right?

ZP: Yes, I agree with that completely. I think improvements in scientific literacy would be critical for an institution like this to succeed. Then the question is, how much literacy? I think we can have a citizenry that is more literate about the scientific method, about the difference between viruses and bacteria. But that still wouldn’t mean that they’d become experts, or that they would need to have a Ph.D. to participate in the science court.

The post Zeynep Pamuk and the Case for Creating Science Courts appeared first on Social Science Space.

The number of African American linguists is growing, albeit gradually. Very few of us share my legacy as a Black baby boomer whose life began in poverty, yet I will soon assume the presidency of the Linguistic Society of America. My life reflects a special brand of American exceptionalism that defies easy classification, and my former Stanford student, professor Tracy Conner, has been kind enough to discuss my journey from Brooklyn, through inner-city Philadelphia as a child and college student. Throughout the seven decades of my life I have witnessed a great deal of inequality that cannot be easily categorized, or reduced to sound bites that might provide grist for ideologically predisposed extremists on either side of the political spectrum.

“Equality smatters” is a tangential product of self-reflective vignettes from a U.S. slave descendant who recognizes the paradoxical fact that America has yet to truly overcome the consequences of its original sin, or the destruction and displacement of those ancient first families that lived on land now occupied by the United States of America. One of my earliest memories of inequality occurred when my mother took me with her to Oak-Lane Country Day School, where she was a student teacher attending Temple University. The pastoral campus where she taught affluent white students occupied several acres of meadows, ponds, and woods that contrasted sharply with the asphalt laden playground at the elementary school that I attended, which occupied one square block in East Germantown, Philadelphia.

As is the case with so many American family success stories, my parents worked very hard and obtained college educations that gradually improved their standard of living; both Mom and Dad eventually earned doctoral degrees. Another sign of my age is reflected by the fact that our family’s move from inner-city Philadelphia to inner-city Los Angeles took place in 1958, when propeller driven airplanes traversed the nation in only nine hours. I landed in California and moved to a multiracial multilingual neighborhood with Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, fellow African Americans, and elderly European Americans who either lacked the desire or the resources to flee to the predominantly white suburbs that were sprouting up in the western San Fernando Valley, at a time (circa 1959) when Los Angeles was creating a fledgling freeway system to accommodate those suburbanites who clogged Sepulveda Boulevard during their daily commutes into various central Los Angeles business districts.

With the advantage of their good jobs and college educations, my parents made the decision to move to the suburbs, where the racial composition of the community was drastically different from those of my early childhood in Brooklyn or Philadelphia. Our new home was nestled at the end of a secluded cul-de-sac where every home had immaculate landscaping, and most neighbors graced their homes with swimming pools, as did my parents. Although we were only the second African American family to move onto our street, my parents took justifiable pride in their accomplishments, having no idea whatsoever that I would soon encounter racist taunts and unfair treatment in an elementary school where I was one of three African American students. Indeed, the early image of educational inequality that I witnessed prior to my mother becoming a certified teacher was emphatically reinforced between 1958, when I was a fourth grade student and all of my classmates were fellow students of color, and 1959, when our family moved to Canoga Park, and I was the only student of color among my new classmates.

The contrasts that I observed were numerous, and my professional work as a linguist who has devoted scholarship to the advancement of justice and equality owes much to having witnessed American educational apartheid firsthand. Far from actually closing economic divisions among racially diverse Americans, public education across the nation tends to perpetuate the class structure, thereby exacerbating disparities that calls our national ethos of equal opportunity and justice for all into question.

Despite having been taught by several teachers who were dismissive of my academic potential, or -occasionally – much worse, there were others who helped me. Most notably, the storied linguist – professor William Labov – of the University of Pennsylvania was kind enough to become my mentor, and he took considerable risk in 1972 when I entered graduate school as his advisee. I knew nothing of linguistic science, but I knew a great deal about linguistic prejudice, and therein lays the origin of my personal rags to riches American story, for which I am eternally grateful. The smatters of personal reflection that I shared with professor Tracy Conner, and those of you who are kind enough to read our interview, paint a picture of partial progress toward the egalitarian nation where self-evident truths, of all people being treated fairly and justly with inalienable human rights, may someday prevail.

The post Equality Smatters appeared first on Social Science Space.

“I tell my students, ‘If somebody utters the sentence that starts with the words, “History teaches us” the rest of the sentence is probably wrong.’ History has no direct lessons for almost anything. Our own age is sufficiently different, sufficiently unique, from what happened in the past that any facile lessons from history are more likely to mislead than to enlighten.”

That series of caveats comes from Joel Mokyr, who, perhaps counter-intuitively, is an economic historian. And in fact, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at the Chicago-area Northwestern University shows in this Social Science Bites podcast that there’s quite a bit to learn from history if you keep your expectations in check.

For example, he explains that “the good old days weren’t all that good and that the very best time to be born in human history is today. That sounds hard to believe in an age where we’re all running around with face masks and facing quarantine, but it’s still true.”

For his own part, Mokyr tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, “I use economics to understand history, and I use history to understand economics.” Mokyr’s ties to economic history are deep: he was president of the Economic History Association in 2003-04, spent four years in 1990s as senior editor of the Journal of Economic History, was editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and is currently editor-in-chief of the Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western World series of monographs.

From that perch, he explains, presumably with a smile, that his peers work with ‘expired data.’ Economic historians “scour the past looking for large data sets that we can use in some way to make inferences. The issue of causality becomes somewhat of an obsession in economics these days, and economic history is very much a part of this.”

In this interview, Mokyr details how the improvement in the human condition he cited above is connected to the Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution is particularly important because that’s where it all started — before 1750 almost nowhere in the world were living standards approaching anything but miserable and poor.”

Economic activity before the year 1750 was mostly the story of trade, he explains, while after 1750, it became the story of knowledge. “The Industrial Revolution was the slow replacement of trade and finance and commerce by another thing, and that is growing knowledge of natural phenomena and rules that can be harnessed to material welfare of people.”

To demonstrate this approach, he offered the example of steel. While it has been made for centuries it wasn’t until 1780 that anyone knew roughly why  this alloy of iron and carbon resulted in such a useful metal, and therefore could exploit its properties more by design than by chance. “If you don’t know why something works,” Mokyr said, “it’s very difficult to improve it, to tweak it.”

Mokyr’s scholarship has earned him a variety of honors, including the biennial Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for a lifetime achievement in historical science in 2006. He has also written a number of prize-winning books, including The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, and most recently, A Culture of Growth.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.

Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

The post Joel Mokyr on Economic Lessons from the Past appeared first on Social Science Space.

In countries like Denmark and Germany, gifts are given on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas morning. Likewise, on Christmas Eve 2021, 587 groups of researchers at universities around Australia received a festive gift from the Australian Research Council (ARC), in the form of news that their 2022 Discovery Projects were to be funded.

More brutally, 2,508 other groups of researchers also received the less than festive news that their proposed Discovery Projects were to be denied funding.

This acceptance rate was even lower than it should have been. Among the 2,508 unlucky applications were six that had passed the ARC’s rigorous peer-review process, but were vetoed by Stuart Robert, acting federal education minister, on the grounds they “do not demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money nor contribute to the national interest.”

In an open letter published January 11, I and 62 of my fellow ARC laureate fellows – including one who is also a Nobel laureate – complain vigorously to the minister and to the chief executive of the ARC about this political interference in the funding of basic research.

Discovery Projects are one of the main mechanisms to fund basic research in the sciences and humanities in Australia. They are an especially vital source of funding for early-career researchers. The Australian government spends around A$250 million of public money each year on these grants. With an acceptance rate of just 19 percent, these awards are highly competitive and prestigious.

The last time such ministerial intervention became public was in October 2018, when it emerged the then education minister Simon Birmingham denied funding to 11 ARC grants over the preceding two years. There was understandable outrage.

In response to significant criticism about that intervention, the government introduced a national interest test. And it was this very test that Robert used to veto funding last month.

The six grants rejected last month were all in the humanities, and included two on understanding modern-day China, and a third on the mass mobilisation of school students in climate change protests and what that means for their participation in democracy.

It’s hard to think of two topics more important for Australia’s future than understanding China and the climate change movement. But let’s put that aside for a moment.

The value of basic research

How and why should a nation decide to spend its precious tax revenue on basic research? The “why” is easy. Life expectancy has roughly doubled in the past 200 years because of investments governments have made in basic research. These investments have given us vaccines, for example, eliminating many diseases that used to kill us at a young age.

Besides being longer, our lives are also more enjoyable, thanks to inventions such as lasers and smartphones, and more knowledgeable, because of insights about everything from dinosaurs to political history.

The “how” is admittedly trickier. By the very nature of research, you don’t know the outcome before you start. But time and again, it has been shown that the best way to pick winners is not to pick winners. Instead, just let bright minds follow their curiosity.

Let me come back to the laser. It’s hard to imagine our lives without lasers. They are used everywhere from eye surgery to industrial welding, from the undersea cables that connect the internet, to barcode scanners in your supermarket checkout. Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for helping discover them, never imagined these myriad uses when he set out to research the phenomenon of “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.”

In 1999, he wrote in his book How the Laser Happened:

The truth is, none of us who worked on the first lasers imagined how many uses there might eventually be […] Many of today’s practical technologies result from basic science done years to decades before. The people involved, motivated mainly by curiosity, often have little idea as to where their research will lead. Our ability to forecast the practical payoffs from fundamental exploration of the nature of things (and, similarly, to know which of today’s research avenues are technological dead ends) is poor. This springs from a simple truth: new ideas discovered in the process of research are really new.

I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to do such research. In 2021, I won an ARC Laureate Fellowship, the largest individual grant awarded by the ARC, to learn about how to build trustworthy AI systems. I don’t know yet how it will work out.

But what I do know is there’s no place for government interference in the ARC’s funding decisions. Comparable countries don’t let governments interfere in this way. In the United Kingdom, for example, this is enshrined in the Haldane Principle, whereas in the United States, it is guided by engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush’s stirring postwar manifesto, Science, the Endless Frontier, which helped power that country’s economic rise.

If Australia wants to come out of the pandemic healthier and stronger, and to tackle the many wicked problems we now face – including societal challenges like dealing with the politics of a changing climate and managing our troubled relationship with China – we must ensure basic research is not subject to political interference.

The post Australian Academics Criticize Political Meddling in Basic Research appeared first on Social Science Space.

In our paper “Building Perspective-Taking as an Organizational Capability: A Change Intervention in a Health Care Setting” in the Journal of Management Inquiry, we the authors (Thomas Calvard, Emily Cherlin, Amanda Brewster and Leslie Curry) sought to investigate how a two-year change intervention in 10 U.S. hospitals could facilitate perspective-taking among diverse staff.

Perspective-taking refers to actively imagining and trying to understand the viewpoints of others by putting ourselves in their shoes and seeing things as they see them. Perspective-taking, along with related but distinct concepts like sympathy and empathy, has a relatively established tradition in psychology of supporting positive relationships and (mostly) cooperative interpersonal outcomes. However, most evidence to date comes from brief laboratory experiments or surveys given to employees asking them about their individual orientations to other workplace parties (e.g. customers, suppliers, leaders).

In a more in-depth qualitative field study in a healthcare setting, we set out to ask – how might perspective-taking be developed as a multidimensional cooperative process and problem-solving capability more widely across teams and organizational systems? Drawing on the existing literature on perspective-taking, we built on conceptions of its interpersonal dimensions, extending and combining them with the idea that organizational systems need cooperative interactions, dialogues and forums for exploring diverse but related roles, identities, and functional backgrounds.

Health care and hospital settings are highly appropriate for studying perspective-taking, given their complex systems of diverse leaders, specialized groups, and agencies, whose views and priorities can vary in their alignment. Our field study involved participant evaluations of the delivery of a two-year change program across 10 U.S. hospitals (2014-2016) called “Leadership Saves Lives” (LSL).

The LSL program emphasized positive culture change, shared leadership and process improvement, and involved each hospital establishing a guiding coalition with 15–20 key staff involved in the care of heart patients with acute myocardial infarction, or AMI. Coalition members included staff with diverse perspectives from multiple departments, professions, and levels of seniority.

The change program comprised a series of egalitarian, inclusive interventions with networks of coalition members focused on role clarity, shared accountability, and creative problem-solving. Interventions included on-site workshops with experiential learning, all-hospital annual forums, and web-based platforms for knowledge sharing and continuous remote support.

Over the two years of the LSL intervention, six of the 10 hospitals involved experienced significantly reduced AMI mortality rates and staff widely reported positive culture change across their organizations. Our study investigated perspective-taking processes based on 393 in-depth interviews with 197 clinical and management staff across three time points—baseline (n = 162), six months (n = 118), and 18 months (n = 113).

We found that, over time, perspective-taking developed across two main levels of abstraction or scope – the local interpersonal level between those working closely together on a coalition or at the same hospital, and the system level, concerning multiple perspectives making up entire organizations and agencies across the integrated health care system. Perspective-taking also developed across three main inter-related dimensions of focus – the affective (emotional experiences of others), the cognitive (task and knowledge contexts of others), and the motivational (willingness to share with and listen to wider perspectives).

Taken together, our two levels crossed with three dimensions of perspective-taking show how, with the right interventions and experiences, organizations can broaden out and build up mutually reinforcing, positive exchanges of views among diverse individuals and groups of staff. While perspective-taking is complex and can be readily threatened by conflicts, pressures, and politics, our findings suggest it is relatively low-risk and low-cost for organizations to try to encourage perspective-taking by seeking to bring together diverse change coalitions frequently and supportively for empathic engagements and problem-solving across their organizational ecosystems.

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A frequent conversation during the pandemic has been the impact of screen fatigue on working life. Academics were already reliant on screens, but the online pivot in teaching and academic communication meant that even the periods of the working day, which were formerly respites from a monitor, were now mediated by screens. Personally, I found it particularly challenging, as someone who lives apart from my partner, with evening video calls proving much more difficult to relax into and enjoy, once Zoom became the overriding feature of my typical working day. The reliance on screens has come to feel wearying for many, with the pandemic drawing attention to the extent of our reliance on these interfaces.

While hybrid working was always a feature of academic life to some degree, the disruptions of the pandemic suggest a return to pre-pandemic patterns of behavior seem unlikely, for either meetings or conferences. In both cases it will be difficult to return to the previous default of face-to-face and hybrid interactions are already becoming a routine part of academic work. This might not mean you’re spending as much time meeting through screens as you did in 2020, but increased screen time will be a continued feature of academic work as we begin to transition into a post-pandemic university.

During the pandemic there has also been a widely documented increase in the popularity of podcasts. The available data relates to the popularity of podcasts in wider society (e.g. here and here), but I’d suggest the same trend is present within higher education. After all, academics are inevitably caught up in wider technological trends because, at risk of stating the obvious, we aren’t just academics. The pandemic may not have driven this trend, but it seems plausible there is a relationship, even accounting for the fall in commuting time which might depress engagement with digital audio.

As someone who has been producing academic podcasts since 2010, there now appears to be a greater awareness of them and higher engagement with them. The newly mainstream character of blended learning has significantly increased the appetite for digital audio, which can be deployed as a pedagogical resource. Furthermore, there seems to be a significant pool of scholars for whom listening has become a significant mode of engagement with ideas and we need to grapple with what this means for knowledge production. This might be using audiobooks rather than codex books, or using text-to-speech services to listen to documents, such as journal articles, rather than read them. These are just a few examples, but it’s useful to see them in terms of a broader transition which is unsettling the pride of place accorded to reading within higher education.

Screen fatigue may be the immediate cause of a shift to listening, but it’s also part of a longer trend predating the pandemic. This points to a risk that we construe listening in deficit terms, as an inferior way to engage with texts. This would be ableist in its assumption that these technologies (many of which have assistive origins) represent a second best to the ‘real’ work of reading. Obviously, a focus on listening can itself be exclusionary and this is why we need a serious conversation about how to build inclusive practice (e.g. institutionalizing transcription), which overcomes the cultural baggage associated with books and reading within higher education. Doing this involves being sensitive to the cultural capital associated with the codex book or printed journal and lacking in the form of audio, particularly when it is played through the mobile phone, which finds itself blamed for an implausible number of the contemporary world’s problems. The fact that even books are increasingly engaged with in electronic form does little to detract from the aura of profundity which surrounds them.

I hope we can get beyond these assumptions, because I’m convinced this turn towards listening could be enormously valuable for scholarship in expanding the range of ways in which we talk about, share and engage with ideas. Doing this would mean engaging with listening on its own terms, rather than seeing it in comparison with reading. For example, as Zachary Davis recently observed, “I don’t think there’s anything that sparks conversation quite like a good podcast episode.” Ideas come to life in different ways through listening to dialogue rather than reading a text. For qualitative researchers listening has been an integral part of practice, both in the field site and when working with data. It is seen in terms of direct connection with voice, rather than a poor alternative to text. We often approach audio in terms of what it can’t do, but we rarely apply the same critical gaze towards text unless we’re specialists in multimodality. This doesn’t suggest we should elevate it, but rather recognize that it has its strengths and weaknesses and use these to inform the scholarly practices we develop around listening.

For example, the most persistent difficulty I’ve found is with recording quotations and references. I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion. It has proved more immediately relevant to my work than I imagined and I’m writing this having spent a couple of hours listening to it and making occasional notes in Omnifocus before writing them up in Roam. This is fine at the level of general impressions. The handful of one-sentence notes I made in my organizer is sufficient to write up a few paragraphs in my notebook when I’m doing it within a few hours and the content is fresh in my mind. However, it’s more difficult when it comes to evocative phrases the author uses or pinning down the specificity of a definition. If I’ve captured a quotation with at least some degree of accuracy I can find it in Google Books, but I’m often confined to snippet view and there are no page numbers provided.

If I persist this leaves me within the realms of looking through secondary literature, buying a digital copy of the text if available, or going to a hard copy of the book from the university library. At least one of the points I’m stuck on (Lippman’s definition of ‘public affairs’) is sufficiently important to my work that it’s likely I will do one or more of these things. At this stage though it does feel like the convenience of listening, the languorous ease with which scholarly engagement can be incorporated into daily routines, begins to fade away and it leaves me wondering if I should have just acquired the codex book in the first place. The Audible app offers a potential solution through its clipping and notetaking feature, which saves a short clip (with the default set to 30 seconds) and allows a title and note to be appended to it. I’m slightly reluctant to tie myself further into the Amazon ecosystem given how weighed down I already feel by a decade’s worth of Kindle books and notes which make it difficult to extricate myself from this firm. This might nonetheless prove to be the most tenable solution to the problem.

Perhaps we should also assess auditory fatigue alongside screen fatigue. I experience a limit to listening which is increasingly familiar: a sense of being over saturated and unable to hear myself think. There are also physical discomforts associated with wearing headphones for long periods of time and practical difficulties which can be caused by not wearing them in some environments. My point is not to valorize listening over reading, but rather to recognize the increasingly multimodal character of scholarship in order to help academics develop practices which work for them, informed by an appreciation of the constraints and enablements of each. I suspect if we don’t we’ll increasingly see what we could term ‘shadow scholarship,’ in which there’s a widespread practice that isn’t professionally acknowledged and doesn’t benefit from being an object of professional discussion and debate.

The post Hear, Hear! Audio Has a Role as a Serious Pedagogic Resource appeared first on Social Science Space.

The January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C. offered social scientists a chance to unlimber the saying about never letting a crisis going to waste. The crisis provided both a natural experiment for current research and a chance to see if past predictions might play out as expected.

While a year after the event is still a little soon for the full weight of academic investigation to have been proposed, conducted, been peer-reviewed and published, a body of learned commentary has arisen in the last 12 months. We’ve collected a handful of some of the more thoughtful pieces published by SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space) in the last year that can help make sense of what happened, why it occurred, and what we might expect to see in the near future as a result. Click on the article title to read the article.

“Will Failed Insurrection Lead to Terrorism in the United States?” by Martha Crenshaw | Violence: An International Journal 

In this research essay, Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, applies her five decades of studying political violence to examine possible outcomes of an attack which failed to achieve its goals of maintaining Donald Trump’s hold on executive power. Crenshaw’s erudite examination notes that failure on January 6 may not be a comprehensive as hoped: “Research has shown that terrorism can be an effective substitute for the mobilization of large numbers when that mobilization is thwarted.”

“The Rise of Presidential Eschatology: Conspiracy Theories, Religion, and the January 6th Insurrection” by Bayleigh Elaine Bond, Ryan Neville-Shepard | American Behavioral Scientist 

Bayleigh, a political communication graduate of the University of Arkansas, and Shepard, an associate professor of communication at Arkansas, offer a messianic mechanism to understand the devotion of the insurrectionists to Trump. “With QAnon making the opening move, the president morphed into the Savior figure they desired, a role that was normalized by his allies calling the election a spiritual battle. While presidents have invoked God in the past, Trump’s actions marked a turning point in presidential appeals to faith.” 

“Memory politics in the future tense: Exceptionalism, race, and insurrection in America” by Piotr Szpunar | Memory Studies 

An interdisciplinary scholar at the nexus of communication and political theory, SUNY-Albany’s Szpunar examines January 6 through the lens of the Bush v. Gore decision, in which the popular vote winner of the 2000 presidential election declined to pursue his claims to the nth degree. Spuznar asks if recasting that as a moment of American exceptionalism in turn means we can expect the narrative of the failed insurrection to be laundered of its racist subtext.

“Decline, radicalization and the attack on the US Capitol” by Andrew H. Kydd | Violence: An International Journal 

Political scientist Kydd, author of Trust and Mistrust in International Relations, argues “that the attack on the Capitol was the culmination of a decades-long process of decline and radicalization in which the core of the Republican Party walled itself off from challenging information and lost faith in the impartiality of all institutions in society.” While that may mark the apex of anti-democratic impulse, he closes with the somber observation that “the structural conditions predisposing the United States toward political violence may persist for some time.”

Also on Social Science Space

“Might the ‘Sore Loser Effect’ Legitimize Violence?” by James Piazza

“Words Matter: Shamelessly Normalizing Big Lies And Alternative Facts” by Ruth Wodak

“When Ignorance is Anything But Bliss” by David Canter

“Harnessing the Power of a Mob” by David Canter

“‘Once You Engage in Political Violence, It Becomes Easier to Do It Again’” by Naomi Schalit and Ore Koren

The post Learned Commentary on the Legacy of January 6 Attack appeared first on Social Science Space.

An attendee at an October 2021 political rally hosted by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk asked: “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”

The attendee was referring to the baseless allegation that Joe Biden stole the 2020 U.S. presidential election and that he unfairly denied Donald Trump reelection.

Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA, condemned the question. But one year after the Capitol insurrection that was fueled by Trump’s claims of a rigged election, Kirk, other commentators and politicians – and, of course, Trump himself – continue to fuel false beliefs of widespread election fraud. Embrace of the “Big Lie” that Trump really won the election has become an article of faith for many Republican politicians. It is also widely believed by conservative Americans; in an October, 2021 poll, 60 percent of Republicans said the 2020 presidential election results should definitely or probably be overturned.

This creates a potentially dangerous situation for the United States. Acceptance of electoral defeat, something political scientists call “loser’s consent,” is essential for stability and order in democracies.

‘Sore losers’ can drive terrorism

Democracy is based on a compact: Election losers agree to accept the results and encourage their supporters to do the same.

In exchange, losing politicians get a chance to run, and win, in a future election.

However, loser’s consent is fragile. And when it is broken the risk of political violence increases. In a recent study I published, I conclude that when election losers in democracies reject election results, becoming “sore losers,” trust in political institutions is eroded, political polarization and tribalism grows and mistrust thrives.

This produces a situation where political violence is no longer seen as taboo, particularly among supporters of the losing political party. My research shows that when losing politicians in democracies refuse to accept election results, citizens begin to see terrorism as more acceptable and domestic terrorism increases.

Here in the U.S., outrage over the Big Lie helped fuel the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It has also driven domestic terrorism plots.

For example, federal authorities announced charges in July against two men who planned to bomb the California Democratic Party headquarters. The two men were radicalized by the Big Lie and expressed hope on social media that the attack would “start a movement that could keep former President Donald J. Trump in office.”

Understanding the data

In my study I examined domestic terrorist attack data in over 100 democracies from 1970 to 2018. I also looked at public opinion on whether people view the use of terrorism as justifiable in 30 democratic countries from 2017 to 2020. I based my definition of domestic terrorism on the one used by the Global Terrorism Database. Finally, I used data to measure whether politicians who lost recent national elections in democracies refused to accept the results. I limited my analysis to democracies that were free from electoral irregularities.

I also accounted for other factors that might make domestic terrorism more common or acceptable in my analyses. These include the country’s economic state, ethnic diversity and political violence history, as well as the government’s strength and stability.

For public opinion on terrorism, I weighed the effects of factors such as the age, gender, income, education level, political ideology and religious and ethnic identity of the survey respondent and the amount of terrorism in the country over the previous three years.

When contested results lead to violence

Here is what I found.

First, when losing political parties in democracies reject election results, domestic terrorism increases and gets more intense. By how much depends on how many, and what types of, political parties were sore losers.

Countries where all political parties, including the losers, accepted the election results experienced only one domestic attack about every two years. However, countries where one of the main political parties lost the election but refused to accept the official results – the situation most like what the U.S. currently faces – subsequently experienced around five domestic terrorist attacks per year. Finally, countries where all losing political parties rejected the election results subsequently experienced more than 10 domestic terrorist attacks per year.

Second, the sore-loser effect also boosts acceptance of terrorism. Only around 9 percent of citizens of democracies where all losing parties accepted election results regard terrorism as justifiable behavior. This percentage increased to around 27 percent in democracies where the main, losing opposition party or parties rejected the election – the category most approximating the United States after the 2020 election. Finally, around a third of citizens in democracies where all losing parties rejected election results also tolerated terrorism as a tactic.

These results show that when politicians refuse to accept a free and fair democratic election’s outcome, and instead choose to promote a popular narrative of a stolen or dirty election, they place their people in physical danger. Popular tolerance for terrorism grows, and so does terrorist activity itself.

The post Might the ‘Sore Loser Effect’ Legitimize Violence? appeared first on Social Science Space.