Political historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an expert on the former Soviet Union and many of its successor states, received the 2023 Princess of Austrias Award for Social Science last month. The international award recognizes creative or research work in the fields of history, sociology, psychology, economics and more.

Born in Paris in 1929 of a Georgian father and a Russian-German mother, Carrère d’Encausse’s first brush with Russian history and culture came from her family. She built on that to become an expert in Slavic studies, the Soviet Union, Russia and Central Asia, publishing more than 30 works, including her 2000 book La Russie inachevée and her 2010 book Victorieuse Russie and the 1992 historical biography Nicolas II. Her most prominent book was 1978’s L’Empire éclaté, which predicted the dissolution of the USSR.

“Including research monographs, biographies and major essays on historical interpretation, the work of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse probably constitutes the most substantive contribution made in recent decades to our knowledge of the Soviet Union and Russia, an essential subject matter for understanding the contemporary world,” noted the minutes of the Princess of Austrias Awards jury. “Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is one of the most brilliant, original and distinguished figures of French historiography and contemporary European thought.”

The Princess of Austrias Awards are granted by the Princess of Austrias Foundation in eight categories: the arts, communication and humanities, social sciences, sports, literature, international cooperation, technical and scientific research and concord. Laureates receive €50,000, which is equal to about US$52,000, a diploma, an insignia and a Joan Miró sculpture.

Throughout her career, Carrère d’Encausse has worked as an educator, political figure and historian. A member of the French conservative party, Rally for the Republic, she served on the European Parliament as a vice president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy from 1994 until 1999. She is also a chair on the Commission of Diplomatic Archives of the French Government.

She has been an elected member of the French Academy since 1990 and has served as the organization’s first female perpetual secretary since 1999. The French Academy has a maximum of 40 members and is the primary council for maintaining the French language.

As an academic, Carrère d’Encausse worked as a history professor at the Paris 1 University, a Science Po lecturer and head of the department of Soviet studies at the Center for International Research, a teacher at the College of Bruges and a visiting lecturer at numerous other universities. She holds honorary degrees from the University of Bucharest, the Catholic University of Leuven and the Universities of Laval and Montreal. She is also a member of the Romanian Academy and the Academy of Athens, is a foreign honorary member of the Georgian National Academy of Science and is an Emeritus Associate Member of the Royal Belgian Academy. She is a foreign honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded her the 2008 Lomonosov Gold Medal. She is also Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and Grand Cross of the French Legion of Honor.

Carrère d’Encausse has received many awards over her lifetime, including the Russian Orders of Honor and Friendship of Peoples, the 2000 Faith and Loyalty Award of the St. Andrew Foundation and the 2020 Great Gold Medal of the Society for the Promotion of Progress.

Other 2023 winners of the Princess of Asturias Awards are:

• Meryl Streep, Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts
• Nuccio Ordine, Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities
• Eliud Kipchoge, Princess of Asturias Award for Sports
• Haruki Murakami, Princess of Asturias Award for Literature
• Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation
• Jeffrey I. Gordon, Peter Greenberg and Bonnie L. Bassler, Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research

Recent recipients of the Princess of Austrias Award for Social Science include:

Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (2022)
Amartya Sen (2021)
Dani Rodrik (2020)
Alejandro Portes (2019)
Michael J. Sandel (2018)
Karen Armstrong (2017)
Mary Beard (2016)

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Bruno Américo and Stewart Clegg discuss organizational methodology research and answer questions about their paper, “Disjunctions in the Context of management learning: An Exemplary Publication of Narrative Fiction,” published in Management Learning. Read their answers to questions about their paper just after the paper’s abstract below.

What motivated you to pursue this research?

What motivated us was to design a method that allows not only reviewing or ordering the past body of specific literature in search for gaps. Instead, our method accounts for disjunctures enacting emergent management methodologies and theories.

Were there any specific external events—political, social, or economic—that influenced your decision to pursue this research?

In addition to designing the method, we decided to apply it to Jermier (1985) to consider the disjunctions observed concerning the literature on narrative fiction. First, we were aware that Jermier (1985) is entirely ignored by past scholarship in emerging countries, such as Brazil. Additionally, the work was that rare thing, an entirely novel methodological approach to how to write about research that was effectively blocked by organizational power on the part of the organization being researched. Moreover, after reading a story sourced from Associated Press in Florida and carried in The Guardian on April 3, 2021- we understood it to be even more pertinent to apply the method to John M. Jermier’s 1985 paper, “When the Sleeper Awakes,” questioning at the end of the text if the critical theory of that time was insufficiently critical in the light of events 36 years later?

What has been the most challenging aspect of conducting your research? Were there any surprising findings?

It is always challenging to review a particular literature’s state of the art, as it demands planning, action, coordination and straightforward research questions. Moreover, it was particularly challenging to operationalize the idea of disjunction in the research process, which was an emergent grounded idea that only became apparent with the data. Thus, the findings of the research itself were surprising, as they highlight apparent disjunctions in the field of studies on narrative fiction in MOS, demonstrating that the field emerged from a paradigmatic precursor to explode into multiple approaches to writing, reading, doing, judging qualitative research, transforming the relationships produced between writer, reader and subject. Moreover, using the method to analyze Jermier (1985), revealed interesting findings for any scholarship intending to review the literature through our approach. The method we used systematically developed a means of conducting a literature review genealogically, from a foundational text. The method has considerable application in any field of literature review where such identification can be made.

In what ways is your research innovative, and how do you think it will impact the field?

Our research introduces an innovative literature review method that allows scholarship to address the disjunctions produced in a given field of study, trace multidisciplinary incorporations and map theoretical and methodological innovations. It could have a significant impact on the field by providing a methodological approach to genealogy.

What did not make it into your published manuscript that you would like to share with us?

It is all there!

What advice would you give to new scholars and incoming researchers in this particular field of study?

Please read our article, the articles we cite, and the citations made by and to the articles we cite. In addition, articles and publication outlets about literature reviews are growing, and it is important to read such texts and the editorials of such specialized journals on the subject. If you are starting to research a particular field of literature, identify if there is a foundational source that represents an epistemological break with prior approaches and that is referenced generically by subsequent scholarship and explore the continuities and discontinuities, the disjunctures and breaks, in subsequent development. A literature grows organically, with roots, branches, new rhizomes and those that decay, for which a method that merely treats the texts as sequential or additive, is not sufficient.

What is the most important/ influential piece of scholarship you’ve read in the last year?

Jermier (1985) for sure, for this project (Jermier, J. M. (1985). ” When the Sleeper Wakes”: A Short Story Extending Themes in Radical Organization Theory. Journal of Management, 11(2), 67-80), although our reading of it began long before this year.

In this year, strictly speaking, perhaps Hilda Hilst’s (2001) O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby (São Paulo: Globo) and Francis Spufford’s (2010) Red Plenty (London: Faber & Faber) which in completely unrelated fields take social inquiry as narrative fiction to a whole other level. Particularly, Red Plenty played a vital role in informing another project that one of us was engaged in, a text that, normally, would not have been encountered, except for a recommendation from Will Clegg.

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Joan Martinez-Alier, a scholar in ecological economics and political ecology, received the 2023 Holberg Prize from Crown Prince Haakon of Norway today The international award is presented annually to individuals who have made outstanding research contributions in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology.

The Norwegian government established the award on behalf of the University of Bergen Ministry of Education and Research in 2004. The prize pays tribute to Ludwig Holberg, a Danish and Norwegian writer and playwright. Recipients receive 6 million Norwegian kroner, which is equal to about US$600,000.

Martinez-Alier has dedicated his career to analyzing economics and the environment. Specifically, his research has reviewed ways societies can regulate economic activity to foster benefits in other areas like sustainability. He has served as a key figure in the degrowth movement, which argues humans should make economic changes to avoid climate crises and should value ecological prosperity more than economic growth. His research has questioned traditional economic theory and existing paths to economic growth and has established ecological economics as a transdisciplinary field.

“This generous award from the Holberg Committee and board places ecological economics and political ecology, and the debates on degrowth, in the academic spotlight and nearer to the center of politics,” said Martinez-Alier. “Our main purpose is indeed to make visible the many environmental conflicts that exist around the world, arising from the growth and changes in the social metabolism.”

Martinez-Alier is a professor emeritus and researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Latin American Social Sciences Institute in Ecuador. He has directed and edited Ecología Politica, an international journal on ecological issues, since 1990. He is also co-director of the Atlas on Environmental Justice, a platform which documents social conflict surrounding environmental issues.

Some of his prominent works include his 1987 book Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society and his 2002 book The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. In addition to the Holberg Prize, Martinez-Alier was also the recipient of the 2017 Leontief Prize and the 2020 Balzan Prize.

He was one of the founders of the International Society for Ecological Economics, serving as president of the organization in 2006 and 2007. He was also a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency from 2000 to 2008. His career also included time as a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin, St. Antony’s College, the University of Oxford, Stanford, the University of California Davis, and Yale University.

During his acceptance speech delivered at the university’s Agula, or ceremony hall, in Bergen, Martinez-Alier explained that issues between the environment and the economy are not solved by the sustainable development measures currently in place, and that agreements protecting human rights and the environment are unlikely.

“Who has the power to simplify complexity and hide injustice and uncertainty? Political science studies power. That is why political ecology studying such conflicts is political ecology.”

Previous recipients of the Holberg include:

Sheila Jasanoff (2022)
Martha C. Nussbaum(2021)
Griselda Pollock (2020)
Paul Gilroy (2019)
Cass R. Sunstein (2018)
Onora O’Neill (2017)
Stephen Greenblatt (2016)
Marina Warner (2015)
Michael Cook (2014)
Bruno Latour (2013)
Manuel Castells (2012)
Jürgen Kocka (2011)
Natalie Zemon Davis (2010)
Ian Hacking (2009)
Fredric R. Jameson (2008)
Ronald Dworkin (2007)
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (2006)
Jürgen Habermas (2005)
Julia Kristeva (2004)

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Professor Heidi Reed discusses the COVID-19 pandemic as a CSR paradox and explores her new paper, “When the right thing to do is also the wrong thing: Moral sensemaking of responsible business behavior during the COVID-19 crisis,” published in Business & Society.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, businesses were faced with difficult decisions where making the ‘right choice’ just wasn’t possible. For example, if a business chose to shut down, it might protect employees from catching COVID, but at the same time, it would leave them without a paycheck. This was particularly true in the U.S. where the government played a more limited role in regulating business behavior leaving managers and owners to make hard choices.

In this way, the pandemic is a societal paradox in which the social objectives of public health and economic prosperity are both interdependent and contradictory. How does the public judge businesses then when they make decisions favoring one social objective over another? To answer this question, I qualitatively surveyed the American public at the start of the COVID-19 crisis about what they considered to be responsible and irresponsible business behavior in response to the pandemic. Analyzing their answers led me to create the 4R Model of Moral Sensemaking of Competing Social Problems.

The 4R Model relies on two dimensions: the extent to which people prioritize one social problem over another and the extent to which they exhibit psychological discomfort (i.e. cognitive dissonance). In the first mode, Reconcile, people view the problems as compatible. There is no need to prioritize then and no resulting dissonance. These people think, “Businesses can just convert to making masks to help the cause and still make a profit.”

The second mode, Resign, similarly does not prioritize one problem over another; however, the problems are seen as competing, suggesting a high level of cognitive dissonance. These people might say, “It’s dangerous to stay open, but if the business closes, people will lose their jobs. Both decisions are bad.”

In the third mode, Ranking, people use prioritizing to reduce cognitive dissonance. These people say things like, “I understand people will be fired, but it’s more important to stop the virus.”

In the fourth and final mode, Rectify, people start by ranking but show signs of lingering dissonance as they acknowledge the harm created by prioritizing one problem over another. Unlike with the Resign mode, they try to find ways to reduce this harm. A common response in this mode would be, “Businesses should shut down, but they should also try to help employees file for unemployment.”

The 4R model has strong implications for other grand challenges where there may be competing social objectives such as in addressing climate change. To this end, the typology helps CSR decision-makers understand how they may be judged when businesses are forced to re- or de-prioritize CSR dimensions. In other words, it helps us understand how people make moral sense of business behavior when the right thing to do is paradoxically also the wrong thing.  

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Meredith Broussard, a data journalist at New York University, is concerned about the Hollywood version of artificial intelligence — and the public’s readiness to embrace the fictionalized AI that’s often portrayed on screen.

“People tend to over-dramatize the role of AI in the future and imply that there’s some glorious AI-driven future where humans are not going to have to talk to each other, and computers are going to take care of mundane activities, and it’s all going to be sleek and seamless,” she says. “I think that’s unreasonable. I think that our narratives around AI should center not on what’s imaginary, but what’s real.”

What’s all too real, she maintains, is that AI is causing many kinds of harm here and now. Broussard, one of the few Black women doing research in artificial intelligence, would like to see us tackling the problems that have been shown to be prevalent in today’s AI systems, especially the issue of bias based on race, gender, or ability. Those concerns are front and center in her recent book, “More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech.”

“When technology reinforces inequality, it tends to be called a glitch, a temporary blip that is easily fixed in the code,” Broussard wrote to Undark in an email. “But it’s much more than this.” The biases that permeate our society are embedded in the data that our computer programs train on, she notes, and ultimately the imperfections of our world are reflected in the AI systems we create. “All of the systemic problems that exist in society also exist in algorithmic systems,” she wrote. “It’s just harder to see the problems when they’re embedded in code and data.”

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

Undark: I thought we could begin with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their latest offering, GPT-4, which came out last month. As you see the headlines, and see their seemingly impressive capabilities, what goes through your mind?

Meredith Broussard: I would like our conversation to start with not only the potential benefits, but also the potential risks of new technologies. So, for example, with ChatGPT, it is fed with data that is scraped from the open web. Well, when we think about what is on the open web, there’s a lot of really great stuff, and there’s a lot of really toxic stuff. So, anybody who’s expecting GPT technology to be positive has an unreasonable impression of what’s available out there on the internet.

UD: There’s a long list of things that people are concerned about — for example a student will hand in an essay, and the professor will wonder, did the student write this themselves, or did they get help from an AI system? But it’s more complicated than that, right?

MB: There are all kinds of subtle biases that manifest inside AI systems. For example, I just read an article about some Hugging Face researchers that had a generative AI generate pictures, based on some prompts. And when they put in the prompt for “CEO,” they got mostly male images. So, there are these very human biases that manifest inside technological systems.

For a very long time, the dominant ethos in Silicon Valley has been a kind of bias that I call “techno chauvinism” — the idea that computational solutions are superior, that computers are somehow elevated, more objective, more neutral, more unbiased.

What I would argue instead is that computers are really good at making mathematical decisions, and not as good at making social decisions. So when we create systems like ChatGPT, or DALL-E, or Stable Diffusion, or whatever, you’re going to get bias in the outputs of these systems, because you’ve got bias in the inputs, in the data that’s used to construct these systems. And there’s no way of getting away from it, because we do not live in a perfect world. And data represents the world as it is, and our problematic past.

UD: You point out that some of the problems in our algorithms go all the way back to the 1950s. Can you expand on that? What was going on way back then that still manifests today?

MB: 1950s ideas about gender are still embedded in today’s technological systems. You see it in something like the way that forms are designed — the kinds of forms that you fill out all the time — that go into databases.

When I was taught how to program databases in college, back in the dawn of the Internet era, I was taught that gender should be a binary value, and that it was fixed. We know now that gender is a spectrum, and the best practice right now is to make gender an editable field, a field that a user can edit themselves, privately, without talking to customer service or whatever. But it’s not just a matter of, “Oh, I’m going to have to change the way this field is represented on this Google form that I’m making” — because not everything is a Google form.

When you enroll in school, for example, you are making an entry into the student information system. Student information systems are generally these monoliths that were set up decades and decades ago, and just keep getting added on to. People don’t tend to go in and revise their large-scale enterprise systems. It’s the same deal in banking, it’s the same situation in insurance.

The other thing to consider when it comes to gender is that when we talk about the gender binary in the context of computing, it’s literally about zeros and ones — it’s about the memory space in the computer. A binary takes up a small amount of space, and a letter or a word takes up a larger amount of space. And we used to have to write our programs to be very, very small, because memory was really expensive — computers were expensive.

So there was an economic imperative around keeping gender represented as a binary, as well as a dominant social concept that gender was a binary.

Things are different now. We have lots of cheap memory. And we have a different understanding of gender. But our new systems also have to talk to legacy systems, and the legacy systems have this normative aesthetic that dates from the very earliest days of computing. So it’s not inclusive for trans, nonbinary, or gender non-conforming folks.

UD: In your book, you look at the how the impact of AI is being felt in the justice system, and in policing. What are you particularly concerned about when AI makes its way into that realm?

MB: I’m pretty concerned about Hollywood images of AI and the way these dominate people’s imaginations. People imagine that Minority Report is an actual future that they want to make happen. And that is not a future that I particularly want to make happen. And in a democracy we get to talk about this, we get to decide collectively, what is the future we want. I do not co-sign on a future of increased surveillance; of using AI tools for policing that more frequently misidentify people with darker skin. AI tools often just do not work, period. They often work better for people with lighter skin than people with darker skin.

And this is this is true across the board. So when we take these problematic tools, and then use them in something like policing, it generally exacerbates the problems that we already have in America around overpolicing of Black and Brown neighborhoods, the carceral crisis in general.

UD: You also mention the idea of algorithmic auditing. What is that, and how might it be useful?

MB: Two things I’m really excited about are algorithmic auditing, and policy changes on the horizon. Algorithmic auditing is the process of opening up a “black box” and evaluating it for problems.

We have an explosion of work on mathematical conceptions of fairness, and methods for evaluating algorithms for bias. The first step is, obviously knowing that algorithmic auditing exists. The second step is being willing to have hard conversations inside organizations in which people confront the fact that their algorithms are probably discriminating.

I think that it’s important to note that we all have unconscious bias. We’re all trying to become better people every day. But we all have unconscious bias — we embed our unconscious bias in the things that we make, including our technologies. And so when you start looking for problems inside algorithmic systems, you’re going to find them.

We can incorporate bias audits into ordinary business processes. People already have testing processes for software. When you are testing your software for whether it works, it’s a good idea to also test it for bias. And we know about a lot of kinds of bias that exist. There are likely going to be additional kinds of bias that are discovered in the future. We should test for those as well. And if something is so biased as to be discriminatory, maybe it shouldn’t be used.

UD: You used the phrase “black box.” Can you expand on that?

MB: If we’re going to talk about fairness, and we’re going to talk about whether particular computer programs should be used in particular contexts, we do need to get into the math, and we do need to talk more about what’s actually happening inside the software system. And so we need to open up the black box a little bit.

This is one of the things that algorithmic accountability journalists do. Algorithmic accountability journalism is a kind of data journalism. It was pioneered by Julia Angwin in her “Machine Bias” investigation for ProPublica. Julia later went on to found The Markup, which is an algorithmic accountability investigative shop. And what we do as algorithmic accountability reporters is, we interrogate black boxes: We figure out what are the inputs, what are the outputs, and what must be going on inside the system.

It’s a kind of algorithmic auditing. Because when you know the inputs and the outputs, you can figure out what is on the inside. That’s called an external audit. But if you are inside a company, you can do an internal audit, which is much easier because you have access to the model and the code as well as the training data and the test data.

I would also say to any folks reading this who work at corporations, you probably want to do internal audits, algorithmic accountability audits, and bias audits. Because that way, you avoid getting investigative journalists interested in doing external audits of your systems.

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Two eminent scholars – philosopher Elizabeth Anderson and sociologist Alondra Nelson – have won the 2023 Sage-CASBS Award. The award, sponsored by Sage, a global academic publisher and the parent of Social Science Space, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, recognizes outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advances our understanding of pressing social issues.

Anderson and Nelson will appear together in a free event on November 16 at the Stanford University home of the center. The award includes a cash prize.

Elizabeth Anderson

Integrating expertise and insights at the intersection of philosophy, economics, history, and other social sciences, Elizabeth Anderson has established herself as one of the deepest and most interdisciplinary thinkers in the academy. In 2020, Prospect Magazine named her among the world’s top 50 thinkers, crediting her approach of “always confronting the world as it truly is rather than how we would like it to be.”

She specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy; feminist theory; social epistemology; and the philosophy of economics and social sciences. Her work involves examinations of democratic theory, equality in political philosophy and U.S. law, the history of egalitarianism and ethics, value theory and the ethical limits of markets, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, and facts and values in social scientific research. A 2019 profile of her in The New Yorker was titled “The Philosopher Redefining Equality.”

“Elizabeth Anderson’s contributions are foundational. They influence our consideration of ethical and moral aspects of justice, democracy, and equality in very tangible ways,” said CASBS interim director Woody Powell. “Her pragmatic approach starts with real issues and problems, identifying ways institutions, policies, and practices create social inequalities that manifest in various dimensions of life and for various societal groups. She explores and formulates correctives that strive for a path for all, not just some, to flourish.”

Her books include Value in Ethics and Economics (1993); The Imperative of Integration (2010), winner of the 2011 Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association; Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It) (2017); and the forthcoming Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (September 2023).

After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University, she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1987, where she now serves as the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor (since 2004), the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies (since 2013), and the Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy (since 2021).

Anderson received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, better known as the MacArthur “genius award” in 2019, and a Progress Medal for scholarship and leadership on making the economy more just from the Society for Progress (2018). She has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2013) and the American Council of Learned Societies (2013). She has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2020), a member of the American Philosophical Society (2021), and a member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society (2022).

Alondra Nelson

Employing expertise at the intersection of science, technology, medicine, and social inequality, Alondra Nelson has advanced understanding of how race, gender, and other social categories shape and are shaped by the development and use of scientific knowledge. In so doing, Nelson has distinguished herself both through scholarly accomplishment and public service and engagement of the highest order. Since 2019, Nelson has served on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as the Harold F. Linder Chair and Professor of Social Science.

Concurrent with her academic appointments, she served as the fourteenth president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council from 2017 to 2021, leaving to accept an appointment as deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and led the office on an acting basis when its director resigned in 2022. Shortly before her exit from government service in February 2023, Nature selected Nelson as one of the 10 people who helped shape science in 2022.

Most of Nelson’s work has examined ways in which science and technology intertwine with issues concerning equity, power, and inclusion and their implications for marginalized communities. Her major research contributions are situated at the intersection of racial formation and social citizenship, on the one hand, and emerging scientific and technological phenomena, on the other. (Her 2020 Social Science Bites episode on genetic testing illustrates that research.)

Nelson’s books include Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (2011), a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award; and The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016).

Her numerous fellowships include the Center for American Progress,  Andrew C. Mellon Foundation (2006-07), the Ford Foundation (2007), the London School of Economics (2007), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Germany, 2011), the University of Bayreuth (2014), and the Hastings Center (2019). Her teaching and research have garnered multiple awards, including the Poorvu Family Award for Distinguished Interdisciplinary Teaching from Yale University (2008), the African American Culture and Philosophy Award from Purdue University (2014), and the Morison Prize in Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). She has been named a member of the Sociological Research Association (2017), the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2018), the American Philosophical Society (2020), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), the National Academy of Medicine (2020), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2021).

Nelson served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science (2014-17) at Columbia University.

In other leadership roles at Columbia, Nelson served as interim director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (2015-16), director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (2013-14), founding co-director of the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research, and founding co-chair of both the Precision Medicine and Society Initiative (2015-19) and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Council (2013-17).

“Alondra Nelson sets new standards through probing social science scholarship that centers equity in science, technology, the public, and policy. She has done a service to society and to social science by firming up connections between both,” said Sage CEO Blaise Simqu.

The Award

The Sage-CASBS Award was established in 2013. Past winners of the award include Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate in economic sciences; Pedro Noguera, sociologist and education rights activist; Kenneth Prewitt, political scientist and former U.S. Census Bureau director; William Julius Wilson, sociologist and celebrated scholar of poverty, inequality, and race; Carol Dweck, social psychologist and foundational figure in the development of mindset science; and Jennifer Richeson, psychologist and authority on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dynamics of intergroup interactions.

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Guillaume Carton, Julia Parigot, and Thomas Roulet reflect on their article, “How Not to Turn the Grand Challenges Literature Into a Tower of Babel?,” which was recently published in Business & Society. Their responses appear below the paper’s abstract.

What motivated you to pursue this research?

This Business & Society commentary grew out of our questioning of the management community’s sudden interest in Grand Challenges. While we were initially seduced by the topic because we thought it would help us strengthen our arguments and be heard by a community of scholars who also care about business and society, we quickly became confused by it and got the impression that we were reinventing the wheel. Building on the concept of academic fashion, we then wrote this commentary to avoid the current risks of turning the Grand Challenges literature into a Tower of Babel and to move towards consolidated perspectives and solutions to Grand Challenges.

What advice would you give to new scholars and incoming researchers in this particular field of study?

As we argue in this commentary that Grand Challenges have become an academic fashion, we want to warn new scholars and incoming researchers about the risks of jumping on the Grand Challenges bandwagon. Like a Ponzi scheme, academic fashions promise very high returns with little or no risk. However, because academic fashions tend to fade as soon as they are widely adopted, by investing in the Grand Challenges literature, new scholars and incoming researchers risk not being able to publish in this literature once well-known management scholars have jumped on a new fashion.

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Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American sociologist, senior policy adviser, educator and father of the communitarianism philosophy, died May 31. He was 94.

In the 1990s, Etzioni devised a social philosophy, which he coined communitarianism, aimed at creating a happy medium between liberals and conservatives. Etzioni believed the ideology would balance individual liberties with societal responsibilities by prioritizing community, family and society over personal freedom and autonomy.

He described the genesis of his insight in a 2013 essay for The American Scholar (an essay, Etzioni said, written as his “hourglass is almost empty”):

Etzioni’s idea of placing the common good above individual rights drew criticism from liberals and conservatives, who contended it placed too much focus on collective interests at the expense of individual rights. Liberals argued communitarianism reinforced authoritarianism by giving those with power in communities control over others, and conservatives said the philosophy enforced conformity.

Nonetheless, the communitarian emphasis on civic engagement, which promoted participating in jury duty and the military, and shifting educational goals and federal spending along with various other policy ideas, drew the attention of Western leaders. Etzioni was able to share his ideas with Bill Clinton during his presidency, Barack Obama during his candidacy for presidency, Tony Blair during his time as Britain’s prime minister (Etzioni was dubbed “the father” of Blair’s ideas) and other government conduits.

To share his communitarian ideas, Etzioni founded the Communitarian Network, a non-profit organization and group of communitarians. He served as editor and founder of the organization’s publication, The Responsive Community. In addition to serving as president of the American Sociological Association in 1989, he was also the founder and president of the International Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics, an interdisciplinary organization that emphasizes work in sociology, economics, political science and various other disciplines.

Despite his high profile, Etzioni was not entirely sure at the end of the day whether his message generated more heat than light. As he wrote in that The American Scholar essay:

Etzioni studied many areas of sociology, including socioeconomics, social order, institutions and norms, and was president of the American Sociological Association from 1994 to 1995. He was also dedicated to implementing sociology in the real world through public policy and served as a senior policy adviser to the White House from 1979 to 1980 during Jimmy Carter’s administration.

“Amitai Etzioni does not share the academic sociologist’s typical reticence about taking an active role in the processes of societal change he studies,” Richard M. Coughlin’s 1994 profile of the president for the American Sociological Association reads. Indeed, in a professional career spanning nearly four decades and covering a broad range of topics and research questions, the common thread running through Amitai Etzioni’s life work as a sociologist has been to connect the theories and empirical findings of academic research (of others as well as his own) to policymaking, and to engage the citizenry at large.”

Etzioni was born with the name Warner Falk on January 4, 1929, in Cologne, Germany. When he was 6 years old, he and his family, who were Jewish, fled to Athens during the Holocaust. They then relocated to Palestine, and he changed his name. Etzioni went on to join the Palmach, a Jewish commando fighting force, and fought in the Israeli War of Independence.

Once the war ended, Etzioni attended an institute set up by philosopher Martin Buber before attending the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1954 and a master’s degree in sociology in 1956. Etzioni then relocated to the United States (he became a citizen in 1963) and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D. in 18 months, graduating in 1958.

Beyond his work with communitarianism, Etzioni was an educator. He was a professor of international affairs and sociology at George Washington University beginning in 1980, where he also served as director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. Prior to his career at George Washington University, he worked as a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1958 until 1978, and as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation professor at the Harvard Business School from 1987 to 1989.

Throughout his career, Etzioni published over 100 academic papers and more than 40 books. Some of his works include his 2001 book The Monochrome Society, his 1968 book The Active Society and his 1968 work The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes.

Etzioni earned various awards, including the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences  and the Jeffrey Pressman Award, and received various fellowships with organizations including the Social Science Research Council and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2001, the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him its Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit.

Etzioni is survived by his wife, Patricia Kellogg, his sons David, Oren, Ethan and Benjamin, his stepson Cliff, his stepdaughter Tamara, 11 grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.

Read Social Science Space’s 2015 interview with Etzioni on a subject that remains pertinent to this very day: Diplomacy or Destroyers: Uncle Sam’s Freedom of Navigation Choice – Social Science Space.

The post Amitai Etzioni, 1929-2023: Father of Communitarianism appeared first on Social Science Space.

Nick Benschop, Arno L.P. Nuijten, Mark Keil, Kristinka Wilmink, and Harry R. Commandeur share a humorous finding uncovered while researching their paper, “The Effect of Project Names on Escalation of Commitment in Information Systems Projects,” which was recently published in Project Management Journal.

As a backstory of our research paper, we would like to share an anecdote of our research that did not make it to the final paper. The anecdote illustrates the joy of doing this research. It shows that IT project names sometimes exhibit an unexpected twist and can have a completely different effect than anticipated. One project name even surprised us as researchers on this topic.

In our study, we test the effects of positive vs. negative project names on the willingness to continue a troubled IT project. To decide which specific project names to use in our study, we conducted a pilot test with a number of different names. In this pilot test we assessed whether a project name that was intended to be negative (positive) would indeed be perceived as such by the respondents. One negative project name that we believed to be promising was ‘Titanic.’ However, the pilot test results for the ‘Titanic’ project name confused us since we found wildly varying responses to the name, including very positive ones.

In later discussions with students and practitioners, we further investigated this curious finding and asked our respondents which specific positive and negative thoughts or images (i.e. the affect pool) the project name evoked. Our a priori expectation was that no one would want to be on-board with an IT project named Titanic, referencing the ship that sunk spectacularly. Indeed, we found that many of our respondents had the same negative affective reaction to the project named Titanic. They described that the project name evoked thoughts or images such as: ‘failing spectacularly’, ‘much too big’, ‘blind to upcoming threats’, ‘panic’, ‘disaster’, ‘people died’, ‘disaster still remembered after a century’ and ‘still down at the bottom after a century.’

To our surprise, there also was a large group of people who instead had a very positive affective reaction to the project name. These respondents associated the name ‘Titanic’ with very different things, including: ‘beautiful,’ ‘piece of art,’ ‘love story,’ ‘Leonardo di Caprio,’ ‘Kate Winslet,’ ‘warmest ties between people,’ ‘helping each other,’ ‘a cherished memory to my mother with whom I watched this movie in the cinema twice.’

This example shows that project names can have unanticipated effects and that they can even surprise us as researchers. Nevertheless, we would not necessarily advise you to award your next ambitious IT-project with the project name ‘Titanic.’ Unless your project is populated with award-winning movie stars, of course.

The post Would You Step on Board an IT Project Named Titanic? appeared first on Social Science Space.

In the Global North, media and political depictions of migration tend to be relentless images of little boats crossing bodies of water or crowds of people stacking up at a dotted line on a map. These depictions presume two things – that this is a generally comprehensive picture of migration and that, regardless of where you stand, the situation around migration is relatively dire.

Enter Heaven Crawley, who heads equitable development and migration at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. She also holds a chair in international migration at Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, and directs the South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub since 2019, a project supported by UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund. From her perch, spanning government, academe and field research, she says confidently in this Social Science Bites podcast that international migration “is not an entirely positive story, but neither is it an entirely negative one. What we’re lacking in the media conversation and in the political discussion is any nuance.”

Connecting nearly all the regional debates about migration “is the lack of an honest conversation about what migration is and what it has been historically. It has historically been the very thing that has developed the societies in which we live, and it is something on which the clock cannot be turned back.

“And none of us, frankly, if migration was to end tomorrow, would benefit from that.”

Trying to bring a clear eye to the debate, she explains to host David Edmonds that roughly 3.6 percent of the world’s population, or 280 million people, could be considered migrants. Of that, about 32 million fit under the rubric of “refugee.” And while the sheer number of Migrants is growing, the percentage of the world’s population involved has been “more or less the same” last three decades.  

And while this might surprise European listeners, almost 40 percent of migration originates from Asia– mostly India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — followed by Mexico. There is a lot of migration from African countries, Crawley notes, which gibes with European media, but most of that migration isn’t to Europe, but within the African continent.

Who are these migrants? Overall, she says, most people who move are less than 45. Nonetheless, “the gender, the age really depends on the category you’re looking at and also the region you are looking at.” Generalizations about their qualifications can be fraught: low-skills migrants ready to fill so-called “dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs” and high-skill migrants draining out their country’s brains can often depart from the same nation.

Crawley agrees that migration currently is a politically potent wedge issue, but she notes it has been in the past, too. She suggests that migration per se isn’t even the issue in many migration debates. “A whole set of other things are going on in the world that people find very anxiety-producing” – rapid changes in society drawing from security, economy, demographics, and more, all against a backdrop of “migration simultaneously increasing (in the number of people on the move, not the proportion) and the variety of people also increasing.”

This creates an easy out for policymakers, she says. “Politicians know that if they’ve got problems going on in society, it’s very easy to blame migration, to blame migrants. It really is a very good distraction from lots of other problems they really don’t want to deal with.”

This is also why, she suggests, that responses such as deterrence are more popular than more successful interventions like addressing the inequalities that drive migration in the first place.

Crawley’s career saw her sit as head of asylum and migration research at the UK Home Office, serve three separate times as a specialist adviser to the UK Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee and Joint Committee on Human Rights, and be associate director at the Institute for Public Policy Research. In 2012, in recognition of her contribution to the social sciences and to evidence-based policymaking, she was named a fellow of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences.

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 Heaven Crawley on International Migration appeared first on Social Science Space.

Join the authors of the new book Beyond Therapeutic Culture in Latin America: Hybrid Networks in Argentina and Brazil as they examine the global phenomenon of ‘therapeutic culture’ through the experiences of Latin America in this free webinar. Drawn from original research conducted in the region, Beyond Therapeutic Culture in Latin America extends the idea of the therapeutic beyond the classroom to encompass a diversity of practices, both “secular” and “religious,” “modern” and “traditional,” that are deemed as therapeutic by the actors involved. Expect to learn lessons specifically about Latin America but that offer insights for understanding therapeutic cultures everywhere.

The authors of the book, Piroska E. Csúri, Mariano B. Plotkin, and Nicolás Viotti will be joined by two editors of the Therapeutic Cultures book series, Edgar Cabanas and Daniel Nehring. The webinar is sponsored by Social Science Space.

Date: Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Time: 1700 Madrid/1600 London/1200 Buenos Aires/1100 New York/0900 Mexico City/0800 Los Angeles

Piroska E. Csúri is a lecturer in communication at the Universidad de San Andrés and teaches at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús and in the Postgraduate program of the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires (Argentina). She is the co-editor of Structures in the Mind: Essays on Language, Music and Cognition in Honor of Ray Jackendoff (MIT Press, 2015).

Mariano B. Plotkin is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a professor of history at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. He is the author of Freud in the Pampas (Stanford University Press, 2001) among many other texts on the history of psychoanalysis in Latin America.

Nicolás Viotti is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and a professor at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Buenos Aires, Argentina). He is the co-author (with Lucia Ariza) of Desconfianzas. Por qué ya no se cree en la Ciencia (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2023).

Edgar Cabanas has a Ph.D. in psychology and is an associate professor at Universidad Camilo José Cela in Madrid. He was a postdoctoral researcher (2014-2016) and adjunct researcher (2016-2018) at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and a visiting scholar, in 2011 and 2013, at the Center for the Study of Rationality at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Industry and Science of Happiness Control our Lives (Polity), co-written with Eva Illouz. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures.

Daniel Nehring is a senior lecturer in sociology at Swansea University in the UK. He has extensive research experience in East Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He is an author or editor of seven books, including his recent of Global Therapeutic Cultures (Routledge, 2020) and Worlds (Routledge, 2019; nominated for the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize (UK) 2020. He is an editor of the Routledge book series Therapeutic Cultures and a founder and convenor of the international academic network Popular Psychology, Self-Help Culture and the Happiness Industry.

The post Webinar! Therapeutic Cultures: A View from Latin America appeared first on Social Science Space.

Carnegie Mellon University has received a five-year, $20 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation to lead an institute that will employ social scientists and artificial intelligence researchers to create human-centric AI tools to help people address challenges on the job. The AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM) is one of seven NSF-funded AI centers aimed at fostering machine learning research and development.

The institute will provide insights for public health departments, non-profits, companies, hospitals, emergency management agencies and various other entities. For instance, it may help public health officials determine how to fairly distribute resources like vaccines or health workers.

Researchers from the CMU School of Computer Science and Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences will be joined at AI-SDM by experts from Harvard University, Howard University, Texas A&M University, the University of Washington, Navajo Technical University, Pennsylvania State University, Winchester Thurston School, the MITRE Corporation and Boston Children’s Hospital.

CMU School of Computer Science professor Aarti Singh will serve as the institute’s director.

“The best applications of artificial intelligence in societal domains will come when we not only advance AI for decision-making, but also better understand human decision-making, and when we can bring the two together,” said Singh. “Social scientists are studying human behavior. Machine learning researchers are developing new AI technologies to aid decision-making. For maximal impact of these technologies, we need to have social scientists and AI researchers collaborate to come up with solutions that will leverage AI capability while ensuring social acceptance.”

Cognitive and behavioral scientists and AI experts at AI-SDM will develop computer models that provide insight into why humans make certain decisions when faced with challenges and how social values play a role in decisions. The tools will have the capacity to predict human choices and replicate human decision-making as they undergo interdisciplinary training to help them face difficult scenarios.

The machine learning models developed at AI-SDM are expected to make independent decisions to assist people across industries and will be deployed in the field to accompany experts from government health departments, emergency management agencies and various other organizations.

The institute will also research how to increase receptiveness to artificial intelligence in societal decision-making across various industries. AI-SDM will inform the public of the ways AI can assist professionals using professional development workshops, workforce training, public engagement efforts and other community involvement approaches.

The post Human-Centered AI: Carnegie Mellon University Heads New NSF-Funded Institute For Societal Decision Making appeared first on Social Science Space.

Georgetown University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are investing $30 million in a new institute that will merge technology research and policy. The Knight – Georgetown Institute, or KGI, aims to be a nonpartisan hub for conducting information and technology research. The center’s findings will be translated into resources to help leaders in the technology industry, journalists and policymakers address technology-related concerns like election security and surveillance.

The Knight Foundation is a non-profit that invests in areas like the arts, journalism and free expression. It partnered with Georgetown’s Tech and Society Initiative, a community of institutes that collaborate on work related to technology, ethics and governance.

The institute, located in Georgetown’s campus at 500 First St. NW, Washington DC, will kick off its work in this summer. Located only a few blocks from Capitol Hill, KGI is expected to foster collaboration between academics and policymakers.

“The Knight-Georgetown Institute is an exciting manifestation of Georgetown’s deep-seated expertise in the issues of technology, ethics and society, and the Knight Foundation’s investment in media and democracy,” said Georgetown Provost Robert M. Groves. “The need to understand the ways technology impacts our information production systems and our democracy is vital to our shared futures.”

KGI will take an interdisciplinary approach, connecting people from the Knight Foundation and Georgetown to academics in social science, the humanities, journalism and various other fields. Through its collaborative efforts, the institute will aim to increase the role research plays in decision-making. The institute will also host workshops to advise researchers on how to turn their research into a resource and how to interact with legislators and policymakers.

Undergraduate and graduate students at Georgetown will use the center as an educational tool to learn how technology research translates into public policy. In addition to research opportunities, the institute will also provide students with pre-professional and mentorship support.

The post New Georgetown, Knight Foundation Institute Aims to Translate Technology Research Into Policy appeared first on Social Science Space.

Jennifer Remnant, a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde business school based in the Scottish Centre for Employment Research, will lecture at the University College London (UCL) Collaborative Social Science Domain Annual Debate 2023.

Remnant’s work emphasizes experiences of health and impairment at work, disability in the workplace, how organizations and health are interrelated and other health and work-related concepts. She also studies how managers make decisions regarding workplace support for those with disabilities and the sociology of disability.

Her hour-long lecture, “The Fragile Worker: Stigma, Illness and Disability in the Contemporary [Western] Workplace,” will take place on Tuesday, July 4, at 6 p.m. BST at the UCL Cruciform Lecture Theatre, LT1, in the basement of the Cruciform Building on Gower Street, London, WCIE 6BT. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

The lecture will also be live-streamed on the UCL YouTube channel. Details on the stream will come later.

The lecture will discuss why some employees with long-term conditions and disabilities choose not to disclose their diagnoses or access workplace support, and how employer prejudices impact employees with disabilities.

“In this talk, I will reflect on the fragility of the disabled worker in this context, a fragility that does not relate to their impairment effects or symptoms, but instead, the insecurity of their engagement and progression at work,” Remnant said.

Three UCL researchers will give brief responses to Remnant’s lecture based on their own disciplinary work in fragility.

Remnant will be introduced by Carey Jewitt, chair of the UCL Collaborative Social Science Domain and professor of learning and technology.

The event is sponsored by Sage, the parent of Social Science Space.

The post Worker Fragility Focus of UCL Collaborative Social Science Domain’s Annual Debate appeared first on Social Science Space.

Cognitive computing — the use of artificial intelligence algorithms to simulate intricate components of human cognition like learning, decision making, processing and perception — sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and psychology.

Machine learning tools like chatbots and virtual assistants can emulate the work of psychologists and psychotherapists and are even helping to address people’s basic therapeutic needs.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model and mobile apps such as Wysa, Woebot and Replika allow people to communicate with machine ‘therapists’ that ask users questions and provide supportive responses. These models are complex developments building on the shoulders of projects like ELIZA, a therapeutic chatbot created by computer scientist and professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Eliza rephrased people’s comments into questions using language processing, and led to the term “the ELIZA effect,” the tendency to ascribe human behaviors to artificial intelligence tools.

In the ’60s, users were very receptive to ELIZA, and even confided in the chatbot for their therapeutic needs, which was not anticipated by ELIZA’s creator. Even when Weizenbaum explained to users that the chatbot was just a program, they continued to attribute human emotions to ELIZA.

“As he enlisted people to try it out, Weizenbaum saw similar reactions again and again – people were entranced by the program. They would reveal very intimate details about their lives, an episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast notes. “It was as if they’d just been waiting for someone (or something) to ask.”

Weizenbaum later criticized artificial intelligence models, arguing that fields like psychotherapy require human compassion and shouldn’t be automated. He also feared future chatbots would try to convince users they were humans.

“He worried that users didn’t fully understand they were talking to a bunch of circuits and pondered the broader implications of machines that could effectively mimic a sense of human understanding,” the podcast says. “Where some saw therapeutic potential, he saw a dangerous illusion of compassion that could be bent and twisted by governments and corporations.”

Now, tools powered by artificial intelligence use a combination of machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to interpret inputs and respond appropriately. Complex computerized models, known as artificial neural networks, can learn and provide responses and predictions after being trained on existing – and presumably accurate — input data.

This aims to make them a useful tool for individuals seeking support for various mental health related concerns.

But today’s more complex chatbots pose challenges just as ELIZA once did. Chatbots do not have the capacity to empathize with patients, could send damaging messages to vulnerable users, aren’t designed for high-risk crisis management and may not be a viable option for users without internet access. According to board-certified Harvard and Yale-trained psychiatrist Marlynn Wei, additional measures must also be taken to protect privacy, to keep patient’s data confidential and to ensure users provide informed consent.

The public isn’t sold on robot therapists. A study by Pew Research Center indicates 75 percent of U.S. adults would be concerned if AI computer programs could know people’s thoughts and behaviors, and machines with no emotions could already be helping humans regulate theirs. At the same time, some people are already using ChatGPT as a supplement to therapy, and others on Twitter and Reddit have called the tools “incredibly helpful” and say they are “using it as therapy daily.”

While today’s machines can’t fully duplicate the capacities of human therapists, they are able to engage in conversations and serve as a supplement to traditional psychotherapy or as a self-help tool. Mental Health America says that 56 percent of adults in the U.S. — over 27 million people — with a mental illness do not receive treatment, and 24.7 percent of adults with mental illnesses have sought treatment but didn’t receive it. Chatbots could increase the accessibility of therapy; they can communicate with humans at any time or place and don’t require advanced booking as do traditional psychotherapists or even telehealth providers.

“Individuals seeking treatment but still not receiving needed services face the same barriers that contribute to the number of individuals not receiving treatment: no insurance or limited coverage of services, shortfall in psychiatrists, and an overall undersized mental health workforce, lack of available treatment types (inpatient treatment, individual therapy, intensive community services), disconnect between primary care systems and behavioral health systems, insufficient finances to cover costs including copays, uncovered treatment types, or when providers do not take insurance,” the Mental Health America website notes.

According to Forbes Health, the average cost of psychotherapy in the United States ranges from $100 to $200 per session. On the other hand, therapeutic AI chat tools offer free and paid options, which helps improve the accessibility of therapy across socioeconomic levels. Machine learning tools also provide the opportunity for those afraid of judgment to receive care without facing any stigma or discomfort. Pew Research found that 40 percent of U.S. adults would be very or somewhat excited if artificial intelligence computer systems could diagnose medical problems and that may become possible as mental health is at the forefront of AI-powered diagnostic tools.

Independent researcher Mahshid Eshghie and Mojtaba Eshghie of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology suggest ChatGPT can assist, rather than replace, traditional therapists. Their paper, “ChatGPT as a Therapist Assistant: A Sustainability Study,” published in April, described a study that involved training ChatGPT to help a therapist between sessions. According to the paper, AI could help assist therapists by screening for mental health issues in patients, gathering more information in one exchange than a therapist could in a single session and providing online therapy based on the insights it gains from conversations.

“ChatGPT can serve as a patient information collector, a companion for patients in between therapy sessions and an organizer of gathered information for therapists to facilitate treatment processes,” the paper reads. “The research identifies five research questions and discovers useful prompts for fine-tuning the assistant, which shows that ChatGPT can participate in positive conversations, listen attentively, offer validation and potential coping strategies without providing explicit medical advice and help therapists discover new insights from multiple conversations with the same patient.”

The use of AI tools in a psychotherapy setting could help reduce the workload of therapists and could help detect mental illnesses more quickly because, as the study notes, chatbots can gather a lot of information in a single session as opposed to several. Machine learning tools could also analyze patient’s data to assist therapists in creating treatment plans.

In another recent study, “Assessing The Accuracy Of Automatic Speech Recognition For Psychotherapy,” Adam Miner, a clinical psychologist and instructor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine and his fellow researchers analyzed the ability of online tools to provide transcripts of therapy sessions and to detect keywords related to mental health symptoms and diagnoses.

As the Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence website described, “Miner and his colleagues examined Google Speech-to-Text transcriptions of 100 therapy sessions involving 100 patient/therapist pairs. Their aim: to analyze the transcriptions’ overall accuracy, how well they detect key symptom words related to depression or anxiety, and how well they identify suicidal or homicidal thoughts.”

The study found the transcriptions had a word error rate of 25 percent. Word error rate indicates how often a tool does not transcribe the correct word. However, the mistakes in the transcript did not have a large semantic difference from the original words, meaning when the transcription did not generate the correct words, the phrases it produced instead had a similar meaning to the original words. The report says the transcriptions could improve by adding further training data.

While AI could support a lot of the work performed by therapists, it might also help improve their performance by helping to train new professionals and by providing feedback to therapists based on sessions and results and to double-check the accuracy of mental health diagnoses. Nonetheless, some therapists have concerns about the use of AI functions in their workplace.

Researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the University of Luebeck found most medical students have their own concerns about chatbots. Research described in “Chatbots For Future Docs: Exploring Medical Students’ Attitudes And Knowledge Towards Artificial Intelligence And Medical Chatbots” determined that of medical students who learned about the applications of chatbots in healthcare in a course named “Chatbots For Future Docs,” 66.7 percent have concerns regarding data protection when using AI in therapy and 58.3 percent worry chatbots will monitor them at work.

Additionally, the article explains concerns about the accuracy of AI tools and suggests extensive evaluation of the machines to ensure they are equipped to assist in supporting psychotherapy efforts. AI tools also cannot express actual emotions or read nonverbal cues that could be pivotal in identifying a patient’s emotional state.

While the enthusiasm from users and fears from Weizenbaum during the ELIZA days may seem outdated considering the complex tools available in 2023, the appeal of and concerns toward the use of artificial intelligence in therapy today seem to mirror those from the past.

Still, chatbots are transforming psychology and will continue to as a supplement to traditional therapy in low-stakes scenarios, as assistants to help psychotherapists get work done efficiently and as mechanisms for double-checking the accuracy of human therapist’s work.

The post How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Psychotherapy appeared first on Social Science Space.

A decade ago, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, tackled the pressing need to improve how funders, institutions, policy makers and others evaluated scientific research and its outputs. Existing measures, centered on scholarly citation, tended to use where the outputs were published as a proxy for the research’s quality, utility, and impact, measuring all disciplines with the same yardstick. 

In the decade since, various efforts to improve assessment and measure societal impact have launched that downplay or even eliminate literature-based measurements. Ideas for these new measures focus on impact in the real world, address disciplinary differences such as those between social science and physical science, and offer useful tools for researchers and end-users alike. 

This webinar, subtitled “A Decade of DORA: Lessons Learned for Social and Behavioral Science ,” saw panelists from the U.S. Social Science Research Council, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Georgia Tech (and formerly the National Science Foundation), discuss: 

• What does impact assessment look like from their perch?
• What should it look like? 
• How have their perspectives on impact changed over the last decade?
• What changes would they like to see 10 years from now? 
• What necessary next steps should be taken – whether immediately practical or aspirational?  

Speakers

Anna Harvey | President at the Social Science Research Council; Professor of Politics, Data Science, and Law and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University

Anthony Michel | Senior Policy Advisor to the Vice-President of Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Cassidy Sugimoto | Professor and Tom and Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, and former program director for the Science of Science and Innovation Policy program at the National Science Foundation

The post Watch the Webinar: What Should Impact Assessment Look Like for Social Science? appeared first on Social Science Space.

“Executive function,” whether expressed in that term or more colloquial language, is a psychological subject of huge interest both inside the discipline and — again using more colloquial terms – in the world at large. The authors of the 2012 paper “The Nature and Organization of Individual Differences in Executive Functions: Four General Conclusions” were well aware of this interest – dating back at least to their earlier work in a paper from 2000 – and crafted this paper covering the latest framework to appeal to as wide an academic audience as possible. Their intentions paid dividends, as the paper, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science in 2012, is one of three winners of Sage’s fourth annual 10-Year Impact Awards.

The 10-Year Impact Awards recognize three articles that were published in Sage Journals from a decade ago and have been cited more than any other papers from that year. The executive function paper has been cited 2,172 times.

“These awards were created as part of Sage’s larger effort to inspire and change the conversation around research impact,” said Ziyad Marar, Sage’s president of global publishing. “While a large part of this effort focuses on finding new ways to recognize impact beyond counting citations and outside of academia, the 10-year awards celebrate research with influence that has lasted longer or grown over time.” This longer time frame for a paper to prove influential is common in the social and behavioral disciplines.

Sage asked the authors, Akira Miyake, a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Naomi Friedman, an associate professor in the same department and the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at Boulder, to reflect on their paper and its impact.

(We invite readers to read our conversations with the other two winning author teams, one studying corporate social responsibility and one on online virality, earlier.)

In your estimation, what in your research—and obviously the published paper—is it that has inspired others or that they have glommed onto? 

Our 2012 article (published in Current Directions in Psychological Science) is a brief review paper that provided an update of research on executive functions conducted since the publication of the first study we published on this topic back in 2000 (Miyake et al., 2000, Cognitive Psychology). This earlier paper of ours became quite popular, so the impact of our 2012 paper stems in large part from the success of our 2000 paper.

We think that a major appeal of that initial work was that it provided an example framework for examining individual differences in executive functions (abilities to regulate and control one’s thought and action, often associated with frontal-lobe functioning). Although executive functions started to gain popularity in the 1990s, they were difficult to measure with individual tasks, and so was identifying the underlying subcomponents. Such difficulties arise in part because the tasks that are typically used to tap these control processes often also require many other non-control processes that are not of interest but can still contribute to individual differences. Additionally, the wide use of the back-then dominant exploratory factor analysis technique also led to a proliferation of different terms used to interpret the resulting factors derived from a battery of executive function tasks.

The confirmatory factor analytic framework we used in our 2000 study offered one effective solution to both of these problems, because it allowed one to extract common variance across multiple tasks, which is a better measure of executive functioning when the tasks are selected to differ in non-executive demands. It also allowed the advance specification of the underlying subcomponents (e.g., updating, shifting and inhibition in our work) and selection of representative tasks, instead of post-hoc interpretations of what the resulting factors might mean. Over 10 years of work with this framework since 2000 led to the insights that we reviewed in the 2012 paper.

We also believe that our 2012 paper had its impact because it provided substantial updates to our 2000 paper in a concise and accessible manner (only 2,500 words of text, written for a broad audience including advanced undergraduate students, because of the journal’s editorial policy). Theoretically, we described the concept of “general executive function” (called Common EF in the 2012 paper) that was not present in our 2000 paper. Empirically, although our initial study was done with young college students, our research had greatly expanded the scope since. Our 2012 paper briefly summarized the results from various studies that intersected with several major subdisciplines of psychological science (e.g., behavioral genetics, psychopathology and developmental psychology). Demonstrating such a broad applicability of our framework to various research domains also likely contributed to the popularity of our 2012 paper.

What, if anything, would you have done differently in the paper (or underlying research) if you were to go back in time and do it again?  

We can point to two things. First, sometimes we have heard other researchers characterize our framework as “the three-factor model,” which may give the impression that all executive function tasks belong to one of these three factors, or researchers may characterize inhibiting, updating and shifting as “core” executive functions, which may give a similar impression. Although we consider the three executive functions we have focused on in our work to be important ones, we never thought that they are the only three functions. We made this point explicitly in our original 2000 paper and then again in our 2012 paper (for example, in our 2012 paper, we said: “…there are other EFs … and other levels of analysis that could be justified and explored,” p. 9). The amount of testing involved in confirmatory factor analysis studies means that only so many tasks can be included within a study before participants get really tired (and even revolt!), but, if that were not an issue, we would have liked to include more constructs and examine different levels of analysis.

Second, when we reread our 2012 paper, what we said about one future research direction—studying influences of individual genes on individual differences in executive functions by conducting simulations—caught our attention. Back then, candidate-gene studies of genetic influences (how different variants of a single gene are associated with individual differences in a psychological function) were still quite popular, but it was already becoming clear that the results of small candidate-gene studies are not reliable and replicable. This makes a lot of sense, given that many, many genes are likely to be contributing to individual differences in any psychological functions. A single gene’s influence on any psychological function is unlikely to be reliably detected in small samples. We had realized this at the time, and that is why we suggested that a promising approach might be to consider aggregate effects of multiple genes.

However, we wish now that our discussion had elaborated on alternative approaches for gene discovery and investigation, particularly genome-wide associations studies, which test every variant across the genome for association with a trait. Genome-wide association studies have recently achieved sample sizes large enough to yield insights into the genetic basis of the Common EF factor (Hatoum et al. 2023, Biological Psychiatry), and one thing that has emerged from this work is the importance of pathways that were not among the usual suspects: specifically GABAergic processes. Had we known what we have learned in the subsequent decade, we would have emphasized the value of hypothesis-free gene discovery and suggested that simulation could be a useful tool for understanding these discoveries rather than just hypothesis generation, as we said in our 2012 paper.

What direct feedback—as opposed to citations—have you received in the decade since your paper appeared?

One of the things we both enjoy so much about studying executive functions is how important they are to so many different areas of psychology (e.g., cognitive, developmental, clinical, social, educational). This broad relevance means that we hear about the importance of executive functions from researchers across many areas of psychology and outside of psychology. Many of such conversations have led to fruitful collaborations to study implicit racial bias, sleep problems, creativity, acute effects of alcohol on executive functions and individual differences in sentence processing.

We have also been invited to various symposia, workshops and colloquium talks to present our work on executive functions. On such occasions, it is often the case that we get questions about some topics that we have not studied ourselves and therefore have not thought too much about (e.g., training of executive functions, impacts of bilingualism or music training on executive functions, best ways to study executive function impairments in special populations, educational implications of individual differences in executive functions). It has been a pleasure to be able to have such interesting conversations with other researchers.

How have others built on what you published? (And how have you yourself built on it?)

In our 2012 paper, we discussed four general conclusions involving (a) the unity and diversity of executive functions, (b) their genetic influences, (c) their relevance to clinical and societally relevant outcomes and (d) developmental stability. We and others have followed up on all of these lines of research.

For example, the unity and diversity of executive functions (the idea that different types of executive functions share some underlying commonality but are also separable) has been studied in the context of neuroimaging studies, both by our group and by other researchers. Genetic influences have been examined using a genome-wide association study, as we already mentioned earlier. Examples of work illustrating clinical and societal relevance of executive functions include studies of internalizing psychopathology (e.g., depression, anxiety) as well as externalizing psychopathology (e.g., substance use), repetitive negative thinking (e.g., rumination, worry), procrastination and implicit racial bias, just to name a few. Finally, we have also examined longitudinal stability—and also changes—in the structure of individual differences in executive functions at both phenotypic and genetic levels. Others have examined the factor structure of executive functions among children and also among older adults.

At the same time, executive function research since the publication of our 2012 paper has raised various new important questions that must be addressed. For example, there is a renewed interest in the measurement of executive functions. In particular, the question of whether commonly used measures of inhibition indeed tap some common underlying ability has become a controversial issue. Another measurement-related issue that has become particularly salient recently concerns the relationship between executive functions as measured with laboratory tasks (our focus in our 2012 paper) and those as assessed with questionnaires (Friedman & Gustavson, 2022, Current Directions in Psychological Science). More recently, there have also been attempts to reconceptualize executive functions, especially from a developmental perspective. These are all interesting new directions in executive function research that we believe have been inspired in part by the work we have published.

Could you name a paper (or other scholarly work) that has had the most, or at least a large, impact on you and your work?

Our initial 2000 work was inspired especially by two studies. First, John Duncan’s work on frontal lobe functions, especially Duncan et al. (1997), entitled “Frontal lobe deficits after head injury: Unity and diversity of function” (published in Cognitive Neuropsychology), introduced us to the notion of unity and diversity (Duncan’s work was in turn inspired by Teuber’s even earlier paper published in 1972, entitled “Unity and diversity of frontal lobe functions”). Second, Randy Engle’s group’s work about the relationship between short-term memory and working memory capacities (Engle et al., 1999, published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) was our first introduction to a confirmatory factor analysis approach to studying individual differences in cognitive abilities. Our 2000 study essentially combined the ideas of these two earlier studies.

In developing our thinking about the nature of a general executive function factor (Common EF) described in our 2012 paper, we were strongly influenced by Miller and Cohen’s (2001) classic review (published in Annual Review of Psychology). In fact, the important role of goal maintenance in attentional control was highly salient when Miyake was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, where Jonathan Cohen was a faculty member at that time. Other faculty members’ theoretical thinking also emphasized the importance of goal management and maintenance in complex cognition. Being exposed to such ideas repeatedly during graduate training no doubt contributed to our conceptualization of the general executive function factor, which we already mentioned speculatively in our 2000 paper.

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Leslie T. Fenwick, dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education, will deliver the 2023 Brown Lecture in Education Research. The American Educational Research Association inaugurated the series in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court took scientific research into account in issuing a landmark ruling ending legal racial segregation in public schools.

This 90-minute public lecture will take place on Thursday, October 19, starting at 6 p.m. ET, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.

Fenwick is a nationally known scholar with deep expertise in public policy, educational equity, and leadership and leadership studies. She has worked her way through the ranks of public education in the United States – a schoolteacher and administrator in urban public and private schools, a foundation program officer and nonprofit board member, a legislative aide in the Ohio State Senate, and a finalist for US Secretary of Education for the Biden administration. At Howard she is a professor of educational policy and leadership, and dean in residence at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

“Her scholarship through a public policy lens and her work in guiding the next generation of education leadership,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine, “will provide an important perspective for the Brown Lecture.”

Harvard Education Press published Fenwick’s award-winning book, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership last year. Fenwick is also a section editor of the Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers and a contributor to the bestselling book The Last Word: The Best Commentary and Controversy in American Education.

She is a member of the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2022, Fenwick was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Board of Visitors for the U.S. Military Academy, where she has served as a MCLC Senior Fellow since 2017 and occasionally lectures about character leadership and ethics. During her tenure as dean, the Howard University School of Education attained its first ranking in U.S. News & World Report’s list of top-100 Schools/Colleges of Education.

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“Although it is clear that social transmission is both frequent and important, less is known about why certain pieces of online content are more viral than others. … Is virality just random, as some argue, or might certain characteristics predict whether content will be highly shared?” This question, and its correlates, animated the 2012 paper “What Makes Online Content Viral.” The authors, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, considered their own findings in crafting the article … and seems to have paid dividends. “What Makes Online Content Viral,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research, is a recipient of Sage’s fourth annual 10-Year Impact Awards.

The 10-Year Impact Awards recognize three papers published in Sage Journals from a decade ago which have been cited more than any other papers from that year. The virality paper has been cited 1,333 times.

“These awards were created as part of Sage’s larger effort to inspire and change the conversation around research impact,” said Ziyad Marar, Sage’s president of global publishing. “While a large part of this effort focuses on finding new ways to recognize impact beyond counting citations and outside of academia, the 10-year awards celebrate research with influence that has lasted longer or grown over time.” This longer time frame for a paper to prove influential is common in the social and behavioral disciplines.

Sage asked Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Milkman, James G. Dinan endowed professor of operations, information and decisions at Wharton, to reflect on the paper and its own virality.

(We spoke with one of the other two winning author teams already and will post a conversation with the other team next week.)

In your estimation, what in your research – and obviously the published paper – is it that has inspired others or that they have glommed onto?

KATY: There are a few things that I think have driven the impact of this work. First, we left the confines of the laboratory and instead of studying how undergraduates respond to survey questions about what they’d be most likely to share online or via word of mouth, we collected real data about what’s shared on a highly influential website – nytimes.com, so the setting was really exciting to people. Second, we published this paper in 2012 just as online sharing was really becoming enormously influential. This is when Twitter was accelerating its growth in leaps and bounds, for instance. The platform hit 100 million users in 2011 and had nearly doubled its user base by 2012. So, there was enormous interest in what drives people to share content online but very little was known, and we swept in with a paper using compelling field data that could offer answers. Third, I think we got a bit lucky with media coverage. Maybe in part because we were studying The New York Times and reporters are naturally quite interested in what goes viral in the world’s premier newspaper, this research drew a lot of media attention. Probably my favorite coverage was from John Tierney in his popular New York Times “Science” column in 2013, where he called one of the findings from our paper “the most important social science discovery of the past century.” He was referring to our discovery that in the context of New York Times sharing, good news was slightly more likely to spread than bad news. All that media coverage certainly didn’t hurt!

JONAH: A few things come to mind. First, the topic of why things go viral has taken off. This isn’t the first paper to ever talk about word of mouth, but it’s one of the first papers to really dive into what drives people to talk and share. Further, the internet, and things going viral, has only become more prevalent, and public fascination with these sorts of issues has skyrocketed. We were fortunate to be early to the space. Second, more and more research has become interested in using mixed methods, and things like automated textual analysis, to provide insights into behavioral science. Again, we weren’t the first paper to do something like this, but using natural language processing to parse newspaper articles, and understand why they’re shared, certainly helped drive attention. Third, word of mouth acts like free advertising. Rather than paying to make people more aware of their products and services, if companies can generate word of mouth, they can spend less money on traditional advertising and have an even larger impact. Consequently, lots of companies now use word-of-mouth marketing, which has furthered interest in these types of questions.

In that vein, did you borrow – intentionally then or perhaps intuitively upon later reflection – any of your own findings in making your own work so, well, ‘viral’?

JONAH: We definitely thought a lot about the title. Something simple, and clear, that would encourage readers to want to learn more. Have also done follow-up work in the space and published a popular press book (Contagious: Why Things Catch On) that (hopefully) encouraged some industry attention.

KATY: What’s funny to me is how organically this paper took off. I didn’t feel like we had to do much to promote it, although Jonah certainly wrote a wonderful book that helped with its visibility. A lot of outsiders just got excited about the research, and they helped us share its insights widely. Maybe the fact that the results were so practically useful was important, and that’s a key finding from the paper – more useful content is more likely to go viral.

What, if anything, would you have done differently in the paper (or underlying research) if you were to go back in time and do it again?

KATY: I wish we could have convinced a website like nytimes.com to let us run an experiment rather than just scraping observational data to determine what goes viral. I also wish we’d been able to get a newspaper’s internal data on what’s published where and how quickly it spreads rather than having to rely on data we scraped from the front page and list of most shared articles. We really tried to convince a lot of newspapers to give us their internal data to analyze but no one was willing to do it (though notably, many offered up data AFTER we’d published this paper and they saw how interesting the results were; at that point, we no longer needed it).

JONAH: There are many more natural language processing tools out there than ever before, and they allow researchers to extract more and more sophisticated features from textual data. Ways to extract sentiment, specific emotion, the topics or themes of the articles and a variety of other things.

What direct feedback – as opposed to citations – have you received in the decade since your paper appeared?

JONAH: It’s been really cool to see so many other people build on these findings. There have been great papers studying why people share word of mouth, what drives the diffusion of fake news and a variety of other related topics. Similarly, it’s been great to see companies and organizations apply these insights to make their own content more likely to be shared.

How have others built on what you published? (And how have you yourself built on it?)

JONAH: The literature on drivers of word of mouth has certainly taken off. Work has explored how accessibility, social currency, practical value and other features of content influence what people share. Other research has explored how factors like the audience (e.g., friends vs. strangers or larger vs. smaller audiences), communication channel (e.g., online vs. offline) and communication devices (e.g., smartphone vs. PC) shape sharing. 

KATY: We did one fun follow-up project together – an invited piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where we looked at what drives people to share scientific findings with one another. The paper we wrote is called “The Science of Sharing and the Sharing of Science,” and it shows that the same patterns that drive the sharing of New York Times articles online are largely also predictive of which summaries of scientific findings from top academic outlets people report being most eager to share. 

Could you name a paper (or other scholarly work) that has had the most, or at least a large, impact on you and your work?

KATY: For me it was a paper called “We Have to Break Up” published by Robert Cialdini in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2009. In this paper, Cialdini (one of psychology’s greatest scholars of the last century, a National Academies member, and mega best-selling author) argues that psychologists don’t place nearly enough value on research that’s done out in the “wild” studying real people making real decisions in their natural habitat (as opposed to undergraduates responding to surveys in the laboratory). If we care about understanding the real choices people make and impacting them, we have to study choices in natural environments. I think Cialdini’s point is undeniably important, and it has had a major influence on the way I think about where to collect data. It certainly influenced our approach in this paper, which was to start by studying what people share on arguably the most influential news website in the world – nytimes.com – and to move away from studying sharing in the laboratory environment, which is where it had primarily been studied before.

JONAH: It’s more popular press than an academic paper, but I wouldn’t have started studying why things catch on without the book The Tipping Point. My grandmother sent me an article about it when I was in college, and reading it changed my life. I’d always been interested in human behavior, but it was amazing to begin to put some structure around why certain things become popular. The intersection of sociology, psychology and marketing was just fascinating. It helped spark my interest in social dynamics, along with great books like Micromotives and Macrobehaviors, and Chip Heath’s work on the spread of rumors and urban legends.

The post A Viral Paper on Determining What Makes Online Content Viral appeared first on Social Science Space.

In its abstract, the paper “What We Know and Don’t Know About Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review and Research Agenda,” announced that it “offer[s] a detailed research agenda for the future, based on a multilevel perspective that aims to integrate diverse theoretical frameworks as well as develop an understanding of underlying mechanisms and microfoundations of CSR.” That eye toward “the future” seems particularly prescient, as the paper, written by Herman Aguinis and Ante Glavas and published in the Journal of Management, is one of three recipients of Sage’s fourth-annual 10-Year Impact Awards.

The 10-Year Impact Awards recognize papers published in Sage Journals from a decade ago which have been cited more than any other papers from that year. The “What We Know” paper has been cited 1,970 times.

“These awards were created as part of Sage’s larger effort to inspire and change the conversation around research impact,” said Ziyad Marar, Sage’s president of global publishing. “While a large part of this effort focuses on finding new ways to recognize impact beyond counting citations and outside of academia, the 10-year awards celebrate research with influence that has lasted longer or grown over time.” This longer time frame for a paper to prove influential is common in the social and behavioral disciplines.

Sage asked Herman Aguinis, the Avram Tucker distinguished scholar and professor of management at the George Washington University School of Business, and Ante Glavas, associate professor in the University of Vermont Grossman School of Business, to answer some questions about their paper and its lasting academic impact. (We will talk with the other two winning author teams in the next two business days).

In your estimation, what in your research – and obviously the published paper – is it that has inspired others or that they have glommed onto?

We were beyond excited to find out that our article on CSR was ranked in the top three most impactful papers in the entire Sage Journal collection! This is a big deal because it means that so many smart and talented scholars out there value the work we’re doing in this field. It’s like we hit the jackpot of good timing and feedback that helped us create something really great.

We’ve talked to quite a few people who have read our paper, and they’ve told us that our article is like a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to learn about corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Readers who are new to the areas of CSR and sustainability and or experts in the field found our paper valuable, which obviously made us extremely happy. Back when we published this paper in 2012, there was a ton of research and practice happening in the world of CSR. But with so much information out there, things were starting to get a bit scattered and hard to keep track of. That’s why we felt it was important to provide a comprehensive and integrative review of the literature.

Our paper wasn’t just an overview of what we already knew about CSR – it actually helped identify some key areas where more research was needed. One of those areas was looking at CSR in a more holistic way that included studying individuals – their attitudes and behaviors, for example. It might sound kind of ironic, but even though CSR was all about improving the well-being of humans and the planet, a lot of the research up until that point had only looked at organizations and their performance. We felt like it was important to point out that individuals were the ones driving CSR, and that they were the ones who ultimately benefited from it. After all, CSR is supposed to make people’s lives better, right?

Given the explosion in interest in corporate social responsibility, whether under that specific term or similar ones, that was occurring as this paper rolled out and which continues to expand today, where do you feel your work fits into that larger ecosystem, both academic and commercial? 

We used the term CSR in our paper because that was the term most commonly used in academic research at the time. But historically, CSR had been mostly associated with activities that were kind of on the fringes of a company’s main business – like donating to charity or doing volunteer work.

Our goal was to help change that perception and show that CSR can actually be a crucial part of a company’s core business strategy. At the time, there was a big shift happening in the world of CSR – instead of just trying to prove that it was necessary, people were starting to focus more on how to actually make it happen.

To move things forward, though, we knew it was important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. We needed to provide a comprehensive overview of what we already knew about how CSR affects organizations and individuals, and also point out what we still needed to learn. In other words, we wanted to set an agenda for future research and practice.

One of the things we emphasized was that CSR needed to be good for business as well as for society and the planet. By embedding CSR in a company’s core strategy and operations, everyone wins – the company benefits, society benefits and the planet benefits. It’s a win-win situation!

What, if anything, would you have done differently in the paper (or underlying research) if you were to go back in time and do it again?

We were really lucky to have some amazing reviewers and, especially, Deborah Rupp (former Journal of Management editor) as our action editor, who helped guide us throughout the process of writing our paper. Looking back, we wouldn’t change a thing!

That said, we’ve gained a lot of knowledge and feedback since then, and one thing we think could be even better in future research is if we could bring together the worlds of academia and practice more. Sometimes there’s a bit of a divide between corporations and academics, and we think it would be really great if we could find ways to work together more effectively.

Thankfully, there have been some really positive developments in this area since we wrote our paper. Both companies and scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of CSR – not just for financial reasons, but also because it helps fulfill human needs and values. For example, by including non-financial goals that focus on the well-being of stakeholders, companies can also promote humanistic values like caring and altruism, as well as a sense of belonging and contributing to something bigger than ourselves. It’s really exciting to see these ideas gaining traction.

How have others built on what you published? (And how have you yourself built on it?)

We’re tackling two questions at once now and building on what we’ve talked about before regarding the importance of focusing on the individual in CSR research. When we wrote our original paper on CSR, we proposed a bunch of potential future directions for the field. One idea that really seemed to resonate with a lot of emerging trends at the time was the idea of looking beyond financial incentives and focusing on things like finding meaning in your work and aligning your personal values with those of your employer – and how CSR can be a conduit for that.

To be clear, we’re not saying that financial incentives aren’t important. What we’re saying is that when people are engaged with their work and feel motivated by intrinsic factors, everyone benefits. They’re more creative, more productive, and more likely to contribute to the success of the organization.

After we wrote our original paper, we continued to explore these themes in our research. For example, we wrote an article on how to embed CSR in core business strategy and operations, as well as another article on how CSR can foster meaningfulness at work.

Could you name a paper (or other scholarly work) that has had the most, or at least a large, impact on you and your work? 

There are simply too many articles to list! In our paper, we did our best to provide a brief overview of some of the most impactful articles in the field, but we have to admit that even our efforts fell short of doing justice to all of the incredible work that has been done in this area.

Thank you so much for honoring us with this award. We are truly humbled to receive it. Contributing to the field of CSR has been an incredibly meaningful experience for both of us, and we are grateful for the opportunity to make a difference in this important area.

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