Social Science Bites

Use social media for any amount of time and eventually you will come across something that's designed to both appeal to the angels of your better nature and asking to make a (small) effort to support or propagate this appeal. The prime example of recent years is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. When these charitable appeals take off, that's when social psychologist Sander van der Linden perks up. He studies 'viral altruism,' and in this Social Science Bites podcast he details to host David Edmonds how he studies this phenomenon. "The idea," van der Linden says, "is that you can 'catch' altruism in a behavioral way. When someone acts altruistically online, you catch that behavior as a social contagion, which then causes you to adopt that behavior and encourage other people in your network to also engage in that behavior, which then spreads quickly and rapidly." Van der Linden observes and describes the mechanics of these processes using something he calls SMArT, breaking down the online altruistic efforts by their social influence, moral imperative, affective reactions and translational impact. This yardstick allows van der Linden to draw conclusions from what can be a smallish data set of unique events. SMArT allows van der Linden to find shared similarities that create body of data and which can be tracked. For example, van der Linden, is currently looking at the #MeToo movement to see if it fits into his scope of inquiry. Van der Linden is a social psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge where he directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a Fellow in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Churchill College, Cambridge and an affiliated researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University.

The Western feud over "nature vs. nurture" dates back at least to an essay by John Locke in 1690. The idea that it's an absolute binary – that our actions are determined solely by one or the other – is thankfully passé. And yet, in an academic setting, with scholars safe in their silos, the tension continues in practice if not in conversation. For a bit of anecdotal evidence, look at Melinda Mills, the head of department and Nuffield Professor of Sociology at Oxford University. She studied the sociology and demography of families and family formation – things like when to choose to have a child, what a women's age is when she first gives birth, or the number of children someone might have. "I was," she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, "looking at them in a very socially deterministic way. I was looking at things such as childcare institutions or gender equality or the kind of jobs that women and men have, and was childcare available and affordable and ... I was using those as explanations and predictors. "And then I met some biologists and geneticists." Over drinks that day, these fellow researchers made fun of Mills: "This is Melinda and she studies fertility, but she doesn't think it has any biological basis." Much hilarity ensued. But the gibes bore a pleasant fruit – Mills broke free of the limits on her scholarship with which she had shackled herself. Her studies and collaborations now combined social science and molecular genetics; she now studies 'sociogenomics,' with a particular emphasis on how these interplay in the areas of inequality and life course. In that vein, she is the principal investigator of the SOCIOGENOME project and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods SOCGEN project. She notes that each part of the triad – social scientists, biologists and geneticists bring their real science to the table. "Wellbeing, depression, reproductive choice – [social scientist] are very good at measuring that. We then work with biologists and geneticists, who determine genetic loci, and then with biologists, who determine the biological function of those genes. "As social scientists, we then create a score, your 'reproductive score,' and we add those to our statistical models together with the social science variables -- the usual suspects lie your family background or your partner or educational level – and we add those together with the genetic data and we look at the interaction between those." And, as you'll learn, there can be surprises for all concerned. Geneticists, for example, might assume that genetic loci are universal ... but are they? The effort also harnesses the big data of genetics technology, tapping into databases like the UK Bio Bank or the direct-to-consumer testing services like 23andMe. In addition to her sociogenomics projects, Mills is a leader of the Working Package on Childlessness and Assisted Reproductive Technology in the European Families And Societies network, editor-in-chief of the European Sociological Review, and a fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.

That some people are just naturally gifted at mathematics is pretty well accepted as conventional wisdom. With enlightened teaching we can all become adequate at math, or maths, and should set expectations accordingly. That, says Jo Boaler, who is a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University, is hogwash. Although she uses the more refined terminology of calling such thinking "a myth." "The neuroscience is showing us petty clearly that there's no such thing as a maths brain, even though so many people believe that, particularly in the Western culture," she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. She doesn't fully reject the notion about enlightened teaching, though, only the bit about merely being adequate: "If you were taught the right way ... you could excel at all levels of maths in school." She describes how brain pathways are formed when we learn something, and the agglomeration of those pathways are what makes one adept, and not some inherent expertise. "This isn't to say everyone is born with the same brain," Boaler explains, "but experiences we have much more potential to shape brains than anything we're born with. What we're born with is really eclipsed by the millions of experiences we have." Her own experiences. Apart from once having been a mathematics teacher in London comprehensive schools, include following hundreds of students over many years in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Some of those students sitting in rows in traditional classrooms, others actively exploring mathematical concepts while untethered from desks. This research has enabled to bust a number of maths myths, such as that boys are better at math than girls – turns out that boys do better at testing, but not in school performance. Boaler notes that mindset plays a key role in learning, and those afraid of making a mistake don't benefit from one of the most productive ways of learning, which is making a mistake. In this podcast, she also details how timed tests actually inhibit the brain from working, and that even adults use (virtual) finger in mathematics, which plays out positively for musicians. In addition to her role at Stanford, Boaler is the faculty director of the math teaching incubator youcubed and the author of the first 'massive open online course' on mathematics teaching and learning. She was also the Marie Curie Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Sussex, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and has written nine books, including the 2015 bestseller Mathematical Mindsets.

"Most people," says Goldsmiths sociologist Bev Skeggs, "think they're using Facebook to communicate with friends. Basically they're using it to reveal how much they can be sold for, now and in the future, and how much their friends can be sold for." That was an almost accidental lesson she learned during research on how social networks were structuring, or restructuring, friendships, she explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. After receiving a monstrous data dump – with permission – of individual's social media usage, Skeggs and her colleagues were "completely diverted" as it dawned on them that Facebook was trawling its users' habits to collect information on people's general browsing habits. The potentially disturbing but legal practice was only the first step in Facebook's efforts to monetize social media – and in what Skeggs argues calcifies inequality. "They probably have the greatest capacity to experiment with social data to see who we're communicating with, how we're communicating with them," Skeggs says, "but basically 90 percent of Facebook profit is made from advertising -- selling your data to advertising companies so that they can place an advert on your browser." And in turn, algorithmically segregating web denizens – well, their composite data profiles, at any rate -- based on their perceived wealth and influence. This "subprime silo-ing" pushes sketchy advertising, in particular for high-interest loans, at people who can least afford to take on more debt. That, she explains, is why "we really, really need to have some strict regulation" when it comes to the trading of personal data, targeting, advertising and similar practices that flow from social media. Skeggs, who has led the sociology departments at Manchester University and Goldsmiths, University of London, has long looked at less explored vectors of inequality, as demonstrated by her breakthrough 1997 book, Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable. She was the joint managing editor of the The Sociological Review for five years starting in 2011, a period that saw the esteemed journal transition into an independent foundation "dedicated to the advancement and study of sociology in everyday life." (She remains an editor at large for the Review.)

Is it just a low wage that conjures up the term when we talk about "crushing poverty"? Or is it really a host of other issues that likely accompany that lack of money? Economist Sabina Alkire has spent her career crafting the measures that demonstrate that latter proposition, work that with fellow economist James Foster resulted in what is known as the Alkire-Foster Method for determining level of poverty. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Alkire – director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative -- explains to interviewer Dave Edmonds the need to have a consistent and reputable means of measuring poverty over time. This usually entails "a monetary measurement, either income or consumption," she details, "and a person is deemed to be poor if they don't have enough by some poverty line." But as noted above, this is only half the battle – or perhaps not even half. "I'm not at all against income poverty level measures or consumption poverty measures, but it doesn't tell the whole story," Alkire explains (and notes that Foster is himself architect of some of those types of indices). "A person is also poor if they're malnourished, and if their house is decaying and they don't have a job and they're not educated or their children are not attending school or if they're victims of violence." What's needed is "a more three-dimensional account," even if that new method doesn't perfectly correlate with traditional material measures. And so she and Foster, building on work by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, created method to derive the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index. That index does not include income but does look at living standards across 10 dimensions. If someone is considered 'deprived' in more than a third of those 10 dimensions, they are officially identified as poor. Looking just at the globe's 103 developing countries, Alkire says 1.45 billion people are "multidimensionally poor." The mixed news, she adds, is that while levels of poverty are declining, the number of poor is increasing. Knowing where people stand is important in a policy context, Alkire says, which makes having an "official permanent statistic" that will survive changes in government, and which is drawn from demographic and health surveys in public domain, important. So far, national-level multidimensional poverty indices have proven their worth in poverty alleviation efforts, with state level governors in Mexico, for example, vying to out-lower each other. (Alkire notes that national indices do vary from the global index due to regional variation: Bhutan uses a measure of a household's distance from a road.)

Philosopher Tom Chatfield's media presence – which is substantial – is often directly linked to his writings on technology. But his new book is on critical thinking, and while that involves humanity's oldest computer, the brain, Chatfield explains in this Social Science Bites podcast that new digital realities interact with old human biases. As Chatfield tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, while he defines bias as "an inaccurate account of the way things actually are," this like confirmation, affect and recency bias aren't automatically toxic to critical thinking. Basic problem is the use of heuristics, which are generally necessary and definitely useful ("sparing you the burden of endless research"), can paper over the need to leave our perceptions open to refutation and challenge. "Letting our emotional reaction double as truth, and be substituted for what we think of as truth," is the problem, and not the mere existence of mental shortcuts. That tolerance of heuristics is baked into his definition of critical thinking. "What I mean by critical thinking," he explains, "is our attempts to be more reasonable about the world. And so this tends to involve coming up with reasoned arguments that support conclusions, reasoned explanations that seek to explain why things are the way they are, and perhaps most importantly, doing all this as part of a reasonable critically engaged discourse, where you're listening to other people, you're prepared to change your mind." Yes, he adds, critical thinking includes the traditional tentpoles of deductive and inductive reasoning, but also something else. "More and more we also need to roll into this the scientific and empirical method of seeking explanations, forming hypotheses, testing theories and – and this is the additional bit for me – building into all this our growing knowledge about human lives, the predictable biases in the way of thinking." Chatfield, a former visiting associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, is currently technology and media advisor at Agathos LLP; a faculty member at London's School of Life; and a senior expert at the Global Governance Institute. He is a regular on the BBC online and broadcast, and has written six books since 2010 exploring digital culture such as Live This Book!, How to Thrive in the Digital Age and Netymology, with a seventh – Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study– being published by SAGE this month. Chatfield also plays jazz piano and by his own admission "drinks too much coffee."

Amid all the handwringing about kids and the damage smartphones are doing them, child psychologist Ioanna Palaiologou is upbeat. "I don't think," she says, "we should worry as much as the media is making it. ... If the elements are there, it's another toy for them." Palaiologou, an associate at the Institute of Education, University College London's Centre for Leadership in Learning, has the background to make a judgment in that regard. Among other things, she's an expert on children and play, as she explains in this Social Science Bites podcast. Play, she explains, is innate - "we are mammals, and mammals do play" – necessary and ultimately informal, she tells interviewer Dave Edmonds. That doesn't meant there won't be rules, but that the wellspring of play in bottom-up, from children, and not top-down, from adults. "Play cannot be initiated by adults. It can be supported by adults, it can be facilitated by adults, but cannot be initiated by adults, in my view. Play can only be initiated by children." This doesn't mean play is anarchy, or even that all play is the same. Palaiologou has identified five types of play -- physical, with objects, symbolic (such as drawing), pretending/dramatic, and games with rules – and adults may have a role. But that role is not dominant: "Instruction is fine, but we actually need play to interact with the environment and to make sense of the world with our own senses, our own minds, and to internalize that." In the discussion, Palaiologou and Edmonds also talk about cultural differences in play and how it is a vital part of children's emotional development. All work and no play, it seems, does more than make Jack a dull boy. Palaiologou has spent more than two decades studying education and early childhood in the United Kingdom and is a chartered psychologist of the British Psychological Society and is the treasurer (and past chair) or the British Educational Studies Association. She is the co-director of Canterbury Educational Services where she is head of children's services. She's published widely on early childhood, including authoring last year's third edition of Child Observation: A Guide for Early Childhood and editing Early Years Foundation Stage: Theory and Practice and Doing Research in Education: Theory and Practice (the latter with David Needham and Trevor Male).

Al Roth on Matching Markets The system that runs the ride-sharing company Uber doesn't just link up passengers and drivers based on price. It also has to connect the two based largely on where they are geographically. It is, says Nobel laureate Stanford economist Alvin E. "Al" Al Roth, a matching market. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Roth explains to interview David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, starting with a quick and surprisingly simple definition. "A matching market is a market in which prices don't so all the work," Roth details, "So matching markets are markets in which you can't just choose what you want even if you can afford it – you also have to be chosen." But while the definition is simple, creating a model for these markets is a tad more complex, as Roth shows in offering a few more examples and contrasting them with commodity markets. "Labor markets are matching markets. You can't just decide to work for Google – you have to be hired. And Google can't just decide that you'll work for them – they have to make you an offer." And like say university admission, matching markets require something to intervene, whether it be institutions or technology, to make this exchange succeed. In turn Roth himself helped engineer some high profile matches in areas where the term 'market might not traditionally have been used: kidney donors with the sick, doctors with their first jobs, or students and teachers with schools. Or even the classic idea of 'matchmaking' – marriage. Roth turned to game theory to help explain and understand these markets, and his work won he and Lloyd Shapley the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As the Nobel Committee outlined: "Lloyd Shapley studied different matching methods theoretically and, beginning in the 1980s, Alvin Roth used Lloyd Shapley's theoretical results to explain how markets function in practice. Through empirical studies and lab experiments, Alvin Roth demonstrated that stability was critical to successful matching methods." Roth is currently president of the American Economics Association, and sits as the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University. He is also the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University

Under normal circumstances, if something was hurting you, you'd likely stop doing it. Except, well, as Theresa Marteau of Cambridge University's Department of Public Health and Primary Care has explored deeply, in some key areas, you're likely not stopping. In a conversation with Social Science Bites host David Edmonds, she notes that the majority of premature deaths are due to four non-communicable diseases – diabetes, cancer, cardio-vascular disease, and lung disease. In turn, there are four main causes of these diseases – smoking, overconsumption of food, alcohol, and not moving around enough. All those causes, you'll notice, flow from behavior. And simply tapping someone on the shoulder and pointing out the connection has not been a particularly effective way to interrupt these pernicious behaviors. "It's quite a common idea that if people only understood better how they might be damaging their health, then they would tackle it," Marteau explains. "Governments and others invest an amount of money in trying to communicate the risks to you and your health of engaging in these behaviors ... and while it can raise awareness, it's not that effective at changing your behavior." That's perplexing, Marteau admits, but undeterred she's spent much of her career at the intersection of basic psychology, neuroscience and behavioral science looking for ways that do work to change behavior. And, as this podcast explores, she's focused on the environment. Or rather, environments. As director of Studies for Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Cambridge's Christ's College, her research group examines how environment – and that includes the cultural, built and financial environments --buttresses short term pleasures over long term benefits. Taking a cue from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Marteau finds that the 'bad' behaviors in question ultimately—despite any initial enthusiasm at some point to quit smoking or go to the gym – default to the so-called 'fast' brain system that oversees routine behaviors. These routines in turn are shaped, or perhaps amplified, by those environments. Ultimately, Marteau focuses on addressing these harmful behaviors, work which this June saw her named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to public health. That work has her collecting evidence for redesigning environments to promote healthy behavior, which touches on public and private industry issues like product pricing, availability (and proximity), portion size, excise taxes, and many others -- "conceptually simple but legally and culturally more complex," she admits.

"Borders," says Mary Bosworth, "are the key issue of our time." And so, says the criminologist, "in response to the mass migration that's happening, the criminal justice system is shifting. This shouldn't surprise us – all other aspects of our society are changing." One of those changes is the creation of a new subfield of criminology, one explicitly evolved to understand immigration control and criminal justice. In this Social Science Bites podcast interview with Dave Edmonds, Bosworth talks about a field which she calls 'border criminology.' She starts the conversation by explaining that even the name of the field is a bit unsettled. Bosworth notes a couple of other terms making the rounds, including 'crimmigration' – coined by Juliet Stumpf -- and 'criminology of mobility.' The latter, she adds, doesn't capture way that it's the movement of people that's being criminalized, and so "that doesn't work quite so well in English. "Border criminology as a term, I think, captures more clearly the way in which this is a field of study which is trying to understand both things that are happening at the border but also things that are happening n our criminal justice system." Border criminologists as a class do lots of field work in places like courts and prisons, and in Bosworth's case much of her recent work has been in Immigration detention centers, which in the United Kingdom hold about 32,000 foreign nationals. One of the main takeaways from her research has been that these detention centers are "very painful places for all the people concerned" – whether detainees and the officers. The officers themselves often "don't fully understand what they're doing" and "don't have a clear narrative" of the population they are detaining, which runs from criminals to visa overstayers to people who just don't have any papers. As an academic who once did research in prisons, Bosworth finds "the detention estate is much more recent and politicized -- and doesn't have tradition of letting researchers in." As someone who has been allowed in, Bosworth says she's found policymakers are interested in hearing her results, but less so on acting on them. A "counternarraitive" on the threat posed by immigrants has created headwinds, she finds, that make reforming policy difficult despite the documented fiscal and human costs of the present system. In this interview, she also describes the emotional toll on this sort of filed work, and some of the brighter spots of her efforts, such as creating an archive of artwork made by detainees. Bosworth is a professor and fellow of St. Cross College at the University of Oxford and concurrently a professor at Australia's Monash University. She's the director of the interdisciplinary research group Border Criminologies and assistant director of the Center for Criminology at Oxford. She's currently heads both a five-year project on "Subjectivity, Identity and Penal Power: Incarceration in a Global Age" funded by the European Research Council as well as a Leverhulme International Network on external border control.

Ask a number of influential social scientists who in turn influenced them, and you'd likely get a blue-ribbon primer on the classics in social science. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination. Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. Irving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Emile Durkheim's Suicide. Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the 50th Bites podcast to air, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three collections. This last of the three appears here, with answers presented alphabetically from Toby Miller to Linda Woodhead. "I remember as a graduate student reading classics in epidemiology and sociology and feeling like a kid in the candy store," recalls David Stuckler, now a University of Oxford sociologist, before namedropping? Durkheim. Several of the guests gently railed at the request to name just one influence. "There isn't one," starts Mirca Madianou, a communications expert at Goldsmiths, University of London. "There may have been different books at different times of my formation." Social psychologist Steve Reicher said he instead liked the idea of desert Island books, which give multiple bites of this particular apple, and then named several influences, including E.P. Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century and Natalie Davis's The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France, which he describes as "beautiful and rich depictions of patterns of social behavior." "I'm unprepared to answer this!" exclaims behavioral economist and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller before he cites Hersh Shefrin and Richard Thaler's work that pioneered the connection between neuroscience and eEconomics. Sometimes, though, the answer comes instantly. "Not a day that I don't think about him or talk about him to somebody," said Lawrence Sherman of Austin Bradford Hill, an economist whose work evaluating the use of streptomycin in treating tuberculosis created the template for randomized controlled trials.

What is an "organization?" According to Chris Grey, the guest in this Social Science Bites podcast, in many ways it's a moment in time. "An organization," he tells interviewer David Edmonds, "is also a momentary crystallization of an ongoing process of organizing." Grey is a professor of organizational studies in the school of management at Royal Holloway University in London and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. And while he's been heavily involved in management studies – he's actually part of the School of Management at Royal Holloway – he makes clear that the rubric of 'an organization' extends far beyond business alone. "A huge amount of life is organized," Grey explains, "and is therefore under the ambit of organizational studies." In fact, the field itself, which essentially emerged from work on bureaucracy by Max Weber, was usually located in an institution's sociology or psychology departments until the advent of business schools in the 1960s exerted a magnetic draw on the discipline. One of Grey's best examples of not being solely a business study is detailed in his 2012 book — Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies — about the (now) famous British World War II codebreaking campus. As he describes in this podcast, Bletchley Park harnessed many of the current cultural trends and personality traits of its selected workforce so well that even spouses didn't know of each other's wartime exploits for decades after V-E Day. Even if organizational studies is boiled down to issues of economic efficiency, he continues, "we have to open up the question of what does efficiency mean and for who?" He adds: "We needn't give the answer, 'efficient for the powerful'." And while admitting that his "take" is far from universal among his colleagues, "Fundamentally the problems of organization are not soluble and they're not amenable to the kind of prediction and control that is sometimes promised." While he has wide ranging research interests and a love of detective novels, Grey remains well-represented in the management field. He was editor-in-chief of Management Learning for six years. Grey co-edited the 2016 book Critical Management Studies: Global Voices, Local Accents and was co-author of another 2016 volume, Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. His most recent book for SAGE is the cleverly named A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations.

How lightly, or how tightly, do you hold your values? Are there things you hold dear, which almost automatically excite your emotions, for which you would make the costliest of sacrifices? These are the sorts of questions Scott Atran discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Atran is a "classically trained" anthropologist (he was once an assistant to Margaret Mead) and is the research director in anthropology at France's National Center for Scientific Research, a research professor of public policy and psychology at the University of Michigan, and a founding fellow of the Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford's Harris Manchester College. He is also director of research and co-founder of Artis Research & Risk Modeling, Artis International, and Artis LookingGlass. As those associations suggests, much of his research sits at the intersection of violent acts and cognitive science, and much of his fieldwork takes place on the front lines of conflict. His findings are often acknowledged as true by policymakers – even as he ruefully tells interviewer David Edmonds, they generally then refuse to recognize the sincerity with which the other side holds its values. And yet these spiritual values often trump physical ones. And from a policy perspective, say the attempting defeat ISIS in the Middle East, it helps to understand that a devoted actor will often outperform a rational actor when the going gets tough. This helps explain the initial successes of ISIS, and the ability of Kurdish forces to battle back against ISIS. Or even of the American colonies to defeat the British empire. Atran explains that while there are no theories, at present, about sacred values, but there are features that he has been able to test for reliability. For example, Atran suggests that something so valued is immune to trading, discounting or negotiating, and that offering to buy your way around someone's sacred values can result in anger or violence. He asked refugees in Lebanon and Jordan what was the chance they would go back to Israel if they had the right of return. Six percent – one out of 16 – said they would 'consider it.' But then they were asked if they would give up this sacred value, the implication being that if they weren't going to exercise it why bother keeping it. Yet 80 percent answered no. Then the researchers asked if the respondents would support the 1967 boundaries of Israel, and accept a cash payment, in exchange for permanently ceding their right of return. "Not only did they refuse," Atran notes, "but it went to ceiling. We tested for support of suicide bombing, skin responses for emotion and moral outrage, it went through the roof." But this allegiance to the intangible works two ways – Atran found that when a questioner acknowledged a refugee's right of return, support for the peace process – even without any other sweetener – increased.

The Communist Manifesto. Novelist Don DeLillo's account of a big moment in baseball. Works by Wittgenstein and Focault. And a famous –and shocking – behavioral experiment. These are a few of the supremely inspiring works which have influenced some of the leading social scientists at work today. During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the 50th Bites podcast to air, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages of those answers. The second appears here, with answers – presented alphabetically – from Bites' guests ranging from Sarah Franklin to Angela MacRobbie. Their answers are similarly diverse. Sociologist Franklin, for example, who studies reproductive technology, namechecked two greats – Marilyn Strethern and Donna Haraway -- who directly laid the foundation for Franklin's own work. "I would hope," she reflected, "that I could continue toward those ways of thinking about those issues now and in the future." David Goldblatt meanwhile, who studies the sociology of football, picked influencers whose contributions are apparent in his work but less academically straightforward. He chose The Communist Manifesto ("the idea that history was structured and organized has never left me") and the first 60 pages of American novelist Don DeLillo's Underworld, which describes 'the Shot Heard Round the World," a famous home run from baseball's 1951 World Series. Goldblatt terms it the "greatest piece of sports writing ever." Other guests in this 15-munte podcast recall important studies that set the scene for their own work, or important figures that left them wanting to emulate their scholarship. And not everyone cited academics in their own fields. Witness Peter Lunt citing Ludwig Wittgenstein and MacRobbie Michel Focault, while Jennifer Hochschild named an historian, Edmund Sears Morgan. She called his American Slavery, American Freedom "a wonderful book, everyone should read it – including the footnotes." The book's thesis, that "you had to invent slavery in order to be able to invent liberalism," sticks with her to this day. Other Bites interviewees in this podcast include Jonathan Haidt, Sarah Harper, Rom Harre, Bruce Hood, Daniel Kahneman, Sonia Livingstone, Anna Machin and Trevor Marchand. To hear the first montage, click HERE. *** Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE Publishing. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100

It's said that in the last two years, more data has been created than all the data that ever was created before that time. And that in two years hence, we'll be able to say the same thing. Gary King, the head of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, isn't certain those statements are exactly true, but certain they are true in essence. And he's even more certain that the growth in the amount of data isn't why big data is changing the world. As he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, roughly 650 million social media messages will go out today. So to someone trying to make statements about what those messages contain, he posited, would having 750 million messages make anything better? "Having bigger data," King says, "only makes things more difficult." Or to be blunter, "The data itself isn't likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful." Which leads to King's real passion: the analysis of big data. It's not the 'big' or the 'data' that really turns the screw; it's the analysis. In this conversation, King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis. He notes that some of the tools that text analysis uses are "mathematically similar" to another project he worked on, trying to determine health priorities in the third world by figuring out what's killing people there. In both cases, the individual, whether someone with a disease or someone with a viral tweet, is less important than the trend. That, explains King, spotlights the difference between computer scientists' goals and social scientists' goals: "We only care about what everybody's saying." He then talks about work examining social media and censorship in China. While the work clearly falls into an area that King, a political scientist, would be interested in, the genesis was actually as a test case for the limitations of the text analysis program. But it nonetheless gave useful insight into both how the Chinse government censors material, and why. King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard. He's been elected a fellow or eight honorary societies, including the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. King also has an entrepreneurial bent – he mentions the company Crimson Hexagon that was spun out of the text analysis work during this interview – and has founded or invented technology for companies like Learning Catalytics and Perusall. And here's some, if not 'big' data, at least 'bigger' data, to consider: This interview marks the 50th Social Science Bites podcast produced by SAGE Publishing. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? This question has been posed to every interview in the Social Science Bites podcast series, but never made part of the audio file made public. Now, as we approach the 50th Social Science Bite podcast to be published this March 1, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages of those answers. In this first of that set of montages, 15 renowned social scientists – starting in alphabetical order from all who have participated – reveal their pick. As you might expect, their answers don't come lightly: "Whoah, that's an interesting question!" was sociologist Michael Burawoy's initial response before he named an éminence grise – Antonio Gramsci – of Marxist theory for his work on hegemony. The answers range from other giants of social, behavioral and economic science, such as John Maynard Keynes and Hannah Arendt, to living legends like Robert Putnam and the duo of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (and even one Social Science Bites alumnus, Stephen Pinker). Some of the answers involve an academic's full oeuvre, while others zero in on a particular book or effort. John Brewer, for example, discusses his own background in a Welsh mining town and how when he went to college he encountered Ronald Frankenberg's Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country. "That book made sense of my upbringing and committed me to a lifetime's career in sociology," Brewer reveals. And not every answer is a seminal moment. Danny Dorling, for example, names a report by his Ph.D. adviser, computational geographer Stan Openshaw, who took two unclassified government reports to show the futility of nuclear war. And not every answer is even an academic work. Recent Nobel laureate Angus Deaton reveals, "I tend to like the last thing I've ever read," and so at the time of our interview (December 2013), named a journalist's book: The Idealist by Nina Munk. Other Bites interviewees in this podcast include Michelle Baddeley, Iris Bohnet, Michael Billig, Craig Calhoun, Ted Cantle, Janet Carsten, Greg Clark, Ivor Crewe, Valerie Curtis, Will Davis and Robin Dunbar.

Human beings are social animals, notes economist Michelle Baddeley, and as such the instinct to herd is hardwired into us. And so while this has changed from (in most cases) physically clumping into groups, it does translate into behavior linked to financial markets, news consumption, restaurant-picking and Brooklyn facial hair decisions. In this latest Social Science Bites podcast, Baddeley – a professor in economics and finance of the built environment at University College London -- tells interviewer David Edmond how modern herding often follows from an information imbalance, real or perceived, in which a person follows the wisdom of crowds. The decision to join in, she explains, is often based an astute reading of risk; as she quotes John Maynard Keynes, "It's better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right." As a real world example of that, she points to the plight of the junior researcher, whose career is best advanced by serving up their innovative insights along conventional lines. Apart from reputational damage control, there are pluses and minuses to human herding, Baddeley notes there are advantages to finding safety in numbers: "It's a good way to find a hotel." But there are pernicious outcomes, too, like groupthink. In that vein, the economist says she finds partisan herding "more prevalent in a 'post truth age,'" as individuals join thought groups that reinforce their existing world-view. And it doesn't help, her research finds, that people are more likely to herd the less well-informed they are. This has also had dire consequences in financial markets (Baddeley was principal investigator on a Leverhulme Trust project focused on neuroeconomic examination of herding in finance), where pushing against the grain makes for a short career for anyone other than the luckiest professional stockpicker. Baddeley's early education was in Australia and her first professional work was as an economist with the Australian Commonwealth Treasury. She then completed masters and doctorate work at Cambridge. Her most recent book is 2013's Behavioural Economics and Finance and other works include Running Regressions - A Practical Guide to Quantitative Research (2007) and Investment: Theories and Analysis (2003).

For Alex "Sandy" Pentland, one of the best-known and widely cited computational social scientists in the world, these are halcyon days for his field. One of the creators of the MIT Media Lab and currently the director of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs, Pentland studies 'social physics,' which takes a data-centric view of culture and society. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about the origins of social physics in the barren days before the advent of widespread good data and solid statistical methods and how it blossomed as both a field and for Pentland's own research. Now, with both plentiful data and very sophisticated statistics, "we can revisit this vision of understanding society, understanding culture, as an alive, evolving animal using these modern techniques." The key change, he explains, has been in the amount and the diversity of data -- even if that's a scary thought from a privacy point of view, "But from a social science point of view it's Nirvana. For the very first time you can look at complicated, real-time continuous interaction of many different groups carrying out real activities." Pentland's own experimental trajectory reflects those advances, with his early work mediated as much by what was lacking (a good way to deal statistically with language) as what was at hand. This led him to study how much of an individual's behavior was due to older, pre-language signaling and how much due to more modern linguistic structure. But with time and computational advances, his work ramped up to study how groups of people interact, even up to the scale of a city. That in turn created some fascinating and widely cited insights, such as the more diverse a city's social ties the more successful, i.e. rich, e city will be. Some of the methodology involved in doing computational social science is also explored in the podcast, as Pentland describes giving an entire community new mobile phones as one part of the data-gathering process (with privacy protecting institutional controls, he notes) even as "we pestered them with a million questionnaires of standard social science things" during the same study period. Pentland is well-known in both the public and private spheres as a leading big data researcher, with Forbes recently dubbing him one of the "seven most powerful data scientists in the world." In addition to his work at MIT, he chairs the World Economic Forum's Data Driven Development council and has co-founded more than a dozen data-centered companies such as the Data Transparency Lab, the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance and the Institute for Data Driven Design. Among his disparate honors are as a 2012 best-article award from the Harvard Business Review, winning the DARPA Network Challenge run as a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the internet, and being honored for his work on privacy by the group Patient Privacy Rights.

Between a series of high-profile shootings of black men by police and the election of Donald Trump by a bifurcated electorate, the racial divide in the United States has achieved a renewed public prominence. While discussion of this divide had faded since the election of Barack Obama, it's an issue that has always been at the forefront of the scholarship of Harvard's Jennifer Hochschild. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hochschild explains to interviewer David Edmonds some of the pertinent data points from her years of using quantitative and qualitative analysis to map the racial, ethnic and class cleavages in America's demography. The issues are devilishly difficult to address in, well, black-and-white terms, it turns out, as Hochschild repeatedly answers "yes and no" to various questions. Academics, she explains, tend to generalize too much about these issues, to focus too much on the role of the federal government to the detriment of state governments, and don't pay enough attention to spatial variations: "Los Angeles doesn't look like Dubuque, Iowa." She depicts a racial continuum of acceptance and opportunity, with whites and Asians at one extreme, blacks at the other, and other communities, such as Latinos and Muslims, populating the expanse in between. While the distance between the extremes seems to be as wide as it's been for the last half century, she sees some hopes in the middle. She draws parallels for the modern Latino community with that of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe at the turn of the last century: they arrived as 'lesser whites' but at this point have full membership in the larger dominant community. Hochschild talks specifically about the Muslim immigrant community in the U.S., with its wide range of homelands and ethnicities but a generally high level of education. She expects the community's traditional low level of political activity to change dramatically in the near future. "My guess is that's going to change over the next decade as they increasingly feel not only beleaguered but in real trouble. From my perspective, I hope there will be more alliances with other groups, but that remains to be seen" Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, where she focuses on African and African American studies. The author of several important books on race and politics, she was also the founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, and was a former co-editor of the American Political Science Review. Earlier this year she completed her one-year term as president of the APSA.

Imagine if we could find the secret to romance and love, the real secret, one vetted by science. Wouldn't that be … well, what would that be. According to Anna Machin, an anthropologist who actually does study romance, it would be disheartening. "I don't want to find the formula for love," she tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in the latest Social Science Bites podcast. "I think that would be incredibly depressing." But Machin, a professor at the University of Oxford and part of an experimental psychology research group run by another Social Science Bites alumnus, Robin Dunbar, is nonetheless fascinated by how evolution has created this thing we call love, using the tools of neurochemistry and qualitative social science. Her research ranges from "our primate cousins" to popular dating sites. And before you insert your own joke here, know that these two examples have more in common than you might think. Distinct primate-centric patterns quickly emerge in dating site profiles, Machin explains. For men, it's displaying their value – their status, resources and good genes. For women, it's their fertility, including youth, and good genes – regardless of their own wealth or status. Not, she cautions, that we're exactly like the rest of the menagerie. "The relationships we build, the reproductive relationships, our romantic relationships, are categorically different to those in other animals," she says. "They persist for much longer, the cognition involved is much more complex," and the neurochemistry doesn't explain how we can stick together for such an incredibly long period of time. Machin's own academic background is varied, beginning with bachelor's work in anthropology and English and leading to a PhD, in Archaeology, from the University of Reading (her thesis was on Acheulean handaxes). As an academic, she delights in explaining her work to the public, an avocation that has including working with the TV show Married at First Sight, where she's used her own scholarship to help participants find life partners.

The culture of dance clubs has a way of popping up in policy debates around the world. In September, for example, the closure of London's Fabric nightclub – called "one of the most influential and internationally renowned electronic music venues on the planet" by a major newspaper half that planet away – created a huge debate. In Los Angeles in July, the deaths of three people at the Hard Summer Music Festival -- on the heels of more than two dozen drug-related deaths at raves across the U.S. Southwest in the past decade -- saw enormous (but unsuccessful) efforts to ban the electronic dance music festivals. Dance culture, then, isn't just frippery, it's policy. That's no surprise to Karenza Moore, the guest of the latest Social Science Bites podcast. Moore, a lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University, has for more than a decade studied and written about the dance clubs, the music they play, and the drug use she says the culture has "hidden in plain sight." Her interests are purely academic; Moore describes herself as a "participant observer" with at least 20 years standing on the dance floor. In conversation with David Edmonds, Moore makes no bones about the prevalence of drugs in the club scene – even if alcohol is the most used drug in the post-rave era. MDMA, whether known as ecstasy , E, Molly, is used as a matter of routine, which she says "needs to be acknowledged." Her sociological ethnography of the scene and its drug use sees her reject purely prosecution-oriented responses to that acknowledgement. Drawing from what she calls 'critical drug studies,' sees, Moore suggests that violence attributed to the clubs is linked to the underground drug trade, not the more-or-less open drug use. "Prohibition causes more harm than good," Moore tells Edmonds, by placing a matter of public health in the hands of people who have no regulation to abide by. In the podcast, Moore also talks about the mechanics of interviewing club-goers – seems many have a desire to overshare their exploits – and how long 'participant observers' can keep observing in a culture that's generally reckoned to focus on youth. At Lancaster, Moore runs the aptly named Club Research as a hub for research on all the drugs, legal, illicit and novel, in the scene, as well the various subcultures and the larger "night-time economy." A lot of that work appears at her blog, http://www.clubresearch.org/, and is covered in her contributions as co-author to the 2013 book from SAGE publishing, Key Concepts in Drugs and Society.