Clik here to view.
first day of class. no pressure. you’ve got two seconds.
Classes started today. Somehow I still have first-day jitters. The problem could be that I am overly cognizant of the importance of first impressions, you know, those first two (!) seconds of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
cognition and the naturalness of institutions
Here’s a recent piece that might interest some orgtheory readers (pdf): Boyer & Petersen, 2011. “The naturalness of (many) social institutions: evolved cognition as their foundation.” Journal of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
camera at the center of rationality
I recently ran into Edna Ullmann-Margalit’s interesting essay about an episode where a colleague installed a CCTV camera in the office kitchen at the Center for Rationality (@ Hebrew University)....
View ArticleClik here to view.
psychology of organizational networks
In case readers haven’t seen this, Organization Science has a call for papers out for a special issue on the psychology of organizational networks. Details can be found by clicking here (pdf). Or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
diederik stapel
This case against social psychologist Diederik Stapel is something else. Unbelievable. Here’s the Science summary: Dutch ‘Lord of the Data Forged Dozens of Studies (including updates). One of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
social theory midterm results: a behavioral approach
Eighty percent of success is showing up. – Woody Allen I have a hypothesis, shared by many social scientists, that life course outcomes are highly correlated with self-discipline. If you are the kind...
View ArticleClik here to view.
question for economists/economic psychologists
Two related questions: 1. What is the standard citation that addresses the difficulty in identifying when business cycles begin or end? 2. Is there a literature that describes when people think there...
View ArticleClik here to view.
republicans fail the ron paul test
Politics is a chorus of dog whistles. Can’t say segregation, say states rights. Can’t say you hate immigrants, you just want them to “self-deport” and obey laws designed to keep them out. That’s why I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
enclothed cognition: clothes and perception
Adam Galinsky’s recent work and experiment on clothing and perceptions of cognition have been getting lots of attention. Here’s the New York Times piece – “Mind games: Sometimes a white coat isn’t just...
View ArticleClik here to view.
kids, minimal group affiliations and intergroup bias
Here’s an interesting piece extending Tajfel et al by studying 5-year-olds and intergroup bias: “Consequences of ‘‘Minimal’’ Group Affiliations in Children” Child Development. So, do 5-year-olds have a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
is gaydar, like, real?
Yeah, it’s real. I didn’t know this, but there’s a literature on gaydar and psychologists have shown that gaydar is real, at least among college students who take psychology experiments. The latest in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
recent orgtheory discussion on the sociology of gay politics and related topics
Previous posts: The gaydar post Kieran discusses Tina Fetner’s book on gay politics Gay rights and public opinion Economist Trevon Logan’s ASR paper on gay sex markets Sean Safford on Don’t Ask, Don’t...
View ArticleClik here to view.
why behaviorism isn’t satanism
Here’s a recent book chapter worth reading: “Why Behaviorism Isn’t Satanism.” Abstract The history of comparative evolutionary psychology can be characterized, broadly speaking, as a series of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
forget the environment, everything is endogenous
Teppo is too humble to let us know that he’s the guest editor of a new special issue of Managerial and Decision Economics. The issue’s theme is the “emergent nature of organization, market, and wisdom...
View ArticleClik here to view.
glaeser book forum 2: understanding the sociology of understanding
This Fall’s book forum is about Andreas Glaeser’s Political Epistemics, a historical ethnography of East German socialism. This week’s installment will focus on the theoretical purpose of the book,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
prodigy bias
A few days ago, a colleague asked about the name of my baby, whom I named after jazz musician John Coltrane. He responded, “Ah, he’ll be a saxophone prodigy!” Later, I realized my colleague didn’t have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rethinking Cultural Depth
The issue of whether some culture is “deep” versus “shallow” has been a thorny one in social theory. The basic argument is that for some piece of culture to have the requisite effects (e.g. direct...
View ArticleClik here to view.
deep culture and organization theory
This weekend, Omar wrote a detail post about the “depth” of culture, the degree to which some idea is internalized and serves as a motivation or guide for action. I strongly recommend that you read it....
View ArticleClik here to view.
J. Richard Hackman and his legacy
Over a week ago, a colleague called to let me know that our advisor, Harvard Prof. J. Richard Hackman, had passed. For months, I knew that this news would eventually come, but it’s still painful to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
measuring the post-racist society: the eclipse of racist words
The original post-racist society discussion, Eric Grollman responds,Tressie McMillan responds, my response to Eric, McMillan part deux, Eric responds again. A few weeks ago, I argued that the era of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
valdedictorians and class background
The Chronicle of Higher Education features a study of valedictorians and finds that class background affects where they apply to college: Poorer students remain underrepresented at America’s top...
View ArticleClik here to view.
how to live a happy life
For seventy five years, Harvard University has conducted a longitudinal study of 269 men who graduated in 1938. It’s an attempt to learn, in detail, about the factors that might contribute to a good...
View ArticleClik here to view.
stop interviewing people
A recent Washington Post op-ed describes recent research showing that interviews are poor predictors of future job performance. The idea is old, but the results elaborate in new ways. From Daniel...
View ArticleClik here to view.
the limits of human sociability
Are humans by nature social animals? My colleague, Adam Waytz, argues in a provocative essay for Edge.org that the idea that humans are naturally social may be more myth than reality. That is, if we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
confidence, gender, and the social psychology of inequality
The Atlantic has a new article called “The Confidence Gap.” Katty Kay and Claire Shipman review the academic literature to discuss one source of gender inequality – the systematic differences in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
centrism and sociology – guest post by chris martin
This guest post on the politics of sociology is written by Chris Martin, a doctoral student in sociology at Emory University. Conservativism doesn’t seem to be a unipolar thing, according to much of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
the psychology of ivy league grads on wall street
Ezra Klein interviews Kevin Roose, who has a new book about young Ivy League graduates who work on Wall Street. The take home point is simple: people who graduate from competitive schools graduate...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ten years towards big impact: david burns’ feeling good
One of the awesome aspects of grad school (besides the occasional “free” pizza as you listen to the latest in research) is the sharing of resources among colleagues who are undergoing the same...
View ArticleClik here to view.
on facebook and research methods
Twitter is, well, a-twitter with people worked up about the Facebook study. If you haven’t been paying attention, FB tested whether they could affect people’s status updates by showing 700,000 folks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ka-ching kitty!
Psych experiments show that we tend to overvalue objects that we possess – according to a coffee mug experiment, we would be willing to sell one that we have at a certain price, but others would not be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
i don’t want to be right
That’s the name of an article in the New Yorker that explores the work of my good friend political scientist Brendan Nyhan. The essence of pretty simple: people don’t change beliefs if it somehow...
View ArticleClik here to view.
letters of recommendation: still garbage
Long time readers know that I am a skeptic when it comes to letters of recommendation. The last time I wrote about the topic, I relied on a well cited 1993 article by Aamodt, Bryan amd Whitcomb in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
is there discrimination against conservatives in academia? comment on duarte...
There’s been a paper making round and a few folks have asked me for comments. It is called “Political Diversity will Improve Social Psychological Science.” It is forthcoming in Behavioral and Brain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
asian american privilege? a skeptical, but nuanced, view, and a call for more...
Raj Andrew Ghoshal is an assistant professor of sociology at Goucher College and Yung-yi Diana Pan is an assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. This guest post is a discussion of Asian...
View ArticleClik here to view.
how to live a good life, the social science answer
This week, I will spend quite a bit of time discussing a book called The Triumphs of Experience by George Vaillant. I’ve written briefly about the book before, but I didn’t appreciate the magnitude of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
let the children play! it’s good for their mental health
Psychology Today has an article on a new analysis of play and the mental health of young people. The gist is that (a) recently, we let kids have less unstructured play and (b) unstructured play...
View ArticleClik here to view.
happiness paradox
My colleague Johan Bollen and his colleagues have been working on a project that tries to measure and verify the “happiness paradox,” which is an extension and elaboration of the “friendship paradox.”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
article discussion: is marriage an all or nothing institution? by finkel et...
Starting on July 1, we will discuss “The Suffocation Model: Why Marriage in America is Becoming an All or Nothing Institution” by Finkel et al. This appeared last summer in Directions in Psychological...
View ArticleClik here to view.
conspiracy theory, donald trump, and birtherism: a new article by joe digrazia
Joe DiGrazia, a recent IU PhD and post-doc at Dartmouth, has a really great article in Socious, the ASA’s new online open access journal. The article, The Social Determinants of Conspiratorial...
View Articlebiology and gender differences in personality
Andy Perrin responded on Scatterplot to a Twitter debate that happened yesterday and I couldn’t resist adding two cents. It started with a link posted by Nicholas Christakis to a review article on...
View Article
