sociology

#562 Jason Manning - Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction

Dec 17, 2021

Dr. Jason Manning is an Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He’s a theoretical sociologist who seeks to develop general explanations of human behavior, his work focuses primarily on conflict and social control, including various means of expressing grievances, handling disputes, and punishing offenses. Within this area he specializes in violent conflict, particularly in self-destructive forms of violence such as protest suicide, homicide-suicide, and suicide terrorism. His other interests include the sociology of science, sociology of religion, and neoDarwinian theories of culture. He is the author of Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. More»
#524 Andrew Guess: Political Polarization, Misinformation, Fake News, and Digital Media Literacy

Sep 20, 2021

Dr. Andrew Guess is an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and political behavior. Via a combination of experimental methods, large datasets, machine learning, and innovative measurement, he studies how people choose, process, spread, and respond to information about politics. Recent work investigates the extent to which online Americans' news habits are polarized (the popular "echo chambers" hypothesis), patterns in the consumption and spread of online misinformation, and the effectiveness of efforts to counteract misperceptions encountered on social media. More»
#515 Sacha Altay: Social Media, Fake News, Science Communication, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Aug 30, 2021

Sacha Altay is doing his PhD in cognitive science at the Institut Jean Nicod of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Fascinated by apparently irrational beliefs and behaviors, he works with Hugo Mercier on the role of epistemic reputation in communication and the cognitive mechanisms underlying information transmission and evaluation. More»
#512 Sander van der Linden: Social Media, Fake News, COVID, and Science Communication

Aug 23, 2021

Dr. Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment, communication, and decision-making, including social norms and networks, attitudes and polarization, reasoning about evidence, and the public understanding of risk and uncertainty. More»
#509 Christian Hoffmann: Social Media, Fake News, and Political Polarization

Aug 16, 2021

Dr. Christian Pieter Hoffmann is Professor of Communication Management and Political Communication at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. In addition, he is responsible for teaching in the field of political communication in cooperation with the Institute for Political Science. Dr. Hoffmann is a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen, Singapore Management University, Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz and the University of Applied Sciences Zurich. His research interests include strategic communication management, financial communication and political communication – with a particular focus on the challenges and opportunities provided by new media. More»
#506 Crystal Lee: Data Visualizations, Online Misinformation, and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Aug 9, 2021

Crystal Lee is a PhD candidate at the History / Anthropology / Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program at MIT, a researcher at the Visualization Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how people interpret and make data visualizations. She also thinks a lot about the relationship between technology and disability, and she loves talking about mixed methods research that combines humanistic questions with data science and critical cartography. In her work as a Digital Teaching Fellow at Harvard, she created a curriculum to integrate digital mapping and visualization into the history of science. Previously, she was a visiting research scientist at the European Commission, and she graduated with high honors from Stanford University. More»
#501 Ethan Porter: The Consumer Citizen

Jul 29, 2021

Dr. Ethan Porter is an assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Political Communication, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Politics, Groups and Identities and Journal of Experimental Political Science. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other popular publications. His research interests include public opinion, political communication, political psychology and experimental design. He is the author of False Alarm: The Truth About Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, and The Consumer Citizen, which investigates the ways in which everyday consumer decision-making affects political attitudes and behavior. More»
#497 Daniel Bell - Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World

Jul 19, 2021

Dr. Daniel A. Bell is Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University. He writes widely on Chinese politics and philosophy for the media including the New York Times, Financial times, Global Times, Nanfengchuang, Worldpost, Project Syndicate, and the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. Dr. Bell received the Huilin Prize in 2018. He is the author of numerous books including The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015), The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age[coauthored with Avner de-Shalit] (2011), China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (2010), Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (2006), East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (2000), and, more recently, Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World. More»
#496 Daniel Hoyer - Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History

Jul 16, 2021

Dr. Daniel Hoyer currently holds a postdoctoral position working with Dr. Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the SESHAT: Global History Databank Project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and comparative project hosted by the Evolution Institute and the University of Oxford. His postdoctoral work focuses on determining the institutional features and structures which underpin economic performance and the provision of public goods in these different places and times. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Buying a Province, Building an Empire: Money, Markets, and Growth in Roman Africa from Augustus to Aurelian on the economic and financial development of the western Roman Empire. He is the author of Figuring Out The Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History. More»
#479 James Cortada - Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America

Jun 7, 2021

Dr. James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions. He is the author of books like Information and the Modern Corporation, and Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America. More»