Like Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters affecting urban areas, Superstorm Sandy reminded many that U.S. cities are unprepared for the effects of climate change. According to sociologist Eric Klinenberg in a recent issue of The New Yorker, the U.S. lags far behind other countries in “climate-proofing,” or investing in infrastructural developments that will protect cities and their inhabitants from increasingly-severe natural disasters and rising water levels.

Beyond investing in physical infrastructure, preparing for and surviving climate change, Klinenberg writes, will involve “recognizing the importance of social infrastructure: the people, places, and institutions that foster cohesion and support.” Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson has emphasized the importance of strong social ties during natural disasters. In their research on the 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed over 700 people, Klinenberg and Sampson found that neighborhoods with a strong sense of community and many churches and civic organizations—neighborhoods where people look out for one another—fare better when disaster strikes.

Although infrastructure investment and development play a major role in mitigating the effects of climate change, it may well prove that “civil society will ultimately determine which people and places will withstand the emerging threats from climate change.”

Heading off to college with a parent’s blank check in hand won’t help students earn high marks, according to sociologist Laura Hamilton. Hamilton’s study, published in the latest Annual Review of Sociology, finds that, regardless of the type of four-year institution they attend, students who receive greater financial contributions from their parents tend to earn a lower GPA along the way (even if they are more likely to complete their degree).

Hamilton says the effect on grades is “modest”—“not enough to make your child flunk”—but nonetheless “surprising because everybody has always assumed that the more you give, the better your child does.”

As the New York Times reports:

Dr. Hamilton found that the students with the lowest grades were those whose parents paid for them without discussing the students’ responsibility for their education. Parents could minimize the negative effects, she said, by setting clear expectations about grades and progress toward graduation.

“Ultimately, it’s not bad to fund your children,” [Hamilton] said. “My kids are little, but I plan to pay for them—after we talk about how much it costs, and what grades I expect them to achieve.”

Well, at least about dating, according to Dan Slater’s recent opinion piece in the New York Times.  Charles Darwin, who is famous for his theories of evolution, argued that through competition for mates, natural selection encouraged man’s “more inventive genius” while nurturing women’s “greater tenderness.”  So, he suggested that the gender roles he saw in Victorian England—men making money and women staying home—dated back centuries.

Decades later, social scientists applied Darwin’s theories to ideas about mating and concluded that men are less selective about whom they’ll sleep with, men like casual sex more than women, and men have more sexual partners over a lifetime.  These assumptions persist today, and many evolutionary psychologists have studied them and argued in their favor.  For example,

  In 1972, Robert L. Trivers, a graduate student at Harvard…argued that women are more selective about whom they mate with because they’re biologically obliged to invest more in offspring. Given the relative paucity of ova and plenitude of sperm, as well as the unequal feeding duties that fall to women, men invest less in children. Therefore, men should be expected to be less discriminating and more aggressive in competing for females.

Critics of this theory (and many other evolution-based theories) argue that cultural norms, not evolution, impact human behavior.  This argument is quite sociological, though it has also found support in the work of psychologists.

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

A more recent study challenged the idea that women are more selective.  In speed dating, the social norm instructs that women sit in one place while men rotate tables.  In 2009, Psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick conducted an experiment in which the men remained seated and the women rotated.  By switching the role of the “rotator,” they found that women became less selective while men appeared more selective.

Slater’s opinion piece, found here, cites several other studies that cast doubt on the notion that evolution dictates gendered behavior.  But, that doesn’t mean that Darwinians are backing down. The debate will likely continue, but Slater gives the last words to those who challenge Darwinian ideas:

“Some sexual features are deeply rooted in evolutionary heritage, such as the sex response and how quickly it takes men and women to become aroused,” said Paul Eastwick, a co-author of the speed-dating study. “However, if you’re looking at features such as how men and women regulate themselves in society to achieve specific goals, I believe those features are unlikely to have evolved sex differences. I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist. But many evolutionary psychologists don’t think this way. They think these features are getting shaped and honed by natural selection all the time.” How far does Darwin go in explaining human behavior?

Educators, parents, and politicians concerned with the bottom line have spent untold time debating the merits of year-round grade school. As the Associated Press reports, the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan falls firmly into the “pro” camp, believing bringing the academic and annual calendars into line will help propel American students to the front of the global classroom. Duncan even announced a new national program adding 300 hours of school per year in select districts: “The three-year pilot project will affect about 20,000 students in 40 schools in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee.” Others plumping for a longer school-year point out that parents would rather arrange for 3 weeks than 3 months of childcare and say that disadvantaged students gain in everything from better nutrition (because they may eat up to two meals at school) to better test scores. The former head of the National Association for Year Round School in San Diego is quoted as saying “The only [kids] who don’t lose [over the summer] are the upper 10 to 15 percent of the student body. Those tend to be gifted, college-bound, they’re natural learners who will learn wherever they are.”

In the “con” camp come parents who enjoy the chance to let their kids daydream, travel, take specific summer courses to bone up in particularly needed areas, and play sports and go to camps. Groups like “Save Our Summers” “point out that states such as Minnesota and Massachusetts steadily shine on standardized achievement tests while preserving their summer break with a post-Labor Day school start,” and that districts are already strapped for cash—how will they pay for extra teachers to fill all those hours?

As it turns out, the calendar conservatives may have at least some research on their side. After outlining the many arguments for and against changing schedules, even profiling San Diego’s 40-year-old blended model (some of its schools are year-round, others aren’t), the AP comes down in the middle: “A 2007 study by Ohio State University sociologist Paul von Hippel found virtually no difference in the academic gains of students who followed a traditional nine-month school calendar and those educated the same number of days spread across the entire year.” So, while the number of classroom hours may make a great deal of difference in educational outcomes, how they’re spread out over the course of a year probably doesn’t.

As an American who is well under 50, I wasn’t too pleased to read a New York Times’ article published this week.

Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.

Researchers have known for a while that the United States fares poorly when compared against other rich countries.  But, most of this research has focused on the health of people of older ages.  This new study, conducted by a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages.

As the NYT article put it, the findings were stark.  American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.

Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females.

Car accidents, gun violence, and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans under age 50.  According to the study, 69% of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared to an average of 26% in other countries.  Americans also had the highest infant mortality rate, and its young people had the highest rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and deaths from car crashes.  In addition, Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries in the study.

“The bottom line is that we are not preventing damaging health behaviors,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was on the panel. “You can blame that on public health officials, or on the health care system. No one understands where responsibility lies.”

To read more of the lengthy coverage of the article, click here.

No matter who you are today, you’ll likely be a pretty different person in ten years.

Don’t agree?  According to a recent study conducted by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, you’d be in the majority.  Most people generally fail to appreciate how much their personality and values will change in the upcoming years, even if they recognize how much they’ve changed in the past.

“I have this deep sense that although I will physically age—I’ll have even less hair than I do and probably a few more pounds—that by and large the core of me, my identity, my values, my personality, my deepest preferences, are not going to change from here on out,” says Gilbert, who is 55.

As NPR reported, Gilbert wanted to see if others felt the same.  So, he and his colleagues Jordi Quoidbach and Timothy Wilson analyzed data from over 19,000 surveys and found that people, whether they are teenagers or middle-aged, underestimate how much they will change in the future.  Life is a process of growing and changing that never really stops, but people of a variety of ages seem to think it does.

Personality changes do take place faster when people are younger,  says Gilbert, so “a person who says I’ve changed more in the past decade than I expect to change in the future is not wrong.”  But that doesn’t mean they fully understand what’s still to come. “Their estimates of how much they’ll change in the future are underestimates,” says Gilbert. “They are going to change more than they realize. Change does slow; it just doesn’t slow as much as we think it will.”

Gilbert and his colleagues don’t yet know why many of us seem to have an “end of history illusion.”  It might be really difficult to imagine a different future, or it might be difficult to think of unknown change.

After 9/11, the actions of a few began to subtly (and not-so-subtly) change the image many held of American Muslims. The UK edition of Wired magazine highlights a recent study that looks to explain how mainstream American discourse on this major religion and its adherents was distorted so drastically. University of North Carolina sociologist Christopher Bail explains in the interview:

The vast majority of organisations competing to shape public discourse about Islam after the September 11 attacks delivered pro-Muslim messages, yet my study shows that journalists were so captivated by a small group of fringe organisations that they came to be perceived as mainstream…

The voices of many pro-Muslim groups, all condemning terrorism, were silenced or ignored, while airtime was given over to anti-Muslim fringe groups. This added to religious and racial tension. As Bail puts it:

Inattention to these condemnations, combined with the emotional warnings of anti-fringe organisations, has created a very distorted representation of the community of advocacy organisations, think tanks, and religious groups competing to shape the representation of Islam in the American public sphere.

Luckily, the damage to Islam’s image doesn’t seem irreparable. According to University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell, also interviewed for the article, “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that core has historically been religious.” Her work has shown that religion is so valued in America that Atheists are the most distrusted minority group of all. By believing in something, Muslims will surely regain American trust, maybe even in the media.

China consumes one-third of the world’s cigarettes.  It also has more smokers than any other country on earth.  And, according to the World Health Organization, tobacco has become the biggest killer in China; more than 3,000 people die each day from smoking-related illnesses.

In an effort to change these statistics, China mandated regulation of smoking in public places in May 2011, banning smoking in areas like bars, restaurants, and subways.  The Global Times took a look at how efforts to implement a smoke-free environment have been fairing and, alarmingly, found that these efforts have been largely unsuccessful.  Turning to social scientists and health professionals to understand why progress has been slow, the Times learned that the lack of success is largely due to a “cigarette culture” and poor law enforcement.

 “People are so ingrained with the habit of smoking. It has long been regarded as a very important part of social and business networking,” said Liang Liwen, a sociologist from Guangdong Provincial Academy of Social Sciences.

Some restaurants have taken specific steps to try to ban smoking, such as putting up non-smoking signs and training waiters and waitresses on how to politely ask people to put out their cigarettes.  Yet, their establishments are not smoke-free.  According to a survey released by the Green Beagle Environment Institute, most Beijing restaurants have failed to create a smoke-free environment.

Beyond old habits dying hard, lack of law enforcement also contributes to the issue.  Law enforcement officials often don’t implement bans.  And, this lack of enforcement matters at different levels.

“The success or failure in China depends largely on the government’s attitude toward tobacco control. Implementing a specialized law that bans smoking and intensifying enforcement are the strongest measures of support available,” Yang Gonghuan, a tobacco control expert with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), told the Global Times, adding that the landscape of tobacco control is not good.

This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been some efforts to enforce the ban and reduce smoking, some of which the article explains here.  But, there’s still a long way to go.

On a busy bridge in Detroit during a traffic jam, Deletha Word was pulled from her car by Martell Welch, whose car she had sideswiped. In view of more than forty people, former football-player Welch savagely beat Word, tearing off her clothes. Welch jumped off the bridge to escape her attacker and subsequently drowned. When I heard this story on the evening news back in 1996, I was horrified that not one of the many onlookers attempted to stop Word’s attack or to pull her from the river (she initially survived the fall, but couldn’t swim). I will never forget my first introduction to the “Bystander Effect,” the social phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to intervene to help someone in distress if there are other people nearby.

The Bystander Effect was highlighted again recently as a result of the notoriously-tactless New York Post’s front-page publication of photographs of a man about to be killed by an oncoming New York City subway train. The man had been pushed onto the tracks after an altercation was struggling to get back onto the platform. Facing criticism for photographing the man’s death, rather than helping pull him from the tracks, the photographer has defended himself in the media. He’s said he could not have gotten to the victim in time to save him, but by taking photos—thus causing his camera’s flash to go off and possibly alert the driver of the train—he hoped to help. Plus, many other people were closer to the man, but did nothing to pull him up.

Arguably, social media has exacerbated the Bystander Effect. Tim Knapp, a sociologist at Missouri State University, commented in an article about the NYC incident, “Now everyone can be a journalist and some times, at the expense of being a good Samaritan.” That is, no longer are onlookers passive observers who “do not want to get involved” or risk their own personal safety; now many bystanders film or photograph the incidents in which they fail to intervene.

“Hoping to get an avalanche of Christmas cards and holiday letters this year? There’s just one rule: send out a pile of your own,”  TSP’s Letta Page explained in her write-up of November’s Media Award winner.

In the award-winning article, “Give And Take: How The Rule Of Reciprocation Binds Us,” KERA News’ Alix Spiegel explains how sociologist Phillip Kunz went about sending 600 Christmas letters to strangers…and received many back in return, illustrating the rule of reciprocation.

 As we’ve said before, the choice of each month’s TSP Media Award is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but we do work hard to winnow our favorite nominees.  And, while we don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer enormous trophies or cash prizes, we hope our informal award offers encouragement for journalists and social scientists to keep up the important work of bringing academic knowledge to the broader public.