SOCIAL STUDIES | KEVIN LEWIS

Be a hero

A new study that made use of experiments, surveys, and interviews finds that life, work, and personal problems all feel more meaningful if you think of them as the literature professor Joseph Campbell described the hero’s journey. That means thinking of yourself as a protagonist who experiences a change in setting or circumstances, leading to a goal or quest in which you enlist support from allies to overcome challenges, grow personally, and leave a legacy of impact on others.

Rogers, B., et al., “Seeing Your Life Story as a Hero’s Journey Increases Meaning in Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (forthcoming).

Getting along

Published scientific research is checked and critiqued through “comment” articles (typically in the same journal as the original research) and through attempts to replicate the original research. A new analysis finds that women write fewer comment articles and fewer replication articles that contradict the original research, relative to their authorship of original research and confirmatory replication papers. In other words, women appear to be more reluctant to challenge fellow scientists.

Klinowski, D., “Voicing Disagreement in Science: Missing Women,” Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming).

Labor pains

Right after World War II, over half of manufacturing employment in the United States was located in what we now call the Rust Belt region. By the 1990s, that share had fallen to a third. Why? Foreign competition is often blamed, but a study in a top economics journal suggests a bigger factor was poor labor relations, a legacy of the hostility surrounding the initial unionizations of Rust Belt industries. That resulted in higher rates of work stoppages than in other industries, which suppressed employment, investment, and productivity growth. The downward trend was stabilized only when the prevalence of work stoppages plummeted in the 1980s. Had cooperative labor relations prevailed earlier, the researchers write, “the location of workers, capital, and production across the United States would be quite different today, with far fewer economic losses within the Rust Belt.”

Alder, S., et al., “Labor Market Conflict and the Decline of the Rust Belt,” Journal of Political Economy (forthcoming).

Uniquely lonely

Psychologists at UCLA scanned the brains of first-year students while they watched different videos. Each participant who felt lonely at the time exhibited neural patterns not seen in any other participant. That phenomenon was not observed in people who were not lonely, confirming what the researchers called an “Anna Karenina” principle: “Non-lonely people are all alike, but every lonely individual processes the world in their own idiosyncratic way.” Demographic similarity, friendship between participants, and each participant’s general friendliness toward peers could not explain the findings, the psychologists say. And they conclude that “these findings raise the possibility that being surrounded predominantly by people who view the world differently from oneself may be a risk factor for loneliness (even if one socializes regularly with them).”

Baek, E., et al., “Lonely Individuals Process the World in Idiosyncratic Ways,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).

The path to enlightenment

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon analyzed data on thousands of students who used educational technologies in language, math, and science courses from elementary school through college. What they found could overturn a fundamental assumption in education. Students across grade levels essentially learned equally well from practice opportunities, regardless of their initial mastery level after going through a lecture or reading. In other words, education outcomes are largely driven by learning conditions, opportunities, and motivation — not aptitude.

Koedinger, K., et al., “An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (March 2023).