SOCIAL STUDIES |

Headline news

In an experiment, hundreds of people received five text messages on their phones every day for 15 days with news headlines about corporate wrongdoing. Some of these headlines were fake, and they were repeated to varying extents. At the end of the experiment, people were asked to rate these repeated headlines and a new set of fake headlines. Relative to the new headlines, the wrongdoing depicted in the repeated headlines — especially those that were repeated the most — was judged to be less unethical. The repetition appears to have dulled the anger people felt about those stories, even though it also made it likelier that the readers would rate them as true. Pillai, R. et al., “Repeatedly Encountered Descriptions of Wrongdoing Seem More True but Less Unethical: Evidence in a Naturalistic Setting,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).

Child welfare

Analyzing data from Michigan child-welfare investigations, researchers found that Black children were significantly more likely to be placed in foster care than white children at similar risk for subsequent maltreatment. The explanation appears to be that investigators were less likely to place children of their own race in foster care, and most investigators were white. Analysis of data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System finds similar results in most states. The authors say their findings lead to a conclusion that may be counterintuitive: The biggest victims of this disparity are white children, who are more likely to be left at risk in their homes. Baron, J. et al., “Racial Discrimination in Child Protection,” National Bureau of Economic Research (July 2023).

Years of pain

Middle-aged, non-college-educated Americans have been reporting increasing levels of pain in recent decades. A new study finds that much of this increase happened during the Great Recession and its aftermath, from 2007 through 2010, and didn’t abate afterward. The jump in pain levels occurred across gender and race, and it doesn’t appear to be readily explained by the sheer fact that there was a recession, since previous recessions didn’t have the same longlasting effect. The authors of the study conclude that the jump “continues to be mysterious” and may have something to do with a unique stress imprint from the financial crisis and the Great Recession. Lamba, S. & Moffitt, R., “The Rise in American Pain: The Importance of the Great Recession,” National Bureau of Economic Research (July 2023).

The social networks of scientists

Artificial intelligence is being trained on scientific literature to suggest promising areas for exploration. Researchers at the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago have developed a twist on this approach. Their AI model doesn’t use just scientific content but also information about the social and knowledge networks of the scientific community to predict what discoveries will actually happen and who will make them. What may be even more useful, though, is that the model can be flipped to suggest areas for exploration — in fields as disparate as materials science and vaccines — that are otherwise unlikely to yield discoveries soon because they are relatively disconnected from current scientific networks. Sourati, J. & Evans, J., “Accelerating Science With Human-Aware Artificial Intelligence,” Nature Human Behaviour (forthcoming).