Christakis: Un sacudón hacia la complejidad en las ciencias sociales

Let’s Shake Up the Social Sciences

By NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a graduate student, there were departments of natural science that no longer exist today. Departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology have disappeared, replaced by innovative departments of stem-cell biology, systems biology, neurobiology and molecular biophysics. Taking a page from Darwin, the natural sciences are evolving with the times. The perfection of cloning techniques gave rise to stem-cell biology; advances in computer science contributed to systems biology. Whole new fields of inquiry, as well as university departments and majors, owe their existence to fresh discoveries and novel tools.

In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. Such inertia reflects an unnecessary insecurity and conservatism, and helps explain why the social sciences don’t enjoy the same prestige as the natural sciences.

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. Like natural scientists, they should be able to say, “We have figured this topic out to a reasonable degree of certainty, and we are now moving our attention to more exciting areas.” But they do not.

I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them.

So social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Behavioral economics, for example, has used psychology to radically reshape classical economics.

Such interdisciplinary efforts are also generating practical insights about fundamental problems like chronic illness, energy conservation, pandemic disease, intergenerational poverty and market panics. For example, a better understanding of the structure and function of human social networks is helping us understand which individuals within social systems have an outsize impact when it comes to the spread of germs or the spread of ideas. As a result, we now have at our disposal new ways to accelerate the adoption of desirable practices as diverse as vaccination in rural villages and seat-belt use among urban schoolchildren.

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science. Eventually, these departments would themselves be dismantled or transmuted as science continues to advance.

Some recent examples offer a glimpse of the potential. At Yale, the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs applies diverse social sciences to the study of international issues and offers a new major. At Harvard, the sub-discipline of physical anthropology, which increasingly relies on modern genetics, was hived off the anthropology department to make the department of human evolutionary biology. Still, such efforts are generally more like herds splitting up than like new species emerging. We have not yet changed the basic DNA of the social sciences. Failure to do so might even result in having the natural sciences co-opt topics rightly and beneficially in the purview of the social sciences.

New social science departments could also help to better train students by engaging in new types of pedagogy. For example, in the natural sciences, even college freshmen do laboratory experiments. Why is this rare in the social sciences? When students learn about social phenomena, why don’t they go to the lab to examine them — how markets reach equilibrium, how people cooperate, how social ties are formed? Newly invented tools make this feasible. It is now possible to use the Internet to enlist thousands of people to participate in randomized experiments. This seems radical only because our current social science departments weren’t organized to teach this way.

For the past century, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve important problems. The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today’s intellectual challenges.

Sunday Review - NYT

Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale University, is a co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.

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Why Wealthy College Kids Are More Into 'Hooking Up' Than Their Poorer Classmates

PETER JACOBS - Busines Insider

The New York Times' recent article on the hookup culture at the University of Pennsylvania has garnered many fiery responses, with current and former Penn students blasting the piece for everything from its casual treatment of rape to its reliance on anonymity. 

Even the Daily Pennsylvania — UPenn's student newspaper — has come out swinging against the Times, noting:

The response has been largely critical, and for good reason: In her failed attempt to glimpse a part of Penn’s culture, Taylor drew conclusions that inaccurately represented and overly generalized the University’s student body.

Despite its many issues, one tidbit deeply buried in the article deserves more attention.

According to the article, two researchers who followed a group of women at IndianaUniversity from their freshman to senior years found that "women from wealthier backgrounds were much more likely to hook up, more interested in postponing adult responsibilities and warier of serious romantic commitment than their less-affluent classmates. The women from less-privileged backgrounds looked at their classmates who got drunk and hooked up as immature."

In an excellent breakdown of the Times' article on Jezebel, writer Tracy Moore sums this up as "Rich ladies like to PARTY, poor girls have to keep it real...virginal." Moore notes that she finds class-based attitudes towards casual sex "actually really fascinating," although "it's almost never explored."

While the research on privilege and hooking up is sparse at best, a 2009 study from Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong — the two researchers quoted in the Times — sheds some light on this often overlooked field. After speaking with a diverse group of women at a Midwest university, here's what they found:

• The dominant college culture "reflects the beliefs of the more privileged classes."
• Less privileged women's disinterest in hooking up could be "characterized by a faster transition into adulthood."
• For less privileged women not interested in hooking up, "college life could be experienced as mystifying, uncomfortable, and alienating."
• 40% of less privileged women left the university, compared to 5% of more privileged women, and "In all cases, mismatch between the sexual culture of women’s hometowns and that of college was a factor in the decision to leave."
• Many less privileged women left the university because of pressure from boyfriends or husbands back home, or to end hometown speculation that they were now a "slut."
• Because less privileged women "had less exposure to the notion that the college years should be set aside solely for educational and career development"they often did not view "serious relationships as incompatible with college life."

While the entire report is fascinating and worth a read, its findings are not without opponents. Although not a direct response to Hamilton and Armstrong's paper, a 2012 study on college sexual activity from researchers at Georgia Southern University found that social class is not a "significant predictor of hooking up." Clearly, this is an area that still requires some study.

Los hombres gastan más mensajes en hacer contacto

Here's How Many Messages Men Have To Send To Women On A Dating Site To Be Sure Of Getting A Response

WALTER HICKEY

Business Insider

Yesterday, we posted a chart that Josh Fischer at Snap Interactive (STVI: OTC BB) sent us based on analytics from their dating website Are You Interested. 

It shows the likelihood that a someone on AYI.com responds to a message from a member of the opposite sex given their age difference. To the left, -10 means the sender was 10 years younger, on the right, the sender was 10 years older, with zero indicating that the sender and the recipient are the same age. 

Here are the two plots for men responding to messages from women (blue) and women responding to messages from men (red).

Josh Fischer / SNAP Interactive

So, we can see that women are much more selective than men when it comes to responding to messages. Not exactly Nobel-quality findings here, but it's definitely interesting to see the exact levels of response.

But for folks in the dating game, how is this information actually usable?

Well, let's find out how many messages the average man will have to send to a woman his own age in order to guarantee various levels of response, and vice versa.

We can't guarantee a response, per se, but we can say how confident we are that these average bachelors and bachelorettes will receive at least one response given the number of messages they send.

We know, from the chart above, that a woman who sends a message to a man her own age has a 17.5% likelihood of receiving a response to that message.

We know that a man who sends a message to a woman his own age has a 4% likelihood of receiving a response to that message. 

Extrapolating from there, here's how confident men and women can be that they will receive a response given the number of messages they send en masse:

Walter Hickey / BI

Fascinating. 

An average man who sends 18 messages to women his own age can be 50% certain he'll receive at least one response. For women, they need to send only 5 messages to be 50% certain they'll get a response. 

Looking at higher confidence levels, if a woman wants to be 90% certain she'll receive a response from a man her own age, she'll have to send 13 messages. A man will have to send 58 messages.

Finally, to be 99% certain she'll receive a response, a woman must send 25 messages to men her own age. 

A man will have to send 114 .

This leads us to believe that one potential cause of the disparity between the male response rate and female response rate is the system itself.

If men must spam women with messages in order to elicit a response, then women will be more selective when responding to the surplus in general. Since women are understandably disinclined to respond to all the messages, men must send out more in order to guarantee any response. It's cyclic. 

Everyone is acting in their own self interest, inadvertently leading to further imbalances in the system. 

It's one of the fundamental issues with online dating in general. 

Anyway, best of luck out there folks. 

Cómo Node XL ayuda a investigar las comunidades de Twitter

Look Out Klout, These Twitter Influencer Maps Are Amazing

Mark Fidelman, Contributor
Forbes

What if instead of a score, you could visualize the impact a person, business or topic has in a social network? What if instead of using complicated listening tools, you could see in an instant who is talking about your company or its products and how you’re connected to them? What if you could tell who the major influencers or connectors are that everyone else is listening to? From what I’ve seen from the social network maps from NodeXL, this is all possible and a whole lot more.

It’s difficult to have a discussion today with any organization who doesn’t tell you some version of this: Advertising is becoming less effective, yet I can’t figure out why, let alone understand how to adapt. I keep hearing that advocate and influencer marketing is more effective, but I haven’t figured out how to find the right people that clearly impact my potential buyer.

Well allow me to speculate. We now live in an increasingly saturated world — a world where ads are placed nearly everywhere – a world with so much marketing noise it’s hard to separate fact from fiction – a world where even the big TV networks and news corporations no longer have the ability to create overnight product successes.

Our saturated world is causing people to tune out of traditional forms of advertising and turn to industry experts or influencers to make sense of it for them. The old magic formula for selling product through proven media channels has disappeared. So smart organizations are turning to thought leaders, influencers and experts to endorse and promote their products.

But how do you accurately find them and how do you know who is really having an impact on the organization? Moreover, can I look at the influencer or expert’s network to understand who they influence?

Take a look at my NodeXL Twitter Social Graph given to me by Social Network Theory expert Marc Smith:

To the untrained eye, the map is a little difficult to decipher (Smith is working on simplifying it for the rest of us) but I am at the center of that blue mass in section G1. Smith tells me that the Forbes community in G3 is supportive of my articles (that’s good to know) but there are a whole lot of people in G2 that I don’t know and are not connected with that are discussing topics related to me. Smith says that I should make the effort to get to know them because they could be very helpful with my goals. In G4 – G34, those are communities of people that I may or may not know – but are discussing my content – and I should seek to extend my network into those communities.

The Six Basic Types of Twitter Social Networks

Below using analysis from NodeXL, Smith outlines the 6 major types of Twitter social network types. What’s exciting is that this tool empowers companies to understand not only the social network around them, but who is most important in it. This huge expansion in social network understanding allows organizations to find hidden prospective customers, connect with the true influencers in their industry, and A/B test the impact of their social campaigns (NodeXL allows multiple ways of looking at the network data).

Let’s briefly explore each type, and then I’ll provide some relevant, real world examples for you to look at on the NodeXL site:

1. Polarized Network: Most often seen in politics or political issues, this pattern emerges when two groups are split in their opinion on an issue. Here’s one on Egyptian crisis.

2. In-Group Network: Seen at conferences and tight knit groups of people, this type of network rarely ventures outside of its membership. A big miss in most cases if you are a brand. Here’s an example of one for Social Business.

3. Brand/Public Topic Network: Most often seen when a person or company becomes a brand and people other than your customers are talking about you. Notice all of the disconnected users that are isolated from the brand and not connected. Car companies are a good example of a brand network.

4. Bazaar Network: Most often seen with medium sized companies or political issues with various community involvement (see the Texas Abortion Law example)

5. Broadcast Network: As its name implies, these individuals or companies have the power to light up the network – or in this baseball team example, have the ability to light up the Twitter scoreboard. News organizations also display a classic broadcast pattern.

6. Support Network: Think customer support. These types of networks are known to be good at customer service.

In case you’re wondering, a lot of this research came out of Microsoft or in partnership with Microsoft research. The following are other people and institutions that are involved including Stanford, The University of Washington and the University of Maryland.

Truly, these maps are very impressive and a big leap for organizations wishing to understand their impact in social networks. But for companies and individuals to take advantage of the opportunities presented in the network maps, NodeXL will need to make it easier for users to understand them and take action. Smith assures me this is right around the corner.

In fact, Smith tells me the maps will be much more interactive and actionable. That will make finding influencers and new customers incredibly easy.

That’s a big game changer.

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