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Social Science

A collection of 116 issues

PK

The world's most compelling Democratic experiment of the past many decades is currently underway in Bihar, home to nearly 140 million people. For nearly three years, Prashant Kishor (PK) has been walking across villages of this predominantly rural state, listening to people, drawing up local plans based on

12 Nov 2025 5 min read

Behavioral Validity Checks for ML‑Based Coding

Social scientists increasingly use supervised ML and LLMs to scale content analysis—classifying texts for protest, policy issues, frames, sentiment, and more. The central question is construct validity: does the coder respond to evidence that defines the concept and ignore evidence that is irrelevant? Standard evaluations (held‑out accuracy, F1,

20 Aug 2025 4 min read

I Endorse This Message: Learning From Endorsement Experiments

Blair et al. 2013 report results from an endorsement experiment in Pakistan. Respondents are asked their level of support for four policies (on a 5-point scale, rescaled to [0,1]). In the treatment group, each policy is randomly paired with an endorsement from one of four militant organizations. The control

12 Jun 2025 1 min read

Oracles, Not Just Scientists. The Seemingly Exceptional Batting Average of Pre-Registered Hypotheses

The model of scientists as explorers suggests endless defeat followed, only on occasion, by a lightning bolt. The model doesn't readily apply to social scientists. Going by published research, empirical social scientists enjoy a lot of success, finding lots of results that are 'consistent with [their] hypothesis.

27 May 2025 5 min read

Political Psychology: What Political Scientists Get Wrong About LaPiere's 1934 Study

Attitudes Vs. Individual Behavior Richard LaPiere's 1934 study revealed a striking gap between stated attitudes and actual behavior. LaPiere, a white sociologist, traveled across the United States for two years with a Chinese couple, visiting 251 restaurants, hotels, and motels. Despite widespread anti-Chinese sentiment at the time, they

18 Dec 2024 3 min read

The Relative Status of Brahmins Across India in 1931

One of the common misunderstandings about caste in India is that the extent of Brahmin privilege is similar across India. One way we can investigate this is by examining literacy rates across castes. In the 1931 census, the Bombay region was a picture of Brahmin dominance, with the literacy rate

15 Apr 2024 2 min read

From Living Instinctively to Living With History

Listening to my maternal grandparents narrate their experience of living with Muslims was confusing. According to them, Hindus and Muslims lived harmoniously. They also liked each other. Hindus and Muslims wouldn’t eat at each other’s houses or might use separate utensils, but that had less to do with

03 Mar 2024 3 min read

Inter-Group Prejudice

Prejudice is a bane of humanity. Unjustified aversive beliefs and affect are the primary proximal causes of aversive behavior toward groups. Such beliefs and sentiments cause aversive speech and physical violence. They also serve as justification for denying people rights and opportunities. Prejudice also creates a deadweight loss. For instance,

16 Dec 2023 1 min read

Time Will Tell

Part of empirical social science is about finding fundamental truths about people. It is a difficult enterprise partly because scientists only observe data in a particular context. Neither cross-sectional variation nor data that goes back at best by tens of years is often enough to come up with generalizable truths.

22 Nov 2023 2 min read

Why Social Scientists Fail to Predict Dramatic Social Changes

Soviet specialists are often derided for their inability to see the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. But they were not unique. If you look around, social scientists have very little handle on many of the big social changes that have happened over the past 70 or so years. 1.

18 Nov 2023 2 min read

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