Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
In a randomized trial conducted on an online job platform, imposing a minimum wage on firms increased wages but reduced hours worked, with no net effects on workers’ total earnings.
Firms posting job openings in an online labor market were randomly assigned minimum hourly wages. When facing a minimum wage, fewer firms hired, but those they did hire paid higher wages. Hours-worked fell substantially. Treated firms shifted to hiring more productive workers. Using the platform's imposition of a market-wide minimum wage after the experiment, I find that many of the experimental results also hold in equilibrium, including the substitution towards more productive workers. However, there was also a large reduction in the number of jobs posted for which the minimum wage would likely bind.
In a series of survey experiments, exposure to uncivil or intolerant social media posts did not lead to majority support for content moderation by social media platforms.
When is speech on social media toxic enough to warrant content moderation? Platforms impose limits on what can be posted online, but also rely on users’ reports of potentially harmful content. Yet we know little about what users consider inadmissible to public discourse and what measures they wish to see implemented. Building on past work, we conceptualize three variants of toxic speech: incivility, intolerance, and violent threats. We present results from two studies with pre-registered randomized experiments (Study 1, N=5,130; Study 2, N=3,734) to examine how these variants causally affect users’ content moderation preferences. We find that while both the severity of toxicity and the target of the attack matter, the demand for content moderation of toxic speech is limited. We discuss implications for the study of toxicity and content moderation as an emerging area of research in political science with critical implications for platforms, policymakers, and democracy more broadly.
Data from a longitudinal survey in the US reveals that women who lived in areas with fewer abortion restrictions or who had an abortion in adolescence have improved socioeconomic outcomes later in life.
Abortion is a safe and common medical procedure. Roughly one in four women in the United States will have an abortion before the end of her reproductive years. Because of how common this experience is and how rapidly abortion policy is shifting, understanding the relationship between abortion and women’s socioeconomic futures is well worth exploring. Extant research has demonstrated that the transition to parenthood is a critical inflection point in women’s socioeconomic trajectories, often leading to poorer outcomes. In this article, we connect previous sociological work elucidating mechanisms of socioeconomic stratification and gender by considering the relationship between abortion use and access and future socioeconomic outcomes such as education, income, and financial stability—as measured by several measures, including evictions, debt, ability to pay bills, and a separate index of economic instability. We use national longitudinal survey data to assess socioeconomic outcomes associated with abortion using two statistical approaches. We find that women who lived in a location with fewer abortion restrictions in adolescence, and women who had an abortion, compared to a live birth, in adolescence, are more likely to have graduated from college, have higher incomes, and have greater financial stability at two time-points over an almost 25-year period. Our results provide evidence that policy environments allowing access to abortion, and teenagers having the option to use abortion to avoid early parenthood, are important axes along which women’s economic lives are shaped. Our research implies that the widespread abortion bans and restrictions in the United States are likely to lead to lower educational attainment and adult economic stability among women living under such restrictions, as compared to women in locations with better access to abortion.
A novel statistical approach applied to neuroimaging finds differences in brain activity in school-aged autistic children relative to non-autistic children.
Independent component analysis (ICA) is widely used to estimate spatial resting-state networks and their time courses in neuroimaging studies. It is thought that independent components correspond to sparse patterns of co-activating brain locations. Previous approaches for introducing sparsity to ICA replace the non-smooth objective function with smooth approximations, resulting in components that do not achieve exact zeros. We propose a novel Sparse ICA method that enables sparse estimation of independent source components by solving a non-smooth non-convex optimization problem via the relax-and-split framework. The proposed Sparse ICA method balances statistical independence and sparsity simultaneously and is computationally fast. In simulations, we demonstrate improved estimation accuracy of both source signals and signal time courses compared to existing approaches. We apply our Sparse ICA to cortical surface resting-state fMRI in school-aged autistic children. Our analysis reveals differences in brain activity between certain regions in autistic children compared to children without autism. Sparse ICA selects coactivating locations, which we argue is more interpretable than dense components from popular approaches. Sparse ICA is fast and easy to apply to big data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.
In rural northern Vietnam, rising rates of chronic illness highlight the moral and social conundrums faced by those caring for ill family members.
This article explores family caregiving in Vietnamese households affected by type 2 diabetes. Drawing on existential phenomenology and on fieldwork conducted in northern Vietnam, I develop the concept of care calibrations as a tool to understand how family members respond socially and morally to the needs for care that diabetes confronts them with. The concept of care calibrations highlights how chronic care is undertaken as an ethical endeavor within domestic environments characterized by multiple care needs. The article explores how caregivers find their bearings in complex care situations by looking toward dominant moral standards while also adjusting pragmatically to the contingencies of domestic lives, placing themselves in others’ situations. On this ethnographic basis, the article calls for more sustained anthropological attention to the social implications of human capacities for sympathetic co-living and particularly to the intermediate realm between selves and others where capacities for moral imagination reside.
The Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, a federally unrecognized Indigenous group, reveals the importance of broadening conceptions of resilience.
Resilience has been conceptualized within international development as the ability to “return to a state of equilibrium” after exogenous shocks. For many Indigenous communities, however, there is no equilibrium to which to return. This article explores how the federally unrecognized Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe (NCRNT) has developed a creative strategy of resilience beyond a return to “equilibrium” in the face of their almost complete erasure by genocide and the illegal termination of their sovereign rights by US state and federal government agencies. The NCRNT’s experience reveals how activities underlying Indigenous resilience include a need for historical redress and reconciliation, thereby creating a “new normal” that is reflective of Native history as well as the ongoing social, political, and economic realities of existing within a settler state. This article bridges history and development studies, revealing how both disciplines must learn from Indigenous groups seeking restorative justice. It further employs oral histories, artwork, and documentation from the newly created NCRN Tribal archive, and so is presented as an interactive digital article.
Children who practice “top-down” self-regulation, or the ability to use logic prior to an emotional response, have better social and school-related outcomes.
Research and theory on the role of top-down self-regulation (TDSR) in children’s developmental outcomes has received considerable attention in the last few decades. In this review, we distinguish TDSR (and overlapping self-regulatory processes) from bottom-up regulation. With a particular focus on Eisenberg et al.’s body of work, we review evidence for the role of individual differences in children’s TDSR to a variety of developmental outcomes. Children’s TDSR processes are consistently inversely related to externalizing problems and internalizing problems, although less consistently for the latter. Moreover, TDSR processes are positively associated with social competence, empathy-related responding and prosocial outcomes, and school-related outcomes. We briefly review complexities in these associations, such as bidirectional relations, mediators, and moderators. Key areas for future work are also discussed.