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.

A difference-in-differences study finds that Yelp’s introduction of a “Black-owned Business” label increased customer engagement and firm performance for restaurants adopting the label.
Is there latent demand to support Black-owned businesses? We explore this question by analyzing a new feature that made it easier to identify Black-owned restaurants on an online platform. We find that labeling restaurants as minority-owned increased customer engagement and firm performance, as measured by online traffic, calls, orders, and in-person visits. These effects were more pronounced in areas characterized by greater support for the Democratic Party and lower implicit bias against racial minorities. Labeled restaurants also see an increase in the fraction of reviews that are written by White customers.

A reexamination of the impacts of gun violence on electoral outcomes leveraging recent advances in difference-in-differences designs finds few impacts, contrary to prior findings in the literature.
Work on the electoral effects of gun violence in the U.S. relying on difference-in-differences designs has produced findings ranging from null to substantively large effects. However, as difference-in-difference designs, on which this research relies, have exploded in popularity, scholars have documented several methodological issues including potential violations of parallel-trends and unaccounted for treatment effect heterogeneity. These pitfalls (and their solutions) have not been fully explored in political science. We apply these advancements to the unresolved debate on gun violence’s effects on U.S. electoral outcomes. We show that studies finding a large positive effect of gun violence on Democratic vote shares are a product of a failure to properly specify difference-in-differences models when underlying assumptions are unlikely to hold. Once these biases are corrected, shootings show little evidence of sparking large electoral change. Our work clarifies an unresolved debate and provides a cautionary guide for scholars currently employing difference-in-differences designs.

More centralized state and local fiscal structures are associated with less spatial inequality in the economic mobility of low-income children, driven by improved outcomes in lower-performing census tracts.
Disparities in state and local government spending are key drivers of spatial inequality in social outcomes, including economic mobility. Yet beyond spending levels, the fiscal centralization of state and local governments—that is, the relative role of higher- versus lower-level governments in taxing, spending, and public employment—also differs substantially, traceable to place-specific founding circumstances and path dependent historical trajectories. In this study, we ask, in more centralized fiscal systems, is there less spatial inequality in the economic mobility outcomes of low-income children? To answer this, we construct a novel Fiscal Centralization Index for each state and each county using data from the U.S. Census of Governments. We then use place-based estimates of intergenerational economic mobility, provided by Opportunity Insights, to measure cross-census-tract variation in the mobility outcomes of children within each state and each county. We find that more centralized fiscal structures exhibit less spatial inequality in the economic mobility outcomes of low-income children, and this is driven by improving outcomes in lower-performing census tracts. Our findings motivate the fiscal sociology of place as a framework for revealing how historically conditioned fiscal systems are implicated in the production of place-based inequalities, with the potential to generate new insights and policy interventions.

A novel stochastic generator applied to surface temperature prediction demonstrates the ability to overcome the vast computational and storage costs of climate systems modeling.
Earth system models (ESMs) are fundamental for understanding Earth’s complex climate system. However, the computational demands and storage requirements of ESM simulations limit their utility. For the newly published CESM2-LENS2 data, which suffer from this issue, we propose a novel stochastic generator (SG) as a practical complement to the CESM2, capable of rapidly producing emulations closely mirroring training simulations. Our SG leverages the spherical harmonic transformation (SHT) to shift from spatial to spectral domains, enabling efficient low-rank approximations that significantly reduce computational and storage costs. By accounting for axial symmetry and retaining distinct ranks for land and ocean regions, our SG captures intricate nonstationary spatial dependencies. Additionally, a modified Tukey g-and-h (TGH) transformation accommodates non-Gaussianity in high-temporal-resolution data. We apply the proposed SG to generate emulations for surface temperature simulations from the CESM2-LENS2 data across various scales, marking the first attempt of reproducing daily data. These emulations are then meticulously validated against training simulations. This work offers a promising complementary pathway for efficient climate modeling and analysis while overcoming computational and storage limitations. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

On the island of Lampedusa, Italy, migrants and locals contend with the lack of assistance from the government, leading to economic, political, and legal conflict between these groups.
Drawing from the extensive literature on the anthropology of borders and border death in and beyond Europe, this article ethnographically explores the processes through which irregular migrants and locals at the borderland of Lampedusa (south of Sicily, Italy) are left to live and die in abandonment. In the process, we highlight the distinct and antagonistic yet shared sense of neglect that both migrants and locals experience in their everyday lives on the island and explore the relationship between abandonment, the everyday, and the law, showing how these are interwoven. By including both irregular migrants and locals in Lampedusa in our analysis, the article importantly establishes how abandonment occurs not in the absence but in the indeterminacy of the law and highlights a chronic failure of the law toward life (deemed as legal and illegal). It moves beyond traditional anthropological critiques on state presence and absence, showing how abandonment pervades everyday life within and beyond borders.

Textual, ethnographic, and scientific evidence suggest that fengshui forests have fostered community resilience and ecological sustainability among Indigenous groups in southern China.
This article explores the concept of resilience within the framework of fengshui forests in subtropical southern China over the last millennium. Consisting of small patches of old-growth or old secondary-growth forest associated with graves, temples, and the paths of wind and water into and out of villages, fengshui forests were historically seen as nodes that supplied vital qi(energy, force or substance) to the community, an understanding that persists to the present day. Using a combination of textual, ethnographic, and scientific evidence, we examine how these forests, deeply embedded in the cultural and ecological fabric of the region, have fostered community resilience and sustainability over centuries. We show that fengshui’s vitalist and syncretic conception of the relationship among living people, ancestors, the land, and the trees allowed it to bridge Indigenous and imperial moral ecologies. By foregrounding both the emic and etic implication of fengshui, this article contributes to our understanding of Indigenous moral ecologies, the histories of social-ecological resilience, and the role of sacred forests in sustaining biodiversity and community well-being, past and present.

A synthesis of 60 meta-analyses finds that having social support is positively associated with adaptation to change and numerous other psychological outcomes.
Social support is the degree to which people are accepted by, cared for, and attended to by important others and is one of the most popular constructs in the psychological canon. This project synthesized data from 60 meta-analyses, which included over 2,700 studies and 2.1 million participants, to evaluate the association of social support with psychological adjustment. Results from a second-order meta-analysis indicated that, overall, social support yielded a robust association with psychological adjustment, r = .24, 95% CI [.22, .26]. Effects of social support were detectable across several outcome categories (mental health, psychological traits, educational outcomes, workplace outcomes), specific outcomes (depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, stress, burnout), and sources of support (friends, family, peers, teachers, coworkers, supervisors), and were detectable across age and cultural groups. However, perceived support was more strongly associated with psychological adjustment than received support. Furthermore, social support effects were larger when examining unhealthy samples, well-validated scales, and cross-sectional studies. Finally, effects were less pronounced in six meta-analyses that controlled for relevant covariates, r = .17, 95% CI [.10, .23]. Given the substantial variability of social support effects across prior meta-analyses (range = .07–.41), future study is needed to identify additional moderators of its association with psychological adjustment.