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.

Pandemic unemployment benefits increased spending but not unemployment

The large temporary increases in US unemployment benefits during the pandemic had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts, suggesting that temporary benefit supplements are a promising countercyclical tool.

Author(s)
Peter Ganong, Fiona Greig, Pascal Noel, Daniel M. Sullivan and Joseph Vavra
Journal
American Economic Review
Citation
Ganong, Peter, Fiona Greig, Pascal Noel, Daniel M. Sullivan, and Joseph Vavra. 2024. "Spending and Job-Finding Impacts of Expanded Unemployment Benefits: Evidence from Administrative Micro Data." American Economic Review, 114 (9): 2898–2939. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20220973 Copy
Abstract

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in US history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics—but not employment dynamics—during the pandemic. Second, benefit expansions allow us to study the MPC of normally low-liquidity households in a high-liquidity state. These households still have high MPCs. This suggests a role for permanent behavioral characteristics, rather than just current liquidity, in driving spending behavior. Third, the mechanisms driving our results imply that temporary benefit supplements are a promising countercyclical tool.

Candidate-citizen town hall meetings increased voter information and turnout

In a randomized experiment, candidate-citizen town hall meetings in Benin led to more informed voters, increased turnout, and reduced effectiveness of vote-buying attempts, relative to one-way communication of candidate platforms to voters.

Author(s)
Leonard Wantchekon and Jenny Guardado
Journal
American Political Science Review
Citation
WANTCHEKON, LEONARD, and JENNY GUARDADO. “Deliberation and Ethical Voting Behavior: Evidence from a Campaign Experiment in Benin.” American Political Science Review 118, no. 3 (2024): 1261–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000813. Copy
Abstract

The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters’ political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign—that is, one-way communication of the candidate’s platform by himself or his local broker. We find that town-hall meetings led to a more informed citizenry and higher electoral participation, which diverged little along socioeconomic lines. We also observe a lower effectiveness of vote-buying attempts where town halls took place. This is consistent with town-hall deliberation promoting what we call more “ethical” voters.

Measuring avoidance in social networks 

In a nationally representative survey, adult Americans were as likely to avoid as to talk to close friends and family about difficult personal issues, suggesting a need to rethink theories of “strong ties.”

Author(s)
Mario L. Small, Kristina Brant, and Maleah Fekete
Journal
American Sociological Review
Citation
Small, M. L., Brant, K., & Fekete, M. (2024). The Avoidance of Strong Ties. American Sociological Review, 89(4), 615-649. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241263602 Copy
Abstract

Theorists have proposed that a value of close friends and family—strong ties—is the ability to confide in them when facing difficult issues. But close relationships are complicated, and recent studies report that people sometimes avoid strong ties when facing personal issues. How common is such avoidance? The question speaks to theoretical debates over the nature of “closeness” and practical concerns over social isolation. We develop an approach and test it on new, nationally representative data. We find that, when facing personal difficulties, adult Americans are as likely to avoid as to talk to close friends and family. Most avoidance is not actively reflected on but passively enacted, and, contrary to common belief, is not limited to either specific network members or particular topics, depending instead on the conjunction of member and topic. Building on Simmel, we propose that a theory of the fundamental need to conceal and reveal helps account for the findings. We suggest that there is no more empirical justification for labeling strong ties as those who are trusted than for labeling them as those who are avoided. In turn, isolation might be less a matter of having no intimates than of having repeatedly to avoid them.

Estimating causal effects of continuous treatments

A new weighting method for estimating causal effects of continuous treatments.

Author(s)
Jared D. Huling, Noah Greifer, and Guanhua Chen
Journal
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Citation
Huling, Jared D., Noah Greifer, and Guanhua Chen. 2023. “Independence Weights for Causal Inference with Continuous Treatments.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 119 (546): 1657–70. doi:10.1080/01621459.2023.2213485. Copy
Abstract

Studying causal effects of continuous treatments is important for gaining a deeper understanding of many interventions, policies, or medications, yet researchers are often left with observational studies for doing so. In the observational setting, confounding is a barrier to the estimation of causal effects. Weighting approaches seek to control for confounding by reweighting samples so that confounders are comparable across different treatment values. Yet, for continuous treatments, weighting methods are highly sensitive to model misspecification. In this article we elucidate the key property that makes weights effective in estimating causal quantities involving continuous treatments. We show that to eliminate confounding, weights should make treatment and confounders independent on the weighted scale. We develop a measure that characterizes the degree to which a set of weights induces such independence. Further, we propose a new model-free method for weight estimation by optimizing our measure. We study the theoretical properties of our measure and our weights, and prove that our weights can explicitly mitigate treatment-confounder dependence. The empirical effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated in a suite of challenging numerical experiments, where we find that our weights are quite robust and work well under a broad range of settings.

Increasing methods training in anthropology

A survey of members of the American Anthropological Association reveals strong support for increasing graduate student training in research methods, including systematic ethnographic research and statistical analysis.

Author(s)
Rosalyn Negrón, Amber Wutich, H. Russell Bernard, Alexandra Brewis, Alissa Ruth, Katherine Mayfour, Barbara Piperata, Melissa Beresford, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Pardis Mahdavi, Jessica Hardin, Rebecca Zarger, Krista Harper, James Holland Jones, Clarence C. Gravlee and Bryan Brayboy
Journal
American Anthropologist
Citation
Negrón, Rosalyn, Amber Wutich, H. Russell Bernard, Alexandra Brewis, Alissa Ruth, Katherine Mayfour, Barbara Piperata, Melissa Beresford, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Pardis Mahdavi, Jessica Hardin, Rebecca Zarger, Krista Harper, James Holland Jones, Clarence C. Gravlee, and Bryan Brayboy. 2024. “ Ethnographic methods: Training norms and practices and the future of American anthropology.” American Anthropologist 126: 458–469. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13991 Copy
Abstract

American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs through each of these three reckonings. This article, written by a team of cultural, biocultural, and linguistic anthropologists, outlines key connections between ethnographic methods training and the challenges facing anthropology. We draw on insights from a large-scale survey of American Anthropological Association members to examine current ethnographic methods capabilities and training practices. Study findings are presented and explored to answer three guiding questions: To what extent do our current anthropological practices in ethnographic methods training serve to advance or undermine current calls for disciplinary change? To what extent do instructors themselves identify disconnects between their own practices and the need for innovation? And, finally, what can be done, and at what scale, to leverage ethnographic methods training to meet calls for disciplinary change?

Text analysis in historical research

Advances in the computational analysis of large bodies of text have created new opportunities in historical research.

Author(s)
Jo Guldi
Journal
The American Historical Review
Citation
Jo Guldi, The Revolution in Text Mining for Historical Analysis is Here, The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 519–543, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae163 Copy
Abstract

We have known since Vico to think of written text and oral traditions as two systems of culture. Social historians have long treated the rise of literacy itself as an important index of modernity, although collectors of oral traditions have typically transcribed folk songs and oral stories into text. Modern historians track the appearance of different genres of writing, from parliamentary blue books to the newspaper to the novel to published transcripts of court cases, as an index of evolving institutions and markets. And knowledge of the way that these texts circulated—whether read aloud in the post office or debated on bulletin board systems on the early internet—is often a clue to important social structures. The knowledge accessible through text does not exhaust in any way the full repository of artifacts that historians use—which of course extends to the formats of texts; to visual and audio media, which may or may not combine graphics, video, or sound with text; to the record of the built and natural environment itself; and to demographic, price, and climate data sometimes measured in nontextual ways and stored in separate repositories. Despite innovation and a plurality of possible concerns, many of our points of entry into the past remain through text.

Anxiety and adaptive threat responses

Developing more effective treatments for anxiety disorders by understanding the adaptive behaviors and biological systems that evolved to defend organisms from threat.

Author(s)
Michael S. Fanselow and Ann N. Hoffman
Journal
American Psychologist
Citation
Fanselow, M. S., & Hoffman, A. N. (2024). Fear, defense, and emotion: A neuroethological understanding of the negative valence research domain criteria. American Psychologist, 79(5), 725–734. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001354 Copy
Abstract

We describe the close correspondence between predatory imminence continuum theory (PICT) and the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) for negative valence. RDoC’s negative valence constructs relate aversively motivated behavioral reactions to various levels of threat. PICT divides defensive responses into distinct modes that vary along a continuum of the psychological closeness of predatory threat. While there is a close correspondence between PICT modes and negative valence threat constructs, based on PICT, we describe some potential elaborations of RDoC constructs. Both have consonant views of fear and anxiety and provide explicit distinctions between these emotional states, relating them to specific defensive behaviors and functions. We describe recent data that causally implicate human subjective emotional states with amygdala activity, which is also critical for defensive behavior. We conclude that attention to neuroethological views of defense can advance our understanding of the etiology and treatment of anxiety and stress disorders.

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