Frontiers in Social 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.
During the US civil rights movement, movement leaders sought to put pressure on the municipal bond market as a means to lever indebted southern municipalities into eliminating racial segregation.
This article uncovers the financial knowledge and bond market campaigns of the paradigmatic non-violent revolution of the twentieth century—the civil rights movement. It builds on an interpretation made by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the early 1960s: segregation was a national problem because it was financed through a network of bankers across the country who specialized in the business of debt; certified by prominent bond attorneys in New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere; and because investors from around the country collected tax-exempt interest payments from indebted southern segregated municipalities. By weaving the internal memos, protest ephemera, and legal strategies of civil rights activists together with the credit assessments, scheduled bond offerings, and perspectives of financiers, this article reconstructs the attempts to politicize bond market transactions and efforts to place the economic certainty of segregation in doubt. In so doing, it offers a fresh perspective on the so-called classic phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965). More generally, it raises powerful questions about the dilemmas of investment-focused campaigns, and how finance capital compounds the difficulties of organizing against authoritarian regimes.
Psychologists’ predictions of societal change during the pandemic were no more accurate than random chance or lay predictions, and accuracy did not improve with domain-specific expertise.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists’ areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statements). How accurate are these kinds of judgments regarding societal change? In Study 2, we obtained predictions from scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) in Spring 2020 regarding the direction of change for a range of social and psychological phenomena. We compared them to objective data obtained at 6 months and 1 year. To further probe how experience impacts such judgments, 6 months later (Study 3), we obtained retrospective judgments of societal change for the same domains (Nscientists = 270; Nlaypeople = 411). Bayesian analysis suggested greater credibility of the null hypothesis that scientists’ judgments were at chance on average for both prospective and retrospective judgments. Moreover, neither domain-general expertise (i.e., judgmental accuracy of scientists compared to laypeople) nor self-identified domain-specific expertise improved accuracy. In a follow-up study on meta-accuracy (Study 4), we show that the public nevertheless expects psychological scientists to make more accurate predictions about individual and societal change compared to most other scientific disciplines, politicians, and nonscientists, and they prefer to follow their recommendations. These findings raise questions about the role psychological scientists could and should play in helping the public and policymakers plan for future events.