For social scientists, the National Basketball Association isn’t simply a source of pulse-pounding excitement, it’s a laboratory that yields insights into human behavior. As the strike-shortened season settles into its groove, we examine some NBA-related studies that have dribbled out in recent months, exploring such game-changing factors as performance-sapping stress, unconscious racism, and the power of positive momentum. Chokehold: LeBron Explained Do world-class athletes choke under pressure? Evidence from the NBA suggests the answer is yes — but only during the final minute of ... Read More
Showing Where Community Colleges Pass, Fail
August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Community colleges, the often-overlooked workhorses of America's higher-education system, are finally getting some respect. Sure, many have been forced to cut their budgets due to shortfalls in state revenues. But President Obama has pledged his support to these schools, setting a goal of an additional 5 million students by 2020. Bill Gates' foundation announced a $35 million grant aimed at boosting graduation rates. And NBC is about to premiere the third season of its hit comedy Community, which is set at one of these underappreciated institutions. The official website of that fictional ... Read More
Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude
July 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A bowling alley. A severed toe sporting a neatly polished nail. An aging hippie and his best friend, a Vietnam War veteran with a hair-trigger temper. If those images don't add up to anything for you, feel free to flip the page. If they do, it means you're familiar — perhaps intimately so — with one of the most analyzed, deconstructed and eclectically interpreted films of recent decades: The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen's subversive comedy, in which a slovenly slacker (Jeff Bridges) in modern-day L.A. gets caught up in a convoluted kidnapping case, was neither a critical nor a ... Read More
Fatherhood Scholars Know Best
June 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The post-World War II era was the age of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, when a benign patriarch's authority over his household was complete and unquestioned. Or was it? Writing in the Journal of Family History in 2004, Georgia State University sociologist Ralph LaRossa concluded the culture of fatherhood between 1945 and 1960 "was a lot more complex than the standard narratives allow." His survey of popular magazines, top-rated television series and child-rearing manuals of the day suggest the role of the father was in flux, with rigid gender roles in society becoming increasingly ... Read More
Dr. Seuss Analyzed for Political, Social Effects
March 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Of all the places he'd go in his wildly fertile imagination, Theodor S. Geisel — better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss — probably never dreamed he'd be referenced in the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting. But the man who wrote a classic work of children's literature using a vocabulary of only 51 words (Green Eggs and Ham) would be amused to discover how many densely packed pages of academic prose are devoted to his work. Today, on the beloved author and illustrator's 107th birthday (which, as always, will be celebrated by the National Education Association as Read Across ... Read More
The History and Frightening Future of Forests
January 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The United Nations has declared 2011 the International Year of Forests, an interestingly ambiguous title that can be read as either celebratory or cautionary. Our review of recent forest-related research is similarly mixed: It seems that for every paper that warns forests are at risk from climate change, another suggests that, if well-managed, they could help mitigate its impact. Playing the role of victim and savior simultaneously is a lot to ask, but then forests have always played a dual role in the lives of man. In literature and folklore, they represent both the terror of the wild ... Read More
What Would Jesus Buy?
November 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The editorial was blunt and caustic: Christmas, it complained, had become "a festival for store-keepers." Retail was replacing religion as the holiday's focus, and the editors of Ladies' Home Journal felt compelled to protest — in 1890. Six decades later, a group of French priests made a similar point in a literally more inflammatory way, hanging and burning an effigy of Santa Claus in front of several hundred children on Christmas Eve. The clerics condemned the bringer of presents as "a usurper and a heretic," according to an account by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. As these ... Read More
How Polling Places Can Affect Your Vote
August 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Political pundits seldom pause to ponder polling places. Unless the lines in a given location are so long they discourage voting, the question of where ballots are cast is usually ignored as irrelevant. But wonks — especially those who straddle political science and social psychology — know better. They argue the physical location of the polls not only affects how many people vote; it may also influence last-minute decisions regarding which box to mark or lever to pull. As the November election approaches, we offer some recent studies that attempt to think outside the ballot ... Read More
