Faculty Notes
Faculty members in the Division of Social Sciences help develop today's undergraduates to become critical thinkers – to ask the "why" questions in the tradition of great philosophers and to answer the "why" questions of economics, anthropology, psychology and politics. They guide these answers through their own research and accomplishments, some of which are detailed below.
Faculty: Enter achievements here.
Recent Honors and Awards
2013
Scott Carrell, associate professor of economics, received the 2012 IZA Young Labor Economist Award for his and Mark Hoekstra's article "Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone's Kids". The award-winning paper studies whether children from troubled families generate negative spillovers on the educational achievements of their peers. The prize money of 5,000 Euros is shared between Carrell and Hoekstra.
Latest Grants and Research
2013
Jeffrey Sherman, professor of psychology, received an Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation. The collaboration award is presented annually to outstanding researchers from other countries with the aim of advancing the internationalization of the respective disciplines in Germany. The award amount of 250,000 EUR can be used to fund research cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany over a period of five years. The researchers are nominated by academic collaboration partners at German universities and research institutions. Funding for the award is provided by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Dina Okamoto in the Department of Sociology was awarded a $368,596 grant by Russell Sage Foundation for "Immigrant-Native Relations in 21st Century America: Intergroup Contact, Trust, and Civic Engagement." This interdisciplinary project seeks to address ongoing debates about ethnic diversity by investigating where and how contact occurs between immigrant and native groups, and how their contact in turn predicts trust and civic engagement. The project will include a large-scale survey, in-depth interviews, and field work in two traditionally black-white metropolitan areas—Philadelphia and Atlanta— and examine intergroup contact experiences among immigrant Mexicans and South Asian Indians, and native-born blacks and whites.
Alison Ledgerwood, assistant professor of psychology, and Amber Boydstun, assistant professor of political science, were awarded a $150,000 grant by the National Science Foundation. This grant will support a new interdisciplinary project that advances an expanded theoretical understanding of framing effects by investigating how encountering different descriptions of the same issue over time can influence people's preferences and decisions. In this project, they examine the hypothesis that loss frames (e.g., describing an economic policy in terms of jobs lost) may be fundamentally stickier than gain frames (describing the same policy in terms of jobs saved) in their ability to shape people's thinking. We examine the basic psychological mechanisms underlying this effect as well as its potentially sizeable implications for political and economic behavior.
