At the end of every interview that host David Edmonds conducts for the Social Science Bites podcast, he poses the same question: Whose work most influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the social and behavioral science enterprise itself. 

In this, the fifth such montage, we offer the latest collection. Again, a wide spectrum of influences reveals itself, including nods to non-social-science figures like philosopher Derek Parfit and primatologist Jane Goodall, historical heavyweights like Adam Smith and the couple Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and two past guests on Social Science Bites itself, Nobel Prize laureates Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman. 

<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">LISTEN TO THE MONTAGE NOW!
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This is the fifth collection in this series. Links to the other montages appear below.

To download this latest montage, right click HERE and ‘save.’ 

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 4: A Social Science Bites Retrospective

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 3

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 2

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 1

A transcript of this episode appears below.

TRANSCRIPT

David Edmonds: After I’ve interviewed social scientists for Social Science Bites, I try to remember to ask each of them a simple question: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or influenced them? Here’s the latest montage. 

Carsten de Dreu: So I’m Carsten de Dreu, and I’m a professor at Leiden University and I study conflict. The most influential paper, and I have been running around for now almost 30 years, so I take a paper that appeared, I think, about 15 years ago in Science magazine by a colleague of mine, Samuel Bowles. And he showed in that paper that throughout our evolution, humans were very cooperative together to fight outsiders. And he had a mathematical model and he had archaeological data. And as a psychologist, I looked at it and I thought, could this be true? But if that’s true, we should see this also in our hormones, in our brains, in our hearts and minds. And that triggered for me a line of work that I’m still busy with these days. So yeah, that was perhaps a defining paper for me and my career. Absolutely. 

Karin Barber: I’m Karin Barber, emeritus professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham. I think of two books that I really love, and they made me think that anthropology was a humanities as well as a social science subject. One is called Feeling Arts, a book about, I think, religion and philosophy. And the other is Alfred Gell’s book, Art and Agency. It is just mind-expanding, highly original, fascinating book. Art and Agency made me think that art forms could be thought of in a different way from the standard Western categories of art being something you contemplate and put in a museum and so on. Alfred Gell conceptualized it as a kind of extension of the person, how people deposit elements of themselves in the environments, and how they do this in order to dazzle and to change other people. 

Bobby Duffy: I’m Bobby Duffy, I’m director of the policy institute at King’s College London. I think it’s Bob Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. The thing that really attracted me about it was the very strong data analysis and very clear revelation of patterns that I hadn’t seen before in such a simple way, and it was looking at cohorts over time, and how that actually proved some elements of his thesis about how we’ve seen a real shift that people were living lives very differently. And you could see this laid out in lines. It was just whole life stories of a changing society, just in a few lines in a chart that had real implications for policy, and practice on a key aspect that was already of interest to me about how connected or disconnected we were becoming as a society. So a lovely piece of clear work, data driven, but then woven into life stories that had real world implications around how we connect. 

Heaven Crawley: Okay, I’m Heaven Crawley, I’m director of the migration for development and equality hub, and I’m also head of equitable development and migration at the UN University’s Center for Policy Research in New York. It’s a very easy question, because Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was a book that I read in the first year of my undergraduate degree in the African and Asian Studies part of the University of Sussex. So in the late 1980s, and it absolutely transformed how I understood the things that I had taken for granted. I was very young, of course, I hadn’t read that much. But, you know, Walter Rodney was a fantastic Guyanan scholar, who unfortunately died very young, but who left a legacy of research, really talking about how Europe’s involvement in Africa through colonialism, and through all the things that have happened subsequently, have really shaped the direction of travel for the continent. And it’s shaped how I think about everything, but it’s also my go-to when I get asked questions like this. 

David Dunning: I’m David Dunning. I’m a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in the United States. The answer I would give, if you could find it, would be [Richard] Nisbett and [Lee] Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcoming in Human Reasoning. It was published in 1980 and it’s the reason why I’m a professor of psychology, because it basically asked the question, how good are people as scientists doing the type of reasoning that scientists do? And it found that there were systematic ways in which people diverged from being scientists in their everyday lives that led to errors and costs and calamities. And it was just an eye-opening book. It made me think, OK, not only am I going to go into psychology, I’m going to work with one of these guys and I did. I worked with Lee Ross. 

Ayelet Fishbach: I am Ayelet Fishbach. I’m a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. When I finished my dissertation, I finished my PhD at Tel Aviv University, I came to work with Arie Kruglanski at University of Maryland. And what I heard Lansky was, was interested in studying was how people pursue multiple goals. So basically understanding what he referred to as goal systems and the idea that there are many goals in each of these causes connected to a means of attainment and like these means they can inhibit some calls and facilitate other calls. There is a whole body of knowledge out there and things can get really complicated pretty quickly. But it kind of really opened my eyes. So at that point in my life, I was studying self-control conflicts, and it was always like two things that are in opposition, I realize that there is many more than two things. They don’