Here are some projects in our pipeline.
Can large-scale environmental disruptions create cultural belief change? While prevailing models of cultural change emphasize the stability of beliefs in adults, we propose that durable belief change can occur when major events transform a society’s material or cultural environment in ways that make specific stimuli unexpectedly salient. Like certain occupations during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown period.
Networks impact how we acquire information and adopt behaviors. Current models of these processes highlight the influence of social structures on person- and system-level outcomes, but in doing so they do so by reducing the people within them to cultural dupes who are "infected" only by passive contact or peer pressure. By contrast, actors often actively and strategically seek out ideas or practices they may adopt in ways that are patterned by their social networks. We're elaborating this argument through a set of agent-based network models that augment existing approaches with active search routines inspired by network theory and cognitive science.
Mothers who work are paid and promoted less, hired less often, and viewed as less competent and committed to their organizations compared to women who are not mothers. One one well-identified cause of this "motherhood penalty" is discrimination against mothers. While researchers who study the penalty often explain it to be the result of conflicting cultural meanings that underpin the roles of “mothers” and “workers” in society, but these schemas have not yet been clearly measured or linked directly to the motherhood penalty. We are working on a project that measures these schemas, and examines whether recently popularized remote work opportunities can reduce the motherhood penalty by reducing role conflict.
More soon!
