Here are some things we're working on right now.
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, such as 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 often reduce people to passive cultural dupes. 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 are 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 less committed to their organizations compared to women who are not mothers. One well-identified cause of this motherhood penalty is discrimination against mothers. While researchers often explain the penalty as the result of conflicting cultural meanings that underpin the roles of mothers and workers, those schemas have not yet been clearly measured or linked directly to the penalty. We are measuring these schemas and examining whether remote work opportunities can reduce the motherhood penalty by reducing role conflict.
More soon.