I received a news alert from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life where they ran a slide show of religious affiliations and political party, and given that they ran one of the few Asian American surveys ever, I thought surely they would add in the Asian Americans this time. Alas no. So I found the numbers from both the July report and from the recent slideshow to put together a few figures that help us put race and... Read more
Cognitive heuristics are mental shortcuts–rules of thumbs–that we use to make judgments about ourselves and the world around us. On of the best known heuristics is the “availability heuristic” that goes as follows. As we estimate the frequency with which something happens, we start by trying to think of an example of it, and if we can quickly think of an example then we think it’s a frequent occurrence. Like most heuristics, it works well often, but it produces biases... Read more
The New York Times recently reported on a study conducted by researchers at Yale in which they found that when presented with identical resumes of two job candidates–one named John and one named Jennifer–both male and female professors in science and math more favorably evaluated the male candidate over the female candidate. This study indicates that, unfortunately, gender biases still matter in the education, and even more unfortunately, that women under-estimate the skills of other women relative to men. What... Read more
In the last two years, I’ve been introduced to the culture of American Girls. Living in a wealthy suburb, I watched my daughter interact with neighbors and classmates carrying around their very own personalized American Girl doll. For just a little over $100, you can customize a doll to look just like you. But the spending does not end there. Here in Chicago, we also have an American Girl store, equipped with a hair salon, where dolls can get their... Read more
This isn’t much of a blog post, but I thought I’d note here that I’ve uploaded the New Family Structures Study data and documentation to ICPSR, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. For social scientists, it’s the most popular repository for data. After they process it, the NFSS should be publicly available there. I think it’s the right thing to do, and the right time, even though raw-data release is not required of... Read more
After writing about religion and social homophily (i.e., like people grouping together), I became aware of a forthcoming study that addresses this issue as it pertains to family life. It’s entitled “Bonding alone: Familism, religion, and secular civic participation” by Young-Il Kim and W. Bradford Wilcox, and it’s published in the prestigious journal Social Science Research. This article finds that religious involvement actually prompts secular civic involvement (though its effect varies by type of family). Interesting and it runs counter to... Read more
As I was thinking about my most recent blog on male-female differences, I asked the female cashier at Starbucks, “Do you think men and women are really different?” The cashier said, “Yeah, of course, you know like Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.” The guy behind me in line started cracking up in a way that I knew he was thinking “Oh yes they are—if you give me a minute I can tell you ‘bout my girl;... Read more
Amid all the rancor these days over who’s sexually attracted to whom—and what public policymakers ought to do about it, if anything—comes news of the emergence of another sexuality category, that of asexuality, or the state of not being sexually interested in men or women. It’s not really new news; acknowledgement of it has been around since Kinsey, if not before. It is thought to characterize around one percent of the population. I can imagine a good slogan about the... Read more
Growing up Korean American, it was taken for granted that Korean culture and politics would figure in family conversation with my mother and my aunts and uncles. Sadly, my Korean was so limited I could only guess what they were talking about based on how loud their conversation grew. And like many petulant second-generation kids, I would justify my ignorance by saying “but we’re in America now and we’re American!” This reasoning makes sense for some who have never migrated... Read more
The email announcement from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp stating he intends to step down next June that I received on Monday caught me by surprise, and I’m still sad about it. Tuesday afternoon, I attended a special session of the faculty council, where hundreds of faculty members packed the auditorium to show their support for Chancellor Thorp and ask him to reconsider his decision. Here is the text of the resolution hundreds of faculty voted... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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