Explorations in Applied Social Science

Explorations in the social contagion of memory.

Four experiments examined social influence on the development of false memories. We employed the social contagion paradigm: A subject and a confederate see scenes and then later take turns recalling items from the scenes, with the confederate erroneously reporting some items that were not present in the scenes; on a final test, the subject reports these suggested items when instructed to recall...

The Structural Topic Model and Applied Social Science∗

We develop the Structural Topic Model which provides a general way to incorporate corpus structure or document metadata into the standard topic model. Document-level covariates enter the model through a simple generalized linear model framework in the prior distributions controlling either topical prevalence or topical content. We demonstrate the model’s use in two applied problems: the analysi...

Multichannel Sequence Analysis Applied to Social Science Data

Pure Science and Applied Science*

The name of my talk is Pure Science and Applied Science, and the idea I would like to sell to you today is that there is no such thing as “pure” or “applied” science. In other words, there is such a thing as science, but there is no difference between pure and applied science. Science is one entity and cannot be separated into different categories. In order to back that up, I would like to tell...

Acquiring Expertise in Science: Explorations of What, When, and How

Relatively little is known about the skills that practicing scientists actually use. This lack of knowledge makes the design of science curricula rather difficult. How can we train students to be scientists if we do not know what it means to be a scientist? In this chapter, we ask two central questions about the nature of expertise in science: 1) Are there general skills that scientists from di...