There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how socia...

Good news is more persuasive when it is more consistent, and bad news is less damaging when it is less consistent. We show when Bayesian updating supports this intuition so that a biased sender prefers more or less variance in the news depending on whether the mean of the news exceeds expectations, and we apply the result to selective news distortion by a manager of multiple projects. If news f...

Giving bad news can be anxiety-provoking. When faced with a bad news delivery situation, people may use prosodic techniques such as mixing good news with the bad. In these events, people may ask, “Do you want the good or the bad news first?” In this study we examined whether news order has affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. Participants completed a personality test and received ...