In a growing body of literature, researchers leverage the occurrence of unexpected events to estimate the causal effects of events on public opinion and behaviours. Specifically, the combination of survey data collected serendipitously around the time of the unexpected event with a quasi-experimental research design makes it possible to draw inferences on the impact of […]
Category: social science
The time problem in the big problem paradox
Here is the abstract from a new paper on what the authors coin the ‘big problem paradox’: Across 15 studies (N = 2,636), people who considered the prevalence of a problem (e.g., 4.2 million people drive drunk each month) inferred it caused less harm, a phenomenon we dub the big problem paradox. People believed dire […]
25 interesting facts #35
851. Women who compete in the Final Jeopardy segment of the game show Jeopardy! are no more risk averse than men (Leeds and Leeds 2024) 852. Dogs and their owners resemble each other in the way they look and in their personality traits (Bender et al. 2025) 853. Wearing a helmet while cycling is beneficial, […]
AI will be dead in five years
There is this joke that people do statistics in R, machine learning in Python, and AI in PowerPoint. (I did not say it is a funny joke.) The point is that AI is not only about technology and programming, but also about framing machine learning in business-friendly terms to convince tech and non-tech savvy audiences […]
Headache estimates are giving me a headache
Here is the first paragraph from the introduction in a paper on headaches: “In the general population 4% have never experienced a headache.” Of course, such a precise number caught my interest. How do we know that 4% of people have never experienced a headache? Luckily, the paper provides some insights, namely that when asked […]