Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 1 of 28

Bridging the Classroom and the Real World

On May 27, 2025

In Behavior/Psychology, Climate/Global Change, Data, Global Health, Space

What if some of the most innovative academic contributions this year didn’t come from tenured professors but students still working toward their degrees? Though often treated as a novel or even surprising idea, student researchers are producing work that challenges these assumptions and pushes the boundaries of work within their fields. Their contributions are not limited to classroom assignments but have transformed into real academic research with tangible impacts.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Duke’s Bass Connections showcase, where student researchers present the results of their year-long interdisciplinary projects. This past month, student researchers across all disciplines gathered together in Penn Pavilion to share work spanning fields from space policy to criminal justice. The showcase revealed how students are not only contributing to research efforts but instead actively shaping its future. Attending the showcase offered me a firsthand look at the creativity, depth, and relevance of these projects. Each one I encountered revealed a unique blend of academic rigor and public purpose that deserves to be highlighted:

Future Space Settlements: Lessons from History

One of the standout projects that I encountered was “Future Space Settlements: Lessons from History.” During the showcase, I had the pleasure of speaking to Simran Pandey (‘27), Lawrence Wu (‘27), and Nikhil Methi (‘27), who were part of the Future Space Settlements team. Their work explored how the legal, political, economic, and social histories of terrestrial colonization might inform future efforts to establish human settlements beyond Earth. Grounded in a policy-oriented framework, the team drew on historical case studies to both model and caution against potential approaches to space expansion

Group from L to R: Lawrence Wu, Simran Pandey, and Nikhil Methi

Over the summer, the team conducted extensive archival research and created a comprehensive database of treaties, documents, and records to anchor their analysis. Throughout the academic year, subteams focused on space settlements from different angles, including legal precedents, historical analogies, and speculative design. Additionally, the team met with experts within the fields of space and policy.

This level of coordination did not come without challenges. The researchers explained how, despite their ambitious scope, finding sources that bridged centuries of terrestrial history with their respective disciplines proved to be difficult. Pandey, Wu, and Methi explained how managing multiple disciplines in conjunction with a scarcity of sources made it difficult to produce a cohesive output. Reflecting on the experience, the team emphasized the importance of narrowing the project scope and aligning deliverables with capacity. As Methi noted, they “began with lofty ambitions,” but future years would benefit from a tighter focus to ensure depth over breadth.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Post Roe v. Wade: Correlates of State Variation in Anti-Abortion Fake Clinics

Another compelling project I learned about during the showcase was Crisis Pregnancy Centers Post Roe v. Wade: Correlates of State Variation in Anti-Abortion Fake Clinics. For this, I spoke to Anushri Saxena (‘25), who based her thesis on this research. Saxena explained how while on the team, she examined the rise and distribution of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) across the United States. CPCs are anti abortion organizations that often present themselves as legitimate abortion providers, intending to dissuade people from seeking abortion care. While they exist in all 50 states, the group’s research aimed to understand why some states host significantly more CPC’s per capita than others.

Anushri Saxena at the Bass Connections Showcase

To do this, Saxena personally used regression modeling by conducting a quantitative analysis of state-level policy. She used demographic factors such as Republican alignment, proportion of evangelical populations, and the restrictiveness of state abortion laws to identify key drivers of CPC density. The process involved conducting a literature review to identify relevant variables, building hypotheses, and learning statistical methods to execute her analysis.

One major challenge Saxena described was the volatile nature of reproductive healthcare policy, as significant legal shifts occurred even during the course of her writing. While reflecting on the limitations of state-level data, she expanded her work this semester to produce a more granular analysis of North Carolina, exploring how CPC’s are concentrated in census tracts marked by education levels, higher poverty rates, and more single-parent households. Her work provides not only a broader understanding of antiabortion mobilization but also a need for local community-specific policy responses in a post-Roe America.

Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County

“Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County” also stood out to me during this showcase. From this team, I was able to speak to Miranda Li (‘27) and Jacqueline Dinh (‘27). This project aimed to examine the intersection between incarceration and mental health outcomes, with a specific focus on Durham County.

From L to R: Miranda Li, and Jacqueline Dinh

To tackle these complexities, the team was divided into four sub-projects: two quantitative and two qualitative. On the quantitative side, one team explored how sociodemographic and spatial data influenced an individual’s likelihood of being rebooked, while another team worked to validate and analyze newly acquired jail service data, such as psychiatric visits and mental health interventions. On the qualitative side, one group led focused group-based interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals to assess whether existing jail services were effective in promoting recovery. Another subteam focused more on the experiences of family members of incarcerated individuals, highlighting the emotional burden that they carry and the importance of community support networks.

While Dinh and Li reflected on the freedom to shape their own qualitative approach, they also described the difficulty of managing an overwhelming influx of raw data and the importance of starting from ground zero to ensure validity. One of the biggest challenges that they struggled with as a group was a wide-open research structure. Although the autonomy was truly empowering, it sometimes led to uncertainty about direction and deliverables. Looking ahead, both researchers emphasized the value of continued collaboration with community stakeholders to better align the research with local needs and strengthen the actionable outcomes.

Together, these three projects spanning space policy, reproductive rights, and criminal justice highlight the depth of student-led research today. Each project showed not only academic rigor but also a clear commitment to addressing real-world issues through thoughtful, interdisciplinary inquiry. Their contributions serve as a powerful reminder that meaningful research is not solely limited to faculty but can also be a space where students lead with curiosity, creativity, and purpose.

Post by Gabrielle Douglas, Class of 2027

The Imperfect Ways of a Perfectionist

By Sarah Pusser

On March 18, 2025

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Field Research, Neuroscience

Perfectionism, although a way to control our surroundings, can often control us. As a student in the stressful and competitive environment of college, I’ve seen the pursuit of perfection overwhelm me and those around me. These incidents caught the attention of Duke psychiatry and behavioral science professors Nancy Zucker and Rachel Alison Adcock. The two decided to do an in-depth study of perfectionism, and how perfectionists can better handle their stress and be more productive.

Photo credits: *Halyna Dorozhynska* via Canva

When first trying to measure perfectionism, Zucker and Adcock found that “…the core essence of perfectionism was the sphere of failure,” meaning that out of everyone they studied, the majority of participants tended to be pushed to perfectionism because of a fear of failing. Given this, Zucker and Adcock were able to show a correlation between one’s concern over mistakes and their anxiety, social anxiety, and depressive symptoms.

Rachel Alison Adcock, M.D., Ph.D., and Nancy Zucker, Ph.D. *Credit: Duke*

Even with these correlations being present, “If given the choice between being a perfectionist and not being a perfectionist, 62.5% [of perfectionists] would choose to stay.” This means that in order to better support perfectionists in their everyday lives, Zucker and Adcock had to find ways to support perfectionists without trying to change them–in other words, you can’t just tell perfectionists to not be perfectionists anymore. So together, they created four different solutions to help minimize the harm of perfectionism:

Solution 1: Increase resource

Zucker and Adcock note that this is usually advice given for better mental health; “Go do something fun. Hang out with your friends. Go do yoga…” While these tips can be helpful, Zucker and Adcock were more interested in the opposite side of the issue–how instead perfectionists can work on optimizing their demands

Solution 2: Defining demands

Again, Zucker and Adcock mention some limitations to this argument. It is not expected that perfectionists will reduce their standards–for example, “Duke. A slightly less than exceptional education, Duke Health. Slightly less than exceptional care.” Therefore this solution of defining demands relies on both the perfectionist and those in the position to assign work to the perfectionist. An example of this is a professor reevaluating the importance of the work they are assigning–does the work really need to be completed by this date? By ensuring the work assigned and completed “respect[s] our own resources, prioritize[s] stamina and [is] orient[ed] to growth and progress,” the standards of work become more realistic and achievable.

Solution 3: Change the reward value (and distress) of making mistakes via self-regulation

Through testing how individuals responded to high confidence versus low confidence errors (or in other words, individuals who confidently answer a question that is incorrect are more likely to remember the correct solution after being told than those who answer a question with low confidence and are incorrect), Zucker and Adcock found that “high perfectionism individuals are less sensitive to error than low perfectionism individuals” and “high perfectionism individuals are only sensitive to error after negative or positive framing.” This means that changing how perfectionists are made aware of their mistakes (showing them how mistakes are learning opportunities) can “increase perfectionists’ sensitivity to surprising feedback in updating beliefs,” and thus help those individuals learn from their mistakes better–so as to show how mistakes are crucial for learning.

Solution 4: Change reward value and distress of mistakes via social contingencies and milieu

Similar to solution three, solution four’s goal is to change the perception of mistakes, however, this solution proposes a change through group support instead of self-regulation. This could look like peer support groups for perfectionist individuals. Zucker and Adcock emphasize the importance of the message, “We are more than a single moment in time,” which can be beneficial for a perfectionist individual to hear from their trusted peers.

The importance of mistakes was a theme that continued to pop up throughout Zucker and Adcock’s presentation. And while that can seem cliche, it’s something that we as students, professors, and people, should listen to more (thanks to Zucker and Adcock, we’ve also seen how making mistakes is scientifically proven to teach us the correct answer).

As the researchers wrapped up their talk, they left us with one more quote that stuck with me. “We are in the pursuit of the unknown. Hope is medicine. Imperatives are not hope.”

In a place like college, where just one failure can feel like the end of the world, Zucker and Adcock’s research encourages us to grow comfortable with the unknown so that our mistakes too can be something to be proud of.

Sarah Pusser Class of 2028

Nature On the Brain: Green Space, Cities and Depression

By Crystal Han

On March 1, 2025

In Behavior/Psychology, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Lecture, Neuroscience

Though I’ve yet to explore all of Duke’s nooks and crannies, I feel confident that my favorite corner of campus will always be the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Nature, and green space generally, is good for us as humans. Most of us understand this on an intuitive level, but what’s the underlying reason? How might it be built into our brains?

Psychology professor Marc G. Berman looks for the answers. At the University of Chicago, Berman directs the Environmental Neuroscience Lab, in which he investigates interactions between our brains and our physical surroundings. In a recent virtual Grand Rounds lecture in Duke’s Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Berman spoke about the broad scope of his research and its implications for a better society.

Attention Restoration Theory

Researchers have proposed various theories for why we love nature. For example, the biophilia hypothesis states that humans have an innate attraction to nature on a genetic and evolutionary basis. However, Berman is focused primarily on the Attention Restoration Theory, a concept he’s contributed to significantly. Under this theory, attention is split into two types: directed and involuntary.

The first type is finite––think about the amount of energy it takes you to deliberately concentrate on something. “The first five minutes of lecture, everybody’s very focused on me,” Berman said, using the example of his own classes. Forty-five minutes later, and people inevitably begin to nod off.

*Mingo Falls, North Carolina. Author photo*

On the other hand, involuntary attention is not really under our control and isn’t as susceptible to becoming drained. Within stimuli that capture our involuntary attention, some are softer or harsher than others, like a stream compared to flashing lights (the stream being a softer attention capture, which we call soft fascination).

The cornerstone of Attention Restoration Theory is that nature provides an ideal environment for the restoration of directed attention; full of “softly fascinating” features, it stimulates involuntary attention without placing demands on directed attention.

A Walk in the Park

Roughly 20 years ago while Berman was a researcher at the University of Michigan, he and his colleagues wanted to test out the Attention Restoration Theory. So, after asking study participants to perform a backwards digit span task (a test for memory that would require directed attention), they told them to take a walk. Participants were directed to either a route through downtown Ann Arbor, or through the Nichols Arboretum. Then another digit span test. A week later, they repeated the whole procedure, this time walking in the other environment. Interestingly, walking through the arboretum proved more beneficial for memory. “We see about a 20% improvement in this task after people go on this brief 50-minute walk in nature versus walking in the urban environment. So that’s pretty impressive,” Berman said.

Many of us wouldn’t be surprised by this–certainly, I know a walk in the Gardens on a pleasant day recharges my ability to focus. Time in green space and warm weather often lifts our moods, but they discovered that this cognitive benefit occurs regardless of how you feel afterwards. Walkers turned cranky from the winter cold demonstrated improvements on par with those who gladly embraced sunny weather in June.

Berman saw even more of a positive effect for the park-goers when repeating the study with participants diagnosed with depression, contrary to a concern that walks alone might induce rumination on negative thoughts.

Cities: Better Than You Think They Are

In the Environmental Neuroscience Lab, Berman and doctoral students look at everything from brief interactions with nature to the long-term effects of living in large cities. Given everything thus far, it would seem logical that the latter would be far worse for our brains than other environments. Yet, Berman found just the opposite.

As it turns out, cities are beneficial for our social connectivity. Since people tend to encounter each other more often in urban areas, an individual will likely develop more social connections on average. Prior neuroscience studies have connected a greater number of social relationships to protection against depression.

*Chicago is the third largest city in the United States, both in terms of population and metropolitan area*.

Based on this, the risk of depression might be aptly represented by an inverse model of the number of people in one’s social network. In other words, the more people you maintain contact with, the lower your risk. To test it, Berman and collaborators enlisted four different data sets regarding depression–including in-person interviews, phone interviews with personal demographics, and over 15 million tweets (converted via machine learning algorithms into a PH-Q depression inventory score). The results confirmed it. “What we see across all of these different data sets is that as cities get larger, you get less depression per capita,” he said.

“Many of us have this impression that in bigger cities like New York, like Chicago, like Los Angeles, people are not as friendly…but these results suggest the opposite,” Berman said. “It must be on average that those social interactions are positive in cities and that more is better.”

Designing Environments for Our Brains

Regarding the main conversation surrounding mental health, Berman said, “We often think about [depression] in terms of this individual scale…your genetic makeup, brain activity patterns, individual psychological patterns. Maybe things about your family. We don’t really think about your neighborhood and your city.”

Knowing what we do about nature and large social networks can ultimately help us improve mental health outcomes on a broad scale. These two factors might seem to work against each other, but they don’t have to. Ultimately, we need more green space everywhere, including in large cities. The benefits are undeniable–urban areas with more greenery consistently see less aggression and crime, even when adjusting for race, ethnicity and income.

In addition, cities tend to have a lot of harsh stimuli, but that doesn’t mean some features of urban environments can’t be potentially restorative. “We believe that certain environmental features can be designed to improve human performance and well-being, like incorporating more natural features or natural patterns in the environment, trying to figure out ways to increase social interactions,” Berman said. By mimicking aspects of nature like curved lines, we might be able to create “soft fascination” closer to home and reduce the different demands pulling on our attention.

Crystal Han, Class of 2028

Making the Case for Data Privacy: Here’s What We’re Up Against

By Crystal Han

On February 24, 2025

In Artificial Intelligence, Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Data, Law

After bringing Data Privacy Day to campus seventeen years ago, Duke faculty Jolynn Dellinger and David Hoffman co-moderated this year’s event at the Law School on January 28. Seated between them were attorneys Joshua Stein and Carol Villegas, partners at law firm Boies Schiller Flexne LPP and Labaton Keller Sucharow, respectively. Both are in the midst of multiple lawsuits against corporate giants; Boies Schiller joined a lawsuit against Meta last year, while Labaton is currently involved in data privacy-related suits against Meta, Flo Health and Amazon, and Google.

Panelists at Data Privacy Day 2025 at the Duke School of Law

Villegas began by emphasizing the importance of legal action on these issues in light of inadequate legislation. She pointed to the confusion of senators at Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data of over 50 million Facebook users was misused for political purposes. “They don’t understand it…You can’t expect a legislature like that to make any kind of laws [on data privacy], not to mention technology is just moving way too fast,” Villegas said.

Facebook and most social media platforms generate revenue through advertisements. While many people are aware that these sites track their activity to better target users with ads, they may not know that these companies can collect data from outside of social apps. So, what does that look like?

Almost all apps are built using Software Development Kits (SDKs), which not only make it easier for developers to create apps but also track analytics. Tracking pixels function similarly for building websites. These kits and pixels are often provided for free by companies like Google and Meta–and it’s not too difficult to guess why this might be an issue. “An SDK is almost like an information highway,” Villegas said. “They’re getting all of the data that you’re putting into an app. So every time you press a button in an app, you know you answer a survey in an app, buy something in an app, all of that information is making its way to Meta and Google to be used in their algorithm.”

So, there’s more at stake than just your data being tracked on Instagram; tracking pixels are often used by hospitals, raising the concern of sensitive health data being shared with third parties. The popular women’s health app Flo helps users track their fertility and menstrual cycle–information it promised to keep private. Yet in Frasco v. Flo Health, Labaton alleged it broke confidentiality and violated the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA), illegally transmitting data via Software Development Kits to companies like Google and Meta. Flo Health ended up settling out of court with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) without admitting wrongdoing, though Google failed to escape the case, which remains ongoing.

It’s not only lawyers who are instrumental to this process. In cases like the ones that Stein and Villegas work on, academics and researchers can play key roles as expert witnesses. From psychiatrists to computer scientists, these experts explain the technical aspects and provide scientific basis to the judge and jury. Getting a great expert is costly and a significant challenge in itself–ideally, they’d be well-regarded in their field, have very specialized knowledge, and have some understanding of court proceedings. “There are really important ways your experts will get attacked for their credibility, for their analysis, for their conclusions, and their qualifications even,” said Stein, referring to Daubert challenges, which can result in expert testimony being excluded from trial.

The task of finding experts becomes even more daunting when going up against companies as colossal and profitable as Meta. “One issue that’s come up in AI cases, is finding an expert in AI that isn’t being paid by one of these large technology companies or have… grants or funding from one of these companies. And I got turned down by a lot of experts because of that issue,” Stein said.

Ultimately, some users don’t care that much if their data is being shared, making it more difficult to address privacy and hold corporations accountable. The aforementioned cases filed by Labaton are class action lawsuits, meaning that a smaller group represents a much larger group of individuals–for example, all users of a certain app within a given timeframe. Yes, it may seem pointless to push for data privacy when even the best outcomes in these cases only entitle individuals to small sums of money, often no more than $30. However, these cases have an arguably more important consequence: when successful, they force companies to change their behavior, even if only in small changes to their services.

By Crystal Han, Class of 2028

The Dukies Cited Most Highly

By Karl Bates

On November 19, 2024

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cardiology, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Genetics/Genomics, Medicine, Neuroscience, Physics, Space

The Web of Science ranking of the world’s most highly-cited scientists was released this morning, telling us who makes up the top 1 percent of the world’s scientists. These are the authors of influential papers that other scientists point to when making their arguments.

EDITOR’S NOTE! — Web of Science shared last year’s data! We apologize. List below is now corrected, changes to copy in bold. We’re so sorry.

Twenty-three of the citation laureates are Duke scholars or had a Duke affiliation when the landmark works were created over the last decade.

*A couple of these Duke people disappeared from this year’s list, but we’re still proud of them.*

Two names on the list belong to Duke’s international powerhouse of developmental psychology, the Genes, Environment, Health and Behavior Lab, led by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi.

Dan Scolnic of Physics returns as our lone entry in Space Science, which just makes Duke sound cooler all around, don’t you think?

This is a big deal for the named faculty and an impressive line on their CVs. But the selection process weeds out “hyper-authorship, excessive self-citation and anomalous citation patterns,” so don’t even think about gaming it.

Fifty-nine nations are represented by the 6,636 individual researchers on this year’s list. About half of the citation champions are in specific fields and half in ‘cross-field’ — where interdisciplinary Duke typically dominates. The U.S. is still the most-cited nation with 36 percent of the world’s share, but shrinking slightly. Mainland China continues to rise, claiming second place with 20 percent of the cohort, up 2.5 percent from just last year. Then, in order, the UK, Germany and Australia round out the top five.

Tiny Singapore, home of the Duke NUS Graduate Medical School, is the tenth-most-cited with 1.6 percent of the global share.

In fact, five Duke NUS faculty made this year’s list: Antonio Bertoletti, Derek Hausenloy and Jenny Guek-Hong Low for cross-field; Carolyn S. P. Lam for clinical medicine, and the world famous “Bat Man,” Lin-Fa Wang, for microbiology.

Okay, you scrolled this far, let’s go!

Biology and Biochemistry

Charles A. Gersbach

Clinical Medicine

Christopher Bull Granger

Adrian F. Hernandez

Gary Lyman

Cross-Field

Priyamvada Acharya

Chris Beyrer

Stefano Curtarolo

Vance G. Fowler Jr.

Po-Chun Hsu (adjunct, now U. Chicago)

Ru-Rong Ji

William E. Kraus

David B. Mitzi

Christopher B. Newgard

Pratiksha I. Thakore (now with Genentech)

Xiaofei Wang

Mark R. Wiesner

Environment and Ecology

Robert B. Jackson (adjunct, now Stanford U.)

Microbiology

Barton F. Haynes

Neuroscience and Behavior

Quinn T. Ostrom

Plant and Animal Science

Sheng-Yang He

Psychiatry and Psychology

Avshalom Caspi

William E. Copeland

Terrie E. Moffitt

Space Science

Dan Scolnic

Navigating the Complex World of Social Media and Political Polarization: Insights from Duke’s Polarization Lab

By Noor Nazir

On April 19, 2024

In Artificial Intelligence, Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Lecture, Political science

This February, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments challenging laws in Florida and Texas that would regulate how social media companies like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) control what posts can appear on their sites.

Given the legal challenges involved over the concerns of the role social media plays in creating polarization, there is a need for further research to explore the issue. Enter Duke’s Polarization Lab, a multidisciplinary research hub designed to explore and mitigate the societal effects of online engagement.

In an April 17 seminar, Polarization Lab postdoc Max Allamong delved into the workings and discoveries of this innovative lab, which brings together experts from seven disciplines and various career stages, supported by twelve funders and partners, including five UNC affiliates.

Duke postdoctoral associate Max Allamong

Unless you’re okay with people stealing your data for their own research, conducting studies based on social media is next to impossible, Allamong explained.

In their attempt to conduct research ethically, the lab has developed a tool called “Discussit.” This platform enables users to see the partisanship of people they are communicating with online, aiming to reduce polarization by fostering dialogue across political divides. To put it simply, they’ll know if they’re talking to someone from the left or if they’re talking to someone from the right. Building on this, Allamong also introduced “Spark Social,” a social media simulator where researchers can adjust variables to study interactions under controlled conditions. This system not only allows for the modification of user interactions but also employs large language models (like those used in ChatGPT) to simulate realistic conversations.

Allamong highlighted a particularly revealing study from the lab, titled “Outnumbered Online,” which examined how individuals behave in partisan echo chambers versus balanced environments. The study placed users in forums where they were either in the majority or minority in terms of political alignment, revealing that being outnumbered led to increased self-censorship and perceptions of a toxic environment.

The lab’s ongoing work also explores the broader implications of polarization on political engagement. By manipulating the type of content users see, researchers are examining variables like believability and replicability of data generated by AI. This approach not only contributes to academic knowledge but also has practical implications for designing healthier online spaces.

As social media continues to shape political and social discourse, the work of Duke’s Polarization Lab and Allamong serves as a safe space to conduct ethical and meaningful research. The insights gained here will better equip us to analyze the polarization created by social media companies, and how that affects the political landscape of the country. The longstanding questions of the effects of echo chambers may soon be answered. This research will undoubtedly influence how we engage with and understand the digital world around us, making it a crucial endeavour for fostering a more informed and less polarized society.

Casting roles, casting votes: Lessons from Sesame Street on media representation and voting

By Emily Zou

On March 13, 2024

In Behavior/Psychology, Policy

Elmo greets the audience during a Sesame Street Live children’s show at Naval Support Activity Naples. Credit: U.S. Navy

La la la la, la la la la, Elmo’s world. La la la la, la la la la, Elmo’s world!

After listening to Dr. Claire Duquennois, it’s come to my attention that we might actually be living in Elmo’s world. On February 29, Duquennois, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at the Sanford School of Public Policy about her research on the impact of “Sesame Street” on voter turnout and behavior. As the first of a series of papers on child media representation, Duquennois and her co-author Jiangnan Zeng examined the impact of the highly popular television show on voters born in the 1960s.

For those who didn’t have “Sesame Street” as a cornerstone of their childhood, the show first aired in November 1969, and quickly attracted a large audience of young children from 2-5 years old. The show was unique in its academic and socio-emotional curriculum, as well as in its diverse and integrated cast. Duquennois described the show as having two intents: the first was to create academic curriculum for preschool age children. But the second, more implicit goal was to improve children’s self image, increase their racial tolerance, and highlight the importance of different perspectives, cooperation, and fairness. This is exhibited by the amount of documentation from the creation of the show, as well as the consultation of psychiatrists like Dr. Chester Pierce, who was an expert in the consequences of racism and television’s impact on the portrayal of minorities.

Whereas other shows like “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” featured a more white and suburban cast and setting, “Sesame Street” aimed to relate to kids in more urban or low income areas. For example, both the adult and adolescent cast featured numerous people of color, and the show’s set was reminiscent of Harlem brownstones. The show also brought on numerous diverse guest stars, many of which were important figures in the Civil Rights movement. For many children living in white-dominated suburbs at the time, “Sesame Street” was their first introduction to people of different cultural backgrounds. This “hidden agenda” did not go unnoticed by more conservative governments. For example, the Mississippi commission for education TV vetoed the airing of “Sesame Street” due to the messaging of integration and diversity, although this decision was later overturned due to popular support for the show. Duquennois and Zeng wanted to know: Can child media reduce prejudice in the long-run, impacting voter preferences and behaviors in adulthood?

There had already been a lot of research on mass media in terms of short-term voting outcomes, Duquennois said. In particular, she spoke about research on the news and mass media creating a negative impact on racial and ethnic tensions. However, there was a lack of research on both child media and its impact on later life voting, as well as media’s ability to reduce biases in the majority group. In particular, Duquennois frequently referenced a paper by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine titled “Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street.” Duquennois also spoke on the previous research done on contact theory, which has proven that interactions with other groups can help to reduce biases. For example, research done on random college roommates has found that introducing college-age students to people from differing cultural backgrounds has a positive impact on reducing prejudice.

To any readers still waiting to hear the connection, here it is. Duquennois used a difference in difference model with four different segments (really, a scale of low to high coverage, but she simplified for our sake). The treatment group is identified as children younger than six (“Sesame Street’s” target audience, as well as kids who would be home the majority of the day instead of at school) and with high coverage. This methodology is primarily based on Kearney and Levine’s 2019 study mentioned earlier. Since it’s impossible to tell which children were actually watching “Sesame Street,” Kearney and Levine relied on the statistic that nearly 50% of children were watching the show if it was available to them. They also controlled for general patterns in a particular cohort in that particular state like migration and attenuation bias.

Kearney and Levine’s difference in difference chart referenced by Dr. Duquennois.

Kearney and Levine’s Sesame Street Coverage Map

In terms of getting voting reports, the study used election year responses from 2006-2020 on the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) as well as Implicit Association Test (IAT) scores. Specifically, the report used data in major party ballots for US House elections.

In terms of results, Duquennois broke elections into various different demographic compositions. This included elections between two white men, a Republican white man and Democrat woman of color, vice versa and et cetera.

The results were quite interesting. In the case of electoral participation, an increase in coverage by one standard deviation (20 ppts) increased the treated cohort’s voter turnout by 2.8 ppts (4.4%). Voter registration increased by 1.8 ppts (2.4%), and treated cohorts were more likely to know whether they were registered or not.

Additionally, those with more television coverage in their childhood later on expressed increased political knowledge, including more interest in public affairs, better recognition of elected officials’ names, and increased engagement for marginal voters. There was also increased identification with a party and political ideology. However, there were null effects on more costly forms of political engagement like protesting or primary turnout rates.

The most interesting part to me, however, is the impact on voter preferences. Duquennois found that former watchers of “Sesame Street” are more likely to vote for minority and female candidates, regardless of political party.

Dr. Duqennois’s data on voter patterns for minority candidates

Dr. Duqennois’s data on voting patterns for women candidates

Even more interesting, the decreased race and gender bias in voting patterns does not translate to policy views. There’s evidence that “Sesame Street” viewers both support gay marriage and restrictive immigration policies, which are often seen as opposing political views. That said, what is consistent is that those in the treated cohort were more likely to have an opinion, regardless of what the opinion actually is.

Moreover, it appears that the hidden messaging of “Sesame Street” was effective in decreasing bias. According to the IAT score results, one standard deviation increase in television coverage reduced the race IAT scores of white subjects by 0.013 standard deviations. However, it had null effects on non-white respondents. There was no evidence of selection bias of taking the race IAT in treatment versus non-treatment groups. As for the gender-career IAT test scores, there was no clear change on bias results, but there was evidence of a selection bias with the treated cohort more likely to take the gender-career IAT.

Duquennois concluded her presentation with a few final takeaways: “Preschool age exposure to child media portraying an inclusive, egalitarian and diverse America reduced prejudice in the long run, with consequential implications for voter preferences.”

Acknowledging America’s Unspoken Caste System

By Skylar Hughes

On March 7, 2024

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Policy

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson took the Page Auditorium stage on February 22 to discuss her most recent book, “Caste,” and its implications for modern-day America. Co-hosted by the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, the event featured a lecture and Q&A section.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.”
Isabel Wilkerson

When Wilkerson first published “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents,” it spent 55 weeks on the U.S. best sellers list. Barack Obama put it in his 2020 reading list, and Oprah Winfrey sent the book to Fortune 500 CEOs around the world. Since then, it has sold over 1.56 million copies and has become a #1 New York Times best seller.

In other words: “Caste” is the Beyoncé of books.

Pictured: Author Isabel Wilkerson and her book, “Caste.”

Wilkerson began by reminding the audience of the recentness of our country’s progress. “In recent times it’s not been unusual to hear people say something along the lines of ‘I don’t recognize my country,’ Wilkerson began. “And whenever I hear that I’m reminded that tragically not enough of us have had the chance to know our country’s true and full history.” She described the U.S. as a patient with a preexisting health condition, asserting that America has been plagued by racism since its inception. Like a chronic disease, these roots continuously persist and flare up.

Pictured: A visual timeline of Black oppression in the United States

For context, the United States is 247 years old. A full 89 of those years were spent in slavery and 99 were spent in the Jim Crow era. For 227 years, race was considered an innate, factual construct (until the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003). Racial injustice isn’t a period of history in this country, it is this country’s history.

Wilkerson furthered her point by detailing the dehumanizing customs of the Jim Crow caste system in the South. “You could go to jail if you were caught playing checkers with a person of a different race,” Wilkerson said. “That means that someone had to have seen a Black person and a white person in some town square… And they felt that the entire foundation of southern civilization was in peril and took the time to write that down as a law.” Before the late 20th century, there was even a separate Black and White Bible to take an oath in court. “That means that the very word of God was segregated in the Jim Crow South,” Wilkerson said.

She described this system of racial oppression as an “arbitrary, artificial, graded ranking of human value” – in other words, a caste system. She highlighted how race was weaponized by early colonists to determine “who would be slave or free, who would have rights and no rights.”

This caste system wasn’t just a “sad, dark chapter,” Wilkerson said. It’s “the foundation of the country’s political, social, and economic order.”

For 6 million Black southerners, the caste system became so suffocating that migrating across the country (a movement called The Great Migration), seemed like the only path to freedom. “No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens,” Wilkerson said. “So this great migration was not a move. It was not about moving. It was a defection. A seeking of political asylum within the borders of one’s own country.”

But the U.S. caste system extends far past slavery and Jim Crow. Take the vastly different police response to the January 6 Capitol riot compared to BLM protests during the summer of 2020. “We alive today are tasked with explaining to succeeding generations how…a rioter could deliver the Confederate flag farther than Robert E. Lee himself.” The United States has never adequately dealt with its racist history, which is why it keeps repeating itself.

In a powerful call to action, Wilkerson urged the audience to honor these histories and “teach the children so that we can end these divisions now with the next generation.” She shared the aspiration of novelist Richard Wright: “To transplant in alien soil…and perhaps just perhaps to bloom” in a more equitable world.

Want to learn more about Isabel Wilkerson’s work? Click here.

Written by: Skylar Hughes, Class of 2025

Democracy Threatened: Can We Depolarize Digital Spaces?

By Ana Lucia Ochoa

On February 26, 2024

In Artificial Intelligence, Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Data

“Israeli Mass Slaughter.” “Is Joe Biden Fit to be President?” Each time we log on to social media, potent headlines encircle us, as do the unwavering and charged opinions that fill the comment spaces. Each like, repost, or slight interaction we have with social media content is devoured by the “algorithm,” which tailors the space to our demonstrated beliefs.

So, where does this leave us? In our own personal “echo chamber,” claim the directors of Duke’s Political Polarization Lab in a recent panel.

Founded in 2018, the lab’s 40 scholars enact cutting edge research on politics and social media. This unique intersection requires a diverse team, evident in its composition of seven different disciplines and career stages. The research has proven valuable: beneficiaries include government policy-makers, non-profit organizations, and social media companies.

The lab’s recent research project sought to probe the underlying mechanisms of our digital echo-chambers: environments where we only connect with like-minded individuals. Do we have the power to shatter the glass and expand perspectives? Researchers used bots to generate social media content of opposing party views. The content was intermixed with subject’s typical feeds, and participants were evaluated to see if their views would gradually moderate.

The results demonstrated that the more people paid attention to the bots, the more grounded in their viewpoints or polarized they became.

Clicking the iconic Twitter bird or new “X” logo signifies a step onto the battlefield, where posts are ambushed by a flurry of rebuttals upon release.

Chris Bail, Professor of Political and Data Science, shared that 90% of these tweets are generated by a meager 6% of Twitter’s users. Those 6% identify as either very liberal or very conservative, rarely settling in a midde area. Their commitment to propagating their opinions is rewarded by the algorithm, which thrives on engagement. When reactive comments filter in, the post is boosted even more. The result is a distorted perception of social media’s community, when in truth the bulk of users are moderate and watching on the sidelines.

Graphic from the Political Polarization Lab presentation at Duke’s 2024 Research & Innovation Week

Can this be changed? Bail described the exploration of incentives for social media users. This means rewarding both sides, fighting off the “trolls” who wreak havoc on public forums. Enter a new strategy: using bots to retweet top content creators that receive engagement from both parties.

X’s (formerly Twitter’s) Community Notes feature allows users to annotate tweets that they find misleading. This strategy includes boosting notes that annotate bipartisan creators, after finding that notes tended towards the polarized tweets.

The results were hard to ignore: misinformation decreased by 25-35%, said Bail, saving companies millions of dollars.

Social media is democracy’s public square
Christopher bail

Instead of simply bashing younger generation’s fixation on social media, Bail urged the audience to consider the bigger picture.

“What do we want to get out of social media?” “

What’s the point and how can it be made more productive?”

On a mission to answer these questions, the Polarization Lab has set out to develop evidence-based social media by creating custom platforms. In order to test the platforms out, researchers prompted A.I. to create “digital twins” of real people, to simulate users.

Co-Director Alex Volfovsky described the thought process that led to this idea: Running experiments on existing social media often requires dumping data into an A.I. system and interpreting results. But by building an engaging social network, researchers were able to manipulate conditions and observe causal effects.

How can the presence of a “like button” or “repost” feature affect our activity on platforms? On LinkedIn, even tweaking recommended users showed that people gain the most value from semi-distant connections.

In this exciting new field, unanswered questions ring loud. It can be frightening to place our trust in ambiguous algorithms for content moderation, especially when social media usage is at an all-time high.

After all, the media I consume has clearly trickled into my day-to-day decisions. I eat at restaurants I see on my Instagram feed, I purchase products that I see influencers promote, and I tend to read headlines that are spoon-fed to me. As a frequent social media user, I face the troubling reality of being susceptible to manipulation.

Amidst the fear, panelists stress that their research will help create a safer and more informed culture surrounding social media in pressing efforts to preserve democracy.

From Occupational Therapy to Stroke Research

By Guest Post

On December 20, 2023

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Guest Post, Medicine, Visualization

Note: Each year, we partner with Dr. Amy Sheck’s students at the North Carolina School of Science and Math to profile some unsung heroes of the Duke research community. This is the first of 8 posts.

Dr. Kimberly Hreha’s journey to studying stroke patients was not a straightforward one, but it started very early.

“My mom was a special ed teacher, and so I would go into her class and volunteer. There was an occupational therapist I met and they really kind of drove my decision to become an occupational therapist.”

After earning a masters degree in occupational therapy, Hreha worked as an OT for 5 years and became fascinated by stroke survivors and ways to help them live their lives normally again. She was able to do this when she moved to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation and began working with a neurologist to study spatial neglect.

Kimberly Hreha and her Prism Adaptation goggles.

“If a stroke happens in the right hemisphere of the brain, the person neglects the left side of space,” Hreha said. “Imagine yourself standing in a room, and I want you to describe to me what the space is. [You would say] Oh my dresser’s on the right side, my bed’s on the right, my picture frame’s on the right. And you would not tell me anything on the left.”

She further explained that this is not due to blindness in the left eye, the left eye usually can see just fine, it’s simply that the brain ignores the entire left side of space.

Hreha co-developed a solution and treatment for this issue. It uses a pair of goggles with modified lenses, to move you into left space. I got to try it out to see how it worked.

Hreha first had me touch my hand to my chest and then touch a pen she was holding. I did this easily without the goggles on. When I tried again with the goggles on, I completely missed and put my finger too far to the right. I kept trying to touch the pen with the goggles on until I had retrained my brain to touch it consistently. Next, she had me take the goggles off and try touching the pen again. I went to touch the pen, but I missed it because my finger went too far to the left!

Hreha explained to me that she had just gotten me into left space. In stroke patients with left spatial neglect, she told me, they could use the goggles to help train them to stop neglecting left space, helping them to vastly improve their lives.

The goggle therapy, formally called prism adaptation, is a simple treatment that is practiced for 20 minutes a day for 10 days. For this Hreha won the Young Investigator Award in Post-Acute Stroke Rehabilitation in 2018 for her contribution to stroke research. Seeing her passion for her treatment and her happiness to have created something that helps stroke patients was very gratifying for me.

Hreha is also working on finding a connection between stroke patients and dementia, something that she hopes will further help the stroke survivor community. This is a research project that is ongoing for her, and one that she hopes to gain valuable data analysis and research practices skills from.

Finally, she talked to me about her goals for the future. Hreha hopes to do a collaborative study with people at the low-vision clinic, get a grant for her prism adaptation research, and create a right brain stroke clinic at Duke to be able to do large scale research to help right brain stroke patients.

As a researcher, she still also finds time to keep up her OT practice, by working as an OT one full day each month. Keeping true to her love of helping others, she said, “That little part of that clinical time just reminds me why I’m doing the research I’m doing. And that when I’m doing the data work, it is, at the end of the day, about that person who is in front of me in the clinic.”

Guest Post by Prithu Kolar, Class of 2025, North Carolina School of Science and Math.