The Center for the Study of Economy and Society hosted its 5th “Future of the Social Sciences” conference on Saturday, February 25th in New York City. The series brings together like-minded social scientists for cross-disciplinary discussion about new work and trends that may influence the direction of the social sciences.

At this year’s conference, we explored new work on the exchange between the humanities and social science on the mind and AI, theory and prediction of the middle range, experiments in the social sciences, cumulative advantage and the Matthews Effect, immigration and climate change, novel methods of studying the dynamics of behavioral traces and multiple triangulation in the study of social behavior.

Videos of the presentations will be shared on our YouTube channel in the weeks following the event.  A complete program can be found here and a list of participants below:

Presenters

• Laurent Dubreuil, Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Cognitive Science, Cornell University
• Delia Baldassarri, CSES Fellow; Professor of Sociology, New York University
• Filiz Garip, CSES Fellow; Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
• Victor Nee, CSES Fellow; the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Economic Sociology, and CSES Director (on sabbatical leave from Cornell University 2022-23)
• John Padgett, CSES Fellow; Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
• David Strang, Professor of Sociology and CSES Acting Director 2022-23, Cornell University
• Arnout van de Rijt, CSES Fellow; Professor of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence
• Sirui Wang, Graduate Student, Wharton School and McKinsey Consulting
• Duncan Watts, CSES Fellow; the Stevens University Professor and twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, University of Pennsylvania
• Cristobal Young, Associate Professor of Sociology, Cornell University

CSES Fellows

• Paul DiMaggio, Professor of Sociology, New York University
• Barnaby Marsh, Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University

Participants

• Brett de Bary, Professor of Comparative Literature, Modern Japanese Literature and Asian Studies, Emerita, Cornell University
• Maurizio Catino, Professor of Sociology, University of Milano-Bicocca
• Laurent Ferri, Curator and Adjunct Associate Professor, Cornell University
• Barum Park, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Cornell University
• Patricia Young, Program Manager, Institute for European Studies, Cornell University

“Wars often erupt and persist because of the two sides’ miscalculations regarding their relative power. In the case of Ukraine, Russia blundered badly by underestimating the resolve of Ukrainians to fight and the effectiveness of NATO-supplied weaponry. Yet Ukraine and NATO are also overestimating their capacity to defeat Russia on the battlefield. The result is a war of attrition that each side believes it will win, but that both sides will lose. Ukraine should intensify the search for a negotiated peace of the type that was on the table in late March, but which it then abandoned following evidence of Russian atrocities in Bucha – and perhaps owing to changing perceptions of its military prospects.

The peace terms under discussion in late March called for Ukraine’s neutrality, backed by security guarantees and a timeline to address contentious issues such as the status of Crimea and the Donbas. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators stated that there was progress in the negotiations, as did the Turkish mediators. The negotiations then collapsed after the reports from Bucha, with Ukraine’s negotiator stating that, “Ukrainian society is now much more negative about any negotiation concept that concerns the Russian Federation.” 

But the case for negotiations remains urgent and overwhelming. The alternative is not Ukraine’s victory but a devastating war of attrition. To reach an agreement, both sides need to recalibrate their expectations.”

Read the full article in Project Syndicate here.  Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University as well as an External Board member of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society.

Register here for online access.

Join CSES for a virtual presentation by Siegwart Lindenberg, Professor of Cognitive Sociology at Tilburg University, as he discusses his latest paper, “Calibrating competition. The special role of competitive intensity and winner selection rule for cooperation after competing. An experimental study.”

Abstract

Much has been written about the desirability to combine the advantages of both competition and cooperation (“coopetition”). Yet, there is surprisingly little research on coopetition inside organizations, even though it may be argued that people’s mindset that is relevant for coopetition even between firms is largely formed on the basis of their experience with competition and cooperation inside the organization. How and under what conditions does the experience of competition negatively affect subsequent cooperation and when does it not have this negative influence? We present an experimental test of two competing theories about experiencing competition of different intensities, the subsequent willingness to cooperate, and the moderating role of how winners are selected: a relative deprivation theory (cooperation compromised by the frustration of losers) and a shifting salience theory (cooperation compromised by regimes that make competitiveness salient). The results favor the shifting salience theory. Experiencing moderate competition intensity affects people’s subsequent willingness to cooperate more positively than experiencing fierce competition. Moderate competition intensity works best, especially with selecting winners on the basis of their performance. If fierce competition cannot be avoided, subsequent cooperation is best served by random selection of winners.