Being bad at math can kill people. Even experts who should understand medical science and help us make good health decisions sometimes fail. In December, a doctor—let’s call him Dr. Smith—advised a tweeter’s elderly mom not to get the COVID-19 vaccine because "99% of people fight off COVID, but [the vaccine is] only 93% effective.” This doctor is blatantly wrong. He doesn’t understand the math and is giving life-threatening advice. When even some experts struggle with numbers, it’s easy to see the problem.

2020 thrust a new world of statistics upon us—numbers of cases and deaths, false positive rates, and percentages of open ICU beds. Many of us track these numbers to stay informed and feel secure, but we don’t always understand or use them appropriately. Communicating facts isn’t always enough. But when facts are presented in forms that make sense to us—using the science of science communication—leaders can inform and motivate better choices.

“At its core, Anthropology is about a simple idea—that the world is a better place if people understand one another,” wrote Alec Barker, past president of the American Anthropological Association. “For some that means basic research, because knowing more about people—their past, present, and prospects—is a worthy goal in itself. Others teach, helping students of all ages better understand the diverse ways of being human, and for others it means applying that knowledge in practical application. It’s the broadest of endeavors, encompassing scientific and humanistic approaches to people and their near kin, to how they communicate, come together, divide, develop and find meaning. That variety is its greatest strength.”

Anthropologists play a critical role by helping to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, developing basic protocols in medical labs, serving as “on the ground” expert witnesses, and yes, even helping reduce anxiety about an impending “robotic apocalypse.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused extraordinary devastation, claiming millions of lives and disrupting the economy and daily life across the globe. From the beginning, the course of the pandemic has depended on behavior – for example, whether people would engage in recommended public health actions like mask wearing and social distancing. Currently, the success of vaccination also hinges on behavior. While the successful development of vaccines is an incredibly important scientific breakthrough and their distribution and accessibility is critical, ultimately, the public’s willingness to get vaccinated will determine whether we bring this pandemic under control. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can help ensure that efforts to encourage vaccination and address hesitancy succeed.

The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wanted to assist the public health community’s communication efforts to foster confidence in COVID-19 vaccines. To identify evidence-informed strategies for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines, we formed a trans-NIH working group consisting of behavioral and social science specialists across the NIH. On November 5th, 2020, the trans-NIH working group convened a multidisciplinary expert panel featuring 15 leading experts in public health and social science (e.g., communication, psychology, behavioral economics, health disparities, and anthropology). The expert panel was charged with identifying effective approaches for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines and suggesting ways these approaches could be tailored, targeted, and delivered to address the unique needs of diverse populations. The expert panel discussion formed the basis for recommendations about how government entities, such as U.S. federal agencies and partners at the state and local levels, could most effectively communicate vaccine-related information to a variety of constituents.

The insidious negative effects of racist stereotypes on African Americans’ academic performance was described in The Atlantic in 1999 by former National Science Board member and social psychologist Claude Steele in “Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students.” The research that Steele referred to throughout the article was conducted during the 1990s and published in several well-respected peer reviewed outlets. It made a splash and spawned an entire branch of research on the various ways that negative stereotypes deleteriously impact their targets.

As an assistant professor of psychology at that time, Steele’s work resonated strongly with me on both personal and professional levels. While delighted to be a member of what was then a top nationally ranked psychology department, I was acutely aware of my status as the only African American member among the 60-plus faculty in the department. I routinely encountered other faculty and graduate students who openly questioned my professional credentials and legitimacy, and even wondered aloud about whether I had what it took to be successful. It was not just that I was a young woman or that I was an African American. It was what I represented in toto, including the confidence and grit I needed just to be present, that most seemed to vex my detractors. So, in addition to managing the expected pressures of being an assistant professor within a research-intensive setting, I also worked hard to counter the stereotype-based expectations of inferiority that a considerable number of people held about me.

As the pandemic drags on, following COVID-19 prevention guidelines can feel like more and more of a challenge.

This kind of fatigue is not unique to pandemic precautions like sticking with social distancing, masking up and keeping your hands washed. With all kinds of health-related behavior changes – including increasing physical activity, eating healthy and decreasing tobacco use – at least half of people relapse within six months.

Think back to the start of April. Much of the United States was under stay-at-home orders. New York City was experiencing close to a thousand COVID-19 deaths a day, and new cases of this previously unknown disease were popping up all over the country.

Fifty years after Ruth Bader Ginsberg worked to secure constitutional equality for women, misogyny is still alive and well in the American political system. We only need to look at the Vice Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence to see the way in which gender is used to undermine the ability of women to lead. Women candidates like Harris are often talked over and interrupted repeatedly by their male opponents. Unlike men who are interrupted, they can’t redirect the flow of conversation with a sharp reprimand (or a “just shut up, man”), but must find ways to do so while maintaining likability. When they act publicly, women politicians are often denigrated, as we heard Trump do to Senator Kamala Harris after the VP debate.

Why does this matter? Research shows that when women candidates are belittled or their credibility or electability is questioned, it dampens other women’s political ambitions. While we saw a “blue wave” of women candidates in 2018, far fewer women than men aspire to elected office. Social scientists point out that American women are still shaped by traditional gender socialization, or raised to embrace traditional family roles. Unlike men, women rarely assume future partners will fully share these responsibilities; nor do they expect that future partners would quit a job or relocate to support the women’s professional aspirations. Many educated, professional women who seem appropriate for a political career work a “second shift” after returning home — and feel too time-crunched to run for office. American politics, long dominated by men, has a masculine ethos; women and men alike perceive political success as being linked to masculine traits such as self-promotion and fighting, and many do not think to encourage women to run for office. Women themselves often do not envision pursuing such a male-coded profession, which could make them appear to be more aggressive than nurturing. Additionally, women tend to be more election- and risk-averse than men and can be discouraged by barriers that men do not face, including sexist media coverage, intrusive questions about their life choices, overt sexual harassment, online misogynist abuse, or accusations of lying.

This article originally appeared on January 24, 2020 as “Teach police nonviolence, scholars say, and how to work with local residents” in The Conversation and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Police have a saying, “better to be judged by 12 than carried by six,” acknowledging they might face a jury if they use excessive force, but it’s preferable to being killed in the line of duty. Many police oppose civilian oversight of their departments, which could prevent both criminal charges and death. Yet right now, all over the U.S., the public is judging police for how they act.

Some police officers question the usefulness of training in de-escalation techniques, which have been shown to reduce threats to them and members of the public. Officers often say it’s hard for civilians to understand how difficult it is for them to “keep cool” during chaotic and dangerous moments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a surge of interest in the press and social media in comparisons with other countries. When did the new virus reach other countries, how did they handle it, and how well did they do? I have lost count of the number of times I have read that the first COVID-19 deaths happened in the United States and South Korea at about the same time in January 2020, but it seems clear that the Koreans got on top of the epidemic, at least the first wave, while the United States did not.

This interest should survive this pandemic and broaden to include all sources of poor health, disease and death. South Korea did not suddenly start to outperform the United States in health last January. This has been true for decades. Life expectancy at birth (a weighted average of death rates at all ages) is the best single metric for the health of a population. In 2004, Korea and the US had almost exactly the same life expectancy at birth, even though the US spent a much larger percentage of its (much larger) gross national product (GNP) on the health sector. By 2018, before the discovery of the novel coronavirus, the US had gained one full year of life expectancy. Life expectancy in Korea improved by five years during the same period. Looking across the developed countries, it becomes clear that Korea’s improvement was better than most countries, but the US is really the outlier. We were caught up to and passed in this fundamental measure of population health by dozens of countries, many of which are considerably poorer, and all of which spend much less that the US on health services and research (Portugal, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Chile—not to mention all other rich countries of Europe, Canada and Japan). We need to ask difficult questions about our performance in the COVID-19 pandemic, but also about the obesity epidemic, the opioid epidemic, heart disease, cancers, stroke, injuries and all other causes of death and disability.

I often get asked questions like, “What is an anthropologist like you doing studying money? I thought that was the domain of economists!” The archaeological and ethnographic record is full of objects, texts, and records of promises humans have used for millennia to mark transactions with one another and figure value. It’s true that I enjoy working with and thinking about those objects, and among my favorite places are the money galleries in museums around the world and at the regional branches of the U.S. Federal Reserve. But the anthropology of money is more than an archive of the arcane. Understanding practices like bridewealth, involving objects like the tevau of the Santa Cruz Islands, can shed light on how contemporary money is far more than a neutral medium of exchange. This matters for product design, financial literacy programming, and macroeconomic policy, too.

Indeed, now that the world is in a global pandemic caused by the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, what people do with money and its technologies has acquired a new kind of significance. Although the virus apparently does not survive for long on fibrous materials like cloth and paper, reports have surged of Chinese and other officials ordering the disinfecting of banknotes to prevent its spread. The fintech industry conference organization Money 2020, promoting its (almost certainly to be cancelled) next event, proclaimed in an email that the pandemic would usher in the end of cash and the era of digital payments—despite the fact that most in-person digital payments (at your local take-out restaurant now, for example) rely on plastic and metal cards and point of sale devices, touched by many hands, on which the virus can survive for several hours. And in Kenya, the authorities are recommending all Kenyans use mobile phones to pay—about which, more below.

In this series, Why Social Science? gives social scientists whose research has been mischaracterized or misunderstood the opportunity to explain once and for all, “Why would you study that?”

Today’s entry comes from Amanda Gregg, Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, who is the Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation grant “Corporate Law, Finance, and Productivity in Historical Perspective,” which supports the collection and analysis of firm-level data describing Russian corporations before the October Revolution of 1917.

Natural disasters (such as hurricanes) have a history of impacting some of the most socially vulnerable communities – low income communities and communities of color. While the intensity and quantity of storms will likely increase in the coming years, we still have very little information on the best services and sources that can support schooling, educators, and students during and after natural disasters. My research is working to address this gap by collecting, analyzing, and presenting data on the best ways to assist recovery for some of the most vulnerable populations.      

What have we learned in the last decade?

Across the last decade, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) confirmed 67 Major Disaster Declarations in the United States from hurricanes alone. Each of these declarations impacted communities, schools, educators, and students throughout our nation.  We’ve also learned that 6 of the 10 (60%) costliest hurricanes in our history occurred between 2010 and 2019, costing a total of $393.7 billion.