Social sciences

J-PAL North America is inviting governments and health care organizations across the United States to apply for support evaluating innovative approaches to address critical social challenges.

J-PAL North America calls for proposals from governments and health care organizations

MIT research center aims to support state and local governments and health care organizations in testing innovative approaches to address pressing policy challenges.

December 6, 2017

Richard Nielsen’s book, “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad,” finds a certain portion of Muslim clerics who end up advocating for jihad — war against Islam’s foes — started out as mainstream clerics looking for state-sponsored jobs where they could use their intellectual training, only to become unemployed, disenchanted, and radicalized.

Why some Muslim clerics become jihadists

In his new book, political scientist Richard Nielsen proposes a “blocked ambition” hypothesis.

November 9, 2017

Google has teamed with Michel DeGraff's Kreyòl-based STEM education project in Haiti, to add scientific and technical terms to the Kreyòl module of Google Translate.

MIT-Haiti, Google team up to boost education in Kreyòl

Institute-led effort to create STEM lexicon is now available for global translation.

October 30, 2017

An interactive map shows the gender diversity in undergraduate classes across MIT on a class-by-class basis.

Mapping gender diversity at MIT

Data visualization map explores two decades of enrollment trends among female students at the Institute.

October 25, 2017

The Media Lab’s Human Dynamics group team beat some 3,000 other submissions from around the world to win three of six categories in the 2017 Fragile Families Challenge.

Media Lab team tops Fragile Families Challenge

Human Dynamics research group earns high marks in new scientific collaboration to improve the lives of disadvantaged American children.

October 4, 2017

“The new museum will be an experimental place," says John Durant, director of the MIT Museum and a faculty member of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. "We are committed to the idea that the MIT Museum can operate along the same principles as the Institute as a whole. We want to try new ideas, test them, and report our findings.”

John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum

A new purpose-built museum will be an experimental place for wider conversations.

September 27, 2017

“I would say that a surprisingly large number of my students at MIT are juniors and seniors, and they often say to me, ‘Oh, I wish I had found out about anthropology sooner,’” anthropologist Graham Jones remarks. “And I say, ‘Oh the same thing happened to me in college.’ Not many people come to college knowing what anthropology is.”

Magic, a microcosm of modern culture

Anthropologist Graham Jones has turned a fascination with magic into a career.

September 25, 2017

New SHASS faculty members include: (top row, l-r) Martin Beraja, Dave Donaldson, and Amah Edoh; (middle row, l-r) E. J. Green, Simon Jäger, and Eric Klopfer; (bottom row, l-r) Justin Reich, Miriam Schoenfield, and Lisa Parks.

Nine new faculty join the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

The school welcomes a superb group of scholars.

September 25, 2017

2017 Phi Beta Kappa Society inductees (l-r) Abdullah Alsalloum, Rachel Osmundsen, and Nagisa Taxifar show off their certificates of membership.

High (achieving) society

The MIT chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society inducts 74 distinguished graduates of the Class of 2017.

September 15, 2017

Twenty high school girls from around the country participated in this year’s Women’s Technology Program (WTP), a four-week program that gives girls hands-on engineering experience in the lab and classroom. Pictured here, this summer’s WTP class takes a tour of the Pappalardo Lab.

Closing the gender gap in mechanical engineering

Women make up 49.5 percent of MIT’s undergraduates in mechanical engineering, due to department’s proactive approach, study finds.

July 31, 2017

“We find that patients who go to hospitals that rely more on skilled nursing facilities after discharge, as opposed to getting them healthy enough to return home, are substantially less likely to survive over the following year,” says Professor Joseph Doyle.

Hospitals that spend more on emergency care yield better outcomes

Study: Investing more in inpatient care relative to longer-term nursing facilities reduces mortality rates.

July 9, 2017

“We try to understand how the rules [for firms] should be written in a way that provides members incentives to do research and work hard, and doesn’t yield disproportionate power to an individual,” says economist Alessandro Bonatti.

Modeling innovation

Economist Alessandro Bonatti’s theoretical studies illuminate the behavior of firms and prices.

July 5, 2017

Baltimore, Maryland, is one of three local governments selected to work with J-PAL North America to evaluate solutions to homelessness, recidivism, and other policy challenges.

J-PAL North America partners with local governments to tackle homelessness and reduce incarceration

Selected cities and counties will receive funding and technical support from J-PAL to test innovative strategies in the fight against poverty.

June 30, 2017

“One of the most frequent questions that we get at J-PAL is a version of, ‘So a program worked in one place. Is it likely to work in my context?’” says Mary Ann Bates, the deputy executive director of J-PAL North America.

How J-PAL thinks globally and acts locally

Can an antipoverty program work in different settings? A new report presents a user’s guide to a tough issue.

June 28, 2017

A new study by an MIT-based team of economists has developed a novel way of evaluating Value-Added Models (VAMs), which assess teachers and schools.

Testing the metrics

MIT researchers refine yardstick for measuring schools and teachers.

June 14, 2017

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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