Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo is pleased to welcome you to two lectures by Professor Cecilia Mo (UC Berkeley) on March 25 and 26.



These talks are part of the UTokyo-UC Berkeley Strategic Partnership, and will take place in the Hongo campus.


Prof. Cecilia Hyunjung Mo specializes in behavioral political economy, comparative political behavior, the political economy of development, and social policy research. She focuses on significant contemporary challenges to development and moral issues of today like cultivating democratic citizenship, understanding and addressing the negative consequences of rising inequality, combatting modern day slavery, and reducing prejudice. Her research agenda is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of political science, economics, and psychology.
https://ceciliahmo.com/




If you are interested in attending, we would appreciate your RSVP through the following link.
https://goo.gl/forms/7pD1jurghiMtEqhc2



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Lecture "When Do the Advantaged See the Disadvantages of Others? A Quasi-Experimental Study of National Service"

Date: March 25, 2019 (Monday) 17:30-19:00 (17:00 Open)

Venue: Room 549, Akamon General Research Building, Hongo Campus, University of Tokyo

http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_08_02_j.html


Abstract:

Are there mechanisms by which the advantaged can see the perspectives of the disadvantaged? If advantaged individuals have prolonged engagement with disadvantaged populations and confront issues of inequality through national service, do they see the world more through the lens of the poor? We explore this question by examining Teach For America (TFA), as TFA is a prominent national service program that integrates top college graduates into low-income communities for two years and employs a selection model that allows for causal inference. A regression discontinuity approach, utilizing an original survey of over 32,000 TFA applicants and TFA's selection data for the 2007-2015 application cycles, reveals that extended intergroup contact in a service context causes advantaged Americans to adopt beliefs that are closer to those of disadvantaged Americans. These findings have broad implications for our understanding of the impact of intergroup contact on perceptions of social justice and prejudice reduction.


URL: https://utokyo.ucberkeley.jp/en/news_and_events/lecture_mo2


Lecture: "Observational Open Science: An Application to the Literature on Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior"


Date: March 26, 2019 (Tuesday) 11:00～12:30 （10:30 Open）


Venue: Room 549, Akamon General Research Building, Hongo Campus, University of Tokyo
http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_08_02_j.html


Abstract:

Replication and transparency have become increasingly important in bolstering the credibility of political science research, yet open science tools are typically designed for experiments. For observational studies, which make up the bulk of political science, current practice suffers from an important pathology: just as researchers can often ``p-hack'' their way to initial findings, it is often possible to ``null hack'' a finding away through specification and case search. We propose an observational open science (OOS) framework that consists of (1) leveraging the passage of time to add new out-of-sample cases, (2) independent collection of all data, (3) pre-registration of alternative specifications, (4) multiple simultaneous replications, and (5) collaboration between original authors and skeptics. We apply the approach to three highly cited studies in the literature on ``irrelevant'' events and voting behavior. On some dimensions, the studies all replicated quite well. On other dimensions, they replicated quite poorly. Had we sought to debunk any of these three studies in a conventional approach to replication with ex post specification search, we could have easily done so. However, given that we conducted pre-registered analyses, we have a more accurate sense of the full and complicated picture. We conclude with suggestions for future refinements to our approach.


URL: https://utokyo.ucberkeley.jp/en/news_and_events/lecture_mo4