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Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education

Published February 8, 2022

Part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” Series

On February 3rd, 2022, Social Science Matrix, together with the Center for Studies in Higher Education, hosted an online “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education, by Charlie Eaton, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced.

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America, while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Eaton reveals in his book, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

Eaton, who earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, was joined in conversation by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, and Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel was moderated by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Letters & Science.

“What I show in this book that’s new is that student loan borrowing is highly unequal across different organizational strata of colleges, and financiers play a major role in these inequalities,” Eaton said in his presentation. “I focus on the divergence of three higher education strata of student debt: at the top elite private institutions, where the fewest students borrow; in the middle are public universities, which enroll 65% of all bachelor’s degree seekers in the US; and the majority of those who borrow are at for-profit colleges, whose students are overwhelmingly working class and disproportionately Black, and whose students have the most debt. How did this divergence occur? My answer is that financiers played a big role in each of these strata.”

Eaton emphasized the role of government policy changes, including tax cuts and financial deregulation, in perpetuating these inequalities, as they allowed financiers to play new roles across the three strata of higher education. “At the top, financiers helped restore elite private universities as the last bastion of debt-free higher education. They did this by partnering with their endowments to exploit tax cuts and financial deregulation. These schools hoarded this endowment boom for their mostly small, privileged, and now debt-free student bodies. At the bottom, financiers took over for-profit colleges en masse to capture public subsidies around federal student loan expansion. In the middle, public universities were squeezed by these tax and subsidy diversions to the top and bottom strata.”

In concluding his remarks, Eaton struck an optimistic tone, noting that “a better future is possible if we mobilize a more diverse and inclusive public university to reimagine finance from below…. More equitable higher education finance is probably only possible as part of a more equitable overall financial system. But public universities can play a central role in advancing such change by connecting people from more varied backgrounds than the Ivory Tower bankers who got us here. In fact, public universities, including Berkeley, are already doing this in many ways.”

In his remarks, Professor Jonathan Glater agreed that “it is difficult to overstate the corrosive effects of money in the financing of higher education.” Beyond student debt, Glater said, the influence of money in higher education affects credentialing of institutions, as well as the admissions and grading of students, “because students are not paying for C’s, D’s, and F’s, they’re paying for A’s.” It also leads to “inequity of opportunity in the form of increasing student debt, which not only may discourage students, but slows the possibility of socioeconomic advancement for students after they graduate.”

Glater praised Eaton’s book for challenging us to look for alternatives to the status quo. “I would suggest that inequality should be regarded as a symptom… of a broader system — social, financial, ideological,” Glater said. “One implication of this story about people, personalities, relationships, and ideas is that different people with different ideas can implement changes. Dr. Eaton’s narrative implicitly challenges us to ask… can we imagine something else? And of course, we can.”

Professor Emmanuel Saez noted how “higher education has really become the route to economic opportunity,” particularly in the United States, and this has fueled the rise of for-profit colleges. Saez referred to his own past research indicating that “if you reach a good higher-ed institution, you’re very likely to have a good economic success, regardless of your parents’ background. But of course the inequality is in who gets access to the good, higher ed institution. And that’s where the inequality here in the U.S. is truly, truly massive, with the best schools having almost three quarters of their kids coming from the top 10%.”

Saez praised Eaton’s book for exposing the damaging impacts of private equity in for-profit institutions, as they were able to “take control of the schools and change the way they were operating to really further increase the predatory nature of the schools. That government retrenchment, with less funding for community colleges or public school, led to the blooming of the for-profit, predatory school, and that is obviously highly detrimental for for opportunity and for inequality in general.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi

Published February 3, 2022

Presented as part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series.

Recorded on January 26, 2022, this video features an “Authors Meet Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press), by Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History.

The Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. This event was co-sponsored by the Institute of South Asia Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime that saw them only as the ruled.

“Not only is it a book of immense erudition, but it also covers a rather vast intellectual terrain,” said Pradeep Chhibber, Professor and Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at UC Berkeley, who moderated the panel. “It speaks about sovereignty, it speaks about popular protests, it speaks about the writing of intellectual history — and whose history is to be trusted and whose history is not to be trusted. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which one is deeply self-conscious about the limits of sources, especially when one is doing research in an area in which the amount of primary materials is somewhat limited.”

In his opening remarks, Kaicker explained that the book aims to focus on the “ordinary people, the men and the women who lived and died in the Mughal empire and whose deeds have gone broadly unsung and unacknowledged in the history of the empire that we have written over the last century or so…. How should we see the people in Mughal Delhi, and in Mughal India, more broadly?”

In her comments, Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, noted that the book “has a great deal to offer us in terms of thinking about the subsequent histories of the subcontinent, and particularly also about where we are today…. It shows us that, in fact, political power, and a conception of sovereignty on the subcontinent, have always been located within a discourse of religion.”

Sethi explained that the book helps illuminate the rise of Hindutya, religious nationalism, in contemporary India. “Just as thinking about the sphere of religion cannot be thought of outside politics, then equally, it is not possible to think of politics outside religion. Which then means that the colonial and the postcolonial state, which attempted to forge a conception of a state not based on the principles of religion… was a brief interregnum and a brief fantasy, and that we can see the breaking of this fantasy in the way in which religion and politics mobilized through the discourse of Hindutva.”

Asad Ahmed, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, described The King and The People as “a scholarly gem,” noting that the book “challenges various long-held notions about the participation of the common folk, the ordinary people, in the political contestations of pre-modern South Asia.”

“Abhishek investigates the manners and modes of the participation of ordinary people in matters of politics in 17th- and 18th-century Mughal India, shedding the reductive idea that the various political upheavals of the period were either responsive to economic discontent or religious fanaticism,” Ahmed said. “He argues rather that these moments were reflective of the participation of the people in the discourse of sovereignty. The ordinary people are hidden from view. Their own voices are suppressed, and their agency is mediated by the pen of the elite….A major task of the book is to unravel the discursive codes of the authors in order to be able to tease out the nature and meaning of popular participation in political affairs. This is no easy task, but Abhishek carries it out wonderfully.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Special Event

Berkeley Psychology 100 Year Celebration

Published December 10, 2021

Recorded on December 8, 2021, this video features a series of talks by members of the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology, in celebration of the department’s 100th anniversary. Speakers included:

Raka Ray, Dean, UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences
Rhona Weinstein, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology
Silvia Bunge, Professor, Department of Psychology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute | Director, Building Blocks of Cognition Lab
Allison Harvey, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic
Rich Ivry, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Cognition and Action Lab
Rodolfo Mendoza Denton, Professor, Department of Psychology | Co-Director, Relationships and Social Cognition Lab
Monica Ellwood-Lowe, Ph.D. student
Hari Srinivisan, Undergraduate Class of 2022

The event also featured a video featuring members of the Charter Hill Society for Psychology, a community of committed donors who make a three-year pledge of $1,000 or more per year to the Psychology Annual Fund.

Lightning Talks

The event featured “lightning talks,” short form-presentations from four distinguished members of the faculty, showcasing the exciting research being conducted in this top-ranked department. Following are abstracts and bios for the faculty members who presented the four lightning talks.

(How) does education change minds and brains?

Silvia Bunge, Professor, Department of Psychology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute | Director, Building Blocks of Cognition Lab

A disconcerting fact is that many of the details that we memorize in our classes fade away in the months or years after we complete our final exams, and it is likely that we will only leverage a small portion of it as we move forward in our careers. An important question, then, is: what, if anything, remains? Does education change us fundamentally – and, if so, how? My lab is interested in whether and how formal education hones our ability to reason logically. I will describe how my lab has approached this problem in the past through behavioral and brain imaging research. I will then mention a topic I am passionate about pursuing in the future: how ideological beliefs bias reasoning, and whether/how education can combat this pervasive societal problem.

Dr. Silvia Bunge is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research. She studies the cognitive and neural processes that support reasoning, memory, and goal-directed behavior in humans. Her lab also studies how these processes mature over childhood and adolescence, how they are shaped by education and demographic factors (for better and for worse) and how they support academic achievement. Dr. Bunge is the co-author of a forthcoming textbook titled “Fundamentals of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience”.

Mental Health and Sleep Health: Challenges Ahead

Allison Harvey, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic

Mental health challenges are common and are often chronic and difficult to treat. My team is interested in treating sleep and circadian problems as a pathway to improving mental health. As we work in this arena, we have become passionate about several challenges that impede progress, such as: How do we ensure scientific breakthroughs reach real-world practice? How do we move beyond diagnostic categories to study mental health challenges as complex, heterogeneous and multi-dimensional phenomena? How can we improve access to effective treatment? Once a person accesses treatment, how do we ensure the treatment promotes lasting change? I will describe how we can leverage implementation science and the science of behavior change to develop solutions to these pressing challenges.

Allison Harvey is a Professor and licensed Clinical Psychologist. Dr. Harvey is a treatment development researcher who conducts experimental and intervention studies focused on understanding and treating sleep and circadian problems, severe mental illness and behavior change processes. Dr. Harvey is a recipient of numerous awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society in 2020. She has also been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Orebro, Sweden and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Mining the secrets of the human brain

Rich Ivry, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Cognition and Action Lab

Cognitive neuroscientists seek to understand the biology of the mind. The development of new methods to probe and perturb the human has helped establish this interdisciplinary enterprise as an essential cornerstone of psychological research. I will review a sample of these technologies, describing how they have been exploited by researchers in our department to develop sophisticated models of the neural basis of human cognition and how these advances in basic research are leading to the development of new interventions in the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Rich Ivry is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs the Cognition and Action lab, using various tools of cognitive neuroscience to explore human performance in healthy and neurologically impaired populations. He is the co-author of the textbook, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind.

Psychological factors affecting equity in higher education

Rodolfo Mendoza Denton, Professor, Department of Psychology | Co-Director, Relationships and Social Cognition Lab

Despite decades of research, disparities in educational outcomes between majority and minority group students persist at all levels of education. Particularly perplexing is the persistence of these inequalities at the highest levels of training, which already selects for the most highly achieving students for specialization in their field of study. This talk will cover some of the psychological processes that can explain these inequalities, and discuss how the structure of traditional higher education may contribute to these disparities.

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton is professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Childhood experiences living in Mexico, the U.S., Ivory Coast, and Thailand cemented an early interest in cultural differences and intergroup relations. He received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from Columbia University. Mendoza-Denton’s professional work covers stereotyping and prejudice from the perspective of both target and perceiver, intergroup relations, as well as how these processes influence educational outcomes. He received the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in 2015, and the University-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018.

Authors Meet Critics

Author Meets Critics: “The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis”

Published December 8, 2021

Recorded on December 3, 12pm PST, this “Authors Meet Critics” discussion focused on The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis, by Neil Fligstein, Class of 1939 Chancellor’s Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

Professor Fligstein was joined in conversation by Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018) and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (2021).

This event was co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

About the Book

More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits—financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows—yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key, Neil Fligstein argues, is the convergence of major U.S. banks on an identical business model: extracting money from the securitization of mortgages. But how, and why, did this convergence come about?

The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis carefully takes the reader through the development of a banking industry dependent on mortgage securitization. Fligstein documents how banks, with help from the government, created the market for mortgage securities. The largest banks—Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns, Citibank, and Washington Mutual—soon came to participate in every aspect of this market. Each firm originated mortgages, issued mortgage-backed securities, sold those securities, and, in many cases, acted as their own best customers by purchasing the same securities. Entirely reliant on the throughput of mortgages, these firms were unable to alter course even when it became clear that the market had turned on them in the mid-2000s.

With the structural features of the banking industry in view, the rest of the story falls into place. Fligstein explains how the crisis was produced, where it spread, why regulators missed the warning signs, and how banks’ dependence on mortgage securitization resulted in predatory lending and securities fraud. An illuminating account of the transformation of the American financial system, The Banks Did It offers important lessons for anyone with a stake in avoiding the next crisis.

Authors Meet Critics

Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India

Published November 29, 2021

Recorded on November 16, 2021, this video presents an “Authors Meet Critics” panel focused on the book, Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), by Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, with a joint appointment with DCRP and Global Metropolitan Studies.

Professor Balakrishnan was joined in conversation by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus, and Co-Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley.

Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India explores new spatial forms of urbanization by focusing on land contestations along infrastructural and economic corridors in liberalizing India. The book explores the production of private mega-enclaves amidst agricultural fields along these corridors. These corridor urbanizations defy our familiar binaries of city and village and our inherited disciplinary silos of agrarian and urban studies. Instead, the book shows how current urban development accretes onto older histories of agrarian capitalism, thus constituting processes of what Balakrishnan calls “recombinant urbanization.”

The Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. This panel was co-sponsored by the Institute for South Asia Studies.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

California Spotlight

The Labor of Fire: Wildlands Firefighting and Incarceration in California

Published November 20, 2021

Part of the California Spotlight Series

Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive. The changing wildfire season not only affects those living near wildfires, but also those charged with fighting fires and managing lands on fire.

Recorded on November 10, 2021, this panel discussion considered how changing wildfires have changed not only how fires are fought, but who fights them. The panel included Brandon Smith, Co-founder and Chief Director of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP); Jameson Karns, a former firefighter from Southern California who is currently a PhD Candidate in History at UC Berkeley; and Lindsey Raisa Feldman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis, whose research and advocacy sits at the intersection of identity, labor, and incarceration, and who has conducted ethnographic research with incarcerated wildland firefighters. The panel was moderated by John Radke, a faculty member in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Matrix On Point: Religion in the Age of Information

Published November 5, 2021

Religion, as we know it, is being reframed, reshaped, and even replaced. Recorded on November 2, 2021, this online panel discussion focused on how digital technologies are transforming both religious doctrines and practices in contemporary society.

Panelists include: Steven Barrie-Anthony, Research Associate at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion; Kelsy Burke, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Erika Gault, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies from the University of Arizona; and Heather Mellquist Lehto, Postdoctoral Fellow with Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. Moderated by Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

This panel was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation.

Co-organized by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Listen to a podcast recording below, produced as part of the Berkeley Talks series.

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: The Rights and Lives of Non-Citizens

Published November 4, 2021

Recorded on October 29, 2021, this panel discussion considered forms of non-citizenship and marginalization around the world, with a special focus on refugees, stateless people, and undocumented migrants.

Panelists included:

Noora Lori, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University
Itamar Mann, Senior Lecturer, University of Haifa, Faculty of Law
Cecilia Menjívar, Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair, Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Serena Parekh, Professor of Philosophy, Northeastern University
Irene Bloemraad (Moderator), Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley; Founding Director, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI)

The event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, or BIMI (https://bimi.berkeley.edu/).

Special Event

Music, the Diaspora, and the World: A Conversation with Angélique Kidjo

Published October 29, 2021

One could say that, by definition, music is the most diasporic of art forms. It is movement itself. It is hybridity. It passes from place to place and from time to time, heedless of natural or social borders. Music belongs everywhere, and yet it is always from somewhere. Diasporic themes and histories have been central not only to the creation and commodification of new musical forms, but also to the emergence of global identities and solidarities.

In this conversation, recorded on October 28, 2021, the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, together with the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Cal Performances, and the Black Studies Collaboratory, took advantage of the precious artist-in-residency of Angélique Kidjo on the UC Berkeley campus to open a conversation about the global circulation of African musical forms and musicians, its worldwide significance, and its social power.

Angélique Kidjo was joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies; Ivy Mills, Lecturer, Visual and Literary Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora; and Victoria Grubbs, Lecturer and Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow.

Watch the event above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: New Directions in Studying Policing

Published October 29, 2021

Contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and the prison abolition movement point to the long histories of police violence and mass incarceration in the United States and elsewhere, demanding new approaches to approaching the history and present of policing.

In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on October 25, 2021, UC Berkeley graduate students were joined by outside experts in discussing the impacts of policing on the lives and health of officers and the communities they serve, as well as how contemporary policing practices are related to an unjust past.

Panelists included Kimberly Burke, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and a Research Fellow at the Center for Policing Equity; Matthew Guariglia, Policy Analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Brie McLemore, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program; and Eduardo Duran, a PhD student, researcher, and instructor in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program.

The Matrix On Point discussion series promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Watch the video of this event above or on YouTube.

Lecture

Transformation Through Trauma: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Survive Injuries of Inequality

Published October 14, 2021

Recorded on October 4, 2021, this video presents a lecture by Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Professor Watkins-Hayes is also director of the Center for Racial Justice.

How do we remake, not simply rebuild, our lives after trauma? Rebuilding suggests a return to a prior state, where the same plans, assumptions, and visions remain in place. Remaking is much more dramatic; it is transformative and generates fundamentally new ways of navigating the world. We often think of significant life transformations as highly individualistic and personal experiences. But drawing upon findings highlighted in her book, Remaking A Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, Watkins-Hayes analyzes the sociological dimensions of transformative life change and the process of healing from personal and collective injuries of inequality.

This event was co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley Department of Sociology, Sociologists of Color and Allies, and the Institute of Governmental Studies. This event was part of UC Berkeley Sociology’s Colloquium Series.

About Celeste Watkins-Hayes

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is an internationally-recognized scholar and expert widely credited for her research at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and institutions, with a special focus on urban poverty and race, class, and gender studies. Dr. Watkins-Hayes has published two books, numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, and pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Chicago Magazine. She has been widely quoted in the popular press as a national expert on social inequality, HIV/AIDS, and societal safety nets.

The release of her book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, (2019, University of California Press) was covered by The Chicago Tribune, Ms. Magazine, EBONY, Chicago Public Radio, New York Public Radio, Detroit Public Radio, POZ Magazine, PBS Newshour, Chicago Tonight, and several other outlets across the country. Remaking A Life has won several awards, including the American Sociological Association (ASA) Distinguished Book Award, the Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award bestowed by the ASA Medical Sociology Section, the Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Section on Sex and Gender, the Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Section of Race, Gender, and Class, the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology, the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Alison Piepmeier Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Remaking a Life was also a Gold Medalist on Women’s Issues from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a 2020 PROSE Book Award finalist from the Association of American Publishers.

Watkins-Hayes’ first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform, was a finalist for the 2009 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2011 Max Weber Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Dr. Watkins-Hayes holds a PhD and MA in sociology from Harvard University and a BA from Spelman College, where she graduated summa cum laude. She served on the board of trustees of Spelman College for over a decade in various leadership roles, leading the search process for the college’s 10th president. She is a founding steering member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, having served on the board of directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts from 2017 to 2021.

Social Science / Data Science

Doing Academic Research with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Published October 14, 2021

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has become increasingly popular as an online tool for conducting social science research. What are the specific advantages and downsides of using online crowdsourcing tools like MTurk for conducting research? What practical and/or moral dilemmas might emerge in the course of the research process, and what concrete strategies have scientists developed to address them?

Presented as part of the Social Sciences and Data Science event series, co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley D-Lab, a panel discussion recorded on October 1, 2021 brought together researchers from diverse disciplines, who shared their experience with the MTurk platform and discussed social and ethical aspects of MTurk more generally.

Moderated by Serena Chen, Professor and Chair of Psychology and the Marian E. and Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. Distinguished Chair for Innovative Teaching and Research at UC Berkeley, the panel featured Ali Alkhatib, Interim director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco; Stefano DellaVigna, Daniel Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at UC Berkeley; and Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

“MTurk has been a huge boon to the social sciences in general, partly because along with a lot of other online platforms, it has reduced the cost, especially the administrative costs, of running experiments,” Lenz said. “MTurk has lots of issues you all should be aware of. But it’s still been a net positive and helped helped us understand real-world problems and real-world behaviors.”

Lenz said that researchers should be wary of assuming MTurk provides a representative sample of large populations, though he noted that there may be some predictability in when and how MTurk is not representative, based on what is known about the platform’s “worker” population.

“Demographically, this is not a representative sample of the US population, and you should never treat it that way,” Lenz said. “If you’re hoping to generalize your findings to the US population, don’t. But the argument for it is that it’s a more diverse sample than your typical lab sample.”

Lenz also warned that researchers should be attuned to bias based on “social desirability,” as MTurk survey respondents may not input their honest opinions. And there may also be bias due to workers’ high level of exposure to information about certain topics, such as politics. He recommended using real-world examples, rather than hypotheticals, to encourage more candid responses. “Try to use Mechanical Turk in ways that you’ll know will reflect more on the real world,” Lenz advised. “For example, we always try to ask people about their actual members of Congress when we’re doing studies on voting.”

One of the trade-offs with using a paid survey service such as Mechanical Turk, Lenz noted, is that the more you pay, the more people appear to attempt to cheat or use bots to shortcut the survey process. “You want to pay people more, but you don’t want people trying to do the study many times,” Lenz said. “Everybody struggles with this.”

In his talk, Stefano DellaVigna talked about how MTurk has made it more efficient to replicate studies without high investment. “It is wonderful to be able to have this quick access to obtain data and evaluate replicability,” DellaVigna said.

He also praised the platform for enabling research during the pandemic, and for allowing graduate students to conduct small-scale studies to gather initial results; he shared an anecdote about a PhD student who came up with a question and ran a study on MTurk in a matter of hours. “It is so empowering and lowers inequality in access to study samples,” he said.

In his talk, Ali Alkhatib from the Center for Applied Data Ethics explained that he is less of a user of MTurk than a researcher focused on understanding the workers behind the platform. “I have been studying the crowd workers themselves, and what they are experiencing as they as they engage with these platforms,” Alkhatib explained.

He noted that researchers should keep in mind the circumstances of the workers on MTurk and similar platforms, who often are struggling to make a living. He noted that, if the workers are in communication with each other, it may be because “they’re not trying to game the system; they’re just trying to not get stiffed. These workers are highly networked and and talking with each other and trying to exchange notes.”

He also explained that researchers should work to build trust in the MTurk community, and gain an understanding of how the platform works before diving in. “Mechanical Turk is very much a community, very much a culture,” he said. “Think of this as a relationship that you try to foster and build and nurture, because these are people, and as much as we would like to think that they pass through and are stateless, the reality is that they are human beings who are just as affected by the research and the treatments that we that we bring to them as as anybody else.”

Alkhatib said that researchers should be “as clear as possible” and “as communicative as possible,” while also trying to be “as humane as possible to the people that we’re working with. It also leads you to a much richer sort of understanding of why you get certain findings or why things don’t necessarily add up.”

“Mechanical Turk is not a panacea,” Alkhatib said. “It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it solves some of them, or it may ameliorate some of them. But we do need to be conscious of how it shifts other problems around as well.”