Lauren RubensteinRobinson's new study explains why it can be so hard to resist alcohol, drugs or sweet treats
Olivia DrakeMasami Imai, professor of economics, professor of East Asian studies, is the co-author of an article titled "Attribution Error in Economic Voting: Evidence from Trade Shocks," published in the January 2015 edition of Economy Inquiry, Volume 53, Issue 1, pages 258-257. Rosa Hayes '13, currently a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, also is one of the paper's co-authors. This article exploits the international transmission of business cycles to examine the prevalence of attribution error in economic voting in a large panel of countries from 1990 to 2009. Masami and his co-authors found that voters, on average, exhibit…
#THISISWHY (by Christine Foster. Originally published in Wesleyan Magazine, Dec. 10, 2014) Professor of Art Tula Telfair’s epic and massive landscape paintings fill the walls of Wesleyan’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. They call forth our memories of the most stunning scenic vistas—craggy mountains topped by threatening clouds; impossibly moist, green valleys; icebergs jutting hundreds of feet out of the freezing aqua waters below. From a distance, they appear to be photographs, but they aren’t. These views don’t even exist, except in Telfair’s mind and on her canvases. Still—even knowing they are imagined— the viewer is tempted to look for signs of…
Professor of Government James McGuire is the author of a book chapter titled "Democracy, Agency and the Classification of Political Regimes," published in Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O'Donnell by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Guillermo O'Donnell (1936-2011) was widely recognized as the world's leading scholar of Latin American politics. During his doctoral studies, McGuire worked closely with O'Donnell in both Argentina and the United States, translating from Spanish to English O'Donnell's Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966-1973, in Comparative Perspective (University of California Press, 1988). McGuire's chapter in this new volume commemorating O'Donnell's life and work argues that schemes for classifying…
In the summer of 2014, students from more than 200 countries enrolled in Professor of Psychology Scott Plous's Social Psychology "MOOC" (massive open online course). The class was offered by Wesleyan, hosted by Coursera.org, and drew more than 200,000 students. The final assignment of the course, "The Day of Compassion," asked students to live 24 hours as compassionately as possible and to analyze the experience using social psychology. (more…)
"We are in the midst of hard times now, and it feels as if art is failing us," writes Scott
The foreign exchange, "forex," scandal was a series of conspiracies, writes Grossman
The Washington Post selected President Michael Roth's book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, on its list of top 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2014. A brief summary of the review states: The president of Wesleyan University describes two distinct traditions of a liberal education--one philosophical and "skeptical," the other rhetorical and "reverential"--and argues that both are necessary for educating autonomous individuals who can also participate with others. Beyond the University was originally reviewed in the Post on May 23 by Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. In that review, Nelson calls the book "a substantial and lively discussion" as well…
Assistant Professor of Psychology Clara Wilkins is the co-author of a paper titled "You Can Win But I Can't Lose: Bias Against High-Status Groups Increases Their Zero-Sum Beliefs About Discrimination" published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2014. The article will be published again in the in the journal's March 2015 print edition. Wilkins co-authored the article with several other researchers including Joseph Wellman, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Wesleyan, who is now at California State University, San Barnardino, and Katherine Schad BA '13/MA '14. The study considered what causes people to espouse "zero-sum beliefs"—or beliefs that gains for one…
Throughout history, advances in these technologies have unsettled the public, yet have forged ahead
Richard Grossman, professor of economics, delivered a keynote speech at the 10th Chief Risk Officer Assembly in Munich, Germany on Nov. 19. The speech was based on his book, WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them (Oxford University Press), and focused the consequences of government policy for economic risk. The CRO Assembly is organized by Geneva Association, an insurance industry think-tank, and the CRO Forum, which is made up of chief risk officers from large (primarily European) multi-national insurance and re-insurance companies. The conference took place at the headquarters of Munich RE, one of the world’s largest…
A book by Magda Teter, the Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish Studies, received honorable mention for the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. The Schnitzer Book Award was established in 2007 to recognize and promote outstanding scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies and to honor scholars whose work embodies the best in the field: innovative research, excellent writing and sophisticated methodology. Teter's book, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation, published by Harvard University Press in 2011, was honored in the Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History category. In recognizing her book, the Prize Committee wrote: "In this beautifully written and…