Social Science

  • Police in front of a large crowd
    A new study finds no evidence of a widespread surge in total, violent or property crime in large U.S. cities in the aftermath of the highly publicized police shooting of Michael Brown. But the research does show the overall rate of robberies across the country has increased, as has the murder rate in certain cities.
  • Children enjoying popsicles
    A child’s perception of an adult’s trustworthiness can affect his or her willingness to resist a small, immediately available reward in order to obtain a larger reward later, a new University of Colorado Boulder study has discovered.
  • Underneath and alongside human history is a history involving animals, as one might note here: President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir ride horses along a road in Yosemite Valley in 1903, with Half Dome in the distance, accompanied by Park Rangers Archie Leonard and Charles Leidig, followed by unidentified man on foot; left to right, Leonard, Muir, Roosevelt, Leidig. Photo courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.
    Thomas G. Andrews, associate professor of history, is writing a book exploring humanity’s relationships with the non-human animal world, but he can sum up his thoughts on the matter in a single word: messy.
  • Cartoon of man in water
    'Our results can assist policymakers in breaking the vicious cycle between drug use and violent deaths, including some suicides,’ researcher says.
  • Angry yelling man
    If you are an eyewitness, and have implicated a suspect not of the same race as you, are you accurate in recognizing and telling that person apart from others?’ Probably not, researcher finds
  • Adam Bradley
    Adam Bradley is a study in contrasts: a hip-hop expert who grew up in Salt Lake City, dissecting the literary devices of Shakespeare in one breath and Slick Rick in the next. He teaches in English, but his RAP Lab is in the chemistry building.
  • U.N. tank
    U.N. peacekeeping forces have been proved effective in breaking the cycle of civil wars, but the blue helmets are deployed in only 38 percent of conflicts. Why? professor finds correlation between peacekeeping deployment and the economic interests of the United Nations’ Security Council members.
  • Nan Goodman, third from left, and her students in front of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey. The man with the button-down shirt at the center is Cem Durak, the group’s guide in Turkey and now a graduate student in religious studies at -Boulder. Photo courtesy of Nan Goodman.
    “When people think about Istanbul, they don’t necessarily think about Jewish life,” says Nan Goodman. The professor of English and director of the Program in Jewish Studies is starting to change that.
  •  study suggests that it may be better to end a marriage than to continue in an unhappy one.
    Love and marriage, as someone once crooned, may go together like a horse and carriage. But if the horse goes one way and the carriage another, the danger of suicide increases. That’s the key finding in an article by four University of Colorado Boulder researchers published in the most recent issue of the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior.
  • "Safe Sex" chalk sign
    When asked why they didn’t use contraception or took other contraceptive risks, women in a University of Colorado Boulder study overwhelmingly replied that they just weren’t thinking. What they meant by that varied widely, and the results have implications for how clinicians can help reduce risky behavior and consequent unintended pregnancies.
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