Big Data and Potential Worlds

Big Data

An avalanche of newly accessible datasets – popularly called “Big Data” – is transforming research questions and processes across the social sciences. Dialogo, UChicago Social Sciences, spoke with Howard C. Nusbaum and James A. Evans to discuss the impact and opportunities surrounding these changes. Link to original article below. 

 

Dialogo: What does big data mean in the realm of the social sciences?

James Evans:  Big data can mean many different things. The classic triptych is high volume, high variety, and high velocity. In the social sciences especially, it’s increasingly high volume and high variety. Each does a different kind of thing. Large-scale data comes off of highly instrumented social processes. For example, our cell phones and all of the transactions that we engage in online and in many other contexts are instrumented by an ensemble of sensors. Those sensors create large streams of data that allow us to ask and answer questions about social process at high levels of resolution than we could have only conceived before, and with much larger scale data over many different kinds of interactions and time periods, et cetera.

The variety part means that we can also explore the relationship between different kinds of social action because they exist in this common format in a way that was previously only conceivable in contexts like ethnography, where people were looking at multiple modes but in very small scales.

Overall, it’s a game changer in social sciences.

Howard Nusbaum:  For a long time, social scientists have used survey instruments like the General Social Survey, which is a very structured set of questions that people answer, and tracked that data over a long period of time. We used to consider that big data, but now there are projects like the Kavli HUMAN Project at New York University, where they intend to survey 10,000 people. To extend this into a place where there are 10,000 people instrumented across the boroughs of New York City gives access to multidimensional data in a way that we’ve never had before. One can think about it as the Hubble telescope of social sciences, moving the social sciences into the realm of something where we have evidence about people’s movements, people’s choices, people’s feelings, interactions between individuals.

Evans:  Recently, we published a study that used all of the Amazon.com book purchase data, along with Barnes and Noble, and other online book purchasers to identify the association between preferences for political ideology books on their red or blue side, and all other consumptive science and literature. That’s a transaction trace, but also clearly reveals insights about the way in which people who hold or consume information about a certain ideology also consume other kinds of things.

We are also using eye-tracking data of a variety of types, which again, increasingly is able to provide really rich interaction signals. We’re able to instrument in ways that before were specific to like one or two labs. Now, you can run a virtual laboratory of 10,000 or 15,000 or 100,000 people and get detailed interaction traces that capture arousal and attention, and other things.

In another study, we took data for tens of thousands of publications related to gene/drug interactions in the literature and aligned them with data from a high-throughput experiment on gene/drug interactions that replicated about 1.7 million of those interactions. We used the trace of collaboration and a whole host of variables that we extracted from the original papers to predict, in some cases with enormous success, the degree to which different kinds of communities produced knowledge that was more or less replicable in the future. This would have been impossible without the ability to perform high-throughput experiments, on the one hand, or use computational tools to extract information in mass from publications, on the other.

In short, there is data that we previously didn’t think of as data; like full text, government documents, user-generated images and videos, from which we can pull signals which are, in some cases, enormously predictive.

Nusbaum:  Finding signals that were heretofore unused or hidden or latent is interesting. That standard model of a meta-analysis, which you’re alluding to as an upgraded approach, the standard modeling of published research in psychology and other fields, is taking studies — specifically the summary statistics recorded in those studies — and analyzing them for consistency across conditions reported in the studies for those statistics. You’d say, ‘Oh look, nine out of ten studies, or 100 out of 150 studies show a certain kind of pattern of data consistent with the conclusions,’ so you have this sense of reproducibility. Now there are new methods of using data in publications that can lead to new insights.

For example, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) papers — those publications have data tables in them, so the data tables have X-Y-Z coordinates corresponding to neural activity in specific spots in your brain. Instead of just taking summary statistics, an approach called NeuroSynth is used to recreate an idealized version of the data from the data tables from each of these studies, generating a new synthetic data set at a much finer grain resolution that the old approach to meta-analysis.  This actually lets you do new experiments on data that has been published. This is a way of doing new studies that are a type of synthetic research.

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Howard Nusbaum (left) and James Evans. Photo by Mark Lawton

 

Dialogo: Are conclusions in research stronger because of the volume of data that is available?

Evans:  The answer to this question has to be ‘yes and no,’ right? Because the ‘yes’ acknowledges that, okay, we’re able to access data from new places, and at new scales. And the ‘no’ highlights that digital data is data from the wild, so to speak…data from transactions or data from clicks online, or from online activity, or dating sites, or wherever, has this deep problem of algorithmic confounding. You have data on choices (e.g., “clicks”), but those choices were given to you because it was predicted that they would most appeal to you, and so as researchers we don’t know what part of online activity is a result of people’s preferences, and the “smart” algorithms that were used to predict them. As a result, there’s way more data on these huge global platforms, but the platforms are smart and that smartness shapes the results of the experiment that you’re performing every time you go online and search for things. It creates enormous opportunities, enormous challenges.

Nusbaum:  Every method, regardless of where it comes from, has its pluses and minuses. In the past days, social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists would go to NORC (a social sciences research organization at University of Chicago) and collect stratified samples of data from populations according to a certain kind of model. Cognitive psychologists like me would run 10, 20, maybe 30 people if we were lucky, in our laboratories and collect data. Then Amazon came along with Mechanical Turk, and researchers started running studies online. We can ramp up a study now from 10 people in the lab to 1500 people (online) basically in a week.

And those people are sitting at home, perhaps watching TV while they’re doing a study. There could be kids running around and dogs barking. If you’re doing an auditory study, the quality of the headphones differs. We have to insert new kinds of quality control checks to see if people are actually engaged in a task. We have to collect demographics in a way we didn’t before. We have to find ways to collect online measures over the Internet. Yet, at the same time, we can see that we generally get very similar results from 1500 people in the field to 10 people in our laboratory. Because of that, it gives us a methodological reach in new directions that we didn’t have before.

At the same time, by going out on the web, we can now collect data from a wide variety of people. For example, there are supposed to be roughly one in 10,000 people who have absolute pitch, the ability to name the note when you hear a note played. As it turns out, we can find them all over the place, and if you set up a website and do testing for absolute pitch, we can start to bring them in to the site for testing. We can now get people with different kinds of backgrounds interested in doing our studies from all over the world. We never could have done that before.

That’s not big data, per se, but it’s a kind of reach into a data space that we didn’t have before.

Evans:  It’s big sampling.

Nusbaum:  It’s big sampling, that’s right. One of the things that is interesting about big data is we’re now trying to think about data in different ways. Scientists in social sciences who perhaps never thought about those issues are confronting those kinds of forces as well, grappling with how to think about the kind of person who has produced these data. How do you think about the framework and situation under which data was collected? What were the intents of the researchers compared to the participants?

Dialogo: What are some of the other challenges that come out of big data?

Evans:  The institutions with the greatest sense or reach into human activity are not public researchers. They’re private companies like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Google. They have more touches of more individuals than anyone else; any other government agency.

That creates a couple of different kinds of challenges. One is that there’s a hierarchy of access by selective individuals who have selective relationships with important people and these companies that creates a kind of random access to this data by the social sciences. A second associated challenge is that the government has decided to invest less in social science data, which puts at risk the possibility that more and more of the science that emerges from these social data streams becomes private rather than public science.

Nusbaum:  There are also problems of meaning. For example, suppose you want to do a study that looks at the neighborhood safety of older people in different income brackets. How do you go about that? There are different ways of deciding what the meaning of safety is and how that translates into existing data or collecting new data, such as converting street view images from different addresses into visual measures of local safety.

The other problem that the data scientists talk about is sustainability. As more data is collected, it piles up and the set of data gets bigger and bigger.  How do you organize the data? How do you organize and allow access to the data, maintaining privacy and security? How do you maintain reproducibility as opposed to replicability such that the same data can be processed by the same kinds of tools and get the same result or the same conceptual kind of tools even as software develops over time?

Evans: Reproducibility and replicability have become deeper issues on platforms that are constantly changing. That’s the polar opposite of something like a NORC survey, which has been the same for 50 years. Just the velocity of technological change for filtering out information from noise signal is changing dramatically. I completely agree with Howard that often data science teams are just looking for variation and they rediscover things over and over again that have maybe been discovered 50 or 100 years before in small scale data.

One of the biggest challenges for the new kinds of insight that comes from big data is that as social scientists we have a taste for certain kinds of questions and we like answers of a certain resolution that conform to a certain kind of story, in the same way that a blockbuster movie has to be between an hour and a half and two and a half hours. You can’t have a five-hour movie or a half-hour movie. It’s both a problem to digest those new studies and to take them seriously, but its also an opportunity, because it holds the possibility of expanding the collective imagination of the social sciences.

Nusbaum:  Early on, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience required that every time you published a paper, you had to put your data in a central repository they maintained. The problem is data came from different scanners, different instruments with different properties, with different work flows, with different kinds of data structures. Nobody could easily make use of it.

Now there is the opportunity for somebody who doesn’t know anything about, for example, Alzheimer’s disease to basically analyze brain data in a unique way that psychologists or neuroscientists haven’t thought about, because we had preconceived notions of the disease.  A computational approach that looks for data patterns can come up with some new information that can provide fundamental insights. Getting more of that behavioral and neuroscience in common formats that are publicly accessible with common data modeling and analysis tools is critical for making breakthroughs in a lot of areas.

Evans:  But many of these methods are fundamentally not “statistical” yet. They’re so high dimensional. There’s no meaningful articulation of a confidence interval or anything like that because we have no precise sense of the search space that methods like multi-layer neural nets explore to identify their answers. And it remains unclear how these kinds of issues are going to shake out in the social sciences.

Dialogo: How is the availability of big data impacting methodologies?

Evans: We see it even in the traditional survey. Today – and this has really been pushed and piloted by social media and information companies like Facebook and Google – has been this development of what I’ll call active and interactive learning surveys, where you’re predicting the answer to the next question that a person might be posed.

Rather than asking a thousand questions, you might ask six personally sequenced questions to maximize that information, which means you have more space and time to ask about a whole host of other things. That’s a big shift using these models and using prediction in the context of performing survey and I would say observational data is similar.

Nusbaum:  That’s an extension of an old process that’s taken place in other areas, often called adaptive testing. GRE uses this kind of adaptive testing. On the one hand, it’s efficient and often effective, and predicts performance in other circumstances. On the other hand, in other cases, it can miss out on some things. We know from work by people like (U.S.C. Professor) Norbert Schwarz that the context of the questions matters as much as anything. If the context changes by adaptive testing, then there may be things changing that we’re not aware of. One question primes you in one way. For example, if you say, ‘How good is your life?’ Then you say, ‘How good is your marriage?’ That gets one kind of ordering versus if you say, ‘How good is your marriage,’ and then, ‘How good is your life?’ It gives another kind of pattern of response. So thinking about those kinds of things are going to nuance the way we approach these things. That will be a developmental process, I think, over time.

Evans: This highlights that more than just forms of data gathering are changing. There was a recent paper by Tom Griffiths then at Berkeley, now Princeton, which talked about experimental design as algorithm design. The idea is when you’re using these algorithms to optimally collect data then, all of a sudden, the whole idea of collecting data and then analyzing it, with a strong wall between the two processes, doesn’t make sense anymore, right?

Nusbaum:  We don’t have yet the precision of understanding our instruments in the way that physicists often do because they’re building them from scratch. Our instruments are much more context dependent than their instruments. The algorithms we use for designing our studies and the algorithms that we use for analyzing our studies are slightly mismatched.

Evans:  By building these models, you figure out what is it that you know firmly, and what you know only loosely.

Dialogo: As big data continues to become bigger, what changes do you anticipate? What do you think will happen in future research?

Nusbaum:  From my perspective, we’re seeing a convergence of different kinds of research methods. James and I were part of a common National Science Foundation research project. The conversations that we had suggested a common approach in conceptualization and different kinds of data that we can bring to bear on the same question.

One of the things we’re seeing in the social sciences is sociologists are taking blood spots. Political scientists are taking buccal swabs. Economists are doing fMRI and using methods from neuroscience. We’re getting biological data. We’re getting behavioral data. We’re getting location and movement data. We’re getting choice data. We’re getting all kinds of data, and it doesn’t matter what discipline you are coming from.

Finding the causal links between the individual and the group by looking at how the individual’s choices and behavior are influenced by the invisible forces of society is fundamental whether we’re talking about linguistics or psychology. Social science research moving in a direction where we can start to address that, because we have data with the grain of the individual and data with the grain of the group. We can look at the big forces, and we can look at the individual in relationship to them. That’s one place in which we’re going to have traction that we have not had good traction in the past.

One thing that relates to this notion of multiple levels of resolution that are studied by different fields coming together is a shift from what a focus on establishing necessary causal conditions to establishing sufficient conditions. This is a distinction that we talk a lot about in explanations in the social sciences. Is the factor that you’re observing necessary for the operation of a mechanism? Is it necessary for the outcome that you observe? Or, is it sufficient? With the integration of different perspectives, and with large-scale data, there is an increasing taste for sufficient explanations that hold in different contexts and situations.

That’s driven almost all activity in the quantitative social sciences over the last 100 years; find something statistically significant, but typically … it’s really small, not really substantial. Increasingly by integrating all these levels of analysis, we’re able to explain sometimes 90, 95, 98, 99 percent of the activity of an individual or of a group in a particular setting.

It changes a lot, right? This can make social science more potentially applied, because now we are talking about effects that are reliable but maybe not substantial, and we’re talking about reproducing phenomena. This shift in stance will provide more opportunities for us to quickly send insights out into the world of systems that generate values for people.

Evans:  Our theories become shaped in a different way. That moves us closer to physics in certain ways. As theories about various phenomena become more complex, seeing the relationships among those kinds of structures becomes much more straightforward. We have this problem in genetics. People in genetics used to have these simple causal theories, ‘This gene produces this outcome.’ Now there are statistical theories, ‘This pattern of genes gives this population.’ There’s no causal theory there. It’s only a statistical association. They don’t go from genes to proteins to neurons to behavior, or structure. They’re in search of the same kind of problem and solutions that we are. They have very complex, highly dimensional problems with data, big data that relate these things. They don’t know how to connect them. There will likely be forms of theoretical solution that may be common amongst different fields now that didn’t used to occur because those disciplines weren’t viewed in common. I think that’s going to be a huge change.

Dialogo: Closing thoughts?

Evans:  There are a number of different potential worlds that could come out of this Big Data moment. In one world, I could imagine that the computational social sciences and behavioral sciences move so quickly and aggressively, and adopt or embrace other epistemological levels of analysis and styles that they separate, and you are left with psychology, and sociology, and political science on the one hand, and you separately have a  computational social science that has speciated from those things. On the other hand, you could have a world in which computational approaches just become the way of doing good sociology or psychology or economics, which brings all of those fields a little closer.

Questions also remain about whether the biggest tranches of data are going to be locked up in such a way that the science that comes out of them is really also locked up in databases and services, and can only be used by the proprietary producers of those things? Or, are they going to be become part of a broader interchange, and feed the individual social sciences that gave rise to them? I don’t know. I think none of us knows.

Nusbaum:  This is particular challenge we see right now. 23andMe has collected many people’s genetic data. If you want to ask questions of and get a guaranteed 10,000 responses with genetic analysis, it’ll cost you six figures. Essentially, you can pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars and run a social science study on the genetic database and you have guaranteed results. If you just imagine the fact that there’s this huge database of hundreds of thousands of peoples’ genetic data as a potential pool that you could sample, consider what kind of social science you could do.

As neuroscience tools have become more effective and cheaper, there has started to be a schism within the field of Psychology. As a cognitive neuroscientist, you might be using fMRI to address basic questions of mechanisms in language understanding and decision making, and you train students in neuroscience methods and forget about the deep theoretical background coming from psychology. There is now a whole cadre of people studying brains and forgetting that we know a lot about behavior and psychology. Hopefully in the future these perspectives will be merged together. In fact, as we’ve seen more biological methods used in other parts of the social sciences, there’s a hope that actually there can be a broader convergence of disciplines and methods, moving from the past separation of psychology versus sociology versus political science to have better understanding of the questions and theories that span the social sciences. I think that’s a real opportunity that’s been missing for a long time.

Read the article: Dialogo. (2018, May 2). Common ground: Howard Nusbaum and James Evans. UChicago Social Sciences. Retrieved from https://dialogo.uchicago.edu/content/common-ground-howard-nusbaum-and-james-evans


 

Howard C. Nusbaum is the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Practical Wisdom at the University of Chicago. He is internationally recognized for his multi-disciplinary studies of the nature of wisdom and the cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate communication and thinking. Nusbaum’s past research has investigated the effects of sleep on learning, adaptive processes in language learning, and the neural mechanisms of speech communication. His current research investigates how experience can increase wisdom and produce changes in insight and economic decisions, and examines the role of sleep in cognitive creativity and abstraction. He is a scholar with Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

James Evans is a professor in the Department of Sociology, director of Knowledge Lab at University of Chicago, and faculty director of the Masters program in Computational Social Sciences. In his research, Evans explores how social and technical institutions shape knowledge—science, scholarship, law, news, religion—and how these understandings reshape the social and technical world. He has studied how industry collaboration shapes the ethos, secrecy and organization of academic science; the web of individuals and institutions that produce innovations; and markets for ideas and their creators, as well as the impact of the Internet on knowledge in society.

“Justice is quickly eroded if one is too cowardly to hold firmly to the ideals that are central to a just society” | Interview with Jean Porter

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Jean Porter is a scholar with the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life, pictured here at our first working group meeting in December 2015.

Moral theologian Jean Porter (University of Notre Dame) will give the talk “What should we fear? Courage and cowardice in public life” on Monday, June 5, 2017 at 7pm in the Swift Hall 3rd Floor Lecture Hall at the University of Chicago. An audience Q & A will be followed by a reception in the Swift Hall Common Room. This talk is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The talk and Q&A will be live-streamed at 7pm central time. For more information and to RSVP, go to https://virtue.uchicago.edu/porter

Amichai Amit is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Chicago and a graduate assistant for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.



Amichai Amit: Courage is often considered a virtue most pertinent to times of crises and especially to actual battle. What is the importance of courage in day-to-day public life? 
Jean Porter: You are quite right, and Aquinas would in fact agree with this, with some qualifications.  Courage is the virtue through which someone firmly holds onto rational and spiritual values in the face of danger, especially the danger of death. As such, it is clearly exemplified by the willingness to face death on the battlefield in defense of the common good. It might seem that courage has little relevance to our day to day lives, which are so safe and secure. And yet, on reflection, how safe are we, and even more to the point, how safe do we feel? In my talk, I focus especially on public attitudes towards the threat of terrorism, and I argue that we are challenged to hold onto certain ideals — equality, tolerance, respect for rule of law — even in the face of potentially lethal attacks. You might say that in certain ways, we are a society in crisis, although it is hard to say whether at this point this crisis reflects actual dangers, or stems from our perceptions of the world.
AA: Is there any difference between courage in the private realm and courage in public life?
JP: The differences would be circumstantial.  Actually, in my talk I will focus on the courage of the community as such, acknowledging that courage at this level is dependent on the courage of many individuals, but assuming nonetheless that it makes sense to speak of a community or a nation as courageous. the parade example would be the courage of the British people during the Blitz, and I claim that the American people displayed courage in the immediate retractions to the 9/11 attacks.
AA: One may think that in a well-ordered society, one in which law and bureaucracy are in good order, courage is required only in times of crises and when the social and legal systems falter. What do you think about this view? 
JP: I think it is critically important for any large-scale, complex society to have a legal system and bureaucratic structures in good working order. These are not only requirements for efficient functioning, they are also the institutional embodiments of ideals of equality and freedom. To put this in medieval terms, they are the preconditions for political rule, in contrast to a kind of dominion that reduces subjects to a servile statues.  that being said, however, formal structures are not enough — they must also be defended and interpreted by individuals who are committed to the rules precisely as embodiments of  moral ideals, and are committed to interpreting them accordingly. Recent experience clearly indicates that formal structures, to say nothing of tacit norms of civility and discourse, are no match for malice and stupidity.
AA: (In relation to the previous question): What are the relation between justice and courage?
JP:  Like all good Thomists, I affirm the connection of the virtues, and therefore believe that true courage presupposes a disposition towards justice. Perhaps more to the point, justice is quickly eroded if one is too cowardly to hold firmly to the ideals that are central to a just society. Again, I think our experience confirms this.
AA: Do you think courage is a virtue especially needed in contemporary public life? Are there any characteristics of our times that render courage more crucial than in past times? 

JP:  I don’t know that I would say it is more necessary, but we are perhaps faced with a distinctive set of challenges. The dangers that we face are in one sense ongoing, but they tend to be expressed in episodic bursts of violence, rather than through continued onslaughts.  This situation encourages either paranoia or complacency, and we see both in public life.
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AA: Aristotle defined courage as the mean between rashness and cowardice. Your talk focuses on courage and cowardice, but not rashness. Do you think rashness is less crucial when it comes to the public sphere? 

JP:  Actually, I do talk about recklessness, which I argue only makes fear worse in the long run.

For more information and to RSVP for “What should we fear? Courage and cowardice in public life,” go to https://virtue.uchicago.edu/porter

Interview with James Dominic Rooney, OP, Summer Session Participant

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This post is part of a series of interviews with our incoming class for the “Virtue, Happiness, & Self-Transcendence” 2017 Summer Seminar. James Dominic Rooney is Dominican Priest and graduate student in Philosophy at Saint Louis University. Valerie Wallace is Associate Director, Communications, for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

 

Valerie Wallace: Where are you from?

James Dominic Rooney: I am from Ohio, originally, but more recently of St. Louis, MO.

 

VW: What are your research areas? Why?

JDR: I am interested in metaphysics, Eastern and Western medieval philosophy, and philosophy of religion.

I’ve always been fascinated by the most general, fundamental questions of philosophy, such as the nature of casuality, what exists, or basic truths we often take for granted. Much of this explains my interest in metaphysics. Metaphysics as I conceive of it follows on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas: it is the science of being-as-being, or the structure of reality. While this can seem esoteric, empirical science appears to require metaphysical assumptions, and I am interested in how we should decide between metaphysical theories that might have ramifications for fundamental physics (quantum mechanics, etc.) or other sciences like biology.

Because of my interests in metaphysics, I have found a lot of interesting resources in medieval philosophy both in the Latin West and in China (Confucianism). Both of these traditions have a view of metaphysics as the science of wisdom, knowing the ultimate causes of everything. We tend to divide theoretical and practical concerns far apart, so that scientific inquiry is neither morally good nor bad, and is just beside the point of leading a fulfilled life. But I think the Chinese and Latin philosophers point to a different vision of wisdom: philosophy (and the wisdom it seeks) is not only a kind of theoretical knowledge, but importantly connected to a way of life. This perspective seems to me often forgotten or unpracticed in contemporary philosophy, let alone society. I think we could all benefit from rediscovering how to acquire wisdom.

 

VW: What are you most looking forward to about this summer’s seminar?

JDR: I look forward to having the opportunity not only to learn from some of the top scholars in their respective fields, but to be able to have personal discussion with them alongside other graduate students. The best and most lively work in philosophy seems to me to originate in these kind of discussions.

VW: What are your non-academic interests?

JDR: I am fond of art-house movies, calligraphy, bonsai trees, skiing, and being generally outdoors. But my aesthetic interests are really just a mature compensation for my love of computer games.

Interview with Timothy Reilly, Summer Session Participant

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This post is part of a series of interviews with our incoming class for the “Virtue, Happiness, & Self-Transcendence” 2017 Summer Seminar. Timothy Reilly is Postdoctoral Research Associate in developmental psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Valerie Wallace is Associate Director, Communications, for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

Valerie Wallace: Where are you from?

 

Timothy Reilly: I’m an Indiana native, originally from Muncie. I began my studies in Bloomington, Indiana, completed my doctorate in California. After that I returned to Bloomington, moved to Muncie, and finally arrived at Notre Dame. I still miss the scenery and weather of the Bay Area, though I am enjoying life back in the Midwest.

 

VW: What are your research areas? Why?

 

TR: My research addresses moral development and positive development from a variety of perspectives. My training is primarily in the fields of developmental psychology and the learning sciences. My graduate research focused on purpose, self-development, and well-being in the transition to adulthood. My current research is a survey and interview study of virtue in laboratory research and ensemble music, as part of a larger project on virtue in practices.

 

I engage in this work in order to understand how best to foster a wide array of individuals’ potential and self-development. In this, I seek to understand both the general patterns that are beneficial, broadly speaking, and the need to account for particularities in individuals’ needs, interests, and capacities. Originally this interest in potential focused on talent development. More recently, however, my interests have been drawn to the centrality of relationships, within families, schools, and other institutions, in facilitating or frustrating self-development and well-being. I am especially fascinated by the way that, for many, the self is most fully expressed, and is most fully fostered, in service to transcendental ends.

 

VW: What are you most looking forward to about this summer’s seminar?

 

TR: I am looking forward to the opportunity to engage with scholars who bring a variety of perspectives. It is important to me to continually ask new questions and to push at the boundaries of my knowledge. I am especially interested in discussing various conceptions of how virtue is developed and discussing the forms that self-transcendence and well-being take at different points in development and in different domains.

 

VW: What are your non-academic interests?

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TR: Outside of my work, I enjoy swimming, cycling, and hiking. I also enjoy reading and board games.

Interview with Jennifer Rothschild, Summer Session Participant

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This post is part of a series of interviews with our incoming class for the “Virtue, Happiness, & Self-Transcendence” 2017 Summer Seminar. Jennifer Rothschild is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida. Valerie Wallace is Associate Director, Communications, for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

 

Valerie Wallace: Where are you from?

JR:  am from Iowa, my philosophical upbringing was in Chicago, and I am currently living in Florida and teaching at the University of Florida.

 

VW: Tell me about your research.

JR: I am endlessly interested in human beings—what it is to be human, what makes individual ones of us good or bad versions of a human being, how to understand what we do (actions and practices) and why we do it, and so on. I suppose my philosophical questions converge in ethics, moral psychology, and action. Though I am willing to draw inspiration from any source that makes good points about the things I care about, my writing tends to be more narrowly anchored in Aristotelian virtue ethics. At this point in my research I would say that I work on Aristotle because, first, of the philosophy I know, he is the most right. Second, I like ancient virtue ethics because this kind of philosophy does not seem to me to lose sight of its connection to actual human beings.

Currently I am working on trying to understand self-improvement from an Aristotelian perspective. Within the framework of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, how is it that we can reach for being better than we are? What does that look like? I think this is an important question, and there are a number of obstacles to seeing our way to a good answer on it.

 

VW: What are you looking forward to for the upcoming seminar?

JR: The topic for this summer’s meeting, self-transcendence, is right in the center of my current project. Part of what I want to understand is what it is to reach beyond ourselves—the internal and external resources we need for this, and the structure of that kind of aiming and transformation. I am excited about coming together with other scholars to see what we can figure out. I am also especially interested in the resources of accounts other than Aristotle’s (in particular, that of Aquinas).

 

VW: What are your interests outside of academia?

 

JR: As the mother of a young baby, I would say sleep ranks right up there on my list of shiny goods. Does that count? I like to cook, and eat, and go new places whenever I can. I am one of those people who always has big plans for a new hobby that I never seem to get around to taking up: this summer, for example, I plan to get my boat captain’s license and learn to make mosaics (among other things, of course).

Interview with Jane Klinger, Summer Session Participant

Jane Adair Klinger.jpgThis post is part of a series of interviews with our incoming class for the “Virtue, Happiness, & Self-Transcendence” 2017 Summer Seminar. Jane Klinger is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Waterloo at Ontario and visiting scholar at The Ohio State University. Valerie Wallace is Associate Director, Communications, for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

 

Valerie Wallace: Where are you from?

Jane Klinger: I’m originally from Washington Grove, Maryland, and am currently a grad student at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario- though I’ve been working from Columbus, Ohio (at OSU) since the Fall.

VW: Tell me about your research.

JK: My research is in social psychology and focuses on self-regulation and motivation and, especially, how these relate to well-being outcomes like perceived meaning and authenticity. A central question of my research is about the trade-offs of top-down control: when does it keep us in touch with our values versus actually alienate us from our values? The latter is most interesting to me, partly because it so often goes unrecognized- how the same processes that allow us to succeed in self-control conflicts can also make us rigid and insensitive to our own values; essentially, reinforcing the letter rather than the spirit of our own laws. I’m coming to appreciate more and more how much insight on this topic comes from areas far outside my own discipline (e.g., Taoism, management science)- and indeed this is a large part of what excites me about learning from this multi-disciplinary group.

VW: What are you looking forward to for the upcoming seminar?

JK: I’m looking forward to a lot about this seminar, but most broadly: thinking in a different way (learning the language of other disciplines), challenging my assumptions, and meeting thoughtful people with common interests.

VW: What are your interests outside of academia?

JK: Other things I like to do are run, write, and make art. I also recently started a book club, which has thankfully gotten me to make more time for leisure reading.

Interview with Andrew Christy, Summer Session Participant

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This post is part of a series of interviews with our incoming class for the “Virtue, Happiness, & Self-Transcendence” 2017 Summer Seminar. Andrew Christy is a graduate student in social  and personality psychology at Texas A&M University. Valerie Wallace is Associate Director, Communications, for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

 

Valerie Wallace: Where are you from?

Andrew Christy: I am from the small town of Greenwich in upstate New York. I lived in Greenwich all my life until going to college at SUNY Geneseo in western New York, and I am now doing my graduate work at Texas A&M University.

 

VW: Tell me about your research.

AC: My research broadly deals with existential psychology and the psychology of well-being, with a particular focus on self- and identity-related processes by which people deal with existential concerns and experience well-being. I study these topics using the methods of social and personality psychology. I ended up in this research area because I was very excited by the questions of meaning and the good life that I encountered in my undergraduate philosophy minor, but I was not optimistic about my ability to provide substantive philosophical answers to these questions. Instead, I study how laypeople answer these questions for themselves, and I have found this to be a very satisfying union of my interests in philosophy and psychology.

 

VW: What are you looking forward to for the upcoming seminar?

AC: This summer, I am most looking forward to meeting other scholars who take different approaches to studying the same topics that interest me. I think I will learn a lot and I hope to come away from the seminar with some new friends in addition to new knowledge!

 

VW: What are your interests outside of academia?

AC: My non-academic interests include cats, hiking, camping, and other outdoor activities, and playing blues and folk music on the lap steel guitar.