Long ties, disruptive life events, and economic prosperity.

Social networks shape and reflect economic life. Prior studies have identified long ties, which connect people who lack mutual contacts, as a correlate of individuals' success within firms and places' economic prosperity. However, we lack population-scale evidence of the individual-level link between long ties and economic prosperity, and why some people have more long ties remains obscure.

An Online experiment during the 2020 US-Iran crisis shows that exposure to common enemies can increase political polarization.

A longstanding theory indicates that the threat of a common enemy can mitigate conflict between members of rival groups. We tested this hypothesis in a pre-registered experiment where 1670 Republicans and Democrats in the United States were asked to complete an online social learning task with a bot that was labeled as a member of the opposing party. Prior to this task, we exposed respondents to primes about (a) a common enemy (involving Iran and Russia); (b) a patriotic event; or (c) a neutral, apolitical prime.

Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration.

How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model. Within each outcome, prediction error was strongly associated with the family being predicted and weakly associated with the technique used to generate the prediction.