2020-2021 IRiSS Seed Grant recipients announced

As policymakers struggle to design and implement policy interventions to battle the spread of COVID-19 and address the accompanying economic crisis, the value of social science research to inform these crucial decisions becomes evermore apparent. Stanford IRiSS invests in research projects that have the potential to yield impactful insights for current and future generations through its Faculty Seed Grant Program.

Through the program, IRiSS funds early-stage research ventures that have promise for growth into impactful, large-scale projects, but require seed capital to produce the proof-of-concept necessary to apply for grants and other extra-departmental funding. The seed grant program brings the bold, innovative research designs of faculty from ideas to fruition. 

IRiSS is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2020-2021 seed grants. The six awardees hail from the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, and Psychology.

Jennifer Eberhardt, Psychology | What Do You Mean by That?”: Agentic Feedback as a Way to Bolster Teacher Beliefs in Black Student Potential

Project abstract: Teachers are less likely to see academic potential in Black students than their White peers, which can drive teachers’ allocation of time, attention, and effort; contributing to the persistent academic achievement gap. In a series of studies, my graduate student, Camilla Griffiths, and I test whether we can lead teachers to see more potential in a Black student by training and encouraging the teacher to engage more thoroughly with them, giving them more agency, and take an inquiring stance in their written feedback. This research will be the basis for the creation of an evidence-based and equity-oriented teacher professional development on writing instruction.  

Michael Frank, Psychology | Using an online platform to measure early language in children from diverse families

Project abstract: Early language learning is both a key theoretical issue in cognitive science and also – since it lays the groundwork for academic achievement – an important construct in applied research. Developing quantitative theories that allow for assessment and intervention requires precise measurement of children’s language ability. Since measuring young children in a lab is challenging, the parent report is a key tool for assessment. Yet instruments for parent report like the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI, the current gold standard) are mostly constructed for, and used with, high socio-economic status, White populations. To gather representative data from a more diverse sample of the US population, the proposed research aims to use a web-based platform that we have developed, WebCDI. In preliminary work, we have used targeted advertising on Facebook to access diverse populations. But this work has revealed a number of challenges, including a) improving the user experience on mobile devices, b) developing effective payment mechanisms, and c) adding design features that will ensure high data quality from participants from a broader range of educational backgrounds. These improvements will allow us to validate our approach, paving the way for a larger-scale study – for which we hope to apply for NIH funding – that establishes new models and empirical norms for early language for children from diverse backgrounds.

Duana Fullwiley, Anthropology | An Anthropology of Environmentalism, Science, and New Vulnerabilities to Ethnic Conflict in West Africa

Project abstract: With the intense focus on climate world-wide, this seed project will investigate how explicit market forces that contribute to environmental degradation in the short term, like overfishing, still require our specific attention, lest the varied factors that contribute to the phenomenon of environmental migrants get blurred, or collapsed into larger anxieties about climate change. Through ethnographic engagement with Senegalese migrants, politicians, fishermen, activists, and scientists I will explore the connection between environmental resource scarcity as a source of economic displacement that incites new forms of ethnic tension, conflict and racism. As an anthropologist of science, I will furthermore be attentive to how the sciences of oceanography and molecular biology, as sites of cultural production that emerge within political structures, might influence legislation in Dakar, Senegal to help remedy the chronic problem of overfishing, waning ocean biodiversity, and, in turn, contribute to more explicit political conversations about human exclusions and border politics. I will also be attendant to how, conversely, scientific truths may be used to tell other stories. These include those that partially absolve recent market-based, man- made environmental degradation tied to extractive industries that operate with little oversight and cause dire effects for people in the here and now.

Matthew Gentzkow, Economics | The Impact of Digital Advertising in the 2020 Election: Experimental Evidence from Facebook

Project abstract: We propose a large-scale experimental evaluation of the effect of Facebook advertising in the November 2020 election. We will take advantage of a new Facebook feature to be introduced in summer 2020 that will allow users to opt out of receiving political ads. We will randomly assign subjects to a treatment group that is encouraged to activate this feature, or to a control group that sees ads as usual. A second treatment group will continue to see ads but will be encouraged to use a different setting to deactivate the most sophisticated forms of ad targeting. We will measure ads subjects actually see using a custom browser extension, and we will study the effects of opting out of ads on a suite of outcomes including turnout, campaign contributions, vote choice, knowledge, attitudes and issue opinions, and polarization.

Miyako Inoue, Anthropology |  Affect and the Politics of Emoji

Project abstract: Cultural and linguistic anthropology have been slow to focus attention on digital media and data analysis. I will carry out preliminary research for a newly launched project on emoji and politics. This initial work will be the basis of a larger—book length—project on social media in Japan.  My larger goals are to demonstrate what cultural anthropology and the methods of linguistics can bring to this topic and to cultivate a new method of analyzing linguistic behavior in the age of social media.

Paul Sniderman, Political Science | The Pseudo-Democrat: The Legitimation of Extreme Belief in American Politics

Project abstract: American politics is caught up in a wave of extremism, and it is not alone.  Far right parties have enjoyed electoral surges in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Great Britain, even in Sweden - the avatar of egalitarian tolerance.  However, for the purposes of this research project, the focus is specifically American politics. Eruptions of extreme belief are a break with normal politics.  One moment, it is as though extreme beliefs had support only at the margins of society; the next, it seems, they have found support in many parts of it.  And yet eruptions of extreme belief are a recurrent feature of American politics.  How can this be?  This is a proposal for a small-scale exploratory study of a possible mechanism: the legitimation of extreme belief.  Our principal hypothesis is that the latitude of what it is acceptable to believe and to say in politics is broader – far broader – than has been supposed.   

See past years' seed grant recipients