Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

William Carter was in a National Archives reading room in the United Kingdom staring at a box of tattered pages covered in cursive writing, sea water stains and smears of blood. It smelled musty, and his hands became smudged turning the soot-covered pages.

Carter, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in geography, was mining these centuries-old slave ship logs in 2020 as part of his research into the transatlantic slave trade and what lessons from then might apply to our own understandings about race, literacy and power today.

But there was a problem: He couldn’t read a single...

A new Berkeley Psychology research study suggests that worrying too much about happiness can actually make you feel less happy and even more depressed.

The research, which was published in August in the American Psychological Association’s journal Emotion and titled “Unpacking the Pursuit of Happiness,” is a collaboration between UC Berkeley Psychology professors Iris Mauss and Oliver P. John, along with Berkeley Psychology alumni Felicia K. Zerwas (New York University postdoctoral researcher) and Brett Q. Ford (University of Toronto associate...

UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik studies how children learn. She also studies artificial intelligence systems. That might sound counterintuitive, but as she explains in this video about her work for UC Berkeley News, there’s much overlap between what we are learning about how babies explore the world and how we might create better AI systems.

“Even very young children are the best learners, and they do it in record time and with very little teaching,” says Gopnik. “So the question is, how do they manage...

In an era when online misinformation is seemingly everywhere and objective facts are often in dispute, UC Berkeley psychologists in a new study have presented a somewhat paradoxical partial solution: Expose young children to more misinformation online — not less.

Doing so in limited circumstances, and with careful oversight and education, can help children gain the tools they’ll need to sort fact from fiction online, said Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology and lead author of...