Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

AI platforms like ChatGPT are widely understood to be sophisticated prediction machines. Trained on vast troves of content ranging from news articles and books to film scripts and Reddit posts, they anticipate the next most likely letters and words when prompted. While their responses can give the impression they’re sentient thinkers, that sci-fi scenario hasn’t yet panned out.

But new UC Berkeley research reveals for the first time that AI chatbots can now analyze sentences like a trained linguist. The study...

Today we are revisiting an October 2023 Berkeley Talks episode in which Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties liberal governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. He joins in a conversation with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

“To have the...

UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells first watched the 1990 movie Arachnophobia as a kid. Her mom warned her not to see it: The horror-comedy, about a California town terrorized by a deadly species of spider accidentally imported from a Venezuelan jungle, was PG-13, and Landau-Wells was a lot younger than 13. But some of her friends were going to the theater to see it — at least one of their parents thought it was fine — so she went.

“I now have this deep-seated conviction that all spiders are at least 8 inches in...

While the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, it holds almost 25% of the world’s incarcerated people, according to the U.S. Census and World Prison Population List. Why?

“Prison Abolition,” an interdisciplinary American Cultures course sponsored by the College of Letters & Science Big Ideas program, explores this issue by examining the social impacts of incarceration and its alternatives. During the Spring 2025 term, the course was taught by Ethnic Studies Professor and Former Department Chair Keith Feldman alongside...