Duncan J. Watts

TL;DR: Practical limits to the predictability of life outcomes in some settings are suggested and the value of mass collaborations in the social sciences is illustrated.

TL;DR: This study reports results from an online experiment in which 47 teams of size ranging from n = 1 to 32 collaborated on a realistic crisis mapping task, finding that individuals in teams exerted lower overall effort than independent workers, in part by allocating their effort to less demanding sub-tasks; however, it is found that individual in teams collaborated more with increasing team size.

TL;DR: The argument of this article is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize, and this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a schema for thinking about research activities along two dimensions-the extent to which work is explanatory, focusing on identifying and estimating causal effects, and the degree of consideration given to testing predictions of outcomes.