Because we split out "soft thought" from "hard social science," I tried to keep a majority of the social science questions on data- or research-driven social science, rather than cultural criticism or theory devised from the lofty perch of an armchair. Because anthropology and especially sociology tend to be a little more theoretical, some of those questions are a little blurry, but that was the general idea. I wanted to keep econ, anthro/socio, and psychology/psychiatry emphasized in the distribution, while also having questions on political science/IR theory, linguistics, and social science methodology. Generally speaking, I tried to connect a lot of these questions to contemporary events or contemporary scholarship.Emperor Pupienus wrote:It seemed to me that there was an abundance of econ in the SS distribution, particularly in the tossups. I'm curious if this was actually the case, and if so, if this was a conscious editorial decision. There are certainly good reasons to weight econ higher than most of the other SS topics, so this is more curiosity than criticism.
(Also, many thanks to Jonathan Magin and Matt Bollinger for writing several very good social science questions for the submitted packets in the last week before the tournament, which allowed me to continue editing instead of shifting back into writing mode.)
Here's the breakdown:
Econ (6/4): Hotelling, the commons, families, real business cycles, production function, Homo economicus, cap and trade bonus, r > g bonus, shoeleather costs bonus, Vickry bonus
Psychology/psychiatry (1/6): Stroop effect, Beck's cognitive triad bonus, Donald Hebb bonus, Google/Cordelia Fine bonus, framing/Tversky bonus, removing homosexuality from DSM bonus, Thene/A-not-b bonus
Anthro/socio (5/7): mushrooms, whiteness, masculinity, Mary Douglas, time, Social Construction of Reality bonus, fieldwork bonus, When Work Disappears bonus, Pareto/elites bonus, Ray Birdwhistell bonus, Birmingham/Hebdige bonus, Theda Skocpal bonus
Methodology (2/2): variables, surveys, meta analysis bonus, Jacob Cohen bonus
Linguistics (2/1): morphology, Lakoff, Aarne-Thompson bonus
Political science/IR (3/1): Supreme Court, diplomacy, Kenneth Waltz, Bradley effect bonus
Miscellaneous (2/0): for-profit colleges (econ-flavored political science/government), managers (management theory)
There was quite a bit of econ, and too few psych tossups, but I think this looks about right. There were also quite a few social science odds and ends in the "soft thought" and "other academic" categories, which tended to shade toward psychology and anthro/socio.