As Trump uses the shutdown to settle scores, the public bears the cost

Louisiana v Callais could roll back what remains of the Voting Rights Act, putting the future of America’s multiracial democracy at stake

NHANES has collected data on eating patterns, diabetes, and other common diseases for decades. The CDC team that runs it has been fired.

School of Data Science at the University of Virginia.

Article: Demographic Differences in Responses to a Two-Step Gender Identity Measure | Sociological Science | Posted May 6, 2025

Right-wing groups are increasingly requesting copies of syllabi and course materials to assess what's being taught in college classrooms. That means universities like UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Greensbor...

The termination of federal F31 diversity fellowships puts many graduate students in a bind — and U.S. science at risk.

The primary input to deciding on the merit of proposals submitted to the NIH for potential funding, as most of my remaining blog audience well knows, is the outcome of the initial peer-review proce…

The Trump administration is inviting all US colleges to participate in a compact — initially rejected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — that would grant preferential federal funding in re...

How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.