Think about a course that you are currently most excited about teaching. Why is this an important course?
I am very excited for my seminar course on Political Culture, which I am co-teaching with my colleague David Laitin. We discuss how human societies come to develop divergent patterns of beliefs, norms and collective behavior, and how these patterns manifest in phenomena like economic development, political regime types and national identity. To understand culture, we use insights from many behavioral sciences, from game theory to evolutionary biology. An important takeaway of the course that deepens our understanding of the world is that human societies are complex systems that display large variation, yet they arise out of individual units – humans – that are fundamentally the same.
What are the five most salient materials from your course, and why is each important?
Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and why – A great introduction to the concept of “cultural difference” and to the idea that variation in economic and social structures is both a cause and consequence of variation in cognitive patterns.
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – This book is an exemplary study on the tangible implications of cultural differences. It is also an inspiring piece of social science, that wonderfully illustrates the method of generating theory out of empirical observation.
Christina Bicchieri’s Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms – A handbook with a very clear analytical theory of social norms. All concepts are linked to direct applications – for instance, suboptimal patterns of behavior sustained by norms, such as public defecation or female genital mutilation – which makes them both interesting and easier for students to understand.
Avner Greif’s “Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies,” (Journal of Political Economy, 102 (5): 912–950) – This article is a combination of historical analytic narrative and game theory modeling that brilliantly illustrates how the same problem (in this case the principal-agent problem that arises in the long-distance trade of goods) can be solved by different societies in different ways.
Robert Ellickson’s Order without law: How neighbors settle disputes – An ethnography of rancher culture in rural California is a perfect entryway into the world of game theory and the study of cooperation, a perennial problem faced (and, very frequently, successfully solved) by human societies.
What is a dream course that you’d be interested in teaching in the future?
I’ve always been dreaming of teaching a course in “Humanology”, that would incorporate all our knowledge from the behavioral sciences on how humans and their societies work. Unfortunately, I don’t yet have the requisite expertise for that, and likely never will. But perhaps I can teach a small part of such a course sequence in the future.
What is a book that changed your life as a high schooler?
I grew up in Greece, and a book that really influenced me as a high schooler was A Flaw (To lathos), by Greek author Antonis Samarakis. The story is centered around a suspect, who is captured by agents of an authoritarian regime and travels with them to the central offices for interrogation. The plan is to give the suspect the opportunity to escape during the trip, which would automatically prove his guilt. When that moment comes, there is a flaw in the plan: one of the agents proves unable to stop the suspect, having bonded with him during the trip. The interaction between oppressive Kafkaesque systemic forces on the one hand and the human factor (“the flaw”) on the other was fascinating to me, and I find that these themes continue to captivate me and motivate much of my research.
What is one piece of advice that you would give new teachers?
I am a fairly new teacher myself, and the biggest struggle I face is to teach really simply and clearly, by breaking down concepts to the very basics. I think the Feynman technique is a good guide for dealing with this problem, as well as putting yourself in the student’s place. Teach in order to learn, is what I tell myself.