Voice Of The Utrecht Young Academy

With the current political climate persisting and war and climate refugees reaching record high numbers, a fundamental discussion on the rights of immigrants and natives is hard to avoid. This area of sociology is a main topic of research for Borja Martinovic, associate professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science/Ercomer at Utrecht University. She has gathered ample empirical evidence on intergroup attitudes in western societies. Her finding underlines the important role of mass media and public education in shaping the in-group identity and positive or negative attitude towards both immigrants and the “true” first inhabitants.

Ron Dotsch is a psychologist that has studied human perception of others' faces for more than a decade. For his research he heavily uses technologies such as virtual reality and computer-generated modelling. He tells me how we adjust our interaction with people based on less than a second of looking at their faces. When meeting strangers, we tend to judge their characteristics, such as trustworthiness, sexual orientation, or political views, based on a very short glance. He also tells me that these kinds of judgment are mostly wrong. Research shows that for guessing the political orientation correctly seeing one's face does not help any more than knowing age, skin color, and gender. Ron has experienced both making it into the system and breaking away from it. Last summer he resigned from his tenured university position as an associate professor of behavioral psychology. He has left academia to work in a company. I curiously wanted to know why and I could not read it from his face.

In a pleasantly sunny summer day, I sat with Lars in Sterrenburg in the center of Utrecht and we talked about job autonomy, his research on policy alienation, and his vision on open science.

How did she become a law professor? What can academics learn from judges in dealing with perils of the new public management? And how can slowness of law be one of its strengths? Hear the answers to these questions in my dialog with Professor Elaine Mak.