Net Cetera: Chatting with Kids About Being Online

The Federal Trade Commission is offering a FREE publication, "Net Cetera," to help parents talk to their kids about safely navigating the online world. Available in English and Spanish. Visit USA.gov to request a copy.

Richard Nathan's "Social Science in Government"

Richard P. Nathan's book Social Science in Government uses rich histories of prominent policy issues and descriptions of major studies of welfare and job programs to bring to life crucial questions about how social science can best serve social policy. Nathan, who recently retired from the Rockefeller Institute after 20 years as its director and co-director, is a social scientist who spent many years conducting evaluation studies of what works — and what doesn't work — in domestic public affairs. The book presents a lively retrospective account of a career as an insider and outsider in American government and academe.
The Institute has now made Social Science in Government available in its entirety online. You can find it here.

I Feel what You Feel if You Are Similar to Me

Social interactions are influenced by the perception of others as similar or dissimilar to the self. Such judgements could depend on physical and semantic characteristics, such as membership in an ethnic or political group. In the present study we tested whether social representations of the self and of others could affect the perception of touch. To this aim, PLoS ONE assessed tactile perception on the face when subjects observed a face being touched by fingers. In different conditions we manipulated the identity of the shown face.