Oral Presentations: Social Sciences I

Sachi Ajmera, Pearl River Community College
Olivia Maurer, University of Mississippi
Kaden Spellman, University of Mississippi

Titles and Abstracts

Sachi Ajmera, Pearl River Community College

How Social Media Creates Political Polarization in America

Social media apps and websites are purely programmed to suck in a user for as long as possible by any means necessary. These “means” are primarily based on showing users personally tailored content to create an addiction fueled by a cycle of confirmation bias and dopamine. This bias creates disillusionment of one’s personal views being the extent of reality, and in a society where half the world uses social media, a small percentage of extreme opinions can effortlessly cause disruption in society. Furthermore, many people who oppose America, whether within the country or not, have learned how to manipulate this confirmation bias to cause politically neutral users to have extreme views.

Olivia Maurer, University of Mississippi

The Case of Santiago de Chile: Pedestrian Deaths, Neo-Liberal Urban Design, and Insufficient Traffic Policy Reform

Chile’s rate of road fatalities and pedestrian deaths in particular has remained a global outlier, even as comparable states have reduced occurrences. Santiago, one of the most urbanized cities in Latin America and Chile’s capital, serves as a unique product of competing urban design ideologies put forth by democratic and authoritarian governments throughout the 20th century, and the social and economic stratification created has continued to present challenges for solving urban planning issues in modern Santiago. Recent adjustments in traffic laws have begun a reduction in road fatalities, but they still do not account for the discrepancy between Chile and other states. This is due to the failure to address the underlying problem of urban design solely shaped to create profit which has ignored lower-income sectors of the population who rely heavily on walkability in urban areas. A comparative analysis of US pedestrian deaths in suburban arterials furthers this analysis that adjustments in traffic policy will be insufficient in impactfully lessening pedestrian deaths in Santiago, Chile.

Kaden Spellman, University of Mississippi

Complementarity of Lotteries and Prize-Linked Savings Accounts (PLSAs)

In 2019, four out of every ten Americans would be unable to pay for an unexpected $400 bill out of their savings accounts. To ameliorate this problem, one policy to incentivize saving is a Prize-Linked Savings Account (PLSA). Unlike a traditional savings account that pays out a minimal and consistent rate of return, a PLSA pools the interest collected on all deposits and distributes the interest in the form of randomly drawn prizes (similar to a lottery). When considering implementing a PLSA, a government may want to know if its PLSA sales could cannibalize their revenue from an already established lottery. A PLSA would encourage individual savings for low-income households, but lottery revenues fund important social programs like education and infrastructure. This undergraduate research thesis focuses on the relationship between Premium Bonds, a PLSA run by the United Kingdom, and lottery sales in the UK. I find that Premium Bonds and lottery sales are loose complements, implying that a government can implement a PLSA to fight poverty without cannibalizing revenue from the lottery. This research provides important policy implications for the state of Mississippi, which battles high poverty and has also recently introduced a state lottery.

Description

Each oral presentation of 15 minutes will be followed by Q&A.

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