Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world have faced an unprecedented crisis. The cataclysm has impacted Russia as well. Who will better deal the hardships—experienced baby boomers, Gen Xers who survived the 1990s, or Gen Yers who have had an easy life?
In lockdowns, why do some people stay home, while others violate the quarantine rules and go out for picnics in the park? Behavioural economics may provide the answer to this question. Oksana Zinchenko, a Research Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, explains how we can predict people’s behaviour with game theory.
Sweden is the only country of the European Union that has not taken strict measures against the coronavirus pandemic. The country’s COVID-19 death rate is growing, unemployment is close to record high levels and GDP could fall by 10%. But does this prove that Sweden’s strategy is ineffective? The HSE School of World Economy invited experts to assess its implications for Swedish society.
Why are Easter eggs painted red? What can be done with consecrated eggshells? How did eggs become part of traditional rituals? Folklorist Andrei Moroz told IQ.HSE about some popular beliefs associated with Easter.
Egor Borsuk from the HSE International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis has developed a software that can resolve international territory disputes. He has tested the programme on the disputed Arctic region. The researcher spoke about his innovation at the 21st April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development and in an interview for IQ.HSE.
People should radiate happiness but also be able to feel compunction; control themselves, but know when to give free rein to their feelings; love without suffering for it; and experience feelings of excitement and nostalgia without succumbing to emotional distress. Society adheres to a rather contradictory code for the expression of feelings or emotional imperatives. Feelings can lead to either a break in social ties or greater solidarity with others. In this article, IQ.HSE looks at emotional imperatives based on a report that HSE sociologist Olga Simonova presented at the XXI April Conference.
Russian companies still pursue authoritarian leadership styles, and employees often avoid articulating their concerns and complaints to management. Together with chronic stress and work-family imbalance, this can often result in emotional burnout. This is the conclusion of a study by researchers from North Dakota State University (USA) and HSE University.
At the end of 1960s, Pete Stephens serendipitously discovered a way to create an autostereogram — an image that creates an illusion of volume without the use of special equipment. However, in fact, this illusion had been described by Lev Mogilev from Irkutsk State University, even earlier in the 1960s. This ‘double discovery’ may have been the result of popular interest in 3D cinema at the time. IQ.HSE cites a paper by researcher Tadamasa Sawada to discuss this double rediscovery of autostereograms.
It may be possible to pressure millennials into addiction treatment, but they tend to rebel against such coercion more fiercely than people born a few decades earlier. There are other intergenerational differences as well. Yuliya Belova has described how different generations of Russians deal with alcohol problems. Based on her report for the XXI April International Academic Conference, we take a look at people's different paths to sobriety.
In 15 years, the share of self-driving passenger vehicles on Moscow’s roads will exceed 60%. However, this change will not have a significant impact if personal vehicle travel is not reduced and car sharing services are not expanded. For the first time, HSE researchers have assessed the effects of self-driving cars on the city. In their study, Alexei Zomarev and Maria Rozhenko lay out predictions for 2030 and 2035.
