Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The Russian government recently announced the results of the sixth round of ‘mega-grants’ for research at Russian universities and research centres. Among the winners there are three HSE research projects.

Conscious decision-making and internalized intentions, as opposed to extrinsic influencing factors, are the key to a student’s successful adaption to life in a foreign country. This was confirmed by research carried out by a group of scientists which included Ken Sheldon, Academic Supervisor and Head of the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation at the Higher School of Economics.

Maria Yudkevich, Vice Rector, Director of the Institute for Institutional Research, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economic Sciences, Head of the International Research Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms, and member of the HSE Academic Council, spoke on her path towards academia, research projects and achievements, as well as shared her thoughts on HSE research development.

On November 27, Sonia Guelton, who teaches Real Estate Economics, Public Finance, and Development Economics at University Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC), will arrive at HSE to deliver several lectures over the course of a week at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism. Her lectures will cover housing market tensions in the EU, density in housing markets, and the role of public policy in addressing these issues. Ahead of her visit, she spoke with the HSE News Service in depth about her lectures, her research interests, and the lessons she has learned over the course of her career.

In many countries, human empowerment – including freedom of expression and action – tends to increase people’s generalised trust in other people, particularly strangers. However, such an increase is usually gradual, reaching its peak in affluent, modernised democracies. In contrast, in countries with below-average levels of development, people, especially educated ones, often demonstrate a lack of trust in strangers, according to HSE researchers.

On November 10, Christopher Pissarides, Nobel Prize laureate in Economics and Professor at the London School of Economics, spoke at HSE ICEF. His lecture on human capital and its impact on economic growth commemorated the 20^th anniversary of ICEF.

Cognitive psychologists of the Higher School of Economics have experimentally demonstrated that people are capable of estimating the mean size of visible objects and their approximate number simultaneously, showing for the first time that these two cognitive processes are independent of each other and do not follow the rules of mathematical statistics. The results of this experiment, published in PLOS One, can inform new approaches to statistical data visualisation and statistical education.

On November 1, Riccardo Cucciolla began a postdoctoral fellowship at the HSE International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. During his year at HSE, he intends to pursue a research project that follows from his dissertation entitled ‘The Crisis of Soviet Power in Central Asia: The Uzbek Cotton Affair (1975–1991)’, which he wrote while completing a PhD in Political History at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Lucca, Italy.