Research & Expertise

How Russians think bears little resemblance to Germans’ attention to detail or American cheerfulness. The difference can be explained, at least in part, by looking at linguistic peculiarities. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) launched by HSE called ‘Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication’ investigates cases when basic Russian cultural values show up through linguistic choices, which may influence the way people act. The nine-week course was first offered in 2014 and was tremendously successful. It will run for the second time starting October 12, 2015. Mira Bergelson, professor in the Faculty of Humanities at HSE and the author of the course, shared the core principles of making contact with people who don’t smile on the street but who may become your best friends after just a few meetings.

Coming from a low-income, uneducated family can affect a child’s language skills, resulting in underdeveloped, ungrammatical speech, which hinders academic performance and limits one’s chances of success in life. However, parents can help a child offset the effects of a negative family background, according to Kirill Maslinsky, research fellow at the Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.

A research seminar on ‘Public-private partnership: design and discussion’ took place at the HSE campus in Perm. The event was organized by the Division of Public-Private Partnership Studies. Russian, as well as international researchers from Italy, Sweden, and Great Britain, spoke on topical problems of public-private partnership.

At the beginning of ‘Nobel Week,’ HSE Professor Konstantin Sonin gave his traditional prediction on his blog, forecasting who might win this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. The winner will be determined on October 12.

Ian Lowrie, visiting PhD-student from Rice University spent last academic year at HSE doing anthropology of Russian Science & Technology.

The processes of globalization should have contributed to reduced inequality in the world. In reality, however, the situation looks differently, with income inequality in the populations of developing economies growing. To correct this, the level of education of low-skilled workers must be increased, said Eric Maskin, Chief Research Fellow at the HSE International Laboratory of Decision Choice and Analysis and Nobel Laureate in Economics for 2007.

At the HSE campus in Nizhny Novgorod, Svetlana Bryzgalova recently gave a public lecture on ‘Pricing Theories in Various Classes of Financial Assets’ as part of the Second International Conference on Econometrics.

Creating totally new and exclusive products, business models and technology solutions is not always necessary in today's innovative economy; it is often sufficient to use the knowledge and inventions already available worldwide, according to professor  Mikhail Shushkin and associate professor  Sergey Alexandrovskiy, researchers at the Department of Marketing, Faculty of Management, HSE Branch in Nizhny Novgorod.

Can the brain be linked directly to the computer? What areas of the brain are involved in speech recognition? What impacts on decision-making and how to other people influence this process? Can you calculate people's inclination to take risks? Participants in the 'Cognitive Control, Communication and Perception: Psychological and Neurobiological Aspects' conference, which took place September 29-30, 2015 at the Center for Neuro-economics and Cognitive Research at HSE.

On October 5th, 2015 Yulia Kovas will give an open lecture at the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making — 'An Introduction to Behavioral Genetics'. Professor of Genetics and Psychology at Goldsmiths College, London University and Co-director of the Russian British Laboratory of Psychogenetics and author of many academic articles, Yulia Kovas will talk about the problems facing contemporary behavioral genetics, how DNA influences the individual variations of a person’s psychological features, what role the interaction between genes and the environment plays in the formation of behaviour and other questions of contemporary behavioral genetics.