Jacob W Bowers

About

Jacob W Bowers is a professor in the Departments of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His methodological research centers on the design and analysis of both randomized experiments and non-randomized observational studies, aiming to understand human behavior and improve public policy. His substantive research includes studies on COVID vaccination attitudes in the USA, tax behavior and attitudes in Malawi, and perceptions of group relationships in neighborhoods in Canada. Bowers currently serves as the Methods Director for the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network and is co-founder and co-director of the Arnold Ventures Criminal Justice Research network. Since 2015, he has worked at the intersection of social and behavioral science, applied statistics of causal inference, and public policy with various organizations including the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the General Services Administration of the US Federal Government (formerly the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team), The Policy Lab at Brown University, and as a Research Affiliate and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. There, he co-founded the Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab with Carrie Cihak and co-founded Research4Impact, an organization connecting researchers and practitioners to improve public policy, governance, and advocacy. Bowers also contributed to the creation of the first Latin…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Demography
• Social psychology
• Chemistry
• Materials science
• Composite material
• Metallurgy
• Nanotechnology

Selected publications

• Evidence from a statewide vaccination RCT shows the limits of nudges

  Nature · 2022-04-06 · 68 citations

  letterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The influence of social norms varies with “others” groups: Evidence from COVID-19 vaccination intentions

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 67 citations

  = 996) and a matched design that approximates pair-randomized experiments. We find a strong relationship between perceived vaccination social norms and vaccination intentions when controlling for real risk factors (e.g., age), as well as dimensions known to predict COVID-19 preventive behaviors (e.g., trust in scientists). The strength of the relationship declines as the queried social group grows larger and more heterogeneous. The relationship for copartisans is second in magnitude to that of f…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Better Government, Better Science: The Promise of and Challenges Facing the Evidence-Informed Policy Movement

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2019-02-20 · 32 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Collaborations between the academy and governments promise to improve the lives of people, the operations of government, and our understanding of human behavior and public policy. This review shows that the evidence-informed policy movement consists of two main threads: ( a) an effort to invent new policies using insights from the social and behavioral science consensus about human behavior and institutions and ( b) an effort to evaluate the success of governmental policies using transparent and…

  PublisherDOI

• No evidence that collective-good appeals best promote COVID-related health behaviors

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021-03-24 · 30 citations

  letterOpen access

  Micro-nano plastics originating from the prevalent usage of plastics have raised increasingly alarming concerns worldwide. However, there remains a fundamental knowledge gap in nanoplastics because of the lack of effective analytical ...Plastics are now omnipresent in our daily lives. The existence of microplastics (1 µm to 5 mm in length) and possibly even nanoplastics (<1 μm) has recently raised health concerns. In particular, nanoplastics are believed to be more toxic since their ...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Maps in People’s Heads: Assessing a New Measure of Context

  Political Science Research and Methods · 2018-11-15 · 21 citations

  article

  Abstract To understand the relationship between place and politics, we must measure both political attitudes and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals. In this paper, we assess a new measure of mental representation of geography, in which survey respondents draw their own local communities on maps and describe them. We use a panel study in Canada to present evidence that these maps are both valid and reliable measures of a personally relevant geographic area, laying…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Propensity Scores and Randomization-Based Inference, or Modeling Assignment to Treatment Conditions as Manifestly or Latently Random

  NSF · $33k · 2008–2011

Frequent coauthors

• Julia M. Rohrer

  Leipzig University

  16 shared

• Tony H. Grubesic

  University of California, Riverside

  16 shared

• Duncan J. Watts

  University of Pennsylvania

  16 shared

• Aaron Frank

  16 shared

• Jake M. Hofman

  Microsoft (United States)

  16 shared

• Elisa Jayne Bienenstock

  Arizona State University

  16 shared

• Emorie D Beck

  University of California, Davis

  16 shared

• Matthew Salganik

  Princeton University

  16 shared

Labs

• The Causal Inference for Social Impact LabPI

Education

• PhD., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  2003

• B.A., Ethics, Politics and Economics

  Yale University

  1992

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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• Brian J Gainesh-21
• Robert J. Carrollh-15