Israeli-Canadian sociologist

Eran Shor is an Israeli-Canadian sociologist and a Professor of Sociology. He is the William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. His research interests include the causes and effects of political conflict and violence, ethnicity and nationalism, the sociology of health, and the media coverage of women and ethnic minorities. He focuses on the relationship between states’ counterterrorist policies and their respect for human rights and civil liberties. His research methods include computational analysis of big data, cross-national regression analysis and meta-analyses, as well as in-depth qualitative methods and content analysis.

Research

Shor has published more than 50 articles, including many in peer-reviewed journals such as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Social Forces, Demography, Social Science Research, Social Networks, Ethnic and Racial Studies, American Journal of Epidemiology, International Journal of Epidemiology, Social Science & Medicine, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Sex Research, Archives of Sexual Behavior and Violence Against Women.

His research findings, including on the longevity of fame, gender roles in the media, unemployment, and mortality, and family ties and mortality, have been discussed and published in multiple media and news sources.

Social conflict and violence

Shor studies the causes and consequences of political conflict and violence. He relies on comparative historical research and media content analysis to look at ethnic conflicts and tensions in countries with large minority populations, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also studies the factors that shape state counterterrorism policies, employing a combination of longitudinal time-series cross-national analyses and case studies.

His work demonstrates the importance of socio-cultural processes in determining state policies, and challenges traditional international relations approaches. For example, he found that counterterrorism legislation is primarily motivated by processes of policy diffusion and imitation, in particular spatial diffusion across bordering countries. He shows that such legislation typically has no effects in the short run and negative effects in the long run on both the level of terrorist attacks and respect for human and civil rights.

Media coverage of women and minorities

Shor uses qualitative content analysis of newspapers. He explores the policing, silencing, and marginalization of immigrants and ethnic minority groups in Canadian and Israeli media. He examines the reaffirmation and redrawing of national and collective boundaries through the exclusion of some ethnic minority groups. He studies mainstream media coverage of “honor killings” in both Canada and Israel, showing how labels often shape the ways in which journalists think about family murders and the type of motivations they ascribe to perpetrators.

In collaboration with Arnout van de Rijt and a group of computer scientists, he collected and analyzed data on millions of individuals from thousands of newspapers and other media over many decades. This work challenged seemingly axiomatic ideas of fame, gender and the media. One study questioned Andy Warhol’s idea of 15 minutes of fame, that is the idea that fame tends to be ephemeral. Shor showed that, in fact, famous people tend to remain famous for many years. In another study, Shor and colleagues show that men outnumber women by 5:1 in newspaper coverage. They demonstrate that having more women as executive editors or on editorial boards does not substantially affect these coverage patterns.

Sexual attraction and sexual violence

Shor researched the foundations of sexual attraction and sexual aversion. Shor and Dalit Simchai challenged the scholarly consensus on the Westermarck effect, which suggests that close domestic proximity during early childhood leads to sexual aversion (also known as reverse sexual imprinting). Shor and Simchai interviewed men and women who grew up in Israeli kibbutzim, showing that even those who were raised in close proximity were often attracted to one another. In contrast to common evolutionary psychology notions, the primary reason for the avoiding inbreeding among these individuals was fear of damaging group cohesion.

Shor looked at portrayals of sexual violence in mainstream internet pornography. In a study with Kimberly Seida, Shor found no consistent uptake in aggressive content of popular online pornographic videos over time. They found that violent porn is less likely to receive views and less likely to be favorably ranked. Instead, most viewers tend to prefer videos where women clearly express pleasure.

Stressful life events, social relationships, immigration and health

Together with David Roelfs, Shor explored the effects of stressful life events and of social relationships on health and mortality in a range of countries and under varying conditions. He employed primarily meta-analysis and meta-regression to re-examine relationships between life events, social support, migration and mortality. Findings include the reaffirmation of the harmful effects of unemployment on mortality, as well as research that shows that social support from family members is more beneficial to health than support from friends. They also found support for the healthy immigrant paradox, showing that immigrants have greater longevity than non-immigrants in their new country.

Education

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed journal publications