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On the heels of WWII, a team of psychologists set out to solve global conflict. Their lab? Boys summer camps. Their goal? Set the 11- and 12-year-old boys against one another to discover what, if anything, could restore peace. The result? One of psychology’s most enduring and controversial experiments.
For your intellectual travels this summer, a baker’s dozen of behavioral science books newly published this year.
Many of us tell ourselves “if only” stories about love that seem entirely reasonable at first—stories that fit with what we’ve learned over the years, and that resonate with our hopes, fears, and intuitions. But when we examine these stories more closely, we sometimes find that they don’t hold up.
Each summer, we read a novel and explore its themes through conversations with leading thinkers at the intersection of science and culture.
Why was Babe Ruth so good at hitting a baseball? In 1921, a journalist and two psychologists brought the “home run king” into the lab to find out.
Does erring toward leniency for first-time criminals amount to wisdom or wishful thinking?
The W.E.I.R.D research participant problem persists not because scientists fail to see it as a problem worth solving, but because conducting studies in new, unfamiliar places is difficult. But overcoming this difficulty is doable and essential.
The tech-first mindset to solving climate change rests on three myths about how global social change happens.
Approximately 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas. Yet most of the theories, experiments, and interventions developed in behavioral science are based on stable contexts. It’s time to stop treating conflict as an edge case.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.
How our sense of human exceptionalism fosters a psychological detachment to the natural world that limits our science and diminishes our understanding of ourselves and other species.
