Behavioral Scientist is a nonprofit digital and print magazine offering expert commentary from the front lines of behavioral science.
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There are things we need to deliberately and consciously slow down for our own sanity and for our own productivity. If we don’t ask the question about what those things are, we might get things terribly, terribly wrong.
Behavioral scientists working in peace and conflict grapple with questions of how prejudice becomes violence, how exclusion begets extremism, and how capable we are of change. The answers are far from simple, but not out of reach.
Framing a scene to draw in the audience, dealing with screaming directors, and getting lost in an actor’s performance with Pauline Edwards, a camera operator.
To help build peace in Colombia, we gave the people most affected by the conflict—victims and ex-combatants—a platform to share their stories with other Colombians across the country. Hearing those stories transformed how people understood their former enemies.
Attempts to improve governance in the world’s most troubled states have failed because they’ve been based on the rational design of formal institutions rather than the behavioral logic of the individuals that work inside them.
On Earth, what goes up must come down. In zero-g, what comes up, floats.
Hauling 32,000 lbs of dead rats, strategically planning every turn and pit stop, and soaking up the highway sunrises and sunsets with Kathy and Gene Lednicky, team truck drivers.
The founders of behavioral economics have more to teach us than what they’ve discovered about human behavior. Over multiple decades, they built a meaningful intellectual movement. Here’s how they did it.
Conjuring a world where kids can reinvent themselves, running a small town in the woods, and witnessing camp counselors falling in love with Eric Sasson, a summer camp director.
Transforming school buses into ice cream trucks, watching kids grow up (one popsicle at a time), and struggling to keep the freezers running with Erin Bailey, an ice cream truck driver in New Jersey.
Social science gives us ideas about human nature. What does it mean for the science when those ideas don’t just describe our nature, but shape it?
