The science of Betsy Levy Paluck is marked by its ingenuity, scope, and purpose. One of her first major studies examined the effects of a radio soap opera on reconciliation in post-conflict Rwanda. In the lead up to the 1994 genocide, Hutus used radio to normalize violence against the Tutsis. A decade later, an NGO was hoping to use that same medium to promote peace. Paluck worked with the NGO to evaluate what impact, if any, the new program—a Romeo-and-Juliet-style story of forbidden love—had on the reconciliation movement.
What Paluck learned was profound. The radio program didn’t do much to change listeners’ personal attitudes and beliefs on issues like intergroup marriage, but it did change listeners’ perceptions of other people’s beliefs. This shift in perceived social norms—their beliefs about what others in their community thought was acceptable—did lead to changes in behavior, like tolerating a dissenting view during a discussion. Paluck’s work complicated the thinking about how large-scale behavior change happens; targeting processes of social influence may be more effective than the conventional strategy of attempting to change people’s personal attitudes and beliefs.
Paluck found a similar pattern with attitudes toward same-sex marriage in the United States in her work with Margaret Tankard. In anticipation of the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage in 2015, she and Tankard began collecting data about how people felt about same-sex marriage and how they thought other Americans felt about it. Once the ruling came down, the two kept collecting data, providing them with a before and after psychological snapshot of the impact of the landmark case. People’s attitudes didn’t change, but their perceptions of what other Americans thought did. Immediately after the decision, the perceived level of support for same-sex marriage increased.
If any scientist can be said to “conduct” research, it’s Paluck. Many of her projects call for skills not unlike those required to lead a symphony orchestra—immersion, preparation, synchronization, and a sense for knowing how and when to innovate away from an established approach to break new ground. She’s partnered with film producers in Nigeria to test the effects of an anti-corruption narrative embedded in a film distributed across dozens of villages. This involved shooting a separate scene, randomizing the communities who saw the movie with this scene, and then tracking the number of text messages reporting corruption sent to a national hotline. In New Jersey, she tested an antibullying intervention with over 24,000 students across 56 schools. In the key treatment condition, she and her research team first identified highly connected students, then recruited them to help design an antibullying campaign, figuring that these highly connected students would help transmit prosocial norms around bullying throughout the student body, which she found they did.
At a time when so much psychological research defaults online, Paluck’s work stands out for its proximity to life and its appreciation for how life actually unfolds. For her research and teaching, Paluck has received a number of awards—a host within psychology, as well as the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.
Paluck grew up in eastern Connecticut in the 1980s and ’90s. Her father was a special education teacher, her mother a librarian. She fondly remembers attending the games of the famed men’s and women’s basketball teams at the University of Connecticut. In high school, she played basketball, volleyball, and ran track. As an undergraduate, like so many with a curiosity about human behavior and an inclination for helping others, she initially imagined being a therapist. But her experience in an experimental lab convinced her that she wanted to go into research. The lab, though, couldn’t contain Paluck for long. It was in graduate school, under the guidance of political scientist Donald Green, that she began to conduct the incisive research that’s become her hallmark, apprenticing for and then leading large, complex field studies like the one in Rwanda.
I spoke with Paluck over video across two morning sessions in the fall. The first time we spoke, Paluck joined from her office in the psychology building of Princeton University, a sleek and reflective metal-and-glass building at the south end of the campus. The second time we met, she answered my questions from her kitchen, our conversation occasionally punctuated by notes from her flock of chickens outside.
In conversation, as in her work, Paluck exudes a thoughtfulness, curiosity, and optimism that’s both measured and infectious. “I think that we get so much more confidence in these ideas—the evidence is that much more compelling—when we see them emerge out of all the other processes that could have been emerging at that time, rather than just isolating one,” she told me. “I think that scientists have an intuition that that’s what really knocks us down, but our training goes entirely against that. . . . But this is a social science. How are we really going to prove to people that these ideas have any predictive value or a substantive impact without testing it in the sociality of the world?”
— Evan Nesterak
INTERVIEWER
When you have a new idea, who is the first person you tell?
BETSY LEVY PALUCK
It’s a little bit like asking for permission. I go to different people who I think will be excited about different things. In the initial phase of an idea, when I’m in love with it, I don’t want someone to challenge me yet. I want someone who will give me permission to keep thinking about it.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know if an idea is worth pursuing?
PALUCK
I don’t for a long time. It takes a lot of conversations. If it’s an idea that leads to good conversation where people can have different intuitions, their intuitions can differ from mine, and we can think of a lot of different angles to the idea, that makes me think it has long legs.
I like it when I hear people say that it reminds them of this or that, because I never want an idea to be so completely unmoored from anything else. That kind of originality doesn’t seem right to me. I think a lot of people are looking for that kind of satisfaction. When people recognize themselves, their psychologies, others’ psychologies in the phenomenon that I’m trying to describe, that makes me think there’s something there— if they can tell stories about it.
But I think you don’t know if it’s a good idea for a really long time. That’s why you just keep talking about it. I think that’s also why I don’t have a single guru who I go to, I try it out on everybody.
INTERVIEWER
Once you’ve decided you want to pursue an idea, how do you get started?
PALUCK
I get into the world really fast. I get into logistics really fast. It’s a way for me to test the idea. I was trained in social psychology in a more classic way where the goal was to think about a phenomenon in the world and think about how to distill that into a laboratory event. To me, as a young student, this was where all the creativity was sizzling, because it was like being a stage manager. How are you going to put on this theater for a group of study participants so they feel that there’s really an emergency? Are you going to put smoke in the room? How are you going to make them feel that they’re watching a news program? My master’s thesis, which I never published because it really wasn’t that good, was right after 9/11. I was thinking about how people were watching the news reports about women in Afghanistan and what living under the Taliban was like. I was wondering what that was doing to the way people reflected on gender inequities in the United States. I was trying to bring people into the lab to have them watch news programming, but do it in a more naturalistic way. How do you replicate when your attention drifts to a news program at home and maybe you’re talking with someone at the same time?
I was trained that way, at first. Then, in graduate school, I got to work with Don Green, who said you can do all the experiments you want to do as long as you’re in the field. When you start thinking about the field, what’s nice is that you get to test out your idea in this reality space right away. No longer are you thinking about the perspective of a person sitting in a white-walled lab space and what that looks like for them or how that feels for them. You think about the millions of different contexts in which people consume news, and you start thinking right away, How could I get my arms around this phenomenon? How can I capture this in the world?
So I start thinking about logistics because that helps me to think about specific situations. For me, that’s fun because it’s a bit of stage management, but it’s also a bit of engineering. It’s very practical, but it keeps feeding the idea. It runs the idea up against all of the reality. And in the end, isn’t it the reality that we’re fascinated with?
INTERVIEWER
How did your Rwanda work get started?
PALUCK
Michelle Twali, a postdoc in my lab, is Rwandan. The other day it started raining, and we could hear the sound of the rain on this little metal piece that sticks out from my office. We suddenly looked at each other and we realized it reminded us of Rwanda, of the sounds of the rain on the metal roofs, and we were reminiscing about being in Rwanda. I was telling her that during my first experience in Rwanda, I didn’t have imposter syndrome, I was just an imposter.
The way it all started was that, as a graduate student, I was putting together a literature review on projects to reduce conflict and prejudice. I found this radio program in Rwanda, and I emailed them, asking, “Can you send me your evaluation that you’ve done?” They said, “We haven’t evaluated, we haven’t even started.” I wrote right back, and I said, “Would you like me to evaluate your program?” I did not have the requisite skills yet, but they kept talking to me about it, and I kept making plans and proposing things. I wrote a small grant, I bought a plane ticket, and I just went.
When I woke up in Rwanda the morning of my landing, the chef de mission shook me awake and said, “It’s time for you to prepare the training now.” And I said, “What training?” I thought I was there to interview some ministers and do logistics; how could I potentially carry out an RCT with these power requirements, and so on. And she said, “The qualitative researchers, they’re all going to show up tomorrow.” I asked, “Will I be going with them?” She said, “Oh yes, you’ll be leading them, and don’t worry, I found you a translator. So now it’s time for you to put together the qualitative research training.” And I said, “Okay!”
They thought that I was there to lead a team of qualitative researchers for four weeks into the field, because they were looking to get responses from many different Rwandans from all walks of life and in all areas of the country on the themes of the radio show. They were going to use the qualitative evidence to inform the writers’ room.
So I got on my little dial-up connection, and I wrote to Don, “I’m going to be out of touch for significant periods of time. I will not be in the capitol. Wish me well, I’m just trying not to get fired here.”
It was the most amazing mix-up that’s ever happened in my life, because I spent all of this time completely immersed in someone else’s qualitative research project, learning so much about Rwanda. By the time I was done, I was certain that I needed to do a project there, and I hoped that it could be about the radio program that would eventually come to be. I was lucky that it happened.
INTERVIEWER
I didn’t know that about your work in Rwanda. You went there thinking you were going to help evaluate the program, which eventually you did, but this was a sort of prologue; the radio program is happening and you’re going to help them collect the qualitative data to inform the writing of the show. What did you learn while you were in this world where science was informing the creative process?
PALUCK
It was the necessary prologue, because a lot of people don’t get to or don’t take time to do this, if they’re doing research in a context that’s not theirs. I had read everything I could get my hands on about Rwanda, but all I had were other scholars’ interpretations and their experiences. This helped me really form intuitions, personal intuitions. It gave me access to so many narratives, in people’s own words, about what had happened during the violence, about what daily life was like in many different places in Rwanda and for different types of people. By the time they had written the show, produced it, and started broadcasting it, I had caught up the tiniest bit.
I came away suspecting that I’d have to pay attention to things other than attitudes, for example. People in these interviews talking about how external some of the violence felt. The onset of the violence not feeling like it was something that they generated but that was visited upon them, almost like the weather or like a new regime.
And thinking about the role of even the geography of Rwanda, actually sitting on those hills and realizing that everybody could see me. The surveillance that those hills bring—there’s every opportunity to be observed by others. It started me thinking about norms and peers and networks, themes that have endured throughout my whole career in thinking about the relationship between violence and conflict and prejudice and how much it can be a property of groups and how much that depends on being observed by one’s peers and on observing others.
I didn’t have that in my head. I wouldn’t have known to even try to measure things like that, if I had just taken that proverbial parachute into Rwanda and started setting up an RCT.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned intuition. How do you think intuition features in your tool kit as a scientist?
PALUCK
You could call it intuition; you could also call it experience or awareness. In psychology, we’ve made a ton of progress. You can list out a bunch of stuff about the way the mind works, and that’s pretty interesting. But now the most interesting thing is what the various combinations are of how those things work together and emerge, or don’t, in what William James called the rich thicket of reality.
I think that that’s where intuition has to come in a lot, an experience and awareness of what is the reality that you’re dealing with. What are the complex contexts in which these various tools of the mind, these percepts, decision rules, emotions, how do they emerge? How they combine? What are their relationships? And how do you respond to these various situations? What do you make of them? How do you understand them? And there’s just endless possibilities. There are so many different ways for humans to behave. Trying to hone your sense of what should emerge, what is predictable, given these very complex contexts, that’s what feels a little bit more like intuition.
INTERVIEWER
In what kind of spaces—offices, cafés, retreats—do you like to work?
PALUCK
I can work anywhere. I honestly don’t have preferences. It’s October now—I find the fall on the East Coast where I grew up to be reminiscent of school, so shiny new places with clean desks where I can line up pages of my manuscript and mark them up excite me. But I work from hotel rooms and my dining room table and coffee shops. At the office that I work in, I like the excitement of knowing there are smart people buzzing around outside. I wouldn’t want to just find a quiet place. I don’t need quiet. I like having life, if not right in front of me, kind of around. That’s why I guess I like working in coffee shops or airport lounges and places like that. I do like being able to look up and see humans, or just imagine that they’re right outside my door, and there are interesting things going on.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any habits or routines that you follow when you work?
PALUCK
The pandemic has been such a disrupter that I feel like I’m thinking about a different person. I’m trying to imagine what old Betsy did. Two things come to mind. One is that I’m an obsessive outliner. I forget whose advice this initially was, that if you just read every first sentence of every paragraph, you would be able to read the paper. So I like telling the story of papers or lectures that way. I really think about the structure of arguments and papers like that, almost as a narrative. I have to tell the story of a paper in that way before I write it. Then it looks like an outline, and I fill it in.
The other thing I do when I’m writing and when I’m analyzing data is I listen to the same album again, and again, and again. Not the same one for every paper, but whatever album I want to listen to, I listen to it on repeat, to where I can’t even hear anymore, it’s just a mood in my ears. Albums come to represent different papers in your life, and you can’t listen to them again.
But you know, I used to do that before I was a parent, and now you can’t really do that as much. You work when you can.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember one of the albums and one of the papers that go together?
PALUCK
I have this really distinct memory of a Dylan album being released when I was a grad student and writing a paper, I forget which one, to the new Dylan album. I’ve never listened to it again. I have to be careful. I don’t want to burn out albums that I want to live with for my life. I can’t write a paper to it. Which Dylan album would it be? It would have been around 2006 or 2007. I’d have to look it up.
INTERVIEWER
Your work is theoretically rich, but it is also in the field. A lot of people might see those as contradictory. What do you make of that?
PALUCK
I think when people hear about work in the field, they interpret it as applied. This interpretation implies that we’ve reached some solutions and what we need to do is just engineer their applications in the field and show whether it’s working or not.
I built my research program on the idea that the way to test and build theory is to do it in the field. We can build a long and impressive list of existence proofs in the lab. I believe lab research, I just don’t know if some of the realities that we’ve stage-managed in the lab occur that often in the field. Labs can be in the field too. It’s not the physical location, it’s the naturalism of the study setup.
Our antibullying work was one of our most highly theoretical projects, but it’s often read as my most applied project. I was actually trying to go after a theoretical problem, and we wanted to push bullying in the right direction along the way.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think there’s enough of this type of work in psychology?
PALUCK
We absolutely need more theoretically rich field research. We need more descriptive work in our field. Our field is currently allergic to description. We don’t publish studies that just seek to capture psychological phenomena. To me that’s the first part of theorizing, and it is a very important part.
Second, I ask my students this: What is the last piece of evidence that just bowled you over, that just knocked you down, that made you think that you learned something about the world? Few people, when I ask them that question, name a study that was based on a behavioral game or a lab setup, these really abstract, precise tools of intervention and measurement in the lab.
I think that we get so much more confidence in these ideas—the evidence is that much more compelling—when we see them emerge out of all the other processes that could have been emerging at that time, rather than just isolating one.
It’s the ultimate horse race of the field to see which idea prevails when you just watch people operate in their complicated worlds in real time. I think that scientists have an intuition that that’s what really knocks us down, but our training goes entirely against that. There’s a role for that kind of precision, that existence proof in the lab. It’s sort of the R and D work of social science, but this is a social science. How are we really going to prove to people that these ideas have any predictive value or a substantive impact without testing it in the sociality of the world?
INTERVIEWER
Whose work do you look to for inspiration?
PALUCK
I get a lot of inspiration from that really imprecise, florid, complicated writing of an older generation. Some of it is just so completely inspired, and some of it is just so confusing and speculative. But I feel comfortable dwelling in that richness and complication. I’m talking about Kurt Lewin, but I’m also talking about Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif, Solomon Asch, everyone who was allowed, because of the time, to speculate more, and to describe more, to write their articles as narratives about what happens and how people reacted, as well as sum up the quantitative evidence. I like to go back to that original stuff, because it reminds me of where we started before the cognitive revolution hit and brought so many good things to our science, but also starved it of that complication.
INTERVIEWER
When you look back, you see these vivid, rich experiments that seem so real and alive, though messy by today’s standards, yet, at the same time, there was this drive to advance psychology to the precision and accuracy of hard sciences like physics.
PALUCK
Lewin was a contemporary of Freud, and Freud’s tension system was all internalized. It was all descriptive, and came out of narratives of patients and his own narrative about interpretation. Lewin’s reaction—somewhat directly in opposition, but somewhat just in terms of thinking about how science could be modern, how you could take the Gestalt movement and make it scientific—was about not tensions within the self, but tensions between the self and the environment. He wanted to make that a science that could be described like physics.
I think that that’s just such an interesting move. It was part of taking psychology out of the individual and putting it into the world and asking, If we can describe the world’s physics, why can’t we describe social physics? One implication of doing this is that we should be a science of prediction. And I think we’ve gotten very far away from prediction. One way we should be evaluating the success of our theories is trying to predict future behavior.
I think that, in some ways, we’ve been selective about what we’ve reified in psychology about how we are a natural or physical science. Here at Princeton, psychology is categorized as a natural and physical science. Psychology sits on campus next to chemistry and genetics. We’ve reified the scientific method, we’ve reified quantitative data and replicability of our procedures, all of which I support, but why not also description? Why not also prediction? I think that’s a fuller account of how to be a science.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think would help address the larger, meatier questions about human behavior, which are often what gets someone curious about psychology in the first place?
PALUCK
My colleagues and I just completed a large meta-analysis of the prejudice reduction literature, covering the past dozen years of research. One of the ways that we coded the studies was whether the intervention was light touch—15 minutes or shorter, cheap, and easy to implement. By that coding, 76 percent of all interventions in the past dozen years were light touch. And the interventions were largely aimed at individual mental life. The interventions were about training people to control their feelings or to reframe their thinking.
What our review suggested is that all of these light-touch interventions are not getting us very far. The average effect size among all the well-powered, well-designed studies is really small. It’s not that the ideas are bad. I think we have good ideas about prejudice reduction, but I think that the next five to 10 years should hopefully see social and behavioral scientists looking toward more structurally oriented interventions; interventions that wouldn’t be categorized as light touch, that wouldn’t be categorized as aimed solely at individuals’ mental lives, creating social change individual by individual. Rather, trying to use some levers that affect the collective all at once to see what kinds of behavioral and psychological change that produces. Some people call those structural interventions. They could be structural; they could be social-structural.
I’d really like to see our social science go in that direction. It would require more interdisciplinary alliances, so not social psychologists doing their thing, economists doing their thing, but rather collaborations, even on prospective, structural interventions.
The next time there’s funding to build a new hospital in a place where there are groups in conflict, I’d like to see economists and psychologists, engineers, and so on think about where would we place this, how would we introduce this new institution to the local population in a way that could address questions of social cohesion, and not just address public health and an economic needs.
I’d like to see more of that embedded behavioral science in projects aimed at more ambitious, structural change. It will be harder to causally identify the effects of those projects, but if we can accumulate a bunch of ambitious projects that try to trace out the outcomes of that kind of change, we’d be in a better place, a place that we could be excited about, and maybe expect larger change, or really extend our theories of change.
INTERVIEWER
How do you balance the specificity and focus needed to be a good scientist with the desire to have a wide-ranging impact?
PALUCK
Teaching. I teach in a policy school, and I try to give my policy students that behavioral eye to complicate their thinking. I think that a really important way to have a broad-ranging impact is to train decision makers to think about context, to consider ideas like construal and situational influence, to get them to have that sense of when they should think about a problem through a behavioral lens.
I’m not the kind of scientist that’s tempted to weigh in on everything. For me, that would feel like hubris. I am dispositionally more inclined to feel quite certain about the projects that I’m working on to be able to say something reliable. It takes a long time, because every project is so specific in its own right. You have to know well the context and the characters. I think that somebody needs to do that, and that person has to be someone who has the affordance of time and focus. That’s not going to be policymakers, so I feel like that’s on the scientists at research institutions.
INTERVIEWER
What is the unifying theme or question guiding your work?
PALUCK
If I had to characterize what guides my research program, I would say it is a desire to think about collective social change, not just individual behavioral change, and what levers affect groups of people and collective psychologies—so perceptions of norms, perceptions of identities, and shared attitudes or shared beliefs. It’s all in the hope of seeing whether a culture of behavior can change, whether patterns of behavior can change.
INTERVIEWER
What does it mean to be creative as a psychologist doing large field-level interventions?
PALUCK
I think it’s the easiest place to be creative because you’re actually in the world. There are millions of combinations of situations and people, and the possibilities are so numerous for figuring out how to measure these behavioral traces that people leave in the world.
A great way to spark that creativity is to be present in that environment. If you’re going to do a field experiment in a school, I hope you’ve spent a lot of time in a school, hanging out and noticing who hangs out where in the hallway. I hope that you’ve thought about where people are getting their media and what people are most likely to talk about. This, for me, is part of the creative process, because you’re really getting the perspective of these participants. You’re not just making stuff up out of whole cloth. You’re watching it happen in front of you, and you’re trying to throw nets around it and be there in the right place and time to capture it, or to provoke it. What kinds of events could I organize? What little spark could I add to a situation? It’s really a creative, fun process, but it all goes back to just how much you know the place and people.
INTERVIEWER
An artist might consider their painting to be one half of a conversation, and the audience the other half. Do you think that’s the case for a scientist writing about their research?
PALUCK
A lot of really creative research designs and creative research measurement allows your readers to be a bigger part of the interpretation with you. For my dissertation, I was measuring the impact of the Rwandan radio soap opera. One of the behavioral measures that I invented was playing for groups of listeners unfinished radio scenes. They didn’t know that it would be unfinished, they were just listening. There would be a social dilemma that occurs in the scene, but then it would end. The person holding the boombox would say, “It doesn’t have an ending. Who wants to act out the end?” We let the radio listeners work together, and we observed their group dynamics as they acted out the end.
Being transparent about those results and the way that they were produced—describing this process to your readers—really allows them to imagine what they would do in that scenario, or to imagine what kinds of people would play act these particular outcomes. That’s an example of something that’s a little bit more creative than using a Likert scale, “Rate this from a one to a seven.” It engages your readers’ imagination, it lets them really think about the people, the place, the possibilities that they could have mentioned but didn’t. I think that your audience gets involved in the human processes that you’re really trying to track.
If you think about art, it’s a little bit similar, right? Maybe the example I’m using is just too close to art, because I’m literally asking participants to enact a theater. But a lot of what we ask research participants to do is close to theater. We ask them to think about what they would say, what they would do, or we ask them to act in front of us in some way.
The more that social and behavioral scientists design these studies to resemble life, I think the more in some ways it seems like art; it’s broadly interpretable and demands active imagination and interpretation from your audiences. (That’s not to say that you shouldn’t also try to benchmark results with some kind of Likert scale.) I think that that’s what creativity in the behavioral sciences can look like. It’s not unlike art in terms of the dialogue that it creates between the researchers, the participants, the research audience.
INTERVIEWER
What are the implications of your paints or your canvas being groups of people, so to speak? A psychologist is going to be creative with their study design, but the thing they’re being creative with are the people they’re studying.
PALUCK
This question screams ethics. That’s the guardrail on your creativity, absolutely. In behavioral science, as we say, you’re always defaulting to something. So what are you going to design away from? How far away does this take people from their everyday lives and their comfort zones? We could have a whole separate conversation about that.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you think the creativity and imagination that you’re speaking about intersect with the scientific method and scientific rigor?
PALUCK
Imagination and rigor feed each other. I don’t see them as constraining one another. The demands of scientific rigor create guidelines and standards, and then within those standards, you have to imagine, How could I try to test this idea in the most impressive way, in the way that I feel like I could actually see the effects? My advisor always told me to try not to do studies where you don’t think you’d be able to see the effects. Your intervention should a priori seem so potentially powerful to you that you could imagine observing, with your naked eye, the impact, not just moving a couple of tenths of a point on a scale.
Within these restrictions, then, how do you imagine something so powerful? How do you imagine measuring the outcome in a way that you could actually be impressed? I like the interplay of the two because I think that you can be most creative within a set of constraints. You have to constrain yourself to in order to really come up with something unexpected or different. I think that they feed one another, rather than squeeze the imagination out of science.
INTERVIEWER
What are your ambitions as a scientist?
PALUCK
I have very relational ambitions. I’ll be successful if I can look back on my career and see that I’ve trained a really diverse, creative, multi-industry bunch of academic and professional social scientists who are all over the place working on lots of different things but share this sensibility in terms of what social psychology and behavioral science can illuminate about problems in the world.
I think that my other ambition is to help social psychologists, in particular, and psychologists and behavioral scientists, in general, to think big about their science. To use the science of individuals and their perceptions to think about how that scales up into collective patterns and collective problems. I hope we think big in terms of what we can do with our science. Can we do literally big studies? Can we be really ambitious with it? I think that’s my other ambition, to model that, encourage that, foster that, and keep that tradition alive. Because it’s not my tradition; I see it as a long-standing tradition that has waxed and waned. My ambition is to be part of that tradition.
This interview first appeared in Behavioral Scientist’s award-winning print edition, Brain Meets World.
Disclosure: Betsy Levy Paluck is a member of the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, which provided financial support to Behavioral Scientist as a supporting partner. Supporting partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
