The Psychology of the Home Run in 1921
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.
May 30th, 2026
Page 69 – Behavioral Scientist
May 25th, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…a Correctional Officer
Grinding through 16-hour shifts, standing behind inmates (never in front), and trying to stay human in an inhuman environment with Bill Farrell, a correctional officer in Massachusetts.
May 24th, 2026
What Becomes of Second Chances?
Does erring toward leniency for first-time criminals amount to wisdom or wishful thinking?
May 23rd, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…a Custom Harvester
Harvesting five million bushels of wheat and corn from Texas to Montana, outrunning hailstorms that decimate a year’s income in 20 minutes, and running a multimillion-dollar convoy of equipment down the highway with Josh Beckley, a third-generation custom harvester from Kansas.
May 03rd, 2026
Helping Scientists Take Their Research Global: 7 Lessons
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.
Climate Change Is Getting Worse. Why Don’t We See More Action?
The tech-first mindset to solving climate change rests on three myths about how global social change happens.
What It’s Like to Be…a Funeral Director
Guiding grieving families through arrangement meetings, orchestrating meaningful memorial services within days, and preparing bodies for viewing with Heather Hill, a funeral director in North Carolina.
April 19th, 2026
The Hard Truths Behavioral Science Must Face in Conflict Settings
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 ‘Busy’ Trap
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.
April 13th, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…an Aerospace Engineer
Landing the Perseverance rover on Mars, working in clean rooms to minimize the microbial bug count, and slogging through hundreds of engineering trade-offs with Swati Mohan, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
