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.
Sequencing departures like a moving puzzle, scrambling when a jet takes off without clearance, and catching what radar misses with a glance out the window with Michael Rejent, an air traffic controller.
Hugging a mother through an anxiety attack, bidding for the best routes, and absorbing strangers’ confessions at 35,000 feet with Linda Beall, a flight attendant.
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.
Shooting cat-three landings in the fog, using the “voice of God” on unruly passengers, and declaring Mayday after an engine fire with Paul Drusch, a commercial airline pilot.
Untangling who gets to speak for a dying patient, weighing a treatment’s benefits against its burdens, and searching for clarity in the grayest corners of healthcare with Esther Berkowitz, a clinical ethicist.
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.
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.
