For Sonja, researching happiness means being asked over and over again, “What is the secret to happiness?” Sonja has always dreaded that question. It’s ridiculous, it’s reductive, and it’s restrictive. But mostly she has dreaded it because she has never had a solid, science-based answer that she could offer with any confidence.

There is no secret to happiness. But there are huge contributors to happiness, and some of them are more powerful than others. Sonja resists being pinned down to just one. But if she were pressed to give an answer, she now has one.

She found it when she met Harry, who studies the science of relationships. She mentioned the dreaded question, and he replied, “I don’t know the secret to happiness either, but I do know people who are happy, and I know people who are unhappy, and I can tell you the main difference between them: Happy people feel loved.” 

The secret to happiness is feeling loved. 

Harry also said, “Isn’t it odd that happiness researchers and relationship researchers don’t talk with each other?” 

* * *

For the next seven years, we decided to talk to each other. Together, we explored the science of happiness and relationships, the advice we give about both, and how we can all feel more loved. 

When we asked a representative sample of nearly two thousand American adults what they do to feel more loved, we were struck by how many seemed to find the question difficult to answer. Some weren’t sure what steps to take, while others felt that love was something that either happened or didn’t—something beyond their control. 

Why does feeling loved feel elusive for so many people? 

We’ve found that the challenge often isn’t a lack of love or inability to love but rather the beliefs we hold about how love works. 

Many of us instinctively follow certain ideas about what will make us feel valued, cherished, and secure in our relationships. We 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.

Here are five of the most common misconceptions about feeling loved:

• If only I were more attractive, powerful, or successful, I would feel more loved.
• If only I could make sure others knew my positive qualities and successes, I would feel more loved.
• If only I could hide my shortcomings, I would feel more loved.
• If only my partner would speak my love language, I would feel more loved.
• If only I could get my partner to love me more, I would feel more loved.

You’ll likely recognize some of these from your own experiences. Our goal isn’t to dismiss these beliefs outright but rather to explore what the science says about them and whether they’re truly helping you feel as loved as you want to be. If not, we’ll consider what you might do differently. 

One common thread running through many of these if-only beliefs is that, when we adopt them, we end up emphasizing our superficial selves—our image, career, and possessions—at the expense of our deeper selves—our values, personality, and quirks. But it’s our deeper selves for which we want to be loved. This raises a question we’ll encounter again and again as we interrogate these beliefs: How can we feel loved if we aren’t known?

If-only belief #1: If only I were more attractive, powerful, or successful, I would feel more loved

Many of us have felt, at one point or another, that success, beauty, and status would make us feel more loved. It’s understandable—our culture constantly reinforces the idea that being admired will translate into feeling cherished. If you were wealthier, sexier, or had more renown, wouldn’t the people in your life appreciate you more? Wouldn’t you feel happier and more loved? Yet research—and the lived experiences of many—suggests that this belief doesn’t always hold up.

Through media, social norms, and the stories people tell each other, Western culture incessantly teaches that the secret to feeling loved is having more—more money, more beauty, more power, more success. The modern dating landscape reflects this: Take a quick scroll through dating-app profiles or social media and you’ll see references to LMS (looks-money-status) as prized qualities. Many people, including us, at some point, have chased after things like A-list status, beauty, or success, hoping they would bring the best possible life. People strive to be influencers or to make as much money as possible to buy the latest tech, luxury vacations, or the hottest DJs for their parties. Others seek these qualities in their mates—one acquaintance of ours insisted on only dating men with the “four sixes”—six figures (salary), six-pack (abs), six feet (height), and six inches (for sex). She’s still looking.

This instinct to optimize themselves—or seek the most “desirable” partner—is completely natural. But does achieving wealth, power, fame, or physical perfection actually lead to feeling loved? Research suggests that while these things may bring attention and celebration, they don’t necessarily translate into feelings of being truly valued and known. Why, then, do people chase these goals? Although many tell themselves that they’re doing it purely for their own fulfillment, deep down, they likely pursue them in hope of being seen as more appealing—more worthy of love. Indeed, “Significance-Quest Theory,” published in 2022, states that humans have a drive or “quest” for significance, sometimes manifested in good works or humanitarian endeavors, but at other times reflected in efforts to bolster their sense of worth by attracting socially desirable “trophy” partners.

Consider Madame Bovary, the iconic character from Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth-century novel. She hopes that having a child will bring the fulfillment she craves, only to realize that no external source—whether a child, a lover, or social status—can fill that void. While her story is fictional, it reflects a timeless human experience: Looking outside oneself for validation often leaves people feeling empty.

How can you feel truly loved if the version of you being loved isn’t you?

One reason that striving for extrinsic goals doesn’t usually lead to feeling loved is that people want to be loved for who they are rather than what they have—for their compassion, integrity, willingness to work hard, sense of humor, and so on, and not for “surface” characteristics, such as money, popularity, fame, and beauty. Emphasizing your extrinsic virtues creates what social psychologists call attributional ambiguity—the unsettling doubt about whether others love you for the “right” reasons. For example, a beautiful person who has always received compliments on their looks might secretly fear that their desirability is the only reason people are drawn to them, rather than their kindness or character.

A classic experiment conducted at the University at Buffalo illustrated this phenomenon. Highly attractive women wrote an essay and then received praise from a hidden male evaluator. When the women believed that the evaluator couldn’t see them, they took the praise to heart. But when they thought that the evaluator had seen them, they were more likely to dismiss the praise—believing it was based on their looks rather than their writing skills. The same pattern emerged for highly attractive men.

A similar dynamic plays out in relationships. Someone who is admired for their wealth or beauty may quietly wonder, Do they love me for who I am—or for what I have? And would they still love me if I lost my money or my looks as I grew older? This uncertainty can undermine trust, making it harder to feel truly loved. Perhaps this helps explain why celebrities and the ultrawealthy are often skeptical when they receive love and admiration from others. When you’re unsure whether others appreciate you for who you are rather than what you bring to the table, that attributional ambiguity can erode relationship trust.

Another reason chasing extrinsic goals can be unfulfilling is known as the “hedonic treadmill”—the tendency for achievements to bring only a temporary spell of satisfaction before again feeling the pressure to accumulate more. Instead, such striving seems to never satiate, thus rendering a person ever more dissatisfied and lonelier. To paraphrase an oft-quoted commencement speech by the American writer George Saunders, the problem with succeeding is that the need to do so constantly renews itself—like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you climb it.

Research shows that pursuing extrinsic goals—such as wealth and status—undermines, rather than bolsters, feelings of happiness and connection. In one longitudinal study of 12,894 U.S. undergraduates, those who, during college, rated being very well off financially as “essential” or “very important” were less satisfied with their lives two decades later compared to those who had placed less importance on wealth. (Notably, only respondents who ultimately achieved very high annual incomes—more than half a million in 2020s dollars—didn’t show this effect.) Similarly, anecdotal evidence from megalottery winners suggests that sudden wealth doesn’t always lead to greater happiness; in some cases, it creates distance and disconnection, as newfound riches make it harder to trust the intentions of friends and loved ones. 

So what does lead to feeling loved? If external markers of success won’t secure your feeling loved, what will? Research suggests an alternative approach—to focus on intrinsic goals rather than extrinsic ones. Intrinsic goals center on:

• Personal growth—learning a new language, exploring a creative passion, spending time in nature or in spiritual reflection
• Connecting to close others and community—reaching out to friends; being a joiner, not a watcher
• Contributing your time, energy, and money—caring for a sick friend, mentoring someone, volunteering for a cause

These activities are ones in which, as Arthur Brooks has said, you “cultivate your roots rather than shine your leaves.” Not only will they improve happiness, belonging, and self-worth, they will make you a psychologically “richer” person—more well-rounded, more interesting, and with almost infinite fuel and fodder for conversation and connection.

If-only belief #2: If only I could make sure others knew my positive qualities and successes, I would feel more loved

Many people have worked hard to achieve success—whether in their careers, social lives, or personal growth. And it’s true that success can contribute to happiness, at least for a while. For example, happier people earn more and are better liked. But when it comes to feeling loved, there’s a common instinct that can lead people astray. It’s the belief that feeling loved comes from making sure other people recognize your strengths, talents, or successes: If only they knew. This belief may seem logical, but research suggests it doesn’t quite work that way.

We live in a culture that celebrates visibility. Society lionizes confident, charismatic individuals who openly showcase their accomplishments—CEOs, influencers, entertainers, and top athletes. Social media has amplified this tendency, encouraging people to highlight their best moments and craft an image of success. Given this cultural backdrop, it makes sense that many people feel the need to broadcast their strengths—whether through direct boasting or carefully curated social-media updates. But, as you already know from if-only belief #1, there’s a catch: While people may admire you for your achievements, admiration doesn’t lead to feeling loved.

Let’s consider the costs of digital self-presentation. Digital tools can sustain long-distance relationships, introduce you to communities you might never have found otherwise, and give you opportunities to express your positive qualities and achievements. But at the same time, they can also subtly reshape the way people interact—sometimes in ways that leave them feeling less, rather than more, connected.

One of the most profound shifts in social life over the past two decades is the emphasis on accumulating “followers” on screens rather than deepening friendships in real life. It’s easier than ever to present a curated version of yourself—one that highlights your best moments, your most flattering angles, your biggest wins. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to put your best foot forward, the unintended consequence is that many people find themselves performing connection rather than experiencing it.

Consider a moment from Sonja’s travels: One day, she found herself waiting an hour for a delayed flight in a crowded airport-gate area. Sitting next to her was a striking young woman with long black hair, and Sonja couldn’t help but watch with fascination as the woman spent the entire hour meticulously taking selfies, carefully editing and retouching each one before taking more, and finally posting the best results on Instagram. Was she hoping for a certain number of likes, to get attention from someone special, or did she believe that a particular beautiful photo would win her love?

The impulse to showcase one’s life online is often driven by a natural desire to be seen, appreciated, and valued. But being noticed isn’t the same as being known. A carefully crafted showreel might impress others, but it doesn’t foster the kind of deep, reciprocal understanding that makes people feel truly loved. Furthermore, research suggests that focusing too much on how you’re perceived—on making a good impression—can actually make you feel less connected.

The impulse to showcase one’s life online is often driven by a natural desire to be seen, appreciated, and valued. But being noticed isn’t the same as being known.

At first glance, the ability to craft and control how one appears to others seems like a good thing. After all, why wouldn’t you want to present the most polished version of yourself? For example, when it comes to people outside your inner circle, displaying your strengths, triumphs, and best qualities can certainly make an impression—it may open doors, attract dates, or even command respect. And in some ways, that’s completely natural—first impressions matter, and everyone wants to highlight their best qualities. But when self-presentation takes priority over expressing what lies beneath the surface, one loses opportunities to truly know and be known to others.

Consider several familiar rituals of modern life:

• Carefully tweaking a dating profile to appear more appealing (perhaps even stretching the truth)
• Exchanging quick, surface-level text messages or engaging in small talk instead of meaningful conversations
• Collecting likes that momentarily boost confidence but rarely lead to deeper connection
• Humblebragging, or boasting masked by a complaint or false humility—e.g., “It’s exhausting being the only person my boss trusts with our big client.” (Studies show that this more subtle approach renders people less likable, not more.)

Each of these behaviors is understandable, even instinctive in a world where visibility feels like social currency. But when people focus too much on how they appear to others, they risk missing out on the richness of real, unfiltered connection and end up feeling unseen. Also, at the same time that broadcasting strengths may inspire admiration, they may breed comparison, envy, and even resentment—pushing people away rather than drawing them in. Once again: You cannot feel loved if you’re not known. Indeed, you cannot even feel fully satisfied with your accomplishments—there’s always someone more beautiful, wealthy, or successful.

Recently, Sonja was hiking with a group of friends when one couple pushed back on this idea. “What’s wrong with being proud of our accomplishments? People prefer winners to losers, stars over nobodies! Our friends and partners and acquaintances should be happy for us!” In some ways, they’re right. Your successes—and the hard journey to achieve them—deserve recognition. The people who care about you want to see you thrive. They may even bask in your reflected glory, celebrating alongside you. But when it comes to sharing those accomplishments, the key is balance.

Talking about your successes in the right context—with the right people, at the right time—can deepen connections. When successes are related naturally—without an agenda to impress or obtain approval—others share in your joy, and your connection with them is deepened. But when success becomes something you broadcast rather than something you share, it can have the opposite effect. If the goal is to feel loved, then simply announcing achievements—especially as a way to seek validation—rarely brings what you’re hoping for.

The good news? The people who truly care about you will notice your wins, whether or not you announce them. And when you share them in a way that invites connection rather than admiration, you’re far more likely to experience the sense of being valued—not just for what you’ve accomplished, but for who you are.

If-only belief #3: If only I could hide my shortcomings, I would feel more loved

So far, we’ve explored how chasing success or carefully curating an image doesn’t necessarily lead to feeling more loved. But what about the parts of yourself you don’t want to showcase—your imperfections, struggles, and vulnerabilities. Everyone has flaws, faces setbacks, and experiences moments of self-doubt. Everyone is a work in progress. Yet a common belief persists: To be loved, you must keep your weaknesses well-hidden and present only your best self. If-only belief #3 suggests that revealing anything “less than perfect” will push people away.

At first glance, this belief makes sense. After all, who doesn’t want to be seen in the best possible light? But research—and real-life experience—suggests that molding yourself into someone you’re not can create distance instead of bringing them closer.

The instinct to manage impressions is natural. As highlighted by if-only belief #2, many people shape their self-presentations in ways that invite interest—and will be attractive and compelling to others. But studies show that people don’t always know what will actually make them more appealing in relationships. Sometimes, the very traits you downplay—your quirks, challenges, or even past failures—are what draw people in. And even when you do manage to “get it right,” molding yourself into what someone else wants (e.g., dressing like a rock star because your romantic partner prefers that look) can leave you feeling uncomfortable, inauthentic, or even like an impostor.

Consider the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, the seventeenth-century nobleman who ghostwrote poetic love letters on behalf of his inarticulate friend, Christian, helping him win his beloved Roxane’s heart. The words that Christian sent were beautiful, but he didn’t write them—so no matter how much those words moved Roxane, he couldn’t feel truly known, valued, and loved. In the twenty-first century, many people do something similar—hiding who they are, carefully curating what they reveal, and hoping that others will love them for the version that others presumably want. But, as we’ve repeated before, how can you feel truly loved if the version of you being loved isn’t you?

Furthermore, if you believe your flaws will push people away, you may instinctively reveal only “safe” imperfections—for example, that you never make your bed—or keep parts of yourself completely out of sight. But secret-keeping makes it hard to feel understood. Imagine someone who reveals little of importance to their close friends. They feel misunderstood, but at the same time, they share almost nothing of what truly matters to them. How could their friends possibly understand them if they never get to see the full picture? This same dynamic plays out with family members, partners, and colleagues—when you don’t let others in, you deprive them of the chance to truly know you.

Of course, being open doesn’t mean oversharing. Some people, recognizing the value of honesty and vulnerability, swing too far in the other direction—disclosing too much too quickly, emotionally unloading or “trauma dumping” before the other person is ready to receive it. The key isn’t to lay everything bare all at once—it’s to share in a way that invites interest, receptivity, and concern. Instead of testing relationships with a flood of unfiltered disclosures, think of vulnerability as an invitation, one that allows space for your conversation partner to reciprocate, listen, and support.

When you give other people the chance to observe both your strengths and your struggles, something powerful happens: They don’t just admire you—they grow to know and understand you. And being known is an absolute prerequisite to feeling loved.

If-only belief #4: If only my partner could speak my love language, I would feel more loved

The next if-only belief is especially easy to embrace—and just as critical to examine. You’ll recognize it instantly—the idea that you’ll only feel loved if the other person speaks your love language. Introduced by pastoral counselor Gary Chapman in 2015, the idea that everyone has a preferred love language has become wildly popular, popping up everywhere you look, from song lyrics (SZA’s “Help me understand how you speak your love language”) to marketing taglines (Venmo’s “Security is our love language”). Even present-day dating apps prompt users to declare their top-rated love language from Chapman’s list of five—gifts, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, or verbal affirmation—in hope of finding a match that enhances their chances of relationship success.

There’s a reason this idea resonates so deeply with people—it’s a relatable and intuitive metaphor that offers a simple, straightforward framework for finding appropriate partners and improving relationships. It also suggests an easy complaint when you’re unhappy with your romantic partner—“They’re not speaking my love language!” Indeed, Sonja confesses that she mentions love languages in conversation at least once a week.

However, while the love-languages concept has captured the public imagination, recent research shows that it’s not as scientifically sound as many believe. Yet rather than viewing this as disappointing news, think of it as an opportunity—because what the research actually reveals is that love can be expressed and received in far more varied and flexible ways than a choice from a simple five-category system implies.

What the research reveals is that love can be expressed and received in far more varied and flexible ways than the “love language” categories imply.

Consider these three key findings from recent studies that serve as nails in the coffin of the love-languages hypothesis.

First, most people report appreciating all five languages, not just their single primary one. Indeed, in three studies of more than two hundred thousand participants, between 39 percent and 54 percent did not identify a single dominant love language.

Second, the idea of five distinct love languages doesn’t hold up statistically. A type of statistical analysis called factor analysis has failed to identify five separate categories, suggesting that these “languages” overlap and mush together. And love can be expressed in countless other ways—such as through humor, intellectual chemistry, spiritual connection, creativity, supporting a partner’s family and friends, sending flowers, or simply giving your partner space when they need it.

Finally, having a partner who expresses love in your unique identified love language doesn’t actually predict whether your relationship will be relatively more satisfying or long-lasting. Not surprisingly, research shows that couples tend to be happiest when love is expressed and received in multiple ways, not just one. In a study of 696 individuals in committed relationships, those whose partners used their “top” love language didn’t feel any more loved than those whose partners used their four lower-ranked love languages. This finding even held true for people who reported strongly preferring a particular love language, such as quality time or touch, and it even held true for people in distressed relationships.

Rather than limiting yourself to one “right” way to embrace love, these findings suggest that expanding your perspective can open up even more opportunities to feel loved. Instead of waiting for someone to speak your preferred love language, what if you became fluent in recognizing and appreciating all the ways love is already being expressed in your life? Indeed, focusing too much on just one love language might actually mean missing out on important love experiences.

Our overarching recommendation is the same as one first offered by researchers at the University of Toronto: Rather than focus on a single love language, think of them as ingredients in a well-balanced diet of connection. Different times and circumstances call for emphasizing one love language over another—affectionate touch during a stressful situation, words of affirmation when feeling insecure, or simply quality time when life feels chaotic. Most humans need to express and feel love in multiple ways. Instead of seeing love languages as rigid categories, our view instead emphasizes viewing them as tools for building the feeling that your authentic, true self is known and embraced by the other. A well-titrated balance of different love experiences, which enables you and your partner to express your love for each other more often, and to express it more naturally, is more likely to help both of you to feel more loved.

But we’re also learning more through new research. Three recent studies revealed that two particular love languages—no matter whether people rank them highly them or not—are the strongest predictors of happy relationships and feeling loved by one’s romantic partner (something that took even us by surprise). The strongest predictors—for everyone—of happy relationships and feeling loved are quality time and words of affirmation.

Our suggestion then is to practice these two “languages” more often in daily life. Prioritize quality time by putting away distractions during conversations, sharing activities you both enjoy, and scheduling intentional check-ins to reconnect. And don’t underestimate the power of words—voice to your partner the qualities you love about them, offer encouraging messages, and express gratitude for little things.

If-only belief #5: If only I could get my partner to love me more, I would feel more loved

An often-overlooked truth about feeling loved: You can be loved and still not feel loved. Even if your partner expresses love consistently and generously—offering compliments, warmth, and reassurance—feeling loved isn’t guaranteed. The same goes for love from a parent, sibling, friend, colleague, or even a child. This brings us to the final, and perhaps most important, misconception about feeling loved: the belief that the key to feeling loved is getting the other person to change—specifically, getting them to love you more. 

But is that really the answer?

Before we go any further, an important reality check: If you’ve made genuine, consistent efforts—sharing vulnerably, listening with curiosity, showing compassion—and the love you’re offering is still not requited, then it may be time to shift your focus. Sometimes, no amount of effort and patience can change how someone feels, and in those cases, the healthiest choice is to redirect your energy toward relationships that can truly nourish you. Or as the incomparable Bonnie Raitt famously sang in her moving hit song “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” you can’t make someone feel love if it’s not in their heart.

That said, if your love is reciprocated, but you still don’t often feel loved, there’s cause for hope. 

Yet if-only belief #5 is particularly tricky—because, in some ways, it contains a grain of truth. If your partner suddenly started expressing their love in a dramatically different way tomorrow, you’d probably notice. You’d likely feel more loved—at least for a little while. But here’s why this belief can mislead: That initial boost doesn’t last. Just like a salary raise feels exciting at first but soon becomes the new normal, an increase in your partner’s expressions of love, without a shift in your own approach, is unlikely to lead to a lasting change in how loved you feel.

There are other reasons this if-only belief doesn’t hold up:

• If you struggle with anxious or avoidant attachment, no amount of “additional” love will fully sink in or penetrate inside your heart—until you shift how you process and receive it. The love is there, but it may not feel like enough.
• Trying to get your partner to love you more by focusing solely on their needs tends to backfire. Overfocusing on the other person while neglecting your own needs and boundaries often leads to resentment, not deeper connection.
• If a relationship already feels empty or unfulfilling, more words of affirmation won’t fix what’s missing. Even if your partner repeatedly tells you they love you, it won’t feel satisfying if the relationship itself lacks meaning or emotional depth.

If your person loves you on some level but you still yearn to feel more loved, the shift that needs to happen is not in trying to get them to change—but in the mindsets that you engage with them. These mindsets, which we explore in full in our book How to Feel Loved, include sharing vulnerably and listening deeply, with curiosity, warmth, and acceptance. 

* * *

Many of us hold beliefs about how love works that get in the way of feeling loved. Just as with nutrition, where some foods nourish you while others leave you unsatisfied, some approaches to feeling loved sustain you while others fall short. The good news? Once you recognize what isn’t working, you can make space for the mindsets and skills that do bring happiness and connection into your life.

Excerpted from How to Feel Loved by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis, published by Harper. Copyright © 2026 by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The post How Can We Feel Loved If We Don’t Feel Known? appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

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. Why does the pilot’s paycheck start with the parking brake? And what does “sterile cockpit” mean? (Spoiler: it doesn’t mean “clean.”)

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About What It's Like to Be...
In each episode of What It's Like to Be..., bestselling author Dan Heath speaks with someone about what it's like to walk in their (work) shoes. Behavioral Scientist serves as a distribution partner with episodes released every other week. Learn more about the podcast's mission of "slow curiosity" here, and head here to get Dan's reflections on how the mission is going after a year of conversations.

The “Airline Pilot” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Paul Drusch. It was produced and edited by Matt Purdy. Copyright © 2026 by Dan Heath. All rights reserved.

The post What It’s Like to Be…an Airline Pilot appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

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. What is the "dignity of risk"? And how do you know which "version" of a person to trust?

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About What It's Like to Be...
In each episode of What It's Like to Be..., bestselling author Dan Heath speaks with someone about what it's like to walk in their (work) shoes. Behavioral Scientist serves as a distribution partner with episodes released every other week. Learn more about the podcast's mission of "slow curiosity" here, and head here to get Dan's reflections on how the mission is going after a year of conversations.

The “Clinical Ethicist” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Esther Berkowitz. It was produced and edited by Matt Purdy. Copyright © 2026 by Dan Heath. All rights reserved.

The post What It’s Like to Be…a Clinical Ethicist appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Each summer, we read a novel and explore its themes through conversations with leading thinkers at the intersection of science and culture.

This summer, we’ll read Flights by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature. 

Flights is an enigma of a novel—part memoir, part short story collection, part ethnography of travel—that explores the human impulse toward movement; the perpetual tension between exploring somewhere new or staying put. 

“Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so when you linger in a place you start to put down roots,” Tokarczuk’s ephemeral narrator tells us in the opening pages. “My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”

Flights is often billed as a book about travel, and Tokarczuk delights with original and memorable observations about the experience of being on the move—including the people you encounter and the places you encounter them. But calling Flights a novel about travel obscures the force with which Tokarczuk asks: What are you running from? What are you running toward?

At times playful and surprising, at others morbid and mysterious, Flights offers us a chance to explore our own journeys. And as we travel, through space and time, in our minds, and over the course of our lives, what do our experiences and memories amount to? Do they form a meaningful whole? Or are they simply fragments; the fruits of entropy and fate rather than free will?

We hope you’ll read Flights with us this summer to explore these questions and others. New this year, the Book Club will include:

• A five-part podcast exploring themes from the book with guest experts  
• Collaborative memory map of the places and travels that have changed us
• Live and asynchronous group discussions 
• Special feature articles
• A final, celebratory online event

The book club will begin the week of July 6 and run through August, culminating with an online event in early September. There are both asynchronous and live participation opportunities, so you can tailor the book club to your summer schedule. (For a full overview of how things will work this summer, head here.)

Already have a monthly or yearly subscription? Join the book club here.

The post Announcing Our Summer Book Club and Podcast appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

The game was over. Babe, who had made one of his famous drives that day, was tired and wanted to go home. “Not tonight, Babe,” I said. “Tonight you go to college with me. You're going to take scientific tests which will reveal your secret.”

“Who wants to know it?” asked Babe.

“I want to know it,” I replied, “and so do several hundred thousand fans. We want to know why it is that one man has achieved a unique batting skill like yours—just why you can slam the ball as nobody else in the world can.”

So away we went. Babe in his baseball uniform, not home to his armchair, but out to Columbia University to take his first college examination.

Babe went at the test with the zeal of a schoolboy, and the tests revealed why his rise to fame followed suddenly after years of playing during which he was known as an erratic although a powerful hitter. How he abruptly gained his unparalleled skill has been one of baseball's mysteries.

Albert Johanson, M.A., and Joseph Holmes, M.A., of the research laboratory of Columbia University's psychological department, who, in all probability, never saw Ruth hit a baseball, and who neither know or care if his batting average is .007 or .450, are .500 hitters in the psychology game. They led Babe Ruth into the great laboratory of the university, figuratively took him apart, watched the wheels go round; analyzed his brain, his eye, his ear, his muscles; studied how these worked together; reassembled him, and announced the exact reasons for his supremacy as a batter and a ball-player.

Baseball employs scores of scouts to explore the country and discover baseball talent. These scouts are known as “Ivory hunters,” and if baseball-club owners take the hint from the Ruth experiments, they can organize a clinic, submit candidates to the comprehensive tests undergone by Ruth, and discover whether or not other Ruths exist. By these tests it would be possible for the club owners to discover—during the winter, perhaps—whether the ball-players are liable to be good, bad, or mediocre; and, to carry the practical results of the experiments to the limit, then may be able to eliminate the possibility, or probability, of some player “pulling a boner” in mid-season by discovering, before the season starts, how liable he is to do so.

The scientific ivory hunters of Columbia University discovered that the secret of Babe Ruth’s batting, reduced to non-scientific terms, is that his eyes and ears function more rapidly than those of other players; that his brain records sensations more quickly and transmits its orders to the muscles much faster than does that of the average man. The tests proved that the coordination of eye, brain, nerve system, and muscle is practically perfect, and that the reason he did not acquire his great batting power before the sudden burst at the beginning of the baseball season of 1920, was because, prior to that time, pitching and studying batters disturbed his almost perfect coordination.

Ruth the superman

The tests revealed the fact that Ruth is 90 per cent efficient compared with a human average of 60 per cent.

That his eyes are about 12 per cent faster than those of the average human being.

That his ears function at least 10 per cent faster than those of the ordinary man. That his nerves are steadier than those of 499 out of 500 persons.

That in attention and quickness of perception he rated one and a half times above the human average.

That in intelligence, as demonstrated by the quickness and accuracy of understanding, he is approximately 10 per cent above normal.

It must not be forgotten that the night on which the tests were made was an extremely warm one, and that in the afternoon he had played a hard, exhausting game of baseball before a large crowd, in the course of which he had made one of those home-run hits which we at Columbia were so eager to understand and account for. Under such circumstances, one would think that some signs of nerve exhaustion would be revealed. The instigation lasted more than three hours, during which Ruth stood for most of the time, walked up and down stairs five times, and underwent the tests in a close warm room. At the end of that time I was tired and nervous, and, although Ruth showed no symptoms of weariness, it is probable that under more favorable conditions his showing would have been even better.

The tests used were ones that primarily test motor functions and give a measure of the integrity of the psychophysical organism. Babe Ruth was posed first in an apparatus created to determine the strength, quickness, and approximate power of the swing of his bat against his ball. A plane covered with electrically charges wires, strung horizontally, was placed behind him and a ball was hung over the theoretical plate, so that it could be suspended at any desired height.

I learned something then which, perhaps, will interest the American League pitchers more than it will the scientists. This was that the ball Ruth likes best to hit, and can hit hardest, is a low ball pitched just above his knees on the outside corner of the plate. The scientists did not consider this of extreme importance in their calculations, but the pitchers will probably find it of great scientific interest.

Science discovers the secret

The ball was adjusted at the right height, and, taking up a bat that was electrically wired, Ruth was told to get into position and to swing his bat exactly as if striking the ball for a home run, to make the end of it touch one of the transverse wires on the plate behind him, then swing it through its natural arc and hit the ball lightly. The bat, weighing fifty-four ounces (exactly the weight of the bats Ruth uses on the diamond), was swung as directed, touched the ball, and the secret of his power—or, rather, the amount of force with which the strikes the ball—was calculated. At least, the basis of the problem was secured: The bat, weighing fifty-four ounces, swinging at a rate of 110 feet a second, hits a ball travelling at the rate of, say, sixty feet a second, the ball weighing four and a quarter ounces, and striking the bat at a point four inches from the end. How far will it travel? 

There are other elements entering into the problem, such as the resilience of the ball, the “English” placed on it by the pitcher’s hand, and a few minor details. But the answer, as proved by the measurements, is somewhere between 450 and 500 feet. This problem cannot be worked down to exact figures because of the unknown quantities.

The experimenters, however, were not so much interested in the problem in physics as they were in the problems in psychology. The thing they wanted to know was what made Ruth superior to all other ball-players in hitting power, rather than to measure that power.

Babe could beat his own record!

Before proceeding to the psychological tests, however, we tried another in physics to satisfy my curiosity. A harness composed of rubber tubing was strapped around Ruth's chest and shoulders and attached by hollow tubes to a recording cylinder. By this means his breathing was recorded on a revolving disk. He was then placed in position to bat, an imaginary pitcher pitched an imaginary ball, and he went through the motions of hitting a home run. The test proved that, as a ball is pitched to him, Babe draws in his breath sharply as he makes the back-swing with his bat, and really “holds his breath” or suspends the operation of his breathing until after the ball is hit. But for that fact, he would hit the ball much harder and more effectively than he now does. It has been discovered that the act of drawing in the breath and holding it results in a sharp tension of the muscles and a consequent loss of striking power. If Ruth expelled his breath before striking the ball, the muscles would not become tense and his swing would have greater strength and rhythm.

The first test to discover the efficiency of his psychophysical organism was one designed to try his coordination; a simple little test. The scientists set up a triangular board, looking some thing like a ouija-board, with a small round hole at each angle. At the bottom of each hole was an electrified plate that registered every time it was touched. Ruth was presented with a little instrument that looked like a doll-sized curling iron, the end of which just fitted into the holes. Then he was told to take the instrument in his right hand and jab it into the holes successively, as often as he could in one minute, going around the board from left to right.

He grew interested at once. Here was something at which he could play. The professor “shushed” me, fearing that I would disturb Ruth or distract his attention as he started around the board, jabbing the curling-iron into the holes with great rapidity. He would put it into the holes twelve to sixteen times so perfectly that the instrument barely touched the sides. Then he would lose control and touch the sides, slowing down. Only twice did he pass the hole without getting the end of the iron into it. With his right hand he made a score of 122. Not unnaturally, his wrist was tired and Babe shook it and grinned ruefully.

Then he tried it with his left hand, scored 132 with it, proving himself a bit more left- than right-handed—at least in some activities. The significance of the experiment, however, lies in the fact that the average of hundreds of persons who have taken that test is 82 to the minute, which shows how much swifter in the coordination of hand, brain, and eye Ruth is than the average.

Every test but another triumph

In a sequel to this test that followed, Babe tapped an electrified plate with an electrically charged stylus with the speed of a drum-roll, scoring 193 taps per minute with his right hand and 176 with his left hand. The average score for right-handed persons undergoing this wrist-wracking experiment is 180, and, while there is no data covering right-handed persons using the left hand, it is certain that Ruth's record is much above the average, as he is highly efficient with the left hand.

But steadiness must accompany speed and so they tested the home-run king for his steadiness of nerve and muscle by having him thrust the useful little curling-iron stylus in different-sized holes pierced through an electrified plate which registered contacts between the stylus and the side of the hole. These measured respectively sixteen, eleven, nine, eight, and seven sixty-fourths of an inch; small enough, but not too small for Babe, for he made a score that showed him better than 499 persons out of 500.

The tests that interested me most were those to determine how quickly Ruth’s eye acts and how quickly its signals are flashed through the brain to the muscles. Showing an amazingly quick reaction time, they interpreted what happens on the ball-field when the stands rock under the cheering that greets another of Ruth's smashes to the fence, proved an eye so quick that it sees the ball make an erratic curve and guides the bat to follow.

The scientists discovered exactly how quickly Ruth’s eye functions by placing him in a dark cabinet, setting into operation a series of rapidly flashing bulbs and listening to the tick of an electric key by which he acknowledged the flashes.

The average man responds to the stimulus of the light in 180 one thousandths of a second. Babe Ruth needs only 160 one thousandths of a second. There is the same significance in the fact that Babe's response to the stimulus of sound comes 140 one thousandths of a second as against the averages man's 150 thousandths.

Human beings differ very slightly in these sight and sound tests, or rather the fractions are so small that they seem inexpressive; yet a difference of 20 or 10 one thousandths of a second indicates a superiority of the highest importance.

Translate the findings of the sight test into baseball if you want to see what they mean in Babe Ruth’s case. 

They mean that a pitcher must throw a ball 20 one thousandths of a second faster to “fool” Babe than to “fool” the average person.

If the results of these tests at Columbia are a revelation to us, who know Ruth as a fast thinking player, they must be infinitely more amazing to the person who only comes into contact with the big fellow off the diamond and finds him unresponsive and even slow when some non-professional topic in under discussion.

The scientific “ivory hunters” up at Columbia demonstrated that Babe Ruth would have been the “home-run king” in almost any line of activity he chose to follow; that his brain would have won equal success for him had he drilled it for as long a time on some line entirely foreign to the national game. They did it, just as they proved his speed and his steadiness—by simple laboratory tests.

For instance, they had an apparatus with a sort of a camera shutter arrangement that opened, winked, and closed at any desired speed. Cards with letters of the alphabet on them were placed behind this shutter and exposed to view for one fifty-thousandth of a second. Ruth read them as they flashed into view, calling almost instantly the units of groups of three, four, five, and six letters. With eight shown he got the first six, and was uncertain of the others. The average person can see four and one half letters on the same test.

When cards marked with black dots were used, Ruth was even faster. He called up the number of dots on every card up to twelve without one mistake, The average person can see eight.

To test him for quickness of perception and understanding, he was given a card showing five different symbols—a star, a cross, and three other shapes—many times repeated, and was told to select a number—one, two, three, four, or five—for each symbol, then to mark the selected number under each one as rapidly as he could go over the card. He scored 103 hits on that test, which his the average of all who have tried it. But when given a card covered with printed matter and told to cross out all the a's, he made a score of sixty, which is one and a half times the average.

The secret of Babe Ruth’s ability to hit is clearly revealed in these tests. His eye, his ear, his brain, his nerves all function more rapidly than do those of the average person. Further the coordination between eye, ear, brain, and muscle is much nearer perfection than that of the normal healthy man.

The scientific “ivory hunters” dissecting the “home-run king” discovered brain instead of bone, and showed how little mere luck, or even mere hitting strength, has to do with Ruth's phenomenal record.

Reprinted from: Fullerton, H. S. (1921). Why Babe Ruth is Greatest Home­ Run Hitter. Popular Science Monthly, 99(4), 19-21, 110. Now in the public domain. (Source 1, Source 2)

Bonus fact one: The term "inside baseball" originated from the home run debate sparked by players like Babe Ruth. “The original meaning appears to have referred to a particular style of play which relied on bunts, stealing bases, and minor hits, rather than on flashier tactics, such as home runs," according to Merriam Webster, before evolving to mean "minutiae or things about which only a few insiders care."

Bonus fact two: In a 2006 feature for GQ investigating the science of hitting a baseball, journalist Nate Penn, inspired by the Ruth experiments, brought MLB-great Albert Pujols into the psychology lab to participate in similar tests.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Alfred Fuchs for unearthing the experiments in his 1998 article in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences; Christopher D. Green, who has developed a terrific archive of the classics in the history of psychology; and to the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron for the original cover image.

The post The Psychology of the Home Run in 1921 appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

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. What happens when an officer gets "frozen"? And why does the sound of scuffling sneakers stop him in his tracks?

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About What It's Like to Be...
In each episode of What It's Like to Be..., bestselling author Dan Heath speaks with someone about what it's like to walk in their (work) shoes. Behavioral Scientist serves as a distribution partner with episodes released every other week. Learn more about the podcast's mission of "slow curiosity" here, and head here to get Dan's reflections on how the mission is going after a year of conversations.

The “Correctional Officer” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Bill Farrell. It was produced and edited by Matt Purdy. Copyright © 2026 by Dan Heath. All rights reserved.

The post What It’s Like to Be…a Correctional Officer appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

A man was arrested for entering a New York subway station through an emergency gate without paying the fare. When police patted him down, they found he was illegally carrying a loaded gun. When another man was arrested for fare evasion at a different stop, police found he was carrying 38 decks of heroin and a loaded gun that had been reported as stolen. Yet another was arrested for not paying the subway fare in another part of the city, and it turned out he was carrying a gun, ammunition, and crack cocaine. New York police argue that enforcing a seemingly minor offense (fare evasion) helps them catch people like these who are up to no good—perhaps preventing violent crime.

And yet, how to handle such offenses has been hotly debated for decades. Some worry that allowing arrests will result in violent confrontations or jail time for people already struggling to make ends meet. For what, a $2.90 subway ticket? While some of those arrested for fare evasion will have a track record of crime, for many others this would be their first arrest. Is a criminal charge really our best option?

In 2023, the board of directors of BART—Bay Area Regional Transit, the San Francisco subway agency—voted to oppose a bill moving through the California legislature that would decriminalize fare evasion. “The public is speaking very loud to us right now—and they have been—about the lack of enforcement of rules in our system,” said BART board member Debora Allen. Local residents were worried about safety on the subway system, with stories about violent crime at the top of everyone’s minds. “I can’t help but say we could help prevent some of the bad behavior in our system by getting tougher on fare evasion.” Daly City resident Howard Bernstein agreed that such a move would only embolden offenders: “The more we decriminalize criminal behavior, the more criminal behavior we’re going to experience.”

A few years earlier, in 2017, Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance Jr. made headlines when he announced he would no longer prosecute fare evasion cases. “Prosecuting for turnstile jumping is counter to this city’s efforts to be a sanctuary,” Anthony Posada of Legal Aid NYC told reporters at the time. The move was generally motivated by a recognition that fare evasion was a crime often committed due to poverty. Clearly, pressing criminal charges in such situations would not address the problem—that the person had no money—and risked making the problem worse. But in 2023, the debate raged on. The New York Times journalist Ana Ley reported that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) had lost $690 million to fare evasion the previous year. Turnstile hoppers were apparently undeterred by tickets written by the police hovering nearby, and seeing some people ride without paying made others feel like suckers for buying a ticket. A year later, Ley followed up with an equally dire statistic: 48 percent of bus riders in the city did not pay the required fare. (The number for subway riders was 14 percent.) “If the transit system does not work and nobody plays by the rules, it feels lawless. It is lawless,” said Janno Lieber, chief executive of the MTA. “This is really tearing at the social compact of New York.”

Current debates about how to handle low-level nonviolent crimes are reminiscent of those from thirty years ago. In 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York City. He came to office promising to make the city safer, and quickly adopted a strategy that had previously been discussed only in academic circles: “broken windows” policing. The idea underlying this approach was that disorder begets disorder. By addressing low-level offending—trespassing, vandalism, prostitution, urinating in public—police could deter more serious offenses. People would know that police were paying attention and that the community was well cared for, and so they would behave better. Fix the broken windows, and arrest the guy who broke them, and you’ll prevent violent crime as well.

Crime fell dramatically in New York City during the 1990s, and Giuliani claimed victory. In his farewell address in 2001, he credited this strategy—cracking down on low-level offenders as a way to prevent crime from escalating—as the key to his success. “The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street-level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, too busy to pay attention to graffiti. Well, you can’t be too busy to pay attention to those things, because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society.”

Since then, it’s become less clear how helpful that strategy really was. Crime fell dramatically throughout the US in the 1990s and early 2000s, not just in New York City. And yet this theory is still appealing to voters, and still motivates the policies of many police departments and prosecutors’ offices. Fast-forward to the present, when many cities are struggling with persistent and increasingly brazen public drug use, homeless encampments, vandalism, petty theft, and, yes, turnstile hopping. More serious crime, including organized retail theft rings, carjackings, and even homicide, also became serious problems in many cities—a shock after decades of declining crime rates. In 2022, the San Francisco resident and political commentator Richie Greenberg described what he saw as a turn toward lawlessness, to The Atlantic’s Annie Lowery. “People are sick and tired of the whole atmosphere of the city. It’s not fun to live here anymore,” he lamented.

The past several years have prompted calls to return to a Giuliani-style zero-tolerance approach to disorder, with stiff penalties for even the most minor offenses. Today, when I speak with policy stakeholders across the United States, I’m frequently asked if a broken windows approach could be the solution to their problems. Could a tougher approach to minor offenses be the key to reducing more serious crime?

Many voters have decided it’s at least worth trying—again—and not just in the subway. In 2023, police in San Francisco began cracking down on public drug use, arresting more than seventeen hundred people between May and December. “You’ll never hear me say that arresting folks will solve addiction, but these are still crimes,” Police Chief Bill Scott told The San Francisco Standard. San Francisco sheriff Paul Miyamoto saw punishment as a compassionate incentive for people to get the help they need: “Justice-involved persons with substance use disorder sometimes need the threat of jail time to compel them to remain in programs that successfully address the root causes of addiction,” he said, explaining the city’s efforts to dismantle open-air drug markets. In Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, police crackdowns targeted public drug use as well as other minor offenses and quality-of-life issues—they shooed away people who were loitering, towed unregistered cars, and cleaned vacant lots. “The neighbors really didn’t complain,” Deputy Commissioner Pedro Rosario responded when asked about community pushback. “They were happy. They were thumbs-upping me a lot.”

There is at least a kernel of wisdom in this approach. We know that people respond to incentives, and swift and certain punishment for bad behavior deters future offending. That is important, and to the extent that broken windows means making consequences more likely, it could indeed reduce crime and put people on a better path. But increasing the probability of punishment is different from making the punishment harsher. Many proponents of the broken windows approach don’t simply want to arrest people for their bad behavior, they want to throw the book at them. (Because of this, broken windows, as a philosophy, extends beyond what police do and into the courtroom, where prosecutors and judges decide the consequence for an offense.) It’s not clear that harsher punishment would be productive. On top of that, it’s possible that prosecuting and punishing low-level offenders has other, detrimental effects that cancel out any benefits we get from deterrence—especially if it’s someone’s first brush with the law.

For instance, a criminal record makes it more difficult to find a job, and it means you might lose the job you had before your conviction. This creates economic hardship that can make criminal behavior more likely, as a way to make ends meet. A criminal record also makes it more difficult to find housing, as most landlords run background checks just like employers do. Without a safe place to live, you might find yourself in more dangerous situations, with less to lose, and more vulnerable to future charges for offenses such as trespassing when you have nowhere else to go. To the extent that your previous offenses were the result of untreated mental illness or substance use, the stress of criminal charges and any punishment could make those problems worse.

How much do all these factors matter in practice? Would reducing the consequences for low-level offenses be helpful? Those who say no—like proponents of broken windows policing—think the threat of harsh punishment has a big deterrent effect. But others say yes. Reform-minded prosecutors, elected in many cities over the past decade, have promised to go easier on minor offenses so that they can focus more attention on violent crimes. In 2019, Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County, Missouri, told NBC News that diverting nonviolent offenders from jail to rehabilitative programming “not only brings our crime rates down, but most importantly, it helps people and families.” Still others believe that the challenges faced by those who commit low-level crimes—poverty, limited education, untreated mental illness—are so large that only a massive reform of our social safety net will keep people from cycling back through the criminal justice system. Who’s right?

* * *

Prosecution in Suffolk County

With such diverging opinions on what to do with people arrested for low-level offenses, figuring out the best path forward requires turning to data. I teamed up with the economist Amanda Agan, now at Cornell University, and political scientist Anna Harvey, from New York University, to study this issue. We wanted to know what effect the decision to prosecute someone for a nonviolent misdemeanor—minor offenses like trespassing, shoplifting, and minor drug possession—would have on a defendant’s future criminal justice involvement. Would cracking down on that low-level offense reduce their likelihood of reoffending (as broken windows proponents expect) or increase it (as reform prosecutors argue)?

We managed to get data from the District Attorney’s Office in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, where Boston is located. The DA there at the time, Rachael Rollins, also wanted to know the answer to this question, and so enthusiastically handed over her office’s data, no strings attached. This is a researcher’s dream. Many policymakers are hesitant to share data when they can’t control the results of the study, and can’t block unfavorable results from being published. But such restrictions are a nonstarter for researchers like us. Luckily, then-DA Rollins was on board with our scientific approach and wanted to follow the evidence. She understood that this was the best way to figure out how to improve public safety—and perhaps end this long-standing debate. 

In Suffolk County, once police make an arrest or issue a summons, and then determine that probable cause exists for the charge, the case goes to an arraignment hearing. In that hearing, an assistant district attorney (ADA) representing the government decides whether to pursue the charges or dismiss the case. They are essentially deciding whether they think the case is a good use of prosecutors’ time. This is the decision we were interested in. What if more cases were dismissed up front? Would that lead to more recidivism, or less?

What if more cases were dismissed up front? Would that lead to more recidivism, or less?

Simply comparing people who were prosecuted with those who were not wouldn’t answer this question, because prosecutors intentionally choose whom to prosecute. If we found that those who were prosecuted were more likely to reoffend in the future, we wouldn’t know if this was the effect of the prosecution decision, or because prosecutors only move forward with cases against higher-risk defendants. Prosecution might be correlated with recidivism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean prosecution causes recidivism.

So once we had the data, it was time to hunt for natural experiments that would allow us to distinguish correlation from causation. The ideal experiment in this context would randomly assign some defendants to be prosecuted and others not. We could then attribute any differences in future behavior across these two groups to the effect of being prosecuted, without worrying there are other underlying differences between them that explain their differences in behavior.

Of course, no one would agree to prosecute cases at random (nor should they). But it turns out that the way nonviolent misdemeanor cases are assigned to ADAs mimics this ideal experiment.

What determines which ADA handles each case? Handling arraignments is the “grunt work” of the prosecutors’ office. (The more interesting work comes later in the case proceedings.) So everyone takes a turn, especially junior ADAs who haven’t specialized yet.

ADAs are assigned to the arraignment courtroom in an ad hoc way that changes week to week, depending on their other meetings and case schedules. This Monday, Tom might be assigned to handle arraignments, but next Monday, Anne might be assigned to that task. This assignment schedule is unrelated to the types of cases expected on that day—this is the key. Because of this, we don’t need to worry that ADAs are selected to handle particular cases on account of their expertise or preferences—at least for the nonviolent misdemeanor cases we are interested in. (They might pull someone with more expertise in for more serious offenses.)

It’s important to understand the huge volume of these cases that go through the courts in any given week—misdemeanors make up 70 to 80 percent of all cases. For these very minor offenses, ADAs have just a few moments to decide whether to proceed with a case or drop it. The goal is to keep the cases moving; this is the only way the courts don’t become completely overwhelmed by minor charges and grind to a halt.

Because everything moves so quickly, and because ADAs’ schedules are so unpredictable, it is not possible for defendants to game the system to get a particular ADA. When their case is at the top of the pile on the ADA’s desk, it’s their turn. They get what they get.

This all means that which ADA handles a particular case is effectively random—there is no correlation between case characteristics and the characteristics or relative harshness of the ADA.

Human discretion as a natural experiment

So we have randomization of ADAs, but this doesn’t help if all ADAs behave the same way. What we also need from this natural experiment is randomness in the decision to prosecute.

This is where we could rely on human nature, and a fact that we see in every domain where humans make decisions: People have different preferences, and so they will use any discretion they have in different ways. And prosecutors have a lot of discretion. In this context, this means that two different prosecutors considering identical cases might make completely different decisions. One might drop the case immediately, while the other might choose to move the case forward with the goal of conviction and punishment.

This probably sounds extremely unfair. Shouldn’t identical cases get the same outcome regardless of who the prosecutor is? That is certainly the ideal, but in contexts like this, there is no right answer about what should happen in a case. We count on human decision-makers to use their best judgment. This leads to differences in outcomes that we’d rather not have. 

In the U.S., we tend to swing back and forth between limiting the discretion of criminal justice actors like prosecutors and judges and giving them more discretion. We hear about big differences in outcomes across similar cases—for instance, Black defendants receiving harsher sentences than similar white defendants—and we demand restrictions on discretion. This is part of the reason for policies like sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences. These tie the hands of prosecutors and judges, at least on some dimensions.

Having your case dismissed rather than pursuing prosecution—reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent, and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent.

But then we hear about a case that, based on these standardized rules, resulted in an outcome that seems totally unfair given some extenuating circumstances, and we demand that decision-makers have more discretion to deviate from those rules when it is warranted. We want them to use their judgment to provide the best outcome. And then when they do, we wind up with different outcomes across similar cases, and we swing back toward wanting less discretion.

What we want is for prosecutors and judges to use their discretion only for good—to reach the decision we think is most appropriate. But the problem is that different people disagree about what is appropriate. Allowing people to use their best judgment has trade-offs, and we have to take the bad with the good.

One silver lining to this complicated dilemma is that human discretion creates great settings for research. In Suffolk County, random assignment of cases across ADAs meant that we effectively had random assignment of cases to different treatments—the ideal experiment we’d hoped for. Some defendants get lucky and their case is handled by a lenient ADA; because of this, they are more likely to have their case dismissed outright. Other defendants are unlucky and their case is handled by a harsh ADA; their case is more likely to move forward to the next stage. Through the luck of the draw—which ADA happened to be in that courtroom that day—we have identical cases that are treated in different ways.

What happened to those lucky defendants whose cases were dropped because they happened to be in the right courtroom at the right time with a lenient ADA? Proponents of broken-windows-style punishment as a deterrent would predict that those defendants would be emboldened. Facing little consequence for their actions the first time, they’d realize the costs of bad behavior were low and commit even more crime in the future.

But that’s not what the data showed. It turns out that leniency at this early stage—having your case dismissed rather than pursuing prosecution—reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent, and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent. The effects were larger for first-time defendants—those with no prior arrest or conviction on their record.

* * *

The power of leniency

David Eil is an assistant public defender in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where Charlotte is located. He has seen firsthand the damage that a first conviction can do. And—unlike most lawyers—he used to be an economist. So he has a keen eye for natural experiments. This makes him a great person to compare notes with about how the criminal justice system works in practice.

“I had two misdemeanor clients who were similarly situated,” he told me recently. “Both were facing the same charge, but their cases had different outcomes due to random chance.”

Both clients were charged with misdemeanor assault on a government official—a charge that sounds really bad, but David assured me that such a charge at the misdemeanor, rather than felony, level is almost always pretty minor. (“I literally had a client get charged with assault of a government official for not saying, ‘Excuse me,’ when moving past a cop through a doorway,” he recalled.) The first client, Tiffany, arrived at the courthouse for her hearing to find that the officer accusing her of assault had not shown up. His partner, who had witnessed the incident, was there, but the prosecutor told him he could leave, then asked the judge for a continuance—a delay to a new date—so that they could get the first officer to the court. The judge denied that request. This led the prosecutor to scramble to get the second officer back to court, to testify as a witness. He succeeded—“a miracle for the prosecutor,” David noted—and Tiffany was convicted. This was devastating for her. As a result of that conviction—her first—she was not able to obtain an employment certification she’d been working toward. The training program she had invested time and money into was suddenly worthless. This first criminal record changed her trajectory for the worse, even though (because the charge was so minor) no meaningful punishment was handed down by the court.

David’s second client, Sam, faced the exact same charge. When he showed up to court, the accusing officer was not there. Just as in Tiffany’s case, the officer had failed to appear. (It turns out that this is a pretty common occurrence, which isn’t great for the smooth functioning of our justice system.) This time there wasn’t another officer who could testify as a witness. The judge again denied the prosecutor’s request for a continuance, and this time the case was dismissed. Sam was relieved—he worked as a security guard, but had been suspended from his job because of this pending charge. (A criminal record—even a misdemeanor like this one—is typically disqualifying for a position focused on public safety.) He had a limited amount of time before his employer would have needed to replace him. Even if the judge had granted the continuance and the case had been dismissed a month later, it would have been too late; he would have lost his job. Because the dominoes fell as they did that day, Sam kept his clean record and got to return to a job he liked, continuing his life as it had been before.

Just like the similar defendants in our study, who were lucky or unlucky depending on which prosecutor they faced during their arraignment hearing, David’s clients faced different consequences as a result of luck rather than anything about them or their cases. It is easy to see how such luck can play out case after case, day after day, putting similar people—like Tiffany and Sam—onto radically different paths. The results of our study support David’s observation that a first misdemeanor record can do a great deal of harm—at least for nonviolent defendants. (The assault charges that Tiffany and Sam faced would not be in this category, of course, but future studies may show similar impacts for violent misdemeanor charges like theirs.) With worse employment options, additional criminal behavior is more likely.

I asked David how aware his clients are of the impact of a first criminal record. “It’s usually me who brings it up,” he told me. “It’s more common that people first feel the impact of a pending charge, and then learn—probably accurately—that if the case is resolved quickly, even if it’s not in their favor, the problem goes away.” For example: “A class 2 misdemeanor for carrying a concealed weapon—a very common misdemeanor in North Carolina that is viewed as relatively minor—probably wouldn’t bar you from driving for Uber, but a pending criminal case will.” So there is a strong incentive to quickly take a plea deal so that you can keep your current job. Even so, there might be longer-term consequences from that conviction, depending on where you live or what types of jobs you might want in the future. So David tries to persuade his clients that waiting for a dismissal might be worth some temporary pain.

“Sometimes I’m in a position where I’m trying to talk somebody out of [taking a plea bargain immediately], reminding them that once a conviction is there [on your record] it will be there until it can be expunged, which is a long time from now and you might not qualify when that time comes. It might be worth trying to get to the next court date and beating this case, even if it’s going to cause you some more short-term difficulty. . . . I’m often the one who is trying to describe for them the problems of having a conviction, and they’re the one saying, ‘Look, I just want to get this over with.’”

More lessons from Suffolk County

Our results from Suffolk County tell us that prosecutors should avoid putting first-time defendants in this situation. They should err more toward leniency at the arraignment hearing and focus instead on trying fewer, more serious cases. This would give us more results like Sam’s, and fewer like Tiffany’s.

As an economist, I’m used to most policies involving trade-offs. And when my colleagues and I started working on the Suffolk County study, I fully expected to find some costs to leniency. Surely we would see some increase in criminal behavior, if only in minor offenses like trespassing and drug possession. The question in my mind was whether those costs outweighed the benefits, like how much time it saved everyone (including defendants) when a case was dropped. But when we followed the data, we found only benefits. Criminal behavior didn’t increase, it fell. And it fell by a lot. The other benefits to the court and defendants were icing on that cake.

As researchers, we are skeptical by nature. We wondered: What if these defendants didn’t offend again because they realized they’d gotten lucky? What would happen if there were an actual policy change that pushed all ADAs to become more lenient? Those defendants might change their behavior, and members of the community might hear about the change and decide obeying the law wasn’t worth it. Would we see crime rates go up then?

Luckily, we had such a policy change to consider. DA Rachael Rollins had implemented a “presumption of nonprosecution” for a list of fifteen nonviolent misdemeanor offenses when she took office. This meant that she instructed her ADAs to dismiss such cases unless they had a good reason not to. (A good reason might be that that person had already cycled through the court several times, and leniency was clearly not working.) This pushed all ADAs to be more lenient, particularly toward first-time defendants—exactly the group we’d found benefited the most from such decisions.

When we looked at the effects of this policy change, we found similar benefits as before: For defendants, we found that dismissing their cases led to fewer future charges, not more, just as we’d found was the case before the policy change. (This rules out the “I got lucky” effect.) And when we looked at local crime rates, we found no increases. Some types of reported crime may even have fallen.

Declining to prosecute low-level offenses isn’t unheard of. All prosecutors consider which cases are worth pursuing and which are not, and decline to prosecute many of them, for a variety of reasons. Under Rollins’s more conservative predecessor Dan Conley, the DA’s office chose not to prosecute 34 to 38 percent of nonviolent misdemeanor cases. Under Rollins’s policy, this rate increased by 5 to 8 percentage points—so her office became more lenient, but it wasn’t a radical shift. The change was on the margin, but it was big enough to make a difference for quite a few people.

“We have to give credit—DA Conley was doing this,” Rollins told reporters, poking fun at those who had criticized her approach as too liberal. “He just wasn’t as vocal about it as I was, and we’ve increased it a bit as well.”

The data vindicated DA Rollins, who had faced extreme pressure from local police officials to be tougher on misdemeanor defendants. Reporters asked what would have happened if the study’s results had come out the other way. “We would be adapting right now because at the end of the day, it’s not about policies, it’s about what are we doing to keep the people of Suffolk County safe,” she told The Boston Globe at the time—an answer that any researcher would love. “What I hope this does is say we are really serious about data-based, and evidence-based, solutions. This data shows the policies we proposed are working.”

Economists like to say there’s no such thing as a free lunch—there are always trade-offs. But we’d found a free lunch! Erring toward leniency, particularly for first-time defendants, made everyone better off.

This was for nonviolent misdemeanor cases, the most minor type of offense. There are many such cases, so this could make a big dent in the number of charges going through the courts, but what might leniency look like for people charged with more serious crimes?

* * *

Leniency in felony cases

Nonviolent felony cases are more serious offenses, like burglary and motor vehicle theft. These types of cases are much less likely to be dismissed outright. But in many places, prosecutors have the option to wait and see if a defendant is a public safety threat before convicting them.

In Texas, this option is called “deferred adjudication.” When prosecutors choose this option, the defendant begins a probationary period. If they successfully complete that probation with no new offenses, their initial charges will be dropped completely and they avoid that conviction. On the other hand, if they do get into additional trouble, their conviction goes into effect, along with some punishment (usually community supervision).

The country star Zach Bryan made headlines in 2023 when he was arrested in Oklahoma on obstruction charges. “It was ridiculous, it was immature, and I just pray everyone knows I don’t think I’m above the law,” Bryan said the next day. “I was just being disrespectful, and I shouldn’t have been. It was my mistake.” He received a deferred prosecution—that state’s equivalent of a deferred adjudication—and completed the terms of his probationary period six months later. A spokesperson for the Craig County District Attorney’s Office explained that Bryan “admitted responsibility and followed all the rules and conditions of probation. [Deferred prosecution agreements] are commonly used in cases where the person has no criminal record. It is an opportunity to take responsibility for their actions, follow probation rules, and avoid having a criminal conviction on their records.”

Does this second chance to avoid a felony conviction lead to more future offending, or less? Again, we face the same potential trade-offs: Reducing the consequences for committing a crime might embolden the defendant, leading to more crime in the future. On the other hand, avoiding a conviction could help them keep their job and housing, allowing them to course-correct on their own.

The net effect is an empirical question, and only real-world data can tell us what happens in practice.

The University of Michigan economist Michael Mueller-Smith and Simon Fraser University economist Kevin Schnepel were able to study this question in Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located. They linked a variety of administrative datasets that allowed them to see not only criminal justice involvement but also employment and earnings.

Linking such datasets is surprisingly difficult in the United States. These datasets are maintained by separate government agencies at county and state levels, and linking them requires complex negotiations and lengthy data use agreements. Many agencies simply say no when researchers ask to use their data, and even more say no when researchers ask to link their data with data from other agencies. This makes it difficult to understand how our criminal justice system affects other aspects of people’s lives—like whether they have a job.

But Mueller-Smith and Schnepel pulled these negotiations off. As a result, they had amazing data on felony defendants in a major American city (one that I now call home).

As before, data wasn’t enough. These researchers couldn’t simply compare defendants who received a deferred adjudication with those who were prosecuted and convicted as usual, because prosecutors carefully choose who gets this second chance. Deferred adjudications might be correlated with lower recidivism, but that could be because prosecutors give this option only to lower-risk defendants.

Mueller-Smith and Schnepel needed a natural experiment—something that sorted similar defendants into “deferred adjudication” and “regular conviction” groups, as if at random. Luck was on their side: They found not just one natural experiment but two.

Policy change one

The first natural experiment was a policy change that had unintended consequences. In 1993, the Texas legislature enacted a reform that imposed a new probationary requirement for low-level offenders. The policy sounded like it was in line with diversionary goals—that is, helping first-time offenders avoid being pulled into the criminal justice system—but in practice it made diversion less appealing to prosecutors. If they granted a defendant a deferred adjudication, and that defendant did not comply with the terms of the probationary period, they could not simply revert to the original conviction and sentence. The new policy said they’d have to put them on probation again before the sentence could go into effect. This gave the first probationary period no teeth.

Prosecutors warned the legislature that this policy could backfire, but to no avail. The policy went into effect on September 1, 1994. Deferred adjudications immediately dropped, by 24 percentage points for first-time defendants.

This meant that identical defendants, charged with the same nonviolent felony offense but who committed their crimes just before and just after September 1, 1994, faced different consequences. The person who offended just before the policy change was dramatically more likely to receive a deferred adjudication than the person who offended just after the policy change.

This created the first natural experiment. The date of the policy change—September 1, 1994—sorted defendants into treatment and control groups, as if at random, based on the date of their offense. Nothing else changed at that date. The only difference between these defendants was whether they got a second chance to avoid a felony conviction.

It turns out this second chance was very helpful. First-timers who got lucky and received a deferred adjudication committed fewer crimes going forward. They were 31 percentage points less likely to be convicted of any new crime over the next ten years—a 44 percent reduction compared with the control group.

First-timers who got lucky and received a deferred adjudication were 31 percentage points less likely to be convicted of any new crime over the next ten years—a 44 percent reduction compared with the control group.

This second chance also increased labor market participation. Employment rates increased by 18 percentage points (49 percent relative to the control group), and total earnings over the following 10 years grew by more than $85,000 (93 percent relative to what the control group earned). A large share of those who received this second chance took full advantage of it.

Policy change two

In the early 2000s, policymakers in Harris County, Texas, were increasingly worried about overcrowding in the local jail. By 2005, there were nearly two thousand inmates sleeping on mattresses on the floor—very bad conditions that were clearly unsustainable.

Government officials sought to raise money to expand jail capacity. In November 2007, they put an initiative on the ballot in the county election to fund construction of a new jail facility. Particularly in conservative states like Texas, such initiatives are usually successful.

This one was not. To everyone’s surprise, the ballot initiative was narrowly defeated, with 50.6 percent of voters voting against it—even as they overwhelmingly approved additional statewide funding for increasing prison capacity. This defeat shocked local policymakers and criminal justice practitioners. They suddenly realized they’d need to solve their overcrowding crisis some other way.

One result was a sudden increase in diversion—either deferred adjudications or outright case dismissal—for nonviolent felony defendants. First-time offenders who committed a crime just after the failed ballot initiative got lucky—they were dramatically more likely to get a second chance. Overnight, the probability of diversion increased by 18 percentage points.

Again, this set up a beautiful natural experiment. Mueller-Smith and Schnepel could compare defendants sentenced on either side of the election on November 6, 2007. The only difference between those sentenced before and after this date was that those sentenced after were much more likely to avoid a conviction. This difference wasn’t because of underlying differences between these defendants or their cases; it was because of the failed ballot initiative. This gave the researchers confidence that any future differences in recidivism or employment would be due to the diversion decision and not to something else about those defendants.

Just as in 1994, there were big benefits to greater leniency. As the likelihood of diversion suddenly increased, the likelihood of new, future convictions fell, by 26 percentage points (46 percent). This is a dramatic change. Nearly half of the first-time offenders who would have committed another crime in the future if they’d been prosecuted and convicted as usual cleaned up their acts and avoided future crime when their cases were dropped or they received a deferred adjudication. It is really difficult to find interventions that reduce recidivism this much. This second chance to avoid a first felony conviction had a much bigger impact than most rehabilitation programs do.

* * *

Putting it all together

When I first saw these results, they seemed too good to be true. We can cut recidivism by half simply by not convicting first-time defendants? This feels like magic, particularly in a context where many highly praised reentry programs struggle to reduce recidivism at all.

But these studies are extremely compelling, with natural experiments that closely mimic ideal experiments with control groups. And the findings are remarkably consistent—a second chance for first-time defendants cuts future crime by half, in all these contexts. As more research comes out, I become more and more convinced that a criminal record is a terrible bludgeon that we should use much more sparingly than we do now. It is very difficult to undo the damage of a criminal record, once it has been imposed.

I become more and more convinced that a criminal record is a terrible bludgeon that we should use much more sparingly than we do now.

Best of all, these dramatic results don’t require dramatic reforms. Small shifts, making leniency the default rather than the exception, are enough. Cutting recidivism in half for first-time offenders will quickly reduce reported crime and court caseloads, allowing greater attention on those who do offend again.

Leniency doesn’t mean no consequences

When we first released our research from Suffolk County, some responded that we should completely decriminalize minor offenses like disorderly conduct and shoplifting. But that’s not what this research showed. Dropping someone’s charges at their arraignment hearing doesn’t mean there were no consequences for their actions.

That person had likely been arrested and booked in jail, and had to show up in court for that initial hearing. This might mean taking time off work, and it certainly meant worrying about what might happen during the hearing. All this isn’t nothing—it is an inconvenience at best and a costly and stressful event at worst.

In the Harris County study, “lucky” defendants also had to successfully complete a probationary period, during which they had to demonstrate that they could refrain from future criminal behavior. That involved following additional rules to earn their second chance.

What this research shows is these earlier steps in the case—arrest and an initial hearing for nonviolent misdemeanors, and a probationary period for nonviolent felonies—are often punishment enough. Adding a criminal record on top is what has big, detrimental effects, at least for first-time offenders. Helping someone avoid that first conviction gives them a second chance. It’s as if they’re standing at a fork in the road, considering what to do next. One direction leads toward more criminal behavior and criminal justice involvement, and the other leads toward a productive, law-abiding life. It turns out that many first-time defendants will choose the better path if we simply get out of their way.

Excerpted from The Science of Second Chances by Jennifer Doleac, published by Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2026 by Jennifer Doleac. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The post What Becomes of Second Chances? appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

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. Why do farmers outsource the harvesting of their own crops? And what happens when you drive a combine into a ditch?

[buzzsprout episode='19032277' player='true']

View the episode transcript

About What It's Like to Be...
In each episode of What It's Like to Be..., bestselling author Dan Heath speaks with someone about what it's like to walk in their (work) shoes. Behavioral Scientist serves as a distribution partner with episodes released every other week. Learn more about the podcast's mission of "slow curiosity" here, and head here to get Dan's reflections on how the mission is going after a year of conversations.

The “Custom Harvester” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Josh Beckley. It was produced and edited by Matt Purdy. Copyright © 2026 by Dan Heath. All rights reserved.

The post What It’s Like to Be…a Custom Harvester appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

In 2010, Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan showed that 96 percent of the data that scientists had relied on to understand human psychology and behavior was from W.E.I.R.D. research participants—people living in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries. That biased sample, they argued, severely limited what we could say we really knew about ourselves. Their work was a wake-up call to many scientists to expand where and how they conduct their research.

But recognizing the need to expand and diversify research is one thing, and actually doing it is another. A decade later, Henrich, Norenzayan, and Coren Apicella conducted a follow-up study to see if participant samples had gotten more diverse. They hadn’t. The research team found that 94 percent of studies were still conducted with W.E.I.R.D. participants. 

The W.E.I.R.D problem persists not because scholars fail to see it as a problem worth solving but because conducting research in new, unfamiliar places is difficult. There are language and cultural barriers, obstacles to finding participants, and complications with technology. But overcoming these difficulties is doable, and it’s essential. 

The W.E.I.R.D problem persists not because scholars fail to see it as a problem worth solving but because conducting research in new, unfamiliar places is difficult.

In 2023, I founded Besample, a platform designed to help scientists reach participants all over the globe, in order to help solve these challenges. As a social psychologist trained in the United States, but born and raised in Russia, helping researchers address the W.E.I.R.D. problem feels both personal and professional. And in Besample’s first three years, we’ve learned that many scientists, when given the opportunity, are ready to address the W.E.I.R.D. problem too, by expanding where they conduct their research.

So far, we’ve worked with over 1,700 scholars on more than 880 studies, collecting nearly 330,000 data points from participants in 42 countries across Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America. Data collected through Besample has covered a range of phenomena and is now making its way into the academic literature, including cross-cultural research on loneliness and investigations into value systems, perceptions of climate change, and family dynamics.

Through this work, we’ve learned quite a bit about how scientists can conduct high-quality, culturally grounded research beyond the West. Here are seven key lessons we would like to share.

1. The world does not speak English

Researchers from North America and Western Europe often default to running studies in English, even when targeting non-English-speaking countries in the Global South. While English may work in former British colonies, like India, South Africa, or Kenya, it falls short elsewhere, especially in Asia and Latin America.

This is a problem, because people from non-English speaking countries who read and write in English are special, not representative. Most likely, they’ve been economically privileged enough to learn the language in good schools or colleges. 

Another problem with running studies in English is that even highly proficient speakers can experience the foreign-language effect, where they feel more emotionally detached from the material simply because it’s not in their native language. People find it easier and more natural to complete tasks in their native language, which can influence how they respond. 

For some, this is a matter of dignity. In Turkey, for instance, some of Besample’s respondents declined to participate in studies conducted in English, because the lack of a Turkish translation felt disrespectful. Kazakhstan presented an even greater challenge; respondents dropped out at the consent stage if it was presented in dense legal English—they treat formal agreements very seriously, and the inability to fully understand the text was perceived as a risk.

At Besample, we recommend translating studies into local languages for countries where the average English proficiency is below 50 percent, which helps boost sample size and representativeness. Today, it’s easy to generate a first draft of translations with AI, and local experts can help proofread and ensure that materials are appropriate given the cultural context.

2. Standard attention checks create more noise than signal

As the popularity of online studies grew in the scientific community, researchers became more concerned with whether participants were actually paying attention. So they developed attention checks—questions to assess whether a participant was reading the materials carefully—to filter out low-quality responses. 

In studies with non-Western populations, researchers frequently exclude those who fail attention checks, assuming this reflects a participant’s lack of focus and indicates low-quality data. However, in global research, such failures are often a matter of a language barrier or less familiarity with participating in studies rather than a lack of engagement or incoherent data. 

For example, in an analysis I coauthored on the data quality of online research platforms, we found that Besample respondents with lower English proficiency could fail attention checks but provide high-quality data to other questions. These findings suggest that attention-check performance is not a definitive proxy for data quality. 

Before making the easy call to dismiss responses, scientists should view attention-check failures through a linguistic lens—or, even better, design localized quality checks based on consistency and accuracy prior to launching a study in a new context. 

3. Questions about race and ethnicity are not universal

Another trap researchers can fall into is using Western-centric templates for questions on race and ethnicity. Though it’s common to think about one’s identity in terms of race in places like the United States or United Kingdom, in other countries it’s not. And when it comes to ethnicity, there are over 800 distinct ethnicities (or over 7,000 if you use ethnolinguistic groups as a taxonomy).

To better understand the diversity of our participants, we surveyed nearly 1,000 people from 11 countries: Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We asked respondents about their self-identification regarding race and ethnicity, providing both open-ended and multiple-choice questions. Open-ended responses showed that many participants described themselves by ethnic group or geographic region rather than conventional racial classifications. 

For the multiple-choice questions, people in countries such as Ukraine, Morocco, and Indonesia selected commonly used categories 50 percent less often and were more inclined to select a category when presented with options from an extended ethnic scale, because it included ethnic identifiers that standard questions leave out.

When launching a study in a new, culturally distinct place, failing to adapt questions around race and ethnicity can lead to meaningless or even misleading data.

4. Simple questions about gender aren’t so simple

Cultural nuances can also alter the meaning of even the most basic-seeming gender identity terms. A couple of years ago, when we were building an early pool of respondents, we noticed a puzzling pattern in Indonesia: In a demographic pre-screener, an unexpected number of people were selecting “other” when asked whether they identified as pria (male), perempuan (female), or lainnya (other). We were curious to learn why. 

We knew that Indonesia was among a few world societies where, in certain provinces, more than two gender categories were accepted. But most of our respondents were not from those provinces. When we added an open text field to the “other” option, we started to see an influx of typed-in responses, all similar to laki-laki. Young Indonesian men were just not calling themselves pria because that was a term for older, adult men. For younger males, there was a different word: laki-laki. While distinctly identifying as male, young men were selecting “other” to type in this exact word. 

Another example is hijra, a gender category found in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Hijra are neither “men” nor “women,” nor simply “transgender” in the Western sense. They are often recognized as a third gender, with long-standing social and ritual roles that stretch back hundreds of years. When people identify as nonbinary around the world, it often means something very different from what we’re used to in the Western context.

Asking about gender also requires more than just understanding the correct terminology. In many places, certain gender identities and sexual orientations face prejudice or are even punishable offences, so researchers need to be aware of this before launching their studies. 

5. Standard questions about marital status are not sufficient 

Marital status is deeply intertwined with family makeup, household decision-making, economic life, and a host of other things that social and behavioral scientists are interested in. But in some cultural contexts, asking about marital status is far more complicated than it might seem. 

For instance, in South Africa, researchers may need to distinguish between a civil ceremony and a traditional union formalized through lobola, a practice involving the negotiated transfer of property (in cash or in kind) from the prospective husband or his family to the bride’s family. 

Additionally, in the West, marital status is often interpreted as monogamy. But in countries such as Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo, polygynous unions account for 40–60 percent of reported marriages.

Turning to divorce—another key variable in studies of close relationships—Western researchers often assume that people are free to exit marriage through divorce. But in many countries, divorce is legally restricted, socially stigmatized, or practically inaccessible, making it a poor proxy for relationship quality or stability. A striking example is the Philippines, where divorce is not legally available for most citizens. Instead, marital dissolution occurs through Catholic annulment, a costly and rare process. As a result, less than two percent of the population has divorced, separated, or had a marriage annulled.

6. Households and household income look differently around the world 

It is common for researchers in the United States to assess participants’ economic standing by asking about their household income. But the idea of the household—a cornerstone unit in Western economics and connected with income, consumption, and decision-making—is frequently different in non-Western cultures. 

For example, in rural Malawi, households often diverge from the idealized Western model. Families can be spatially dispersed, household membership fluid, and major decisions follow matrilineal or patrilineal kinship lines. So in Malawi, kin social networks and resource flows often capture economic reality better than the Western household template. 

Additionally, many people assess their income in monthly terms and in immediate purchasing power, rather than in abstract annual household income terms (and especially not in foreign currencies like dollars or euros). 

Another financial difference worth pointing out is that many researchers assume they can pay online participants using bank transfers or PayPal. However, the ways people bank and handle everyday purchases is extremely variable. In many countries, cash and mobile transfers are the default rather than bank cards, and PayPal is virtually unknown. Bureaucratic hurdles can also make it highly inconvenient for people to receive a small $1–$3 reward for participating in a study via bank transfer. In some cases, this even requires visiting a bank in person to justify the transfer. This reality led us to build a network of more than 20 country- and region-specific partners, offering more than 45 different payment options to reward research participants. 

7. Conventional technical criteria do not indicate data quality

Traditionally, certain technical criteria, such as a unique IP address, served as a proxy for data quality. If many people logged in from the same IP address, researchers assumed that the same participant was taking the survey multiple times, and the data should be thrown out. But this isn’t necessarily the case.

In regions with limited IP availability, such as parts of Africa and Asia, it’s common for multiple users to share the same IP address. Many mobile operators assign a single public IP to hundreds—or even thousands—of devices, especially in mobile broadband networks where dynamic IP allocation manages connectivity for large user bases.

Researchers have also traditionally assumed that respondents using a desktop or laptop computer will provide higher quality data, and have often optimized their studies for PCs. But in many non-Western countries access to PCs are limited—in some countries less than 10 percent of people have access to a computer or laptop. Limiting studies to PCs can create a barrier to data collection and bias samples toward higher-income, urban participants with better digital access. 

But even if a survey is designed to work on a mobile device, people may lack reliable internet or have limited mobile data. These factors make it difficult for respondents to complete long surveys, especially those with large files or videos. 

What appears to be “low-quality” data based on a technical criterion may actually reflect local infrastructural and socioeconomic realities. Relying on technical checks like PC-only access or unique IP addresses leads to biased samples, slower data collection, and a failure to capture the true diversity of non-Western regions. 

* * *

These lessons detail some of the practical steps that researchers can take to move beyond W.E.I.R.D. populations. Taken together, these lessons also point to a broader shift that is needed if we want to make the social and behavioral sciences truly global: We need to have the courage to admit that things will likely go differently than we expect. And as we venture out to study the world, intellectual humility should be our starting point.

The post Helping Scientists Take Their Research Global: 7 Lessons appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

There is a popular belief that technological innovation will solve climate change without fundamental shifts in society and politics. For example, the World Economic Forum claims “we must invent our way out of climate change.” Solving climate change, the thinking goes, means investing in innovation.

Technocratic policies, such as the carbon tax, also assume a direct path between problem and solution. The idea of a carbon tax assumes that if emissions are priced correctly, firms and consumers will automatically reduce carbon use and invest in cleaner alternatives. The “solution” lies in engineering policies to calibrate the tax rate, coverage, and enforcement mechanisms.

Technological innovation and tech-oriented policies are a vital part of the way forward, but the approaches suffer from a blind spot. Both overlook key social and political factors underpinning climate action. This tech-first mindset rests on three myths about how global social change happens.

Myth 1: Environmental policies, activism, and solutions develop as a natural response to environmental problems. 

When environmental problems get worse, we might assume that we’ll naturally respond with more ambitious action. But that’s not necessarily the case. More extreme wildfires or heat waves, for example, ought to generate support for stronger climate change policies. But decades of research in sociology and political science shows that grievances and need alone do not automatically produce movements or reforms. 

Consider the “London Fog,” one of the most well-known examples of an environmental problem that persisted for decades without meaningful reform. For more than a century across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Londoners lived with a lethal smog that blanketed the city. It was such a feature of everyday life that it became normalized in media at the time; the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House famously characterizes a dense fog that chokes the city as an ordinary part of urban life. It wasn’t until 1956, when political conditions made action possible and people also saw pollution as a preventable public health problem, that the Clean Air Act was passed in the United Kingdom.

In the case of climate change, extensive evidence shows that environmental understanding and concern does not automatically translate into action. For example, among developing countries, environmental associations tend to emerge in countries where ties to global environmental networks are deepest rather than in countries facing the most severe environmental degradation.

The presence of a problem alone, even if there is awareness, is not enough to generate mobilization or reform. Social causes require organization, political opportunities, and compelling narratives in order to succeed.

Myth 2: The right technology and policies will automatically lead to change on the ground.

If the first myth assumes problems naturally produce solutions, the second assumes that once the right technology or policy appears, meaningful change will follow. 

When it comes to policy, research in sociology and political science shows that countries and organizations frequently adopt policies for reasons that have little to do with solving the underlying problem. Policies often serve as a signal of modernity or demonstrate alignment with global norms, producing legitimacy. At times, symbolic adoption can create the appearance of action without necessarily producing real change, a phenomenon known as “loose coupling.” Although some instances of loose coupling are intentional acts of “greenwashing” intended to gain legitimacy while avoiding the costs of action, in other cases actors may simply lack the capacity to enforce or implement policies.

Take the Paris Climate Accords: Nearly every country in the world ratified the international treaty a decade ago, but many are not meeting their promises to cut world pollution levels. Many countries failed to submit their updated nationally determined contribution plans by the 2025 deadline, as required by the treaty. Airline carbon offset programs offer another example. Companies often adopt policies that allow passengers to pay to “offset” emissions from their flights, but there is limited evidence that these policies meaningfully reduce overall emissions in practice.

When it comes to technology, successful solutions can fail to spread because of social and political dynamics. For example, from a technical standpoint, induction cooktops use less energy, offer faster cook times, and provide substantial safety and indoor air quality benefits relative to traditional gas and electric stovetops. The technology has been available for decades, yet uptake is slow due to a range of individual, social, and institutional barriers. These include the hassle and expense of replacing your stove, the norm of gas stoves as the “professional” standard, and the failure of big box retailers to add induction stoves to their display rooms.

Myth 3. Scale is a silver bullet.

The third myth is that solutions work better if they are scaled. If the problem is global, then the solution must be to scale promising technologies and policies to everyone, everywhere. 

This line of thinking tends to equate local effectiveness with scalability. But interventions that are effective in one context often fail when transplanted elsewhere, even to settings within the same country. Moreover, research also shows that large-scale reforms can generate reaction and backlash. As environmental policies and institutions spread globally, they can provoke reactions from groups who see these changes as threats to their values, autonomy, or ways of life. These groups emerge in reaction to large, ambitious reforms that seem disconnected from their own interests and work to challenge, deny, and roll back environmental policies.

Consider the farmers’ protests that erupted in Europe from 2023 to ’24. In response to the European Union’s Green Deal, many farmers blocked highways, dumped manure on roads and outside government buildings, and drove tractors through key cities to protest laws they saw as threatening their livelihoods. Ultimately, these actions forced the European Commission to delay or relax key climate measures, which is a trend that has continued to this day. These actions are part of a broader trend, which also includes the Yellow Vest protests in France that emerged in response to a proposed fuel tax hike in 2018 and the recent push against carbon pricing taxes in Canada that led to their partial repeal in 2025. 

Policies and technologies provoke resistance when they disrupt established practices, challenge existing identities, or are misaligned with local conditions. Scale can amplify all of these effects.

What can be done?

Our discussion points to the importance of understanding the social, political, and historical conditions that shape how solutions emerge, whether solutions work, and when inventions and climate policies can provoke backlash. Climate solutions do not operate in a vacuum: They interact with existing norms, identities, and interests, and they can fail when they conflict with them. 

This means that top-down regulations and efforts to scale inventions and policy need to come with serious attention to understanding and addressing the concerns of groups whose identities or livelihoods might be threatened. Relevant stakeholders should be meaningfully engaged from the very start of design processes rather than as an afterthought during implementation. We can also work from the bottom-up, developing local or community-based solutions. 

At the same time, we should think of new inventions, interventions, or policies as a first step toward the goal we really care about, not the end point. We should focus on outcomes like whether emissions fall, infrastructure changes, or behaviors shift at least as much as we focus on policy design and the development of technical solutions. This requires sustained attention to implementation. Potentially effective technologies, interventions, and policies can fall short not because they are wrong but because a lack of attention to social and political dynamics inhibits widespread behavioral change. For instance, energy companies routinely adopt voluntary methane reduction initiatives and publish extensive sustainability reports in some countries, but in practice implementation is weak as they evade substantial emissions reductions by continuing flaring practices in other countries with low enforcement or excluding overseas facilities from their emissions reports.

Finally, because countries and organizations routinely adopt policies to conform to what others are doing, public narratives have an important role to play in shaping what kinds of policies are adopted in the first place. These narratives are capable of provoking broad pro-environmental change by shaping our beliefs about climate change, creating more pressures on countries or organizations to act, and empowering new actors to advocate for pro-environmental change. The cumulative result of these cultural processes acting in the same direction is a systemic shift that can provoke social change, even when single policies or institutions look like they are weak or ineffective in isolation.

Addressing climate change means that people from different backgrounds with different viewpoints and different motives will need to act together to address the problem. When our solutions don’t acknowledge that, or are based more on hope than reality, we fall short of what the situation demands. If we treat climate change as purely a technological problem, we miss the necessary role of norms, identities, and worldviews in creating enduring social change.

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