Approximately 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas. Yet the field of behavioral science has developed most of its theories, run most of its experiments, and built most of its interventions in stable contexts. When behavioral scientists do work in conflict settings, we tend to follow a familiar pattern: take what worked elsewhere, “localize” it, and evaluate it. But this isn’t enough. 

This is an urgent problem. Conflict is reshaping lives globally at an unprecedented scale. In 2024, 123 million people were forcibly displaced—the highest number on record. Civilian casualties in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine have reached levels unseen in over a decade, including for children. 

I’ve spent nearly a decade applying behavioral science in conflict settings across 15 countries and 4 continents, and here is the hard truth: Our field is still missing critical understanding about how behavioral science works in active conflict—and there’s more to learn than we might realize.

At the Neuropaz conference this past February, I was asked to speak about the hard truths those working at the intersection of behavioral science and peacebuilding need to confront. 

What follows are five of those hard truths, and what we can do about them.

Hard truth #1: We don’t have much evidence about what works from conflict settings

The vast majority of theories, experiments, and interventions we use in applied behavioral science were developed in stable contexts. Political science has studied conflict dynamics; development economics has studied postconflict recovery; and social scientists have run studies in conflict settings evaluating specific programs. But we lack systematic evidence about how conflict reshapes decision-making, how to co-design interventions grounded in what communities actually need, and how to measure and scale what works in these contexts.

Why don’t we have good evidence from conflict settings?

First, doing research amid conflict is difficult—logistically, ethically, and politically. Access and security is limited, populations are displaced, and the basic infrastructure needed for research can be absent (though we’re beginning to figure out ways to navigate these challenges).

Second, our field tends to bring existing frameworks, measures, and theories, all developed elsewhere, and then adapt them at the margins. What we need more of is systematic understanding of how conflict shapes psychology and what communities actually need from the outset, before deciding what interventions to test. Too often, qualitative research with communities happens after an intervention has been designed and evaluated, to explain what worked or didn’t. By then, we may have missed the chance to get the fundamentals of the intervention right, for the people who need it most.

Third, there is also a deeper problem: Research in this space can be optimized for measurability over impact. Research questions are often chosen based on what we can easily evaluate, not necessarily where intervention would matter most. As a field, we haven’t invested as much in developing the foundational knowledge for conflict settings as we have for stable contexts.

Conflict isn’t just harder development or more extreme poverty. It fundamentally shapes how people think, decide, and cooperate. We've made some progress moving beyond WEIRD research in recent years, but we cannot assume that evidence from stable contexts—even in the Global South—readily transfers to conflict settings.

Hard truth #2: Conflict creates different psychologies, and we often misdiagnose behaviors we don’t understand as “biases”

In northeast Syria, years of conflict and climate change have devastated farmland and dismantled the seed system. Starting in 2021, our teams at the Airbel Impact Lab—the International Rescue Committee (IRC) research and innovation unit—partnered with IRC’s Syria Country Team and local stakeholders to address this crisis. Working with farmers, they developed an innovative seed multiplication program where farmers would grow climate-resilient wheat varieties and donate a portion of their harvest back to a collective pool, spreading high-quality seed across their community.

The model’s success depended on farmers being willing to set aside part of their harvest for collective benefit—trading today’s security for tomorrow’s gains. For this to work, we needed to understand how people in active conflict think about the future and make trade-offs between immediate and delayed rewards. So we ran a standard time discounting survey to understand how people in this context think about the future.

We asked farmers: Would you take 500,000 Syrian pounds today, or 1 million in one month?

Forty percent chose the immediate amount, a daily discount rate of 10 percent, compared to a global average of 0.3 percent. The behavioral economics literature would call this hyperbolic discounting, or present bias—a behavior to correct.

But when we talked to farmers, we found something different. As one farmer explained: “I cannot be sure I will be alive in one month to collect a larger payment.”

This wasn’t bias; it was a rational adaptation to chronic uncertainty. When the future is genuinely unstable, when conflict is ongoing, when you might be displaced next week, prioritizing the present is survival, not error.

This is why we need to be more thoughtful with the term “bias” in crisis settings. When behavior looks “irrational,” we need to get more curious about people and context. Ask: What’s the logic of this behavior in this environment? In our program, we didn’t try to “correct” farmers’ time preferences. We adapted our approach to provide benefits sooner rather than later.

Conflict doesn’t just amplify existing behaviors. It fundamentally reshapes how people think about the future, trust, risk, and cooperation. The psychological adaptations are different in kind, not just degree.

Hard truth #3: We can’t just adapt existing interventions. We must co-design from the beginning

In the past decade, there has been significant focus on “localizing” behavioral interventions. The aim of localization is to ensure that programs are culturally appropriate, contextually relevant, and led by local actors rather than imposed by international organizations. The push for localization is a long-overdue shift away from decades of top-down development.

But in practice, localization often becomes: take what worked elsewhere, translate the materials into the local language, add some cultural elements, and evaluate it. This falls short of what is needed. 

Take the case of social-emotional learning (SEL). SEL interventions have demonstrated significant impact with vulnerable children globally—improving academic achievement, attendance, and mental health. Based on this evidence, international organizations began adapting evidence-based SEL programs developed in stable contexts for use in conflict, crisis, and displacement settings. The goal was to test whether these adapted interventions could improve both learning and well-being outcomes among conflict-affected children.

IRC ran a series of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating SEL programs that had been adapted and implemented in northeast Nigeria—a place which has experienced ongoing conflict with Boko Haram for over 16 years. The RCTs were rigorously designed to test program impact on children’s social-emotional and academic outcomes.

However, the studies showed limited or null effects on the social-emotional outcomes they were designed to address. The programs had been translated, cultural elements added, frameworks adjusted, but they were still built around assumptions from elsewhere. 

Teachers weren’t using them, as they found them disconnected from what mattered locally—both the skills and values children needed to succeed in their communities and the classroom realities teachers faced daily.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that researchers don’t adapt interventions or even that communities won’t adopt behavioral science research. It’s that interventions designed in different places, with different people, under stable conditions are less likely to work in conflict settings.

It’s not that we can’t draw from the broader behavioral science evidence base, but we have to acknowledge that adaptation can only go so far. Developing effective interventions requires co-designing with the community from the start. 

In Nigeria, we shifted to this approach. Our behavioral science team at Airbel joined the project to identify barriers and co-design interventions that could overcome them.

We didn’t ask ourselves, “How do we get teachers to use these SEL activities?”

We asked teachers, parents, and community leaders: “What do children in your community need to grow up to become successful adults—beyond academics? What values matter here? What skills? And how can behavioral science help design supports that work for what people actually need?”

Community members identified skills and values that mattered most to them. Some overlapped with standard SEL frameworks, like self-regulation and empathy. Others were different, like respect, obedience, and discipline.

As one teacher told us: “Discipline is the most important thing because you need to be disciplined to achieve a lot in life.” This wasn’t in our original SEL framework. But it was central to what communities saw as essential for children’s success.

We then co-designed new activities with teachers and community members around the skills they had identified—discipline, respect, tolerance. We kept the active ingredients—the psychological mechanisms that make SEL effective, such as conflict resolution and social problem solving, and focused on short, targeted activities that build specific skills. But the specific activities were co-designed from the ground up with teachers and community members around the skills they had identified. 

Same psychological mechanisms, different expressions, and co-designed from the start.

In a pilot study after this, teachers were implementing SEL activities for an average of 18 minutes per day—the intended dose—compared to the previous program, where most teachers reported they hadn’t used the SEL activities since their initial training.

This is the difference between the light touch localization and genuine co-design. Localization takes what works elsewhere and adapts it. Co-design starts with what matters here and uses behavioral science to support it.

Hard truth #4: We still need to learn how to sustain and scale what works 

In northeast Syria, years of conflict have also created deep tensions between internally displaced people and host communities—those who stayed in place during the war. Our behavioral science team at Airbel, again in partnership with IRC Syria, is currently working on a project to increase peacebuilding behaviors between these two groups, including internally displaced people and hosts serving together on local committees, and jointly deciding how to resolve intergroup conflict and allocate resources within the community. 

In an early workshop testing behavioral interventions to build these behaviors, an internally displaced person said: “I used to think the hosts are racist, but after the exercise I realize that we are the same.” 

That moment of rehumanization was profound. And it happened in a single workshop with a few dozen people.

In many cases, exciting behavioral science interventions that address conflict risk remaining one-offs. Even when we find interventions that create real change, we lack clear, evidence-based pathways for scaling them. Contact interventions, one of the most well-documented interventions in conflict settings, show short-term prejudice reduction. But how do we move from workshops with dozens of people to population-level change? How do we design for scale from the beginning, in a way that is both deep (contextually relevant) and wide (reaching most of the population)?

In our recent seed-security Syria work, we’re designing and testing this from the beginning. What behaviors need to spread for social cohesion to improve at a population level? How do we design and measure interventions that can reach entire communities across a region, not just individuals? Who are the most effective spreaders of behaviors? What motivates them? Under what conditions do people invite others into programs? 

Hard truth #5: We’re measuring the wrong things

Most peacebuilding research measures individual-level attitudes, like prejudice reduction, trust, or empathy. But we need to measure actual behaviors, not just attitudes. Do people cooperate across group lines? Do they engage in violence? Self-reported attitudes are easier to measure, but behavior is what matters.

And still there’s a deeper mismatch: We’re intervening at the individual level and measuring at the individual level, but often the things we're trying to prevent—for example, intergroup violence—happen at the community level. We can’t assume that changing individual attitudes or behaviors translates to preventing community-level violence without actually measuring whether it does.

* * *

A different approach: Five principles for research in conflict settings

If our field were to approach behavioral science in conflict settings differently, here’s what it might look like.

First, start with communities, not problems. Conventional approaches often pick a problem first, then ask, “What’s measurable?” This means optimizing for what we can count, not what counts. Instead, ask people directly: What challenges do they face in their day-to-day lives? What are their goals? What does a better, healthier, safer life look like to them? This scopes where intervention would matter most. 

Second, co-design with communities and with local researchers as true co-scientists. Local teams bring lived experience, cultural expertise, and community trust that outside researchers cannot. This should shape intervention design from the start, before deciding what to test. This includes specific wording, delivery mechanisms, and measurement approaches. We need to design for the realities people actually live, not the ones we assume.

Third, identify the active ingredient, then ask how it works here. Don’t just translate an intervention. Ask: What’s the psychological mechanism that worked elsewhere? Then ask: How does that mechanism work in this specific context? For example, in our initial testing of “conversational receptiveness,” an intervention that helps people listen across disagreement, in Syria, we don’t plan to just translate scripts. We’re asking: How do people actually express active listening across group lines in this context?

Fourth, test assumptions at a small scale before full rollout. This is good practice in any setting, but it becomes even more critical in conflict settings, where the context is likely to be novel and rapidly changing. Start by prototyping—turning solution ideas into simple, tangible mockups (drawings, paper concepts, role-plays) and testing them directly with users to learn what resonates and co-design what needs to change. Then run small behavioral tests or experiments to check: Does this actually work as we think? Does it help or hurt? This rapid, iterative testing with users allows teams to surface contextual misalignments early, before investing in full-scale implementation. 

In our seed-security work in Syria, we found that farmers donated 38 percent more to others when they perceived the “others” as similar to them, confirming our hypothesis that emphasizing common ground can increase cooperation.

But small-scale testing also caught assumptions that would have derailed the program. We hypothesized that women would need to bring a family member to enroll, based on what we'd been told about cultural norms. Testing revealed this was wrong in some areas and right in others for completely different reasons: In areas with recent attacks, women needed someone for physical safety traveling to sites, not for cultural reasons. Without testing, we would have applied a one-size-fits-all rule that failed everywhere.

Finally, design for scale from the beginning, but define what scale means for your context. Scale doesn't always mean exact replication or global reach. Given that conflict creates different psychologies and contexts vary enormously, an intervention might only spread effectively within a specific area or region—and might need to adapt as it spreads. The question isn’t, “How do we scale this everywhere?” It’s: “What’s the right scope for this intervention given the context? And what conditions allow it to spread within that scope? Ask from the start: What behaviors need to take hold for this to work at the target population level in this setting? Who can help them spread, and what social infrastructure needs to be in place? 

As global foreign aid faces unprecedented cuts and humanitarian needs reach all-time highs, we cannot afford to keep testing interventions that aren’t grounded in the realities of people’s lives. We cannot afford to treat 2 billion people as an edge case.

This work would not have been possible without the IRC Syria and Nigeria Country Programs who co-designed, led and implemented these projects, the Climate Innovation Team at Airbel, Vaidehi Uberoi, and Tahirat Omolara Eniola.

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If you live in America in the twenty-first century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college—she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the café together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven, cranky, anxious, and sad—turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school—it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, What time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after, and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs, and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

An ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’s “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll and Hyde and the benzene ring: History is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks, and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions, and masterpieces than the hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write Childhood’s End and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.

From The New York Times. © 2012. The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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Landing the Perseverance rover on Mars, working in clean rooms to minimize the microbial bug count, and slogging through hundreds of engineering trade-offs with Swati Mohan, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. What are the "seven minutes of terror"? And is there evidence of past life on Mars?

[buzzsprout episode='18903199' player='true']

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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 “Aerospace Engineer” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Swati Mohan. 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 Aerospace Engineer appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Take a long, deep breath in. Now slowly let it out. Each time you inhale, you’re drawing in oxygen from the plants around you. Once in your lungs, oxygen navigates the bloodstream, where it gets exchanged for carbon dioxide. With each exhale, you fill the air with carbon dioxide, the very substance that all these plants need for photosynthesis.

What we breathe out, plants breathe in. What plants breathe out, we breathe in. The air you breathe is the collective breath of other living beings.

You are immersed in the world. And the world is immersed in you.

Your body hosts a remarkable diversity of life; as many as one thousand different species dwell on your skin, in your mouth, and in your gut. Only about 10 percent of your cells carry the human genome, while the remaining 90 percent harbor genomes from bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microorganisms. This multispecies collective (also known as the microbiome) keeps you alive—it facilitates digestion, metabolism, immunity, neurological function, and other vital processes.

Delving deeper, seven octillion atoms exist in your body, each billions of years old, forged in the core of an ancestral star before eventually becoming part of you. That is, perhaps, what the naturalist John Muir meant in observing that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

But the way we typically understand evolution doesn’t reflect this interconnectedness. And the way we see evolution shapes the way we see ourselves.

Think back to when you first learned about evolution. If you’re like me, phrases such as “survival of the fittest” and “struggle for existence” come to mind. These terms tend to evoke a competitive, selfish model of Nature. This view—sometimes called “nature, red in tooth and claw”—depicts organisms engaging in a perpetual battle for resources, territory, and dominance.

However, most scientists today would agree that most major events in the history of life on earth were also the result of enormous cooperation and symbiosis. Mutualistic relationships abound among microbes, fungi, plants, and animals like us.

Cooperation is neither the antithesis of conflict nor some rare exception in evolution. So why does this stereotype of “nature, red in tooth and claw” persist in the public and scientific imagination?

The emergence of evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism. Darwin’s central ideas were thus interpreted in ways that resonated with the competitive ethos of this growing capitalist system. Social Darwinism emerged later that century to apply evolutionary ideas like natural selection to human societies. It posited that societal progress was driven by competition: those who excelled in the competitive market were regarded as more evolutionarily successful and inherently superior. Similarly, poverty and failure were attributed to the supposed inferiority of certain individuals or groups. As one might imagine, this perspective provided a pseudoscientific rationale for existing social hierarchies and economic disparities.

For instance, it was not Charles Darwin but Herbert Spencer, an influential English sociologist and proponent of Social Darwinism, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” In an effort to connect his racist economic theories with Darwin’s biological principles, Spencer posited that social hierarchy was not only justifiable but also reflective of the most advanced and resilient societies. Darwin himself was more cautious about applying his own theories directly to human society. Nevertheless, his ideas on the mechanisms of natural selection in evolution offered a seemingly natural and scientific justification for capitalist and imperialist narratives of competition and the pursuit of self-interest.

The individualistic competitive worldview is reflected in other popular metaphors, such as the “selfish gene,” put forward by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. As metaphors gain popularity, we unfortunately tend to lose sight of the fact that they are mere analogies. Dawkins himself has repeatedly clarified that selfish genes don’t necessarily make for selfish individuals. On the contrary, selfish genes can lead to all kinds of altruistic behavior in individuals!

Darwin also stressed that natural selection is not a process by which organisms independently vie for supremacy. For instance, upon introducing the term “struggle for existence” in On the Origin of Species, he explains, “I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another” (emphasis added). In the book’s famous final paragraphs, Darwin invokes an entangled bank—filled with many species of plants, birds, worms, and insects—to illustrate this interdependence. Years later, he would suggest in The Descent of Man that sympathy is a fundamental evolutionary force in social animals: “It will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

In short, the co-optation of evolution into a purely competitive and individualistic framework offered a narrow and often distorted view of Darwin’s theory, one mirroring the broader societal trends and ideologies of the time. But even during that period, various scholars issued strong challenges to this one-sided view. One notable rebuttal came from the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his widely read 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin asserted that cooperation is abundant in Nature and plays a vital role in the overall well-being of individuals and societies. “Don’t compete! . . . Practice mutual aid! That is what Nature teaches us,” he exclaims. “That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.” Kropotkin proposed that the modern emphasis on competition was anthropocentric, likely a reflection of our own strivings and failings rather than of how Nature works.

* * *

Competition or cooperation?

Is Nature fundamentally competitive or cooperative? A lot seems to hinge on how we answer this question.

But why must we choose one? Animals like chimpanzees are no more inherently violent and competitive than they are peaceful and cooperative. Reassurance behaviors multiply when the potential for conflict is highest, revealing how cooperation and competition themselves are entangled. One begets the other. Competitive problems often require cooperative solutions. Those who cooperate better typically compete better. Life requires the management of both competitive and cooperative relationships.

Just think of the people you have the most conflict with. Next, think of the people you cooperate the most with. If you’re like me, the answers are the same. Our most involved and intimate relationships—whether with partners, family members, close friends, or colleagues—often demonstrate the entangled nature of competition and cooperation.

Our most involved and intimate relationships—whether with partners, family members, close friends, or colleagues—often demonstrate the entangled nature of competition and cooperation.

Yet popular literature and media often question whether human nature is essentially cooperative or competitive, a dichotomy exemplified by the stark contrasts drawn between bonobos and chimpanzees, humans’ closest living relatives. Those favoring a peaceful view of human nature tend to endorse bonobos’ female-bonded “make love not war” reputation, while those leaning more toward the “nature, red in tooth and claw” outlook emphasize the stereotype of the male-dominated, aggressive chimpanzee. My collaborators and I have shown, however, that the social behavior of these two ape species is more similar than often assumed. Through an analysis of various chimpanzee and bonobo sanctuary communities, we’ve found that variation within the two species is greater than differences between them. For instance, consider empathetic responses like consolation and sociosexual interactions during consolatory acts. Based on existing stereotypes, one might reasonably expect such friendly behaviors to be more prevalent in bonobos than chimpanzees. But group differences reveal a far more nuanced pattern: Some communities of chimpanzees look more bonobo-like, and some communities of bonobos look more chimpanzee-like.

So are we innately hostile and violent toward others (supposedly like chimpanzees) or friendly and peaceful (supposedly like bonobos)? A glance at the news will also suggest that the answer is not so straightforward: Humans possess the capacity for both aggression and cooperation. Shouldn’t we afford the same recognition to our closest primate relatives, rather than categorizing them into rigid species stereotypes?

Competition and cooperation are both driving forces in evolution. The point is not to emphasize one over the other but to recognize the complex interplay between the two. But how has the conventional emphasis on competition influenced our scientific approach and, consequently, our understanding of Nature’s deeper workings?

* * *

The subversive science

Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, grew up roaming Canada’s old-growth forests with her family, exploring moss-covered trails, foraging for mushrooms, and building forts and rafts from fallen branches.

As a young student in forestry school, she learned an accepted dogma: Life in the forest was governed by competition. According to this view, trees were solitary individuals constantly competing with one another for access to sunlight, water, and nutrients.

At the same time, Simard was growing concerned with the rise of commercial logging projects clear-cutting diverse forests and replacing them with homogenous, single-species plantations. In many ways, the conventional competitive view sanctioned these forestry practices, emphasizing techniques like weeding, spacing, and thinning to favor specific individuals or species. The idea behind these “free-to-grow” initiatives was that by reducing competition from other vegetation, the newly planted trees would thrive.

But compared with the trees in the old-growth forests Simard had come to know and love, these newly planted trees proved more susceptible to disease and climatic stress. Without competitors, they were less healthy. For instance, Simard noticed that when nearby trees like paper birch were removed, planted Douglas fir saplings were more likely to get sick and die. But why? The planted saplings had ample space and received even more light and water. Why did they fare noticeably worse?

Simard eventually obtained a grant to test her hunch that the answer was hidden beneath the soil. If planted seedings were mixed with other species, she hypothesized, they might survive better through some kind of underground support system involving their roots. To test this idea, Simard planted birch and fir trees together and traced how carbon molecules went back and forth between the two. Her groundbreaking doctoral research found that birch and fir trees collaborate by exchanging carbon through the underground fungal networks connecting their root systems (a.k.a. mycorrhizal networks). The more shade the birch trees cast on the fir trees, the more carbon was sent over to the fir. Essentially, there was a net transfer from birch to fir that compensated for this shading effect. Upending the long-held view that species were always competing, Simard’s research was featured on the cover of Nature in 1997, which called these networks the “wood wide web.”

Since then, Simard and her students have discovered extensive mycorrhizal networks connecting the trees within an area of a forest. They are often connected to one another through an older tree she calls a “mother” or “hub” tree who shares nutrients with other trees and young saplings. The fungal network helps not only with nutrient exchange but also in protecting the plants against pests and disease. However, there is another side to this coin. When plants are unable to carry out photosynthesis themselves, they may resort to extracting resources from others through these shared mycorrhizal networks. And not all chemicals moving through the networks benefit the receiving plant: for example, plants can also distribute toxic substances that hinder the development of neighboring plants.

Though Simard’s research landed in a top scientific journal, she faced intense backlash and criticism for challenging conventional forestry science, a male-dominated field. As she recalls in a 2020 New York Times interview: “The old foresters were like, Why don’t you just study growth and yield? . . . I was more interested in how these plants interact. They thought it was all very girlie.” Skepticism about Simard’s research persists, in part because of entrenched beliefs that humans are the only species capable of such elaborate cooperation. This skepticism is also fueled by the suggestion—frequently amplified by the media more than Simard herself—that trees always benefit from being connected by mycorrhizal networks. Such singular narratives overlook the variety and complexity of relationships possible in the forest. The forest is both a collaborative and competitive ecosystem. It’s again about this intricate interplay, this give-and-take, this essential balance defining any living, evolving, dynamic relationship.

Simard explains her frustrations with the tendency of Western science to overlook these relationships. “We don’t ask good questions about the interconnectedness of the forest, because we’re all trained as reductionists. We pick it apart and study one process at a time, even though we know these processes don’t happen in isolation.”

As Simard acknowledges, this interconnected ecological perspective has long been part of many animist and Indigenous views of reality, which approach the world through relationships of reciprocity. Today’s cutting-edge Western scientific findings tend to agree much better with such worldviews than is commonly presumed. Yet even throughout Western history, numerous scientists have defied reductionism in favor of interconnection. Instead of regarding Nature as a collection of discrete objects, Darwin saw a densely entangled web of subjects. The revered German philosopher Goethe championed a holistic approach to studying the natural world, expressing that “in nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.” His friend the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt similarly believed in studying relationships between different elements of the natural world rather than isolating them: “Everything,” Humboldt wrote, “is interaction and reciprocal.”

In the late nineteenth century, the development of ecology—the study of the relationships among living beings and their physical surroundings—offered a formal challenge to the principles of scientific reductionism. Ecology earned a nickname as “the subversive science” for its power to make humans reconsider their place in the natural world. A notable offshoot is deep ecology, conceived by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the 1970s. This environmental philosophy explicitly rejects anthropocentrism, emphasizing the intrinsic value of all living beings and acknowledging the profound interconnectedness that defines our existence.

Fungi and trees are so interconnected that some scientists believe they should not be viewed as separate organisms; instead, the forest functions as an integrated entity. According to the principles of deep ecology, everyone is deeply entangled with everyone else. Humans are no exception. So then where does Nature end and do we begin?

* * *

A wide and deep net

Influential thinkers have cautioned that using terms like the “natural world” and the “environment” (as I’ve done for convenience) risks suggesting that Nature lies somewhere beyond ourselves. That is, the very existence of a word and concept like “nature” reinforces a dualistic understanding of the natural world as distinct from human culture or society. 

How can updated knowledge of biological relationships among living beings also reframe our understanding of individuality? One fascinating example is the lichen. No matter where in the world you reside, you have probably encountered one. If you’re in New England like me, think of those crusty sage-green formations you see adorning tree trunks and rock surfaces, though lichens come in myriad colors and forms. The plantlike appearance of many lichens, along with their ability to photosynthesize, led early naturalists to categorize lichens as a type of plant. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that scientists discovered that lichens are actually collaborations between two organisms: a fungus and an alga. The fungus provides structural support, nutrient absorption, and water retention, while the alga contributes through photosynthesis, supplying essential energy to the fungus. The partnership allows lichens to thrive in diverse environments, from the harsh Arctic tundra to the most arid desert landscapes. A lichen is not a singular entity but a composite being.

Lichens led the German botanist Albert Frank to coin the term “symbiosis” in the late 1870s. Symbiosis refers to close, long-term physical associations between members of different species. (When the association benefits all parties, it’s a particular kind of symbiosis called mutualism.) Since the term was introduced, symbiosis has been found to play an essential role in the development and survival of almost every organism. It is a ubiquitous feature of life.

Our bodies and senses have evolved in delicate reciprocity with the lifeforms surrounding us. We cannot separate humans from other beings—indeed we are who we are because of them.

Consider the algae that power coral reefs. Years ago, I was snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef and noticed patches of coral reef bleaching. I had assumed that elevated ocean temperatures (due to global warming) caused these once colorful and thriving coral formations to fade. It turns out that corals have a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae living in their tissues. When water is too warm, corals expel the algae, leading to a loss of nutrients and pigmentation, making the corals appear white. So it’s not that rising ocean temperatures are bleaching the corals per se, but rather that they are disrupting the relationship between coral reefs and their algal symbionts.

We also have symbiosis to thank for the mitochondria that make our cells run. Mitochondria originated from a free-living bacterium that got swallowed up by an ancestral bacterial host some 1.5 billion years ago. But instead of being digested, the bacterium formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the host, providing energy in return for a protected environment and nutrients. The process came to be known as endosymbiosis.

Endosymbiotic theory, first proposed by the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis in the late 1960s, explained the presence of mitochondria in our cells (and chloroplasts in plant cells, which were thought to originate from a similar endosymbiotic event). It showed that complex lifeforms, including animals, plants, and fungi, evolved from simpler, symbiotic relationships. Margulis’s theory pushed back against the prevailing scientific emphasis on competition at the time: “The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of ‘survival of the fittest,’ dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them.”

Nature is not a zero-sum game, where one entity’s gain is necessarily the other’s loss. Yet like so many of the revolutionary thinkers we’ve encountered, Margulis was initially scoffed and laughed at by the scientific establishment. She was denounced as a scientific radical, apparently even critiqued for upending biology in favor of creationism (the equivalent of academic heresy). Her manuscript was rejected more than a dozen times before it was finally accepted. Today, endosymbiotic theory is the leading evolutionary theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells—those constituting our life and that of all complex organisms. It is considered one of the great discoveries of twentieth-century evolutionary biology. Not bad for a heretic!

* * *

Picture an evolutionary tree, with species diverging from one another over time, each on their own trajectory until they settle on separate branches. Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory offers an alternative perspective, emphasizing how organisms readily interact and influence one another—more like a web or a net than a tree. Building on Margulis’s insights, the anthropologists Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers propose a new term: “involution.” Unlike the word “evolution” (which literally means “rolling outward”), “involution” suggests a “rolling, curling, turning inwards,” where living beings continuously intertwine themselves in processes like symbiosis.

Perhaps even the image of an evolutionary tree reflects a cultural bias toward individualism—of atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel. We’re neither standing atop a ladder nor perched at the tip of a twig. We’re enmeshed in a wide and deep net of symbiotic relations.

Because we coevolved with plants, for instance, we often experience a pleasant sensation when we eat them. Imagine savoring a deliciously ripe blueberry. What a clever strategy on the part of plants—to bear fruit with such delectable flavors, enticing animals like us to eat them so we then spread their seeds. This long coevolutionary partnership has led to a diversity of fruit types and tastes, with different plant species adapting to the habits of specific animals. For instance, avocado plants, with their large fruit pits, originally evolved alongside megafauna such as mammoths, horses, and giant ground sloths—animals sizable enough to disperse their seeds. Our eyes, too, are adapted to perceive the vibrant colors of fruits and flowers, helping us animals easily spot ripe, edible plants in the environment. 

How enriching it is every time I come to recognize and experience one of these coevolutionary processes. Our bodies and senses have evolved in delicate reciprocity with the lifeforms surrounding us. We cannot separate humans from other beings—indeed we are who we are because of them. As my friend the cultural ecologist David Abram puts it, “We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

* * *

Rethinking the “biological individual”

Developments in the microbial sciences have also made it hard to define the boundaries of an individual organism. It’s no longer possible to think of “you” as distinct from the microbial communities you share a body with. You are one big symbiont, what researchers have called a “holobiont” (from the Greek holos, meaning “whole”; bios, “life”; and ont, “to be”), an ecosystem in and of yourself.

By cell count, the vast majority of what you might consider “your” body is not actually yours—it contains trillions of microorganisms, outnumbering your human cells by ten to one. The number of bacteria in your gut alone exceeds the number of stars in our galaxy. The number in your mouth is comparable to the total number of human beings who have ever lived on earth! If one were to remove all these microbes from the body and put them on a scale, they’d weigh in at about three pounds—the same weight as an average human brain. And research suggests they can wield as much influence as the brain. Your ability to solve complex memory and learning tasks is predicted by the health of your gut flora. Your mood, too, depends in part on the composition of your gut bacteria (as suggested by the colloquial “gut feeling”). For instance, interventions that alter the gut microbiome (such as probiotics) have shown promise in regulating behavior and brain chemistry associated with depression and anxiety.

The immune system also develops in close dialogue with your microbiota. At any given moment, these unseen partners are helping mediate your response to other organisms. They shape not only how you fight disease but also how you digest and derive nutrients from the environment. Microbes extend the capabilities of their hosts, who rely on this symbiotic relationship for their very existence. For instance, cows themselves can’t eat grass, but their microbial populations can. Over time, animals and their microbial partners have coevolved so closely that unique bacterial strains are adapted to a particular animal niche. As one example, 90 percent of the bacterial species residing in termite guts are not found anywhere else in the world. (Importantly, this also means that for every animal species who goes extinct, some unknown number of highly specialized bacterial lineages also disappear.)

All these findings trouble the idea of a discrete, autonomous entity known as “the self.” Our microbiome is dynamically shaping who we are in ways we are only beginning to understand. Of course, not all aspects of this relationship are harmonious. There are many situations where the interests of the symbionts don’t align. For example, a bacterial species in our gut may be essential for digestion but could also lead to a fatal infection if it enters our bloodstream.

In 2012, a team of respected biologists published a paper titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” In it, they draw on recent technological advances and scientific discoveries, like those I’ve highlighted, to argue that it is high time we rethink the notion of a “biological individual” in favor of a recognition of interspecies interdependences. The article concludes with a bold declaration: “For animals, as well as plants, there have never been individuals. This new paradigm for biology asks new questions and seeks new relationships among the different living entities on Earth. We are all lichens.”

* * *

The God species

There is a cartoon by the artist Dan Piraro titled “The Year 3011,” which depicts two ants, clad in togas, sitting amid the remains of ancient Greek pillars and temples—pondering over the ruins of human civilization. A callout bubble shows one ant asking the other: “And yet, can a species that eliminates itself in just a few million years be called ‘successful’?”

Despite our apparent evolutionary “success” as a species, it’s likely that other lifeforms—among them ants, lichens, and countless others—will endure long after humans’ tenure on earth. Science fiction novels (such as those that inspired Planet of the Apes) imagine a future earth run by other species in the aftermath of humanity’s self-destruction. If given the opportunity, would these other forms of life come to dominate the planet to the extent that human activities have?

As highlighted earlier, evolution isn’t just about ruthless competition; the history of life on earth is equally marked by widespread cooperation and symbiosis. Yet despite this evidence, prominent thinkers today continue to promote the identification of evolutionary “success” with dominance over the rest of Nature. A recent Scientific American article titled “What Makes Humans Different Than Any Other Species” exemplifies this perspective: “Why are humans so successful as a species? [Humans and chimpanzees] share almost 99 percent of their genetic material. Why, then, did humans come to populate virtually every corner of the planet—building the Eiffel Tower, Boeing 747s and H-bombs along the way?”

A brief aside: I would not cite nuclear weapons as evidence of our species’ “success.”

However, perhaps the article is merely acknowledging humans’ remarkable capacity to manipulate and control their environments. But even in this aspect we are not without rivals. Just take cyanobacteria—some of the earliest photosynthesizing organisms—responsible for the rapid oxygenation of earth’s atmosphere during an episode known as the Great Oxidation Event. Billions of years ago, they set the conditions for life as we know it today, causing the extinction of many anaerobic organisms (those not requiring oxygen) and allowing aerobic lifeforms (those requiring oxygen) such as animals, plants, and fungi to evolve and thrive.

Many technofixes are deployed today in the name of saving the environment, yet they often reflect only the human exceptionalism that has driven its destruction in the first place.

Zoologist Luis Villazon explains for the BBC that even humans’ claim to ecological dominance represents a narrow view: “Humans have certainly had a profound effect on their environment, but our current claim to dominance is based on criteria that we have chosen ourselves. Ants outnumber us, trees outlive us, fungi outweigh us. Bacteria win on all of these counts at once. They existed four billion years before us, and created the oxygen in the atmosphere. Collectively, bacteria outnumber us a thousand, billion, billion to one, and their total mass exceeds the combined mass of all animals.”

Measuring and defining evolutionary success by a particular kind of dominance in which humans happen to excel, let alone dominance at all, is a self-serving perspective. One can also see why this characterization is human-centric via examples of species who are successful by other means.

Mosses provide a helpful illustration. As Robin Wall Kimmerer has shown, mosses have thrived on this earth for more than three hundred million years (compared with Homo sapiens’ meager 200,000), thanks to very low competitive ability. These tiniest of plants survive by collaboration—building soil, purifying water, and creating a viable home for many other forest creatures. What if cooperation were the means by which evolutionary “success” was measured and achieved? Or qualities like longevity, resilience, and the ability to sustain thriving interspecies communities?

But humans sit at the top of the food chain—isn’t that evidence of a natural hierarchy? A food chain offers a simplistic, linear view. A more realistic representation of consumption relationships in ecosystems is food webs, which consist of many interconnected food chains, where organisms at different levels mutually influence one another. Yet so long as we want to think in a linear fashion, plants are the top of the producer chain. They possess the miraculous ability to convert sunlight into food for animals like us. Without them, our existence would be inconceivable. Does this imply that plants are superior to humans? Then there are fungi, relishing their place atop the decomposition chain, recycling organic matter (such as dead plants and animals) into simpler compounds while promoting soil fertility, nutrient cycling, and the health of plant communities. Why establish hierarchies based solely on consumption—a value deeply embedded in capitalist culture—when Nature’s relationships can be described in myriad ways?

* * *

The fallibility of “inevitability”

Through the standard view of evolution that emphasizes competition for resources, human ascendancy over the natural world can seem like a logical, inevitable consequence of our own natural selection. Accordingly, the ecological crisis sometimes gets framed as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process: the logical outcome of humans acting in their own self-interest. In a similar vein, scholars and journalists often claim that the human mind is simply not designed to solve the problem of climate change. There are evolved psychological barriers, so this story goes, that prevent us from acting to address it on the scale that is required. Let’s call it the inevitability narrative. You can probably tell from my tone that I don’t agree much with it.

For one, as Quentin Atkinson and my colleague Jennifer Jacquet have argued, the inevitability narrative disregards profound variation within and between human cultures in the way people respond to climate change. There is no universal human response to this issue. Framing climate inaction as part of human nature (by suggesting it’s not only natural but inevitable) is a way to justify the status quo. It also conveniently frames responsibility for climate change in terms of the individual rather than cultural values, norms, and institutions (including corporate actors).

Several years back, I attended a talk by the renowned scientist David Keith on solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering aims to counteract global warming by reflecting sunlight away from earth’s surface, usually by injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere. As I listened to the presentation, I became increasingly bewildered by its implications. The technology appeared eerie and outlandish—more the stuff of science fiction than academia. Yet as Keith argued, if it could be realized (and notably, recently, the first outdoor test in the United States took place), solar geoengineering could potentially slow, stop, or even reverse the rise in global temperatures in just a few years. So even as I resisted, I found myself wondering: Why haven’t we yet taken the actions necessary to reduce global emissions and avert climate catastrophe? And perhaps more urgently, what is the alternative if we continue down this path of inaction?

I began feeling nostalgic for blue skies (solar geoengineering could result in a hazy, white appearance to the sky). Questions started to swirl in my mind regarding inadvertent consequences, such as the impact of dimming the sun on other species—including pollinators like honey bees—who rely on sunlight to navigate and find food (I have since learned that scant research exists on this question, despite our food system relying on answers). Furthermore, I wondered, might this intervention de-incentivize other efforts to reduce carbon emissions (a.k.a. the “moral hazard” of geoengineering)? Not to mention that the vast majority of scientists involved in solar geoengineering research hail from elite American and European universities, with growing concerns about the technology’s unequal distribution of risks in rich and poor countries. But above all, I found myself grappling with the uncomfortable realization that solar geoengineering exacerbates human dominance over Nature precisely when we urgently need to curtail it. I kept asking myself, isn’t there an inconsistency between the positive ecological values the use of these technologies purports to serve and the mindset these same technologies reinforce within our culture?

In her bestselling 2021 book, Under a White Sky, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at human attempts to actively manage and control natural systems to address environmental challenges—engineering the atmosphere and oceans, manipulating genomes, electrifying rivers, assisting migrations, and introducing novel species to manage those deemed problematic. Kolbert reveals how even the most well-intentioned interventions often yield unintended consequences, inadvertently harming ecosystems and disrupting global weather patterns. This triggers a domino effect, leading to more complex problems that demand evermore inventive solutions. The more we attempt to defy Nature, the more obvious our own limitations become. And yet paradoxically, the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as our only lifeline.

Darwin’s entangled bank reminds us that human beings are just one species among many interconnected within the great web of life. In these intricate networks of cause and effect, it’s no wonder that human interventions often yield unintended consequences! As ecologist Frank Egler highlights, “Nature is not only more complex than we think. It’s more complex than we can think.” As a result, human technology frequently struggles to reproduce the invaluable capacities of intact, healthy ecosystems.

This doesn’t mean that technological innovation has no part to play in addressing ecological degradation. However, I am convinced that we are not going to get very far with such interventions unless we first question human dominion and sovereignty over Nature. Many technofixes are deployed today in the name of saving the environment, yet they often reflect only the human exceptionalism that has driven its destruction in the first place. If we want to chart a truly sustainable course forward, we will need to address the root problem rather than its symptoms.

* * *

Our anthropocentric, individualistic, competitive view of life fosters a psychological detachment from the natural world, diminishing our understanding of ourselves and nature, limiting our scientific approaches, and reducing other species (and even entire planets) to mere commodities for exploitation. Yet in this endeavor, we too ultimately suffer. The more we center ourselves and seek to manipulate and control Nature, the greater the harm we endure—an insight powerfully elucidated by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which exposed the detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment and human health. As Carson poignantly remarked, “But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Adapted from The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb, published on September 2, 2025 by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Christine Webb.

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Defusing a crisis after an ambassador hinted at a preemptive strike on Russia, delivering demarches in multiple languages, and surviving the frantic evacuation of the Kabul embassy with John Johnson, a retired diplomat who spent more than twenty years in the US Foreign Service. Do diplomats still send "cables" in the 21st century? And what does "not/not" mean?

[buzzsprout episode='18818060' player='true']

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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 “Diplomat” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured John Johnson. It was produced and edited by Matt Purdy. Copyright © 2026 by Dan Heath. All rights reserved.

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I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say. “Eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.

These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never criticized by your ancestors. It had been the effort of lawgivers and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had, however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given up trying to regulate the subject at all.

By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes, commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

Excerpted from Looking Backward: 2000–1887 by Edward Bellamy. Published 1888. Now in the public domain.

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In southwest Philadelphia in August 2019, a young Black man sat down on a folding chair in a high school auditorium and clipped a lapel mic to a bright yellow T-shirt that read “Philly Thrive.” “So, how you doin’? My name is Ricky,” he said into a camera. “I’m a resident in the Gray’s Ferry community, and I’m hoping and praying the refinery gets shutdown.” The refinery in question was Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), up to that point the largest oil refinery on the Eastern Seaboard. It had operated just a stone’s throw from the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood until two months earlier.

In the early hours of June 21, 2019, Philadelphia was rocked by three explosions at the refinery and a fire that burned for more than a day. A week later, PES shut down the refinery. The next month, the company declared bankruptcy and announced it was looking for a buyer. Amid rampant speculation about whether a new owner would restart the refinery or redevelop the site for other uses, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney established a Refinery Advisory Group “to bring together people with diverse experiences, knowledge, and perspectives on the refinery” and inform the city’s planning for the future of the 1,300-acre site.

This could have been a moment for moral repair. City officials had set themselves up to learn how surrounding neighborhoods had been affected by the refinery over its 150-year history. By acknowledging the harmful legacy of pollution—which Ricky went on to describe as “a hundred years of overwhelming pain and agony for people”—they might have affirmed as a shared norm the protection of Philadelphian’s health and quality of life. They might have established the City of Philadelphia as a community that would rally around neighborhoods who were being treated poorly by industry and help them call polluters to account.

That’s not exactly what happened, as we’ll see. But the Refinery Advisory Group did create space for people to have their experiences heard. At its second public meeting, the group set up a Story Station and filmed short statements by residents of South Philadelphia, Ricky among them. He and others explained why he thought the refinery should remain shut. “I’m sick of the air pollution, the asthma epidemic, just like the health issues, man, is very bad.” The next speaker, a white woman who introduced herself as Carly, elaborated. She and her husband had lived in Gray’s Ferry for five years, she said, and “since the refinery has not been in operation, I have actually been able to take deep breaths outside my house comfortably for the first time since I moved there.” The refinery’s pollution was a problem for the whole neighborhood, Carly said. “We’ve lost hundreds of people to cancer, there are hundreds of people with asthma, and learning disabilities, that are a direct result of the chemicals that have been emitted from this facility. The science is very clear.”

Not everyone shared this view. After Carly, the Story Station was claimed by a bald white guy. He spoke fast and loud, with a South Philly accent. “Okay, my name’s Patrick, I work in the refinery seventeen years. All of a sudden, the people who work inside these walls, why don’t we have cancer? Where is the proof? These people come out with accusations, they wanna get paid, they want money, how about the cigarettes you smoke? Is that causing emphysema? I guess it is.” Patrick, needless to say, thought the refinery should go back to operating as a refinery. His job was on the line, and he blamed people like Ricky and Carly for keeping him from it. “I go to work every day. And I work hard. And I’d like to go back to work tomorrow, but I can’t because people are crying about air quality.”

Nothing here surprises you, I expect. You’ve heard the stories of refinery neighbors who say they’ve been sickened by pollution. You’ve seen them criticized and vilified by people associated with the petrochemical industry. “Jobs” versus “the environment” is a wearyingly familiar trope. You also likely suspect that Patrick and Ricky represent a racial divide among the speakers. As Story Station testimony continued, all but one of the refinery workers were white, and all of those who spoke against the refinery were Black, with the exception of Carly.

You may, in fact, be so familiar with this scene that you are tempted to stop listening. You already have an argument about what’s going on here. You could say that operating this oil refinery, seemingly without regard for the health and safety of the low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods surrounding it, is just one more example of state-sanctioned violence against people of color. If you took that approach, which has been developed by sociologist David Naguib Pellow, you could even say that the City of Philadelphia doesn’t appear at all inclined to repudiate that violence. If they were, the Refinery Advisory Group would have taken a more explicitly antiracist stance, rather than setting up a false equivalency between refinery workers’ concern for their jobs and Gray’s Ferry residents’ fear for their lives.

Alternatively, you could jump in with the argument that “jobs versus the environment” is a specious choice. No one can thrive unless we phase out extractive, polluting industries. Doing so will make us more able to promote economic and racial justice, which will include good jobs for workers displaced from refineries. This is the “just transitions” approach, theorized by scholars like Julian Agyeman and advocated by organizations such as the Sunrise Movement, the Climate Justice Alliance, and Philly Thrive, the grassroots organization that Ricky and other yellow-shirted Story Station speakers belonged to. One of them, Mark Clincy, expressed the position this way: “We can get sustainable energy, renewable energy, clean energy that not only provides jobs for our employees, but also make it better for everyone to live.”

Before you talk back to the Story Station, though, notice something. Advocating for a just transition and condemning state-sanctioned environmental violence are both ways of trying to shift widely accepted ideas about right and wrong, or shared moral standards. This is important work. We can’t persuade people or governments to stick up for communities living with outsized burdens from pollution if we don’t share a belief that it’s wrong to pollute. The environmental justice movement’s arguments also work at changing people’s understanding of who counts as part of the moral community when it comes to upholding those shared standards. We can’t persuade people or governments to stick up for mostly Black communities like Gray’s Ferry if society treats people of color as expendable—even if they are inhaling more than their share of pollution.

Now perhaps you can see the argument in the Story Station a little differently. Ricky, Carly, and Patrick weren’t just arguing about whether PES should reopen as a refinery or become something else entirely. They were arguing about whether refinery pollution, or job loss, was conscionable. They were arguing about whether the city should go to bat for people with asthma or for people suddenly on unemployment. That’s not all, though. In addition to these arguments over moral standards, participants in the Story Station were fighting over who deserved to be protected, who deserved to be defended against wrongs, and who deserved to be listened to about matters of right and wrong. They were fighting over who was really part of the moral community, or the set of people who share moral standards and count on each other to uphold them.

Keep listening to the Story Station and you’ll see: This was not a fair fight. Refinery workers had weapons that residents of the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood didn’t—namely, our prevailing moral standards for economic activity. Residents had more scientists on their side, to be sure. But the scientists and their evidence didn’t tip the balance. They couldn’t, because upholding their scientific standards kept them on the sidelines of the real fight over who deserved protection.

* * *

Good people

When it was Sonya Sanders’s turn in the Story Station, she described “living in fear in my house” in Gray’s Ferry. “This refinery all the time, there’s gasses that’s being let go, spills has just been coming out, or we smell gas all the time. I have to put blankets at the bottom of my door.” She continued, making reference to the June 21 explosions, “When this thing blew up, I was scared to death. I don’t want to live like that. Jobs shouldn’t be based on people’s lives. I don’t want any money, I just want to live.” While she asserted how things should be, she was also on the defensive against Patrick’s charge that the refinery’s detractors “just wanna get paid.” She reiterated, “It’s not about a dollar with me. I’m getting paid with my life.” Yet she was equally insistent that “I don’t want to live in fear.”

This is a plea you might expect some sympathy for. A few speakers later, Jimmy McGee, a white man with tattoos snaking down his arms, returned to the idea of living in fear—but he made it sound like a choice. McGee had not only worked in the refinery for more than 20 years; he was also the United Steelworkers’ head of safety for the refinery. He stressed that workers followed procedures, looked out for each other, and made sure that everyone went home safe. “I know people are scared about different things happening in their community, maybe vapors coming over and stuff like that,” he said, but having just explained refinery workers’ commitment to safety, it was clear he believed that people were scared because they didn’t understand what was really going on. He continued: “You can’t live your life being scared and worrying about stuff like that. You can’t live like that.” Sanders and her neighbors, he seemed to imply, could suffer less if they only trusted refinery workers more.

Like Patrick, McGee was indignant that people like Sanders would call for the refinery to remain closed. “We’re going to lose our jobs. And, what, thousands of people are going to be affected by this? Over 800 union workers are going to be out of jobs that pay for the houses, the cars, the schooling, my kids went to Catholic school, now my daughter’s going to college, her first year. It’s not easy.” He accused refinery opponents of “look[ing] at us and say[ing], ‘It’s okay, they don’t matter,’” citing a barbeque that Philly Thrive had held to celebrate PES’s closure as evidence. “A barbeque on us losing our jobs! . . . That’s a bunch of crap for that to happen. That’s a disgrace. Look at the people being affected here. We all got families. And I understand you got issues you want, the environment. I love the environment, too, but I’m telling you, we lose these jobs, man, a lot of families are going to be messed up.”

Here is the problem with the usual way that scientists defend communities exposed to pollution. The facts they have to offer are no defense against the most biting criticisms that residents face.

Here’s the old jobs-versus-the-environment trope again. But pay attention to what else was going on. Jimmy McGee was accusing Philly Thrive members of bad moral relations. People—families—were going to suffer financially if the refinery shut down for good. In his opinion, that called for solidarity. Few Americans would dispute the idea that we should go to bat for families in financial straits. It’s a standard that we share, at least in principle, and by that standard, celebrating refinery workers’ financial ruin is a disgrace. It appears to undermine shared norms and send the message that no one cares if refinery workers are wronged.

Recall Patrick’s testimony, and you’ll see that he also told stories about how refinery opponents were violating shared standards of right and wrong. Wanting money is a serious transgression if you’ve done nothing to earn it. Patrick used this cultural norm to declare the behavior of refinery detractors out of bounds: “To me it’s a crime, a crime that these people are looking to get paid, when people just want to go to work for an honest day’s pay.” Blaming other people for your own poor choices is equally reprehensible, and it was a charge refinery workers frequently leveled against residents who accused the refinery of ruining their health. That’s what Patrick was doing when he asked, “How about the cigarettes you smoke?” He was saying to Philly Thrive members that they caused their own breathing problems by smoking. He was also reminding them of a shared norm, that blaming someone else for a problem that you caused is dishonest and irresponsible. Jimmy McGee’s comments about living in fear had a similar flavor. There was in fact nothing to be afraid of, in McGee’s telling. If people like Sonya Sanders were scared nonetheless, they could only blame themselves, not the refinery.

You could poke holes in all of these accusations. You could point out the ways they deploy negative racial stereotypes. You could turn the accusation of bad moral relations on refinery workers, for not sticking up for people’s health. Before you rush to the defense of Gray’s Ferry residents, though, imagine for a moment that all of the charges against them are true. Better yet, think of an acquaintance of yours whom these accusations would fit. They’re callous about other people’s suffering. Maybe they even revel in it. They’re always out for a buck. They make bad choices, but nothing is ever their fault. You know the kind I mean. If you’re lucky, such people are few and far between in your experience. If you’re kind, it takes a lot for you to conclude that someone really is that kind of person. But once you do, the implications are clear. You don’t rely on those people. You don’t go out of your way to help or defend them. You certainly don’t defer to their judgment on matters of right and wrong. They don’t have the same basic values that you or I do, and they don’t deserve the same standing in our moral community.

Now you see the work that refinery employees’ accusations were doing. People like Patrick and Jimmy McGee weren’t just saying that Gray’s Ferry residents were incorrect in their assessment of the refinery’s hazards. They were saying that residents were not living up to basic norms and thus didn’t deserve to be listened to or defended. This is how communities on the front lines of pollution get left to battle industrial facilities on their own. As part of telling ourselves that the harms they experience aren’t really harms, we tell ourselves that the people alleging the harms lack the integrity that would make them valued members of our moral community and compel us to act on their behalf.

* * *

The high ground

To be fair, refinery workers clearly felt vulnerable to similar attacks on their moral standing. As McGee put it, “There’s too many misconceptions about the refinery being the boogeyman.” On the surface, workers responded to these perceived criticisms by defending their work practices. According to Patrick, “We work in a controlled, safe environment. We can’t just throw material on the ground because it’s convenient for us. That’s not how we work, that’s not how we do things.” But through their talk about safety culture, they also asserted their good character. “We do things right” evokes upstanding workers, even more than proper procedure. McGee, pleading to keep refinery jobs, made the case outright: “We’re not bad people, we’re good people, the only thing we want to do is provide for our families.”

No one in the Story Station actually questioned the character of refinery workers. In fact, Philly Thrive members went out of their way to affirm workers’ need for jobs. “Let me say this to everyone,” Sylvia Bennett began, after introducing herself as a resident of the Gray’s Ferry area, “It’s a sad day when people can’t work. That’s sad. But it’s a sad day when you lose family members and you know when your doctors tell you what it came from, fossil fuel. I love to see people with jobs. I’m all for people with jobs. But one can’t say that we want money. I want my daughters to live. My daughters are dying, do you understand?” Bennett sounded on the verge of tears as she explained that two of her three daughters had breast cancer; for one, chemotherapy had caused nerve damage so severe that she could no longer walk. Pointing to others in the neighborhood who were dying, or had already died, of cancer, Bennett called it an “epidemic.” She ended with a call for unity: “It’s a sad day when we pit each other against each other for something like this, life. Life. Life is important. We’re not against you guys for your jobs. We want the company to be responsible and put out clean air.”

Compare Bennett’s approach to that of refinery workers. Where they dismissed her and others, she appealed to them, offering “life”—long, healthy lives—as something they should all be able to agree on. She tried to call them in to moral community, where they had been trying to drum her out. Yet even as she advanced a better moral standard, Bennett felt the need to affirm prevailing standards. Her community did not want undeserved money, she assured their critics, and they did value workers and their jobs. They were faithful upholders of shared standards, in other words, and were thus entitled to participate in thinking through those standards and how they should be applied to PES and its future in Philadelphia.

The asymmetry here is telling. Gray’s Ferry residents had to defend themselves in ways that refinery workers didn’t. They had to accede to the norms of people who were actively attacking them. The “jobs” camp has the moral high ground. The economic well-being of companies and workers is a norm that is taboo to question. Workers can assert their moral authority—including the authority to judge the integrity of others—without even having to say, “Of course we care about the health of the community. It’s a sad day when people in their 40s and 50s are dying of cancer.”

Prevailing norms around health help job defenders keep the high ground. Although health is valued in contemporary American culture, it’s considered the responsibility of the individual to stay healthy. When people like Sylvia Bennett or Sonya Sanders say that their loved ones are sick, it becomes an occasion for people to ask not “How can we help?” but “What did they do wrong?” The slight acknowledgments that refinery workers did offer to Philly Thrive members’ concerns about health were tinged with this kind of judgment. John Wharton, a white refinery worker who “lived in the community for years,” said, “I understand about the cancer. My mother died of cancer at 47, but she smoked three packs a day. It’s not all the refinery.”

Here is a place where science could seemingly help. Scientists could investigate the links between refinery emissions and various health effects, like asthma and cancer. They could demonstrate that oil companies and regulators understate the harms that pollution causes. Solid evidence of those harms could cause us all to rethink our moral calculus where it comes to tradeoffs between economic activity and people’s lives. We could adjust our shared standards to make unacceptable the kind of pollution that people living near oil refineries have long been forced to tolerate.

The thing is, scientists are already doing those studies. They have been for decades. Although it is notoriously difficult to prove that exposure to pollution caused an illness, we do have evidence that curbing refinery pollution would improve health in nearby communities. Yet the debate over PES that occurred in 2019 didn’t look very different from controversies over petrochemical facilities in the 1990s. Our regulatory regimes still operate on the same logic, allowing as much pollution as the environment can absorb. “Jobs” still have pride of place in the public discourse. People are still blamed for their own ill health. Somehow, all of the research that has been done hasn’t been very effective in shifting the standards to which we hold industrial facilities. If we look at how scientific evidence is used to back up communities like Gray’s Ferry, where people face assaults on their health and their integrity, we start to see why.

* * *

Non-exonerating evidence

A week after the Story Station, Dr. Marilyn Howarth, a physician and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), took the microphone in the same high school auditorium at the Refinery Advisory Group’s fourth public meeting. A white woman with decades of experience in her field, Howarth started by introducing her organization and its mission: “The environmental health researchers, physicians, and public health professionals of the CEET work every day on environmental health issues that affect our region and recognize the value of scientific evidence to establish and maintain public policy protective of human health.”

From this you might glean that Howarth and CEET were on the side of community members like Sylvia Bennett and Sonya Sanders, who believed that illnesses in the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood were connected to pollution from the refinery. Indeed, Howarth had for many years been sounding the alarm about the negative effects refinery emissions could have on human health. She was among the critics of a 2014 proposal by business leaders to make Philadelphia an “energy hub” with new pipelines and petrochemical facilities. The refinery, she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 2015, was releasing “very strong pollutants” that “contribute to asthma and would irritate the airways for people with chronic pulmonary disease.”

Howarth’s testimony to the Refinery Advisory Group likewise connected ill health in the city to refinery pollution. She began by offering “background on the health outcomes that are relevant to [PES’s] emissions and releases.” Rates of several kinds of cancer were higher in Philadelphia than in Pennsylvania or the United States as a whole, she explained, and “several of these cancers are caused by environmental exposures,” including exposure to benzene, a chemical released by refineries. Howarth then turned her attention to asthma, heart attacks, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, each of which, she said, was significantly more common in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. “Certainly there are many contributors to each of these health outcomes,” she conceded, but went on to suggest that the refinery’s contributions were significant. The refinery was the city’s largest source of volatile organic compounds. A number of these hazardous chemicals caused cancer, and all of them contributed to the formation of ozone, which worsens asthma and makes heart attacks more likely. Howarth also noted that, for the past three years, the refinery had been spewing more pollution than its permits allowed.

To stick up for communities like Gray’s Ferry, researchers need to do more than responsibly represent the facts. They need, somehow, to become part of a bulwark against attacks on community activists’ moral standing.

Having mustered all of these facts, Howarth sided firmly with those who felt that PES’s July 2019 closure should be the end of petrochemical operations at the site. “Given the size of the large refinery complex, its significant health-impacting emissions, and the close proximity to millions of Philadelphia residents, we conclude that permits for this type of industry in this location would not be granted in the future.” In other words, even by the existing standards enshrined in environmental law, this amount of this kind of pollution was unacceptable.

If you had been a resident of Gray’s Ferry, convinced that your spouse’s cancer or your child’s asthma was caused by refinery pollution, you might well have felt vindicated by Howarth’s testimony. Cancer and asthma were more common in your community than they should be, according to this respected physician. They were caused by chemicals that PES emitted, and emitted much more of than anyone else in the area. But if you were a refinery worker, you might also have felt that Howarth’s testimony proved your point. She said there were many reasons that people got cancer and asthma. You couldn’t pin all the blame on the refinery, just like John Wharton had said. Nothing in Howarth’s testimony ruled out the possibility that people in Gray’s Ferry had cancer because they smoked.

Here is the problem with the usual way that scientists defend communities exposed to pollution. The facts they have to offer are no defense against the most biting criticisms that residents face. Refinery workers accused Gray’s Ferry residents of wanting a handout. They accused them of making irresponsible choices. They accused them of blaming others for problems they brought on themselves. They accused them of not only failing to stick up for suffering families but also reveling in their misfortunes. These attacks weren’t just petty insults. They were elements of a larger argument, that people who complained about the refinery—allegedly for disingenuous and self-serving reasons—did not deserve to be listened to or defended.

When Marilyn Howarth weighed in on behalf of the community, she did not say, “People with asthma are not asking for money they don’t deserve.” She did not say, “Cancer is not something that people brought on themselves.” She did not even question the premises and say, “You should be able to choose to live in Southwest Philadelphia without choosing a lifetime of illness.” At best, she said that PES’s emissions were at least partially responsible for high cancer and asthma rates—but not that Gray’s Ferry residents were fully justified in blaming PES for what ailed them.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that Howarth should have said these things. There was not a scientific basis for saying that Sylvia Bennett’s daughters had cancer because they were exposed to PES’s emissions. It’s likely that no amount of research could produce such a direct, causal claim. Howarth framed available evidence in a way that was accurate and responsible, in keeping with scientists’ standards for making factual claims. My point is that an accurate, responsible reading of the available evidence barely touches the real stakes of the debate. It doesn’t—it can’t—address allegations of greed, irresponsibility, and bad moral character.

To stick up for communities like Gray’s Ferry, researchers need to do more than responsibly represent the facts. They need, somehow, to become part of a bulwark against attacks on community activists’ moral standing. Scientists’ research alone can’t shift our standards for right and wrong to make sure that, ultimately, exposing communities to toxic pollution is met with widespread public disapproval and reparative action. Community activists need to question the moral logics that excuse the harms that scientists demonstrate. When members of groups like Philly Thrive say, “Your jobs do not make up for our lives,” we need to hear them as legitimate contributors to our collective conscience.

In a way, Howarth’s closing remarks did assert the community’s moral standing. She recommended that “public participation by residents in this process be enhanced.” Her recommendation didn’t defend residents’ fitness to be part of public deliberations so much as it took for granted that they deserved to be included. Nonetheless, it countered efforts to drum residents out of the conversation. That was a start. But, as the Refinery Advisory Group process shows, public participation is no panacea, especially when it is structured by entities with limited interest in changing prevailing norms.

* * *

Costs and benefits

Listening to Marilyn Howarth’s August 2019 testimony was a row of individuals, most of them white, representing the City of Philadelphia. It included the city’s managing director, fire commissioner, and director of the Office of Sustainability, as well as professors from local universities and business leaders who had been appointed to the Refinery Advisory Group by the mayor’s office. Their collective charge was to assemble a report on the PES situation—a report that would express the city’s moral standards for industrial development.

No one said so in quite those words, of course. But city officials were emphatic that they could not tell PES what to do with its property. The Refinery Advisory Group process could not result in anything as concrete as a plan for remediation and redevelopment. What it could do was collect the viewpoints of assorted stakeholders and highlight the values that it hoped would guide future uses of the privately owned site. Accordingly, testimony to the Refinery Advisory Group had everything to do with what should be protected and what should be considered out of line. Marilyn Howarth and others who spoke at the Group’s public meetings, including Sylvia Bennett and Jimmy McGee, had a rare chance to articulate the norms for right and wrong that they thought Philadelphians should be sticking up for.

Only two from that row of people, Managing Director Brian Abernathy and Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel, were ultimately listed as authors of the report that was released in November 2019, entitled A Close Call and an Uncertain Future. A disclaimer on page 3 credited the work of other city staff in preparing the report and clarified that it “does not reflect the views of the Advisory Group as a whole or its individual members.” You might infer that consensus about relevant moral standards was not to be found among the diverse Refinery Advisory Group. That didn’t stop the city from putting forth its position about what it would stand up for on behalf of its populace and why.

The report included considerable background on the refinery’s history, the 2019 explosions, and the Refinery Advisory Group process. At the heart of the report, though, were a chapter on “Benefits” and a chapter on “Costs.” Each concluded with quotes from public testimony, under the heading “What we heard.” Sonya Sanders, Sylvia Bennett, Mark Clincy, and other Philly Thrive members were pictured at the end of the costs chapter, alongside their words. So, too, were white representatives from environmental organizations, with assertions about the need to shift away from fossil fuels. Marilyn Howarth, notably, wasn’t among them. Her testimony, along with that of other scientists, was incorporated into the text of the chapter. There authors enrolled her into an analysis that upheld prevailing moral standards, despite her efforts to show that continued refinery operations should be intolerable.

One of the chapter’s main sections was devoted to health impacts and began by noting that health was “a dominant theme” in public comments. The text went on to explain how hard it is to prove that health problems are caused by a specific source, like a refinery. “However,” the authors conceded with a footnote to Howarth, “data strongly suggests that Philadelphians suffer disproportionately adverse health effects, and many of those are correlated to emissions like those generated from the refinery.” The next paragraph consisted of statistics taken directly from Howarth’s written testimony about these elevated rates of cancer and asthma in Philadelphia. The report then invoked another set of public health researchers, in this case from Drexel University, citing their claim that exposures to air pollutants increased respiratory disease among people living near refineries in particular. Nonetheless, the report’s authors concluded the section in a way that suggested health effects weren’t really a cause for public action: “While a reduction in air emissions from the refinery site may help improve Philadelphia’s air quality more generally, it is difficult to tie that reduction in refinery emissions directly to a reduction in the air pollution that impacts any specific community or population because there are other relevant risk factors and pollution sources involved.”

Notice what happened here. The city officials who authored the report respected scientists’ authority. They didn’t question their facts. They just missed their point. Howarth and her colleagues at Drexel were offering evidence to demonstrate that refinery emissions were a source of harm. They were offering evidence to add weight to activists’ claims that the city shouldn’t tolerate this kind of injury to its people. But instead of acknowledging the moral significance of their evidence, the city’s report enlisted it in a project of bean-counting. It said, sure, the evidence demonstrated some costs, but those costs were not so direct, not so certain, and not so large as to overwhelm the economic benefits of the oil refinery.

Let me be clear: When I say the city ignored the moral significance of scientists’ testimony, I don’t mean that they stripped it of its values and dealt with the underlying, unadulterated facts. What I mean to say is that, by weighing the costs and benefits associated with industry, the authors of the city’s report imposed a particular moral framework of their own onto the evidence offered by Howarth and others. Like other policymakers who choose a cost–benefit frame to make sense of environmental controversy, they designated economic activity as the “benefit.” Industry was awarded the moral high ground from the start. Pollution, health impacts, and safety concerns—the “costs”—were a tradeoff, a sacrifice, a price to be paid for this greater good. By grounding the report’s conclusions in a tally of costs and benefits, authors suggested that tax revenues could reasonably be weighed against asthma attacks, that more money flowing in the local economy could somehow be measured on the same scale as fewer years spent with loved ones whose deaths were hastened by exposure to pollution.

Public participation is no panacea, especially when it is structured by entities with limited interest in changing prevailing norms.

People who argue against the continuation of fossil fuels and the petrochemical industry work to destabilize this cost–benefit logic. They have to, if our society is ever to embrace moral standards that ask us to side with the communities on the front lines of pollution. In Refinery Advisory Group public meetings, people like Sylvia Bennett were able to be direct about the fact that jobs were no compensation for lives. Scientists like Howarth had to be more circumspect. Her evidence said only that the presence of the refinery did harm. It did not say—it could not say—that we as a people should not tolerate those harms. Had her arguments been wrapped together with Bennett’s, the implication would have been more obvious. Stripped from its context and reappropriated into the city’s story about benefits and costs, Howarth’s evidence lost its standard-shifting power.

Once again, an accurate, responsible reading of the evidence doesn’t touch the real stakes of the debate. Just as Howarth’s testimony couldn’t rebut attacks on community activists’ moral standing, it couldn’t destabilize the moral logic that shaped the city’s assessment of the PES situation. Arguably, it only legitimized the cost–benefit analysis by helping to generate a credible assessment of costs. If costs are significant, but not that significant, then the game doesn’t look rigged from the start.

A scientist could refuse to be enrolled, of course. She could state outright that communities deserve our protection. She could declare cost–benefit analysis to be a morally bankrupt way of approaching the issues surrounding petrochemical pollution. But if someone like Howarth were to launch an attack on the Refinery Advisory Group’s moral logic, she would find herself on the “What we heard” page of their report, not in the footnotes. Worse, she’d find her own standing in the moral community questioned. Environmentalists who opposed the proposal to make Philadelphia an energy hub back in 2014, Howarth among them, were characterized by its chief proponent as irresponsible, polemical people who don’t work for a living—charges not so different from those leveled at Gray’s Ferry residents by PES refinery workers in 2019.

* * *

Overcoming abandonment

You see now, if you didn’t before, what I mean by dysfunctional moral relations. But keep in mind that the summer of 2019 wasn’t their lowest point. Residents of Gray’s Ferry had lived through “a hundred years of overwhelming pain and agony,” to borrow Ricky’s words from the Story Station, without the moral community rallying around to acknowledge their suffering or to insist that the refinery stop its harmful pollution. It’s the same in Port Arthur, Texas; and New Sarpy, Louisiana; and Benicia, California—places that you may never have heard of, which is part of my point. Dysfunctional moral relations entail widespread abandonment. The people who struggle most because of our collective ways of living fight for accountability, and survival, mostly without backup from the rest of us.

The Refinery Advisory Group process shows how this abandonment is engineered. First, there is the issue of shared standards for right and wrong. Economic activity is awarded the moral high ground by city officials and white, male refinery workers. It is jobs we must protect; workers’ ability to send their kids to college we must stick up for. You or I might not disagree, or not completely. But other things that we might consider wrongs, like Carly’s inability to breathe deeply when the refinery is operating or Sylvia Bennett’s middle-aged daughters being debilitated by cancer, are things that the city and its populace are not as willing to stand up against. Certainly petrochemical pollution is not widely considered a wrong as such. It is a price to be paid and a tradeoff to be made. If that’s all it is—an inconvenience and not an injustice—then it comes with no obligation to go to bat for the people who suffer it routinely.

Then there is the issue of who deserves to be defended. When residents of Gray’s Ferry called on the City of Philadelphia to defend their health, refinery workers accused them of being irresponsible and greedy. These are charges routinely leveled at refinery neighbors who call on the rest of us to rein in industry on their behalf. They are told to mind their own health and make better life choices. If, in fact, we believe they are responsible for their own fates, the rest of us need not feel guilty for failing to show up. If, in fact, we understand them as grifters milking minor insults, we are justified in leaving them to their own devices.

Even if it is not environmental justice that you care most about, these patterns will be familiar to you. Women pressured for sexual favors by their bosses are still too often told it’s no big deal. They’re not really being harmed. Those with the audacity to try to hold them accountable in the court system, or the court of public opinion, are accused of wanting money or pursuing personal vendettas. They are made out to be people who don’t deserve our sympathy or our solidarity. People who seek to fight racism, to undo discrimination against people with disabilities, and otherwise to make oppression unacceptable all confront not only abandonment. They also confront the denial that they have been wronged and the denial that they have the moral standing to expect solidarity.

If you are a researcher committed to justice in any arena, this is the thing you need to understand: Just showing up as an ally is not enough to overcome the abandonment faced by marginalized groups. It is the right start, to be sure. But if you show up armed with facts alone, you risk having them used to deny that the harms people experience are really wrongs that anyone needs to feel obligated to fix, as Marilyn Howarth’s facts were in the City of Philadelphia’s report on PES. If you show up armed with facts alone, you’ll find they don’t offer much of a rebuttal to those who argue that the people you’ve come to defend aren’t worthy of protection.

If science is going to contribute to the repair of moral relations, it has somehow to help resist efforts to push people out of the moral community. It has somehow to shore up people’s moral authority when they fight for improved standards of right and wrong. Research can work to these ends—if scientists focus on the power of processes of inquiry, rather than facts themselves, to improve moral relations.

Excerpted from ​The Science of Repair by ​Gwen Ottinger. Copyright ​© ​2026 by ​Gwen Ottinger​ and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

The post Facts and the Fight for Moral High Ground appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Wiring a neighborhood back to life after a tornado, coveting the work of helicopter linemen in Faraday suits, and surviving the collapse of a rotten utility pole with Elden Rivas, a journeyman lineman in Houston, Texas. What is the one sound on the crew radio that stops every lineman cold? And why does a squirrel on a transformer mean easy money?

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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 “Lineman” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Elden Rivas. 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 Lineman appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Consider the following. A young child, having received a playhouse as a gift and finding its interior too dark, asks her mother how she makes their house so light. “By flipping a switch,” says the mother. The child finds a spare switch in the basement, hangs it on the playhouse wall, and flips it, but gets no light. How charming is the innocence of young children. And how oblivious adults can be to the background conditions that are necessary to make “flipping the light switch” give us light.

The upshot of part three of this essay, and the argument in Choose Wisely, is that someone who asks how to make a good decision and is told to use rational choice theory (RCT)—to quantify the options and attributes, the probabilities and values, and to calculate—is like the child who is told that light comes from flipping a switch. The switch works only if it is connected to the house wiring system, which in turn is connected to the utility’s wiring system, which in turn is connected to an extremely complicated electricity-generating system, which in turn is energized by some sort of fuel. Similarly, RCT works well only if the decision problem is framed well; if the options and attributes are specified well, formulated in quantifiable terms, and the probabilities and values are quantified well. Typical decision problems do not come in that form. They need to be put in that form by a series of substitutions for the original amorphous form they actually come in. These substitutions replace the original problem, step by step, with a version that RCT can handle. These substitutions crucially involve framing, and the decisions we make, with or without RCT, will only be as rational and good as their framing is.

RCT itself has little to contribute to that process of framing. It can tell us to transform the decision we face into something like a casino gamble, but not whether, in doing so, we have preserved the actual character of the decision. The gamble is a paradigm of RCT, in the sense of being an exemplary case. It is also a paradigm in the sense used by philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he suggests that scientific paradigms establish both the problems to be solved and the methods of inquiry to be used in formulating a solution to those problems. The gambling paradigm strongly determines a form of process that is largely formal and quantitative. But the framing of decisions cannot be accomplished by quantitative and formal methods. Formal methods do not—and more important, cannot—tell us how to frame a problem well, how to specify options and attributes, how to formulate the options and attributes as measurable, or how to quantify the relevant probabilities and values. Nor can formal methods provide a criterion for when we have framed a problem well. And the decision is no better than the framing of the problem allows. Of course, once all the framing is done, solving the problem requires only mathematical calculation, just as bringing light to the house requires only flipping the switch. But to credit flipping the switch with lighting the house is extremely misleading. Framing a problem requires deliberation, a decidedly nonformal process, just as generating and transmitting electricity has little in common with flipping a switch.

To light a room, the light switch must be connected to the power grid. Most of what Schuldenfrei and I tried to do in the book was to spell out how the power grid of rationality works, and what it requires.

* * *

Good judgment

We propose that an adequate account of rationality must replace RCT-type calculation with judgment—replace counting with thinking. Which are the right colleges or jobs to apply to is not a matter of maximizing something, or a decision that can be made by formula: It is a matter of judging what is a good subset of appropriate schools or jobs given a decision-maker’s purposes, and of judging the quality of those purposes themselves. The same is true of most other significant decisions in life.

Imagine that, having just graduated from college, you are offered six different jobs in your field as a management consultant. The jobs vary in a host of respects: starting salary and benefits, location, size of the firm, opportunities for advancement, attractiveness of colleagues as potential collaborators and friends, and the nature of the work you will be doing. Each of these features of the jobs (and no doubt there are others) can itself be decomposed into sub-features. Take location. What is the cost of living in the area? How close is it to family and friends? What about housing and commuting? Restaurants and nightlife?  Which job to take is a complex and consequential decision indeed—one that may cast a long shadow into your future.

RCT offers us a way to make such decisions. You might create a spreadsheet. Across the top are columns for each of the features of prospective jobs that matter to you. Below that are columns for the relevant subfeatures that matter. For each of these many columns, you need to assign three numbers. First, how important is this feature or sub-feature to you, say on a 10-point scale? Second, how good or valuable is each job you’ve been offered on each dimension you care about, again on a 10-point scale? And finally, what is the likelihood that each feature you are evaluating will deliver the goods (or bads) that you are expecting? Every decision is a prediction—not only about what will happen, but also about how what happens will make you feel.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s an important decision. The virtue of using RCT in this way is that it may encourage more careful examination of features of various jobs that are important to you. It may also protect you from allowing preconceptions and biases from putting their fingers on the scale. In any case, if you do your due diligence and fill out this spreadsheet, it becomes a simple matter to calculate which is the best job. Push a key on your computer, let Excel do its calculations, and voilà, you know which job to take.

An adequate account of rationality must replace RCT-type calculation with judgment—replace counting with thinking. 

You could do the same sort of analysis to decide which college to attend, which discipline to major in, which career to pursue, whether (and whom) to marry, and whether (and when) to have children. And you could do it for more trivial decisions, like where to go on vacation, what restaurant to eat in, and the like. It is, one might say, a precise and objective way to calculate what is essentially a subjective quantity—how much satisfaction (utility) each option is likely to deliver.

I believe, however, that the precision apparently offered by RCT is an illusion. Virtually every number you enter into the spreadsheet requires a significant amount of judgment. It is, at best, a rough estimate about how each job is likely to unfold for you, how important each feature of the jobs will be to you, and how much, in what ways, you will change as you work at the job and mature as a person. In addition, the job you take will have effects on the lives of people who matter to you. How much, and in what ways, should that enter into your calculations? There may also be moral dimensions to your work in that it will have effects on clients and customers. Will you be contributing to social welfare or impairing it? And how much should that matter? Finally (well, not really finally, since the dimensions of this decision are endless), the job you choose may affect other aspects of your life that you care about. A great job whose demands leak into other important features of your life won’t be such a great job.

And this point illustrates what is perhaps the greatest deficiency in the RCT approach to decisions like this. It claims to substitute calculation for judgment. Remember, for each feature of the jobs you are considering, you have to enter a number that represents how good or valuable that feature is. What, exactly, do “good” and “valuable” mean? Location is not valuable in the same way that salary is. Salary is not valuable in the same way that good colleagues are. Good colleagues are not valuable in the same way that work you care about is. Each of these different dimensions of each job likely provides not just a different amount of value but a different kind of value. If so, how can you sum scores across columns and arrive at a grand total for each job? You can’t. RCT provides an abstract term—utility—to capture value. It thus requires you to translate financial, social, moral, and intellectual values that may be reflected in your spreadsheet into the common currency of utility. Does that make sense? I think not.

Creating an RCT-type spreadsheet has its value. It may force you to think more broadly and carefully about many aspects of a decision than you otherwise would. But that virtue is not quantitative. It exists before you enter a single number estimating value or probability into the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet helps you to avoid overlooking something important. But having done that, it is time to substitute judgment and reflection for calculation and thus avoid the false precision that using a spreadsheet encourages.

* * *

Practical wisdom

Aristotle taught us that many, perhaps most, on-the-ground decisions require judgment—what he called practical wisdom. The particulars of a given situation are crucial: Context always matters. Context influences how we should balance our obligations to family and friends with our own opportunities. It influences how differently we should treat each of our kids, or our students, each of whom needs different things. The answer to questions we ask ourselves about issues like these is, almost always, “It depends.” The right thing to do with one person at one point in time may be a catastrophe with another person at another point in time. In the book Practical Wisdom, written with Kenneth Sharpe, I argued that in almost every part of life we care about—work, education, friendship, parenting, politics—when we face decisions, the right answer is usually, “It depends.” No formula substitutes for judgment. A formula, or a rule, is like a road map with enough resolution to distinguish various cities and towns, but not enough to distinguish streets. Such a map may get us to the right city, but not the right address in that city. Finding the city provides a frame within which locating the address becomes possible.

Why does the importance of good judgment constitute a criticism of RCT? I believe that to exercise good judgment reliably, one must cultivate qualities of mind that are most essential to good judgment and good decisions. These are: understanding, reflectiveness, self-knowledge, and values. When RCT leaves all these attributes of rational thinking out, or simply presupposes them, it discourages the cultivation of exactly the qualities we need most.         

The kinds of decision problems people are posed in the laboratory, though they come within frames, come within very limited frames. By adding context to the situations, one changes the frames and thus also the character and complexity of the decisions we face. By keeping background information skeletal, researchers make decision problems seem more similar to one another than they really are, and more simple than they really are. In consequence, aspects of thinking like meaning and understanding sink to the background, seemingly irrelevant to the problem at hand.

Our proposed alternative to RCT does not take the form of a formal procedure or anything approximating or modeled on one. Our alternative is based on the notion that any action we take needs to be understood as parts of whole lives, and that a given decision, if it is an important one, has to be made largely on the basis of how it fits into a whole life. Decisions are not, and should not, be made in isolation. We believe the best sort of life is (among other things, and all other things being equal) a life of narrative unity and purpose—a life with worthy goals that, to the best of our ability, we articulate as we make progress toward them. It is a life that is appropriately unified (not obsessively limited) by those goals or purposes. We can abbreviate this desideratum as calling for a meaningful life.

To exercise good judgment reliably, one must cultivate qualities of mind that are most essential to good judgment and good decisions. . . . RCT discourages the cultivation of exactly the qualities we need most.

We think understanding, reflectiveness, and self-knowledge are essential ingredients in a meaningful life. They help us place perspicuous frames around our experiences, which in turn enables us to assess their current and future significance. They help us appreciate the radical uncertainty of many events in the world, which in turn helps us to maintain a flexible and adaptable stance toward the future. They also help us appreciate the inherent ambiguity of many experiences, opening us up to the interpretations and decisions of others. And they help us articulate the values we want to live by, and then to assess how the decisions we face may impact those values. If we lived in a world in which framing is unneeded or to be avoided, radical uncertainty does not exist, ambiguity can be eliminated, and diverse values can all be reduced to utilities, then understanding, reflectiveness, and self-knowledge may not be needed. But that is not the kind of world we live in—or would want to live in.

And a whole life itself has to be evaluated above and beyond the evaluation of the individual decisions that compose it. Judgment about a whole life is not a yes or no, good or bad matter. But having some ideals in mind can facilitate our assessment of our lives in something like the way that geometry helps us understand the physical world. There are no objects in the world that are perfect geometrical shapes. Nonetheless, models from geometry put us in the right ballpark. It’s a great start, but it must be reconciled with the empirical facts on the ground. Thus, the process of thinking we envision is one that shuttles back and forth between the ideal and the real—between the simplified formalisms of a discipline like geometry and the bumps and ridges of lived reality. RCT is missing this back-and-forth. It impoverishes decisions by analogizing them to gambles and stops there, rather than renormalizing them.

We think a similar point can be made about the narrow framing of decisions that enables RCT to be used to make them. It takes judgment to know when and how to frame the decision context, and when and how to change the frame. Often, deliberation about a choice between two options can and perhaps should lead to the realization of a hitherto neglected third option. Perhaps the two original options, on examination, are both inadequate, a discovery that “forces” us to open things up and consider new alternatives.

We can easily imagine something similar happening when the whole RCT process is completed. Suppose the process yields a decision for an option that, looked at freshly, seems simply unacceptable. Is it irrational to simply say, “No. There must have been something wrong with the process that led up to the calculation”? This is similar to rejecting a hypothesis when it leads to a false prediction. Is that not rational? A conclusion like this has no explicit role in RCT, but it should have a role in rational decision-making. Rejecting such reasoning is a least partly the effect of the (false) notion that the real work in deciding is in the calculation, not the thinking that surrounds the calculation. It is, in effect, an argument that we should be seeking reasonableness, not formal, quantifiable rationality as we make our decisions and live our lives.

* * *

Conclusion

There are limits to how much the arguments in an entire book can be captured by a summary—even an extended one like this. Schuldenfrei and I urge you to look at the whole book if the arguments presented here have managed to pique your curiosity. We don’t expect our book to be the death knell of RCT. RCT certainly has and should have its place. But that place is not every place. We hope that our book will stimulate thoughtful conversations about where RCT belongs, and where it doesn’t. And we hope that when you face a decision about what to do on a beautiful Saturday, or throughout a beautiful but complicated life, you will resist the temptation to resort to oversimplified quantification. Quantification can turn any decision into a “no-brainer.” But making decisions is what brains are for.

Adapted from Choose Wisely By Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei. Published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2025 by Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei. All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Barry Schwartz is a member of the Behavioral Scientist advisory board. Advisors do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

The post What It Takes to Make Good Decisions: Judgment, Not Calculation appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Suspending the licenses of unsafe restaurant operators, hunting down the origins of foodborne illness outbreaks, and eliciting truthful answers from anxious managers with Justin Dwyer, a health inspector in Peoria, Illinois. What happens when a restaurant locks the door on an inspector? And why should you never wash your Thanksgiving turkey?

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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 “Health Inspector” episode of What It’s Like To Be… featured Justin Dwyer. 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 Health Inspector appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.