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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The world does not speak English

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

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

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

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

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

2. Standard attention checks create more noise than signal

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

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

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

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

3. Questions about race and ethnicity are not universal

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

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

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

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

4. Simple questions about gender aren’t so simple

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

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

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

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

5. Standard questions about marital status are not sufficient 

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

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

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

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

6. Households and household income look differently around the world 

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

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

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

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

7. Conventional technical criteria do not indicate data quality

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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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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.

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In part 1 of my discussion of Choose Wisely, I detailed a typical decision—what to do on a beautiful Saturday—to illustrate the sorts of decisions we face in everyday life. My aim was to show that even a simple decision such as this one comprises a complexity that we often fail to appreciate. Far from a straightforward, algorithmic process of weighing pros and cons and specifying their probabilities, deciding what to do on a Saturday is inextricably wrapped up in our values and goals, our mood and situation, our sense of morality and the expectations of our community.  

In part one, I also sketched briefly what my collaborator, Richard Schuldenfrei, and I called “intelligent reflection” as a model of how such a decision might be made. As I explained:

“Intelligent reflection allows you to see multiple aspects of a decision. It allows you to compare options that seem to have little or nothing in common. It allows you to consider how a simple decision of how to spend a Saturday says something about who you are and what you value. It allows you to ponder what kind of shadow your decision about today may cast on your future. Intelligent reflection speaks not only to what you decide, but also to how you decide.”

There is no “science” of intelligent reflection, nor are there rules that enable us to distinguish clearly instances of intelligent reflection from instances of unintelligent reflection … of which there are many in most of our lives. There is, however, an alternative to intelligent reflection for which there is a science and within which there are rules. It is known as rational choice theory (RCT), and it has become the normative standard for decision-making done well. In this part of the essay, I will suggest that RCT is deeply inadequate as a normative standard. First, I’ll briefly outline RCT and how decisions are made using it. Second, I’ll show how Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work revolutionized our understanding of decision-making, but left RCT as the normative standard untouched. Finally, I’ll share why RCT doesn’t hold up as the normative standard.

* * *

A brief sketch of rational choice theory

From the perspective of rational choice theory (hereafter RCT), which comes, largely, from economics, the presumed goal of a decision is to maximize utility or preference. What “utility” means has been debated for centuries. Unlike something like money, “utility” is subjective—it is in the eye of the beholder. Though extremely vague, its virtue is that it captures more than just pleasure. Utility could be pleasure in some decision settings, but it could be usefulness in others. Two hours in the weight room may not give the professional athlete much pleasure, but it can be useful in making the athlete better at her sport. The term “utility” functions as a way of acknowledging the diversity of things that are valued. Though pleasure and money capture much of what most people value, people value things that are neither of those, such as health or achievement or meaningful social relationships. “Preference” often substitutes for utility. It too is subjective, and virtually content free. The way we know what someone “prefers” is by observing what someone chooses. Almost by definition, what people choose is what they prefer.

RCT assumes that people bring well-articulated preferences to the decision process—in other words, that preferences are exogenous (they exist prior to the occasion on which a decision must be made). People then array the options before them, or construct a set of options, analyze them into relevant attributes, and assess the importance each attribute should have in influencing their decision. For example, someone might decide that a car’s reliability is much more important than the color of its upholstery and give reliability extra weight in deciding what car to buy. Then, people assess how good each attribute of each alternative is; they assign each attribute a value. Next, they try to determine how likely it is that if they choose an alternative, their goals with respect to the target attributes will actually be realized. For example, they might think, “The value of going to the beach is great if it is sunny, but there is some significant probability it will rain, and in that case the value will be greatly decreased.” The value of the options and the probability of attaining those values are given numerical specifications. You multiply those specifications, and the product of the values and the probabilities is the expected utility of that option. “The value of the beach in good weather is 100, the value of the beach if it rains is 10. The chance of good weather is 80 percent, of rain, 20 percent.” Rational choosers then just do the math: 80 percent of 100 is 80, and 20 percent of 10 is 2, so by adding them together we get the expected utility of the trip to the beach.

One could imagine using this framework to decide where to go to college, what to study, what job to take, where to go on vacation, what investments to make, what house to buy, what city to move to, and perhaps whether (and when) to marry, and whether (and when) to have children. And one could use it to decide what to do on a beautiful Saturday.

RCT is meant to be essentially an all-purpose tool for making complex and often difficult decisions. It is a tool for asking and answering two very important questions: What are you trying to attain with this decision, and how likely is each of the options on the table to enable you to attain it? RCT has a better known and more influential cousin in what is called “cost-benefit analysis.” With cost-benefit analysis you assess the plusses and minuses of each available alternative to get a net value and then choose the alternative with the highest net value. Not only is cost-benefit analysis meant to guide individual decisions, it is also meant to guide government decisions (for example, which program to reduce greenhouse gases should be implemented; which prescription drug plan should be adopted) and business decisions (for example, which new product should be developed; which marketing campaign should be pursued).

Why assess probability in addition to value? Because little in life is certain, and every decision is a prediction. You may choose a college because you sat in on a couple of biology classes and loved them. But are all the biology teachers as engaging as the ones you heard? You may choose to vacation at a national park because of its beauty and serenity. But what if it’s extremely crowded? You may choose a job because it seems that your colleagues will be great people to work with. But how much can you tell on the basis of one day spent at the company? Thus, probability assessment is essential.

This description of RCT is admittedly highly schematic, but it enables me to highlight a few key points. First, the structure of RCT is entirely formal; one could substitute variables for actual alternatives and attributes and have a recipe that applies to all decisions. Second, deviations from this normative model will also be formal. That is, “errors” or biases in decision-making are identified as errors because of their failure to match the formal normative model. For RCT, the paradigmatic model of rational decision-making is the gambling casino, in which possible gains and losses and probabilities of those gains and losses are unambiguously specified, and different possible bets can be compared using a common metric—expected monetary value.

* * *

Rational choice theory meets heuristics and biases

In the past half century or so, a part of psychology known as behavioral decision-making, or judgment and decision-making, has grown into a major enterprise, the central purpose of which is to describe and explain how decisions actually are made and look for discrepancies between what RCT tells us to do and what we actually do. As a result of this research, a more refined idea of what RCT can tell us has emerged.

The field of judgment and decision-making has developed an ever-growing catalogue of the mistakes human beings are susceptible to when they use a variety of heuristics, or shortcuts, rather than RCT, or in preparation for the use of RCT, to evaluate information, make decisions, and then calculate the expected results of those decisions. Much of the time, these heuristics work fine, but sometimes they introduce bias. Taken together, these mistakes or biases are subsumed under “System 1” (S1) in Daniel Kahneman’s synoptic Thinking, Fast and Slow. S1 works outside of consciousness, rapidly delivering results to consciousness that are produced by these heuristics. In other words, S1 provides answers to the questions we may have. Afterward, a second, slower process, which is conscious, effortful, and rule-governed, may go to work using logic, probability theory, and other formal systems. This second system, S2, of which we are aware, may take the results of S1 and analyze them, sometimes leading to a different decision than S1 has produced on its own. Perhaps because S2 is slow, effortful, and conscious, it is usually what we have in mind when we say we are thinking a decision over. But in fact, the fast-acting S1 may already have made the decision before S2 even gets started.

In his book, Kahneman analogizes S1 to many perceptual processes. Think about driving in city streets. You want to turn left, but a car is approaching from the other direction. Do you have enough time to make the turn? How far away is the car, and how fast is it going? Your visual system answers these questions for you very fast, and typically very accurately. But when the passenger sitting next to you—a teenage beginning driver—asks you how you knew that you had the time to make the turn, you have nothing to say. So it is with S1-type decision-making processes. They deliver answers, but the conscious you typically has no idea how they arrived at those answers. And because S1 is so fast, it may answer a question for you before you have even fully formulated it.

Kahneman spent a quarter of a century researching S1 processes, most of it in collaboration with Amos Tversky. Their focus was on elucidating the ways S1 goes wrong. But studying the errors of S1 required that there be some standard—some normative theory—of how judgments and decisions should be made. To provide that standard, Kahneman and Tversky, like most other researchers in their field, relied on the RCT model I just described to provide a contrast with S1 processes. RCT is at the heart of how economics captures decision-making, and provides the background against which heuristics, biases, and other S1 processes are evaluated.

RCT is the province of S2, and is slow, effortful, and logical. A decision-maker need not accept the results of the automatic S1 processes as competent or definitive, but these processes deliver answers upon which consciousness acts. One of Kahneman’s main arguments is that people think they are using S2 when faced with problems of judgment and choice when in fact S1 is doing much of the work—automatically, effortlessly, rapidly, but not always accurately.

I cannot overstate the significance of Kahneman’s body of work (with Tversky as well as other collaborators) mapping out various S1 processes and relating them to S2. Among the characteristics of S1 processes are these: They distinguish surprising events from normal events; they infer causes and intentions; they neglect ambiguity and suppress doubt; they exaggerate the consistency of the information being processed; they focus on what is present in a situation and largely ignore what is absent, even when absent information is relevant to the task at hand; they respond more to changes in the environment than to steady states; they overweight the significance of rare events; they are more affected by potential losses than potential gains from a baseline state; they tend to frame the decisions being faced narrowly. And they are always working. This list of attributes is impressive, but hardly exhaustive. The research that Kahneman and Tversky did launched an explosion of interest in heuristics and biases and their effects on decision-making (see the work of Gerd Gigerenzer for many examples studied from a somewhat different perspective). By some counts, at this point more than one hundred different ones have been identified and studied. The exploration and explication of S1 processes has been quite a growth industry.

For beginning this line of research that countless others have followed, Kahneman deservedly won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (Tversky would surely have shared it had he not died prematurely). A few years later, economist Richard Thaler also won a Nobel, for work very much inspired by Kahneman and Tversky. But my aim here is not to describe various S1 processes and explain how they lead us astray. For that, Thinking, Fast and Slow is pretty definitive.

Kahneman and others have offered serious criticisms of the notion that RCT in its pure form can adequately capture judgment and decision-making. But they are proposing, in my and Schuldenfrei’s view, modifications of RCT rather than basically different ways of understanding what thinking is about. Their critique of RCT is essentially that it fails as a description of decision-making, not that it fails as a norm for decision-making. We think this approach is inadequate to capture the scope of the problem. We argue that what is needed is a different, nonformal conception of judgment and decision-making, which I will sketch in part three of this series. Kahneman’s articulations of the limits of RCT lead only to a variant that defines itself by differences from RCT, and in that sense keeps RCT as the central model. And RCT remains the basic prescriptive model, the proffered guide to good judgment and decision-making. Another way of stating our objective in Choose Wisely is this: Economists and many other social scientists had assumed that human beings are “rational” decision-makers. Research has shown that people are not nearly as rational as these researchers assumed. And RCT is a deeply inadequate account of what it means to be rational.

* * *

Mischaracterizing what we mean by thinking

We believe that the view of S2, largely governed by RCT, overseeing and correcting the errors of S1, mischaracterizes both the relation between the two systems and thinking in general. We believe that rather than being a corrective to the errors of S1, S2 (and RCT in particular) are parasitic on S1. Without S1 doing crucial work, the RCT-driven processes of S2 could not get off the ground. Furthermore, RCT mischaracterizes what we mean, or should mean, by “thinking.” Thinking, and thus rationality, is much more than what RCT provides the norms for. And with a more comprehensive understanding of thinking in mind, S1 processes loom even larger.

We think RCT should not be the normative standard for rational decision-making. Our basic reason is that RCT requires that we frame our decisions in a “closed” and formal way. For judgment and decision-making researchers, framing is a paradigm case of S1 bias. Indeed, one of Kahneman and Tversky’s most celebrated papers is titled “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Framing phenomena are typically considered to be obstacles to rational decision-making. In taking this stance, decision researchers have typically had a specific handful of examples of framing in mind, examples in which people frame the decisions they face more narrowly than they should. In contrast, we think framing, understood more broadly as imposing limits and context on a decision, is essential to RCT in particular and rationality in general. For RCT to work, the options need to be limited. They need to be clearly defined, unlike the terms that frame much of ordinary life (like, “What should I do on this beautiful Saturday?”). The decisions people face need to be separated from the larger context in which they are, in reality, often embedded. And data and preferences must be homogenized—squeezed into a common framework that facilitates comparison, even among very different things. The data must be homogenized to be amenable to evaluation with quantitative methods. Preferences must be homogenized so that quantitative methods can be used to assess them. What the focus on RCT and S1 deviations from it have in common is that they take a system (thinking) that is varied in form and substance, and extremely sensitive to context, and they close the system to make it manageable and formalizable.

In many cases, good framing is itself the goal of decision-making. It helps us decide what options should properly be on the table, and how they should be assessed and compared. And there is no inquiry or deciding without it. This point is often overlooked or underappreciated, in part because it is thought that rigorously presented examples, like monetary gambles, that call for the use of RCT are themselves unframed. It is central to our view that the standard RCT cases, though thought to be unframed, are in fact framed: They are framed to the extent that they can be easily quantified.

Expressed slightly differently, our view is that framing is a prerequisite for the operation of RCT; without framing, RCT procedures can’t even get started. In addition, RCT requires quantification of both probability and value, which we believe cannot be done within the bounds of RCT, at least not without framing. In many situations in real life, attaching probabilities to outcomes is at best wishful thinking and at worst sheer fantasy. In addition, assigning value to the options we face often depends on framing, and since RCT can’t tell us much about how decisions should be framed, it can’t tell us much about how alternatives should be valued.

By now, almost everyone who studies decision-making knows that RCT is an idealization that does not match how many decisions are actually made. Indeed, perhaps, speaking practically, RCT is not even a good model for how decisions always should be made. Going through the process of RCT decision analysis may be more costly in time and cognitive resources than the decision is worth. And an outcome that is utility maximizing in an individual decision may be destructive when cumulated, so that individual decisions must be considered in terms of the long-term consequences they may have.

This acknowledgment has led some researchers, in the spirit of Herbert Simon (another Nobel Prize winner), to modify the rational choice norm and speak of “bounded rationality,” which highlights the cognitive (and emotional) limitations of human beings. The notion of bounded rationality leaves the normative status of the model of rational choice intact, simply describing the ways finite organisms actually make decisions with processes that fall short of the normative standard. Thus, the normative standard exerts a powerful influence on research, on what investigators find interesting and noteworthy, and on the prescriptions that are offered to improve decision-making. Perhaps most significant, the normative standard makes certain important questions about rationality essentially invisible to researchers and policymakers alike. In our book, we try to make them visible. And in part three of this series, I’ll describe our alternative model for understanding how we should make decisions.

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 Why Rational Choice Theory Should Not Be the Standard for Good Decisions appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Imagine waking up on a Saturday morning, gazing out the window to see the sun shining, and asking yourself, “What should I do today?” You quickly review your obligations and responsibilities and discover that there’s nothing you have to do; the day is yours. Complete freedom awaits. So you do some stock taking. Will you be facing any challenges at work next week that maybe you should get a jump on? Are there chores around the house that you’ve been putting off? Is there any shopping that has to be done? No, no, and no. No constraints. Nothing obvious that a responsible person “should” be doing. You’re free as a bird.

Now what? It looks like a beautiful day, so perhaps you should do something outside. There’s a hike you’ve been meaning to take. It would be a challenging adventure in a gorgeous setting. You feel up for it—but are you up to it? You’ve neglected your cardio for the last few weeks and the inclines may exhaust you. Besides, the day looks so promising that the trail may be crowded—and full of unleashed dogs. How about spending the day getting your garden started? On the other hand, you’ve had a tiring week. Perhaps you should just relax and enjoy yourself. Any good sports on TV? A movie to stream? But if you do something like that, you’ll hate yourself after spending a day sitting passively in front of the tube. If you’re going to relax, then at least do something worthwhile. Catch up on the news by spending the day watching cable? These are tumultuous times and you’ve been neglecting the larger world. But cable news is so damn polarized. It raises your blood pressure. And you never know who or what to believe. Okay, then: relax by reading a book? Not a mindless potboiler, but one that actually teaches you something. If you do that, you can both relax and better yourself, and end up feeling like you had a productive day. But you suspect that a day spent reading will end up as a day spent mostly napping. Then you’ll really hate yourself.

Whew! Who knew that all this freedom of choice would be this hard? You could occupy the whole day just deciding what to do. And you’ve only gotten started. (Actually, we knew it could be this hard. I wrote a whole book about it—The Paradox of Choice—more than 20 years ago, when life was simpler because there were fewer options.) Maybe it’s time to clear your head with a cup of coffee.

Now that the coffee’s brewing, you resume your reflections about how to pass the day. “Everything I’ve been thinking so far is just about me. Is that how it should be? Should this be a ‘me day’ or a ‘we day’? I haven’t talked to my daughter in a week, and right now she’s probably packing boxes to get ready to move to her new apartment, with a new roommate, next week. I bet she’s a little overwhelmed, and maybe also a little nervous about how the new roommate situation will work out. Maybe I should call her and invite myself over to help her pack, calm her down, and keep her company.” This thought makes you feel a lot better. You can fill your day doing something productive that also helps someone you love. That makes a lot of sense. But now you’ve opened a can of worms. Your mother has been down in the dumps lately. Her health has not been great, and she spends a lot of time alone. She’s never really recovered from the depression that set in when she moved to an assisted living facility. Perhaps you should take her out to lunch, go for a little stroll. That will probably cheer her up. Which of these loved ones will benefit more from your visit? Who needs you more? And which option will give you more pleasure?

Who knew that all this freedom of choice would be this hard? You could occupy the whole day just deciding what to do.

This is getting hard. Perhaps the caffeine will help. But as you sip your coffee, something else occurs to you. Why just choose between a “me day” and a “we day”? How about a “they day”? You’ve been active in a few organizations concerned with social justice. These activities are important to you, and the organizations operate on a shoestring. Perhaps you can do some useful office work for one of them. But which one? This would be a productive way to spend the day. But do you really want to be productive on this particular day? Yes, this seems like a good idea.

But just when you think you’ve resolved your dilemma, another thought occurs to you. You’ve been thinking very short term. Shouldn’t thinking about how to spend the day be embedded in a larger project—like how to conduct your life, or what kind of person to be in the world? Lord knows that the busyness of everyday life affords little opportunity to take the longer view. Today you seem to have the chance. Maybe this is the day to take stock. “How am I doing? Am I the kind of person I thought I would be? The kind of person I hoped to be? If not, what’s missing? And how can I cultivate aspects of the self I want to have but have been neglecting? If not now, when? I’m not getting any younger. Maybe it’s time to do some major reflecting on the big things. Change of career trajectory? Change in my intimate life? Why not put everything on the table?”

* * *

There is something important to notice about the “me day” versus “we day” and the “short-term” versus “long-term” perspectives. They are very different from the “Should I take a hike or work in the garden?” options. Thinking “me day” versus “we day” establishes a context within which your final decision will be made. It puts a frame around the possibilities, with some possibilities very much inside the frame and others very much outside it. If you decide to frame this Saturday as a “we day,” suddenly all kinds of options move off the table. You’re not asking, “What should I do today?” but rather “What ‘we’ thing should I do today?”

We will see that the effects of decision framing have been much examined in the science of decision-making. We will also see that for the most part, framing has been viewed as an obstacle to good decision-making. What our book argues, in contrast, is that framing is an important ingredient—perhaps the most important ingredient—in good decision-making. Some of the possibilities you are thinking about are, in effect, possibilities that try to answer the question, “How should I frame my day?” while others try to answer, “Within the frame I have chosen, what should I actually do?”

* * *

I could go on and on enumerating ways to spend a free Saturday, but I don’t want to make you impatient, silently screaming, “Just do something!” The point of this scenario is to illustrate just how complex an apparently simple, everyday decision can be. How do we actually make such everyday decisions? What do we think about? What moves do we make to turn seemingly intractable decisions into manageable ones—or the reverse? And how should we make such decisions? What does science tell us about how decisions should be made, and about how they actually are made? The scenario just described suggests that at least sometimes, making a decision can involve all of our cognitive and emotional resources—all that we know, and all that we aspire to. But we will see that the dominant approaches to decision-making aim to reduce this potential complexity to an almost algorithmic, mechanical process. Our book argues that such simplification is a serious mistake—that to understand decision-making is to understand almost everything about human thought.

There are many ways we might go about answering the question “What should I do today?” depending on our character and our inclinations at the moment. We might simply do what strikes us—whimsically and almost impulsively. We might act in accordance with our habits and community customs—traditionally. We might simply use common sense, taking account of the obvious facts of the situation and taking our initial inclinations at face value. We might try to decide systematically and scientifically, creating some sort of spreadsheet that considers the possibilities along with our assessment of the aspects that seem to matter to us. We might think about it seriously, using our reflective intelligence to consider who we are and who we want to be. We might decide socially, thinking about who we can be helpful to and what our community expects of us. We might decide hedonically, thinking about what will give us the most pleasure. We might decide instrumentally, thinking about what will serve us best in the long run. Or we might decide more or less directly on the basis of some overarching value—philosophically.

What does science tell us about how decisions should be made, and about how they actually are made?

The discussion to follow in this series will focus on two distinct approaches to making everyday decisions—intelligent reflection on the one hand, and some type of formal, mechanical decision process represented by rational choice theory on the other. We’ll get more into the shortcomings of the latter in part two; but for now, let us discuss briefly what we mean by intelligent reflection.

Intelligent reflection allows you to see multiple aspects of a decision. It allows you to compare options that seem to have little or nothing in common. It allows you to consider how a simple decision of how to spend a Saturday says something about who you are and what you value. It allows you to ponder what kind of shadow your decision about today may cast on your future. Intelligent reflection speaks not only to what you decide, but also to how you decide. We do not always have the luxury (or the burden) of intelligent reflection. Much of the time, the demands of daily life press on us, taking much of our freedom of choice away. But even when that happens, it is intelligent reflection that may enable us to decide that these demands on us come up too often, and that they lead us away from doing the things we most want to do, or the things we should want to do. It not only enables us to be who we are; it enables us to change who we are.

* * *

Let’s zoom out from how to spend a Saturday to how to spend a life. Should you try to acquire as much money as you can? Then work on Wall Street. Should you strive to have the best relationships you can with the people (family, friends, and community) in your life? Then cultivate those relationships and also develop the aspects of your character that you will need to establish and sustain those close relationships. Should you strive to experience as much pleasure as you can in life? Then choose an undemanding job, and minimize social entanglements (no spouse or kids) to pursue what you want, when you want. Should you attempt to attain the admiration of your community? Then consider politics or charity work. These life paths are not necessarily in conflict, but can easily become incompatible, so let’s assume you have to choose between them. We believe that many young people today have exactly this kind of decision to make, and many of them are tortured by it.

So how should we decide what to do with our lives? Much of the thinking (by social scientists, at least) about how we make decisions, and how we should make decisions, falls short as a way to think about decision-making in our own lives. That theory of decision-making, known as rational choice theory, offers us a formal, quantitative alternative to intelligent reflection.

In part two I will describe what rational choice theory is and how influential it has become. I will discuss how everyday decisions must be transformed, losing much of their complexity, in order for rational choice theory to be applied to them. I will illustrate some of the ways rational choice theory fails as a description of how people make decisions, and how it also fails as a prescription for how people should make decisions. And, in part three, I will offer an alternative model for decision-making—both descriptive and prescriptive—that replaces the formal, quantitative aspirations of rational choice theory with considered, thoughtful judgment.

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 A Day in the Life appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

I arrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but the evidence remained. One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot. My question: Why don’t people return their shopping carts?

I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t).

I’ve never understood why people don’t put their carts away. In high school, I worked as a shopping cart attendant at my local grocery store, shepherding carts across the lot. Since then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should, with every trip to the grocery store a reminder of the special kind of havoc humanity is capable of.

Then last year, on a windy weekend morning in a Wegman’s parking lot, it hit me. Not a cart, but the realization that I can do something productive about it. 

So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group whose mission is to encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so. They upload their efforts on their YouTube channel, which boasts hundreds of videos recorded between 2020 and 2025, taking place mostly in California, but also Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, New York, Canada, Australia, and England. Cart abandonment, it turns out, knows no regional bounds. As of September 2025, these videos have collectively been viewed over 90 million times. (See below for one of the tamer videos.)

I watched a total of 564 encounters between Cart Narcs and cart abandoners. These don’t represent a perfectly random sample of interactions, but together they capture a broad cross-section of everyday behavior. (And, as far as I know, it’s the largest archive of shopping cart behavior available.) Most interactions begin the same way: Someone leaves their cart and a Cart Narc requests they return it. At this point I documented what happened next, transcribing parking lot reactions word for unhinged word. To be clear, this was not a quick process. I spent dozens of weekend hours hunched over my computer pausing and replaying YouTube videos. People in my life called this “concerning” and a “waste of time.” I called it research. 

My approach was inductive, which is a fancy way of saying that I had neither theory nor hypotheses. Instead, I let the data speak for itself, coding people’s raw (and wildly unfiltered) responses. Over time, patterns emerged, and eventually, I was left with a detailed catalog of behavior, complete with justifications, deflections, hostility, and, miraculously, humanity.

Why don’t people return their carts?

People had all sorts of reactions to being asked to do the right thing (see Figure 1). There were those who deflected, challenging the question itself rather than answering it. Do you work here? Are you the cart police? Do you represent this company? Who are you? Can I see your ID? Do you have any authority? Who do you work for? Who do you think you are? Why don’t you get a real job? 

Some responded with anger and aggression. They yelled, cursed, and mocked. Some threatened to (or did) call law enforcement. Others escalated further, brandishing weapons like guns, tasers, or knives. “I’m gonna slash your face,” warned one man. “Why don’t I kick your ass?” asked another. A third shopper told the Cart Narc, “This is how you get killed.” If only returning the cart stirred as much passion as did refusing to.

Then there were the many, many excuses. In over half of the encounters I watched, shoppers provided at least one justification for their choice to abandon the cart (see Figure 2).

Many invoked entitlement, sometimes mentioning an identity they believed exempted them from common decency. “I worked at Safeway for lots of years and people left their carts all the time,” one man said. Another explained his choice to leave his cart by saying, “After 40 years of working retail grocery, I’ve earned it.” Earned what, exactly? The right to not pick up after yourself?

There were those who cited physical limitations barring them from cart return. “I’m 72 years old. I can’t walk that far,” explained a man after pushing his cart to the furthest edge of the lot. Another shopper clarified her choice to leave the cart in the middle of a handicap parking spot by mentioning, “I’m handicapped myself.” And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?

Other people were simply too busy to return their carts. “I’m over an hour late to my own kid’s birthday party,” revealed one hurried shopper. “We have somewhere we need to be,” another alleged, before spending the next eight minutes arguing with the Cart Narc about how he didn’t have time to return his cart. Some mentioned inconvenience. “Them carts don’t even roll,” one shopper complained, after going out of his way to dig the wheels of his cart straight into grass and dirt.

Many justified their behavior by invoking norms and pointing to other cart abandoners. “Everyone else puts them there,” one shopper said, leaving his cart with a gaggle of similarly unreturned ones. “The culture around here is doing it,” insisted another, as if not returning one’s cart were a local tradition. This reasoning—everyone else does it—pairs best with a juice box and a timeout. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?

Another type of excuse invoked other people by shifting responsibility (or blame) to others. Many shoppers pointed to their choice to leave the cart as a form of job stability or creation. “They pay someone to collect them all” explained one man. Another insisted that returning the cart is selfish because, “You’re putting someone out of a job.” It’s true that many stores do employ people to gather carts, but the job is to collect them from designated return areas—not to chase them down across the lot like loose cattle.

In some interactions I watched, people feigned ignorance. Like the woman who was unaware that carts shouldn’t be left on the curb: “I don’t know where we’re supposed to put them. I typically stop at Ralph’s.” As if basic decency is wildly store-specific. 

My personal favorite justifications were the ones that invoked habitual good behavior, explaining their choice to not return their cart by saying they always put their cart away. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I put it back,” insisted a shopper after not putting his back. 

But, between the shouting and the excuses, there were people who, upon being asked to return their cart, did. Some weren’t happy about it. “There’s too much going on in the world to pay attention to that,” one man grumbled while wheeling his back to the corral. Another threatened to break the Cart Narc’s arm before, incredibly, returning his cart. Others returned theirs silently. A few even owned up to their mistake. “I just got Cart Narc-ed! I apologize,” said one shopper. (Watch one cart abandoner's mea culpa below). 

What does behavioral science say?

We can also look to existing research in the social and behavioral sciences for insight into why people don’t return their carts. 

People respond to incentives. At Aldi, for example, you can’t take a cart without first inserting a quarter. When you’re done, you return the cart and get your quarter back. According to Aldi, this system saves customers money: By eliminating the need to pay employees to collect stray carts, Aldi can keep their prices low. (This kind of deposit system is standard in many European countries.) 

But if you Google “Aldi shopping carts,” you’ll find countless blog posts, articles, and videos explaining how to get around the quarter system, suggesting incentives have limits.

People respond to signals of hierarchy. Many of the cart abandoners I watched justified their choice by saying, “They pay people to do that.” The implication was that returning the cart would deprive someone of work—or worse, that the task of cart return was beneath them. The grocery store where I worked in high school didn’t bother trying to incentivize people to return their carts. Instead, they cemented the hierarchy by hiring teenagers like me to wheel carts out to people’s cars, not wanting to burden their clientele with the task of cart return. Even in stores where returning the cart is expected, people may fail to do so if they feel the task of cart return is beneath them. Seeing a task as low status makes neglecting it feel more permissible. 

People respond to social norms. Psychologists distinguish between descriptive norms (what people do) and injunctive norms (what people think they’re supposed to do). When we see carts scattered across a parking lot, the descriptive norm tells us that leaving them is fine. But when we see other people returning their carts, it can feel wrong not to. Social norms cut both ways: They can excuse cart abandonment but also encourage cart return. 

Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm. The insight that people adjust their behavior to match what they believe others are doing has powered countless “norm campaigns” from hotel signs reminding guests that most people reuse their towels to university initiatives curbing binge drinking by publicizing that most students do not drink excessively. In fact, shopping carts had their own norm campaign. In 1969, a retired grocer declared February “Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket” month, in an attempt to recover stolen shopping carts. Norms can tell us what to do, but not always why it’s worth doing them.

But people respond to meaning. Without a deposit system or a norm campaign, the most effective motivator might be reframing the act itself. Like Blockbuster’s “Be Kind, Rewind,” which turned something that felt like a chore into a small act of kindness and a favor for the next person. Or, drawing from something more serious, the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” campaign that turned an uncomfortable confrontation into a gesture of loyalty. 

So, do your part, return your cart. Not because the cart matters, but because returning it means other people do.

The post Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

On March 27, 1964, a New York Times headline proclaimed, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,” with the subheading, “Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector.” “For more than half an hour,” the article began, “38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”

The story about the New Yorkers who “didn’t want to get involved” as they heard the blood-curdling screams of Kitty Genovese became a parable of the callousness and alienation of modern urban life. It was soon amplified by an article in Life magazine titled “The Dying Girl That No One Helped” and a book by the New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal called Thirty-Eight Witnesses.

Some journalists never let the facts get in the way of a good morality tale, and the thirty-eighth witness who materialized between the headline and the body of the original story was just one of many humbugs in the report. As the Times, to its credit, admitted in a series of follow-ups over the decades, only six people, not thirty-seven or thirty-eight, witnessed parts of the incident, which consisted of two attacks, not three, and some thought the screams were from a quarrel between lovers or drunks. Two people did in fact call the police, and a neighbor ran out and cradled the dying Genovese in her arms until an ambulance arrived.

Still, no one can deny that people often fail to act when they know they should. Many of us have walked by a homeless person, or been awakened by a scream and turned over to fall back asleep, or shirked from refilling a coffee pot in a communal kitchen.

The phenomenon of bystander apathy has been well-documented in a set of classic studies from the golden age of social psychology, when experiments were a kind of performance art designed to raise awareness of the dangers of mindless conformity (this was before committees for the protection of research subjects put the kibosh on the genre). The psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané suspected that people in the presence of other people might fail to respond to an obvious need not because of apathy but because of a diffusion of responsibility. Everyone assumes that someone else will step in, and that if no one does, the situation mustn’t be all that dire.

In experiments that have become a staple of the undergraduate psychology curriculum, Darley and Latané brought people into the lab to fill out questionnaires and then staged an emergency, such as a loud crash in an adjoining room followed by agonized moans, or smoke pouring out of a ventilator. If the participant was sitting with a confederate of the experimenter who continued to fill out the questionnaire as if nothing was happening, 80 percent of the time the participant did nothing too. When the participants were alone, only 30 percent failed to respond.

But pondering the game-theoretic payoffs faced by the Good Samaritans and the Don’t-Get-Involvers provides a deeper explanation than the nebulous metaphor of diffusion. The sociologist Andreas Diekmann analyzed the bystander effect as a game he called the Volunteer’s Dilemma. If someone intervenes, then each bystander enjoys a benefit, namely the reduction of distress at the thought of a person in danger. But the intervener incurs a personal cost in risk, time, and forgone opportunities to do something else. The best outcome for each bystander, then, is for someone else to intervene, and the worst is for no one to intervene, with oneself intervening falling in between. Each volunteer would step in if he was certain that no one else intended to, so he tries to discern their intentions while hiding his own. The result is an outguessing standoff, like poker players bluffing and calling, generals attacking and defending, or hockey players shooting and goaltending, each hoping to exploit a longstanding habit or momentary tell in the other.

Since predictability is fatal in an outguessing standoff, the best strategy is to roll the mental dice and act randomly, with whatever probability makes your opponent indifferent between his two choices (in game theory, choosing one of several moves with certain probabilities is called a mixed strategy). The result is a Nash equilibrium, a nervous deadlock in which neither side can do better with any other strategy. In the Volunteer’s Dilemma, the strategy is to volunteer with a probability that depends on the relative costs of no one helping, someone helping, and oneself helping—and on the number of potential volunteers. The more volunteers, the lower the odds that you have to spring into action, since it becomes likelier that someone else will spring first. The classic bystander effect—a greater number of bystanders reduces the chance that any one of them will step in—is simply what happens when rational actors in a Volunteer’s Dilemma play the most viable strategy.

Notice that the entire scenario presumes common knowledge, which is “knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of their knowledge of one’s knowledge, ad infinitum.” Common knowledge is the subject of my latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…. And essentially, the title describes what common knowledge is—it’s how I know that you know that I know that you know that I know and so on. Common knowledge is “a distinctive cognitive state corresponding to the sense that something is public, unignorable, or ‘out there.’” It is logically different from private knowledge: learning about something in public, even if everyone already knows it, can change everything.

Learning about something in public, even if everyone already knows it, can change everything.

In the scenario above, the volunteers all know about the need to help, and know the others know. When the knowledge is asymmetrical, everything changes. To see this, imagine renting an apartment from an absentee landlord who needs one of the tenants to change the oil filter on the building’s furnace, or else the filter will clog and the whole building will be out of heat and hot water. If you were the only tenant on the premises, you would have little choice. But if other tenants were there and knew of the chore, you might hope that one of them would volunteer, and the more of them there are, the likelier one will step in.

But it’s not just the existence of other tenants that should affect your decision but your knowledge about their knowledge, and theirs about yours. Suppose the landlord has not generated common knowledge by posting a sign about the need for the filter change, or sending out a notice to everyone by email, or announcing it at an annual meeting, but instead informs the tenants one by one. As you walk down the hallway you overhear him telling another tenant about the need for someone to change the filter. If you do a quick about-face and tiptoe away before you’re noticed, you can leave your neighbor with the burden. You have second-order knowledge (you know that he knows), but he has only private knowledge, so he’s on the hook.

Better still, your freedom doesn’t depend on how many other tenants know about the need, as long as none of them think you know. With private knowledge, unlike common knowledge, responsibility needn’t diffuse as the number of potential volunteers increases.

Now consider a third level. Suppose the landlord tells you about the chore, and tells you that he’s telling the other tenants about the chore, while also mentioning to them that he told you. But he doesn’t tell the other tenants that he told you he’d be seeing them; as far as they’re concerned, you may think you’re the only one who knows. You have third-order knowledge (you know that they know that you know about the chore), but they have only second-order knowledge (they know that you know, but they don’t know you know they know). So now you’re on the hook—you have reason to believe they’ll shirk, so you have to act.

Think you can handle a fourth level? The landlord has sent just you and another tenant a notice about the chore, and you see the other tenant opening his mailbox and pulling out the same notice you got. He spots you looking at his envelope, but just before he tries to get your attention, your cell phone rings and you get absorbed in a conversation. Now you have fourth-order knowledge: you know that he knows that you know that he knows about the chore, but he’s stuck at three orders: he doesn’t know you know he knows you know. You’re back off the hook—as far as he’s concerned, you have a reason to shirk, so he has to act.

Our team wanted to see whether real people, when placed in a Volunteer’s Dilemma, go through the recursive thinking about thinking that would allow them to make the shrewdest decision about whether to volunteer or shirk. We invited internet users to pretend they were merchants in a marketplace and could earn a certain profit every day. But on some days the marketplace owner might need help from one of the merchants, who must sacrifice half his earnings to carry out the chore; if he failed to find a volunteer, he’d fine everyone their entire earnings.

As in our earlier experiments with the butcher and the baker, the crucial information (in this case, whether the owner needed help that day) might be public knowledge broadcasted over a loudspeaker, or private knowledge conveyed by a messenger to the merchant alone, or various orders of embedded knowledge about knowledge depending on what the messenger told them he was telling the others. The participants had to decide whether to volunteer and sacrifice half their earnings or shirk and take a chance at earning nothing.

And they behaved, more or less, like recursive mentalizers in a Volunteer’s Dilemma should, zigzagging in their volunteerism with the level of embedded knowledge. They volunteered when the messenger gave them private knowledge, shirked when they had second-order knowledge about the other merchants’ private knowledge, sprang back into action when they got third-order knowledge, and shirked when they got fourth-order knowledge. When the loudspeaker granted them common knowledge, their rate of volunteering fell in between, as if they mentally rolled the dice.

And in a twist that brings us back to the classic bystander effect, we compared what happened when the participants thought they were one of just two merchants and when they thought they were one of five. With common knowledge, more merchants always led to less helping, just as in the textbook experiments. But with private knowledge, and with intermediate levels of embedded knowledge, the size of the volunteer pool made no difference or a very small one. All this is what you’d expect from people trying to read the minds of other mind readers.

So as preposterous as it may seem that I could know that you know that I know that you know something, we appear to be equipped with cognitive processes that strive to do just that. We think about thoughts about thoughts, at least to some number of turtles. Most commonly, we recognize that if something is self-evident, or even salient to us, it’s likely to seem so to others. And we jump from one kind of thinking to the other, sometimes when we shouldn’t, but often when we should. As I show in the book, the fruits of this thinking drive a vast range of human affairs, including elections, game shows, economic bubbles, and, as we’ve seen, when and how we help.

Excerpted from When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… by Steven Pinker. Copyright © 2025 by Steven Pinker. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

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In the past several months, America has undergone drastic domestic and international policy shifts with major implications worldwide for poverty, public health, the climate, scientific research, and more. 

In the wake of such massive changes affecting the well-being of millions, it’s easy to feel paralyzed by the sense that anything you do would amount to nothing more than a tiny drop in a really, really big bucket.

Of course none of us can single-handedly end poverty, solve the climate crisis, or prevent the next pandemic. But we still care. So, in the face of enormous global issues, we face a tension between our desire to help and our sense of helplessness. 

As a social psychologist and director of Giving Multiplier, a research-based charitable giving platform that connects people to charities addressing many of these causes, I think about this tension a lot. What should we make of our simultaneous desire to help and sense of helplessness? And what can we do about it?

In the face of enormous global issues, we face a tension between our desire to help and our sense of helplessness.

There’s plenty of research on how we tend to reason about mass suffering. For one, we’re moved by vivid stories of specific individuals more than abstract statistics, what psychologists call the “identifiable victim effect.” The media plays to this tendency, often ignoring large-scale atrocities while publicizing isolated, captivating events. We also find it harder to care about others far away in physical distance and time, leading to underinvesting in international and intergenerational issues. And our minds are not well-attuned to large numbers. We’re “scope insensitive,” meaning it’s hard to feel 10 times as concerned about a disease that affects 500,000 people as 50,000.

But there’s another psychological phenomenon that I’ve come to appreciate, called proportion dominance, which can help understand our competing feelings of compassion and overwhelm.

Proportion dominance is the preference for making relative progress toward a goal, at the expense of absolute impact. For example, imagine you provided 100 families with one year’s worth of meals. Research suggests it would feel more satisfying if the 100 meals fed every family in a small town rather than merely some of the families in a bigger city. Even if the number of families assisted is exactly the same, the way we feel about our impact could be quite different.

In a foundational paper on proportion dominance, researchers asked participants to rate their support for lifesaving interventions such as emergency medical treatments. In one of the studies, participants tended to favor interventions that saved a greater proportion of lives over interventions that saved more lives overall but a lower total proportion. For example, people preferred a program that saved 225 out of 300 people (75 percent) than one saving 230 out of 920 people (25 percent), despite the former option saving five fewer lives. Even when viewing both options at the same time, nearly half of participants preferred the intervention that saved fewer, but a greater proportion, of lives.

In another of the paper’s studies, most participants preferred to save four hours of writing on a term paper when it would take five hours to complete (80 percent), rather than 10 hours (40 percent). This also applied to saving money: about one third of participants reported they would rather save $10 on a jacket that cost $20 (50 percent savings) than when it costs $100 (10 percent savings), despite saving the exact same amount of money.

Proportion dominance shows that when making decisions, we can be motivated by our perceived impact on solving a problem and less sensitive to the absolute effects of our actions. This means we tend to focus on relative progress at the expense of overall impact.

Maybe you recognize this tendency in other facets of your life. Let’s say you just crossed off three tasks on your to-do list. Would you feel better about your progress if your list were 5 or 50 items long? Our motivation to make progress means we don’t just care about what we’ve done but also how much left there is to do.

Proportion dominance shows that when making decisions, we can be motivated by our perceived impact on solving a problem and less sensitive to the absolute effects of our actions.

Why is proportion dominance so pernicious? Because it can feel like a trap. The larger the problem, the less we might feel like our actions have an impact, regardless of how much of a difference we actually make. With so many people in need, such as the nearly 700 million people living in extreme poverty, the proportion of individuals we’re able to help can seem trivially small.

In addition to proportion dominance, there is another complicating factor. Research in charitable giving finds that if donors are reminded of the people in need they aren’t helping, they give less. The proverbial “warm glow” that we feel after our good deeds is counteracted by an accompanying negative feeling for those left unhelped.

This brings us back to the tension between wanting to make a difference and feeling helpless about it. What are we to do? 

It might be tempting to turn away from the most daunting problems, because you feel you won’t have much of an impact. But the research on proportion dominance shows us why we feel this way. If you want to make an impact, it’s important to remember what matters is the size of the drop, not the size of the bucket. That is, if you care about the objective outcomes of your actions, you shouldn't let the scope of the problem deter you from doing something to address it.

Interestingly, participants in the studies mentioned above generally agreed with this. When researchers asked them directly, they acknowledged that absolute impact mattered more than relative progress. This and other research suggests that making a deliberate effort to reflect on the rationale for your choices could be a useful strategy to overcome proportion dominance. 

For example, you may find yourself asking how your $60 donation could possibly matter relative to the nearly $600 billion in total U.S. charitable giving in 2024. Instead, if you care about absolute impact, you can reframe that thought by asking how you can make that $60 do as much good as possible. And you can apply a similar logic to any of the resources you have at your disposal, whether it’s your money, skills, or time.

For charitable giving, this could mean drawing on the recommendations of trusted charity evaluators like GiveWell. Their expert evaluators spend tens of thousands of hours each year rigorously analyzing and identifying highly cost-effective charities, such as Helen Keller Intl’s vitamin A supplementation program or Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. Both programs help prevent deadly diseases and dramatically improve children’s lives at an astonishingly low cost, often a few dollars. 

If you want to make an impact, it’s important to remember what matters is the size of the drop, not the size of the bucket.

At Giving Multiplier, our goal is to introduce people to nonprofits recommended by GiveWell and other expert charity evaluators, as well as help donors maximize the impact of their donations. Our psychologically informed donation tool encourages users to split their donations between any charity personally meaningful to them, like a local food bank or animal shelter, and one of the charities recommended by experts as being highly effective at addressing big global challenges. Giving Multiplier also adds matching funds on top to incentivize this donation bundling strategy, which we call giving “smart and from the heart.”

You can also think about creating pragmatic, manageable targets for your impact. By setting yourself up to actually achieve a goal, you can both have an impact and build momentum toward more ambitious targets. We apply this advice in many other aspects of our lives. We all know that if you want to start running, it seems wiser to begin with a 5k instead of an ultra marathon. Why not apply this strategy to our prosocial aims? For example, if you care about global health, you can provide a year’s worth of disease-preventing nutritional supplements to a vitamin-deficient child for about $2 through the Helen Keller Intl program mentioned above. Perhaps you start by setting a goal to help 50 children for $100. It’s a target that you can both accomplish and feel deeply proud about.

The reality that we can’t help everyone in need shouldn’t deter us from doing what we can. By understanding our tendency to favor felt progress over actual impact, we can begin to break through any sense of helplessness. The size of the problem doesn’t need to prevent us from taking action. Rather, it can prompt us to search for the best ways to harness the very real capacity we each have to make a difference.

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As an introvert and an only child, I was fortunate to learn one skill early on in my life: how to be alone. I didn't even realize it was a skill until people would tell me, offhandedly, that they “hated to be alone” or even that they “couldn’t be alone.”

For many years, the line between lonely and alone was blurry. Some days, I craved connection, and wished for a sibling. Other days, I relished my own company, writing detailed stories about the squirrels living in my backyard, etching charcoal “self-portraits,” and choreographing elaborate dances to the soundtrack of Hercules. My surplus of solitude forced me to find solace in it, and so I did.

As I became an adult, I continued to prioritize finding time for reading and reflection, which remained essential ways for me to recharge and process my experiences. 

And then, I had my son. Becoming a mother changed my relationship to time—alone time in particular. It made my once plentiful solitude more scarce, sacred, and complicated. It has also made me wonder: How do I make the most of this now much rarer resource?

Becoming a mother . . . made my once plentiful solitude more scarce, sacred, and complicated. It has also made me wonder: How do I make the most of this now much rarer resource?

Trying to answer this question led me to the work of Virginia Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury College who studies social and emotional development across our lives.

Like me, Thomas treasured her alone time growing up, using it to read, and to write short stories, poems, and plays. Unlike me, she was one of four siblings, which meant “physical solitude was almost impossible to get.” Instead, she learned to “create a psychological bubble of solitude for myself even when people were around me…. I was always full of ideas and those ideas really germinated when I was able to be in my own world, thinking and dreaming.”

As she grew up and began a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, she found something surprising. While there was a lot of research about the importance of relationships to our developmental well-being, she found hardly anything about the benefits of being alone. Distinct from loneliness—which is alone time we don't want—solitude is chosen, and meant to be rejuvenating and generative, a state she and I had both found throughout our lives.

Since then, Thomas has focused her career on asking and answering two fundamental questions: What are the benefits of solitude, and how do people use solitude well?

Before we get to that, let's clarify a common misunderstanding: Solitude doesn't encompass just any alone time. The time Thomas studies is mindful and intentional. It is not watching a show on Netflix, although that can be part of the overall experience, especially if you're entering into solitude in a depleted or emotionally dysregulated state (hello, caregivers!). 

Distinct from loneliness—which is alone time we don't want—solitude is chosen, and meant to be rejuvenating and generative.

In that case, Thomas says, “sometimes what you need is just to chill for an hour and watch something to [reduce the activity in] your nervous system. Once you do whatever that mindless activity is and get back to your baseline, then you can start to think, feel, and do something that's generative and meaningful to you. But you can't do that right away if you're exhausted.”

The key is continuing to pay attention to your internal state so you know when you're ready for the more generative part of the practice. “It takes discernment to know when you're being mindless with your solitude,” Thomas says, like if all of the sudden watching one episode turns into seven, or if you find yourself scrolling endlessly on Instagram. Social media can be especially harmful, and can obstruct the positive aspects of solitude, Thomas warns.

The benefits of solitude

Cultivating solitude offers an opportunity and a gift, one that philosophers (Stoics in particular), poets, and artists have long recognized: the ability to create a revitalizing refuge that you can return to wherever and whenever. 

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, which historians believe was sometime between 170-180 AD. “But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul…. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself.”

Solitude offers more than a recharge. In his Notes on the Melody of Things, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke reflects that “the more solitary a person is, the more solemn, moving and powerful their community.” The solitary part is only half of the story. Rilke’s words, backed by Thomas’s work, suggest that connecting more deeply with ourselves when we're alone allows for deeper relationships with others.

When we’re tired of being social, solitude can replenish our energy “so that we can go back out into the world of relationships and connect from a place where we can actually give something back,” Thomas says. “So many of my [research] participants have said that if they are deprived of the alone time they need, they’re irritable, aggressive, moody, they snap at people, and it harms their relationships. They’ve learned, If I can just go away for a while, I'll come back a better person and be able to relate with you without feeling resentful, drained, or irritable. All of the things we're experiencing in the social world, we bring it into our solitude to digest, reflect on and grow from. It’s a dance between both worlds.”

We all need different amounts of social time and alone time. Depending on our temperament, being social or being solitary may come more naturally to us. If the solitary life is less natural to you—if you avoid it at all costs and loathe the experience of being alone—what do you do then?

Developing solitude skills 

Through her research Thomas has identified skills to help people learn how to enjoy their time alone, and developed a program to teach people those skills. In a current working paper, she found that her program successfully developed those skills. Her solitude skills are organized into three groups—connecting with self, protecting time, and finding a balance between solitude and social connection. 

Connecting with self

To enjoy your time alone, you first need to figure out what you like to do when you’re on your own. Maybe it’s journaling, taking long walks, cooking, or drawing. Perhaps you don’t know yet, and you’re living the question of: What do I like to do when I’m alone? (If so, might I recommend starting a questions practice?)

As anyone who has spent time alone knows, it doesn't always feel peaceful and relaxed—in part because of the emotions and thoughts that can emerge. The ability to face, accept, and listen to your own emotions when you’re alone “might be the most difficult skill,” Thomas told me. 

“In our culture, where we’re very productive, active, and busy, we often put our emotions—and the dilemmas, questions, and conflicts that we have about our lives and relationships—on the back burner,” she said. “By the time we find ourselves with alone time, those emotions come back up in full force. This can be really uncomfortable and distressing.” All of which can make people want to run away from solitude. “The skill here,” she said, “is learning how to sit with those emotions, allowing them to take their turn and their time … to listen to them as messengers of valuable information.”

Better emotional regulation can emerge from learning how to introspect, or the ability to enjoy and be curious about your inner workings. It can mean asking questions like: What do I believe? Who am I? What do I want? “The more we can become comfortable with that self-dialogue, the more rich solitude will be for us,” she says.

Protecting time

“When I first started solitude research I was newly married and I had no children yet, so solitude was easy [to find] back then,” Thomas told me.  

With two children now, finding solitude has become a challenge and requires that she put into practice additional skills to make sure she’s protecting that time (this sounded familiar). These include carving out the time in the first place (think calendar blocks), “negotiating for that time, and validating to myself this is okay, it’s not selfish, I shouldn’t feel guilty for taking this time.” Claiming this time can be especially hard for those embedded in cultures that prize sociability, or when your family or community demands a lot of your time and attention.

Connecting more deeply with ourselves when we're alone allows for deeper relationships with others.

Part of protecting time means using it mindfully. It’s about having the self-awareness to consider what you really need and want so that you don’t regret those choices later. It also means knowing when a few minutes spent Instagram shopping is helpful as a tool to recharge (like in the Netflix example earlier), or if it’s just an avoidance tactic. 

For instance, I used to feel guilty about using my small shard of free time in the evening to watch some TV. At the same time, I was too exhausted after putting my son to bed to immediately start reading and journaling, activities I enjoy, but that require some cognitive and emotional space. I’ve found that watching a show helps me decompress enough to be able to enter into a more nourishing solitude space. (And to accept that some nights, journaling is only a sentence or two.)

Finding balance

Keep an eye out for physical signals that you need solitude. This might be feeling depleted or overstimulated. Or, if you’ve had enough alone time, you might feel lonely or bored. 

These signals can be confusing. For instance, if we feel bored at the beginning of our time alone, that may indicate not that we need to call a friend, but rather that we haven’t identified the activities that will prove most meaningful for us in solitude. It could be a sign that we haven’t yet identified what we need from being alone.

“The function of boredom is not to make us bored, it is a call to action,” writes neuroscience professor James Danckert. “It is telling us that what we are doing now is failing to satisfy us in some important way. But its purpose is not to just push us into any action. Boredom encourages us to choose actions that give expression to who we are.”

Knowing when to stay in solitude or return to social life requires discernment and inner knowing. Are you choosing actions that give expression to who you really are?  

This points to what Thomas thinks is the best part of cultivating solitude: It brings you closer to yourself so you’re better able to pick up on the little signals of what you need and want—not just when you’re alone, but all the time. “When I don’t have time to be alone, I miss myself, I long to reconnect,” she says. “That's the real treasure of solitude.”

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He was finally, blessedly, alone. No crying baby or clingy mistress to interrupt the whirling of his brilliant mind or sap his creative juices.

And yet, the artist still wasn’t satisfied. In January 1920, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke recounted one of our most enduring human tensions. “In addition to my voice which points beyond me, there is still the sound of that small longing which originates in my solitude and which I have not entirely mastered,” he writes. “It is a whistling-woeful tone that blows through a crack in this leaky solitude—it calls out, alas, and summons others to me!”

That whistling-woeful tone is one I’ve heard before too. As an introvert and a writer, I crave time to be alone with my thoughts, to better understand what I’m thinking and feeling. Less romantically, I find myself pulled toward work in the evenings after putting my kid to bed rather than socializing with friends, even when I know that human connection is likely a healthier way to spend my time than logging more hours at my laptop. Checking items off my to-do list is a short-term, ephemeral pleasure, but not a long-term recipe for satisfaction and happiness.  

Here is the conundrum: Without enough alone time, I feel disconnected from myself. But too much alone time makes me feel like I’m losing part of myself, too—the part of me that comes alive when I’m with other people. When weeks go by without seeing friends or with only superficial experiences of connection, I feel a different kind of yearning to be seen, heard, and understood. I’ve often wondered: How do I find a balance? And is that even the right question to ask?  

An irresolvable tension

In 1791, physician Johann Georg Zimmermann published a book that, despite its downer title, became a smash hit. Titled Solitude Considered With Respect to Its Dangerous Influence Upon the Mind and Heart, it pointed to an enduring question about the human condition. In his own book, the History of Solitude, David Vincent writes, “Zimmermann’s treatise was a way station in a debate about social engagement and disengagement that stretches back to classical times and has acquired new urgency in our own era. Current anxieties about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ and the fate of interpersonal relations in digital culture are reformulations of dilemmas that have surfaced in prose and verse for more than two millennia.”

Perhaps we continue to return to this question because there is no real permanent sense of “balance” to be found. Andy Merolla, a professor of communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that it “seems to be one of the most fundamental and irresolvable tensions.”

Without enough alone time, I feel disconnected from myself. But too much alone time makes me feel like I’m losing part of myself, too—the part of me that comes alive when I’m with other people.

At an individual level, consider how we develop our identities in the first place. According to attachment theory, children need to feel a sense of safety and security with their caregivers so they’re able to venture out into the world to explore and build independent identities. Interdependence begets independence. Later, as we develop relationships with our romantic partners, we must continue to find the boundaries between others and self by “creating the sense of a ‘we’ identity without losing ‘me’ and ‘you,’” says Merolla.   

And there is another dimension of this ancient dilemma that causes it to endure—perhaps in an irresolvable way.

Solitude masking a desire for control

At its core, the struggle to find balance is also a struggle to wrest control and certainty from an unpredictable world. Solitude, Merolla points out, gives us a kind of illusion of control that isn’t present in our social relationships, which can be variable and messy. 

When you choose to spend your night watching Netflix or journaling, you know what to expect. When you go to a party, it’s less predictable. It can be hard, then, to ever know: How much does our desire to be alone come from a genuine desire to be with ourselves and how much is about avoiding the unknown? Further complicating this tension is the idea that self-care and compassion are important components of well-being. But when does staying home become an excuse to maintain control? 

Alone time becomes even more seductive if we use it not only to recharge but to work toward professional or personal goals. Then, it can lead to the “direct acquisition of rewards, unlike social interaction which is more variable and can lead to disappointment,” Merolla explains.

The art of choosing the unpredictable

While we may be able to achieve more on our own these days—supercharged by technological advancements and remote work—we also know that a myopic focus on goal achievement does not typically result in what philosophers and scientists would call the good life. Indeed, in the longest running scientific study designed to understand the factors that make for a good life, researchers found that the most significant factor in happiness and longevity is the strength of our relationships to others.

The question, then, is not only how do we integrate social connection into our lives but how do we integrate unpredictability into it? 

The key might be broadening the scope for what counts as social connection, letting go of our search for the perfect relationship or ideal social experience, and reminding ourselves of the positives of unpredictability. 

How much does our desire to be alone come from a genuine desire to be with ourselves and how much is about avoiding the unknown?

Let’s start with something more basic. What do we mean by social connection? According to Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who also helped lead the long-running study mentioned above, our relationships can constitute just about anyone who you regularly interact or socialize with. It could be a romantic partner, friend, or coworker, or it could be your barista, neighbor, or the acquaintance you see on your morning commute. Any of these connections can contribute to greater well-being. Indeed, research suggests that relational diversity, or cultivating connections across our lives—including with strong ties, like a romantic partner, and weak ties, like a stranger—is a significant contributor to well-being. 

In a commencement address, the writer Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out that many of the interpersonal conflicts we have in our marriages stem from wanting one person to be an entire community. To paraphrase him: We cannot be “whole societies” to each other. Instead, he advises, “everybody here [should] join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.”

Vonnegut’s larger point is not that we should all surround ourselves with morons, but that we’d be well-served to choose the messiness and imperfections of connection when we can.  

A simple place to start

“A lot of us have very high expectations for ourselves and other people, which is a really good thing, but that can also raise expectations in a way that is unrealistic,” Merolla told me. That can make us unwilling to engage in a social situation unless we’re confident of meeting those expectations.

To counter this, we can ask ourselves questions to “come to terms with the challenges of connection” and the patience required to realize the benefits of relationships. These are questions like: What do I need and want out of my relationships? How can I come to terms with the imperfections of others and my own—and the notion of a perfect relationship or interaction? Am I okay with the fact that I may pursue these aspects of relationships and fail, and that doesn’t mean I’ve done something wrong? 

Exploring these questions can help us find value not only in certain types of relationships—for instance, the ease and warmth you might feel with your closest friend—but with other more complicated ones too.

The question, then, is not only how do we integrate social connection into our lives but how do we integrate unpredictability into it? 

Another question: How might relationships be unpredictably positive? Unpredictability tends to have a negative valence, making it feel threatening or stressful. But social interaction can also surprise us with how good it makes us feel: lifting us from a bad mood, helping us discover a new side of ourselves, or simply allowing us to process a challenging experience. Positive relationships, even if they’re sometimes unpredictable, are important ways that we manage stress, Waldinger said.

Indeed, this seemed to be part of Rilke’s mental health strategy; throughout his life, he wrote thousands of letters, using them to find the balance between connection and solitude, to allow vulnerability and messiness to puncture the illusion of control. 

Just like there are many valuable kinds of relationships, there are also many ways to connect. If a three-hour dinner feels too ambitious (or impossible with other obligations), even smaller gestures of connection count. Merolla suggests one simple, though not always easy, step: Reach out to someone you’ve been wanting to connect with, and let them know you were thinking about them. 

“Sometimes we think people don’t want to connect with us as much as they do, and we can feel like the time for certain relationships has passed,” he says. “But there's something wonderful about knowing someone was thinking about you. Even if the person doesn't respond, it doesn't mean you did something incorrect. It’s just the messiness of interdependence.”

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