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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Already a subscriber? Sign up for the book club here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Prosecution in Suffolk County

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human discretion as a natural experiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

The power of leniency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More lessons from Suffolk County

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Leniency in felony cases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy change one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy change two

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Putting it all together

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

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

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

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

Leniency doesn’t mean no consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Good people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

The high ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Non-exonerating evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Costs and benefits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Overcoming abandonment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Good judgment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Practical wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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.

Welcome to our selection of Notable Books for 2025. Each year, we review hundreds of newly published titles that cover the science of human behavior.

We select books that expand our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world; that deepen our knowledge of the events shaping our lives; that sharpen the way we do behavioral science and design; that help us navigate life more effectively.

As you explore the Notable Books of 2025, we hope you find titles on the topics you care about and delight in something unexpected.

— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief and Heather Graci, Editor

This is our sixth annual selection of Notable Books. You can find previous selections here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.

10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children's Lives
By Jean M. Twenge

From the back cover: “Parenting today often feels like an uphill battle, with technology invading every corner of our kids’ lives. From the rise of social media addiction to the growing mental health crisis among children and teens, parents are grappling with how they can create a healthy, balanced relationship with technology for their kids. . . . Drawing on her decades as a psychologist studying the impact of technology and mental health and her personal experience as the mother of three teenagers, Twenge offers ten actionable rules for raising independent and well-rounded children.”

Abundance
By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

From the back cover: “Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance.”

After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
By Dean Spears and Michael Geruso

From the back cover: “Most people on Earth today live in a country where birth rates already are too low to stabilize the population: fewer than two children for every two adults. In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound a wakeup call, explaining why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to do now.”

The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
By Sophia Rosenfeld

From the back cover: “Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. . . . The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.”

Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World
By Toby Stuart

From the back cover: “Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit.”

The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters
By Christine Webb

From the back cover: “The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence. . . . [Webb] gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves.”

The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life
By Rob Dunn

From the back cover: “Nature is red in tooth and claw, but in equal measure, life works together. Cells host even smaller life, wrapped in a web of mutual interdependence. Ants might go to war, but they also tend fungi, aphids, and even trees. And we humans work . . . with yeast, crops, and pets. Ecologists call these beneficial relationships mutualisms. And they might be the most important forces in the evolution of life. We humans often act as though we are all alone, independent from the rest of life. As The Call of the Honeyguide shows, we are not.”

Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities
By Nilanjana Dasgupta

From the back cover: “How can ordinary people fight for social justice? Can individual actions change structural inequality? . . . Social psychologist Nilanjana Dasgupta offers a science-driven approach to achieving social change, arguing that small changes to the “wallpaper”—the local cultures around us—are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts, or relying solely on good intentions.”

Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making
By Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei

From the back cover: “Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei . . . show how the focus on rationality, narrowly understood, fails to fully describe how we think about our decisions, much less help us make better ones. Notably, it overlooks the positive contribution that framing—how we determine what aspects are most important to us—contributes to good decisions. Schwartz and Schuldenfrei argue that our choices should be informed by our individual ‘constellation of virtues,’ allowing for a far richer understanding of the decisions we make and helping us to live more integrated and purposeful lives.”

Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices
By Baruch Fischhoff

From the back cover: “Decisions describes the evolution of decision science . . . through its application to challenging personal and public policy decisions, since the inception of the field. Baruch Fischhoff covers all major topics in basic research, including how people create options, determine what matters to them, evaluate their chances of achieving those goals, and engage their emotions. He shows how those processes play out in an exceptionally wide variety of decisions regarding health, safety, the environment, disasters, and national security, among other topics. He also examines how decision-making abilities vary across individuals and across the lifespan, as well as the ethics and politics of how research is conducted and its results are shared and applied.”

Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World
By Emma Holten

From the back cover: “Emma Holten traces how economic thinkers—from the Enlightenment onwards—created a value framework that overlooked and neglected ‘women's work’ and acts of care. She reveals how the economic models that drive political decisions today are just as flawed, giving us unparalleled monetary wealth, but causing deep social harms that are hurting us all.”

Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes
By Sunita Sah

From the back cover: “How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something but ended up swallowing your words, shaking your head, and just going along? . . . In a moment when many of us are anxious and unsure what to do—whether we’re confronting injustice on a social scale or facing something closer to home . . . Sunita Sah offers simple strategies to activate your values.”

The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace
By Rosalind Chow

From the back cover: “The way we currently network and engage in mentorship isn’t working. Given the ever-evolving nature of the workplace, transactional networking and company-enforced mentorship programs simply don’t help make our professional relationships more authentic or our workplaces more equitable. What we need instead is sponsorship.

“What’s the difference between mentorship and sponsorship? Mentorship involves helping a mentee change their behavior, while sponsorship involves changing how other people see a protégé. Sponsorship is as important, if not more so, than mentorship in determining who gets ahead, making it a more effective way to promote social equality and inclusion in the workplace.”

The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map
By Alex Hutchinson

From the back cover: “More than just a need to get outside, the search for the unknown is a primal urge that has shaped the history of our species and continues to mold our behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand. . . . Alex Hutchinson refutes the myth that, in our fully mapped digital world, the age of exploration is dead. Instead, the itch to discover new things persists in all of us, expressed not just on the slopes of Everest but in the ways we work, play, and live.”

The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell—and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose
By Jonas Olofsson

From the back cover: “Our sense of smell guides our lives far more than our screen-heavy, sight-privileged era would suggest. It animates our experience of food and drink, helps us access memories, and strengthens our intimacy with each other. . . . Jonas Olofsson uncovers the sophisticated processes that drive our olfactory system, with profound implications for how we perceive the world around us.”

Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter
By Juliet Schor

From the back cover: “Juliet Schor . . . shares her pioneering analysis of the benefits of a shorter work week, how companies can achieve them, why the concept has taken so long to emerge and gain acceptance, and why doing so will help a company’s employees and its bottom line. The book is a blueprint for implementing a change that once seemed radical, but is now within reach.”

Read an excerpt from Four Days a Week on Behavioral Scientist: “The rapid development of digital technology and AI, and the efficiency gains that come with it, is an opportunity to reverse that trend. But will it? There are powerful structural factors operating to keep hours high. We saw this in the Industrial Revolution. Those technological breakthroughs led to longer, not shorter, hours of work. In recent decades, digitization has transformed work in many occupations and industries, but in the U.S. hours haven’t fallen.”

The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing
By Mary-Frances O'Connor

From the back cover: “Coping with death and grief is one of the most painful human experiences. While we can speak to the psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies. . . . As she did in The Grieving Brain, O’Connor combines illuminating studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being..”

Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours
By Corinne Low

From the back cover: “For women in America today, the promise of ‘having it all’ is an ever-elusive carrot. Faced with unsustainable demands in every sphere, we are certainly doing it all—but at a steep cost. . . . In Having It All, Wharton professor and economist Dr. Corinne Low unpacks the hidden factors that influence women’s decision-making, and how the unintended consequences of these choices alter the course of our lives. From when and whether to get married and (or) have children to what type of career to pursue, whether to obtain an advanced degree to where to live.”

How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past
By Steve Ramirez

From the back cover: “In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez explores how scientists discovered that memories are fluid—they change over time, can be erased, reactivated, and even falsely implanted in the lab. Reflecting on his own path as a scientist, he examines how memory manipulation shapes our imagination and sense of self. If we can erase a deeply traumatic memory, would it change who we are? And what would that change mean anyway? Throughout, Ramirez carefully considers the ethics of artificially controlling memory, exploring how we might use this tool responsibly—for both personal healing and the greater good.”

How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty
By Elizabeth Weingarten

From the back cover: “What if our questions—the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose—are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Inspired by 150-year-old advice from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and backed by contemporary science, Elizabeth Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with these seemingly unsolvable questions. In her quest, Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of many others, whose lives have transformed through a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty.”

Read an excerpt from How to Fall in Love with Questions on Behavioral Scientist: “[Curiosity] is complex, mutating, unpredictable, and transformational. It is, fundamentally, an act of connection, an act of creating relationships between ideas and people. Asking questions then, becoming curious, is not just about wanting to find the answer—it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.”

The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives
By Michael Hallsworth

From the back cover: “In our increasingly distrusting and polarized nations, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But the strange truth is that our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy often backfire, creating what Michael Hallsworth calls The Hypocrisy Trap. . . . He shows how our relentless drive to expose inconsistency between words and deeds can actually breed more hypocrisy or, worse, cynicism that corrodes democracy itself.”

Read an excerpt from The Hypocrisy Trap on Behavioral Scientist: “The function of hypocrisy in politics and life is more complex than we recognize. Indeed, democracy relies on the existence of some hypocrisy. For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely.”

The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking
By Leor Zmigrod

From the back cover: “The human brain faces a set of dilemmas every day: how to achieve coherence from fragmented sensory inputs and how to attain connection with other people in an increasingly atomized and isolating world. Ideologies offer a shortcut, providing easy answers, scripts to follow, and a sense of shared identity. But ideologies also come at a cost: demanding conformity and suppressing individuality through rigid rules, repetitive rituals, and intolerance. Once ideologies grip our minds, they fundamentally transform the way we think, act, and interact with others, making us less sensitive and adaptable. . . . While some individuals are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others, all of us can strive to be more flexible, and Zmigrod ultimately explains how we can keep our minds open in the face of extreme ideologies.”

Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal
By Max H. Bazerman

From the back cover: “Bazerman tells the sobering story of how fraud in a published paper about inducing honesty upended countless academic careers, wreaked havoc in organizations that had implemented the idea of ‘signing first,’ and undermined faith in academic research and publication.”

Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others
By Adam Galinsky

From the back cover: “Inspiring leaders aren’t born—instead, we can inspire or infuriate in any given moment through our behavior, words, or presence. . . . Galinsky identifies the three . . . archetypes of truly great leaders and explains how each of us can develop these characteristics within ourselves to become more inspiring: Visionaries offer a big-picture, optimistic, and engaging vision of the future; Exemplars are courageous and calm protectors who authentically express their passion while remaining consistent in word and deed; Mentors encourage, empower, and elevate others while challenging them to reach their potential.”

The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World
By Robert J. Coplan

From the back cover: “Solitude is part of the human experience. But just like other relationships, your relationship with solitude can be satisfying, intimate, and enhance your well-being, or it can leave you wanting, stuck in a cycle of sadness, anxiety, or anger. . . . Most of us have never thought carefully about how to get the most out of the time we spend by ourselves. . . . How can we unlock the positive power of solitude?”

Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life
By Shigehiro Oishi

From the back cover: “What makes for a good life, he asks? Is it the simple, predictable pleasures we call happiness? Or can happiness lead to complacency and regret? Is the answer a deep sense of meaning and purpose? Or can a life of purpose invite narrow or misplaced loyalties? Both happiness and meaning as paths to a good life have decades of scientific research to support them. But in recent years, Oishi has uncovered a third dimension to a good life, psychological richness. A psychologically rich life prioritizes curiosity, exploration, and a variety of experiences.”

Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results
By Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi

From the back cover: Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi “offer data-backed, actionable solutions that build fairness into the very fabric of the workplace. Their methods—tested at many organizations, and grounded in data proven to work in the real world—help us make fairer, and simply better, decisions. Using their three-part framework, employees at all levels can embed fairness into their everyday practices.”

Read an excerpt from Make Work Fair on Behavioral Scientist: “Men have never been asked to justify their presence in any position of power. It is only the people not in power today—including women and members of other underestimated groups—who are asked to make the case for why they deserve to be there. This is fundamentally unfair and fundamentally wrong.”

Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change
By Olga Khazan

From the back cover: “Is it really possible to change your entire personality in a year? . . . Olga Khazan had been spiraling toward an existential crisis. Though she treasured her loving relationship and her dream job, her neurotic personality often left her snatching dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness. . . In Me, But Better, Olga embarks on an experiment to see whether it’s possible to go from dwelling in dread to ‘radiating joy.’ For one year, Olga reluctantly clicked ‘yes’ on a bucket list of new experiences—from meditation to improv to sailing—that forced her to at least act happy. With a skeptic’s eye, Olga brings you on her journey through the science of personality.”

Read an excerpt from Me, But Better on Behavioral Scientist: “That’s the thing about conscientiousness: It’s hard to do it if you don’t already do it. You can wish that you were better organized or more productive and still not have the faintest idea how to get there. Many of us might be sold on the idea of personality change, but conscientiousness exemplifies how difficult it can be in practice: The very behaviors that turn you conscientious require a certain level of conscientiousness to perform.”

Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior
By Sandra Matz

From the back cover: “Sandra Matz reveals . . . how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg. Yet big data also holds enormous potential to help us live healthier, happier lives—for example, by improving our mental health, encouraging better financial decisions, or enabling us to break out of our echo chambers.”

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
By Rutger Bregman

From the back cover: “A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs. There's an antidote to this waste of talent, and it's called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world's biggest problems.”

My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America
By Ruth Braunstein

From the back cover: “Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against ‘taxpayer funded abortions,’ and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good. Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear.”

Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts
By Gregory M. Walton

From the back cover: “The emotional questions we face can define our lives. If you’re expecting an interaction to go wrong, that expectation can make it so. That’s spiraling down. But as . . . Greg Walton shows, when we see these questions clearly, we can answer them well. Known to social psychologists as wise interventions, these shifts in perspective can help us chart new trajectories for our lives. They help us spiral up.”

Read an excerpt from Ordinary Magic on Behavioral Scientist (our most read article of 2025): “Yet if our struggles arise, in part, from the inferences we draw, we have an opportunity. In my work, my colleagues and I identify early moments where people could go one way or the other. By understanding the questions that come up at critical junctures, we can offer people better ways to think through challenges—ways that can help them spiral up, instead of down.”

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
By Kurt Gray

From the back cover: “We all care about protecting ourselves and the vulnerable. Conflict arises, however, when we have different perceptions of harm. We get outraged when we disagree about who the ‘real’ victim is, whether we’re talking about political issues, fights with our in-laws, or arguments on the playground. . . . Gray provides a captivating new explanation for our moral outrage, and unpacks how to best bridge divides. If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question—what harms do they see?”

Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality—and Why Men Still Win at Work
By Cordelia Fine

From the back cover: “Cordelia Fine examines . . . why gender inequality is embedded in the workplace and why it has to change. . . . She examines two of the most prominent movements in the corporate world. The Different But Equal viewpoint espouses that women are in the jobs they want despite their lower status and salaries. In the meantime, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has become a slogan that emphasizes productivity and profit, not fair play. Fine shows how both are wrong and the bad effects on everyone when men are still stuck in traditional breadwinner roles and women are having to fight for their due.”

The Period Brain: The New Science of Why We PMS and How to Fix It
By Sarah E. Hill

From the back cover: “Sarah E. Hill explains why we feel so universally icky before our periods—and what to do about it. The problem isn’t that women are hormonal; the problem is that the second half of the menstrual cycle—the luteal phase, when the hormone progesterone rises and estrogen decreases—has been systematically ignored by science and medicine. . . . Because the luteal phase is understudied, every bit of health, diet, and relationship advice you’ve followed is based on that first, estrogen-glow half of the month or, worse, was designed for men.”

Reset: How to Change What's Not Working
By Dan Heath

From the back cover: “Changing how we work can feel overwhelming. Like trying to budge an enormous boulder. We’re stifled by the gravity of the way we’ve always done things. And we spend so much time fighting fires—and fighting colleagues—that we lack the energy to shift direction. But with the right strategy, we can move the boulder. In Reset, Heath explores a framework for getting unstuck and making the changes that matter. The secret is to find ‘leverage points’: places where a little bit of effort can yield a disproportionate return. Then, we can thoughtfully rearrange our resources to push on those points.”

Read an excerpt from Reset on Behavioral Scientist: “You don’t want to fall into the. . . trap of relentlessly chasing a goal and triumphantly moving the numbers only to discover (whoops) that it was all misdirected energy. One simple way to avoid that misalignment—a goal that’s inconsistent with the real mission—is to ask a simple but powerful question: What’s the goal of the goal?”

The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know but Probably Don’t―Yet
By Keon West

From the back cover: “Studies and surveys show, time and again, that about 50 percent of people believe that racism is no longer an issue today. The other half would disagree—vehemently. And much of the writing on the subject of race and racism is equally divisive, in large part because so much of it is based on opinion and personal experience. It’s not grounded in empiricism. It’s not science. In The Science of Racism, social psychologist Keon West corrects that idea, moving this urgent conversation beyond anecdote and polemic in search of conclusive answers and solutions.”

Shift: Managing Your Emotions–So They Don't Manage You
By Ethan Kross

From the back cover: “Whether it’s anxiety about going to the doctor, boiling rage when we’re stuck in traffic, or devastation after a painful break-up, our lives are filled with situations that send us spiraling. But as difficult as our emotions can be, they are also a superpower. Far from being ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ emotions are information. When they’re activated in the right ways and at the right time, they function like an immune system, alerting us to our surroundings, telling us how to react to a situation, and helping us make the right choices. . . . In Shift, [Ethan Kross] dispels common myths . . . and provides a new framework for shifting our emotions so they don’t take over our lives.”

Read an excerpt from Shift on Behavioral Scientist: “As my wife and I hauled lawn chairs toward the soccer field, I thought about what a difference those four minutes and eleven seconds of Journey might have made for [my daughter] that day. It was such a small thing: a song on the car radio. But it had completely reshaped her emotional state, perhaps the type of game she was about to have, and even, in the future, her memories of this day.”

The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us
By Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall

From the back cover: “Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall establish a new way to think about our relational life: as existing within “social biomes”—complex ecosystems of moments of interaction with others. Each interaction we have, no matter how unimportant or mundane it might seem, is a building block of our identities and beliefs. Consequently, the choices we make about how we interact and who we interact with—and whether we interact at all—matter more than we might know. Merolla and Hall offer a sympathetic, practical guide to our vital yet complicated social lives and propose realistic ways to embrace and enhance connection and hope.”

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
By Nicholas Carr

From the back cover: “As Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the ‘superbloom’ of information that technology has unleashed. . . . Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it’s not too late to change ourselves.”

Read an excerpt from Superbloom on Behavioral Scientist: “History and psychology both suggest that, in politics as in art, generative AI will succeed in fulfilling the highest aspiration of its creators: to make the virtual feel more authentic than the real.”

Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
By Alison Wood Brooks

From the back cover: “All of us can struggle with difficult conversations, but we’re often not very good at the easy ones either. Though we do it all the time, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks argues that conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with possibilities for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. And yet conversations can also be a source of great joy. . . . Drawing on the new science of conversation, Brooks distills lessons that show how we can better understand, learn from, and delight each other.”

There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work
By Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer

From the back cover: “The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important. There has to be a better way. And there is: the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design. . . . It has been used in organizations around the world to close the gap between results promised and results delivered.”

Read an excerpt from There’s Got to Be a Better Way on Behavioral Scientist: “No one would ever ask a cardiac surgeon to stop an operation midstream because something supposedly more important popped up—we know this is a bad idea—yet we ask knowledge workers to do something similar multiple times a day because the immediate impact doesn’t seem onerous.”

A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality
By Daniel Yon

From the back cover: “How does your brain decide what it's seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realizing that the answer lies much closer to home. New research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists are: using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in.”

The Unbuilt Bench: Experimental Psychology on the Verge of Science
By David Peterson

From the back cover: “Psychological experts are omnipresent across public and private spheres. Nonetheless, psychology has always been dogged by questions about its authority and validity. . . . In The Unbuilt Bench, David Peterson argues that the scientific study of the mind and human behavior is a different sort of epistemic activity than the work of the natural sciences. Through fieldwork in ten experimental psychology laboratories and, as a comparison, a molecular biology lab, he explores the concrete practices of experimentation. 

“Ongoing improvement of research practice and technology at the frontiers of data collection, a process Peterson calls ‘bench-building,’ is essential to most sciences, since it opens new possibilities for experimentation. Psychology labs, however, largely lack an emphasis on bench-building. Instead, the discipline and its subfields gravitate toward different dimensions of scientific progress that focus on theory building and cultivation of outside audiences.”

Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence
By Jens Ludwig

From the back cover: “Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don’t, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe. . . . Progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.”

What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change
By Emily Falk

From the back cover: “With so many competing priorities pulling us in different directions every day--family, friends, work, our health—it can feel difficult to make decisions that are aligned with what we care about most. . . . Falk introduces readers to a new paradigm for understanding why we, and those around us, do what we do. This is the value calculation: the often-subconscious mechanism by which the brain computes our everyday choices. By learning how it works, Falk shows, we can learn to work more strategically with it—whether we want to embrace new activities and behaviors, connect more meaningfully with others, or become more effective leaders in our organizations and communities.”

What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life
By Allison Daminger

From the back cover: “While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and following up—and shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work. She argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traits—for example, she’s type A while he’s laid-back—and more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. . . . What’s on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families.”

Read an excerpt from What’s on Her Mind on Behavioral Scientist: “If I looked solely at their domestic activity, men and women did appear to differ systematically in their capacity for planning, problem-solving, and processing complex informational inputs. The catch is that the same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.”

What's Real about Race? Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society
By Rina Bliss

From the back cover: “Bliss traces the history of race, revealing how unscientific categories of identity—White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native—became the modern standard, and illuminates how the myth of biological races endures in science and society, warping our understanding of complex topics like intelligence, disease susceptibility, and behavior.”

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
By Steven Pinker

From the back cover: Steven Pinker “explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. . . . This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or ‘out there,’ is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives. . .  Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date.”

Read an excerpt from When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . on Behavioral Scientist: “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. . . . 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.”

The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now
By Richard H. Thaler and Alex Imas

From the back cover: “Over thirty years ago, Richard H. Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then. Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex O. Imas to write a new book. . . . Each chapter starts with an original Anomaly, retaining the spirit of its time stamp. Then, shifting to the present, the authors provide updates to each, asking how the original findings have held up and how the field has evolved since then.”

Read our conversation with the author on Behavioral Scientist: “In my view, behavioral economics is more relevant now than it was 30 years ago. Even though the promise of tech was that it would be less relevant, we have seen the opposite. It could be true that in 30 years, tech and AI will have led to more inequality and more exploitation of biases. . . . That’s a situation that we could end up in, and it’s really up to us where we go.”

When you purchase a book using a link, we’ll receive a small commission that helps us sustain our nonprofit mission.

Disclosure: Evan Nesterak and Heather Graci served as editorial consultants on Dan Heath's Reset. Evan served as an editorial consultant on Ethan Kross's Shift. Evan served as an early reader and peer-reviewer for MIT Press for The Hypocrisy Trap. Michael Hallsworth is a member of the BIT which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine. Richard Thaler and Barry Schwartz are members of the Behavioral Scientist's advisory board. Advisors do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

The post Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2025 appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Hypocrisy accusations are woven into the fabric of politics—they are probably the most common attacks that politicians make. As the political thinker David Runciman notes, hypocrisy is what you reach for “if you wish to do the maximum possible damage to your political opponent in thirty seconds of airtime.”

One side will point at, say, right-wing bastions of law and order who want leniency and special favors when their rule breaking comes to light. The other side will mock wealthy left-wing advocates of equality, diversity, and social justice who maneuver furiously to ensure spots at elite universities go to their children, not to those whom they claim to care about.

These attacks are so common because they are so easy. You don’t need to engage with or debate someone else’s principles on their own terms—that’s hard. All you have to do is say that they have not lived up to those principles, whatever they are.

Call it the “simple inconsistency” ploy. With it, you can avoid seeming to take a position. You’re not trying to push your own position on taxes or abortion. But you can give the impression that you’ve understood your opponent’s position because you’ve spotted an inconsistency that they apparently missed.

If we are making these kinds of attacks, we’re already in trouble. There’s no attempt to engage the other side on the issues and convince them they are wrong. A polarized era gives you few incentives to do that. But even if we can’t agree on any shared values, we can still attack the other lot for not living up to their values. That still has some bite. As Judith Shklar put it, when you don’t have a shared moral knowledge, “the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains.”

So hypocrisy accusations may be a symptom of breakdown and dysfunction. In a polarized world, you want to fire up your side with fury. Hypocrisy is a reliable source of fuel for the flames. As the temperature rises, you look around for even more stuff to chuck into the fire, and so the cycle continues.

The problem is that polarization crushes trust. When you point out the gap between your opponent’s words and deeds, on the slightest pretext, you aim to destroy trust in them. But they’re trying to do the same to you. As more accusations pile up, the effect is to reduce trust in politics and people in general. If everything and everyone seems fake, the result can be a thirst for a “real,” sincere, authentic politician to step forward. This person will offer the false promise of a politics free of hypocrisy. 

If everything and everyone seems fake, the result can be a thirst for a “real” politician to step forward. This person will offer the false promise of a politics free of hypocrisy.

What’s a better way forward? Well, let me say upfront what I’m not proposing. It would be quite simple to do a contrarian take that we all should just relax about political hypocrisy: “Let it go! We’re all being too uptight!” But there’s too much at stake to slip into easy, empty cynicism. The hypocrisy of malign deception can break down society’s vital systems until they fail completely. Nor can we simply stamp out hypocrisy in politics. 

As I write in my book, The Hypocrisy Trap, the function of hypocrisy in politics and life is more complex than we recognize. Indeed, democracy relies on the existence of some hypocrisy. For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely. 

It’s fairly obvious why we can’t let all hypocrisy slide. But we have a blind spot when it comes to understanding the effects of calling out hypocrisy relentlessly and trying to stamp out hypocrisy completely. And it’s a blind spot that erodes our trust in our political institutions and can mean we end up electing even more deceptive politicians. Taking a more practical and nuanced understanding of hypocrisy can allow us to participate in politics more effectively and with a clearer-eyed view of our elected leaders.

So how is our political environment being damaged by unrestrained accusations of hypocrisy? 

First, we’re creating cynicism by exhausting the concept. In politics, accusations of hypocrisy are relentless but not costless. We empty hypocrisy of meaning when we overuse it as an accusation. We make it just another term of abuse in the game of politics. As Judith Shklar explains, “In the unending game of mutual unmasking, the general level of sham rises. As each side tries to destroy the credibility of its rivals, politics becomes a treadmill of dissimulation and unmasking.” We end up mired in cynicism and distrust. 

Second, we’re distracting ourselves from the bigger issues. Ironically, these attempts at unmasking may end up missing things instead. If people are too focused on personal inconsistencies, they may not see how groups or institutions are creating a system where they can afford to play by different rules, with no consequences. Hypocrisy accusations may be distractions based on naive assumptions about how power can be curbed.

Third, we’re pushing ourselves toward what my book identifies as the bad “worlds” of hypocrisy. If we hound politicians for the slightest inconsistency, decent people who are aware of their flaws won’t enter politics. Instead, we will get people who aren’t aware of their flaws or who don’t care about them. If we get angry at politicians for falling short of an impossible standard, we will either end up with an ever more punitive attempt to enforce complete consistency, or a cynical state where no one cares about hypocrisy as long as they are strong enough to do what they want.

If all this is true, then we need to think differently about hypocrisy in politics. We don’t have to like hypocrisy—it’s so dislikeable. Instead, we need to accept that tolerating a certain level of hypocrisy in politics is the least-bad option overall.

For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely.

The first step is to realize that hypocrisy is unavoidable, at least in democracies. Anyone promising otherwise is also a hypocrite—and a potentially dangerous one. So we need a reckoning with all the reasons that hypocrisy is baked into democratic politics. Democracies are about power as well as principles, meaning that ambiguity and compromise are inevitable. Democracies allow a range of groups to exist, such as unions, religions, companies, and cities. Each wants to hold power and advance its interests. To get them onside, politicians need to persuade them—but the variety of interests means politicians need to present things a bit differently to each. That means inconsistency and compromise slip in.

If you end up getting power, things get even harder. You need to deliver for your group’s interests, which means you must be flexible, focused, and tactical. But, while being partisan, you also have to keep promoting principles such as freedom and the rule of law—and stick to the persuasive things you said to different groups in the past. Power needs to exist alongside principles; you can’t just ditch one or the other.

Unfortunately, that combination is not popular. The public hates it when politicians don’t live up to their big, clear claims. As Judith Shklar puts it, “Democracy generates disappointment, and a sense of always being deceived.”

Then comes the harder part. We need to edge toward an understanding that trying to stamp out political hypocrisy completely is both futile and self-defeating. But that’s difficult because politics makes antihypocrisy seductive. It feels so good when someone promises to rip away the suffocating lies and replace them with something real. It can also feel like the right thing to do. If a politician is promising to uphold ideals, supporting their stance seems like a blow against pervasive political cynicism. Maybe we can believe, just one more time, in something true?

Time to steel ourselves and accept that antihypocrisy is a false promise. In fact, we are just choosing between one kind of political hypocrite and another.

There are the politicians who engage in some pretense as part of the normal run of democratic politics. Those are the hypocrites we usually get angry about: the politicians who seem false, who we suspect are carefully controlling their public statements, while saying what they really think in back rooms. The other kind are the ones who deny that they ever act like this, who present themselves as unsullied by the dirty compromises of politics. They look down on the other politicians wallowing in the muck. They make a big, explicit play about not being hypocrites. These are the politicians who present themselves as true believers, the real deal, or as authentic straight talkers.

But hypocrisy in politics is unavoidable, so antihypocrites can never live up to their claims—especially if they want to get anything done. So we need to change our views and see that these politicians do not offer an escape from hypocrisy but just serve it up in a more deceptive form. They prey on our tendency to see ourselves as consistent, truthful people, and they claim that they, too, are just like that ideal self-image. In contrast, other politicians are toxic liars.

All this kicks away at our support for compromises that make democracies work. Instead, it offers a vision of politics as a quest for purity and truth. That vision is like a sweet treat that tastes good but makes us sicker in the end. The politician can never sustain it—democracy always disappoints—and that means an even more toxic collapse of trust later on.

Taking a more practical and nuanced understanding of hypocrisy can allow us to participate in politics more effectively and with a clearer-eyed view of our elected leaders.

To move our politics to a healthier place, we also need to come to terms with our part in creating political hypocrisy. We are inconsistent in the demands we place on politicians. We pull them between the logic of power and the logic of principles, depending on how we feel. But we don’t admit this. Instead, we embrace the fantasy of a simple war of principles or adopt a cynical view that everything’s just corrupt.

So we need to edge closer to understanding that democratic politics has to do contradictory things, and we play our part in that dynamic. That means not buying in completely to the idea that politics is about seeking truth and achieving purity but instead retaining the sense that it’s also an act of collective problem solving.

That double view of politics is hard to face directly because it triggers an unpleasant dissonance. It’s easier to keep switching effortlessly between demands for complete sincerity and demands to just get something done. But forcing either extreme breaks democratic politics. We need to recognize that in politics, inconsistency is a feature, not a bug.

That means realizing that we may not be choosing between truth and lies but between “politicians who are sincere but untruthful and those who are honest but hypocritical.” It means recognizing the value in flawed striving for something better, rather than rejecting the attempt altogether. And it means tolerating the flexing of absolute rules when the context demands compromise.

I’m not urging desiccated centrism, stunted ambitions, or lazy complacency. We shouldn’t abandon political convictions but rather see them as the framework for navigating trade-offs. But the path is not easy. It requires tolerating compromise, incoherence, and maybe even disappointment. That goes against our political instincts and incentives. But maybe those incentives will change if we realize how our overuse of hypocrisy takes us to dark places when it goes unchecked.

Excerpted from The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives by Michael Hallsworth. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hallsworth. All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Michael Hallsworth is a member of the BIT which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine. Evan Nesterak of Behavioral Scientist served as an early reader and peer-reviewer for MIT Press for the book.

The post Our Hypocrisy Blind Spot appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Kathy and Randall run a home with three teenagers, two dogs, two birds, and two careers. It’s “an all-hands-on-deck kind of operation,” explained Kathy. Both spouses recalled fighting over their division of labor when their children were young but said that in the intervening years they’d found harmony. Kathy explained why: “We both went where our strengths are.” She acts as “the planner” or, as Randall put it, “the foreman.” Whereas Kathy identifies as “a control freak,” she lovingly referred to Randall as “a mess.”

Kathy and Randall’s story is a tale of labor allocation driven not by gender but by finding the right “fit” between person and task. Kathy is a “control freak,” so she manages the family calendar. Randall is “so good at the home repair kind of stuff” that he takes the lead on DIY projects. This arrangement seemed perfectly logical to me as I sat across the dining table from Randall and Kathy in turn.

It was only later, when I reflected on their story and compared it to those I was hearing at countless other tables, that I began to wonder: Are cognitive labor leaders born or made?

Cognitive household labor is a set of mental processes aimed at figuring out what the family requires, what it owes to others, and how best to ensure that both requirements and obligations are fulfilled. Cognitive labor operates as a near-constant “background job” for the spouse who acts as cognitive laborer-in-chief. Most of my interviewees, including Kathy and Randall, argued that the responsibility fell to the spouse who was best equipped to handle it. But I ultimately came to a different conclusion: Cognitive labor leaders are largely made, and in different-gender couples, it’s most often women who undergo this transformation.

Kathy and Randall’s story provides important clues about how and why this happens. Kathy, for example, was the undisputed family scheduler. Until very recently, she even made Randall’s medical appointments for him. Yet one of Randall’s core professional responsibilities as vice principal at a nearby junior high was to manage the calendars of hundreds of middle schoolers. “I do scheduling for the entire [grades] seven to nine,” he explained, along with coordinating parent-teacher meetings and events for the school’s enrichment program. Randall also described himself as a stickler for timeliness, a relic of his old military days. I doubted he would have lasted long as an administrator or a soldier if his organizational skills were as lackluster as he and Kathy implied.

Cognitive labor operates as a near-constant “background job” for the spouse who acts as cognitive laborer-in-chief.

My research shows that the apparently individual “personality traits” said to drive couples’ cognitive labor inequality are better understood as skills. Men and women in different-gender couples tend to deploy the more general capabilities they possess differently across the paid and unpaid spheres of their lives. Individual traits undoubtedly interact with these skills, placing upper and lower bounds on what is possible. Yet context—including gendered judgments about who is to blame when something goes wrong at home—plays a larger role than most couples acknowledge. Over time, it seems, gendered behaviors help create and maintain the very selves they are said to reflect.

The characteristics required to run a household—like being organized, proactive, and a good multitasker—overlap considerably with the set of capacities psychologists call “executive function.” Self-control, working memory, and mental flexibility, among the core components of executive function, are also core to many cognitive tasks.

Though executive function and the abilities required of a cognitive laborer may not be identical, the former is a useful proxy for the latter because researchers have devoted considerable attention to studying whether executive function can be taught and how it differs by gender. The broad consensus is that specific components of executive function can be improved with training and practice. Gender differences are apparent in some individual components of executive functioning, but neither men nor women have a systematic overall advantage. Further, findings of gender differences differ widely across studies and appear to depend heavily on measurement and testing strategies.

This research conflicts with my interviewees’ focus on immutability (“I am who I am”) and individual difference. Indeed, if I looked solely at their domestic activity, men and women did appear to differ systematically in their capacity for planning, problem-solving, and processing complex informational inputs. The catch is that the same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.

Cognitive labor leaders are largely made, and in different-gender couples, it’s most often women who undergo this transformation.

Nina, for example, described her husband, Julian, as temperamentally ill-equipped for the frenetic multitasking and constant forecasting she relied on to juggle home, paid work, and childcare. “If something is broken in the house and Julian gets used to it, he will not consider it a problem,” she explained.

But Julian worked as a surgeon—a position that certainly relies on attention to detail and deadlines. He acknowledged the contrast between his professional and domestic personas. It was “mostly time [availability]” that prevented him from doing more of the cognitive labor at home, he began. “And then also—I mean with the mental stuff I think Nina’s much more attentive to all the things that need to be done . . . I can mostly go a very long time before it hits me that now is the time to deal with it.” Quickly, he clarified: “I mean, in the home life. Not, like, work.”

Nina made a similarly astute observation about this contradiction. “I’m also just, like, more of a detail-oriented person than Julian,” she mused. “Except with regards to his career, where apparently he’s . . . he’s a doctor, so he has to . . .” Nina trailed off, changing the subject rather than dwell on this puzzling inconsistency.

“What do you think is different about your attention to those things in the work side [versus the home side]?” I asked Julian. He thought for a moment before speculating:

“I don’t know. I mean, I think just being in a pretty busy job. I think in my work pretty consistently—I tend to try to prioritize basically all of that, and don’t spend a lot of time with that [home] stuff. [Paid work] comes at the expense of, like, proactive work [at home]. I think I’m likely fairly intellectually exhausted. I don’t come home and think about what needs to be arranged for childcare.”

Several other men acknowledged a similar contrast between paid work and home. Alan described himself as the “ideas guy” in his marriage and his wife as the “project manager” who figures out “what are we going to do and how [would] that actually work and, like, the nitty-gritty.” But this arrangement is “funny,” he admitted, because Alan works full-time as a project manager.

The same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.

Contrasts like these point to a pattern of differential deployment rather than differential ability. It was less that men like Randall, Julian, and Alan were innately laid-back and more that different contexts brought out different sides of them. Why? Men who recognized the discrepancies between their work and home personas argued that by the time they finished with paid work, they had little mental bandwidth left.

This is a logical argument, if we imagine cognitive labor capacity as a tank that refills overnight or a muscle depleted with use. However, when it was a woman who held a more demanding job—in terms of number of hours or schedule (in)flexibility—different logic prevailed. In a handful of cases, women’s cognitively taxing paid work was referenced as further evidence of her inherent managerial prowess. Bridget, for instance, described herself as the “organizer” and her husband, Jimmy, as the “executer” in their relationship. By way of explanation, she added, “My [paid] job is basically to project-manage things . . . the dynamic in our relationship is very clearly a result of that.” Rather than competing with her domestic responsibilities, Bridget argued that the professional skills she’d honed enhanced her domestic capacity.

Still, many women did experience their paid work as intellectually exhausting and a threat to their managerial role at home. But rather than accept this as an unfortunate reality, women viewed their occupational demands as a problem in need of a solution. They typically responded by making professional changes rather than by expecting or asking their husband to pick up the slack at home. This was true even of women who outearned their husband, sometimes by a significant margin. Cassie, a telecommunications executive with an annual income more than twice her husband’s, described herself as “a workaholic” who was formerly “consumed” by her job. Despite her intense career, Cassie did not cut herself much slack at home: “I was literally working [for pay] from, like, 6:00 a.m. ’til 9:30 p.m. and then would get up the next day and do it again. And [my husband] was working ’til 9:30 at night, so I would have to come home and still do everything that needs to be done when you’re a parent.”

Cassie remembered reaching a breaking point one evening when she was giving her six-month-old a bath. “My [work] phone was going off and was buzzing, and it’s always numbers, numbers, numbers. And nothing happened to [my son], but he turned and I wasn’t paying attention. And I was just like, ‘I gotta get out of here, ’cause I’m not paying attention to my child while he’s in the tub.’” Soon after this incident, Cassie switched from the commercial to the government division of her company, where work hours were considerably less intense. Though she had likely lowered the ceiling on her future compensation, Cassie now felt she had sufficient bandwidth to be an attentive parent. Intellectual exhaustion was not, in her mind, a valid reason to neglect her domestic responsibilities.

Cassie’s story suggests the “facts” of partners’ employment—hours, income, schedule flexibility—mattered less than the meaning couples ascribed to those facts. While men’s paid work was allowed to deplete their cognitive reserves, women’s was not. This gender asymmetry meant that women often experienced more obstacles to their career growth than their husband faced.

Men and women are not merely responding to personal differences when allocating cognitive labor. Rather, their choices are creating and sustaining those differences.

It would be easy to dismiss men as bad actors weaponizing their incompetence to shirk responsibility, or women as too willing to give up on their professional ambitions. But this is at best an incomplete explanation—gendered social forces also channel men and women in different directions. Women are held socially accountable for most domestic outcomes, like a messy house or a poorly dressed child. Meanwhile, men are more on the hook for a family’s financial outlook. Men and women alike internalize these gender-specific societal expectations, a fact that helps explain, if not fully excuse, what could sometimes seem like a myopic focus on men’s careers.

Men were also not the only ones who practiced selective deployment of their abilities. Women who demonstrated considerable skill in most other areas of domestic life, for instance, sometimes displayed a curious incapacity when it came to finances. Holly, who described frustration with her husband Tyler’s passive approach to household management, was more laid-back about finances: “He’s a lot better at that than I am. So he’s always running numbers in his head and thinking about finances. I’m just more on the, like, ‘Let’s make sure that [our daughter’s] fed’ and, you know, being a mom, and let him worry about the financial stuff.”

When we link mind-use patterns to innate traits, we miss the critical role learned skills and honed capacities play in shaping how “good” one is at cognitive household labor. Men and women are not merely responding to personal differences when allocating cognitive labor. Rather, their choices are creating and sustaining those differences.  When men deploy their problem-solving and planning skills at the office, they fail to recognize how those same skills might be useful at home. Yet these “choices” are only partially individual: men and women alike are responding to a range of social forces that make it easier for women to acquire domestic knowledge and build family-centered relationships and that disincentivize men from using up their limited energy on domestic matters for which they are unlikely to be held accountable.

These forces are not determinants, however. While couples like Kathy and Randall may be the norm, other different-gender couples managed to craft a more balanced division of cognitive labor. And regardless of their actual allocation, the happiest couples were those who believed in their own ability to reshape their patterns as goals and circumstances changed.

Excerpted from What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life © 2025 by Allison Daminger. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

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