The year was 1948. Only three years had passed since the Axis powers signed the instrument of surrender effectively ending the Second World War. Fifty nations had taken part in the conflict that saw genocide and the first use of nuclear weapons. An estimated 50 million lives were lost and another 19–28 million died in the aftermath from disease and famine.

Borders had been redrawn across Europe. The Nuremberg trials had concluded on the international stage but were still underway in U.S. military courts. The United Nations was still in its infancy. Expansions to the Geneva Convention to protect civilians during war were still a year away. The Cold War loomed on the horizon.

It was in this year that social psychologist Muzafer Sherif began sketching out his vision for an experiment that he hoped would get at the heart of intergroup conflict and demonstrate the means to resolve it. In a letter to his former Ph.D. advisor, Gardner Murphy, he laid out his idea: two groups of boys set in competition with one another while attending a summer camp. Using standard camp activities, Sherif would manufacture conflict between the groups and then set about uncovering the best means of restoring peace. The project would prove to be a landmark in psychology that continues to influence the field some 70 years later.

After two major world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists began asking themselves what they could offer to help stave off a third global encounter. After receiving an influx of European scientists who had experienced fascism firsthand, the field of social psychology in the United States in particular was primed to lead this new focus of research.

Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish émigré who found himself searching for a home in the immediate postwar years. He held master’s degrees from Istanbul University and Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia University in 1935. After returning to Turkey following his doctoral studies, Sherif began to speak out against a growing fascist regime, lending his support to the Communist Party of Turkey. His support of communism led to his arrest, albeit briefly; he escaped longer imprisonment thanks only to his brother’s political connections and by agreeing to leave Turkey. This arrangement meant that in 1945, Sherif returned to the United States. After breaking Turkey’s law forbidding civil servants (including professors) from marrying a foreigner, by wedding an American woman, fellow psychologist Carolyn Wood Sherif, any thought of one day returning to his home country was permanently rescinded.

And so as the world grappled with the aftermath of global conflict, Muzafer Sherif searched for a new home in a country where he did not hold citizenship and where his political views would eventually draw the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although initially successful in finding a fellowship at Princeton University, Muzafer spent the better part of two years searching for opportunities for himself and for Carolyn, a search made all the more urgent by the arrival of the first of their three daughters. During the process, he was told that universities weren’t in the process of giving aid to foreign researchers. Eventually, with the help of colleagues, Sherif managed to secure a Rockefeller Research Fellowship at Yale University.

It was this fellowship that allowed him to pursue his vision of an experiment that he hoped could act as a microcosm for global relations. Working collaboratively with Carolyn, he led his colleagues (including Marvin B. Sussman, Robert Huntington, O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, and William R. Hood) through a series of three camp studies between 1949 and 1954.

These camps saw 11- and 12-year-old boys establish tight-knit groups with self-appointed team names like the “Red Devils,” “Pythons,” and “Rattlers” enter into rivalries that descended into name calling, the destruction of the opposing group’s cabin, and even physical fights. Viewing the young campers as mirrors for larger global unrest, Sherif and his colleagues believed the camps offered the chance to understand conflict and, more importantly, develop and test ideas to help unravel it. The challenge became how to put the vision into action.

The Camps:

• 1949 Happy Valley Camp, Winsted, CT — Red Devils and Bulldogs
• 1953 Camp Talualac, Middle Grove, NY — Panthers and Pythons
• 1954 Camp Tom Hale, Robbers Cave State Park, Wilburton, OK — Eagles and Rattlers

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Part 2: Call to Adventure

Heavy blankets, pajamas, shorts, swim trunks, underwear, a softball glove—the items listed on the bulletin sent to campers sound like what might appear on any standard camp packing list. Parents were reminded to label everything they sent with their son and urged not to overpack. As a teaser, campers were told activities would include swimming, hiking, and overnight camping. For all intents and purposes, a typical summer camp.

The boys selected for each camp came from remarkably similar backgrounds: they were Protestant, white, from middle-class two-parent homes, average students, healthy, and well-adjusted. Most were 11 or 12 years old, and most had previous camp experience. This similarity was deliberate. Sherif wanted to control as many variables as he could in order to isolate the effects of the experiment; in some cases, his research team painstakingly interviewed the parents and teachers of potential campers and reviewed their school and medical records.

A key part of Sherif’s experiment involved observing the boys covertly. To pull off the ruse, the research team played the role of camp staff working alongside junior camp counselors. The researchers were told to avoid clothing with identifiable insignia that might reveal their relationship to the university and to record their observations privately, without conferring with other observers. All staff were instructed to not show any preference when the boys were discussing plans or solving problems. For his own role, Sherif chose to play the camp caretaker, alias Mr. Mussey, as a way to minimize the impact of his Turkish accent while still allowing him to remain close to the activity.

As they boarded the buses, the boys had no indication that their camp was a highly choreographed field study that would soon pit them against one another.

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Part 3: Road of Trials

The general design of all three camps was roughly the same: first, the boys were divided into two groups. In the first two camps, these groups were selected after the boys had formed friendships in order to purposefully split up friend groups, whereas in the third camp, the groups were preselected and the boys were initially unaware there was another group of campers. Through a series of team building activities—hikes, cookouts, overnight campouts, swimming—the groups bonded, spontaneously formed their own leadership structures, and created their own group culture.

The research team tried to stoke the rivalry between the two groups through a series of tournament style events, including baseball, tug-of-war, touch football, tent pitching, skits, songs, and cabin inspection; pocket knives were offered as prizes for the tournament winners.

The tournament succeeded in creating friction between the groups, friction which increased as the contest progressed. The boys began to trade taunts and insults; they also planned raids on the opposing cabin, turning over bunks and dumping personal possessions on the floor. In 1954, the Eagles stole and burned the flag of their rivals, the Rattlers; in retaliation the Rattlers stole a pair of jeans from the Eagles’ appointed leader and painted them with the words “The Last of the Eagles” in bright orange paint and then carried the jeans as a flag.

With animosity and overt aggression growing between the groups, the researchers turned their focus to the core of the experiment: bringing the groups back into a state of harmony. Sherif believed that resolving the conflict at the camps would provide valuable insight into the social and psychological process for how to secure peace between warring nations. The success of his vision hinged on this final stage—but resolving conflict would prove difficult to achieve.

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Part 4: Discoveries

For Sherif and his colleagues, having the boys develop an affinity for the members of their assigned group and then generating conflict between the groups was relatively straightforward. The conflict formed as planned at the first and third camps; at the second camp, the boys discovered the experimental setup as the conflict was building, so Sherif cut the study short. In the end, resolving the animosity between the groups was achieved in only the last of the three camps.

Initially, the researchers arranged a series of scenarios in which the rival groups were increasingly in contact—sharing the mess hall during meal time, attending a movie together. Not only did mere exposure to one another fail to relieve the tension, in some circumstances it exacerbated the name calling and arguments between the groups. At the first camp, researchers also challenged the groups to band together to compete against an external softball team, but even this “common enemy” was only temporarily successful in creating peace between the two groups, and created new conflict aimed at a third group.

It wasn’t until the researchers introduced at the 1954 camp a series of tasks with superordinate goals—problems that cannot be ignored but can only be resolved if the groups work together—that harmony rose. At that final camp, researchers arranged for the drinking water to fail, requiring the groups to team up to locate the problem with the water system. The boys shared tools and worked together across group lines, but the animosity returned when they later sat for a meal together. Researchers continued to introduce similar superordinate goals. For example, the two groups had to band together to pull-start a stalled truck that contained their meals. They were also challenged to come up with a solution that would allow them to see a movie after it was announced the camp did not have enough funds to cover the movie fee. After coming together to bring water, food, and even a movie to the camp, the lines that had been drawn between groups began to fade.

With the final of the three camps concluded and most of the boys making friends within the opposing group, Sherif and his colleagues believed they had achieved success. But would figuring out how to reduce conflict at a summer camp have an impact in the wider world?

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Part 5: Mastering Two Worlds

“The world leaders should heed the lesson of the experiment.” Muzafer Sherif did not mince words when he shared a summary of the camp studies with the public in 1969 within the pages of The Washington Post. But this was 15 years after the final camp, and it was one of only a small handful of articles authored by Sherif in the popular press.

When he did speak of the camps, Sherif merged the three in his summaries and focused primarily on the 1954 results—the only camp in which they reached the final stage and conflict was resolved. He also made clear how he interpreted the actions of the boys: the vandalism of the cabin of the opposing group was a “raid” while the collection of apples was the “stockpiling of ammunition.” From Sherif’s perspective, these were not merely summer camps but also a mirror for the rising tensions between nations.

The camp studies, or the 1954 camp to be exact, became the best-known demonstration of realistic group conflict theory—a model of intergroup conflict in social psychology. It may be the novelty of the approach alone that resulted in the popularity of the experiment; Sherif and his colleagues were not particularly active advocates. Aside from a handful of academic articles and presentations, the team only published the results of the 1954 Robbers Cave study initially as a technical report that was distributed privately to colleagues. The full book version was not published until 1961, and then with a small publisher at the University of Oklahoma. The study results would not see larger distribution until the text was republished in 1988.

In classic researcher style, Sherif took less interest in communicating the meaning of his research for the real-world to others and instead focused his time expanding on the lessons learned within the camp studies, investigating intergroup conflict—and group dynamics more generally—in new settings with expanded participant pools.

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Part 6: Reflections

Summer camp was not the final scene of Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif’s research into group behavior. They brought their observational work to other settings, diversifying their participant groups in terms of age, gender, and race. While intergroup conflict remained core to their collaborative work program, the Sherifs expanded their focus to include other elements of a group’s dynamics, like conformity to and deviation from group norms, and the hierarchy of relationships among members.

In 1966, the Sherifs moved from Oklahoma, where they had been since 1949, to Pennsylvania State University. Muzafer took his interdisciplinary methods into the sociology department, while Carolyn increasingly shifted her research toward the psychology of gender, becoming a founding member of the Society for the Psychology of Women (Division 35 of the American Psychological Association).

Throughout their careers, Muzafer and Carolyn wrote extensively about their research on groups, jointly publishing nine books in addition to their own respective works. But their names would become inextricably entwined with the 1954 Robbers Cave camp, their larger research program overshadowed. And as psychologists have looked back on psychology’s classic studies, the Sherifs’ legacy has found itself at the center of renewed controversy.

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Part 7: Re-visions

Similar to other well-known social psychology studies of the mid–twentieth century—such as Stanley Milgram’s “shock box” obedience experiments—Sherif conceived the camp studies as a direct response to the Second World War and other global conflicts. Social psychologists of the postwar era struggled to make sense of the horrors of the Holocaust by researching human conformity, obedience to authority, and intergroup relations.

Today, the camp studies are remembered as classic examples of the field study method, as well as for their overarching examination of intergroup relations. Echoing how the results were published, people generally focus on the 1954 camp at Robbers Cave State Park, and mention the 1949 and 1953 camps in passing, if at all. Those reporting on the studies typically assign Muzafer Sherif (and occasionally Carolyn Wood Sherif) sole credit, overlooking his many collaborators across the three camps.

But in more recent years, serious questions have been raised about the ethics of these postwar researchers, particularly their collective decision to conceal from participants the true purpose of their research. Contemporary reviews of the camp studies regularly invoke William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies (coincidentally published the same year as the Robbers Cave camp), although unlike in the book, the conflict between groups was artificially and purposefully created by Sherif and his team, rather than having emerged naturally. Central to the criticism are questions of the transparency of the original research reports.

Gina Perry’s 2018 book The Lost Boys has perhaps ignited the heaviest round of concern as she revealed in a series of interviews with former campers that not only were they unaware that their camp days had been part of psychological research but also that several of the boys attributed some enduring discomfort to the memories of the experience. Deceiving the boys about the true nature of their camp had never been secret; Sherif and his colleagues believed it was essential that the boys be unaware that the camp was anything but a regular summer camp. This point was emphasized in planning documents, instructions to observers and camp counselors, and in communications with parents. But the boys were never debriefed, instead learning of the deception when Perry approached them for interviews, just over half a century later.

For their part, parents knew from the beginning that they were sending their children to an atypical summer camp. Consent forms, informational letters, and in-person information sessions explained that the camp was being run for the purposes of research. The true purpose of that research and what the study would entail were less clear. Researchers told parents that the camp would provide a “wholesome cooperative living experience” that would “prepare the youngsters for better citizenship and to be leaders in their communities.” There was never mention of purposefully engineering conflict with other campers, nor the overarching search for a solution to global conflict.

Perhaps more striking among concerns of the transparency surrounding the camp studies is that a careful reading of Sherif’s original footnotes by Frances Cherry in 1995 re-exposed why the second camp in 1953 had been called off. In his own writing, Sherif initially acknowledged that the study had been cut short after the boys discovered the experimental ruse. In later accounts, Sherif changed how he framed the 1953 study, citing “unfavorable conditions” and “errors in judgment” on the part of the researchers for its early conclusion, and obscuring that the cleverness of his young subjects was the real reason why the two groups of campers never completed the conflict stage.

Critics have also raised additional questions concerning the way the researchers merged results of the three studies. Psychology students have often been introduced to the studies through confident statements about the dynamics of group formation, intergroup conflict, and how working toward a common goal can bring peaceful resolution—but these are the results only of the 1954 Robbers Cave camp. In 1949, the groups failed to resolve their conflict; in 1953, the study was cut short. Much like in the real world, conflict in an experiment proved to be complex, an important nuance that receives little attention amid the work’s greater legacy.

In spite of the criticisms, it cannot be said that Sherif shied away from trying to put his work to use for a greater good. With the outbreak of the Korean and Vietnam wars on the heels of the Second World War and the growing threat of the Cold War, the Sherifs’ work was a direct attempt to resolve the problems consuming the world. Carolyn herself reflected that it should be no surprise that a Turkish psychologist who witnessed the atrocities of war firsthand as the Ottoman Empire fell in his youth only to find himself exiled from his homeland after marrying an American should come to study global conflict.

In his notes and publications, Muzafer was cautious to never lay blame on individuals for global hostilities, instead focusing on groups—nations, governments—that he spent his career seeking to understand through the observation of group dynamics among children and adolescents. To pave the path to harmony, he called for a world organization with the power to hold even the strongest nations accountable. Today, the question remains as to whether a new generation of social scientists will take up the optimism and ambition of the Sherifs’ vision and bring new solutions to the world stage.

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The author thanks Lizette Royer Barton and Heather Graci for their research assistance.

Select References

• Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif papers. Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron, Akron, OH.
• Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The Robbers Cave experiment. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Book Exchange.
• Perry, G. (2018). The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment. Victoria, Australia: Scribe.
• Cherry, F. E. (1995). The ‘stubborn particulars’ of social psychology: Essays on the research process. New York, NY: Routledge.

The post Journey to Robbers Cave appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

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

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

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

The secret to happiness is feeling loved. 

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

* * *

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

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

Why does feeling loved feel elusive for so many people? 

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

Many of us instinctively follow certain ideas about what will make us feel valued, cherished, and secure in our relationships. We tell ourselves “if only” stories about love that seem entirely reasonable at first—stories that fit with what we’ve learned over the years, and that resonate with our hopes, fears, and intuitions. But when we examine these stories more closely, we sometimes find that they don’t hold up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider several familiar rituals of modern life:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is that really the answer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The world does not speak English

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

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

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

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

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

2. Standard attention checks create more noise than signal

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

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

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

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

3. Questions about race and ethnicity are not universal

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

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

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

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

4. Simple questions about gender aren’t so simple

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

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

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

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

5. Standard questions about marital status are not sufficient 

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

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

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

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

6. Households and household income look differently around the world 

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

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

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

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

7. Conventional technical criteria do not indicate data quality

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myth 3. Scale is a silver bullet.

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

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

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

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

What can be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

A different approach: Five principles for research in conflict settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Hard Truths Behavioral Science Must Face in Conflict Settings 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.

The post ‘We Have Never Been Individuals’ appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

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.

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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.

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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.

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