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.

Last year was the hottest on record. For the first time, the annual average global temperature pierced the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold set by the Paris Agreement a decade earlier. That threshold was established by the 195 nations that signed the agreement in 2015 in an attempt to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. 

While the threshold was an ambitious target, scientists and policymakers hoped that at that level the worst effects of a warming planet—including increased frequency of extreme weather, irreversible damage to ecosystems, climate-related migration and deaths, and sea level rise—could be mitigated and managed.

Only 10 years later, the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is in the rearview mirror. 

Should we be surprised? Last year wasn’t just the hottest on record, it was also a record year for fossil fuel consumption (including a record year for coal). We also set a record for global forest loss in 2024, losing an area the size of Panama. 

Meanwhile, in one of his first actions as president, Donald Trump withdrew the United States—the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses—from the Paris Agreement for a second time. He also rolled back a number of climate friendly policies, opened up drilling and mining on public land, and made cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring Americans have clean air, land, and water. 

Yet there were some bright spots. In 2024, global renewable energy capacity reached new heights, as did electric vehicle adoption. The U.K. closed its last coal-fired power plant, countries like Ecuador, Brazil, and New Zealand added legal protections to natural resources, and researchers showed that conservation efforts are effective at helping retain critical biodiversity. 

Against this backdrop, a group of social and behavioral scientists focused on climate change convened earlier this year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). The convening was led by CASBS’s director, sociologist Sarah Soule (incoming dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business), sociologist Edward Walker, professors of management Brayden King and Wren Montgomery, and professor of business economics and public policy Thomas Lyon. 

Over two days, I joined a group of more than 40 scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences and those working in adjacent fields at the Center. This included economists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists, as well as those working in climate science, engineering, journalism, public policy, and law.

The goal was to address the “backlash, burnout, and backsliding” happening in the realm of climate action and to identify ways to achieve a sustainable future. After crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold and the new wave of Trump administration policies, it was a chance to reflect on what had and hadn’t worked and reevaluate what a successful path forward might look like. 

After the convening, I asked participants to reflect on the most pressing issues and questions on their minds. Below, you’ll find 11 perspectives. Together they offer a glimpse into some of the ways social and behavioral scientists from a range of disciplines are thinking about how to address climate change. You’ll find perspectives addressing the need for technological and social innovation, the importance of emphasizing co-benefits to spur climate action, the role social movements might play, the toxicity of greenwashing, and more.

Of course a brief collection can’t offer a definitive way forward, but it can help bring together views that might not otherwise be seen side-by-side and perhaps offer a new jumping off point for mitigating climate change. Because even though we’ve crossed the 1.5 threshold, it doesn’t mean climate efforts no longer matter. In fact, action is more urgent than ever.

— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief

The power of ‘how’
Rene Almeling

Climate scientists, activists, and journalists routinely lament the lack of progress on addressing climate change. Why, they ask, is more not being done? After all, the threats from climate change have been apparent in the data since the mid-twentieth century. And yet, again and again, the response from those with power to enact change has been insufficient to meet the challenge, to say the least. Instead of throwing up our hands and continuing to ask why there is such a disconnect between knowledge and action, I think we need to take a page from qualitative social science and shift to a how question: How has the massive quantity of climate knowledge resulted in such inaction?

How has the massive quantity of climate knowledge resulted in such inaction?

Whereas “why” questions tend to result in singular answers that offer clear explanations—e.g., political polarization or corporate interests—“how” questions prod us to explore a wider array of historical processes, social mechanisms, and cultural norms that led to the current moment. Think about the difference in your answer to these two questions: Why are you reading this article? How did you come to read this article? 

Asking how the powerful continue to disregard the existential threat of climate change will undoubtedly surface many already-familiar explanations, but I hope that shifting the question would uncover historical and social processes that have not received as much attention, such as how privilege enables everyday ignoring, or how complacency shades so easily into complicity. And perhaps with a more expansive analysis of how climate knowledge has resulted in climate inaction, the complexity of our response would be better aligned with the complexity of the problem, all with the goal of identifying new pathways for spurring action on the climate crisis. 

Rene Almeling is professor of sociology at Yale University. Using a range of qualitative, historical, and quantitative methods, her work examines questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, markets, and individual experiences. She is the author of Sex Cells, GUYnecology, and co-editor of Seminal (with Lisa Campo-Engelstein and Brian T. Nguyen).

Making sense of the anthropocene
William P. Barnett

How we construe a problem determines how we try to solve it, and so it is with environmental sustainability. Three different construals of sustainability are common in public discourse, each revealing important aspects of the challenge.

Many construe sustainability as a technical issue. They attend to the physical and biological processes involved. This lens focuses attention on problems such as global warming due to an increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, or on biodiversity loss due to development. Guided by this lens we look for technical solutions, such as renewable power or species preservation and resource conservation.

Others see sustainability through a behavioral lens, asking why humanity threatens the very environment we rely on for life. This lens explains behaviors at various levels, from why individual-level choices favor today over tomorrow, to why organization-level strategies seek profits despite environmental costs, to why collective action fails to safeguard nature. The behavioral lens helps craft Interventions at all levels.

Still others view sustainability through a moral lens, highlighting the right and wrong of environmental problems. This lens reveals the unfair distribution of environmental costs and benefits over space and time, where those least responsible for environmental damage are the most affected. Advocates of environmental justice construe sustainability in these moral terms.

I propose that change will be more effective if it is informed by all three lenses. Such changes will be technically effective, behaviorally sound, and morally acceptable.

William P. Barnett chairs the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and directs the Stanford Initiative on Business and Environmental Sustainability at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also the faculty director of the Stanford Executive Program.

Bringing in social innovation
Patricia Bromley

We don’t need to wait for the next big technology breakthrough to generate solutions to the climate crisis—plenty of new ideas and approaches are at our fingertips if we can expand the range of ideas and approaches at the core of climate governance. Few realize the extent to which a narrow set of worldviews dominate the most influential conversations about how to solve the climate problem. 

For example, in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leadership teams for Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) and III (Mitigation of Climate Change), none of the current co-chairs or vice chairs are from the social sciences or humanities; both leadership teams are solely engineers, natural scientists, plus a handful of policymakers and practitioners.

The big question that we ought to be asking is not about technology or measurement, it is about social innovation.

This omission is critical because the social sciences and humanities could play a crucial role in addressing the climate crisis by providing insight into human behavior, societal change, and issues of justice. While the natural sciences and engineering provide technical solutions like renewable energy and carbon capture, the social sciences explore how and why people adopt and implement these innovations or why they reject innovations. The social sciences and humanities tell us that business as usual with some technological advancements can’t solve this problem. 

So the big question that we ought to be asking is not about technology or measurement, it is about social innovation: How can we help individuals and societies embrace the fundamental changes that are required of our economies, societies, and governments to transition to more sustainable ways of living?

Patricia Bromley is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, the Doerr School of Sustainability, and (by courtesy) sociology at Stanford University. She is the director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR) and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS).

Co-benefits and collective action framing
Sarah A. Soule, Brayden King, and Edward Walker

In thinking about something that we should be doing more of to move the needle on climate change, we would do well to emphasize the co-benefits of sustainability initiatives. Doing so will help mobilize more people to participate in sensible climate action, whether collectively or individually.

Co-benefits are the positive, sometimes unintended, outcomes that arise from sustainability initiatives that go beyond their primary environmental goals. These include things like improved public health, more jobs, and economic savings. 

The idea of co-benefits resonates with the literature on collective action frames, as articulated by social movement scholars Dave Snow and Rob Benford. Collective action frames are interpretive frameworks used by social movements to shape how people understand a problem and what should be done about it. Frames help mobilize people by providing a shared meaning and motivation for action.

Successful social movements are good at frame bridging and frame extension, which when applied to sustainability involves connecting sustainability efforts with other issues or concerns, such as public health or economic development. 

For example, renewable energy policies could be framed not only as environmental solutions but also as job creation strategies, potentially attracting labor advocates. Similarly, urban greening projects could be linked to public health movements focused on reducing air pollution and chronic disease. Stanford professor Rob Jackson’s research underscores the power of co-benefits in sustainability, showing that policies aimed at reducing emissions also improve public health and economic stability. His work highlights how framing climate action around these tangible benefits builds broader support, even among those less motivated by environmental concerns.

By leveraging co-benefits, advocates of sensible climate action can expand their appeal. Effective sustainability campaigns mirror successful social movements by framing their message in ways that resonate across different constituents, turning abstract environmental concerns into tangible, relatable benefits.

Sarah A. Soule is the incoming dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is also the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior. Her research applies social movement theory to organizational processes, and organizational theory to social movement processes. 

Brayden King is the Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment and a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University. His research focuses on how social movement activists influence corporate social responsibility, organizational change, and legislative policymaking.

Edward Walker is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research examines the political activities of corporations and social movements, including how corporations intervene in public life through mobilizing grassroots campaigns and partnering with nonprofit organizations, the ways that business contexts structure the tactical choices of protest groups, and the relationship between fully professionalized (or “non-membership”) advocacy organizations and traditional membership organizations. 

Tap into the need for connection
Nicole Ardoin and Alison W. Bowers

As concerns related to climate change have emerged and grown, so too has a focus on individual behavior through the promotion of actions such as recycling and home energy conservation, resulting in ideas like the carbon footprint and “100 things you can do to save the planet.” Although individual behavior is certainly part of an overall climate solution, we know individual actions alone are insufficient. To transform structural barriers that will stem climate change and the worst of its impacts, we must motivate and support collective action while working systemically. 

Because it is not part of the everyday vernacular, collective action can be a daunting term, with unclear motivators, pathways, and outcomes. But at its core, collective action is about people working together. The most elegant and impactful climate solutions do not have to be complicated; simply bringing people together and encouraging aligned work toward a common goal is a solid start. 

Climate-related activities like building neighborhood solar projects or joining climate advocacy groups are certainly helpful, but so are climate-adjacent initiatives like improving public spaces, organizing community volunteer days, and hosting community-gardening gatherings. All these build social cohesion, trust, and sense of belonging—prerequisites for tackling larger challenges together in a sustained way. Every community has schools, public libraries, neighborhood centers, parks, places of worship, and other third spaces where people can come together, learn from each other, and solve problems iteratively, creating a flywheel of success, support, and engagement. 

By reframing climate action as a joyful opportunity for community-building rather than sacrifice, we tap into the fundamental human need for connection. Through such strengthened bonds, we lay the groundwork for societal change that creates meaningful climate progress. Along the way, we not only build a more climate-friendly future but also resilient communities ready to address a range of societal challenges.

Nicole Ardoin is an associate professor of environmental behavioral sciences in the Environmental Social Sciences Department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She is also a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. She and her Social Ecology Lab research motivations for and barriers to environmental behavior at the individual and collective scales. 

Alison W. Bowers is a senior researcher in the Social Ecology Lab at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She earned her Ph.D, in educational research and evaluation from Virginia Tech.

Don’t neglect a political economy perspective
Marco Casari 

When discussing the obstacles to global mitigation action, we should consider behavioral factors without neglecting a political economy perspective. Factors such as short-sightedness, inability to cooperate, or lack of information are relevant to account for inaction. On a positive note, consider that the world has succeeded in addressing the problem of ozone layer depletion, which exhibited similar behavioral challenges to the ones relevant for climate change today. Such events can provide a rationale for hope.  

When discussing the obstacles to global mitigation action, we should consider behavioral factors without neglecting a political economy perspective.

However, there may be deeper reasons why many do not seem to truly want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or want a strong international agreement. From a political economy perspective the issues of ozone layer and climate change appear quite different. First, we must acknowledge that powerful special interests such as the fossil fuel and agricultural sectors oppose climate policies and have captured politicians, the media, and even academia. 

Second, it is a common understanding that climate mitigation will benefit disproportionately poor countries rather than rich ones, because they are in tropical regions. Moreover, even when we look within each country, wealthy individuals are far less vulnerable to climate impacts than poor individuals. 

In short, it is the political economy of climate change that may explain inaction. 

Marco Casari is a professor of economics at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on behavior in social dilemmas, decision-making in climate change, and social norms. Using experimental and institutional economics, he explores the behavioral obstacles that hinder cooperation in climate mitigation policies.

Divide and conquer
Roger Noll

Despite surveys showing strong public support for policies to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases, little progress has been made. Part of the problem is effective resistance by a unified front of firms in fossil fuel industries. As with most regulatory policy issues, actions to arrest climate change suffer from a classic “mobilization bias” problem: those who bear the costs of the effective policies (fossil fuel industries) have large per capita stakes in resistance while benefits are more widely spread and uncertain, and so less effectively organized.

Perhaps experiences decades ago in achieving economic deregulation of several competitive industries provides a useful lesson on how to break the logjam. The lesson is divide and conquer: Find ways to include projects that benefit some emitters and softens their resistance.

One possibility is R&D subsidies for technologies that are widely disfavored among advocates of strong policies to arrest climate change. An example is subsidies for R&D on carbon recapture, which is being pursued by some large oil and gas companies as a way to preserve their core business in a world of net zero emissions.

Roger Noll is professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University. Noll is also a senior fellow and member of the Advisory Board at the American Antitrust Institute. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a senior economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and institute professor of social science at the California Institute of Technology.

The toxicity of greenwashing
Thomas Lyon and Wren Montgomery

Communication that misleads people into adopting overly positive beliefs about an organization's environmental performance is known as greenwash. Greenwash is ubiquitous, and most consumers are familiar with it as yet another marketing gimmick. To us, though, it is much more than that. Greenwash has two faces, both pernicious, that act as barriers to climate progress.

First, greenwash lulls well-intentioned people into believing the climate crisis will be solved through business and markets, and we don’t need public policy. One version of this illusion comes in the form of “ESG investing”—that is, investments that incorporate environmental, social, and governance criteria. With multiple claims that ESG has been largely greenwash, investors may be getting ripped off while believing they are “doing well by doing good.” The more dangerous part of the ESG illusion, however, is the belief that the power of finance alone will solve the climate crisis.  

Second, greenwash begets political backlash from powerful interests who believe the hype. In the case of ESG investing, the oil and gas industry, a powerful lobbying juggernaut, got to work funding the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which slapped asset managers with antitrust suits for allegedly “colluding.” This backlash led many asset managers to abandon their stated commitments to investing in clean energy.

For climate, the two faces of greenwash come together in a toxic fashion: Those who want to solve the climate crisis are distracted from taking action, while those who want to profit from it are mobilized to block action. 

Thomas Lyon holds the Dow Chair of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce at the University of Michigan, with appointments in both the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability. His research covers self-regulation, regulatory preemption, voluntary environmental programs, greenwashing, astroturfing, and corporate nonmarket strategy. 

Wren Montgomery is an associate professor of management and sustainability, and JJ Wettlaufer Faculty Fellow at the Ivey Business School at Western University, Canada, as well as a faculty affiliate at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Enterprise. Her research on firm environmental communications has been pivotal in defining greenwash and its tactics, and informing strategies to stop it. 

Climate action depends on repairing moral relations
Gwen Ottinger

At the heart of our climate crisis lie damaged moral relations. In particular, not everyone can reasonably hope that, if they are wronged, others will acknowledge the injuries they’ve suffered, affirm that they are owed better, and do their best to ensure that those responsible are compelled to make it right. 

People breathing the worst of fossil fuel pollution must fight to be believed about the ways their health has suffered. People losing their homes to climate-fueled natural disasters know better than to suppose that oil company executives will be called to account. And people who are losing their livelihoods in the transition away from fossil fuels struggle to have their integrity acknowledged. 

Effective, collective action on climate change requires restoring that hope to everyone. But that isn’t as easy as taking Exxon or Chevron to court for their misdeeds. It also involves acknowledging that former fossil fuel workers took on hard, dirty, hazardous work on behalf of a carbon-hungry society. It involves understanding how they are wronged by facility and mine closures, and by the dearth of comparable middle-class, unionized jobs. 

Like the majority of the population, fossil fuel workers may well recognize that continuing to emit greenhouse gasses is inexcusable. Yet those of us keen on climate action can hardly expect them to embrace that emerging moral consensus and stick up for those harmed by climate change, until they have good reason to hope that wrongs against them won’t continue to be ignored and minimized. If we wish to overcome so-called partisan divides, we need to attend to healing damaged moral relations.

Gwen Ottinger is a professor at Drexel University in the department of politics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society. They direct the Fair Tech Collective, a research group that uses social science to promote justice in science and technology. They are the author of Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges. 

Where will people go?
Alice Farmer

What keeps me up at night is human mobility caused by climate change. We are looking at some pretty alarming predictions about how many people may need to move because of drought, salinated earth, repeated flooding, excessive heat, and more. Our refugee system was largely built for conflict, and dates back to World War II. We need new ideas to help people displaced by climate move with dignity. 

Our refugee system was largely built for conflict, and dates back to World War II. We need new ideas to help people displaced by climate move with dignity. 

There is innovation—while many governments are slamming doors shut, we see welcoming communities extending a hand in many corners of the world. Women’s savings clubs in small-scale fishing areas help communities choose to make infrastructure more resilient after a disaster; family, friends, and religious institutions open doors for shelter from wildfires; and remittances sent from family members abroad can help communities decide to relocate to higher ground. 

We need local, national, and international government stakeholders to support locally grown solutions like these, scale them, and adapt them to new settings. This is urgent work. Governments should support their citizens’ drive to welcome those in need, instead of retreating in fear.

Alice Farmer is a refugee lawyer studying how climate change alters the international legal framework of forced displacement. Currently a CASBS fellow, she has spent two decades in humanitarian work for the UN and NGOs. She is developing a climate mobility lab that uses interdisciplinary study to equip governments and other stakeholders with the necessary research to form human-rights centered policies in response to climate-change-induced displacement. 

Is the climate movement in the streets or the courtroom?
Sidney Tarrow

Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in the number of court cases fighting climate change in the United States—more than in the rest of the world put together, as data collected by the Sabin Center shows. Although we do not yet have comparable data, there has been a similar surge in climate protests around the world. How—if at all—are these two streams of climate activism connected? 

In my research, drawing on social movement research, I have been identifying three kinds of relationships. The first is a complete disconnect between the two forms of activism. The second is what I call fusion, when legal advocates merge their efforts with those of protesters. The third is “synergy,” the coordination of legal and activist efforts by different actors within the same broad movement.

The next step will be to choose a sample from the records of climate cases from the Sabin Center database and code each one for the presence or absence of these three types and, where possible, their eventual outcomes.

I hypothesize that while a disconnect wastes or duplicates efforts and fusion is unlikely between activists with different strategies and types of organization, synergies are the most hopeful for progress in fighting climate change.  

Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor Emeritus in the Government Department at Cornell University, where he specializes in social movements, contentious politics and legal mobilization. Before coming to Cornell, he taught at Yale University.

The post Burning Questions: A Collection of Perspectives on Climate Action appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

International aid looks nothing like it did six months ago. Emergency food assistance sits in abandoned warehouses. Health workers who administered life-saving treatment were there one day, gone the next. People who relied on the United States for food and medicine are weaker and sicker, and some are already dead. 

“The fact that the Trump administration thought that the best first target is USAID, because people would back them in that, suggests a failure on our part to make the case for international aid,” Pulitzer-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof said to Dean Karlan, former chief economist of USAID, at this year’s Behavioral Science & Policy Association conference.

The Trump administration began slashing aid funding days after taking office in January of this year, reigniting a long-running debate about the role of the United States in international development. By the end of March, USAID, the primary agency responsible for distributing U.S. foreign aid, had been dismantled. Just 300 of its 10,000 former employees will be rehired for new roles in the State Department. Projects to prevent the spread of malaria and to feed malnourished children were stopped in their tracks. Gavi, an organization that provides vaccines to children in developing countries, estimates that if the U.S. follows through on pulling their funding, 75 million children won’t receive the vaccines they need in the next five years, and over a million will die.

Karlan and Kristof came together at BSPA’s annual conference to discuss these rapid and radical changes to the United States’ approach to international aid. Both believe in the U.S. imperative to use its disproportionate wealth to help the world, but neither knows how that will look going forward. 

Both believe in the U.S. imperative to use its disproportionate wealth to help the world, but neither knows how that will look going forward.

They began by discussing the role of behavioral science in international aid. “I've come to think that some interventions in the aid space that we traditionally thought benefitted people because of what was tangibly provided may have had their greatest power because of an increase in agency,” said Kristof. 

Karlan and his team have found that providing psychosocial support to families in poverty—help with saving, problem-solving, and life planning—can sometimes be just as effective as providing the same support alongside a cash transfer. “With the same budget, [we can] reach more people,” said Karlan.

Behavioral scientists can push a limited aid budget further, but there’s little they can do with no budget at all. Karlan and Kristof also considered how behavioral science might help address the larger failure to rally sufficient public support for foreign aid. 

Should we appeal to people’s innate desire to do the right thing? Or to their instinct for self-preservation—if we control avian flu there, it won’t make it here? Should we draw attention to present suffering or to the remarkable strides we’ve already made to reduce it? 

“We need to do a better job acknowledging a potential arc of possibility."

“We need to do a better job acknowledging a potential arc of possibility,” said Kristof. “We focus so much on all that is going wrong, we don't adequately acknowledge the amazing things that have happened over the last 75 years. There’s been this extraordinary increase in well-being, this stunning decline in poverty, and illiteracy, and child mortality.”

Partway through their conversation, an early-career researcher posed a question to the pair. “As a junior scientist on the [job] market whose research focuses on authoritarianism, misinformation, disinformation, and environmental psychology, I often worry that my career has ended before it could begin. Do you have any advice for early career researchers trying to navigate the workforce during such a hostile time?”

“My advice is maybe selfish in the sense that I'm answering it from the global perspective, not the personal perspective,” Karlan said. “But the world needs that kind of research more now than before, so please stay at it. Is that advice, or is that a plea?” 

Watch their full conversation here.

Disclosure: BSPA is an organizational partner of Behavioral Scientist. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

The post The Future of International Aid: A Conversation Between Dean Karlan and Nicholas Kristof appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Contraceptives are available in Sub-Saharan Africa, but maternal deaths caused by unwanted pregnancies are still rampant. Refugee agencies support those forced to flee their homes, but don’t always know where they’ll go—or what they’ll need when they get there. AI-powered tutors provide crucial support to kids struggling in under-resourced schools, but may not treat their students equally. 

These are the sorts of humanitarian challenges that featured at the seventh annual United Nations Behavioural Science Week earlier this month. Each year, the UN Behavioural Science Group brings together researchers and practitioners from inside and outside of the UN to discuss how to use behavioral science for social good. Practitioners are exposed to the latest research that could inform their work; academics glimpse how their ideas play out amid the chaos of the real world. And everyone learns about projects happening beyond their focus area. Experts in healthcare, finance, education, peace and security, and beyond share a common language—and common solutions—in behavioral science. 

This year technology was a central theme. Panelists from organizations like UNICEF and the World Bank joined academic experts from behavioral science, data science, and AI to discuss how thoughtful, behaviorally-informed technologies can bolster global development and aid efforts. 

I’ve curated three sessions from the week that capture the different ways this is happening. Digital assistants that boost the capacity of health care workers or teachers. Predictive models that help aid agencies send the right resources to the right regions. And just as AI can exacerbate bias, it can mitigate it too—as long as we understand how it intersects with different cultures as it’s deployed around the world.

Digital assistants add capacity in crucial situations

Sometimes there just aren’t enough teachers, doctors, or aid workers. We might have vaccines, but no one to administer them. We might have the textbooks, but no one to teach them. How can we push our resources further when manpower is finite? 

Stanford economist Susan Athey showed how incorporating digital tools into aid programs can help. She presented a project that her team conducted at a hospital in Cameroon, where many women report wanting to avoid pregnancy but few use contraception. Unwanted pregnancies often result in complications that endanger both the mother and child. When Athey’s team equipped nurses at the hospital with AI-powered assistants to help structure the conversation about contraception, including personalized recommendations based on the patient’s needs and preferences, uptake of long-acting, reversible contraception methods like IUDs and implants tripled.

In Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, the WHO estimates that 1 in 40 15-year-old girls will eventually die from a cause related to pregnancy and childbirth. Scaling interventions like Athey’s can help save those lives. 

“AI has the potential to augment humans,” Athey explained. “Any place where we have a scarcity of human teachers, coaches, service providers, doctors, nurses, or any place we have a bottleneck from expensive people's time, AI and digital technology can help make those people more effective.”

Agent-based modeling to tailor support for refugees

When refugees return home, how will aid agencies know where to direct their efforts? And how do they know what specific aid will be needed in different locations—water and sanitation in one, setting up schools in another? 

Agent-based modeling is a tool to help policymakers make these sorts of decisions by simulating how people are likely to behave in different situations. Innovation officer and data scientist Rebeca Moreno Jimenez explained how one team at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) uses agent-based modeling to understand how to support refugees who have fled conflict-ridden regions like Ukraine, Myanmar, and Somalia, as well as those returning home after weeks, months, or years away. (Jimenez’s talk begins at 29:30 in the video below). 

The team at UNHCR starts by building a dataset that contains the key variables they think might influence the behavior they’re interested in modeling. The dataset is often a product of their own data-gathering efforts combined with data from other organizational, academic, and local sources. With the dataset in hand, they simulate how people might behave given different levels of those variables.

Finally, they compare the simulated behavior to behavior in real time—if their model doesn’t match what’s happening on the ground, they’ll incorporate new or updated information to get closer to reality. The closer they get, the more effective aid agencies can be in sending the right resources to the right places at the right time. 

Currently, a team at UNHCR is working on modeling the behavior of people who are returning to Ukraine after fleeing during the war with Russia. Their dataset contains sociodemographic information about their ties to Ukraine—details like whether they have families still in the region or whether they own property. These kinds of variables, they reason, are likely to impact both the region to which refugees return and their needs once they arrive. The team has built similar models to help curb the spread of COVID-19 infections in an overcrowded refugee camp in Bangladesh, and to anticipate where internally displaced Somalis are likely to go after climate and conflict-driven evacuations.

The limits of technology that doesn’t take culture into account

What happens when new technologies are built with a limited understanding of the humans who will use them? 

“If AI is to truly serve humanity, it has to be informed by behavioral sciences,” says linguist Anna Korhonen, who co-directs the Center of Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. “We have all seen the limits of current AI systems . . . They struggle to understand our cultures, motivations, emotions, and social norms.” This, she argues, is why we are left with “systems that may seem technically very strong, but are actually socially misaligned.” 

This misalignment is particularly glaring when technologies are applied in settings that are culturally distinct from where they were developed, like chatbots in the Global South powered by large language models trained on data from the Global North.

The Mind, Behavior and Development Unit (eMBeD) at the World Bank is working to understand what biases might be baked into these technologies. Michelle Dugas, a behavioral scientist in the unit, shared results from a project where ChatGPT was used as a tutor. When ChatGPT was prompted in English to assign practice problems to a hypothetical student, it assigned more difficult problems to female students than male students. When prompted in Hindi, they observed the opposite effect—male students received more difficult practice problems than female students. 

Imagine how these kinds of issues might play out at scale: A fleet of AI tutors in India might systematically favor their male students, where girls are already far less likely to receive an education than boys. Those same AI tutors might favor their female students when deployed in the U.S., where more women than men earn college degrees. 

“Without human grounding, AI can still work in many simple and low-risk settings,” Korhonen allows. “But it will often fall short in high-stakes areas like decision-making, policy, and justice, especially when we bring it into socially complex contexts.”

The post How Behaviorally Informed Technologies Are Shaping Global Aid appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

A portrait of mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing recently sold for $1.08 million at auction, shattering original estimates. One might expect a flurry of emotions from the artist, perhaps a few tears. But she seemed to take the news in stride. 

The artist in question has a black bob and high cheekbones. She is unpretentious, her small frame clad in black denim overalls. She is also a robot.

Ai-Da (named after Ada Lovelace, considered the world’s first computer programmer) is the brainchild of gallerist Aidan Meller. His team built Ai-Da to provoke reflection on the evolving role of technology in human creativity. “The greatest artists in history grappled with their period of time,” Meller said, “and both celebrated and questioned society’s shifts.” 

In 2024, Meller prompted Ai-Da to create a piece for the AI for Good Global Summit. The portrait of Turing was the robot’s idea. Its elaborate creative process involved using its robot arm to paint 15 pieces of different parts of Turing’s face and one of the Bombe machine, which Turing built to decipher encrypted Nazi communications during World War II. It selected three, plus the painting of the Bombe, to compile into a single portrait. 

Meller hopes the experiment “challenges traditional notions of art and artists.” 

Questions of what is art and who is an artist elude straightforward answers—artists, philosophers, and scientists have been offering their interpretations for millennia. But researchers have made progress on a different question: What qualities matter to people in deciding whether to deem something “art?” 

It’s another question with many answers, but several emerge as particularly important: intention, effort, originality, communication, and essence. These qualities can help us understand the ways that AI-generated art is aligned, and the ways in which it is at odds, with what we feel art should be. 

What qualities matter to people in deciding whether to deem something “art?”

First is intention. In short, if you didn’t mean to make art, you didn’t make art. We develop a radar for intention from an early age—three-year-olds will call the same splotch of paint a “spill” if done by accident, a “painting” if done on purpose. If you prompt an AI to generate an image of a rainforest, but the AI is responsible for the sunbeams piercing the canopy, the dewdrops studding the leaves, and the pair of tree frogs peering out from underneath a rock, did you really intend to create that rainforest? 

Next: the more effort a work takes to produce, the more we like it. This is a qualm with simpler forms of AI-generated art, as in the early days of photography. All you did was push a button! But there may be a loophole in the preference for high-effort work in originality. Philosopher Raphaël Millière describes an artist who puts a canvas in the forest and lets the elements “do their work.” Though leaving a canvas outside and seeing what happens is about as low-effort it gets, it’s original. If everyone started leaving canvases in their backyards the way everyone is now generating images with tools like DALL-E, maybe we’d be less inclined to call those canvases “art.”

Others worry that AI will compromise the communicative quality of art. What happens to the dialogue between artist and audience when the artist isn’t human?

Related but more nebulous is the “essence” imbued by a creator in their work. Despite its intangibility, psychologist Ellen Winner and her colleagues found a clever way to investigate essence by exploring how we think about copies of art. 

An original work is always going to be valued more than a copy. Copies come with baggage—they’re worth less on the market, and the possibility of forgery provokes a moral repugnance. But what if you remove money and morality from the equation?

The researchers showed participants an original artwork, then asked them to evaluate one of three identical copies. They told participants that it was created by either the artist, the artist’s assistant, or a forger. As expected, the forged copy was devalued the most. Crucially, the copy by the assistant was devalued more than the copy by the artist, despite being otherwise indistinguishable. Both were copies, both were signed by the artist, neither sparked moral quandaries, and they would sell for the same amount. 

“Our argument is that what's left is simply knowing that it was touched by the hand and the mind of the artist,” Winner said. “This is a mystical, magical belief.... I think it comes down to thinking that you're reading the traces of the artist's mind when you look at the work. And we're not interested in the traces of a copier's mind, because the mind is less interesting.”

This presents a formidable hurdle for AI-generated art. It’s impossible to read traces of an artist’s mind when the artist in question doesn’t have one.

Our preference for qualities like effort and essence illuminate why we often resist technologies that we feel make art easy and impersonal. 

There is no single condition that excludes AI-generated art from being art for the same reason there is no single condition that excludes human-generated art from being art. But our preference for qualities like effort and essence illuminate why we often resist technologies that we feel make art easy and impersonal. 

This dilemma isn’t new. Synthesizers were banned by the U.K. Musician’s Union in the 1980s; Charlie Chaplin said he’d “give the talkies three years, that’s all.” Painter J. M. W. Turner glimpsed an early photograph in 1839 and declared, “This is the end of Art. I am glad I have had my day.”

But today, synthesizers are uncontroversial. Talkies are just movies; silent films require the extra qualifier. Museums feature painters and photographers side-by-side. Art is alive and well, if different than before. The question remains how AI’s growing role in the creative process will change what we create and how we perceive it. 

Researchers recently found that evaluating human-created art alongside AI-generated art made people more appreciative of human creativity. Study coauthor Sheena Iyengar reflected: “AI can be a powerful tool enabling human–AI collaborations to emerge as a distinct art form that elevates, rather than erases, the unique role of human talent.”

The post When Robots Paint: How Will We Decide if AI Art Is Art? appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Rafaela Bastos wears many hats, among them public manager, geographer, marketing director, Carnival commentator, and samba dancer. She’s also the head of the first government-based behavioral science unit in Brazil. By the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) count, NudgeRio is one of over 200 such teams around the world—and one of around 50 based in local government.

While wearing her NudgeRio hat, Bastos’ primary focus is to use behavioral science to improve the lives of the citizens of Rio de Janeiro. But she also has two loftier ambitions. The first is to better equip behavioral scientists across Latin America to run experiments, develop solutions, and share knowledge to improve the health and well-being of people in their own communities. The second is to elevate the role of behavioral science in local governments, both within Latin America and around the globe. 

When the world leaders of the G20 decided to come to Rio de Janeiro for their annual summit this year, she saw an opportunity to make progress toward both. 

Bastos and her team at NudgeRio organized the Latin American Conference on Behavioral Science alongside the summit. There, she gathered a group of researchers, practitioners, and local decision-makers to discuss how to improve collaboration among behavioral scientists across Latin America. The goal was to enable more ambitious projects and to develop solutions to region-specific problems that may not be part of the broader conversation in behavioral science, which U.S.- and European-based researchers often dominate. 

I flew to Rio to join this discussion and to learn about the behavioral science happening in Brazil and the region. I was also curious to see how behavioral science fits into the big-picture conversations happening at the G20. The summit convenes national leaders from 19 countries, the European Union, and the African Union to discuss global issues like climate change, public health, and economic development.

G20 member countries compose about 85 percent of the global GDP and two-thirds of the global population, so these conversations have potentially far-reaching implications. My trip was part of our ongoing effort at Behavioral Scientist to expand the routes of behavioral science knowledge happening in different parts of the world. (Earlier this year, I reported on the Neuropaz conference in Colombia as part of the same mission.)

“Institutions in the northern hemisphere tend to be older and more established, more rigid. We’re newer countries . . . there’s more room to find our own ways of doing things."

First on the agenda was the behavioral science conference hosted by Bastos and her team. There, the room was buzzing with visions of a bright future. Brazilian psychologist Vera Rita de Mello Ferreira was optimistic that Latin America is uniquely positioned to use behavioral science to influence the systems and structures that shape people’s lives. “Institutions in the northern hemisphere tend to be older and more established, more rigid,” she said. “In Latin America, it’s all less structured. We’re newer countries . . . there’s more room to find our own ways of doing things.” 

The day began with two panels that featured local perspectives, including Bastos and Ferreira from Brazil, who presented on the foundational behavioral science principles that have informed their work. Bastos described the framework developed by her team at NudgeRio to aid local decision-makers in finding creative solutions to long-standing problems. She’s found that it helps derail the “I’ve tried it all” flavor of resistance that often crops up in local politics. 

Michael Hallsworth of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and Mary MacLennan at the United Nations provided a global perspective on similar themes. Hallsworth described several of the BIT’s successes in applying behavioral science across the region—from increasing tax compliance in Guatemala to COVID vaccine uptake in Argentina. MacLennan reflected on the lessons that the UN has learned from its international projects—particularly the ethical imperative to engage with and support local people in doing this work in their own region.

In the afternoon, attendees collaborated on guidelines that could help entities across the region collaborate more successfully. The priorities they identified included: consolidating existing knowledge, prioritizing projects that span institutional and national borders, and organizing training sessions to share best practices. 

The conference was held on the third floor of the Rio Operations Center (COR), an imposing, glass-walled building that houses an interdepartmental team tasked with keeping the city running smoothly. After a series of flash floods and mudslides struck Rio in April of 2010, killing over 200 people and leaving 15,000 homeless, the city built the COR to better manage crises. The core function is information management—to keep track of what is happening, where it’s happening, and who needs to know about it—whether the goal is to evacuate neighborhoods in danger of flooding or to reroute traffic during rush hour. Marcus Belchior, head of the COR, recounted an incident in which a lamb from a local farm wandered off and caused a traffic jam. Now, he said, there’s a protocol for what to do when there’s an animal in the road.

The control room on the first floor of the COR appears equipped to handle a rocket launch. The front wall of the room is tiled with over 100 CCTV cameras pointed toward intersections, bridges, and plazas. The ongoing G20 Summit meant that over 50 of them were trained on the event space. Other screens show traffic maps and weather patterns. At the touch of the button, a cluster of those screens fades to black, and a chipper AI-generated assistant named Cora appears in their place to welcome any visitors.

Though the Operations Center exists separately from NudgeRio, Belchior hopes to infuse more behavioral science into the management of the city. When an emergency evacuation alarm sounds and people need to decide whether to heed the warning—that’s a behavioral challenge. When Rio hosted the Olympics in 2016 and swarms of eager attendees were trying to figure out the best route to take from the beach volleyball courts to the gymnastics arena, that’s another one. 

Since the founding of NudgeRio ten years ago, Bastos and her team have already conducted over 30 projects in collaboration with various municipal departments. These include redesigning intersections to reduce dangerous street crossings, curbing workplace harassment in municipal offices, and building reading habits among kids at local schools.

In 2021, they were invited to facilitate the city’s strategic planning session for the next four years to ensure that the city’s priorities accurately reflect those of the people who live in it. They brought in athletes and scientists, educators and Carnival organizers. They invited community leaders and people from the favelas. They even brought in a group of kids from local schools when it came time to speak about education.

“We’re designing the future,” explained Pedro Arias Martins, coordinator of data and behavior at the Rio de Janeiro City Hall. “We need to talk to the people that are going to live in it.”

"Cities may have the greatest potential for applying some of this work . . . Cities interact in so many ways with people directly."

The combination of a dedicated behavioral science team, expressed buy-in from the mayor, and infrastructure honed by a city accustomed to marshaling its 6.2 million citizens through everything from natural disasters to the Olympic Games makes Rio well-positioned to push this work further. But one challenge they face—a challenge that Bastos hoped to address during this conference—is Brazil’s relative isolation. 

Brazil is isolated both linguistically, as the only Portuguese speakers in the region, and geographically—most of its major cities hug the eastern coast, with mountains to the west and ocean to the east. This dynamic was apparent even at the conference itself. Though the aspiration was to facilitate collaboration within Latin America, there was little representation from outside of Brazil.

But starting the conversation was a first step. And that barrier didn’t prevent Bastos and her team from making strides toward her larger goal of advocating for more behavioral science in government globally. One means to this end, Bastos believes, is giving leaders in local governments visibility into the sort of work that behavioral scientists can do alongside policymakers. 

So in addition to the conference, they organized a mainstage panel on behavioral science at the Urban 20 (U20), the city-focused companion event to the G20 that convenes mayors and urban policymakers from major cities across the world. There, Bastos, Ferreira, Hallsworth, and MacLennan spoke to an audience of policymakers experienced in local government but new to behavioral science. The quartet shared their perspectives and experience on how to bring behavioral science to city government.

Though the number of behavioral science units in government has grown from 1 to over 200 in just 14 years, less than a quarter of those are based in local government. This presents an opportunity. 

“We work with many different levels of government from the UN down. I think cities may have the greatest potential for applying some of this work,” Hallsworth said in his closing remarks on the panel. “Cities interact in so many ways with people directly. Messages, incentives, shared spaces where new behaviors emerge . . . There are practical things you can do in those messages and in those built environments that make a difference.”

Disclosure: Michael Hallsworth, who is quoted in the piece, is a member of the BIT, which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

The post A Dispatch from Rio: Working to Strengthen Behavioral Science in Latin America at the G20 appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

“How do you balance dreams of peace with the complex reality of achieving it,” said conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus, “without giving up on the dream, but without ignoring the reality?” 

Tensions permeate the work of those trying to understand the roots of conflict and pathways to peace. What motivates people to accept those they’ve only ever learned to hate? Why do people join extremist groups, and how do some get out? How do institutions contribute to violence, and how can they foster peace?

The answers to questions like these are far from simple. They are nuanced and context-dependent, but not out of reach. Recently, a group of people who have dedicated their careers to finding those answers convened at the third annual Neuropaz conference in Medellín, Colombia. 

One of those people is Andrés Casas, the founder and organizer of Neuropaz, an annual conference in Colombia that explores how the behavioral sciences can promote peace. Casas led this year’s conference with support from local and international organizations, including Comfama, Fundación Corona, UNDP Colombia, and the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism. Across the four-day conference and workshop, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from within Colombia and around the world came together to share what they’ve learned. 

Colombia was a fitting setting for the gathering. After more than 60 years of war between the government and guerrilla and paramilitary groups, a peace deal in 2016 brought a formal end to the conflict. It was a significant step for the peace builders who had spent years dedicated to the cause. But their work was far from over. Since then, they’ve been working to ensure that the declaration of peace translates to peace in practice. Neuropaz is part of that ongoing mission. 

During the conference, I spoke with eight of the local and international experts who have worked on conflicts in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S. and U.K. These are behavioral scientists who have convinced members of al-Qaeda to have their brains scanned in an fMRI machine, consulted with decision-makers on the ground in South Sudan in the years leading up to independence, and provided a platform for former guerrilla combatants and their victims to share their stories together.

Below are their reflections on the questions that define their work, the answers they’ve found so far, and their aspirations for what’s yet to come. 

* * *

Economist Pablo Abitbol asks: “How can we build democracy in local communities to nurture more dignified human development?”

Pablo Abitbol is an economist at the Technological University of Bolívar and a member of the Montes de María Regional Space for Peace Construction in Colombia. He studies collective memory, cultural change, and deliberative democracy in an effort to restabilize the territories in Montes de María and Cartagena that were impacted by years of violence. Many of those territories are still governed by corrupt actors that neglect public institutions like education and mental health services. Abitbol works with local leaders to restore the voices of those who have been excluded from the democratic process and political decision-making within their own communities.

“Our approach is to create spaces and processes of democratic deliberation within these communities. We are trying to reincorporate into the democratic process its heart, which is what Amartya Sen calls government by discussion—exchange of arguments, being able to listen attentively and respectfully to others’ positions and worldviews, and being open to reconciling your own worldviews and perceptions with those of other people.

“One thing that emerged from these deliberative assemblies, which is what we call our specific design, is the precariousness of mental health services for these kinds of rural communities. They’re often totally absent or harm-producing. 

“But given the absence of good mental services for these communities, many have developed their own practices for taking care of themselves. A paradigmatic example is the tejedoras, the weavers of Mampuján, a group of displaced women from the town of Mampuján. They were displaced by paramilitaries and had to resettle. A lot of pain, a lot of trauma. The women started gathering to make sancocho, which is a delicious soup that is typical of the region, and to take care of their hair. And then they started producing tapestries. Those tapestries tell the memory of their displacement and their resistance, and they have become an incredible work of art that is now in the National Museum of Colombia. And now they have their own museum of Mampuján. That is a clear example of how, in the absence of the institutional service of mental health, they developed their own way of healing anchored in their traditions. 

“We have deliberated about how to connect local practices with institutions so that institutions might offer a better kind of service that is more connected with their communities. If you want to have better mental health services, or any other kind of service—state services, public services—you have to change the way that politics is done.”

* * *

Psychologist Boaz Hameiri asks: “Why is it so difficult to change people’s views about conflict?”

Boaz Hameiri is a senior lecturer and head of the Conflict Management and Mediation Program at Tel Aviv University. He studies the psychological barriers to conflict resolution and how we might overcome them. One of those barriers is cognitive freezing—a hallmark of intractable conflict. When our views about a conflict are characterized by closed-mindedness and rigidity, there’s little that activists and policymakers can do to garner support for peace. Unfreezing, then, is central to moving toward peaceful conflict resolution. A useful tool for unfreezing people’s views, Hameiri believes, are metaperceptions.

“Metaperceptions are what we think others think. When we talk about intergroup relations, they refer to what we think members of the outgroup think about us. If I'm Jewish Israeli, a metaperception is what I think Palestinians think about Israelis.

“We find that people tend to have pessimistic metaperceptions. They often think that people from the outgroup think much more negative things about them than they actually do. In a study published in 2020, led by Samantha Moore-Berg, we found that Democrats and Republicans in the United States are essentially in complete agreement: both of them think that the other party thinks much more negative things about them than they do in reality. They think that the other side dehumanizes them much more than reality. They think the other side dislikes them much more than reality. And the differences are staggering—on a 100-point dehumanization scale, the perceived dehumanization and dislike was 20 to 40 points higher than actual dehumanization and dislike.

You're not trying to change people's views about the outgroup . . . The only thing that you're saying is: You think that they think something about you, but the truth is something else.

“But it's not only that the divide is so big—it's also consequential. If you think that the other side dislikes you, you dislike them in return. There’s a reciprocal response. If they dehumanize you, you dehumanize them. 

“So metaperceptions are overly pessimistic and completely false in the vast majority of cases. If that's the case, then you can correct these kinds of perceptions. And if you correct those erroneous metaperceptions, you can also reduce dehumanization and dislike. 

“You're not trying to change people's views about the outgroup. You're not trying to contest anything that they think about the outgroup. You’re not trying to persuade them to think something different. The only thing that you're saying is: You think that they think something about you, but the truth is something else. It's much easier to do—people will be less defensive.”

* * *

Conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus asks: “When working toward peace, how do we make visible the tension between an idealized version of the future and the reality of getting there?” 

Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara, an organization working to incorporate behavioral science into development work in the Global South, and author of Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (open access here). She studies the emotions, memories, experiences, and actions of people in situations of violent conflict to better understand how we might facilitate peace. Lately, Schomerus has been thinking about the mental models of conflict held by practitioners working toward peace and the cognitive dissonance that arises when reality is at odds with those models.

“I worked on the conflict in South Sudan five or six years before independence. Although this was a seemingly happy moment for a country about to become independent, we could see that conflict dynamics were already developing. 

“I was trying to convey that concern to decision-makers. They would patiently and politely listen to me, but at some point you could see this cognitive dissonance click into action. They would go, ‘Yeah, but people wouldn't throw away newly gained independence to go back to war.’ The decision-makers would dig in their heels and effectively say, ‘I just cannot imagine that this would be any other way than exactly how I imagine it to be.’

“There was this international wave of consensus that carrying South Sudan through the democratization process, elections, and a referendum on independence was going to be a huge international freedom fighter success story. After South Sudan went into horrific civil war, a lot of senior decision-makers said, ‘Well, if we'd only known.’ But people had written about this—it just didn’t fit into the narrative, the mental model of peacemaking, so it couldn't be heard. 

“People often imagine peace processes to be romantic, but the reality is human. The romanticism can be detrimental because it means you ignore the real problems. But sometimes it’s also quite beautiful—that's where human dignity, hope, and beauty lie. How do you balance dreams with realities without giving up on the dreams, but without ignoring the reality? And if we know this tension to be true—the cognitive dissonance between dream and reality—how do we make it visible?”

* * *

Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid asks: “Why do people join and leave extremist groups?”

Nafees Hamid is the research and policy director of XCEPT at King’s College London. He investigates how trauma and mental health influence an individual’s propensity for peace or violence. He has also studied political violence among groups spanning jihadists, white nationalists, and QAnon to better understand how individuals get pulled into extremist groups, and how we might pull them back out again. 

“When people hold sacred values—values so morally important that they're willing to give their lives—the material incentives that governments typically use to dissuade violence not only fail but actually backfire. If you’re trying to get people to compromise on their sacred values (if you’re trying to negotiate with the Taliban or trying to convince someone to not join a neo-Nazi group, for example), then you would be better off avoiding material incentives or disincentives. Instead, things like social inclusion, social norms, acknowledgment, symbolic concessions, making people feel like they're heard, giving them space to talk—all become useful.

“Tools like social inclusion aren’t going to get rid of your sacred values, but they can adjust what you’re willing to do for them. Maybe you're not going to fight, maybe you're not going to kill people. On the other hand, when you socially exclude people, as our neuroscience studies on early-stage extremists show, you can see nonsacred values turning into sacred values. You can see that at the level of the brain. You can see both an increase in sacred values and an increased willingness to fight and die for those sacred values.

How do you make the extreme group feel . . . that they’re still part of the broader society, while at the same time making it clear that you do not support their level of violence?

“Now think about the wake of a terrorist attack, for example. You have political leaders telling this broader group, ‘You must condemn this extremist group in your midst. You must say they are not one of us.’ I understand where that's coming from, but what you're actually doing is severing the only vector of influence we have over these extreme people. 

“It’s like telling people who have a child or relative in a cult to condemn them for being part of the group—to stop talking to them, to stop listening. Guess what’s going to happen if you do that? They become more a part of the cult. If you want to influence the cult, you want to make sure that each of those cult members still has multiple connections to the outside world—that’s the only way you can influence who they are and what they do. 

“This is why demands for the broader population to condemn the more extreme population can, in some cases, make the problem worse, rather than better. And so the balance that the broader population must find is: How do you make the extreme group feel like they belong, that they’re still part of the broader society, while at the same time making it clear that you do not support their level of violence?”

* * *

Economist Sandra Polanía-Reyes asks: “How do we influence people’s preferences to achieve a less divided, more integrated society?”

Sandra Polanía-Reyes is an associate professor at the University of Navarra and a research associate at the Navarra Center for International Development. She studies social norms, trust, and cooperation and works to steer people toward prosocial behavior—to help them make decisions for the common good in contexts including migration and peace building. 

“Mainstream economics would describe endogenous preferences—those shaped by our economic and sociocultural environment—as complex. But actually, in one word, it’s education. As we learn, we define our preferences, and then we behave according to our preferences.  This is why early intervention is crucial. The brain is still developing, so helping children, teenagers, or young adults adopt prosocial behaviors during these formative years can have a lasting impact. 

“For example, when children are exposed to different phenotypical groups—in Europe, you have Black and Caucasian Europeans, African communities, refugees from Syria—in their public school classrooms when they are very young, there is evidence that when they are teenagers, it’s completely normal to interact with people that are different from them. We play together. We make the same mistakes. We both like soccer. 

“This is an example in terms of phenotype, but of course there are many kinds of differences. In Colombia, we have Venezuelans and Colombians, and we are very similar physically, ethnically, religiously—so why does this still happen?

“Across contexts, we find that influencing endogenous preferences in children by exposing them to diverse groups results in adults who are more generous, care about others, and are open to diversity—so many positive attributes that otherwise would have been much harder to cultivate in adults whose past experiences have shaped preferences that are far more difficult to change.”

* * *

Technologist and innovation researcher Martin Waehlisch asks: “How do we use new technologies to address global challenges in conflict prevention and peacemaking?”

Martin Waehlisch has been a leader in innovation at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and is now a researcher at the University of Birmingham. He focuses on how we can borrow knowledge from disciplines that haven’t typically played a role in the peace process—with a particular focus on computational social science—to measure things we haven’t been measuring, to communicate more accurately and effectively with peace constituencies, and to bring voices to the forefront that aren’t usually part of the peace process.

“Technology can play a role in the conflict prevention, management, and peace building phases equally. First, we can use new technologies to prevent conflict—for instance, to help us get a sense of public sentiments. When we know something is brewing, the data that we have on hand might ordinarily be built based on surveys or social media analysis in the best case. But now there are ways that we can multiply data sources to get a more thorough idea about what the public thinks at large, and those issues can then be addressed in order to prevent an outbreak of violence. 

“Then we have the actual ongoing peace negotiation, which is right in the middle of the war. That's where technology can help to bring people together who wouldn't normally have the chance to be heard by politicians. One example is the digital dialogs we've been running for years where artificial intelligence is used to achieve the scale of a poll, but the intimacy of a focus group. Imagine thousands of people talking to each other at the same time about the same issue in a 45-minute conversation, and then an AI listening digitally to every individual, and then summarizing everything to instantly give the peace mediator a sense of what’s relevant. 

Imagine thousands of people talking to each other at the same time . . . and an AI listening digitally to every individual, and then summarizing everything to instantly give the peace mediator a sense of what’s relevant.

“Trauma work usually comes at the very end of the peace process. I'm curious about how machines allow us to have conversations in a deeper way, in comparison to human-to-human conversations, when it comes to overcoming trauma. There's research showing that people often feel more comfortable talking to a machine than a human psychologist—there seems to be some comfort in talking to an object whose memory can be deleted. It also gives more privacy and creates a sense of safety, to a certain extent. We only have a limited number of psychologists or mental health workers, so that’s where these technologies can step in. But of course, this must be approached with sensitivity and responsibility, as many questions remain around AI, including concerns about algorithmic biases and hallucinations.”

* * *

Behavioral science specialist Josh Martin asks: “How do ‘normal’ people—those who otherwise seem like typical members of society playing typical roles—come to participate in extreme action?”

Josh Martin is a lead expert in countering extremism at the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism and former director at ideas42 and Beyond Conflict, a project dedicated to applying behavioral science toward conflict resolution. One theme of his peace and conflict work is the often subtle pathways toward extremism and how we might use our knowledge of human behavior to help people detect, avoid, and escape them.

“One lens through which I often view this problem is channel factors—the bucket of behavioral mechanisms that conspire to put you on a path that you may not realize you're on. And then they keep you there by imposing some nonmonetary cost for leaving that path. 

“A lot of people who end up in extremist organizations, for instance, start on a path that looks nothing like that. Channel factors are things like networks of friends or your information environment on social media, but also much more mundane things like the timing of when you're exposed to certain messages. These things all contribute to the existence of this channel that pushes you toward extremism. 

“An example is the case of Adolf Eichmann. I just finished reading Hannah Arendt's book about the banalities of evil, and there’s a quote by Eichmann: ‘It was like being swallowed up by the party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly.’ He ended up working on the Holocaust and murdering millions of people without any ideological predisposition on his part. Arendt is pretty skeptical about this—he’s not blameless. Just because people can be guided without their knowledge toward an extreme doesn’t make them blameless. We’re all still accountable for our actions. But she cites him as much more of an example of the situation acting on an individual than an individual who was violent from the beginning. 

“We often want to console ourselves by thinking that people who do bad stuff are just bad because that keeps us from seeing ourselves in them. But all the evidence goes in the other direction. We are all the sort of people who might. It's not that we're all evil, or that there’s evil inside of us. That's not the point. The point is that we are all people who, under the wrong set of circumstances, would do the wrong thing.

“And to be clear: you would never tell victims of armed conflict that they shouldn't blame their perpetrators for the violence and atrocities. The distinction I would draw is between accountability and prevention. We should hold people accountable for not doing more to get themselves out of the channel. But it is totally fine to analyze the future behavior of others in a way that would lead us toward better prevention strategies. If we appreciated the ways in which the modern world can act upon somebody, then we might design the modern world slightly better.”

* * *

Psychologist Andrés Casas asks: “Can people change?”

Andrés Casas is a doctoral researcher studying neuroscience and conflict resolution across Latin America, the United States, Africa, and the Middle East. He is also the founder and organizer of Neuropaz, and the reason that all the experts quoted in this piece—among many other researchers and practitioners from Colombia and around the world—came together as a part of this effort to advance the science of peace. He shared a personal anecdote that captures the heart of his work.

“I grew up in a country where not supporting your side of the conflict was seen as inappropriate. You’re a coward—you’re not supporting your national identity while we’re fighting against these terrorists, the worst people in the world, who kidnap people, who commit massacres. 

“But my grandpa was a political activist back in the 1940s. His mission, in a sense, was to educate us about the real situation of the country. And he worked with a famous political leader called Jorge Eliécer Gaitán who was an inspiration to all rebel causes—he was from one of the poorest sectors, made it through law school, and became an incredible communicator about the injustices of the country. 

“Gaitán was assassinated in Bogotá in 1949, and his death changed the history of Colombia. That event was called El Bogotazo because the city got destroyed, and it sparked the outbreak of violence that persisted through the next 60 years. My grandpa was working with him, yet the people who rose up to avenge his death were responsible for the atrocities that followed. In my family, the idea that things are not black-and-white and that you need to educate yourself about context and the nuances of reality was very important. 

If we appreciated the ways in which the modern world can act upon somebody, then we might design the modern world slightly better.

“That's why I got into this. My mom, who has already passed away, was against FARC because she always worked to provide services for people who were victims of the insurgent violence. Colombia has the second highest rate of internal displacement after Syria, and my mother devoted the last part of her life to helping people in that situation. I'm so proud. But again, my mother was very prejudiced against FARC members because she saw the effects of what they did. 

“When I was younger, difficult situations in my family made me think that people cannot change. I saw my mom working hard and doing this stuff for other people, but she was prejudiced against FARC. It was confusing. Growing up, I had a very difficult relationship with my mom, politically speaking, because she was on one side, I was on the other side. 

“But my grandpa had educated me about politics. That's why I became a political scientist. I want to go beyond just understanding political systems, I want to understand how political change happens. In a sense, my work was trying to convince my mom to think differently. 

“She was diagnosed with cancer back in 2000. And before she passed, Emile [Bruneau, a peace scientist and former collaborator of mine who has also since passed away] and our team had managed to do the first stage of our project to help correct misperceptions of former FARC combatants and foster their peaceful reintegration into society. We had conducted the interviews, developed the first videos, and run the first study to find the video that worked best to reduce dehumanization and increase support for peace. 

“My mother was sick already, but she was still aware. ‘Mom, I want to show you what we're working on,’ I said to her. So we played the video, and I asked her, ‘What do you think about it?’ 

“And she told me, ‘Maybe I was wrong.’”

Disclosure: Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

The post The Questions at the Heart of Conflict and Peace appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

We’re excited to invite you to join a new book club we're hosting this summer titled “Techno-Visions.”

We’ll read Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Player Piano, about a future society full of powerful machines, the special class of engineers who manages them, and the people at the mercy of both. The 1952 novel poses questions that we’re still seeking answers to, even more urgently in the age of AI, about what technological progress means for us individually and collectively.

We’ll complement the book with discussions, expert conversations, and bonus content published throughout the summer. We’ve designed the schedule so you can tailor it to your summer, participating at the level that's right for you.

The Summer Book Club is open to Supporters of Behavioral Scientist—readers who make a monthly or annual donation at any amount they choose—or those who purchase a ticket. This financial support helps power our work as an independent, nonprofit magazine. 

Find out how to join the Summer Book Club here, and read below for more on why “Techno-Visions” and what to expect this summer. 

Why Techno-Visions? And What Can You Expect?

Over the past several years, we’ve all been whipsawed by competing visions of where AI is headed. We’ve been told that AI will take jobs and create them; eliminate creativity and bolster it; stunt our intelligence and extend it; destroy what makes us human and allow us reimagine who we are.

We’ve been told AI could usher in the long-awaited, Keynesian future, when “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure … to live wisely and agreeably and well.” We’ve also been told that AI poses an existential threat; that we’re one errant model away from catastrophe.

Vonnegut would empathize with our lot. Although observing a different technological age, Vonnegut too wondered what the future might look like if technology really did advance the way some hoped (and others forebode). At the heart of Vonnegut’s Player Piano and our own uncertainty about the future lie the same questions: Where exactly is the technology we’re developing taking us? And: Do the people building it have an accurate idea? Do the rest of us get a say in where we go?

At the heart of Vonnegut’s Player Piano and our own uncertainty about the future lies the same question: Where exactly is the technology we’re developing taking us?

The novel will give us a leaping off point to discuss these questions and others with leading behavioral scientists, technologists, writers, and each other. We’ll host several synchronous and asynchronous conversations in July and August, peppered with bonus content throughout the summer. (For instance, we’ll explore the 1950 essay, “The Human Use of Human Beings” by an MIT mathematician that helped inspire Player Piano. And, did you know that Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago? Learn how the ideas of a particularly eccentric professor influenced his writing.) 

Player Piano is a book I’ve spontaneously gifted to friends, colleagues, and people I’ve just met. If you’ve read a book by Vonnegut before you know the pleasure of his original ideas, gallows humor, biting sarcasm, and overflowing empathy. If this will be your first, you’re in for a treat. But don’t just take my word for it. The back cover of my copy of Player Piano refers to Vonnegut as “one of the best living American writers.” Having passed away in 2007, he’s now considered one of the best dead ones too. How about that for crossover appeal?

Interested in joining Techno-Visions? Find out how to join here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out at editor@behavioralscientist.org

We look forward to reading with you this summer.

The post Announcing Techno-Visions: A Summer Book Club by Behavioral Scientist appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

In the last 10 years, the number of people who have been forcibly displaced due to war, conflict, and human rights violations has more than doubled. And as of May 2023, the number of refugees worldwide is the highest ever recorded. Conflict-related civilian deaths are on the rise, and 2021 saw the highest number of homicides in the previous 20 years. 

Behavioral scientists are among the many working to reverse these trends. Earlier this month, the United Nations Behavioural Science Group convened a panel at their sixth annual Behavioural Science Week to discuss the role of behavioral science in facilitating peace and security. They invited two experts to share their perspectives: Mina Cikara, a professor of psychology at Harvard University who studies intergroup conflict, aggression, and prosocial behavior, and Andrés Casas, the chief scientist at Neuropaz, a peace science initiative based in Colombia. 

Peace scientists face a fundamental challenge: “Oftentimes, the things that bring out the worst in humanity come in service of being the best group members,” Cikara explains. “Our interpersonal morality gets cast aside when we are making choices on behalf of our groups.” 

Oftentimes, the things that bring out the worst in humanity come in service of being the best group members.

The research itself is also fraught. The available data tends to come at the national level, while the majority of conflicts happen locally. Facilitating friendship across conflict divides can create the illusion of progress but heighten the potential for long-term hostility. And interventions to change individual attitudes run up against powerful propaganda that masks a collective preference for peace.

Cikara and Casas explored these challenges, among others, during the recent event. We've curated five of the key takeaways from their conversation below. The full session is available to watch here. 

The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

The cognitive basis of collective violence

Many cognitive biases—among them our adherence to social norms, stronger recall for negative relative to positive information, and the availability heuristic—make us more susceptible to the propaganda that underlies violence and conflict. 

Mina Cikara: "There are fundamental quirks of human cognition that then feed into how quickly propaganda can take root in people's psychologies and influence their behaviors. People are incredibly attuned to normative information—people basically behave the way they think that they're allowed to behave on the basis of the preferences of people around them. If you think that there is broad support for violence against a particular entity, that's a difficult tide to swim against, even if privately that is not exactly your own attitude or preference. 

"Conflict entrepreneurs [those who profit by provoking people to violence] and elites understand that there has to be a particular perception in place before we can get people on board with engaging in costly violence. Most people don't want to be violent most of the time. These leaders have to get people to believe that all alternative means of negotiation are no longer an option.

"People tend to have a very stereotyped distortion of numbers. We tend to overestimate small proportions of things and underestimate large proportions of things. Why does this matter? 

"It matters because even very small numbers of, say, immigrants from a particular country will be overestimated as a proportion of the community. To the extent that political elites want to use that mobility and the presence of this new entity as a means of fomenting fear, perceptions of threat—economic, material, symbolic, even pathogenic threat, like they're bringing with them particular kinds of diseases—all of that puts people in a defensive crouch. The power of that defensive crouch is that almost anything becomes morally acceptable if it's done in self defense."

* * *

A mismatch between the data we have and the data we need:

Nation-level data doesn’t help us understand community-level conflict. Without understanding community-level conflict, it becomes much harder to design policies to prevent it.

Cikara: "So much of the data that we have is at the level of the nation, when our effects are all happening at very local levels. You see these reports that say, “In Germany, 14 percent of the population is immigrants.” It doesn't matter at the national level, because they're not distributed evenly across the geography. That means that some communities are going to be at greater risk for conflict than others. But that sort of local variation and sensitivity to it, at least heretofore, has really been missing from the conversation on the research side. Even when you're in the same place, in the same country within the same state, the same canton, there can still be a ton of variation from neighborhood to neighborhood. 

Conflict entrepreneurs understand that there has to be a particular perception in place before we can get people on board with engaging in costly violence.

"The other thing that we know matters a lot is not just the diversity of these neighborhoods but the segregation of them. It turns out that these kinds of prejudices and violence are less likely to break out in those places where it's both diverse and people are interdigitated with how they live. So it's not just the numbers, it's also the spatial organization. 

"For example, in Singapore, because so much of the real estate is state-owned, they make it so that people who are coming from different countries can't cluster together because they assign them to live separate from one another in order to prevent these sorts of enclaves. All these structural and meta-level organizational features have really, really important inputs for intergroup dynamics and psychology."

* * *

After 60 years of guerilla violence, is peace possible? 

Behavioral science combined with narrative storytelling has been a powerful tool in the efforts of Casas and his team to support the peaceful reintegration of former FARC combatants in Colombia.

Andrés Casas: "In Colombia, we lived throughout 60 years of war. We were exposed to these ideas about who the good guys or the bad guys were. Basically, people didn't want the bad guys to be pardoned and forgotten for everything they did throughout the 60 years. That was the story.

"But going out to the field meeting the people who signed the peace agreements in the demobilization camps, talking to the people in the big cities, the ones who were opposing reincorporation and reintegration of these combatants—we learned that it was not just trust, there was something else going on. We found that people basically didn't have their theory of mind working, they thought that the FARC members were not human. Empathy was not playing a part here because you don't project your humanity to people that are not human.

"We spent six months with a cinematographer in these communities with the previous enemies, and we used the power of narrative to present people in their humanity. We tried to use the social proof mechanism to present their previous enemies as trustworthy, new possible cooperators, people that they were playing soccer with and building roads.

"We saw that meta-perceptions can open a road to change the way people see other people. First, to present them as humans—we understood that people were avoiding the pain of others, because we know in this situation there's competitive victimhood going on and other mechanisms that wouldn’t allow your mind to project your humanity to others—but this can be reversed if we see what people are already doing for peace."

* * *

Intervention weak points: blindspots and backfire

Success depends on more than designing and deploying interventions. Determining whether those initiatives are working, acknowledging designers’ possible blind spots, and proactively avoiding possible backfire are just as essential. 

Casas: "The World Bank started this movement with a special report in 2015 under the direction of the great economist Karla Hoff. They started using experiments to understand what biases their own personnel and their own collaborators had in development projects, especially in the global south. I think that sobering type of approach is what we need right now. The UN is trying to do it, but we need to further it."

If we don't take what we know about humanity and our ability to adapt and change, if we don’t ignite the prosocial behaviors that we know we're capable of, then we are lost.

Cikara: "Often, people aren't necessarily collecting the data to make sure that what they've done hasn't backfired. After some of these summer programs with the kids, [where they brought together kids from different religious backgrounds in Ireland], the potential for betrayal is so much worse. Because what you've done is you've established a relationship between people across two sides of the conflict divide. Now they think, 'Well, the next time the conflict breaks out, I expect my friend from summer camp to call and make sure that my family and I are okay.' But then they don't. 

"They're back with their family, and they're back with their community, and they may feel pressure not to call. That engenders even potentially more hostility than would have been there at baseline. I think that there are these incredibly well intentioned interventions, but I don't know that people have necessarily always thought through some of the unintended consequences of them."

* * *

Imagining peace science with an unlimited budget

Looking ahead, both speakers imagine an interdisciplinary effort not only to understand and address conflict as it happens but also to predict where tensions are likely to boil over and intervene before they do. 

Cikara: "What we really need to do is get a team of people who all have different backgrounds and expertise. We want the historians, we want the sociologists, we want the cultural anthropologists, and of course, core to this team is the local community members with the expertise of this particular conflict. 

"Different places are at different points in their dynamic evolution of either pre-conflict, in conflict, post-conflict, or long-term reconciliation. All of these different stages require different interventions. There are different processes that are playing out, whether people were firsthand victims of the violence versus being subsequent generations, children or grandchildren. All of these things matter quite a lot, as well as the narrative that gets carried forward that then reorganizes people's beliefs about history, and then further legitimizes or delegitimizes the conflict. 

"So the historians, the anthropologists, the local community members. But also the political scientists, who understand elite-to-constituent dynamics much better than most. The psychologists who understand constituent-to-elite dynamics. And then, of course, the computational social scientists who understand network dynamics, as well as the physicists who understand fission-fusion models.

"With my big pile of money, what I would do is I would try to start a seed project to bring people with these expertise together. I would pick a particular region and then I would try to see what we could do there."

Casas: "First, I will put all my money on Nina's proposal. More specifically, I would bring the power of arts, and especially the power of storytelling. . . If we don't take what we know about humanity and our ability to adapt and change, if we don’t ignite the prosocial behaviors that we know we're capable of, then we are lost. In that sense, hope is moving us."

The post The Behavioral Scientists Working Toward a More Peaceful World appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Laws move slow, technology moves fast. That’s one challenge when regulating AI—sometimes the damage is already done by the time lawmakers pass legislation. Like the European ban on using images scraped from the web to build facial recognition databases, a ban that was approved years after a company had already collected billions of pictures of our unsuspecting, unconsenting faces to do exactly that.

The stakes also vary wildly depending on the context where AI is deployed. For instance, how do you regulate a dual-use technology that some might use to sort handbags on an e-commerce site, others to direct military drones in a warzone? And regulation requires anticipating and countering risks—but it’s difficult to anticipate risk when we can’t possibly predict every novel situation an AI might encounter, nor how it will behave when it does. During a grisly incident in San Francisco, a self-driving car struck a pedestrian and proceeded to pull over—a reasonable response to a collision, but not when the victim is still in harm’s way. 

The versatile, unpredictable, and rapidly evolving nature of AI presents a challenge for regulators tasked with keeping us safe as the technology becomes both more sophisticated and more entrenched in our day-to-day lives. 

This is not a problem with just the machine. It’s a problem with how the machine interacts with us.

Earlier this month, the 2024 Behavioral Science & Policy Association convened a panel at their annual conference to discuss the role behavioral science can play in regulating AI. Ronnie Chatterji, professor of business and public policy at Duke University, moderated the conversation, which featured perspectives from the worlds of business, academia, and government.

The panel included Paula Goldman, ethical and humane use officer at Salesforce; Kristian Hammond, professor of computer science at Northwestern University and chief scientist at Narrative Science; and Elizabeth Kelly, director of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.

The core question that Goldman, Hammond, and Kelly are grappling with in their respective domains is how to mitigate harm without hampering innovation. All three agree that behavioral science is essential to these efforts. “This is not a problem with just the machine,” Hammond said. “It’s a problem with how the machine interacts with us.” 

We’ve curated a portion of their discussion. You can watch the full discussion here.

The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

What about safety and AI keeps you up at night?

Paula Goldman, Salesforce: I spend a lot of time thinking about how to apply safety to the world of AI agents. In a world where we’re moving from generative AI—going from generating content to taking action on our behalf, to these interfaces where you can ask a million different things and a million different actions result from it—how do you know in advance, when you ask for an action, what it's going to look like? If one prompt is going to launch a million emails, for example, how do you in advance check the quality of that? And then ex-post check the quality of that?

Kristian Hammond, Northwestern: I worry that we’re going to end up trying to solve the wrong problems. There are some really flashy AI fears, but the thing I worry about is that if we ignore the genuine reality of how this impacts individuals and groups in society, we’ll end up with, “Oh, we have regulations around transparency,” “We have regulations around explanation,” “We have a focus on being responsible,” but without actually getting into the concrete places where there are genuine harms. The fact is that there is a rise in depression among young women ages 13 to 23. There’s a rise in online addiction. We allow the production of false pornography that’s humiliating women across the country, and we’re like, “Well, we don't know what to do.”

Let's focus on the places where there are real harms because they are rampant. The thing I genuinely worry about is that we’ll focus on, you know, evil drones blowing people up instead of the fact that we are creating a nation of people who are being humiliated, addicted, and pushed into depression, and we’re not doing anything about it.

Elizabeth Kelly, U.S. AI Safety Institute: I totally agree with what Kris said, but I push back a little on the “not doing anything about it,” because federal agencies are pretty hard at work trying to make sure they’re addressing a lot of these harms. And there’s honestly more that Congress needs to do, and we were very clear about that. 

This is light speed for government, but it's still slower than the technology.

The thing that keeps me up at night is just how quickly this is moving. If the technology is evolving exponentially, we have no idea what 2025 or 2026 will be. It’s hard to say these are the harms we should anticipate. And I think it’s even harder to say that we as policymakers, we as government, will be able to stay on top of it. 

We’ve seen the global community move pretty quickly for government. [The executive order] came together in a couple of months, the G7 Code of Conduct. This is light speed for government, but it’s still slower than the technology. And for all the reasons that we’ve talked about, we've got to stay ahead of it.

What else is on your mind? 

Paula Goldman, Salesforce: I spend a lot of time in this AI bubble. When I step out of it and talk to someone, like a friend I haven’t talked to in a long time, I hear a lot of fear, and honestly, a lot of mysticism about AI. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to break that down and to give people a mental model for how to interact with AI. How do we build that into these systems? Accounting for not only the strengths and weaknesses of where AI is right now and where it’s going, but also human strengths and human cognitive biases. And that’s, I think, where the magic is. That’s where we unlock not only avoiding harm with AI but actually using AI for good.

Kristian Hammond, Northwestern: We have to embrace the notion that this is sociotechnical, that this is not a problem with just the machine. It’s a problem with how the machine interacts with us. And that means we have to understand and admit who we are and how we’re hurt, and realize that you're not going to solve the problem by telling people to act differently. You’re going to solve the problem by making sure the machine is built so that when people do what people do, they don’t hurt themselves.

Elizabeth Kelly, U.S. AI Safety Institute: Agreed, and that’s why my leadership team includes both an anthropologist and an ethicist. For me, the question is: How do we shift away from AI that is easily monetized, that produces a lot of the harms that Kris has talked about, to AI that is actually able to tackle a lot of our most pressing societal problems. Drug discovery and development, carbon capture and storage, education. How can we together work to shift the narrative?

Disclosure: BSPA is an organizational partner of Behavioral Scientist. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

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