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.

The post The Challenges of Regulating AI and the Role of Behavioral Science appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

The loss of Daniel Kahneman looms large over the behavioral sciences. The pathbreaking and Nobel-winning psychologist has died at the age of 90. His work deepened our understanding of how the mind works and how people make decisions. In doing so, it transformed the fields of psychology and economics. 

His research on biases and heuristics, conducted alongside his close collaborator Amos Tversky, challenged the dominant model of human behavior in economics, one in which people act as rational utility maximizers. Kahneman and Tversky showed that our judgments err in predictable ways (biases), and we often rely on mental shortcuts to make decisions (heuristics).

Initially dismissed as describing quirks of human psychology, their research revolutionized how we understand human decision-making and contributed to the emergence of behavioral economics. For this contribution, Kahneman earned the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, an award Tversky would have shared if not for his untimely death in 1996. (Michael Lewis famously documented their collaboration and its impact in The Undoing Project.)

Identifying errors in judgment and choice was something Kahneman seemed called to do, particularly as it applied to his own thinking.

Kahneman brought this research to a wider audience through his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The book aimed to “improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them.” For millions of readers, Thinking, Fast and Slow was their entrée into the science of decision-making. 

Identifying errors in judgment and choice wasn’t just the focus of his research; it was something Kahneman seemed called to do, particularly as it applied to his own thinking.

“I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,” he said. 

He once remarked to journalist Jason Zweig, who helped him with Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have thousands of people who can tell you you’re wrong?”

Kahneman’s ability to change his mind in light of new evidence seems to have been one of his superpowers. Is it a coincidence that the scientist who changed so many minds was also especially adept at changing his own?

Lessons like this inspired us to reach out to many of his close collaborators and colleagues to learn more about the scientist behind the science. We asked them to share a memory or a lesson they learned from him.

We bring together more than 30 entries. The authors include some of Kahneman’s first students who went on to become psychologists themselves, former graduate students and postdocs, and the psychologists, economists, and others who collaborated with or were deeply influenced by him. These contributors represent only a fraction of the people he impacted across his seven decades in the field, spent at universities in Israel, Canada, and the United States.

Is it a coincidence that the scientist who changed so many minds was also especially adept at changing his own?

The resulting collection is a mosaic of memories and lessons that helps preserve his wisdom and approach to science. You’ll learn about Kahneman the thinker, the coauthor, the emailer, as well as Kahneman the partner, mentor, and friend. 

As you’ll see, his ability to interrogate his own thinking was legendary, but it wasn’t without cost. It sometimes meant hours, weeks, years on one paper, project, idea. But it was born of a desire to ask deep, meaningful questions, try to answer them rigorously, and, ultimately, get it right. Of course “right” was temporary; there was always more to learn.

Kahneman taught us that losses loom large, and his death feels especially immense. But the memories and lessons shared in this collection also remind us what we’ve gained.

— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief

Last week in Paris
By Barbara Tversky, Professor Emerita of Psychology, Stanford University

The last week in Paris. We had immersed ourselves in Les Nymphéas and Rothko, marveled at the ballet, La fille mal gardée and the opera Simon Boccanegra, walked and walked and walked in idyllic weather, devoured île flottante and chocolate mousse and soufflés, laughed and cried and dined with family and friends, among them Olivier and Anne-Lise Sibony. Took his family to his childhood home in Neuilly-sur-Seine and his playground across the river in the Jardin D’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. He wrote in the mornings; afternoons and evenings were for us in Paris. There was spare time one afternoon, what would you like to do? “I want to learn something.”

To be continued …
By Richard Thaler, Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics, University of Chicago

My fondest memories of working with Danny come from 1984 to ’85 when I spent a year visiting him in Vancouver at The University of British Columbia. Danny had just begun a new project with Jack Knetsch on what people think is fair in market transactions and they invited me to join them. We had the then-rare ability to ask survey questions to a few hundred randomly selected Canadians each week. We would draft three versions of five questions, fax them to Ottawa Monday morning, get the results faxed back to us Thursday afternoon. Who needs Mturk! We then spent the weekend digesting the results and writing new questions.

We learned that raising the price of snow shovels the morning after a blizzard might make sense to an economist, but would make customers angry. Danny displayed two of his most prominent traits. He was always a skeptic, even (especially?) about his own ideas, so we stress-tested everything. And he was infinitely patient in that pursuit. Was our finding just true for snow shovels? What about water after a hurricane? Flu medicine? How about late-season discounts (which of course are fine). It was total immersion; meeting in person several times a week and talking constantly. We were in the zone.

Although we spent another year together in New York seven years later, we were unable to recreate that intensity. We had too many other balls in the air. But we continued our conversations and friendship until the end. Every conversation ended the same way: “To be continued.”

Danny was a special man and I got to spend time with him off and on for 47 years. Which raises the question: Would it be fair for me to complain that I miss him?

Has anything been accomplished?
By Cass Sunstein, Professor of Law, Harvard University

You are sitting in a large room—a hotel room, or perhaps an apartment. There are two of you, or maybe three. The leader of the conversation has an ironic smile, an intense look, a keen focus, mixed with a sense of pleasure, even mischief. The topic might be outrage and how to measure it. It might be group decision-making. It might be preference reversals. It might be anchoring. It might be noise, understood as unwanted variability in judgment.

The discussion starts at 11 a.m. There is a puzzle—say, the varieties of noise. What are they? Stumbling in the dark, you offer an account. The leader of the conversation looks respectful and obviously unsatisfied. He ventures an alternative account, which is infinitely better than yours. He identifies three kinds of noise. You nod in amazement. (You are thunderstruck.) He pauses and looks mildly distressed: “What I said isn't right.” You pause. You try to help, but what you have to say is useless. He pauses and puts it another way. It is better—clearer, cleaner, more precise. He remains dissatisfied. He tries again. And again. It is time for lunch. You are already exhausted.

You keep at it. It is 6 p.m. The two or three of you have been at it for seven hours. Through the discussion, three kinds of noise have been specified, with different and better names from those Danny first suggested, and with different and better content. But Danny is unsatisfied with the names and the content; he thinks he hasn't gotten it right and that he remains far off. In the process, you have been discussing criminal sentencing, child custody determinations, insurance companies, the social cost of carbon, x-rays, medical diagnoses, and human dignity.

You are exhausted. You can’t possibly keep track of the flood of ideas. It’s dinner time. There are smiles, and some references to the food, but the major question at dinner remains: What are the varieties of noise? And once they are specified, which is the most important? How can we measure them?

It is 10 p.m. Your mind is spinning. Has anything been accomplished? It all seems so ephemeral, lost. Danny has said 25,000 interesting things. They seem important, too. Are they gone?

In despair, you ask a version of this question. Danny responds, “Cass, you think by writing. I think by talking.”

Deadlines have no effect on me
By Olivier Sibony, Professor of Strategy, HEC Paris

One thing that I will remember Danny for is his incredible perfectionism. When we were working on Noise, he could rewrite the same sentence two, three, or ten times. His goal was to make it as short and as precise as possible. This sometimes made a paragraph harder to read. But he would never sacrifice precision for the sake of readability. Similarly, time constraints were irrelevant to him. As he once told me, “Deadlines have no effect on me. I can’t hurry even if I want to; and I don’t want to.”

Danny also worried about flaws in our work that we might have missed. Feedback from trusted colleagues who read our drafts was not sufficient to reassure him, because he knew his reputation predisposed readers favorably. This led him to a logical conclusion: “We have to pay people to tell us how bad this work is.” We hired consultants with a specific brief: to play the role of reviewers in an academic journal and look for errors in one of our chapters. It worked. They found flaws, and we fixed them.

That was wonderful. I was wrong.
By Adam Grant, Professor of Management and Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

I gave a talk on some of my research on givers and takers. I didn’t realize that Danny Kahneman was in the audience. As I’m walking offstage, Danny is there. He stops me, and he says, “That was wonderful. I was wrong.” His eyes twinkled as he said it, and he lit up.

Danny is not somebody who walks around beaming all the time, so I was struck by the reaction and intrigued by these two sentences that normally would contradict each other. Normally, what you expect people to say is, “That was wonderful, I was right.” Or, “Actually, you’re wrong. Let me tell you why.”

I ended up sitting down with him and asking him to explain this reaction. I said, I’ve seen this a couple times—I’ve seen you make predictions, people end up running the experiment and you see something that’s not what you expected, and you seem to really take joy in being wrong. The first thing he said was something to the effect of, No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.

But what’s different about Danny is he seems to do that even when his core beliefs are attacked or threatened. He seems to take joy in having been wrong, even on things that he believes deeply. And so I asked him about that—why and how?

On the why question, he said, Finding out that I was wrong is the only way I’m sure that I’ve learned anything. Otherwise, I’m just going around and living in a world that’s dominated by confirmation bias, or desirability bias. And I’m just affirming the things I already think I know.

On the how part, he said for him it’s about attachment. He thinks there are good ideas everywhere, and his attachment to his ideas is very provisional. He doesn’t fall in love with them, they don’t become part of his identity.

He had that ability to detach and say, look, your ideas are not your identity. They’re just hypotheses. Sometimes they’re accurate. More often, they’re wrong or incomplete. And that’s part of what being not only a social scientist, but just a good thinker, is all about.

Excerpted from a conversation with Adam Grant for Behavioral Scientist.

I’m more like a spiral than a circle
By Dan Lovallo, Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Decision Sciences, University of Sydney

Many people have heard that Danny changes his mind—a lot. This is certainly true. I have never written even a 5,000-word essay with him that didn’t take a year. Let me add another dimension to the discussion. During our last working dinner at a bistro in New York, and possibly out of mild frustration, I said, “Danny, you know you change your mind a lot.” It wasn’t a question. He continued chewing. I continued my line of non-question questioning: “And often you change it back to what it was at the beginning.”

Danny, having finished his bite and without missing a beat, looked up and in his characteristic lilt said, “Dan, that’s when I learn the most.” Then using his finger he drew a circle in space. “I don’t go around and around a problem. It might seem like it, but I am getting deeper and deeper." The circle morphed into a three-dimensional spiral. “So, you’re missing all the learning,” he explained, as he displayed the invisible sculpture. “I’m more like a spiral than a circle.” Happy with this new idea, Danny grinned as only Danny could.

Studying with Moses
By Carey Morewedge, Professor of Marketing, Boston University

I had the fortune to be Danny Kahneman’s last postdoc. It initially felt like going to study with Moses, but a modern version with a love of Scandinavian recliners who offered you an espresso as you walked into the door. Working with Danny fundamentally changed my model of human judgment and decision-making. When I first arrived in Princeton, he told me to get the latest textbook on visual illusions and see if there was anything the field missed.

Danny saw the mind through the architecture of the eye and believed the eye and mind have similar illusions, blind spots, and mechanisms. That simple, elegant insight gave rise to much of the field we know today. Each conversation with Danny left me smarter, humbler about what I knew, and wildly overcaffeinated. Despite his stature, he seriously considered our scientific disagreements and verbally “preregistered” the evidence that would change his mind.

Danny was generous with his time and the experiences that he shared. He and Anne Treisman would often take me to lunch to talk psychology. At the time, I had no idea where they were taking me. The lunches were just fantastic conversations. Later, I realized that one “nice place” in Berkeley had been Chez Panisse.

Beyond being a closeted foodie, Danny was also a romantic. He would pick up Anne from Green Hall in their pristine 1990s Honda Accord almost every day I met with him in Princeton. During seminars, one of them would often fall asleep, head rested on the other’s shoulder. After I moved to Pittsburgh, Danny frequently flew me back to meet with him in his home, whether in Princeton or Berkeley. I hope it was because he enjoyed our conversations and collaboration. I can’t help thinking it was partly because it helped me afford the many flights I took to see my girlfriend (and future wife), Mina Cikara. I had fallen in love with Mina while in Princeton, and she was still living there at the time.

A case in character
By Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

One evening, more than twenty years ago, I was the last one in the lab when the phone rang. "Hello?" I said, I hope not brusquely. I was a Ph.D. student at the time and eager to get back to my work. "Hello?" came the reply of an uncommonly polite older gentleman, whose accent I couldn't quite place. "I'm so sorry to trouble you," he continued. "I believe I've just now left my suitcase there." Ah, this made sense. We'd hosted an academic conference that day. "It's a terrible inconvenience, I know, but might you keep it somewhere until I can return to pick it up?" "Sure," I said, cradling the receiver and grabbing a notepad. "How do you spell your name?" "Thank you so very much. It's K-A-H-N-E-M-A-N." I just about fainted. "Yes, Dr. Kahneman," I said, coming to my senses, likely more deferentially than when I'd first picked up.

When I hung up, I thought to myself, Oh, it's possible to be a world-famous genius—the most recently anointed Nobel laureate in economics, among other honors—and interact with anybody and everybody with utmost respect and dignity, no matter who they are. In the years that followed, I got to know Danny Kahneman much better, and when I did, that view was only confirmed. Confirmation bias? Halo effect? No and no. What then? Character. The world is mourning the loss of Danny Kahneman the genius, as we should, but I am missing Danny Kahneman the person.

Merely average
By Donald Redelmeier, Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto

I first heard about Daniel Kahneman when I was in high school. We later met when I was in graduate studies at Stanford. The two of us stayed connected for the next three decades. Kahneman had superb insights on intuitive judgment, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics. He was also a smart, diligent, efficient, honest, savvy, and generous scientist throughout. I was not surprised when he won a Nobel Prize.

Kahneman, however, was merely average when driving. We drove together several times and he was no better than me at anticipating other vehicles, visualizing traffic flows, staying unrushed, and avoiding pejoratives. This shows how excellence in science does not necessarily extend to other domains. Unlike average drivers, however, he recognized his limits behind the wheel and did not consider himself as better than average.

This humility saved Kahneman from uncountable traffic crashes because he knew his limits and compensated accordingly. The same humility was true in his science because he always worried about mistakes and actively sought contrary views to detect errors. That’s a strength of being open-minded and soliciting alternate perspectives. His self-disciplined humility is a trait worth emulating by all of us in behavioral science.

I hated it so much
By Linnea Gandhi, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pennsylvania

“I hated it so much that it clarified what I wanted to say.” After working late to write a memo that, I hoped, captured both Danny’s thinking and his voice, I woke up a few hours later to those words. Normally, that sort of feedback from a collaborator would devastate me. With Danny though, this was not only normal but a compliment.

Danny believed in “no sunk costs” when it came to iterating on ideas, especially in writing. Sometimes he didn’t even track changes. Every draft served a purpose—to inspire a better one—after which it was no longer needed. Ego was irrelevant. If anything, you knew Danny genuinely cared about you as a collaborator merely because he welcomed you into his process and was (nearly) as hard on you as he was on himself. He never let you question your worth. The drafts lasted hours, the relationships lasted years.

I wish he were around to hate more of what I wrote.

My objection is fatal
By Shane Frederick, Professor of Marketing, Yale University

I once asked Danny to comment on a paper I was about to submit. His response:

“Shane, I was hoping to like your paper, but I did not. You lost me once I understood what you were doing. Since my objection, if valid, is fatal, there is nothing that you could do that would fix it. So you should hope that the referees don’t agree with me. I join you in that hope.”

Another time, he reached out at 10:30 p.m. on a Monday:

Danny: “Shane, are you watching the game?”
Shane (super puzzled, since I didn’t think he followed football): “No.”
Danny: “Fantastic. I want to talk about heuristics.”

Never finished thinking
By Benjamin Manning, Ph.D. Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

What I will remember most about Danny is not the content of our conversations but the hours that followed.

Danny’s way of extending care and humility was touching. Despite the occasional tension in our discussions, a common occurrence when academics argue over experimental design, he would always reach out to check in, unduly apologizing for any perceived stubbornness or insensitivity. He, the Nobel Prize winner, the bestselling author, and the smartest person in the room, often needlessly apologized to us!

Danny also was never finished thinking about anything. There was always another layer. We would agree that an idea was sound, that we should move forward with the experiment. But two hours later (a bit after the apology call), we would get a message telling us we were all wrong and we had to rethink everything. Of course, he was usually right.

When this kept happening, I tried to anticipate his critiques. I would think for hours after our conversations. Where was that deeper level of understanding? Unsurprisingly, I could not find it. I’d be convinced that our plan was right. Boom—10 minutes later, an email highlighting a problem so clearly. I had known there were other layers, but I just could not see them. Danny, however, always saw more.

Now it is time that we turn on ourselves
By David Schkade, Professor Emeritus of Management and Strategy, University of California, San Diego

Danny was what I called a “serial monogamist” with his ideas and hypotheses. He loved his current favorite idea with all his heart and worked relentlessly to make it the best it could be. Careful empirical tests were then designed, with much effort to make the result as fair and as convincing as possible (usually large samples and between-group comparisons). But in the end, the empirical evidence was always the decision maker. If it did not support the cherished hypothesis, then he abandoned it. Sunk costs did not matter. If it wasn’t true, he was on to the next idea, which he loved with all his heart ... and there were always more ideas.

But if the data was supportive, at first there was excitement. But then, he would say, “Now it is time that we turn on ourselves,” time to try to critique and tear down what we had just built. Better that we do it to ourselves than to leave it for our critics to do, he would say. He was more concerned with getting it right than a rush to publish. Although he could seem to be in a hurry in some ways, he was very patient in “getting it right.”

Just wait, it’s going to change everything
By Barry Schwartz, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Swarthmore College

It was 1983, and I was working on a book that aimed to be a systematic critique of conceptions of human nature shared by economics, evolutionary biology, and Skinnerian psychology. I was an “expert” on Skinner, but very much an amateur when it came to the other two fields. In my critique of economics, my plan was to show that a slew of assumptions economists made about what people valued, what they cared about, and how they made decisions were wrong.

The work of Kahneman and Amos Tversky was to be a central part of my argument. But I was on shaky ground, preparing to make sweeping claims on the basis of what might have been very superficial understanding of their work and its implications. So I made appointments to see each of them—Tversky at Stanford and Kahneman at Berkeley—to lay out my arguments and give them a chance to educate me and protect me from embarrassing myself.

Both conversations went more or less the same way. At that moment in history, their work was mostly regarded as the discovery of a set of quirks and imperfections in decision-making that pretty much left the edifice of economic rationality intact. But their work, I argued, would revolutionize how economists think about human aspirations and decisions. It would revolutionize how we all think about what it means to be rational. Just wait, I said. It’s going to change everything.

Each of them, in their own way, tried to calm me down. Danny said that he rarely found himself in the position of defending economics, but my grandiose claims on his behalf had put him in that position. Yes, he agreed, their work might prove to be important, but it wasn’t going to turn anything upside down. He was kind and gentle as he tried to save me from public humiliation.

I left the conversations with each of them even more convinced that their discoveries would be world-changing. They failed to talk me out of my view. I wrote my book, The Battle for Human Nature. Essentially nobody bought it—the book or the argument. Nonetheless, I think the following 40 years have shown that I was right.

I interacted with Danny many times over the years since that conversation, which surely loomed much larger in my mind than his. But that initial conversation remains a jewel in my professional life, never to be forgotten.

Better act like you are surprised
By Craig Fox, Professor of Management, University of California, Los Angeles

Within the first five minutes of Danny Kahneman’s class in judgment and decision-making at UC Berkeley, I was hooked. Two weeks into the class I had a feeling I might have found my future career. What better way to spend one’s days than to study how to help people make better decisions for a better life?

As an undergraduate working in Danny’s lab, he always treated me with greater kindness and consideration than I thought a random undergraduate deserved, and he showed a bafflingly keen interest in my success. Nevertheless, I was surprised one Saturday morning in February when the phone rang in my apartment and it was him.

“Craig, this is Danny. I just wanted to call to congratulate you!”

“Thanks,” I replied reflexively. But I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Congratulations for what?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard?” he replied. “Well, you’ve been admitted to Stanford’s psychology department. And not only that, you’ll be working with Amos.”

I was beyond thrilled. Stanford was my first choice for graduate school, and the opportunity to study with Amos Tversky was a dream come true. We chatted for a few more minutes about this news and what it would mean for me, and then said goodbye.

Five minutes later, the phone rang again. It was that same familiar voice.

“Craig, this is Danny.” He paused, awkwardly, then continued: “When Stanford calls … better act like you are surprised.”

An inch taller and in love
By Maya Bar-Hillel, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

My first memory of Danny Kahneman goes back to 1963. I had just ended my service in the Israeli army, and was enrolled in The Hebrew University’s psychology department, the only department, besides the medical school, which at that time selected students on the basis of a competitive psychometric test. Danny taught the freshman course Introductory Statistics. He walked into a class brimming with the eager minds and shiny eyes of novices to the academic world. Tall and handsome, he greeted the class warmly, and immediately announced that we were “the crème de la crème.”

At the end of the class, I was an inch taller, and in love—with Danny, with Statistics, with the University. I graduated from that department, years later even joining its faculty, but Danny remained till his death the person to share my work and writing and ideas with, and who, while giving sharp criticism, still always made me feel like I was the crème de la crème. Thank you, beloved Danny. I will miss you.

He gave us confidence
By Lord Richard Layard, Professor Emeritus of Economics, London School of Economics

Danny changed my life. He first persuaded me that happiness could be measured. Then he twice invited me to Princeton for a month each time. We had many memorable lunches. Danny introduced me to many key people, especially Richard Davidson. But more importantly, he came to every conference we had in England—I can remember at least six. We also had regular phone calls. Without his wisdom (and his credibility from the prize) well-being would never have progressed as it has in Britain. He gave us confidence.

But, most importantly, it was so enjoyable to be with him. He was incredibly open and sweet-natured. And I am so glad he had those years with Barbara, which made him very happy. He was a real giant whose influence can only grow and grow.

Anxious and unsure
By Eric Johnson, Professor of Business, Columbia University

A few months before the publication of Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011, the Center for Decision Sciences had scheduled Danny to present in our seminar series. We were excited because he had decided to present his first “book talk” with us. Expecting a healthy crowd, we scheduled the talk in Uris 301, the biggest classroom in Columbia Business School.

I arrived in the room a half hour early to find Danny, sitting alone in the large room, obsessing over his laptop. He confided that he had just changed two-thirds of the slides for the talk and was quite anxious and unsure about how to present the material. Of course, after the introduction, Danny presented in his usual charming, erudite style, communicating the distinction between System 1 and System 2 with clarity to an engaged audience. Afterwards, I asked him how he thought it went, and he said, “It was awful, but at least now I know how to make it better.” Needless to say, the book went on to become an international bestseller.

This was not false modesty. Having studied overconfidence throughout his career, Danny seemed immune to its effects. While surely maddening to some coauthors, this resulted in work that was more insightful and, most importantly to Danny and to us, correct. He was not always right, but always responsive to evidence, supportive or contradictory. For example, when some of the evidence cited in the book was questioned as a result of the replication crisis in psychology, Danny revised his opinion, writing in the comments of a critical blog: “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies.”

The best tribute to Danny, I believe, is adopting this idea, that science and particularly the social sciences, is not about seeming right, but instead, being truthful.

A beginner’s mind
By Jason Zweig, Columnist, The Wall Street Journal

Working on Thinking, Fast and Slow exposed me to three of Danny’s qualities I hadn’t previously encountered in their full intensity. Only years later did I realize that I’ve internalized them as a journalist and an investor. Or so I hope.

First, Danny saw everything through a child’s eyes or, as some people call it, “beginner’s mind.” No one else I’ve ever known has so often asked: Why? Instead of assuming the status quo is valid, Danny always started by wondering whether it made any sense.

He was also relentlessly self-critical. I once showed him a letter I’d gotten from a reader telling me—correctly but rudely—that I was wrong about something. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have thousands of people who can tell you you’re wrong?” Danny said.

Finally, Danny could rework what we had already done as if it had never existed. Most people hate changing their mind; he liked nothing better, when the evidence justified it. “I have no sunk costs,” he would say.

One of his favorite words, while working on the book, was “miserable.” He used it to describe whatever we had just written; the process of writing a book; and, above all, himself. Danny’s misery was largely rooted in the decades he and Amos had spent exploring the failings of the human mind by picking apart their own errors of thought and judgment.

Taking the outside view on everything else had given Danny the outside view on himself. He embodied the ultimate form of self-knowledge: to distrust yourself above all. He knew full well how smart he was, but he also knew how foolish he could be.

Noticing that he intuitively stereotyped a bespectacled child as “the young professor,” Danny realized people extrapolate the future from almost no data at all. After buying an expensive apartment, he laughed at knowing that he would also overpay to furnish it.

Excerpted with permission from an article that originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Kahneman and Tversky 101
By Max Bazerman, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University

Many scholars had the good fortune to study with Danny. Some were his students, postdocs, or served on the same faculty. I was jealous of these scholars. I write as one of the thousands of more distant students of Danny’s. I benefited from having an early fascination with the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman and Tversky’s use of rationality as a goal post against which actual decision-making could be systematically described became the orientation for my research and teaching in decision-making, negotiation, and ethics. My research and life experiences have been greatly enhanced by the Kahneman and Tversky lens.

Danny and I interacted occasionally over the three decades after I first met him at a conference in 1984. Before the term “behavioral economics” existed, Danny heard that I taught what I often described as “Kahneman and Tversky 101.” In 1993, when Danny took a position at Princeton, and would be teaching public policy students, he flew to Chicago to watch me teach Kahneman and Tversky 101 to executives at Northwestern. He was surprised to see me highlight in class the systematic mistakes that students made; his style was gentler, highlighting the mistakes of others.

In 2005, I had the wonderful opportunity to coteach decision-making with Danny for a large company, an experience that was truly memorable—he would continue to disagree with my approach, while being happy to engage in discussions about the best way to improve decision-making. The goal was discovery, not winning the argument.

Our relationship became much closer in 2013, when we worked together helping an insurance company improve their agreements. Throughout the project, I learned so much by watching Danny’s openness to the ideas of others, his passion for making better decisions, and his focus on helping the company achieve fair policies. This collaboration was one of the most profound professional experiences of my life.

Practical problem solving
By Todd Rogers, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University

I was part of a group helping some political candidates think about how to respond to untrue attacks by their political rivals. We focused on what cognitive and social psychology said about persuasive messaging. Danny suggested a different emphasis I hadn’t considered.

He directed us to a literature in cognitive psychology on cognitive associations. Once established, associations cannot simply be severed; attempting to directly refute them often reinforces them, and logical arguments alone can’t undo them. But these associations can be weakened when other competing associations are created.

For instance, if falsely accused of enjoying watching baseball, I’d be better off highlighting genuine interests—like my enjoyment of watching American football or reality TV—to dilute the false association with baseball. This anecdote is one small example of the many ways Danny’s profound intellect has influenced practical problem-solving. He’ll be missed and remembered.

Premortems
By Michael Mauboussin, Head of Consilient Research, Morgan Stanley

The opportunity to spend time with Danny and the chance to interview him were professional delights. One of my favorite lessons was about premortems, a technique developed by Gary Klein that Danny called one of his favorite debiasing techniques. In a premortem, a group assumes that they have made a decision (which they have yet to do), places themselves in the future (generally a year from now), and pretends that it worked out poorly. Each member independently writes down the reasons for the failure.

Klein suggested that one of the keys to premortems was the idea of prospective hindsight, that putting yourself into the future and thinking about the present opens up the mind to unconsidered yet relevant potential outcomes. I then learned that the findings of the research on prospective hindsight had failed to replicate—which made me question the value of the technique.

Danny explained that my concern was misplaced and that prospective hindsight was not central to the premortem. Rather, it was that the technique legitimizes dissent and allows organizations the opportunities to consider and close potential loopholes in their plans. That I had missed the real power of the premortem was a revelation and a relief, providing me with a cherished lesson.

Dancing dissonance
By Katy Milkman, Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, University of Pennsylvania

One of my fondest and most awkward memories of Danny is of a visit I made to his New York apartment in 2019 to conduct a recorded interview about his work on prospect theory for a podcast I host about behavioral science called Choiceology.

I remember sitting down in Danny’s living room across from him and waiting while a sound engineer placed a fancy portable microphone in front of his mouth, which Danny found enormously uncomfortable. Despite wanting to do nothing more than move that mic, and giving it the stink eye throughout our conversation, Danny was incredibly gracious. He gave a terrifically thoughtful interview, and he even made the time to take me out for lunch afterwards at his favorite neighborhood Japanese restaurant.

Over that simple meal, we had a wide-ranging conversation about the state of our field (he was very concerned about the replicability crisis; a concern I shared), his latest book project (he was working on Noise at the time), and our hobbies. There was a particularly memorable moment when Danny told me how much he loved watching dance performances, and I replied by asking if he’d ever wanted to try dancing himself. What I’d thought was a reasonable question clearly was not, as it earned me a wilting look and a vehement “No!” I made a mental note at that moment to avoid heated intellectual arguments with Danny!

I also vividly recall talking with Danny about his experience winning the Nobel Prize. He explained to me that the best thing about winning it, by far, was how happy it made all the people around him—even his casual acquaintances. He said their joy was by far his greatest source of delight; it caught him by surprise but was truly wonderful.

Subject: moment of pride
By Avishai Henik, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Over fifty years ago I was an undergraduate in Danny’s classes in the new psychology program at Be’er-Sheva. Danny taught without any written material in front of him. He would enter the class, ask one of the students where we finished off the previous week and from there, he would continue lecturing. One day he needed something written for the corresponding class at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Because I was a diligent student who wrote down everything the teacher said, he asked me for my notebooks, promising I would get them back.

At the time I used to be called to reserve duties in the military every year. Not surprisingly, it also happened during the year we studied perception. Hoping that I would have some time to study for the expected exam, I asked Danny what and how to study. Danny told me that I should read and know the textbook. I asked in what way I should know this book, and Danny, with no hesitation responded: “By rote of course.” I followed Danny’s advice. I still remember the sense of competence that I had during the exam. Danny was impressed.

We published an article on social priming that was replicated. I received the following email from Danny.

What happened to brilliant?
By Tom Gilovich, Professor of Psychology, Cornell University

To make the kind of contributions Danny has made, it’s essential to look at things from several angles, to zoom in and zoom out on a problem, and to be self-critical. And Danny’s capacity to do so was legendary. Most notably, he was often in a lather about how Thinking, Fast and Slow would not only fail to have much impact, but might be an embarrassing end to his career.

Naturally, Danny’s ability to be self-critical had implications for those who worked with him. Collaborators had to accept that the journey would not be smooth. I experienced this firsthand when Vicki Medvec and I submitted a chapter for a book for which Danny wrote a final-chapter commentary. I don’t remember whether I knew he was assigned that role, but I do remember being very surprised—and thrilled—when I checked my phone messages and heard, “This is Danny Kahneman and I want to tell you that your chapter is brilliant. Reading it made my day.”

I didn’t know him then, so to receive that feedback from psychology’s Mount Olympus … talk about making one’s day! I don’t believe my feet touched the ground until I realized that I stupidly deleted the message rather keep it forever to play for anyone who’d listen.

My feet became even more anchored to the ground a week later when I got another call from Danny: “I’ve been thinking more about your chapter. It’s all wrong. I believe you’re planning to publish the data you describe in the chapter, but you can’t. People will go after you. It will damage your career.” Eeek! What happened to “brilliant”?

This story has a happy ending because Danny’s second thoughts on our work resulted in an adversarial collaboration with him that led to a broader perspective on the psychology of regret. Danny’s habit of looking at a problem from different perspectives once again paid off in greater insight.

Don’t take rejection to heart
By Anat Ninio, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

For about five years, I was Danny’s student, supervisee, research assistant, teaching assistant, and sometimes secretary. What I hadn’t expected but turned out to be a valuable part of our relationship was his advice on the right way to be a successful academic. One wise sentence I keep repeating in his name to young hopefuls is the strategy of sending your work out for publication. Danny told me to start with the top journal in the field, and ignore its very high refusal rate. He said that even if the manuscript gets rejected, you end up with intelligent comments from the reviewers. Treat them as valuable feedback, use them to better your manuscript, and then send it to the next journal in the hierarchy. Don’t take the rejection to heart—turn it into an opportunity. This advice serves very well even for young children, fostering a willingness to dare to fail.

Stay receptive to criticism
By Andrei Shleifer, Professor of Economics, Harvard University

I met Danny Kahneman in the 1980s at a behavioral economics conference in New York. Although his research would end up shaping and inspiring much of mine for the next 40 years, I did not yet know that. In fact, I did not get to know Danny well until we had a long walk in Princeton after Amos Tversky’s death. After that, I tried as often as I could to run ideas by him, benefit from his wisdom, and just enjoy his patient and sympathetic company.

Two Danny experiences are vivid in my memory. About 20 years ago, I became increasingly skeptical about prospect theory, and my research started moving in the direction of memory, attention, and cognition more generally. I was particularly worked up about the “rare Asian disease experiment,” which to me had to do with framing and representation of the problem, and not with loss aversion in the value function. I did not get a warm reaction to these digressions from behavioral economists, for whom prospect theory ruled. But the person who wanted to engage, to think it through, and to stay receptive to criticisms, was of all people Danny. He stayed curious.

We last had lunch in New York in November 2023. He was as sharp as ever. Seeking his wisdom, I asked him why my papers on cognition in economics were being ignored by psychologists, despite being so respectful of that field. He told me that he thought memory and attention were whole fields in psychology, and the idea that these mechanisms can be integrated into a general model of cognition and choice was unlikely to gain a warm reception. This is not what I wanted to hear, but I also understood that Danny was thoughtful, sincere, wise, and probably, as usual, correct.

The early years
By Daniel Gopher, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology

I graduated in 1972 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Daniel Kahneman was my advisor and I was his first graduating Ph.D. student. These were the early years before Danny met Amos Tversky. Attention was the main research focus for Danny, his laboratory, and his students. I was fortunate to be a member of this exciting group and participate in many long hours of discussions.

We enjoyed his creativity and brilliant ideas while mentoring and encouraging open discussions. We were motivated by his bright-eyed excitement and interest. His first book, Attention and Effort, draws upon the discussions and conducted research in this framework.

Danny was interested not only in the scientific contribution of his attention research but also its implication to daily life performance. He introduced the term “attention limits” to pilots’ education and together with me developed an auditory test of selective attention test, which was validated and incorporated in the selection battery of Israel air force flight school and also tested on bus drivers.

We worked closely for several years. I consider him my guide and mentor of how knowledge should be acquired and questioned, how research should be designed and conducted, and how to get students involved. These early years of mentoring have stayed with me through my years in academia and applied work.

Hours talking
By Annie Duke, Psychologist, Former Professional Poker Player, and Co-Founder of the Alliance for Decision Education

Danny was generous with his friendship, generous with his time, generous as a collaborator. He was just so incredibly kind.

I had the privilege of getting introduced to Danny by Josh Wolfe right after my book, Thinking in Bets, came out. I remember being so nervous as I waited in the restaurant where we were to have lunch. I mean, after all, Danny was an idol of mine. His work was the single biggest influence on my thinking about decision-making.

But from the first moment he sat down, he was so welcoming. Danny was possibly the lowest ego person I have ever met, certainly in comparison to the outsized volume and quality of work he produced in his life. As we chatted, he was much more curious to learn about decision-making at the poker table than to talk about his own work. He made me feel like I was his equal in that conversation even as I was lightyears behind him.

When I was writing Quit, Danny spent hours and hours on Zoom with me talking through the subject. He read early drafts and offered edits. It is still hard for me to fathom that Danny took the time to do that. But that is who he was. The book is, of course, so much better for his contribution. Quit was deeply informed by his body of work, and having the opportunity to collaborate with him is hard to comprehend for me even now. I am not sure how I got so lucky. But I am so grateful that I did.

Excerpted with permission from Annie Duke’s newsletter, Thinking in Bets.

I took Danny’s advice
By Terrance Odean, Professor of Finance, University of California, Berkeley

In the spring of 1989, I asked Danny Kahneman for advice about grad school. He invited me to his house on Saturday morning. I was currently enrolled in a UC Berkeley cognitive psychology course cotaught by Danny and his wife, Anne Treisman. The previous semester, I had taken Danny’s judgment and decision-making course.

When I arrived Saturday morning, I told Danny that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology and study with him. He responded that if I really wanted to study psychology, he would be happy to have me as a student. However, there was another field that he thought I should consider: finance. Danny thought that I should take insights from judgment and decision-making and apply them to finance. I could be one of the early researchers in behavioral finance—a very small field at the time.

Danny was particularly concerned about my family. My wife, Martha, and I had two daughters—our third daughter was born while I was in graduate school. Martha was from Berkeley and wanted to raise our daughters here. Danny told me that if I got a Ph.D. in psychology, I’d likely end up with a job somewhere Martha and I didn’t want to live and with a lower salary than we might have hoped for.

If, as he expected, behavioral finance took off, I would have more job choices and better pay. He cautioned, though, that behavioral finance might not get me a job. But, in that case, I would have a Ph.D. in finance, go into industry, make more money, and be able to keep my family in the Bay Area.

I took Danny’s advice. In graduate school, I often felt as though I were a missionary banished to a foreign land. The people were friendly but saw the world quite differently. And then, as Danny had predicted, behavioral finance took off. And my daughters grew up in Berkeley.

It’s a hell of a thing
By Colin Camerer, Professor of Behavioral Economics, California Institute of Technology

In the mid-1990s, I met Danny at his gorgeous house in Berkeley to talk about utility. He and Barbara Fredrickson, and others, had been finding that remembered evaluations, like reminiscing about a vacation, were not mathematical integrals of momentary hedonics. Time duration was neglected, and the best and last moments were too heavily weighted (a “peak-end rule”).

Both of us liked to “think by talking.” But Danny was a master of an extra level—thinking by conversing, like idea tennis. I wasn’t. And Danny was notoriously pessimistic; he wanted a gardener to weed out bad ideas. But all his ideas were so intriguing; I didn’t see weeds.

Danny and most early behavioral economists used all parts of life as data. In 1991–92, we had a dream sabbatical together at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York along with Dick Thaler. We went to see a Western, The Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood’s character says, about a murder, “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” Danny was fascinated by this.

Five years later, scientific descendants of “all he’s got” and “all he’s ever gonna have” showed up as “remembered utility” and “predicted utility” in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Eradicating unhappiness
By George Loewenstein, Professor of Economics and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University

For Danny, research was intensely personal. He got into intellectual disputes with a wide range of people, and these would hurt him viscerally, in part because it pained him that people he respected could come to different conclusions from those he held so strongly. He came up with, or at least embraced, the concept of “adversarial collaboration” in which researchers who disagreed on key issues would, however, agree upon a definitive test to determine where reality lay. A few of these were successful, but others (I would say most) ended with both parties unmoved, perhaps reflecting Robert Abelson’s insight that “beliefs are like possessions,” and, hence subject to the endowment effect.

I was spending time with Danny when he first got interested in hedonics—happiness—and that was a personal matter as well. His mother was declining mentally in France, and he agonized about whether to visit her; the issue was that she had anterograde amnesia, so he knew that she would forget his visit as soon as it ended. The criterion for quality of life, he had decided, should be the integral of happiness over time; so that—although she would miss out on the pleasure of remembering it—his visit would have value if she enjoyed it while it was happening.

Showing the flexibility of his thinking, and his all-too-rare willingness to learn from the data, his perspective changed as he studied happiness. He became more concerned about the story a life tells, including, notably, its peak and end; he concluded that eradicating unhappiness was a more important goal than fostering happiness, and began to draw a sharp distinction between happiness and life satisfaction, perhaps drawing, again, on his own experience. He always seemed to me to be extremely high in life satisfaction, but considerably less so in happiness.

Why do people care about things they will never know?
By Ilana Ritov, Professor of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

I’ve had the opportunity to work with Danny quite intensively on the topic of evaluation of public goods. I found it extraordinary that he would rethink every idea at any stage of the research, and restart writing a paper as many times as he thought were needed, even when we got to version thirty-something of it. While this made working with him frustrating, it was incredibly inspiring.

But my first meeting with Danny was quite different. I came to consult with him about a paper I wrote with Jon Baron on compensation of accident victims. This discussion with Danny developed in an unexpected direction: Why do people care about things they will never know, because these things are only revealed posthumously?

Danny was intrigued by the thought that we care about what people will know or think about us after we die. To examine this idea, we contemplated various unusual scenarios: a beloved spouse who turned out to have been unfaithful, a work of art that the deceased was a proud owner of but later was revealed as a fraud, a scientist whose big discovery came into question, and so on. Danny seemed intrigued and amused by thinking of people’s misperceptions related to their own death, unable to grasp that they would no longer be alive.

A joke—the hard part
By Daniel Read, Professor of Behavioural Science, University of Warwick

Danny once told me a joke which has persisted with me, partly due to its crypticness, partly to its profundity. A mathematician, he said, announced that he had discovered a proof of Fermat’s last theorem and almost solved it. He had divided the problem into two parts, a hard part and an easy part, and the part he completed had been the hard part.

Danny did not really explain this joke. I think one reason it sticks in my mind is that it does not allow for an easy interpretation. It’s like one of those aphorisms a mystic tells when the seeker for truth finally finds them on top of a mountain. The reality is that I repeated this story a few times, and I felt no one understood it so I stopped repeating it, but I did not stop thinking about it.

I interpret it so: the part you have not done is always the hard part. I think about it whenever I have “just about” completed a piece of work, with just one or two small steps to go. All the difficulties that are yet to come are still hidden from view, but I know they are lurking there.

How is life treating you today?
By Ruth Kimchi, Professor Emerita of Psychology, University of Haifa

I had the privilege to be a student of Danny Kahneman at the Hebrew University in my undergraduate and MA studies. Danny was a wonderful teacher, inspiring and challenging, and he had a profound influence on my academic life. I first fell in love with cognitive psychology when I participated in Danny’s Experimental Psychology class. It was a mandatory course in the second year of the undergraduate studies and the title did not hint, even in the least, at the instructive and enlightening lessons.

I also worked as Danny’s research assistant, mainly in the years he was working on his book Attention and Effort. We used to meet in his small office, which was crowded with books and the huge computer-output papers, discussing ideas, results of experiments, and so often, contemplating life. I still remember how he used to welcome me on the days we met, asking, “How is life treating you today?” It’s perhaps not surprising that somewhat later in his career, Danny studied happiness and well-being.

Danny, my teacher, I’ve learned a lot from you; lessons that accompanied me during my Ph.D. studies at Berkeley and in the many years of research and teaching.

Images: Feature image, courtesy of the Trustees of Princeton University; "Working," courtesy of Richard Thaler; "With Amos Tversky," "Moses," and "With Barbara Tversky," courtesy of Barbara Tversky; "With Avishai Henik," courtesy of Avishai Henik; all other images courtesy of the Kahneman family. Used with permission. Not for reuse or distribution.

Disclosure: Barry Schwartz, Richard Thaler, and Angela Duckworth are members of Behavioral Scientist’s advisory board. Craig Fox and Katy Milkman lead organizations that have provided financial support to Behavioral Scientist. Advisors and organizational supporters do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine. 

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