We are reluctant to tell people how to live their lives, except insofar as individual decisions affect the lives of others. We can learn a valuable lesson for the present moment from the examples of smoking and drunk driving.
We typically try to avoid boredom. But in trying to outrun boredom, we risk failing to heed its call.
If things return to the way they were, we will have failed.
The Research Lead is a monthly digest connecting you to noteworthy academic and applied research from around the behavioral sciences. Here are our picks for May 2020.
How can we generate long-term behavior change when compliance isn’t exciting anymore? (Hint: don’t build “Piano Stairs.”)
In order for governments to promote public health effectively, they must ensure their citizens abide by public health orders, without turning their open societies into police states.
Our field wasn’t ready for a pandemic. We must learn its lessons before the next emergency.
Advice that can seem grounded in “universal” human tendencies often isn’t. The actions that developing countries take will have to be carefully tailored to their specific circumstances.
“Ignorance,” wrote Charles Darwin in 1871, “more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
This moment could be a portal into a world where caregiving responsibilities are divided more equally between partners, where we value care work for what it actually is—the backbone of our entire economy.
