On the heels of WWII, a team of psychologists set out to solve global conflict. Their lab? Boys summer camps. Their goal? Set the 11- and 12-year-old boys against one another to discover what, if anything, could restore peace. The result? One of psychology’s most enduring and controversial experiments.
Why was Babe Ruth so good at hitting a baseball? In 1921, a journalist and two psychologists brought the “home run king” into the lab to find out.
The W.E.I.R.D research participant problem persists not because scientists fail to see it as a problem worth solving, but because conducting studies in new, unfamiliar places is difficult. But overcoming this difficulty is doable and essential.
The current political moment makes equity-grounded research harder. But that’s precisely the reason we need to keep doing it.
How can researchers and practitioners better translate, scale, and adapt their interventions? A concept from cartography offers some inspiration.
Social science gives us ideas about human nature. What does it mean for the science when those ideas don’t just describe our nature, but shape it?
The common constraint for all life is the ability to find and use energy, yet we take it for granted, says Michael Muthukrishna. In his new book, he makes the case that energy should be central in how we understand ourselves and how we design our world.
Michael Muthukrishna wants to integrate the science of human beings, from genes to culture to our environments, into ‘a theory of everyone.’ Doing so, he says, is key to advancing social and behavioral science.
Most of us tend to think of randomness as being “well spaced.” Genuinely random distributions seem to contradict our inherent ideas of what randomness should look like.
Good thinkers frequently ask themselves this question, the way good doctors frequently check their practices against the Hippocratic oath they swore.
