The Healthy Society in Fifty Years
By 2065, I predict that we will have evolved societies that explicitly embrace values and goals for ensuring the wellbeing of every person.
March 17th, 2015
policy
March 09th, 2015
The Nurture Effect: A Q&A with Anthony Biglan
In his new book, The Nurture Effect, Psychologist Anthony Biglan describes how interventions aimed at creating nurturing environments could help solve some of society’s most stubborn, harmful, and costly issues.
January 26th, 2015
ideas42 Sets Out to Help End Poverty Through Behavioral Interventions
It’s well documented that the consequences of childhood poverty are immediate and long-lasting. By their first day in school, children in poverty score worse than their middle and upper class peers on nearly every developmental measure from language use to attention skills.
December 16th, 2014
Senate Report Calls CIA Tactics Inhumane and Ineffective, Details Unethical Application of Psychology
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) interrogation program following 9/11 details a horrifying program of physical and psychological torture that they argue was ineffective in eliciting new intelligence.
July 13th, 2014
Head of White House “Nudge Unit” Maya Shankar Speaks about Newly Formed Social and Behavioral Sciences Team
Public reaction to the news that the White House was in the process of setting up its own “Nudge Unit” was a mix between hopeful anticipation on the one hand and big-government alarmism on the other.
April 17th, 2014
Why Not Nudge? A Review of Cass Sunstein’s Why Nudge
The field mistakenly called “behavioral economics” (mistakenly because what it is is psychology applied to domains that are the normal province of economists) has taken the intellectual and political world by storm.
April 07th, 2014
Science to SPARQ Change: Stanford’s New Psychology Solutions Center
Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions, or SPARQ, is setting out to do what most budding social scientists hope to do: change the world. Through working directly with the public – policy makers, educators, non-profit leaders – SPARQ’s mission, as its rather lengthy but straightforward name suggests, is to develop and help implement […]
January 14th, 2014
Can traffic-light labels and better shelf positions help people make healthier decisions?
Over the last three decades obesity rates have doubled for adults and tripled for children. Today, over 35% of adults and 17% of children are considered obese, with the percentage of obese adults expected to rise to 50% by 2030.
September 02nd, 2013
The Cognitive Burden of Poverty
Nobody is perfect. At times we have difficulty managing our finances, we don’t always take our medications as planned, and sometimes we don’t perform up to par at work.
July 25th, 2013
The Importance of Psychology in the Public Sphere
When I wrote an article for The Atlantic about a year ago arguing for the importance of a Council of Psychological Advisors, I was motivated by frustration that policy makers fail to take advantage of the best that psychology has to offer when it comes to formulating and implementing public policy.
