A man was arrested for entering a New York subway station through an emergency gate without paying the fare. When police patted him down, they found he was illegally carrying a loaded gun. When another man was arrested for fare evasion at a different stop, police found he was carrying 38 decks of heroin and a loaded gun that had been reported as stolen. Yet another was arrested for not paying the subway fare in another part of the city, and it turned out he was carrying a gun, ammunition, and crack cocaine. New York police argue that enforcing a seemingly minor offense (fare evasion) helps them catch people like these who are up to no good—perhaps preventing violent crime.

And yet, how to handle such offenses has been hotly debated for decades. Some worry that allowing arrests will result in violent confrontations or jail time for people already struggling to make ends meet. For what, a $2.90 subway ticket? While some of those arrested for fare evasion will have a track record of crime, for many others this would be their first arrest. Is a criminal charge really our best option?

In 2023, the board of directors of BART—Bay Area Regional Transit, the San Francisco subway agency—voted to oppose a bill moving through the California legislature that would decriminalize fare evasion. “The public is speaking very loud to us right now—and they have been—about the lack of enforcement of rules in our system,” said BART board member Debora Allen. Local residents were worried about safety on the subway system, with stories about violent crime at the top of everyone’s minds. “I can’t help but say we could help prevent some of the bad behavior in our system by getting tougher on fare evasion.” Daly City resident Howard Bernstein agreed that such a move would only embolden offenders: “The more we decriminalize criminal behavior, the more criminal behavior we’re going to experience.”

A few years earlier, in 2017, Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance Jr. made headlines when he announced he would no longer prosecute fare evasion cases. “Prosecuting for turnstile jumping is counter to this city’s efforts to be a sanctuary,” Anthony Posada of Legal Aid NYC told reporters at the time. The move was generally motivated by a recognition that fare evasion was a crime often committed due to poverty. Clearly, pressing criminal charges in such situations would not address the problem—that the person had no money—and risked making the problem worse. But in 2023, the debate raged on. The New York Times journalist Ana Ley reported that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) had lost $690 million to fare evasion the previous year. Turnstile hoppers were apparently undeterred by tickets written by the police hovering nearby, and seeing some people ride without paying made others feel like suckers for buying a ticket. A year later, Ley followed up with an equally dire statistic: 48 percent of bus riders in the city did not pay the required fare. (The number for subway riders was 14 percent.) “If the transit system does not work and nobody plays by the rules, it feels lawless. It is lawless,” said Janno Lieber, chief executive of the MTA. “This is really tearing at the social compact of New York.”

Current debates about how to handle low-level nonviolent crimes are reminiscent of those from thirty years ago. In 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York City. He came to office promising to make the city safer, and quickly adopted a strategy that had previously been discussed only in academic circles: “broken windows” policing. The idea underlying this approach was that disorder begets disorder. By addressing low-level offending—trespassing, vandalism, prostitution, urinating in public—police could deter more serious offenses. People would know that police were paying attention and that the community was well cared for, and so they would behave better. Fix the broken windows, and arrest the guy who broke them, and you’ll prevent violent crime as well.

Crime fell dramatically in New York City during the 1990s, and Giuliani claimed victory. In his farewell address in 2001, he credited this strategy—cracking down on low-level offenders as a way to prevent crime from escalating—as the key to his success. “The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street-level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, too busy to pay attention to graffiti. Well, you can’t be too busy to pay attention to those things, because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society.”

Since then, it’s become less clear how helpful that strategy really was. Crime fell dramatically throughout the US in the 1990s and early 2000s, not just in New York City. And yet this theory is still appealing to voters, and still motivates the policies of many police departments and prosecutors’ offices. Fast-forward to the present, when many cities are struggling with persistent and increasingly brazen public drug use, homeless encampments, vandalism, petty theft, and, yes, turnstile hopping. More serious crime, including organized retail theft rings, carjackings, and even homicide, also became serious problems in many cities—a shock after decades of declining crime rates. In 2022, the San Francisco resident and political commentator Richie Greenberg described what he saw as a turn toward lawlessness, to The Atlantic’s Annie Lowery. “People are sick and tired of the whole atmosphere of the city. It’s not fun to live here anymore,” he lamented.

The past several years have prompted calls to return to a Giuliani-style zero-tolerance approach to disorder, with stiff penalties for even the most minor offenses. Today, when I speak with policy stakeholders across the United States, I’m frequently asked if a broken windows approach could be the solution to their problems. Could a tougher approach to minor offenses be the key to reducing more serious crime?

Many voters have decided it’s at least worth trying—again—and not just in the subway. In 2023, police in San Francisco began cracking down on public drug use, arresting more than seventeen hundred people between May and December. “You’ll never hear me say that arresting folks will solve addiction, but these are still crimes,” Police Chief Bill Scott told The San Francisco Standard. San Francisco sheriff Paul Miyamoto saw punishment as a compassionate incentive for people to get the help they need: “Justice-involved persons with substance use disorder sometimes need the threat of jail time to compel them to remain in programs that successfully address the root causes of addiction,” he said, explaining the city’s efforts to dismantle open-air drug markets. In Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, police crackdowns targeted public drug use as well as other minor offenses and quality-of-life issues—they shooed away people who were loitering, towed unregistered cars, and cleaned vacant lots. “The neighbors really didn’t complain,” Deputy Commissioner Pedro Rosario responded when asked about community pushback. “They were happy. They were thumbs-upping me a lot.”

There is at least a kernel of wisdom in this approach. We know that people respond to incentives, and swift and certain punishment for bad behavior deters future offending. That is important, and to the extent that broken windows means making consequences more likely, it could indeed reduce crime and put people on a better path. But increasing the probability of punishment is different from making the punishment harsher. Many proponents of the broken windows approach don’t simply want to arrest people for their bad behavior, they want to throw the book at them. (Because of this, broken windows, as a philosophy, extends beyond what police do and into the courtroom, where prosecutors and judges decide the consequence for an offense.) It’s not clear that harsher punishment would be productive. On top of that, it’s possible that prosecuting and punishing low-level offenders has other, detrimental effects that cancel out any benefits we get from deterrence—especially if it’s someone’s first brush with the law.

For instance, a criminal record makes it more difficult to find a job, and it means you might lose the job you had before your conviction. This creates economic hardship that can make criminal behavior more likely, as a way to make ends meet. A criminal record also makes it more difficult to find housing, as most landlords run background checks just like employers do. Without a safe place to live, you might find yourself in more dangerous situations, with less to lose, and more vulnerable to future charges for offenses such as trespassing when you have nowhere else to go. To the extent that your previous offenses were the result of untreated mental illness or substance use, the stress of criminal charges and any punishment could make those problems worse.

How much do all these factors matter in practice? Would reducing the consequences for low-level offenses be helpful? Those who say no—like proponents of broken windows policing—think the threat of harsh punishment has a big deterrent effect. But others say yes. Reform-minded prosecutors, elected in many cities over the past decade, have promised to go easier on minor offenses so that they can focus more attention on violent crimes. In 2019, Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County, Missouri, told NBC News that diverting nonviolent offenders from jail to rehabilitative programming “not only brings our crime rates down, but most importantly, it helps people and families.” Still others believe that the challenges faced by those who commit low-level crimes—poverty, limited education, untreated mental illness—are so large that only a massive reform of our social safety net will keep people from cycling back through the criminal justice system. Who’s right?

* * *

Prosecution in Suffolk County

With such diverging opinions on what to do with people arrested for low-level offenses, figuring out the best path forward requires turning to data. I teamed up with the economist Amanda Agan, now at Cornell University, and political scientist Anna Harvey, from New York University, to study this issue. We wanted to know what effect the decision to prosecute someone for a nonviolent misdemeanor—minor offenses like trespassing, shoplifting, and minor drug possession—would have on a defendant’s future criminal justice involvement. Would cracking down on that low-level offense reduce their likelihood of reoffending (as broken windows proponents expect) or increase it (as reform prosecutors argue)?

We managed to get data from the District Attorney’s Office in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, where Boston is located. The DA there at the time, Rachael Rollins, also wanted to know the answer to this question, and so enthusiastically handed over her office’s data, no strings attached. This is a researcher’s dream. Many policymakers are hesitant to share data when they can’t control the results of the study, and can’t block unfavorable results from being published. But such restrictions are a nonstarter for researchers like us. Luckily, then-DA Rollins was on board with our scientific approach and wanted to follow the evidence. She understood that this was the best way to figure out how to improve public safety—and perhaps end this long-standing debate. 

In Suffolk County, once police make an arrest or issue a summons, and then determine that probable cause exists for the charge, the case goes to an arraignment hearing. In that hearing, an assistant district attorney (ADA) representing the government decides whether to pursue the charges or dismiss the case. They are essentially deciding whether they think the case is a good use of prosecutors’ time. This is the decision we were interested in. What if more cases were dismissed up front? Would that lead to more recidivism, or less?

What if more cases were dismissed up front? Would that lead to more recidivism, or less?

Simply comparing people who were prosecuted with those who were not wouldn’t answer this question, because prosecutors intentionally choose whom to prosecute. If we found that those who were prosecuted were more likely to reoffend in the future, we wouldn’t know if this was the effect of the prosecution decision, or because prosecutors only move forward with cases against higher-risk defendants. Prosecution might be correlated with recidivism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean prosecution causes recidivism.

So once we had the data, it was time to hunt for natural experiments that would allow us to distinguish correlation from causation. The ideal experiment in this context would randomly assign some defendants to be prosecuted and others not. We could then attribute any differences in future behavior across these two groups to the effect of being prosecuted, without worrying there are other underlying differences between them that explain their differences in behavior.

Of course, no one would agree to prosecute cases at random (nor should they). But it turns out that the way nonviolent misdemeanor cases are assigned to ADAs mimics this ideal experiment.

What determines which ADA handles each case? Handling arraignments is the “grunt work” of the prosecutors’ office. (The more interesting work comes later in the case proceedings.) So everyone takes a turn, especially junior ADAs who haven’t specialized yet.

ADAs are assigned to the arraignment courtroom in an ad hoc way that changes week to week, depending on their other meetings and case schedules. This Monday, Tom might be assigned to handle arraignments, but next Monday, Anne might be assigned to that task. This assignment schedule is unrelated to the types of cases expected on that day—this is the key. Because of this, we don’t need to worry that ADAs are selected to handle particular cases on account of their expertise or preferences—at least for the nonviolent misdemeanor cases we are interested in. (They might pull someone with more expertise in for more serious offenses.)

It’s important to understand the huge volume of these cases that go through the courts in any given week—misdemeanors make up 70 to 80 percent of all cases. For these very minor offenses, ADAs have just a few moments to decide whether to proceed with a case or drop it. The goal is to keep the cases moving; this is the only way the courts don’t become completely overwhelmed by minor charges and grind to a halt.

Because everything moves so quickly, and because ADAs’ schedules are so unpredictable, it is not possible for defendants to game the system to get a particular ADA. When their case is at the top of the pile on the ADA’s desk, it’s their turn. They get what they get.

This all means that which ADA handles a particular case is effectively random—there is no correlation between case characteristics and the characteristics or relative harshness of the ADA.

Human discretion as a natural experiment

So we have randomization of ADAs, but this doesn’t help if all ADAs behave the same way. What we also need from this natural experiment is randomness in the decision to prosecute.

This is where we could rely on human nature, and a fact that we see in every domain where humans make decisions: People have different preferences, and so they will use any discretion they have in different ways. And prosecutors have a lot of discretion. In this context, this means that two different prosecutors considering identical cases might make completely different decisions. One might drop the case immediately, while the other might choose to move the case forward with the goal of conviction and punishment.

This probably sounds extremely unfair. Shouldn’t identical cases get the same outcome regardless of who the prosecutor is? That is certainly the ideal, but in contexts like this, there is no right answer about what should happen in a case. We count on human decision-makers to use their best judgment. This leads to differences in outcomes that we’d rather not have. 

In the U.S., we tend to swing back and forth between limiting the discretion of criminal justice actors like prosecutors and judges and giving them more discretion. We hear about big differences in outcomes across similar cases—for instance, Black defendants receiving harsher sentences than similar white defendants—and we demand restrictions on discretion. This is part of the reason for policies like sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences. These tie the hands of prosecutors and judges, at least on some dimensions.

Having your case dismissed rather than pursuing prosecution—reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent, and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent.

But then we hear about a case that, based on these standardized rules, resulted in an outcome that seems totally unfair given some extenuating circumstances, and we demand that decision-makers have more discretion to deviate from those rules when it is warranted. We want them to use their judgment to provide the best outcome. And then when they do, we wind up with different outcomes across similar cases, and we swing back toward wanting less discretion.

What we want is for prosecutors and judges to use their discretion only for good—to reach the decision we think is most appropriate. But the problem is that different people disagree about what is appropriate. Allowing people to use their best judgment has trade-offs, and we have to take the bad with the good.

One silver lining to this complicated dilemma is that human discretion creates great settings for research. In Suffolk County, random assignment of cases across ADAs meant that we effectively had random assignment of cases to different treatments—the ideal experiment we’d hoped for. Some defendants get lucky and their case is handled by a lenient ADA; because of this, they are more likely to have their case dismissed outright. Other defendants are unlucky and their case is handled by a harsh ADA; their case is more likely to move forward to the next stage. Through the luck of the draw—which ADA happened to be in that courtroom that day—we have identical cases that are treated in different ways.

What happened to those lucky defendants whose cases were dropped because they happened to be in the right courtroom at the right time with a lenient ADA? Proponents of broken-windows-style punishment as a deterrent would predict that those defendants would be emboldened. Facing little consequence for their actions the first time, they’d realize the costs of bad behavior were low and commit even more crime in the future.

But that’s not what the data showed. It turns out that leniency at this early stage—having your case dismissed rather than pursuing prosecution—reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent, and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent. The effects were larger for first-time defendants—those with no prior arrest or conviction on their record.

* * *

The power of leniency

David Eil is an assistant public defender in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where Charlotte is located. He has seen firsthand the damage that a first conviction can do. And—unlike most lawyers—he used to be an economist. So he has a keen eye for natural experiments. This makes him a great person to compare notes with about how the criminal justice system works in practice.

“I had two misdemeanor clients who were similarly situated,” he told me recently. “Both were facing the same charge, but their cases had different outcomes due to random chance.”

Both clients were charged with misdemeanor assault on a government official—a charge that sounds really bad, but David assured me that such a charge at the misdemeanor, rather than felony, level is almost always pretty minor. (“I literally had a client get charged with assault of a government official for not saying, ‘Excuse me,’ when moving past a cop through a doorway,” he recalled.) The first client, Tiffany, arrived at the courthouse for her hearing to find that the officer accusing her of assault had not shown up. His partner, who had witnessed the incident, was there, but the prosecutor told him he could leave, then asked the judge for a continuance—a delay to a new date—so that they could get the first officer to the court. The judge denied that request. This led the prosecutor to scramble to get the second officer back to court, to testify as a witness. He succeeded—“a miracle for the prosecutor,” David noted—and Tiffany was convicted. This was devastating for her. As a result of that conviction—her first—she was not able to obtain an employment certification she’d been working toward. The training program she had invested time and money into was suddenly worthless. This first criminal record changed her trajectory for the worse, even though (because the charge was so minor) no meaningful punishment was handed down by the court.

David’s second client, Sam, faced the exact same charge. When he showed up to court, the accusing officer was not there. Just as in Tiffany’s case, the officer had failed to appear. (It turns out that this is a pretty common occurrence, which isn’t great for the smooth functioning of our justice system.) This time there wasn’t another officer who could testify as a witness. The judge again denied the prosecutor’s request for a continuance, and this time the case was dismissed. Sam was relieved—he worked as a security guard, but had been suspended from his job because of this pending charge. (A criminal record—even a misdemeanor like this one—is typically disqualifying for a position focused on public safety.) He had a limited amount of time before his employer would have needed to replace him. Even if the judge had granted the continuance and the case had been dismissed a month later, it would have been too late; he would have lost his job. Because the dominoes fell as they did that day, Sam kept his clean record and got to return to a job he liked, continuing his life as it had been before.

Just like the similar defendants in our study, who were lucky or unlucky depending on which prosecutor they faced during their arraignment hearing, David’s clients faced different consequences as a result of luck rather than anything about them or their cases. It is easy to see how such luck can play out case after case, day after day, putting similar people—like Tiffany and Sam—onto radically different paths. The results of our study support David’s observation that a first misdemeanor record can do a great deal of harm—at least for nonviolent defendants. (The assault charges that Tiffany and Sam faced would not be in this category, of course, but future studies may show similar impacts for violent misdemeanor charges like theirs.) With worse employment options, additional criminal behavior is more likely.

I asked David how aware his clients are of the impact of a first criminal record. “It’s usually me who brings it up,” he told me. “It’s more common that people first feel the impact of a pending charge, and then learn—probably accurately—that if the case is resolved quickly, even if it’s not in their favor, the problem goes away.” For example: “A class 2 misdemeanor for carrying a concealed weapon—a very common misdemeanor in North Carolina that is viewed as relatively minor—probably wouldn’t bar you from driving for Uber, but a pending criminal case will.” So there is a strong incentive to quickly take a plea deal so that you can keep your current job. Even so, there might be longer-term consequences from that conviction, depending on where you live or what types of jobs you might want in the future. So David tries to persuade his clients that waiting for a dismissal might be worth some temporary pain.

“Sometimes I’m in a position where I’m trying to talk somebody out of [taking a plea bargain immediately], reminding them that once a conviction is there [on your record] it will be there until it can be expunged, which is a long time from now and you might not qualify when that time comes. It might be worth trying to get to the next court date and beating this case, even if it’s going to cause you some more short-term difficulty. . . . I’m often the one who is trying to describe for them the problems of having a conviction, and they’re the one saying, ‘Look, I just want to get this over with.’”

More lessons from Suffolk County

Our results from Suffolk County tell us that prosecutors should avoid putting first-time defendants in this situation. They should err more toward leniency at the arraignment hearing and focus instead on trying fewer, more serious cases. This would give us more results like Sam’s, and fewer like Tiffany’s.

As an economist, I’m used to most policies involving trade-offs. And when my colleagues and I started working on the Suffolk County study, I fully expected to find some costs to leniency. Surely we would see some increase in criminal behavior, if only in minor offenses like trespassing and drug possession. The question in my mind was whether those costs outweighed the benefits, like how much time it saved everyone (including defendants) when a case was dropped. But when we followed the data, we found only benefits. Criminal behavior didn’t increase, it fell. And it fell by a lot. The other benefits to the court and defendants were icing on that cake.

As researchers, we are skeptical by nature. We wondered: What if these defendants didn’t offend again because they realized they’d gotten lucky? What would happen if there were an actual policy change that pushed all ADAs to become more lenient? Those defendants might change their behavior, and members of the community might hear about the change and decide obeying the law wasn’t worth it. Would we see crime rates go up then?

Luckily, we had such a policy change to consider. DA Rachael Rollins had implemented a “presumption of nonprosecution” for a list of fifteen nonviolent misdemeanor offenses when she took office. This meant that she instructed her ADAs to dismiss such cases unless they had a good reason not to. (A good reason might be that that person had already cycled through the court several times, and leniency was clearly not working.) This pushed all ADAs to be more lenient, particularly toward first-time defendants—exactly the group we’d found benefited the most from such decisions.

When we looked at the effects of this policy change, we found similar benefits as before: For defendants, we found that dismissing their cases led to fewer future charges, not more, just as we’d found was the case before the policy change. (This rules out the “I got lucky” effect.) And when we looked at local crime rates, we found no increases. Some types of reported crime may even have fallen.

Declining to prosecute low-level offenses isn’t unheard of. All prosecutors consider which cases are worth pursuing and which are not, and decline to prosecute many of them, for a variety of reasons. Under Rollins’s more conservative predecessor Dan Conley, the DA’s office chose not to prosecute 34 to 38 percent of nonviolent misdemeanor cases. Under Rollins’s policy, this rate increased by 5 to 8 percentage points—so her office became more lenient, but it wasn’t a radical shift. The change was on the margin, but it was big enough to make a difference for quite a few people.

“We have to give credit—DA Conley was doing this,” Rollins told reporters, poking fun at those who had criticized her approach as too liberal. “He just wasn’t as vocal about it as I was, and we’ve increased it a bit as well.”

The data vindicated DA Rollins, who had faced extreme pressure from local police officials to be tougher on misdemeanor defendants. Reporters asked what would have happened if the study’s results had come out the other way. “We would be adapting right now because at the end of the day, it’s not about policies, it’s about what are we doing to keep the people of Suffolk County safe,” she told The Boston Globe at the time—an answer that any researcher would love. “What I hope this does is say we are really serious about data-based, and evidence-based, solutions. This data shows the policies we proposed are working.”

Economists like to say there’s no such thing as a free lunch—there are always trade-offs. But we’d found a free lunch! Erring toward leniency, particularly for first-time defendants, made everyone better off.

This was for nonviolent misdemeanor cases, the most minor type of offense. There are many such cases, so this could make a big dent in the number of charges going through the courts, but what might leniency look like for people charged with more serious crimes?

* * *

Leniency in felony cases

Nonviolent felony cases are more serious offenses, like burglary and motor vehicle theft. These types of cases are much less likely to be dismissed outright. But in many places, prosecutors have the option to wait and see if a defendant is a public safety threat before convicting them.

In Texas, this option is called “deferred adjudication.” When prosecutors choose this option, the defendant begins a probationary period. If they successfully complete that probation with no new offenses, their initial charges will be dropped completely and they avoid that conviction. On the other hand, if they do get into additional trouble, their conviction goes into effect, along with some punishment (usually community supervision).

The country star Zach Bryan made headlines in 2023 when he was arrested in Oklahoma on obstruction charges. “It was ridiculous, it was immature, and I just pray everyone knows I don’t think I’m above the law,” Bryan said the next day. “I was just being disrespectful, and I shouldn’t have been. It was my mistake.” He received a deferred prosecution—that state’s equivalent of a deferred adjudication—and completed the terms of his probationary period six months later. A spokesperson for the Craig County District Attorney’s Office explained that Bryan “admitted responsibility and followed all the rules and conditions of probation. [Deferred prosecution agreements] are commonly used in cases where the person has no criminal record. It is an opportunity to take responsibility for their actions, follow probation rules, and avoid having a criminal conviction on their records.”

Does this second chance to avoid a felony conviction lead to more future offending, or less? Again, we face the same potential trade-offs: Reducing the consequences for committing a crime might embolden the defendant, leading to more crime in the future. On the other hand, avoiding a conviction could help them keep their job and housing, allowing them to course-correct on their own.

The net effect is an empirical question, and only real-world data can tell us what happens in practice.

The University of Michigan economist Michael Mueller-Smith and Simon Fraser University economist Kevin Schnepel were able to study this question in Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located. They linked a variety of administrative datasets that allowed them to see not only criminal justice involvement but also employment and earnings.

Linking such datasets is surprisingly difficult in the United States. These datasets are maintained by separate government agencies at county and state levels, and linking them requires complex negotiations and lengthy data use agreements. Many agencies simply say no when researchers ask to use their data, and even more say no when researchers ask to link their data with data from other agencies. This makes it difficult to understand how our criminal justice system affects other aspects of people’s lives—like whether they have a job.

But Mueller-Smith and Schnepel pulled these negotiations off. As a result, they had amazing data on felony defendants in a major American city (one that I now call home).

As before, data wasn’t enough. These researchers couldn’t simply compare defendants who received a deferred adjudication with those who were prosecuted and convicted as usual, because prosecutors carefully choose who gets this second chance. Deferred adjudications might be correlated with lower recidivism, but that could be because prosecutors give this option only to lower-risk defendants.

Mueller-Smith and Schnepel needed a natural experiment—something that sorted similar defendants into “deferred adjudication” and “regular conviction” groups, as if at random. Luck was on their side: They found not just one natural experiment but two.

Policy change one

The first natural experiment was a policy change that had unintended consequences. In 1993, the Texas legislature enacted a reform that imposed a new probationary requirement for low-level offenders. The policy sounded like it was in line with diversionary goals—that is, helping first-time offenders avoid being pulled into the criminal justice system—but in practice it made diversion less appealing to prosecutors. If they granted a defendant a deferred adjudication, and that defendant did not comply with the terms of the probationary period, they could not simply revert to the original conviction and sentence. The new policy said they’d have to put them on probation again before the sentence could go into effect. This gave the first probationary period no teeth.

Prosecutors warned the legislature that this policy could backfire, but to no avail. The policy went into effect on September 1, 1994. Deferred adjudications immediately dropped, by 24 percentage points for first-time defendants.

This meant that identical defendants, charged with the same nonviolent felony offense but who committed their crimes just before and just after September 1, 1994, faced different consequences. The person who offended just before the policy change was dramatically more likely to receive a deferred adjudication than the person who offended just after the policy change.

This created the first natural experiment. The date of the policy change—September 1, 1994—sorted defendants into treatment and control groups, as if at random, based on the date of their offense. Nothing else changed at that date. The only difference between these defendants was whether they got a second chance to avoid a felony conviction.

It turns out this second chance was very helpful. First-timers who got lucky and received a deferred adjudication committed fewer crimes going forward. They were 31 percentage points less likely to be convicted of any new crime over the next ten years—a 44 percent reduction compared with the control group.

First-timers who got lucky and received a deferred adjudication were 31 percentage points less likely to be convicted of any new crime over the next ten years—a 44 percent reduction compared with the control group.

This second chance also increased labor market participation. Employment rates increased by 18 percentage points (49 percent relative to the control group), and total earnings over the following 10 years grew by more than $85,000 (93 percent relative to what the control group earned). A large share of those who received this second chance took full advantage of it.

Policy change two

In the early 2000s, policymakers in Harris County, Texas, were increasingly worried about overcrowding in the local jail. By 2005, there were nearly two thousand inmates sleeping on mattresses on the floor—very bad conditions that were clearly unsustainable.

Government officials sought to raise money to expand jail capacity. In November 2007, they put an initiative on the ballot in the county election to fund construction of a new jail facility. Particularly in conservative states like Texas, such initiatives are usually successful.

This one was not. To everyone’s surprise, the ballot initiative was narrowly defeated, with 50.6 percent of voters voting against it—even as they overwhelmingly approved additional statewide funding for increasing prison capacity. This defeat shocked local policymakers and criminal justice practitioners. They suddenly realized they’d need to solve their overcrowding crisis some other way.

One result was a sudden increase in diversion—either deferred adjudications or outright case dismissal—for nonviolent felony defendants. First-time offenders who committed a crime just after the failed ballot initiative got lucky—they were dramatically more likely to get a second chance. Overnight, the probability of diversion increased by 18 percentage points.

Again, this set up a beautiful natural experiment. Mueller-Smith and Schnepel could compare defendants sentenced on either side of the election on November 6, 2007. The only difference between those sentenced before and after this date was that those sentenced after were much more likely to avoid a conviction. This difference wasn’t because of underlying differences between these defendants or their cases; it was because of the failed ballot initiative. This gave the researchers confidence that any future differences in recidivism or employment would be due to the diversion decision and not to something else about those defendants.

Just as in 1994, there were big benefits to greater leniency. As the likelihood of diversion suddenly increased, the likelihood of new, future convictions fell, by 26 percentage points (46 percent). This is a dramatic change. Nearly half of the first-time offenders who would have committed another crime in the future if they’d been prosecuted and convicted as usual cleaned up their acts and avoided future crime when their cases were dropped or they received a deferred adjudication. It is really difficult to find interventions that reduce recidivism this much. This second chance to avoid a first felony conviction had a much bigger impact than most rehabilitation programs do.

* * *

Putting it all together

When I first saw these results, they seemed too good to be true. We can cut recidivism by half simply by not convicting first-time defendants? This feels like magic, particularly in a context where many highly praised reentry programs struggle to reduce recidivism at all.

But these studies are extremely compelling, with natural experiments that closely mimic ideal experiments with control groups. And the findings are remarkably consistent—a second chance for first-time defendants cuts future crime by half, in all these contexts. As more research comes out, I become more and more convinced that a criminal record is a terrible bludgeon that we should use much more sparingly than we do now. It is very difficult to undo the damage of a criminal record, once it has been imposed.

I become more and more convinced that a criminal record is a terrible bludgeon that we should use much more sparingly than we do now.

Best of all, these dramatic results don’t require dramatic reforms. Small shifts, making leniency the default rather than the exception, are enough. Cutting recidivism in half for first-time offenders will quickly reduce reported crime and court caseloads, allowing greater attention on those who do offend again.

Leniency doesn’t mean no consequences

When we first released our research from Suffolk County, some responded that we should completely decriminalize minor offenses like disorderly conduct and shoplifting. But that’s not what this research showed. Dropping someone’s charges at their arraignment hearing doesn’t mean there were no consequences for their actions.

That person had likely been arrested and booked in jail, and had to show up in court for that initial hearing. This might mean taking time off work, and it certainly meant worrying about what might happen during the hearing. All this isn’t nothing—it is an inconvenience at best and a costly and stressful event at worst.

In the Harris County study, “lucky” defendants also had to successfully complete a probationary period, during which they had to demonstrate that they could refrain from future criminal behavior. That involved following additional rules to earn their second chance.

What this research shows is these earlier steps in the case—arrest and an initial hearing for nonviolent misdemeanors, and a probationary period for nonviolent felonies—are often punishment enough. Adding a criminal record on top is what has big, detrimental effects, at least for first-time offenders. Helping someone avoid that first conviction gives them a second chance. It’s as if they’re standing at a fork in the road, considering what to do next. One direction leads toward more criminal behavior and criminal justice involvement, and the other leads toward a productive, law-abiding life. It turns out that many first-time defendants will choose the better path if we simply get out of their way.

Excerpted from The Science of Second Chances by Jennifer Doleac, published by Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2026 by Jennifer Doleac. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The post What Becomes of Second Chances? appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say. “Eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.

These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never criticized by your ancestors. It had been the effort of lawgivers and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had, however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given up trying to regulate the subject at all.

By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes, commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

Excerpted from Looking Backward: 2000–1887 by Edward Bellamy. Published 1888. Now in the public domain.

The post ‘Looking Backward’ to the Future appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

In February 2026, Behavioral Scientist partnered with the peace science organization Neuropaz to host an online event exploring the latest work and thinking at the intersection of behavioral science and peace and conflict.

The theme of Neuropaz 2026—hard truths and paths forward—reflects the many roadblocks that characterize this line of work, including funding cuts to research and aid agencies, technologies that amplify outrage, and politicians who prioritize power over peace. Neuropaz 2026 brought together leading scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and funders to face these obstacles head-on. Through open, candid conversations about what stands in our way, we hoped to illuminate new paths forward.

Below, you'll find all the recordings from the event, plus a curated selection of further reading and resources from each of the speakers.

— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief, Behavioral Scientist and Andrés Casas, Founder, Neuropaz

Neuropaz 2026 — Hard Truths and Paths Forward: Peace as a Scientific Challenge

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

Andrés Casas and Evan Nesterak introduce the event and provide an overview of the program. They also show a brief video about the life and work of Emile Bruneau (to whom the event is dedicated).

In recognition of the tenth anniversary of the historic peace agreement in Colombia, Neuropaz presents Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia from 2010-2018 and leader of the peace process, with the inaugural Neuropaz Lifetime Achievement Award. President Santos joins Andrés Casas for a conversation to reflect on the decade since the agreement and share how he continues his work toward peace through Fundación Compaz.

Further Reading & Resources from President Juan Manuel Santos:

• Santos, J. M. (2016). “Peace in Colombia: From the Impossible to the Possible.” Nobel Prize Lecture. (English | Spanish)
• Santos, J. M. (2021). The Battle for Peace: The Long Road to Ending a War with the World's Oldest Guerrilla Army. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. (English | Spanish)
• Fundación Compaz website (English | Spanish; Instagram; LinkedIn)
• Open Library of the Colombia Peace Process (English | Spanish)
• Santos, J. M. “La historia no contada del proceso de paz.” Podcast. (Link)

BUILDING PEACE IN COLOMBIA 10 YEARS AFTER THE HISTORIC PEACE AGREEMENT

In this session, Andrés Moya and Felipe De Brigard explore two lines of applied research that emerged after the 2016 Peace Agreement. The two cases are powerful illustrations of how behavioral science is being applied to help build peace and prevent conflict in Colombia and beyond.

Further Reading & Resources from Andrés Moya:

• Semillas de Apego website (Link)
• Sánchez-Ariza, J., Cuartas, J., & Moya, A. (2023). The mental health of caregivers and young children in conflict-affected settings. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 113, 336–341. (Link)
• “Rompiendo el Ciclo” | “Breaking the Cycle.” (2025). Semillas de Apego. (Link)
• Andrés Moya's LinkedIn (Link)

Further Reading & Resources from Felipe De Brigard:

• Memory & Forgiveness website (Link)
• Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab website (Link)
• Love, S. (2024). “Must you forget to forgive? A scientist tests the relationship.” Psyche. (Link)
• “Forgetting and Forgiving | Dr. Felipe De Brigard.” (2022). John Templeton Foundation. (Link)

Further Reading & Resources from Andrés Casas:

• “Pathways for Peace.” (2023). Pirata Films. (Link)
• “Evaluating How Movies Build Support for Peace: An RCT in Cinemas.” (2022). Gusano Films. (Link)
• Casas, A. & Hameiri, B. (2022). Giving peace a chance: Lessons from translational research in Colombia. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 28(3), 284–291. (Link, open access)
• “Hope.” (2019). Season 1, episode 6 of Why We Hate. Amblin Television and Jigsaw Productions. (Link)

The post RECORDING & RESOURCES—Neuropaz 2026: Hard Truths & Paths Forward appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Join us today—Friday, February 6—for an online event exploring the latest work and thinking at the intersection of behavioral science and peace and conflict. The event is free to attend, and you can join the event here. Below you'll find more about the theme and the full program for the event.

Date: Friday, February 6, 2026
Time: 9:00am - 4:30pm New York/Bogotá | 2:00pm - 9:30pm London | 3:00pm - 10:30pm Berlin/Lagos | 5:00pm -12:30am Nairobi
Location: Online
Cost: Free to attend
Event link: Join the event
View the recording: View the full recording here

If you'd like live captioning during the event, please use the Chrome browser with the live captioning feature enabled. Instructions here. 

Theme: Hard Truths & Paths Forward

Preventing conflict and promoting peace is always an urgent undertaking. Recently, these efforts have felt even more pressing.

Around the world, conflicts rage and simmer. People are killed, injured, and displaced. The instability of global politics has exacerbated already fraught situations. Powerful digital technologies create new fronts on which people fight. 

Wherever we find conflict or peace, we find ourselves. We find our attitudes and emotions, our norms and traditions, our governments and institutions. A better understanding of who we are is crucial to understanding who we can become—people at war or people at peace.

The theme of Neuropaz 2026—hard truths and paths forward—reflects the many roadblocks that characterize this line of work, including funding cuts to research and aid agencies, technologies that amplify outrage, and politicians who prioritize power over peace. Neuropaz 2026 will bring together leading scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and funders to face these obstacles head-on. Through open, candid conversations about what stands in our way, we hope to illuminate new paths forward.

Progam

Please find the program below. Session times may change in advance of the event. We’ll keep the most up-to-date schedule on this page.

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
9:00 - 9:30am EST (New York)

Andrés Casas and Evan Nesterak will introduce the event and provide an overview of the program. They’ll also show a brief video about the life and work of Emile Bruneau (to whom the event is dedicated).

REFLECTIONS ON BUILDING PEACE
9:30 - 10:00am EST (New York)

In recognition of the tenth anniversary of the historic peace agreement in Colombia, Neuropaz will present Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia from 2010-2018 and leader of the peace process, with the inaugural Neuropaz Lifetime Achievement Award. President Santos will join Andrés Casas for a conversation to reflect on the decade since the agreement and share how he continues his work toward peace through Fundación Compaz.

BUILDING PEACE IN COLOMBIA 10 YEARS AFTER THE HISTORIC PEACE AGREEMENT
10:00 - 10:30am EST (New York)

In this session, we’ll explore two lines of applied research that emerged after the 2016 Peace Agreement. The two cases are powerful illustrations of how behavioral science is being applied to help build peace and prevent conflict in Colombia and beyond.

SOCIAL GRAVITY
10:30 - 11:15am EST (New York)

Betsy Levy Paluck will introduce the concept of social gravity— “a fundamental force of human social life that pulls people toward common ideas or behaviors in their social worlds”—and describe how it influences our behavior in contexts of peace and conflict.

UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR DURING AN ACTIVE CONFLICT
11:15am - 12:15pm EST (New York)

What is the value in understanding human behavior during an active conflict? And how do you do it? We’ll explore these questions through work happening at three key levels: the individual, the community, and the institutional. We’ll hear about individual interventions happening in Syria, research on the spread of hate in online digital communities, and why a behavioral perspective is key to building democratic institutions that last.

SCHOLARS REFLECT ON PAST AND ONGOING VIOLENCE
12:45 - 2:00pm EST (New York)

How do scholars who are personally connected to contexts of past and ongoing violence experience, navigate, and rethink their work? In this panel, scholars from regions affected by violence will share their reflections.

COULD BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE PREVENT A WAR?
2:15 - 3:00pm EST (New York)

What would it take to use behavioral science to prevent war? This panel will feature a discussion between researchers, practitioners, and technologists who each have a role to play in a) discovering new solutions and testing them in the field, b) paying for those solutions, and c) driving down costs through better technology for targeting, forecasting, and scaling.

* * *

INNOVATIONS IN PEACE FUNDING
3:00 - 3:45pm EST (New York)

Peace funding stands at a crossroads. Bilateral donors have substantially reduced their investments in peace and other foreign aid. At the same time, new pools of capital are entering the development space, often prioritizing interventions with clear, quantifiable outcomes. How do we make the case for investing in peace when the field sits between competing funding paradigms? What innovative models might provide a path forward? How do we bridge traditional peace funders, emerging capital sources, and practitioners to fund what matters most, even when impact is hardest to prove?

REFLECTIONS ON HARD TRUTHS
3:50 - 4:15pm EST (New York)

James Robinson will reflect on the hard truths he’s faced over the course of his career. What has he learned, why has he changed his mind, and where does he think he’s going next?

CONCLUSION AND GOODBYE
4:15 - 4:30pm EST (New York)

Andrés Casas and Evan Nesterak will bring Neuropaz 2026 to a close, and they’ll share ways attendees can access resources from our speakers and stay engaged.

* * *

The post PROGRAM—Neuropaz 2026: Hard Truths & Paths Forward appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

My dear fellow citizens,

For 40 years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adults in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

Allow me a small personal observation. When I flew recently to Bratislava, I found some time during discussions to look out of the plane window. I saw the industrial complex of Slovnaft chemical factory and the giant Petržalka housing estate right behind it. The view was enough for me to understand that for decades our statesmen and political leaders did not look or did not want to look out of the windows of their planes. No study of statistics available to me would enable me to understand faster and better the situation in which we find ourselves.

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children's homes, and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.

The previous regime—armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology—reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could not do more than slowly but inexorably wear out itself and all its nuts and bolts.

When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last 40 years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably, and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: The best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.

In the effort to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. The recent period—and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution—has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way. And let us ask: Where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents—the very generation that had been considered lost—joined them? How is it that so many people immediately knew what to do and none needed any advice or instruction?

I think there are two main reasons for the hopeful face of our present situation. First of all, people are never just a product of the external world; they are also able to relate themselves to something superior, however systematically the external world tries to kill that ability in them. Secondly, the humanistic and democratic traditions, about which there had been so much idle talk, did after all slumber in the unconsciousness of our nations and ethnic minorities, and were inconspicuously passed from one generation to another, so that each of us could discover them at the right time and transform them into deeds.

The last six weeks of our peaceful revolution—has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy.

We had to pay, however, for our present freedom. Many citizens perished in jails in the 1950s, many were executed, thousands of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of talented people were forced to leave the country. Those who defended the honor of our nations during the Second World War, those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another. Independent courts should impartially consider the possible guilt of those who were responsible for the persecutions, so that the truth about our recent past might be fully revealed.

We must also bear in mind that other nations have paid even more dearly for their present freedom, and that indirectly they have also paid for ours. The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany, and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today's freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom. Without the changes in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic, what has happened in our country would have scarcely happened. And if it did, it certainly would not have followed such a peaceful course.

The fact that we enjoyed optimal international conditions does not mean that anyone else has directly helped us during the recent weeks. In fact, after hundreds of years, both our nations have raised their heads high of their own initiative without relying on the help of stronger nations or powers. It seems to me that this constitutes the great moral asset of the present moment. This moment holds within itself the hope that in the future we will no longer suffer from the complex of those who must always express their gratitude to somebody. It now depends only on us whether this hope will be realized and whether our civic, national, and political self-confidence will be awakened in a historically new way.

Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: Only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies, and regretting its own guilt. Let us try to introduce this kind of self-confidence into the life of our community and, as nations, into our behavior on the international stage. Only thus can we restore our self-respect and our respect for one another as well as the respect of other nations.

Our state should never again be an appendage or a poor relative of anyone else. It is true that we must accept and learn many things from others, but we must do this in the future as their equal partners, who also have something to offer.

Our first president wrote: “Jesus, not Caesar.” In this he followed our philosophers Chelčický and Komenský. I dare to say that we may even have an opportunity to spread this idea further and introduce a new element into European and global politics. Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.

Masaryk based his politics on morality. Let us try, in a new time and in a new way, to restore this concept of politics. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not simply the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can also be the art of the impossible, that is, the art of improving ourselves and the world.

We are a small country, yet at one time we were the spiritual crossroads of Europe. Is there a reason why we could not again become one? Would it not be another asset with which to repay the help of others that we are going to need?

Our homegrown Mafia, those who do not look out of the plane windows and who eat specially fed pigs, may still be around and at times may muddy the waters, but they are no longer our main enemy. Even less so is our main enemy any kind of international Mafia. Our main enemy today is our own bad traits: indifference to the common good, vanity, personal ambition, selfishness, and rivalry. The main struggle will have to be fought on this field.

The best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. . . . Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so-far clean face of our gentle revolution. Let us not allow the sympathies of the world, which we have won so fast, to be equally rapidly lost through our becoming entangled in the jungle of skirmishes for power. Let us not allow the desire to serve oneself to bloom once again under the stately garb of the desire to serve the common good. It is not really important now which party, club, or group prevails in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civic, political, and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations. The future policies and prestige of our state will depend on the personalities we select, and later, elect to our representative bodies.

My dear fellow citizens!

Three days ago I became the president of the republic as a consequence of your will, expressed through the deputies of the Federal Assembly. You have a right to expect me to mention the tasks I see before me as president.

The first of these is to use all my power and influence to ensure that we soon step up to the ballot boxes in a free election, and that our path toward this historic milestone will be dignified and peaceful.

My second task is to guarantee that we approach these elections as two self-governing nations who respect each other’s interests, national identity, religious traditions, and symbols. As a Czech who has given his presidential oath to an important Slovak who is personally close to him, I feel a special obligation—after the bitter experiences that Slovaks had in the past—to see that all the interests of the Slovak nation are respected and that no state office, including the highest one, will ever be barred to it in the future.

My third task is to support everything that will lead to better circumstances for our children, the elderly, women, the sick, the hardworking laborers, the national minorities and all citizens who are for any reason worse off than others. High-quality food or hospitals must no longer be a prerogative of the powerful; they must be available to those who need them the most.

As supreme commander of the armed forces I want to guarantee that the defensive capability of our country will no longer be used as a pretext for anyone to stand in the way of courageous peace initiatives, the reduction of military service, the establishment of alternative military service, and the overall humanization of military life.

In our country there are many prisoners who, though they may have committed serious crimes and have been punished for them, have had to submit—despite the goodwill of some investigators, judges, and above all defense lawyers—to a debased judiciary process that curtailed their rights. They now have to live in prisons that do not strive to awaken the better qualities contained in every person, but rather humiliate them and destroy them physically and mentally. In a view of this fact, I have decided to declare a relatively extensive amnesty. At the same time I call on the prisoners to understand that 40 years of unjust investigations, trials, and imprisonments cannot be put right overnight, and to understand that the changes that are being speedily prepared still require time to implement. By rebelling, the prisoners would help neither society nor themselves. I also call on the public not to fear the prisoners once they are released, not to make their lives difficult, to help them, in the Christian spirit, after their return among us to find within themselves that which jails could not find in them: the capacity to repent and the desire to live a respectable life.

My honorable task is to strengthen the authority of our country in the world. I would be glad if other states respected us for showing understanding, tolerance, and love for peace. I would be happy if Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama of Tibet could visit our country before the elections, if only for a day. I would be happy if our friendly relations with all nations were strengthened. I would be happy if we succeeded before the elections in establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican and Israel. I would also like to contribute to peace by briefly visiting our close neighbors, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. Neither shall I forget our other neighbors—fraternal Poland and the ever-closer countries of Hungary and Austria.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his airplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic that serves the individual and that therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems—human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

The most distinguished of my predecessors opened his first speech with a quotation from the great Czech educator Komenský. Allow me to conclude my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement:

People, your government has returned to you!

© Václav Havel author of “New Year’s Address to the Nation”—heirs c/o DILIA, 1990. All rights reserved. Translated by Paul Wilson.

The post Václav Havel on Overcoming Authoritarianism appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

This year was marked by uncertainty: political upheaval, economic unpredictability, varying promises that AI will soon transform our work, our culture, and our relationships (for better or for worse). Perhaps it’s not surprising then that several of our most popular articles of the year focused on navigating uncertainty. 

In our most-read article of the year, “Why We Spiral,” Gregory Walton helped us understand the psychological processes through which we grapple with uncertainty about ourselves and where we belong. He showed us how we can use these processes to “spiral up” rather than down.

Elizabeth Weingarten’s “In Uncertain Times, Get Curious” showed us how asking better questions can act as an antidote to uncertainty—and the anxiety that comes with it.

In “The Power of Asking ‘How?’” Rene Almeling recommended asking ‘How?’ instead of ‘Why?’ She wrote: “When it comes to human behavior, it can often be more productive and compelling to ask questions that begin with how rather than why?” The reason? “‘Why’ questions tend to provoke the stating of specific reasons, a need to explain via rational justification. . . . In contrast, ‘how’ questions can evoke more wandering responses that often include crucial information about social processes, history, networks, decision-making, and uncertainty.”

We also learned how to take a step back and get perspective when we’re perhaps a bit too certain that we’re on the right path. Dan Heath explained that “when we lock into a particular goal too quickly, we blind ourselves to alternate routes forward that might have been better and easier.” To avoid such a fate, we can ask one, simple question: “What’s the goal of the goal?”

And in “The Imperfect Life,” Oliver Burkeman explained why embracing “imperfectionism” can be so liberating: “The day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.”

The other articles on this list helped us, in a number of other ways, to better understand:

• AI and where it might be headed
• Personal development via solitude and conscientiousness
• Gender equality at work and home
• How to avoid overloading your team
• Why simplicity can be a strength in behavioral design
• And a perennial question of the human condition—“Why don’t people return their shopping carts?” 

On this list, you’ll find our 10 most-read articles of the year, plus five honorable mentions. We hope you enjoy the articles that you and your fellow readers turned to most this year.

— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief

(You may also be interested in the Most Read Articles of 2024, 2023, and 2022.)

Most Read Articles of 2025

Why We Spiral
By Gregory M. Walton

Questions of who we are or what we’re worth can send us into a tailspin. But the very same processes that pull us down can propel us up, too.

Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation
By Hannah B. Waldfogel

For reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should. But then I realized I can do something about it.

In Uncertain Times, Get Curious
By Elizabeth Weingarten

Asking better questions can act as an antidote to uncertainty—and the anxiety that comes with it.

What’s the Goal of the Goal?
By Dan Heath

When we lock into a particular goal too quickly, we blind ourselves to alternate routes forward that might have been better and easier. We can avoid this trap by asking ourselves one simple question.

The Imperfect Life
By Oliver Burkeman

The day is never coming when all the other stuff will be “out of the way,” so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.

Two part series on solitude

The Art of Balancing Solitude and Connection (Part 1)
By Elizabeth Weingarten

Without enough alone time, I feel disconnected from myself. But too much alone time makes me feel like I’m losing part of myself, too—the part of me that comes alive when I’m with other people.

* * *

Solitude Is a Skill (Part 2)
By Elizabeth Weingarten

We all need different amounts of social time and alone time. If the solitary life comes less natural to you, what should you do?

The Power of Asking ‘How?’
By Rene Almeling

Humans love to ask, “Why?” But when it comes to our behavior, it can often be more productive and compelling to ask, “How?”

Why Simplicity Can Be Strength in a Complex World
By Michael Hallsworth

As intuitive as it seems, a complicated approach to behavioral design may not be the best response to complexity.

How Do You Become More Conscientious When You’re Not Conscientious Already?
By Olga Khazan

The easiest way to become more conscientious is to already be conscientious—last week’s to-do list makes writing this week’s easier. But if you can’t lean on your past self, considering your future self can help.

What Happens When AI-Generated Lies Are More Compelling than the Truth?
By Nicholas Carr

What if the danger of AI-generated misinformation isn’t that we’ll believe it—it’s that we’ll eventually stop believing anything at all?

Honorable Mentions

How Zero-Sum Beliefs Get in the Way of Fairness
By Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi

The more we are stuck in the fixed-pie mentality, the harder it is to spot the opportunities to expand the pie.

The Cognitive Contradictions That Shape Who Runs the Household
By Allison Daminger

There’s a puzzling inconsistency in the way couples deploy their skills at work and at home.

How to Rescue an Overloaded Organization
By Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer

Many leaders mistakenly believe that their organizations thrive under constant pressure. But overloaded systems are broken systems—to fix them, we must learn our way to the right amount of work.

AI, Productivity, and Human Finitude: A Conversation With Oliver Burkeman
By Aline Holzwarth and Samuel Salzer

AI productivity tools promise to help us get things done today so we can enjoy tomorrow. But a laser focus on “tomorrow” can vacate meaning from today.

Vibe Check: AI and Behavioral Science in Silicon Valley
By Evan Nesterak

Kristen Berman has worked at the intersection of behavioral science and technology in Silicon Valley for the past decade and a half. What’s her on-the-ground view of where AI is headed?

The post Most Read Articles of 2025 appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Around the world, conflicts rage and simmer. People are killed, injured, and displaced. The instability of global politics has exacerbated already fraught situations. Powerful digital technologies create new fronts on which people fight. 

Preventing conflict and promoting peace is always an urgent undertaking. Recently, these efforts have felt even more pressing.

In February, Behavioral Scientist will team up with the peace science organization Neuropaz to host “Hard Truths and Paths Forward: Peace as a Scientific Challenge,” an online event exploring the latest work and thinking at the intersection of behavioral science and peace and conflict. The event is free to attend, and you can register here.

Date: Friday, February 6, 2026
Time: 9:00am - 3:30pm New York/Bogotá | 2:00pm - 8:30pm London | 3:00pm - 9:30pm Berlin/Lagos | 5:00pm -11:30pm Nairobi
Location: Online
Cost: Free to attend
Register: Register here

About Neuropaz 2026

Wherever we find conflict or peace, we find ourselves. We find our attitudes and emotions, our norms and traditions, our governments and institutions. A better understanding of who we are is crucial to understanding who we can become—people at war or people at peace.

The theme of Neuropaz 2026—hard truths and paths forward—reflects the many roadblocks that characterize this line of work, including funding cuts to research and aid agencies, technologies that amplify outrage, and politicians who prioritize power over peace. Neuropaz 2026 will bring together leading scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and funders to face these obstacles head-on. Through open, candid conversations about what stands in our way, we hope to illuminate new paths forward. 

Featured speakers include leading scholars and organizations, such as Nobel Prize-winning economist James A. Robinson, psychologists Betsy Levy Paluck and Felipe De Brigard, the International Rescue Committee, Global Partners Governance, Semillas de Apego (Seeds of Attachment), Memoria & Perdón (Memory & Forgiveness), and more. 

The event will bring together the different philosophies, methods, interventions, and programs from behavioral science, peace and conflict, and beyond. The aim is to create productive collisions among the varying perspectives and approaches.

The full program for Neuropaz 2026 will be released in January 2026. Today, you can register for the event to secure your spot.

Neuropaz goes global

This will be the first time the Neuropaz event goes global. Neuropaz began in Colombia in 2022 and has hosted four in-person events across Bogotá, Medellín, and Cartagena. The event was founded in part to honor the late neuroscientist Emile Bruneau and his vision for what behavioral science can bring to peace building. He worked with passion and purpose to make progress on peace through science in Colombia and beyond. Now, Neuropaz 2026 will bring the event and the spirit of Emile to a global community.

We hope you’ll join us. Register here for the event and invite your friends and colleagues.

Sincerely,

Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief, Behavioral Scientist & Andrés Casas, Founder, Neuropaz

The post Save the Date—Neuropaz 2026: Hard Truths & Paths Forward appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

I arrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but the evidence remained. One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot. My question: Why don’t people return their shopping carts?

I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t).

I’ve never understood why people don’t put their carts away. In high school, I worked as a shopping cart attendant at my local grocery store, shepherding carts across the lot. Since then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should, with every trip to the grocery store a reminder of the special kind of havoc humanity is capable of.

Then last year, on a windy weekend morning in a Wegman’s parking lot, it hit me. Not a cart, but the realization that I can do something productive about it. 

So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group whose mission is to encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so. They upload their efforts on their YouTube channel, which boasts hundreds of videos recorded between 2020 and 2025, taking place mostly in California, but also Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, New York, Canada, Australia, and England. Cart abandonment, it turns out, knows no regional bounds. As of September 2025, these videos have collectively been viewed over 90 million times. (See below for one of the tamer videos.)

I watched a total of 564 encounters between Cart Narcs and cart abandoners. These don’t represent a perfectly random sample of interactions, but together they capture a broad cross-section of everyday behavior. (And, as far as I know, it’s the largest archive of shopping cart behavior available.) Most interactions begin the same way: Someone leaves their cart and a Cart Narc requests they return it. At this point I documented what happened next, transcribing parking lot reactions word for unhinged word. To be clear, this was not a quick process. I spent dozens of weekend hours hunched over my computer pausing and replaying YouTube videos. People in my life called this “concerning” and a “waste of time.” I called it research. 

My approach was inductive, which is a fancy way of saying that I had neither theory nor hypotheses. Instead, I let the data speak for itself, coding people’s raw (and wildly unfiltered) responses. Over time, patterns emerged, and eventually, I was left with a detailed catalog of behavior, complete with justifications, deflections, hostility, and, miraculously, humanity.

Why don’t people return their carts?

People had all sorts of reactions to being asked to do the right thing (see Figure 1). There were those who deflected, challenging the question itself rather than answering it. Do you work here? Are you the cart police? Do you represent this company? Who are you? Can I see your ID? Do you have any authority? Who do you work for? Who do you think you are? Why don’t you get a real job? 

Some responded with anger and aggression. They yelled, cursed, and mocked. Some threatened to (or did) call law enforcement. Others escalated further, brandishing weapons like guns, tasers, or knives. “I’m gonna slash your face,” warned one man. “Why don’t I kick your ass?” asked another. A third shopper told the Cart Narc, “This is how you get killed.” If only returning the cart stirred as much passion as did refusing to.

Then there were the many, many excuses. In over half of the encounters I watched, shoppers provided at least one justification for their choice to abandon the cart (see Figure 2).

Many invoked entitlement, sometimes mentioning an identity they believed exempted them from common decency. “I worked at Safeway for lots of years and people left their carts all the time,” one man said. Another explained his choice to leave his cart by saying, “After 40 years of working retail grocery, I’ve earned it.” Earned what, exactly? The right to not pick up after yourself?

There were those who cited physical limitations barring them from cart return. “I’m 72 years old. I can’t walk that far,” explained a man after pushing his cart to the furthest edge of the lot. Another shopper clarified her choice to leave the cart in the middle of a handicap parking spot by mentioning, “I’m handicapped myself.” And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?

Other people were simply too busy to return their carts. “I’m over an hour late to my own kid’s birthday party,” revealed one hurried shopper. “We have somewhere we need to be,” another alleged, before spending the next eight minutes arguing with the Cart Narc about how he didn’t have time to return his cart. Some mentioned inconvenience. “Them carts don’t even roll,” one shopper complained, after going out of his way to dig the wheels of his cart straight into grass and dirt.

Many justified their behavior by invoking norms and pointing to other cart abandoners. “Everyone else puts them there,” one shopper said, leaving his cart with a gaggle of similarly unreturned ones. “The culture around here is doing it,” insisted another, as if not returning one’s cart were a local tradition. This reasoning—everyone else does it—pairs best with a juice box and a timeout. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?

Another type of excuse invoked other people by shifting responsibility (or blame) to others. Many shoppers pointed to their choice to leave the cart as a form of job stability or creation. “They pay someone to collect them all” explained one man. Another insisted that returning the cart is selfish because, “You’re putting someone out of a job.” It’s true that many stores do employ people to gather carts, but the job is to collect them from designated return areas—not to chase them down across the lot like loose cattle.

In some interactions I watched, people feigned ignorance. Like the woman who was unaware that carts shouldn’t be left on the curb: “I don’t know where we’re supposed to put them. I typically stop at Ralph’s.” As if basic decency is wildly store-specific. 

My personal favorite justifications were the ones that invoked habitual good behavior, explaining their choice to not return their cart by saying they always put their cart away. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I put it back,” insisted a shopper after not putting his back. 

But, between the shouting and the excuses, there were people who, upon being asked to return their cart, did. Some weren’t happy about it. “There’s too much going on in the world to pay attention to that,” one man grumbled while wheeling his back to the corral. Another threatened to break the Cart Narc’s arm before, incredibly, returning his cart. Others returned theirs silently. A few even owned up to their mistake. “I just got Cart Narc-ed! I apologize,” said one shopper. (Watch one cart abandoner's mea culpa below). 

What does behavioral science say?

We can also look to existing research in the social and behavioral sciences for insight into why people don’t return their carts. 

People respond to incentives. At Aldi, for example, you can’t take a cart without first inserting a quarter. When you’re done, you return the cart and get your quarter back. According to Aldi, this system saves customers money: By eliminating the need to pay employees to collect stray carts, Aldi can keep their prices low. (This kind of deposit system is standard in many European countries.) 

But if you Google “Aldi shopping carts,” you’ll find countless blog posts, articles, and videos explaining how to get around the quarter system, suggesting incentives have limits.

People respond to signals of hierarchy. Many of the cart abandoners I watched justified their choice by saying, “They pay people to do that.” The implication was that returning the cart would deprive someone of work—or worse, that the task of cart return was beneath them. The grocery store where I worked in high school didn’t bother trying to incentivize people to return their carts. Instead, they cemented the hierarchy by hiring teenagers like me to wheel carts out to people’s cars, not wanting to burden their clientele with the task of cart return. Even in stores where returning the cart is expected, people may fail to do so if they feel the task of cart return is beneath them. Seeing a task as low status makes neglecting it feel more permissible. 

People respond to social norms. Psychologists distinguish between descriptive norms (what people do) and injunctive norms (what people think they’re supposed to do). When we see carts scattered across a parking lot, the descriptive norm tells us that leaving them is fine. But when we see other people returning their carts, it can feel wrong not to. Social norms cut both ways: They can excuse cart abandonment but also encourage cart return. 

Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm. The insight that people adjust their behavior to match what they believe others are doing has powered countless “norm campaigns” from hotel signs reminding guests that most people reuse their towels to university initiatives curbing binge drinking by publicizing that most students do not drink excessively. In fact, shopping carts had their own norm campaign. In 1969, a retired grocer declared February “Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket” month, in an attempt to recover stolen shopping carts. Norms can tell us what to do, but not always why it’s worth doing them.

But people respond to meaning. Without a deposit system or a norm campaign, the most effective motivator might be reframing the act itself. Like Blockbuster’s “Be Kind, Rewind,” which turned something that felt like a chore into a small act of kindness and a favor for the next person. Or, drawing from something more serious, the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” campaign that turned an uncomfortable confrontation into a gesture of loyalty. 

So, do your part, return your cart. Not because the cart matters, but because returning it means other people do.

The post Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Hypocrisy accusations are woven into the fabric of politics—they are probably the most common attacks that politicians make. As the political thinker David Runciman notes, hypocrisy is what you reach for “if you wish to do the maximum possible damage to your political opponent in thirty seconds of airtime.”

One side will point at, say, right-wing bastions of law and order who want leniency and special favors when their rule breaking comes to light. The other side will mock wealthy left-wing advocates of equality, diversity, and social justice who maneuver furiously to ensure spots at elite universities go to their children, not to those whom they claim to care about.

These attacks are so common because they are so easy. You don’t need to engage with or debate someone else’s principles on their own terms—that’s hard. All you have to do is say that they have not lived up to those principles, whatever they are.

Call it the “simple inconsistency” ploy. With it, you can avoid seeming to take a position. You’re not trying to push your own position on taxes or abortion. But you can give the impression that you’ve understood your opponent’s position because you’ve spotted an inconsistency that they apparently missed.

If we are making these kinds of attacks, we’re already in trouble. There’s no attempt to engage the other side on the issues and convince them they are wrong. A polarized era gives you few incentives to do that. But even if we can’t agree on any shared values, we can still attack the other lot for not living up to their values. That still has some bite. As Judith Shklar put it, when you don’t have a shared moral knowledge, “the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains.”

So hypocrisy accusations may be a symptom of breakdown and dysfunction. In a polarized world, you want to fire up your side with fury. Hypocrisy is a reliable source of fuel for the flames. As the temperature rises, you look around for even more stuff to chuck into the fire, and so the cycle continues.

The problem is that polarization crushes trust. When you point out the gap between your opponent’s words and deeds, on the slightest pretext, you aim to destroy trust in them. But they’re trying to do the same to you. As more accusations pile up, the effect is to reduce trust in politics and people in general. If everything and everyone seems fake, the result can be a thirst for a “real,” sincere, authentic politician to step forward. This person will offer the false promise of a politics free of hypocrisy. 

If everything and everyone seems fake, the result can be a thirst for a “real” politician to step forward. This person will offer the false promise of a politics free of hypocrisy.

What’s a better way forward? Well, let me say upfront what I’m not proposing. It would be quite simple to do a contrarian take that we all should just relax about political hypocrisy: “Let it go! We’re all being too uptight!” But there’s too much at stake to slip into easy, empty cynicism. The hypocrisy of malign deception can break down society’s vital systems until they fail completely. Nor can we simply stamp out hypocrisy in politics. 

As I write in my book, The Hypocrisy Trap, the function of hypocrisy in politics and life is more complex than we recognize. Indeed, democracy relies on the existence of some hypocrisy. For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely. 

It’s fairly obvious why we can’t let all hypocrisy slide. But we have a blind spot when it comes to understanding the effects of calling out hypocrisy relentlessly and trying to stamp out hypocrisy completely. And it’s a blind spot that erodes our trust in our political institutions and can mean we end up electing even more deceptive politicians. Taking a more practical and nuanced understanding of hypocrisy can allow us to participate in politics more effectively and with a clearer-eyed view of our elected leaders.

So how is our political environment being damaged by unrestrained accusations of hypocrisy? 

First, we’re creating cynicism by exhausting the concept. In politics, accusations of hypocrisy are relentless but not costless. We empty hypocrisy of meaning when we overuse it as an accusation. We make it just another term of abuse in the game of politics. As Judith Shklar explains, “In the unending game of mutual unmasking, the general level of sham rises. As each side tries to destroy the credibility of its rivals, politics becomes a treadmill of dissimulation and unmasking.” We end up mired in cynicism and distrust. 

Second, we’re distracting ourselves from the bigger issues. Ironically, these attempts at unmasking may end up missing things instead. If people are too focused on personal inconsistencies, they may not see how groups or institutions are creating a system where they can afford to play by different rules, with no consequences. Hypocrisy accusations may be distractions based on naive assumptions about how power can be curbed.

Third, we’re pushing ourselves toward what my book identifies as the bad “worlds” of hypocrisy. If we hound politicians for the slightest inconsistency, decent people who are aware of their flaws won’t enter politics. Instead, we will get people who aren’t aware of their flaws or who don’t care about them. If we get angry at politicians for falling short of an impossible standard, we will either end up with an ever more punitive attempt to enforce complete consistency, or a cynical state where no one cares about hypocrisy as long as they are strong enough to do what they want.

If all this is true, then we need to think differently about hypocrisy in politics. We don’t have to like hypocrisy—it’s so dislikeable. Instead, we need to accept that tolerating a certain level of hypocrisy in politics is the least-bad option overall.

For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely.

The first step is to realize that hypocrisy is unavoidable, at least in democracies. Anyone promising otherwise is also a hypocrite—and a potentially dangerous one. So we need a reckoning with all the reasons that hypocrisy is baked into democratic politics. Democracies are about power as well as principles, meaning that ambiguity and compromise are inevitable. Democracies allow a range of groups to exist, such as unions, religions, companies, and cities. Each wants to hold power and advance its interests. To get them onside, politicians need to persuade them—but the variety of interests means politicians need to present things a bit differently to each. That means inconsistency and compromise slip in.

If you end up getting power, things get even harder. You need to deliver for your group’s interests, which means you must be flexible, focused, and tactical. But, while being partisan, you also have to keep promoting principles such as freedom and the rule of law—and stick to the persuasive things you said to different groups in the past. Power needs to exist alongside principles; you can’t just ditch one or the other.

Unfortunately, that combination is not popular. The public hates it when politicians don’t live up to their big, clear claims. As Judith Shklar puts it, “Democracy generates disappointment, and a sense of always being deceived.”

Then comes the harder part. We need to edge toward an understanding that trying to stamp out political hypocrisy completely is both futile and self-defeating. But that’s difficult because politics makes antihypocrisy seductive. It feels so good when someone promises to rip away the suffocating lies and replace them with something real. It can also feel like the right thing to do. If a politician is promising to uphold ideals, supporting their stance seems like a blow against pervasive political cynicism. Maybe we can believe, just one more time, in something true?

Time to steel ourselves and accept that antihypocrisy is a false promise. In fact, we are just choosing between one kind of political hypocrite and another.

There are the politicians who engage in some pretense as part of the normal run of democratic politics. Those are the hypocrites we usually get angry about: the politicians who seem false, who we suspect are carefully controlling their public statements, while saying what they really think in back rooms. The other kind are the ones who deny that they ever act like this, who present themselves as unsullied by the dirty compromises of politics. They look down on the other politicians wallowing in the muck. They make a big, explicit play about not being hypocrites. These are the politicians who present themselves as true believers, the real deal, or as authentic straight talkers.

But hypocrisy in politics is unavoidable, so antihypocrites can never live up to their claims—especially if they want to get anything done. So we need to change our views and see that these politicians do not offer an escape from hypocrisy but just serve it up in a more deceptive form. They prey on our tendency to see ourselves as consistent, truthful people, and they claim that they, too, are just like that ideal self-image. In contrast, other politicians are toxic liars.

All this kicks away at our support for compromises that make democracies work. Instead, it offers a vision of politics as a quest for purity and truth. That vision is like a sweet treat that tastes good but makes us sicker in the end. The politician can never sustain it—democracy always disappoints—and that means an even more toxic collapse of trust later on.

Taking a more practical and nuanced understanding of hypocrisy can allow us to participate in politics more effectively and with a clearer-eyed view of our elected leaders.

To move our politics to a healthier place, we also need to come to terms with our part in creating political hypocrisy. We are inconsistent in the demands we place on politicians. We pull them between the logic of power and the logic of principles, depending on how we feel. But we don’t admit this. Instead, we embrace the fantasy of a simple war of principles or adopt a cynical view that everything’s just corrupt.

So we need to edge closer to understanding that democratic politics has to do contradictory things, and we play our part in that dynamic. That means not buying in completely to the idea that politics is about seeking truth and achieving purity but instead retaining the sense that it’s also an act of collective problem solving.

That double view of politics is hard to face directly because it triggers an unpleasant dissonance. It’s easier to keep switching effortlessly between demands for complete sincerity and demands to just get something done. But forcing either extreme breaks democratic politics. We need to recognize that in politics, inconsistency is a feature, not a bug.

That means realizing that we may not be choosing between truth and lies but between “politicians who are sincere but untruthful and those who are honest but hypocritical.” It means recognizing the value in flawed striving for something better, rather than rejecting the attempt altogether. And it means tolerating the flexing of absolute rules when the context demands compromise.

I’m not urging desiccated centrism, stunted ambitions, or lazy complacency. We shouldn’t abandon political convictions but rather see them as the framework for navigating trade-offs. But the path is not easy. It requires tolerating compromise, incoherence, and maybe even disappointment. That goes against our political instincts and incentives. But maybe those incentives will change if we realize how our overuse of hypocrisy takes us to dark places when it goes unchecked.

Excerpted from The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives by Michael Hallsworth. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hallsworth. All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Michael Hallsworth 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. Evan Nesterak of Behavioral Scientist served as an early reader and peer-reviewer for MIT Press for the book.

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Kathy and Randall run a home with three teenagers, two dogs, two birds, and two careers. It’s “an all-hands-on-deck kind of operation,” explained Kathy. Both spouses recalled fighting over their division of labor when their children were young but said that in the intervening years they’d found harmony. Kathy explained why: “We both went where our strengths are.” She acts as “the planner” or, as Randall put it, “the foreman.” Whereas Kathy identifies as “a control freak,” she lovingly referred to Randall as “a mess.”

Kathy and Randall’s story is a tale of labor allocation driven not by gender but by finding the right “fit” between person and task. Kathy is a “control freak,” so she manages the family calendar. Randall is “so good at the home repair kind of stuff” that he takes the lead on DIY projects. This arrangement seemed perfectly logical to me as I sat across the dining table from Randall and Kathy in turn.

It was only later, when I reflected on their story and compared it to those I was hearing at countless other tables, that I began to wonder: Are cognitive labor leaders born or made?

Cognitive household labor is a set of mental processes aimed at figuring out what the family requires, what it owes to others, and how best to ensure that both requirements and obligations are fulfilled. Cognitive labor operates as a near-constant “background job” for the spouse who acts as cognitive laborer-in-chief. Most of my interviewees, including Kathy and Randall, argued that the responsibility fell to the spouse who was best equipped to handle it. But I ultimately came to a different conclusion: Cognitive labor leaders are largely made, and in different-gender couples, it’s most often women who undergo this transformation.

Kathy and Randall’s story provides important clues about how and why this happens. Kathy, for example, was the undisputed family scheduler. Until very recently, she even made Randall’s medical appointments for him. Yet one of Randall’s core professional responsibilities as vice principal at a nearby junior high was to manage the calendars of hundreds of middle schoolers. “I do scheduling for the entire [grades] seven to nine,” he explained, along with coordinating parent-teacher meetings and events for the school’s enrichment program. Randall also described himself as a stickler for timeliness, a relic of his old military days. I doubted he would have lasted long as an administrator or a soldier if his organizational skills were as lackluster as he and Kathy implied.

Cognitive labor operates as a near-constant “background job” for the spouse who acts as cognitive laborer-in-chief.

My research shows that the apparently individual “personality traits” said to drive couples’ cognitive labor inequality are better understood as skills. Men and women in different-gender couples tend to deploy the more general capabilities they possess differently across the paid and unpaid spheres of their lives. Individual traits undoubtedly interact with these skills, placing upper and lower bounds on what is possible. Yet context—including gendered judgments about who is to blame when something goes wrong at home—plays a larger role than most couples acknowledge. Over time, it seems, gendered behaviors help create and maintain the very selves they are said to reflect.

The characteristics required to run a household—like being organized, proactive, and a good multitasker—overlap considerably with the set of capacities psychologists call “executive function.” Self-control, working memory, and mental flexibility, among the core components of executive function, are also core to many cognitive tasks.

Though executive function and the abilities required of a cognitive laborer may not be identical, the former is a useful proxy for the latter because researchers have devoted considerable attention to studying whether executive function can be taught and how it differs by gender. The broad consensus is that specific components of executive function can be improved with training and practice. Gender differences are apparent in some individual components of executive functioning, but neither men nor women have a systematic overall advantage. Further, findings of gender differences differ widely across studies and appear to depend heavily on measurement and testing strategies.

This research conflicts with my interviewees’ focus on immutability (“I am who I am”) and individual difference. Indeed, if I looked solely at their domestic activity, men and women did appear to differ systematically in their capacity for planning, problem-solving, and processing complex informational inputs. The catch is that the same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.

Cognitive labor leaders are largely made, and in different-gender couples, it’s most often women who undergo this transformation.

Nina, for example, described her husband, Julian, as temperamentally ill-equipped for the frenetic multitasking and constant forecasting she relied on to juggle home, paid work, and childcare. “If something is broken in the house and Julian gets used to it, he will not consider it a problem,” she explained.

But Julian worked as a surgeon—a position that certainly relies on attention to detail and deadlines. He acknowledged the contrast between his professional and domestic personas. It was “mostly time [availability]” that prevented him from doing more of the cognitive labor at home, he began. “And then also—I mean with the mental stuff I think Nina’s much more attentive to all the things that need to be done . . . I can mostly go a very long time before it hits me that now is the time to deal with it.” Quickly, he clarified: “I mean, in the home life. Not, like, work.”

Nina made a similarly astute observation about this contradiction. “I’m also just, like, more of a detail-oriented person than Julian,” she mused. “Except with regards to his career, where apparently he’s . . . he’s a doctor, so he has to . . .” Nina trailed off, changing the subject rather than dwell on this puzzling inconsistency.

“What do you think is different about your attention to those things in the work side [versus the home side]?” I asked Julian. He thought for a moment before speculating:

“I don’t know. I mean, I think just being in a pretty busy job. I think in my work pretty consistently—I tend to try to prioritize basically all of that, and don’t spend a lot of time with that [home] stuff. [Paid work] comes at the expense of, like, proactive work [at home]. I think I’m likely fairly intellectually exhausted. I don’t come home and think about what needs to be arranged for childcare.”

Several other men acknowledged a similar contrast between paid work and home. Alan described himself as the “ideas guy” in his marriage and his wife as the “project manager” who figures out “what are we going to do and how [would] that actually work and, like, the nitty-gritty.” But this arrangement is “funny,” he admitted, because Alan works full-time as a project manager.

The same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.

Contrasts like these point to a pattern of differential deployment rather than differential ability. It was less that men like Randall, Julian, and Alan were innately laid-back and more that different contexts brought out different sides of them. Why? Men who recognized the discrepancies between their work and home personas argued that by the time they finished with paid work, they had little mental bandwidth left.

This is a logical argument, if we imagine cognitive labor capacity as a tank that refills overnight or a muscle depleted with use. However, when it was a woman who held a more demanding job—in terms of number of hours or schedule (in)flexibility—different logic prevailed. In a handful of cases, women’s cognitively taxing paid work was referenced as further evidence of her inherent managerial prowess. Bridget, for instance, described herself as the “organizer” and her husband, Jimmy, as the “executer” in their relationship. By way of explanation, she added, “My [paid] job is basically to project-manage things . . . the dynamic in our relationship is very clearly a result of that.” Rather than competing with her domestic responsibilities, Bridget argued that the professional skills she’d honed enhanced her domestic capacity.

Still, many women did experience their paid work as intellectually exhausting and a threat to their managerial role at home. But rather than accept this as an unfortunate reality, women viewed their occupational demands as a problem in need of a solution. They typically responded by making professional changes rather than by expecting or asking their husband to pick up the slack at home. This was true even of women who outearned their husband, sometimes by a significant margin. Cassie, a telecommunications executive with an annual income more than twice her husband’s, described herself as “a workaholic” who was formerly “consumed” by her job. Despite her intense career, Cassie did not cut herself much slack at home: “I was literally working [for pay] from, like, 6:00 a.m. ’til 9:30 p.m. and then would get up the next day and do it again. And [my husband] was working ’til 9:30 at night, so I would have to come home and still do everything that needs to be done when you’re a parent.”

Cassie remembered reaching a breaking point one evening when she was giving her six-month-old a bath. “My [work] phone was going off and was buzzing, and it’s always numbers, numbers, numbers. And nothing happened to [my son], but he turned and I wasn’t paying attention. And I was just like, ‘I gotta get out of here, ’cause I’m not paying attention to my child while he’s in the tub.’” Soon after this incident, Cassie switched from the commercial to the government division of her company, where work hours were considerably less intense. Though she had likely lowered the ceiling on her future compensation, Cassie now felt she had sufficient bandwidth to be an attentive parent. Intellectual exhaustion was not, in her mind, a valid reason to neglect her domestic responsibilities.

Cassie’s story suggests the “facts” of partners’ employment—hours, income, schedule flexibility—mattered less than the meaning couples ascribed to those facts. While men’s paid work was allowed to deplete their cognitive reserves, women’s was not. This gender asymmetry meant that women often experienced more obstacles to their career growth than their husband faced.

Men and women are not merely responding to personal differences when allocating cognitive labor. Rather, their choices are creating and sustaining those differences.

It would be easy to dismiss men as bad actors weaponizing their incompetence to shirk responsibility, or women as too willing to give up on their professional ambitions. But this is at best an incomplete explanation—gendered social forces also channel men and women in different directions. Women are held socially accountable for most domestic outcomes, like a messy house or a poorly dressed child. Meanwhile, men are more on the hook for a family’s financial outlook. Men and women alike internalize these gender-specific societal expectations, a fact that helps explain, if not fully excuse, what could sometimes seem like a myopic focus on men’s careers.

Men were also not the only ones who practiced selective deployment of their abilities. Women who demonstrated considerable skill in most other areas of domestic life, for instance, sometimes displayed a curious incapacity when it came to finances. Holly, who described frustration with her husband Tyler’s passive approach to household management, was more laid-back about finances: “He’s a lot better at that than I am. So he’s always running numbers in his head and thinking about finances. I’m just more on the, like, ‘Let’s make sure that [our daughter’s] fed’ and, you know, being a mom, and let him worry about the financial stuff.”

When we link mind-use patterns to innate traits, we miss the critical role learned skills and honed capacities play in shaping how “good” one is at cognitive household labor. Men and women are not merely responding to personal differences when allocating cognitive labor. Rather, their choices are creating and sustaining those differences.  When men deploy their problem-solving and planning skills at the office, they fail to recognize how those same skills might be useful at home. Yet these “choices” are only partially individual: men and women alike are responding to a range of social forces that make it easier for women to acquire domestic knowledge and build family-centered relationships and that disincentivize men from using up their limited energy on domestic matters for which they are unlikely to be held accountable.

These forces are not determinants, however. While couples like Kathy and Randall may be the norm, other different-gender couples managed to craft a more balanced division of cognitive labor. And regardless of their actual allocation, the happiest couples were those who believed in their own ability to reshape their patterns as goals and circumstances changed.

Excerpted from What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life © 2025 by Allison Daminger. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

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