Sublime

Skinner was one of the major intellectual forces behind the behaviorist movement in psychology—the idea that biological systems always respond a certain way to certain stimuli. Control the stimuli, and you can control the behavior. “Condition” the organism with rewards and punishments, and the organism will learn exactly how to behave. Over the dec

When we do, we assume the politicians are clients in a patron–client relationship, and we assume their obligations will cloud their impartial judgment.

Because people don’t follow simple mechanical rules, modeling human decision-making is an even bigger challenge. Understanding how people make decisions, both as individuals and in groups, is an important goal of the disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science.

He quickly figured out that the government’s efforts, which should have been guided by logical rules and deliberate priorities, were instead driven by bizarre institutional processes that, in many ways, operated like habits. Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get re

Can you have a boring life and be a first-rate social scientist? To some extent, probably yes. You can be very smart and figure our how people behave under conditions that you have never yourself experienced—nor anyone you know. I cannot say it is impossible. But I think it is unlikely: because it in human nature, however smart we may be, to under

When we focus on novelty, we lose sight of behavioral outcomes. And while using validated pressures to inform our designs can help guard against the natural tendency to pursue interventions that feel unique, they aren’t a guarantee; just as data can be used to justify bad business decisions, pressures can be used to justify bad interventions.

This is why being specific about population in your behavioral statement can be so powerful: not everyone needs to have the same behavioral outcome.