By the spring of 2020, the high stakes involved in rigorous, timely and honest statistics had suddenly become all too clear. A new coronavirus was sweeping the world. Politicians had to make their most consequential decisions in decades, and fast. Many of those decisions depended on data detective work that More
A sample of research on confidence and task prioritization, language patterns, eyeblinks and perception, dishonesty, negotiation, sound symbolism. More
As schools and universities closed across the country, the #ClassOf2020 challenge went viral, with graduates taking to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to mark the rite of passage online. Using the hashtag, they posted photographs of themselves in cap and gown, holding their diploma and surrounded by More
COVID-19 has now killed more than 148,000 people in the U.S. On a typical day in the past week, more than 1,000 people died. But the deluge of grim statistics can dull our collective sense of outrage. And part of that has to do with how humans are built to perceive the More
Life has improved for most people around the world over the past generation, temporary pandemics aside. The rub is that you can’t get anyone to believe the good news. And the result is a toxic political environment—and the potential collapse of democratic norms if too few people feel that a stressed system is worth saving. Those More
A sample of research on economic behavior, motivation interventions in education, perception, neural representations of procedural knowledge, empathy and romantic relationships, and stereotype-threat in chess. More
