Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

My open letter to David Ellison

You argued that the American people have misjudged you — that they are wrong about what is in your heart and mind. I want to be clear: I don't care what you think or feel. What I care about is your actions.

The Art of Taking Smart Risks

Good risk can bring joy to life, but Americans are up against forces that profit from the reckless kind.

Since 9/11, Fear Has Driven Our Politics. Don’t Let It Drive The Next 25 Years.

Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had…

Beware of samples! A cognitive-ecological sampling approach to judgment biases.

Opinion | 9/11 took Islamophobia mainstream in America – and things have only gotten worse

Although I have always had kind and mostly tolerant neighbors, the effects of widespread Islamophobia have touched my life intimately.

Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism.

The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned

Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?

Views of American politics, polarization and tone of political debate

In many ways, Americans’ emotions toward politics today are as negative as their evaluations of the country’s political system. Majorities say they always or often feel exhausted (65%) and angry…

Echo Chambers and Their Effects on Economic and Political Outcomes

In this review, we survey the economics literature on echo chambers. We identify echo chambers as arising from a combination of two phenomena: ( a) the choice of individuals to segregate with like-minded ones, i.e., the creation of chambers, and ( b) behavioral biases that induce polarization when individuals exchange beliefs in these chambers, i.e., the echo. We summarize the literatures on these two phenomena and suggest how to combine the two literatures to gain insights about the effects of echo chambers on economic and political outcomes. We end by suggesting pathways for future research and discussing policy interventions to alleviate echo chambers.

Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults

The changes in daily life induced by the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to longstanding concerns about social isolation in the United States. Despite the links between the physical setting for individuals' daily lives and their connections with family, friends, and the various institutions of collective life, trends in where American adults spend their time have been largely overlooked as researchers have focused on how and with whom they spend their time. This article analyzes data from the American Time Use Survey over a timeframe spanning nineteen years and argues that the changes in Americans' daily routines induced by the COVID era should be seen as an acceleration of a longer-term trend: the rise of time spent at home. Results show that from 2003 to 2022, average time spent at home among American adults has risen by one hour and 39 minutes in a typical day. Time at home has risen for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities. Preliminary analysis indicates that time at home is associated with lower levels of happiness and less meaning, suggesting the need for enhanced empirical attention to this major shift in the setting of American life.

Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults

The changes in daily life induced by the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to longstanding concerns about social isolation in the United States. Despite the links between the physical setting for individuals' daily lives and their connections with family, friends, and the various institutions of collective life, trends in where American adults spend their time have been largely overlooked as researchers have focused on how and with whom they spend their time. This article analyzes data from the American Time Use Survey over a timeframe spanning nineteen years and argues that the changes in Americans' daily routines induced by the COVID era should be seen as an acceleration of a longer-term trend: the rise of time spent at home. Results show that from 2003 to 2022, average time spent at home among American adults has risen by one hour and 39 minutes in a typical day. Time at home has risen for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities. Preliminary analysis indicates that time at home is associated with lower levels of happiness and less meaning, suggesting the need for enhanced empirical attention to this major shift in the setting of American life.

The marketplace of rationalizations

Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation.

The changing nature of America’s irreligious explained

Americans are increasingly choosing not to identify with any religious tradition. But this group of irreligious people is a complex one – with different relationships to religion.

Situational awareness

I consider this article to be a form of American propaganda. There are a number of things in here I agree with, or believe may happen, but don't necessarily ...