A couple of years later, Earth Day was created to demonstrate support for the environment. Every April 22nd, over 1 billion people around the globe get together to help with environmental cleanups, tree planting, and advocacy for sustainable policies. To honor earth day, we decided to share our most ambitious research on climate change—it offers some insight into the types of messages the inspire or depress support for climate action.

There is heated debate about how to communicate about climate change. Many experts are yelling that the world is burning. UN Secretary-General António Guterres coined the term “Global boiling” in 2023 to describe the current era of extreme, record-breaking climate change. And a growing body of individuals known as ‘doomers’ now regularly share extremely pessimistic, nihilist or fatalistic views about global problems on social media.

But might this extreme paralyze us into inaction, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? If we are all doomed, maybe it doesn’t matter if I buy a Hummer and skip public transit. I’ll just post catastrophic memes for clicks on social media as the world burns around me. At least I’ll get some klout before it all goes up in flames.

In fact, this is pretty much what we found in a massive study that we published in Science Advances two years ago. To help figure out the precise impact of climate doomerism and compare it with alternative messages, we recently completed one of the largest experiments ever conducted on climate change behavior, with 59,440 participants in 63 countries.

Together with an international team of 255 other behavioral scientists and climate change experts (led by Madalina Vlasceanu & Kim Doell), we tested the effects of the 11 common messages meant to boost climate change beliefs, policy support, and concrete action. These messages were selected by a team of experts, and we consulted with the scientists who had originally created and tested each message to ensure we got it right (you can see a summary of each intervention below).

The messages/interventions ranged from emphasizing scientific consensus (e.g., noting that “99 percent of expert climate scientists” agree on the climate change facts), or the widespread concern of others (e.g., a majority of people in each nation is concerned), to emphasizing the consequences for one’s region (e.g., increased frequency and severity of wildfires and floods) or the effects of climate change on future generations (e.g., asking participants to imagine writing a letter about their actions regarding climate change that would be read by people decades from now).

Imagine how you would feel if you read this message (from the negative emotions intervention), which involved exposure to scientific claims about the impacts of climate change in a doom and gloom messaging style typically used by climate communicators to induce negative emotions:

“Climate change is happening much more quickly and will have a much greater impact than climate scientists previously thought, according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022). If your anxiety about climate change is dominated by fears of starving polar bears, glaciers melting, and sea levels rising, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a young adult today. And yet the swelling seas—and the cities they will drown—have so dominated the picture of climate change/global warming that they have blinded us to other threats, many much closer at hand and much more catastrophic…”

Does this inspire you to take action or leave you feeling overwhelmed?

We compared this doom and gloom message to the other climate change messages on a highly diverse sample of participants. Since climate change is a truly global issue, we translated and tested these messages in 63 different countries. This allowed us to see which messages worked best around the globe—as well as within specific countries and cultures.

Our findings revealed that doom and gloom messaging was highly effective for stimulating climate change information sharing, like posting on the internet or social media, where negativity reigns. As you can see in our figure below, doomerism (ie negative emotions) was the single most effective strategy for increasing social media sharing.

However, doom and gloom messaging was the absolute worst for motivating action and among the worst for changing climate change beliefs or support for climate change policies. In fact, negative emotions backfired on effortful behavior—making people significantly less likely to take action for the environment compared to a neutral control condition (shown as the dotted line on the figure below).

It turns out that critics are right to worry that doom and gloom can demoralize the public into inaction. We found that this strategy had no effect on policy support or climate beliefs. For these outcomes, writing a letter to future generations explaining one’s climate actions today or thinking about the consequences of climate change in one’s region were the most effective interventions.

And doom and gloom even backfired when it came to more effortful behavior. When faced with the enormous stakes of the climate crisis, personal actions—and perhaps even policy change—can seem futile. People withdraw or disengage. As Madalina and Jay recently concluded in an article for Scientific American:

“Doom and gloom messaging can do both things: induce helplessness, discourage individual-level action; but also motivate people to spread the word.”

Many other messages also failed or even backfired, underscoring how difficult it is to actually mobilize real, effortful action on climate change. This is why far more research is needed on the topic and why we all need to embrace greater intellectual humility around this issue.

It’s common to see certain messages—and messaging strategies—go viral on social media. But that doesn’t mean they will work in the real world. In fact, they might even backfire. The norms and incentive structures of social media are very different from the real world. The messages that go viral online may be completely counterproductive offline. The incentive structures that drive engagement online might ultimately depress real world climate action.

If we are past the point of no return, why bother taking action or making sacrifices?

We also found that different people responded differently to the various climate messages and that this varies across countries. To design the most effective messages, scientists and policy makers will need to tailor them to the right audience.

To see the effects of our interventions along dimensions such as country of residence, income level, age, ideological leaning, socioeconomic status, gender and also type of climate action targeted, visit our open-access user-friendly web app. Feel free to play around and find out what worked best (or worst) in your home country.

Sadly, we did not find a silver bullet for spurring climate action. But our research found several messages that moved the needle on climate change beliefs and actions. We suspect that similar lessons apply to other issues, from strengthening democracy to public health. In fact, we were recently part of a similar project designed to reduce affective polarization and found that several messages either didn’t work or backfired (thankfully, the optimistic message we created—based on The Power of Us—was the 3rd most effective, from over 252 submissions).

It also suggests that there are very serious downsides to doomerism. It might be fun to get engagement on social media, but the reward system there does not apply very well to the things that drive real policy change or behavior. We should be very wary about leaning on doomerism when the same set of facts can be conveyed in a more powerful message.

This has been well known for some time in the persuasion literature. Messages that appeal to our fears (known as fear appeals) are only really effective when they increase a sense of efficacy and focus on one-time behaviors. Alas, the doom and gloom messages on climate change often undercut a sense of efficacy and require repeated, long term habit change.

Does this mean we should avoid sharing the scientific facts about climate change? No, not at all. In fact, the message about scientific consensus was more effective than negative emotions on every single measure in our study—except sharing on social media. In short, people are highly responsive to scientific messages when they are framed in the right way.

We asked Jamie Hyneman, one of the most prominent science communicators in the media and former co-host of MythBusters for his thoughts on effective climate change messaging. He suggested messaging that provides 1) clarity of action and 2) appeals to morality and ethics.

“Looking at the ethics might be the way to go, more specifically, what is the right or wrong thing to do and what does that look like? The morality aspect of climate change is one thing that stands on its own and transcends identities - like whether you’re conservative or liberal.”

His intuitions were on point: our study confirmed that messages with moral foundations yielded the most motivation for positive climate action. And we have found that framing messages through a moral or ethical lens can make people feel more strongly about almost any action—from riding a bike to studying for a test. This might be a lesson that people should take to heart.

Let us know if you are doing anything for Earth Day in the comments.

News and Updates

Why do two people look at the same evidence and reach completely opposite conclusions? Jay discussed selective attention, sycophantic AI, political tribalism, and how it impacts leadership on the Culture Changers Podcast with Allison Hare:

Ask me Anything

We have one final monthly virtual meeting (Ask Me Anythings) for paid subscribers this spring! This is a chance for you to meet one-on-one or in small groups with Jay and Dom to talk about anything you want (e.g., our book, the topics we cover in this newsletter, our latest research, a problem you’re struggling with, or whatever else you would like). Our summer series will be announced soon.

• May 9th, 2pm EST with Jay

Paid subscribers received an email from powerofusbook@gmail.com with details on how to sign up. Reply to this email with any questions you have about this, or feedback on paid subscriber offerings.

Learn more about THE POWER OF US

If you like our newsletter, we encourage you to check out our award-winning book “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. You can learn more about the book or order it from the links on our website (here or scan the QR code below). We keep the newsletter free, but are extremely grateful if you have a chance to purchase the book or buy it for a friend who wants to learn more about group psychology.

Catch up on the last one…

One more week to join our book giveaway for a free copy of Sonja Lyubomirsky’s newest book, How to Feel Loved.

The Power of Us

How to feel more loved

Love isn’t just something we give or receive, it’s something we communicate. In HOW TO FEEL LOVED: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis argue that many of us are already loved, yet still feel unseen and disconnected. The gap isn’t about effort or compatibility, but about how we show up in our relationships…

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9 days ago · 21 likes · 2 comments · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

While some Americans praised Bad Bunny’s performance as a pivotal moment in American culture which expressed the value of connecting with one’s community and celebrating one’s heritage, others were outraged. Backlash following the performance forced Bad Bunny to clear his Instagram account due to the immense volume of online harassment he received.

Many football fans felt that the performance was not traditionally American enough and that a Puerto Rican artist does not belong on stage at the Super Bowl Halftime show. On Truth Social, Donald Trump called the performance a “slap in the face to our country” and added, “nobody understands a word this guy is saying”. (According to U.S. Census data, Spanish is the second most common language spoken in the U.S., with over 41 million speakers.)

Boxer Jake Paul’s call to turn off the halftime show referred to Bad Bunny as a “fake American citizen” and received 125,000 likes on X. These posts and many more fueled animosity towards Bad Bunny and Hispanic Americans in general. Although Bad Bunny is an American citizen, for many he was not “prototypically” American enough and therefore undeserving of the spotlight.

Racial dynamics in the U.S. are complicated and require nuance to understand. However, there are two psychological theories that can help explain some of the reactions to Bad Bunny’s performance.

1. Stereotyping models quantify the ways different groups are perceived in society and visualize the status quo. Researchers have found that there are systematic ways people stereotype based on different traits like foreignness, warmth, and competence.

2. Perceptions of status threat are likely at play. Status threat is the perception that one’s social group is losing status, power, or cultural dominance relative to other groups. Perceived status threat can trigger preferences to maintain the status quo, specifically when a group that is usually dominant in society feels threatened.

Perceptions of status threat can be triggered by a shift in racial demographics, or as in Bad Bunny’s case, greater representation in pop culture and the media. Bad Bunny’s trajectory has made big waves in the entertainment industry as of late — his latest record, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS was the top album globally on Spotify and was awarded album of the year at the 2026 Grammys.

How stereotypes shape what it takes to be considered American

At the end of his performance, Bad Bunny shouted “God Bless America!” before naming countries across the Americas as he and other performers crossed the field carrying their flags. This display has been viewed as a moment of decentering the United States as the default for defining America, and shined a light on all countries in North, Central and South America. This reframing of “America” is rooted in a larger question: who is considered “American” and who belongs?

Within all societies, racial groups are subject to stereotypes that influence how they are viewed and treated. Research finds that when group perceptions are measured by ratings of inferiority-superiority and foreign-American, distinct patterns emerge.

In a set of studies conducted in 2017, researchers asked participants “To what extent are [racial group] seen as foreign or American in U.S. society?” (1 = Very Foreign, 7 = Very American). They found that White Americans were seen as the most American, followed by Black Americans, then Native Americans/American Indians. Hispanic/Latino Americans were viewed as relatively foreign. White Americans were also rated more patriotic than other racial groups.

These group dynamics can, in part, explain why a Puerto Rican artist performing at the Super Bowl felt “not American enough” to some. It challenges the status quo by spotlighting a culture and group of people who are marginalized in U.S. society. A performance on a stage as big as the Super Bowl may imply that Hispanic Americans’ cultural presence is increasing and could threaten other groups’ positions on the social hierarchy.

The role of status threat and implications of a Hispanic population surge

Recent U.S. Census data predict that by the year 2045, people of color will outnumber White individuals. The implications of a majority-minority country are important to understand in order to build a more inclusive future for all, but research in this area has suggested that the future may be difficult to navigate. Turning Point USA’s “All American” halftime show as an alternative to Bad Bunny’s performance foreshadows a deep divide.

This begs the question: Will the future be one where Americans embrace diversity and celebrate the U.S.’s multifaceted identities and cultures, or one marked with heightened conflict, racism, and xenophobia?

A 2019 Pew Research study revealed positive perceptions of racial and ethnic diversity, hinting that amicable attitudes will shape the nation’s future. The nationally representative survey of U.S. adults showed that more than three-fourths of Americans (77%) agreed that racial and ethnic diversity is at least “somewhat good” for the country. The study found some variation in opinion among White (55%), Black (59%) and Hispanic (60%) individuals. However, other psychological studies suggest otherwise…

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The test is also being used to determine our love life. Yes, people actually do put their Myers-Briggs category on their Tinder profiles and funders gave 1 million dollars to develop an app that matches couples based on their Myers-Briggs personality types. The test also makes a pretty regular appearance on dating profiles and NYT Wedding announcements, like a charming young couple below who decided to evaluate their romantic capability:

While the Myers-Briggs test is telling people who to hire and marry, scientists hate it. As Laith Al-Shawaf notes, “any psychologist will tell you, it’s mostly bullshit.”

Then why is it so popular?

We explain why people are suckers for terrible psychology tests—from the Meyers-Briggs to the Zodiac—and how you can assess your personality with a scientific valid measure. We also share our own personality test scores, for the curious.

But let’s start with the MBTI. The test was develop during World War II by an American mother and daughter who were fascinated by Carl Jung’s 1921 book “Psychological Types”. They created a series of 93 forced-choice questions, like the following: “Are you more (a) realistic than speculative or b) speculative than realistic.

Based on these answers, the MBTI categorizes people into a group based on four personality dimensions (the sample question above is used to determine if you are sensing or intuitive):

• Extraversion (E) or introversion (I), which measures whether you get energy from outwardly focused action like socializing or from inwardly focused activities like quiet reflection

• Intuition (N) or sensing (S), which measures how much you see big picture patterns rather than focusing on sensory information from direct experience

• Thinking (T) or feeling (F), which measures whether you make decisions using logic rather than by focusing on feelings

• Judging (J) or perceiving (P), which measures your preference for structure rather than spontaneity

After you complete the Myers-Briggs test, you get sorted into one of 16 categories. Each group is often given an appealing name: the “logical pragmatist”, “compassionate facilitator”, or “insightful visionary” — providing a perfect new title for a professional development seminar or your online dating profile.

Another perk is that you get matched with famous people (most of whom are long since deceased and never completed the test). Are you an “ISFP” like Bob Dylan and Rihanna or an “INTP” like Albert Einstein and Tina Fey?

We (Dom and Jay) both completed the test and were categorized as “Commanders” with an ENTJ personality type. This puts in in prestigious—and tyrannical—company, like Steve Jobs, Margaret Thatcher, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gordon Ramsay. Our editor, Yvonne, fared a bit better and was categorized as an INFP, like John Lennon and Princess Diana. Here is the MBTI test if you want to try it yourself. And remember that none of these historical figures probably ever completed the MBTI.

Despite the joy of being compared to celebrities, psychologists have repeatedly argued that the Myers-Briggs has dubious predictive ability and is grounded in debunked theory. To make matters worse, it’s unreliable. Which means that if you take the test more than once to learn more about your “true self”, it’s quite likely to give you different answers each time.

Another big problem is that these 16 categories contradict how contemporary psychologists think about personality. Most experts agree that human personality can be boiled down to five traits—the BIG 5: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Each trait is a continuous dimension, so that someone can score high, low, or anywhere in between. To take the same Big 5 test for yourself, follow this link to take the 120-item measure.

A recent report in Scientific American compared the Meyers-Briggs to other personality scores, ranging from the Big 5 to Astrological signs (see their results in the figure below) to see how each predicted 37 life outcomes (see their full report for details), ranging from how many close friends they had to how often they exercised to how satisfied they were with life.

Here is what they found:

What is it about this scientific mess that people so readily buy into? We believe that one of the bugs that drives psychologists crazy is actually a feature that explains the test’s enduring popularity.

Unfortunately, however, it is quite hard to conceive of yourself in five-dimensional space. It’s also awkward to tell people at a conference, first date, or a job interview that you have a moderate score on extraversion, moderate-to-high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, high on openness, and moderate-to-low on neuroticism. This is hardly sparkling dinner party conversation!

This is why assigning people to Myers-Briggs’ categories is compelling. Scoring low on extraversion and high on openness doesn’t sound particularly impressive, but being a “mastermind” does. People would much rather claim a social identity that includes Sun Tzu, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen and Arthur Ashe (setting aside the absurd fact that several were deceased hundreds of years before the test was even invented).

The use of categories is a great marketing maneuver and a big part of the reason behind the popularity of many dubious personality tests from the Myers-Briggs to the infamous TIME Harry Potter Quiz or Cosmo’s quiz to help you learn what kind of lover you are. The same logic also applies to Astrology signs!

All these tests operate a bit like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, slotting us into different groups. People crave self-definition and social identities provide this for us. We are attracted to group memberships that provide both a sense of connection to people just like us and distinction from others—what Marilynn Brewer termed “Optimal Distinctiveness”. These groups fulfill multiple core social needs.

The ease with which people form group identities can be traced back to one of the most important studies in social psychology (we personally think it is the most important experiment in our field). In the minimal group experiments from the 1970s, people were randomly assigned to groups after completing a test of dubious merit, such as their ability to estimate the number of dots in an image or their preference for abstract art (e.g., Klee vs. Kandinsky).

Within minutes, they had created a new sense of identity and were treating their new in-group members very differently from out-group members. In fact, this research revealed that the mere act of being categorized as a member of a group was sufficient to cause discrimination. It also inspired on the of the most important theories in the social sciences—Social Identity Theory.

When we use personality tests that impose categories—like the Meyers Briggs or Astrology—we risk exaggerating the differences between groups and the similarities within them. When this occurs with other types of identities like race or gender, we typically call it “stereotyping” and we try to avoid it. When consultants do it in companies, they are exploiting the same social psychology and doing it on dubious scientific grounds to make a buck.

There is reason for caution when it comes to categorizing others too readily by personality as well. We might well fail to hire, promote, or even marry someone because they fall into a false category about which we make exaggerated assumptions. Even with the Meyers-Briggs, putting people into categories is the weakest use of the test. It is roughly as useful as astrology.

This is why organizations could do much better by creating other meaningful social identities. If you can create a sense of belonging around other social identities, people might feel less of a need to rely on these dubious tests to create a sense of self.

It is also why you should focus less on fictitious identities—like whether you are a Commander or an Aries—and more on real ones that matter. And if you do want to make romantic decisions based on personality, we highly recommend using a scientifically valid personality test like the Big 5.

For both men and women, their partner's conscientiousness predicts their own future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion, even after accounting for their own conscientiousness. There reason is because conscientious partners (both men and women) perform more household tasks, exhibit more pragmatic behaviors that their spouses are likely to emulate, and promote a more satisfying home life, enabling their spouses to focus more on work.

Choosing a partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. And relying on the Meyers-Briggs or the Zodiac is about the worst way you could make that decision.

Learn more about THE POWER OF US

If you like our newsletter, we encourage you to check out our award-winning book “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. You can learn more about the book or order it from the links on our website (here or scan the QR code below). We keep the newsletter free, but are extremely grateful if you have a chance to purchase the book or buy it for a friend who wants to learn more about group psychology.

Catch up on the last one…

Happy 2026 Winter Olympics! We share profound examples of cross-cultural collaboration in last week’s post. With interesting anecdotes about displays of national identity and olympic village hook-ups.

The Power of Us

Competition is what we see. Cooperation is what makes it possible

In a touching display of empathy, the international figure skating community and fans rallied around Maxim Naumov. After a remarkable performance dedicated to his late parents (who were killed in a tragic plane crash in Washington, DC), he dropped to his knees and looked to the sky. The crowd of fans gave him an emotional standing ovation that transcended national team lines, illustrating the shared human experience of the athletes…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych received widespread solidarity from other athletes after he used his platform to honor friends killed by the Russian invasion into his home county. While his actions led to a controversial disqualification by officials, many fellow Olympians and fans showed their support for his courage.

In one of the most unique examples of cross-country support involves a community of athletes from nations not traditionally known for winter sports. Cross-country skiers from 40 smaller nations formed a group chat—called Team Avalanche—to share technical tips, resources, and moral support. The members even started cashing in the same bedrooms during events. “For me, it’s like a family, it’s like a team”, said Indian skier Bhavani Thekkada.

These are just some of the examples of cross-national comraderie from the 2026 Milan Olympic Games. With competitors from nearly 100 countries and an estimated audience of 2 billion people around the globe, the Games provide a common experience—a shared moment of inspiration and enjoyment—for a huge swath of humanity. It’s a rare moment when the world stops and celebrates together.

Fostering a sense of solidarity among the world’s peoples is exactly what the Olympics are meant to be about. In fact, they create very explicit social norms around it. As the International Olympic Committee puts it:

Yet, the Olympics are also perhaps humanity’s most elaborate ritual of nationalism. From the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremony to the flags and national anthems that pay tribute to the medalists, national pride is everywhere on display. Many of these same countries competing together have a history of conflict, even war.

With fans draped in the colors of their home nation, flags waving in the air, and Olympic glory riding on every sport, it might trigger images of nationalistic violence. Yet it almost never does. Instead, people cheer together and there are numerous instances of mutual support across national boundaries.

How do the Olympics balance this tug-of-war between national pride and collective celebration? What is the psychological switch that allows people to fiercely compete for scarce resources while embracing their enemy?

This is called “The Olympic paradox” and it reveals how competition and cooperation can coexist in harmony. We think it’s also a powerful lesson for any community, organization or institution that wants to foster competition for excellence while maintaining a overarching sense of shared purpose.

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Over 65,000 fans are willing to spend roughly $4,000 a ticket to watch their favorite players fight for a Super Bowl ring (you can see what all the fuss is about in the image below). And the Super Bowl will generate a billion dollars in revenue (which is just a slice of the $25 Billion dollar industry that is the NFL). The psychology of fans is extremely lucrative.

There is extensive evidence that playing on the same sports team can bind people together in powerful ways. For instance, one study in a war torn region of Northern Iraq found that Christian players on mixed-religion soccer teams were more willing to train with Muslims in the future, vote for a Muslim to win a sportsmanship prize, and sign up for a mixed-religion team the next season. By sharing a group identity and working together, they were able to bridge what had seemed like an impossible divide.

And winning made everything better: Team success amplified these effects. Successful teams forged an especially strong sense of shared identity, and connections between teammates reducing patterns of discrimination for many months. It provided the first steps toward rebuilding a sense of community.

But the impact of the Super Bowl will extend far beyond the field. Fans from around the world will be watching. This singular event will have an impact on the sense of self for countless people. Indeed, it’s one of the rare moments in our society where it’s socially acceptable for grown men to cry in public.

But the Super Bowl might have the biggest impact on kids. Like baby goslings instinctively bonding with the first moving object they see after hatching, many children will become lifelong fans. It turns out the winning team can make an imprint on their soul that lasts a lifetime.

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“International House was my best experience while living in NYC, much better than my studies at Columbia University…”

What kind of institution could possibly provide a better learning experience than one of the most prestigious and well-resourced universities in the world?

We spent the last three years studying the culture of International House and believe it offers a model for how to create community and encourage dialogue across lines of difference. As any team, organization, or business knows, curating culture is key. Yet the culture that many places have created is one which makes difference a dirty word.

Just a few blocks north of Columbia University, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, sits International House. Founded over 100 years ago, International House–affectionately known as I-House by its residents–was the first global community of its kind.

More than a residency program and housing, it provided graduate students and young professionals from around the world a place to connect and learn from each other, as they studied or worked in NYC.

In 2023, we were invited to do an independent evaluation of the residential experience and whether it advances I-House’s mission to install “a lifelong dedication to cultural understanding [and] cultivate individuals who will help bridge the polarization, isolation, and division our world continues to face.“ With decades of experience studying intergroup relations, prejudice and discrimination, and political polarization in a wide range of educational contexts, we were skeptical that a relatively short-lived experience could generate such deep and lasting transformation. But we agreed to run a study of the alumni and report the results back to the I-House trustees.

To uncover what makes I-House special, we spent the past three years interviewing alumni and studying how I-House residents change to determine if I-House indeed transforms residents—and if it might offer a blueprint that we could share with other businesses, organizations, and universities.

A Community that Actually Changes People

We first surveyed 1,600 alumni from I-House, dating back to the 1950s (you can read our full summary of that study here). The alumni scored very high in several prosocial traits, such as emotional intelligence and intellectual humility, empathy, and a sense of global citizenship. When we asked alumni about their prosocial behavior in the past month–using a measure known as the World Giving Index–roughly 80% of I-House alumni had helped a stranger and 60% had donated money. If I-House alumni were its own country, it would rank among the top three most prosocial nations worldwide.

The alumni also showed much lower political polarization compared to the general U.S. population.

As we read through hundreds of survey interviews with alumni, the results were striking. The alumni uniformly raved about the experience, including how it has helped them many decades later in careers ranging from politics to business. They overwhelmingly described their time at I-House as transformative.

One former resident wrote “ In many contexts over the last 20 years I have had to draw on skills learned at the House” and another said “I believe my time at I-House was hugely impactful on my life. I definitely view myself as a global citizen and approach my work that way.”

Others spoke about the specific skills they gain from the experience, noting they gained “Invaluable skills for cultural navigation and communication. Organizational skills for managing events and groups of people. Expanded my heart and mind!”

These testimonials struck us as a remarkable departure from the student experience at many of our leading universities over the past few decades. Perhaps this is why the difference between I-House and Columbia stood out so clearly to the student from Columbia. In an era of echo chambers, I-House stood out as a space that actively fostered dialogue across differences and encouraged discussion of challenging topics.

We reported the positive results to the I-House board of trustee, with the caveat that correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps only the most enthusiastic alumni completed our survey or students from the past had a much rosier view of education than the anxious generation. Or perhaps they simply had a pristine admissions process, effectively weeding out any sociopaths or narcissists.

So I-House invited us back to conduct a longitudinal study with a full cohort of new residents at I-House. We measured their traits and beliefs in the first few days of the academic year (after most of them had moved into I-House) and again at the end of the semester. We warned that the results might not be as impressive.

But low and behold, when we got the results back, they were even more impressive! After just a few months of living at I-House people seemed to become more charitable, trusting of strangers, and emotionally intelligent.

In fact, the results were even more positive than the alumni survey—The current I-House residents outperformed the benchmark samples across every measure of prosociality we measured, even higher than the I-House alumni (as seen in the future below):

As we dug into the data, it became clear that the students who rose the most were those who had the most to gain. Immersing themselves in the I-House community led to an entire suite of positive changes–these residents improved on almost every measure of pro-sociality.

As for the residents who came in already scoring highly on these measures, they could have dropped off since there was nowhere to go but down—in statistical terms, this is known as regression to the mean—but they didn’t. Instead they continued to score highly at the end of the academic year.

The Key Ingredient for Personal Growth

What was the key ingredient that created such a transformative social and intellectual environment?

We found that participation in formal programming that was intentionally designed to cultivate personal and professional growth (like roundtable discussions, a ballroom dance showing different cultural dancing traditions) was linked to improvement on emotional intelligence and global citizenship.

But we also found that simply sharing a meal or talking in the hallway about life, school and politics was also linked to change. We concluded that the main ingredient of I-House’s magic sauce was largely just interacting with people who were fundamentally different in a place where disagreement was not only tolerated, but valued.

It dawned on us that I-House is exceptionally effective in cultivating psychological safety. At I-House, residents feel safe taking “interpersonal risk-taking”, meaning they feel like they can express their true opinions and discuss difficult issues without fearing judgment or exclusion.

This atmosphere creates a sense of belonging and trust which allows residents to explore and share different perspectives and deepen their understanding of one another and the world. For instance, one resident reported that I-House has made them “more confident in expressing [their] views, knowing that people generally mean no harm and that it’s all about understanding [people’s] perspectives”.

Moving Beyond Echo Chambers

In recent years, American colleges have been struggling to maintain a climate of open and respectful discussion of different ideas and beliefs. American college students increasingly feel unsafe to share their opinions and beliefs on campus; two in three report self-censorship during class discussions and educationally valuable conversations on campus.

This creates a kind of echo chamber where everyone retreats into their own silo. It’s not the kind of climate that students want and it’s not conducive to learning new perspectives, engaging in robust debate, or resolving conflicts–skills that are critical when students graduate, enter the workforce, and take on leadership roles in their communities.

More importantly, students are disenchanted with the culture of silence at many universities. The faculty also feel under attack from the government, at odds with university leaders, and sometimes even fear their own students (or at least being reported by their students to the administration or news). These conditions make it very difficult to learn from one another both inside and outside the classroom.

A similar dynamic has occurred in companies who created “affinity groups”— a way for people of an underrepresented background or life experience to find each other and connect. This has the benefit of fostering a sense of belonging, but it cuts off people from cross-group interactions. This eliminates two of the most powerful ways to reduce hostility: intergroup contact and working together towards a common goal.

Instead of worrying about debates between people with different ideas, our leaders and institutions should encourage genuine and constructive disagreements. Even if students or employees ultimately disagree, they can move past the caricatures they see on social media and humanize people with a different perspective. And, more importantly, they might actually learn something.

One of the striking things about I-House is that they have been practicing this for the past century. They embraced diversity and debate before it was in vogue, and stuck with it when it became a political liability. As many major institutions have simply followed the trends, this sincere commitment to these values. Their mission is to create “an open-minded and intellectually challenging community where our residents expand their worldview and form lifelong bonds.”

In an era of heightened polarization and a stretching of our social fabric, I-House is an example of how to build and bind a community as diverse as they come. Smart institutions should pay attention to these lessons if they want to cultivate social and cultural intelligence.

Thanks for reading The Power of Us! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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News and Updates

Check out our new Ask Me Anything sessions for the new year! Paid subscribers can join us for our monthly live Q&A with Jay or Dom where you can ask us anything from workshopping research questions, career advice to opinions and recommendations on pop culture happenings — for paid subscribers only. Upgrade your subscription using the button below. Invites to RSVP have been sent via email from powerofusbook@gmail.com

• February 20 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

• March 4th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

• April 17 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

• May 6th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we discuss how AI can threaten democracy…

In an interview with the press, President Trump asked his aide to pull up the video. Surely, if we could just see what happened, disagreement would fade. It did not.

Despite watching the exact same video, people reached radically different conclusions.

How can that be?

The myth of the objective camera

Many of us place enormous trust in video evidence. When anything newsworthy happens, people immediately pull out their cameras to document the event. Indeed, this single event was videotaped by numerous bystanders, along with the ICE agent who shot Goode. And in his video, you can see Goode’s wife, Rebecca, taping him in return. Everyone was recording everyone in the video.

With multiple angles of real time video footage and the camera as our neutral witness, we expect people to see events objectively. Surely this is an opportunity to build a shared sense of reality. We assume that justice should follow naturally.

And yet, in an age when nearly every encounter can be recorded in high definition, video evidence often fails to settle our disputes or strip legal decisions of biases. In fact, it sometimes does the opposite.

Why? Because our eyes don’t work like cameras.

An eye captures only about 1-2 degrees of our visual field in high resolution. The rest is blurry. Our eyes are also constantly jumping around, and during these rapid movements (“saccades”), visual input briefly shuts down.

What we confidently have “seen with our own eyes” is not a perfect replica of the world. It is an image that our brain has stitched together from the few bits and pieces that our eyes were able to gather.

And what visual information we gather and how we stitch it together is deeply shaped by who we are.

When we look and still don’t see

Attention is guided by our social identities. We attend differently to people who belong to “us” and those who don’t. For instance, outgroup members tend to capture our attention quicker, but our eyes often linger longer on ingroup members. These patterns can unfold in milliseconds, long before our conscious thought enters the equation.

Missing key moments is therefore not always willful blindness. In a classic study on “inattentional blindness”, many participants didn’t notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of a scene because they were focused on counting basketball tosses. You can show the video (below) to a few friends to measure the accuracy of their attention.

Social identity can shape this blindness: White participants were less likely to notice a Black man than a White man interloping a scene. Group based attentional biases are especially pronounced when people are under perceptual load. Even the most obvious events can fail to register when our minds are somewhere else.

From biased views to biased judgment

Biased attention often means biased judgment.

Decades of research on the weapon (or “shooter”) bias finds that, under time pressure, people are more likely to mistake harmless objects for weapons when they are held by outgroup members, partly because attention is allocated differently. For example, participants are quicker to shoot armed outgroup targets than armed ingroup targets in a mock shooting task. These biases often operate automatically, and researchers have observed them even among trained police officers (though typically attenuated).

In a study led by Yael Granot, we tracked eye movements as participants watched an altercation between a police officer and a civilian. Social identity shaped where viewers looked, and those who focused relatively more on the officer later assigned greater responsibility and harsher punishment.

A similar paper in The Yale Law Journal found that prior attitudes toward police significantly affected participants’ judgments of the officer’s conduct—regardless of whether they saw video evidence or learned in other ways—and the degree of bias did not differ significantly across the different types of evidence (see figure below). Furthermore, people who identified strongly with the police—but not those who identified weakly—became more confident in their judgments when presented with video evidence.

This means that disagreement over video evidence is not always about dishonesty or bad faith. Sometimes, people are simply not watching the same scene. Moreover, it suggests that video evidence can even increase polarization among people who highly identify with the policy compared to those who don’t!

When video evidence challenges what we want to see

When video evidence contradicts what we want to believe about “people like us” or the institutions we trust, our perception can shift to protect those beliefs, and this can happen outside of our awareness.

This dynamic may have played a role in the trial following the killing of Jonathan Ferrell. Jurors reviewed the same video evidence yet saw different events unfold. While a White juror saw “a very aggressive move towards these police officers”, a Black juror saw the opposite. The jury ultimately deadlocked, divided largely along racial lines.

Similar patterns can appear outside the courtroom. In one study, partisanship influenced how participants saw and interpreted footage from the Women’s march. Supporters of President Trump viewed the protest as more extreme and later recalled more violent and fewer peaceful actions than had occurred.

Sometimes, we are seeing the world through group-colored glasses.

Changing our viewpoint

When we watch video evidence, many of us cannot step outside our social identities. But we can change how we engage with it.

Research suggests that when viewers are prompted to watch all parties equally or when the footage they watch includes multiple perspectives, their judgments can become more balanced. This is why we encourage you to watch all angles of the footage before forming an opinion—and you probably shouldn’t trust the opinions of hyperpartisans. Watch all the videos for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Justice isn’t just about what evidence we have, but how we watch it. It is also about the institutions and processes designed to reduce harm and ensure accountability. Core priorities of law enforcement are no loss of life, de-escalation, and an impartial judicial process. Reducing tension and avoiding escalation requires attention, training, and institutional support.

It also requires effective public leadership. Leadership that prioritizes de-escalation and emphasizes thorough investigation matters at all times, and becomes especially important during periods of polarization. Understanding the limits of human psychology reminds us why impartial institutions and an independent justice system are crucial.

If you want to delve deeper into the psychology of visual attention and the justice system, check out the book chapter that Anni co-wrote with Yael Granot and Emily Balcetis.

This newsletter was written by Anni Sternisko and edited by Jay Van Bavel. ChatGPT was used to improve grammar and clarity.

A new year represents a new you, a chance to reinvent yourself and create a new identity. As our colleague, Dr. Katy Milkman has found, on new beginnings—dates like New Year’s Day, a birthday and even Mondays—people are extra motivated to tackle their goals because they feel like they can turn the page on past failures and create a new direction.

For many people, new year’s resolutions represent the most important things they want to accomplish. Do you want to save more money? Exercise more? Eat healthier? If so, you are among a majority of Americans, for whom these were three most popular New Year’s resolutions in 2026.

But before you set any resolutions for the coming year, take a moment to remember your goals from last year. How well did you achieve them?

Despite decades of practice, roughly 80% of people fail to keep their resolutions by February, and a mere 9-12% stick with their resolutions for the entire year. This is a pretty dismal record—especially when you consider these are the most important goals we have for the entire year. And we set them for ourselves.

At this time of year, advice columns offer all kinds of recommendations for leveraging your willpower to meet your goals. Dream Big! Commit yourself! Give yourself a medal! (and those are just the tips from Harvard Medical School). As much as we’d like to give ourselves a medal, much of this advice fails rather badly.

This is why we have dedicated this column to our the secret of our own success: The power of collective control! It is why book clubs, writing groups, and workout partners are so effective.

We revisited our resolutions from the past to see how well we lived up to our best intentions. Yes, we wrote them in our newsletter to hold ourselves publicly accountable. Would our own knowledge of behavioral science give us an edge? Let’s dig into the results.

Our results were quite positive overall.

Jay set out to launch the Center for Conflict & Cooperation. Indeed, he managed to pull it off—you can check out the new website here. But Jay and Dom are still chipping away at their book. This is the year! We now include regular posts from the center as past of this newsletter. Yvonne started a new full-time job in January and pledged to achieve greater balance in her professional life. This year, she only said yes to two film productions (record low) and moved on from her role as a case supervisor at a foster youth advocacy agency. She continues to do advocacy work and attend court hearings for her own case, but stopped volunteering to advise other ones.

Although we felt frustrated by our own imperfections, we did a fair bit better than most. You might be wondering: what was the secret to our success?

A couple of years ago we researched how to succeed at keeping your New Year’s Resolutions. We have updated our advice here and added several new examples to help you find a new relationship or make friends, get healthier, drop the distractions, make professional progress, and much more. At the end, we offer our own resolutions for the New Year.

Here is what you can do differently to actually stick to our resolutions:

Psychologists who study self-control have found that the best approach for achieving goals is called "situation change." This means avoiding temptation by changing or modifying your surroundings and environment, rather than relying on our rather flimsy willpower to resist it.

Situation change can involve removing tempting foods from your home if you are trying to diet, deleting social media apps if you are trying to reduce your screen time, keeping your phone in the other room when you are trying to work, or blocking off time on your calendar for specific goals.

Situation change also involves paying attention to your social circumstances and leveraging the influence of those around you to help achieve your goals. For example, joining a writing group can provide accountability and support for aspiring writers.

We did this ourselves when we were writing our book, “The Power of Us.” We set weekly meetings, blocking off time to write together. We met in cafés to argue over stories, studies, and turns of phrase. Working together created both social accountability and social support. In fact, we’ve started doing this again now that we are working on our next book.

This also seems to work nicely for physical activities. For instance, “Runners who had group activities in January 2022 recorded 78 percent more active time than those who ran solo.” Working out with others has at least three significant benefits: accountability, support, and community. In other words, you’ll be in better shape and build friends at the same time!

In New York City, large running groups have also become the hottest place to meet a new date. The rules of run club are simple: Singles wear black. If you’re taken, wear colors. Everyone gets some exercise, meets new people, and they often head to a bars to mingle afterwards.

Larger groups can create social norms that push us in the direction of our goals. For instance, we have joined book clubs and writing clubs to help us read more books and stick to our writing goals. Indeed, the social norms of these groups are an essential ingredient for collective success.

For instance, Jay organizes a monthly writing group with his lab. Everyone writes down their own goals and tracks their progress. They meet over lunch on the first workday of each month to review their success (or failure) at meeting each of their own goals. If everyone hits their goals, Jay buys lunch for the entire group. This incentivizes helping one another to obtain the collective goal, rather than competing for individual success.

In one recent study, researchers compared whether establishing a social norm against using technology in class would help university students resist the temptation to multitask while listening to lectures. They found that students who were in a course with a clear social norm against using technology spent only about 10% of their time multitasking, compared to 24% for students who had personal resolutions not to use technology.

Moreover, students in the course with a social norm against technology even reported fewer urges to use their phones or computers during class and experienced less of a need for willpower to resist temptation. We have found the same thing with cooperation: A group with the right norms makes it easier to achieve your goals.

Social norms clearly trumped willpower!

This is also why we have described social media as a collective trap—we are sucked into using it because others are online. We respond to the various notifications because for many reasons, but one of the biggest forces is the desire to stay connected with our friends, family, colleagues, and communities. This is what makes this technology uniquely difficult to escape: if everyone we know is using it, disengaging feels like a form of social suicide. But if there was a norm among our friends to disconnect, it would be far easier for each of us to keep our resolution to say offline.

In fact, we feel compelled to stay engaged, even if we hate it. A recent paper found that the majority of people would prefer to live in a world without Tik Tok or Instagram (which currently have 3.5 billion users). Indeed, nearly 60% of Instagram users wish the platform wasn’t invented.

So when you create a New Year’s Resolution this year, we suggest that you think more deeply about how your good intentions can be supported (or undermined) by groups and their norms. You might form a running group with friends, start a book club with coworkers, join a local environmental organization, start a luddite club to minimize technology, or attend regular meditation meet-ups. But this is just part of the puzzle of achieving your goals…

Read more

Back in 2022, Dr. Anni Sternisko, was one of the runners. She recently spoke with the New York Post about her experience and why New Yorkers would spend their precious Sunday rooting for strangers. She explains the strange psychology of fans below:

The overview: Why do we cheer even for total strangers?

There are many reasons, but let’s unpack four of them in more detail.

1. The marathon turns strangers into teammates

2. We love social rituals

3. Cheering together connects us

4. Supporting the runners feels good

The marathon tur…

Read more

In a wide ranging conversation, they covered the dangers of rising political polarization, how social media incentives contribute to polarization, and why we should consider political polarization as a social determinant of health. In this episode, listeners will learn more about the psychological mechanisms behind polarization, potential interventions to reduce social and political tensions, and how social media drives polarization.

Listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows!

The topics they discussed include:

• Social Identity

• Political Polarization (Ideological vs Affective Polarization)

• Partisanship/Partisan Ani…

Read more

So it was big news when a physics paper with 5,154 authors(!) broke the record for the largest number of contributors to a single research article. This team of scientists were working at the Large Hadron Collider to provide a precise estimate of the size of the Higgs boson—commonly referred to as “The God Particle”. It was a big deal.

The rise of team science has been one of the most fascinating and exciting developments across the sciences. Whether researchers are mapping the human genome and trying to understand cultural diffe…

Read more

Read more

I don’t experience symptoms of major depression but if I did, I feel like going to my local gym’s Sunday afternoon Zumba class would probably cure me. I actually find myself tearing up while I dance sometimes, the positive energy in that room is just too powerful. And it turns out, I’m not alone.

A recent review/meta-analysis has been making the rounds on social media and reported that dancing was more effective in treating symptoms of depression compared to other forms of exercise and treatment.1

The study got me thinking about how joyful I feel while in Zumba class, and what aspects of the class might be the magic ingredients for reducing feelings of depression.

There are good biological reasons why dancing makes us feel good. Of course, movement is medicine—it burns calories, increases heart rate, and can improve muscle strength and tone. Dancing can also strengthen executive function and mind-body coordination. Research in psychology suggests that the act of dancing also leads to increased neurotransmitter activity in your brain, especially for serotonin.

Dancing is also fun, and people in my class know how to have fun. During class, one of the uncles hit the worm in the middle of the dance floor during a Electronic Dance Music track and he made everyone smile.

Aside from the dancing itself, my Zumba class is one of the healthiest groups I have ever been a part of. It’s really about the social aspects—I get teary-eyed while observing how people show up for themselves and each other, and feeling a sense of connectedness during group exercise. Below, I share some of the social psychological aspects of my class that make it a healthy, productive group—in the hopes that you can either join a similar class or apply these ideas into your own groups.

Setting Healthy Norms

At the beginning of each class, our instructor asks if there is anyone new and welcomes them. She’ll run up to them to say hello and give them a welcome high-five, then the entire class would clap for the new person. We are mostly comprised of regulars, so she lets newcomers know that they can take a water break anytime, and to modify the choreography if they have mobility restrictions. The first day of a group exercise class can be intimidating, but approaching newcomers like this lowers the stakes and creates a welcoming environment.

The instructor sets inclusive norms about group membership, and other learners in the class practice these same behaviors. People take care of each other, welcome newcomers, remind each other to drink water, and give high fives to their neighbors in between songs.

Fostering Psychological Safety

Norms aren’t just set by the instructor, since she always welcomes people to the front to dance beside her when “their song” comes on. Often, the people who join her are objectively stiff dancers, off-beat and/or don’t get all the moves right, even when it’s their favorite song. But messing up in front of classmates demonstrates to other people in the class that it’s okay to mess up. This creates psychological safety, and no one is shamed or embarrassed when this happens.

When someone’s song comes on and they excitedly run to the front, that’s where the magic happens. The dynamic changes when a student is at the front, and it’s a reminder that the class is interactive and the class belongs to all of us. To me, people who dance at the front for their favorite song feel so unapologetically themselves and unafraid of judgement—because no one in the class came to judge them. In a room lined with mirrors on two sides, no one seems to be concerned about their appearance or looking silly. Research on psychological safety has also shown that when employees feel a sense of psychological safety in their workplace, they are more likely to ask for feedback, be themselves and speak up.

When their song ends, everyone claps and celebrates them, which encourages others to follow suit. When one person demonstrates it’s okay to look silly, that makes it more okay for other people to look silly. I believe that all adults should be allowed to tap into their child-like whimsy for at minimum 1 hour and 15 minutes per week.

Inclusive Identity Leadership

I live in a diverse city, and that makes our class diverse on multiple dimensions: skill-level, gender, race/ethnicity, body type, age, mobility, fitness goals, etc. Our instructor learns and teaches new songs and choreography that honor those identities. Her rotating lists consist of American pop, Korean pop, Japanese pop, Desi pop, Latin pop, EDM, Jazz, Traditional vocal pop, R&B/Soul, and Country just to name a few. Some choreographies are very high energy for those who really want to burn calories, and others are more slow-paced.

She takes song requests and consults the class on what songs they would like to dance to, because this is not her class, it is our class!

This was not my experience at a different gym I went to a few years ago. That other instructor didn’t greet newcomers, only stuck to one genre of music and rarely changed the songs. The class was also more homogenous in gender, age and skill level. Needless to say, I didn’t feel very welcome and didn’t relate to anyone in the class.

Just freakin say “hi”

I always stand in the right corner of the room at about same spot during class. Lots of people also have “their spot”, and we get to know each other before and after class because of proximity. We always say hello and high-five each other in between songs and at the end of class.

We learn each other’s “spots" and notice when people are missing. When I don’t show up for two weeks because I’m traveling or sick, people in my corner ask me where I was and how I have been. I wouldn’t say that I’m friends with them, but they care about me and want to get to know me.

One of the easiest ways to help people feel seen and that they belong in a group is simply by saying hello. It can mean a lot. In fact, research finds that talking to strangers can make us happier. Lots of newcomers who join our class are unsure if dancing is for them or if this is a place where they can belong, but I have seen people quickly integrate into our group and have a great time—and it all starts with saying hello.

Each of these four elements of healthy groups can be applied to any group or team that you lead or are a part of. We have written about these topics in our newsletter for several years and truly believe in the power of these strategies for building healthy groups! For more on embracing diversity and setting new norms in groups, check our our previous articles.

News and Updates

Speaking of social connection and health, Jay gave a talk this week at NYU Langone Medical School as part of a conference on the health implications of social media. His discussed the potential health risks of disconnecting with real people and replacing it with social media (along with other health risks of social media, like the spread of misinformation). This is an issue that public health experts are taking very seriously and it was great to bring experts from multiple fields together to share insights.

We have contacted all of the winners of our book giveaway with ! If you missed it, don’t worry, we plan to give away more books in the future as we interview more authors.

Catch up on the last one…

Sometimes, conformity makes sense in decision making and is the smart thing to do. Last week, we revisited the Solomon Asch’s classic conformity studies with important added context.

But what really matters is how a team actually performs. One of the beautiful things about sports is that the results are easy to see. After each game, the result is plastered on the scoreboard and the wins and losses are there for everyone to see. But in many organizations—or research labs, for that matter—it can be hard to see if a team is working well together.

One challenge is that many tasks take a long time before they bear results. Another is that teams start with radically different resources, challenges, and talent. This makes it hard to know when a team is flourishing or floundering—and obscures the keys to collective success.

This creates a ripe field for pundits: People can easily pontificate about the secrets to …

Read more

Two years ago, we ran a column based on a show on Netflix called “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones”. In the show, Dan Buettner travels to areas around the world — including Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California — where people live significantly longer than average, including many who live past 100.

He concluded: “What people think leads to a long, healthy life is misguided or just plain wrong”. The gym memberships and supplements people spend millions on might matter far less that other lifestyle factors.

It turns out that the notion of Blue Zones itself may be a myth! Saul Newman, a postdoctoral researcher in Australia discovered that these blue zones do not exist and appear to be a result of shoddy record keeping of vital statistics about births and deaths. In an interview with the New York Times he reported:

After analyzing 80 percent of all documented supercentenarians — people who live …

Read more

A new year represents a new you, a chance to reinvent yourself and create a new identity. As our colleague, Dr. Katy Milkman has found, on new beginnings—dates like New Year’s Day, a birthday and even Mondays—people are extra motivated to tackle their goals because they feel like they can turn the page on past failures and create a new direction.

Do you want to save more money? Exercise more? Eat healthier? If so, you are among a majority of Americans, for whom these were three most popular New Year’s resolutions in 2024.

What were your resolutions last year? And how well did you achieve them?

Despite centuries of practice, roughly 80% of people fail to keep their resolutions by February, and a mere 9-12% stick with their resolutions for the entire year. This is a pretty dismal record—especially when you consider these are the goals we set for ourselves.

At this time of year, advice columns offer all kinds of recommendations for leveraging your willpower to meet your goals. Dream Big! Commit yourself! Give yourself a medal! (and those are just the tips from Harvard Medical School). As much as we’d like to give ourselves a medal, much of this advice fails badly.

This is why we have dedicated this column to our the secret of our own success: The power of collective control! This is why group workout settings are so effective.

We revisited our resolutions from last year to see how well we lived up to our best intentions. Yes, we wrote them in our newsletter to hold ourselves publicly accountable. Would our own knowledge of behavioral science give us an edge? Let’s dig into the results.

Our results were quite positive overall.

Dom resolved to “dabble in photography”—and succeeded. Although it’s fair to say that dabbling is a somewhat low bar. Jay set out to “say no to a lot of things” to help focus on writing. Indeed, he managed to write. A lot. He and Dominic drafted a full book proposal and a record number of new scientific papers with his students and collaborators. Yvonne wanted to write more, which she did! She also pledged to publish a long narrative essay she had written about her grandma. She managed to write it, but didn’t submit it anywhere because she felt differently about it every time she edited it.

Although we felt frustrated by our own imperfections, we did a fair bit better than most. You might be wondering: what was the secret to our success?

A couple of years ago we researched how to succeed at keeping your New Year’s Resolutions. We have updated our advice here and added several new examples to help you find a new relationship or make friends, get healthier, drop the distractions, make professional progress, and much more. At the end, we offer our own resolutions for the New Year.

Here is what you can do differently to actually stick to our resolutions:

Psychologists who study self-control have found that the best approach for achieving goals is called "situation change." This means avoiding temptation by changing your surroundings and environment, rather than relying on our rather flimsy willpower to resist it.

Situation change can involve removing tempting foods from your home if you are trying to diet, deleting social media apps if you are trying to reduce your screen time, or blocking off time on your calendar for specific goals.

Situation change also involves paying attention to your social circumstances and leveraging the influence of those around you to help achieve your goals. For example, joining a writing group can provide accountability and support for aspiring writers.

We did this ourselves when we were writing our book, “The Power of Us.” We set weekly meetings, blocking off time to write together. We met in cafés to argue over stories, studies, and turns of phrase. Working together created both social accountability and social support. In fact, we’ve started doing this again now that we are working on our next book!

This also seems to work nicely for physical activities. For instance, “Runners who had group activities in January 2022 recorded 78 percent more active time than those who ran solo.” Working out with others has at least three significant benefits: accountability, support, and community. In other words, you’ll be in better shape and build friends at the same time!

In New York City, large running groups have also become the hottest place to meet a new date. The rules of run club are simple: Singles wear black. If you’re taken, wear colors. Everyone gets some exercise, meets new people, and they often head to a bars to mingle afterwards.

Larger groups can create social norms that push us in the direction of our goals. For instance, we have joined book clubs and writing clubs to help us read more books and stick to our writing goals. Indeed, the social norms of these groups are an essential ingredient for collective success.

In one recent study, researchers compared whether establishing a social norm against using technology in class would help university students resist the temptation to multitask while listening to lectures. They found that students who were in a course with a clear social norm against using technology spent only about 10% of their time multitasking, compared to 24% for students who had personal resolutions not to use technology.

Social norms clearly trumped willpower!

Moreover, students in the course with a social norm against technology even reported fewer urges to use their phones or computers during class and experienced less of a need for willpower to resist temptation. We have found the same thing with cooperation: A group with the right norms makes it easier to achieve your goals.

Read more

These are just a few of the thousands of self-help books that promise to improve our lives by turning us into better people. By learning to procrastinate less, better manage anxiety, exert self-control, mediate, sleep longer, etc., etc., we will achieve our goals and live more fulfilling lives.

Or, as Radiohead famously put it (sardonically): “Fitter, Happier, More Productive”

This week, we are pleased to feature a guest column by Scott Barry Kaufman, in which he explores the fact, exploited by the self-help industry, that people generally seem to be much more interested in improving aspects of themselves that will promote personal well-being and individual success rather than moral improvement and the development of good character.

In short, the self-help field is incredibly selfish and myopic. We notice this every time we pass through an airport and see best-selling books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck or The Art of Selfishness. Why are people paying to learn how to ignore and exploit others (books that sound like surefire pathways to score high on the the dark triad)? Is selfish self-improvement indeed the path to happiness? These are serious questions that this entire industry (and readers of this genre) should grapple with.

Scott is a Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. He writes the Beautiful Minds Newsletter and hosts The Psychology Podcast, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times (and Jay has been a guest). We hope you enjoy his provocative column. As he wisely notes:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an “other-help” section of the bookstore. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a biohacking video on Instagram that talked about “how to biohack your way to true love”. I don’t recall ever seeing a Dave Asprey video where he says “Drink coffee with butter so that it makes you a better human being.” We basically take it for granted and even have come to expect that self-help will be mostly about, well, helping the self.

Don’t get me wrong: Helping the self is fine, but I would argue that moral development is a crucial aspect of developing the self. Why isn’t moral development more prominent in the self-help industry? Is there any market for it at all?

Research shows that most people do want to change some aspects of their personality— in particular, 78% of people state that they would like to be more extraverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, agreeable, or open to new experiences. But what about moral character? Psychologist Jessie Sun and Geoffrey Goodwin set out to answer this question in their 2020 paper called “Do People Want to Be More Moral?”. What did they find?

Overall, people report the strongest desires to be less anxious, depressed, emotionally volatility, and angry and to be more creative, productive, and sociable. So far, this tracks what the self-help industry is selling. In contrast, people reported weaker desires to change on traits that were more morally relevant such as honesty, general morality, compassion, and fairness.

What’s more, moral improvements were rarely prioritized. Only about 9% of people prioritized a goal to become more compassionate and only 3% prioritized their general morality. People were much more inclined to focus on reducing anxiety and depression. These results also applied to close others— close family and friends were more interested in changing nonmoral traits in close others compared to moral traits. If anything, people wanted to change themselves on morally relevant traits to a much greater extent than close others wanted them to change.

You may think that people who are already high in morally relevant traits may wish to change those traits the most, but the researchers found that knowing someone’s current standing on a morally relevant trait provided relatively little information about whether they want to have higher or lower levels of that trait.

The researchers conclude that their findings suggest “that personality change goals might be primarily motivated by the desire to improve one’s own life rather than by more noble considerations. Still, on an uplifting note, close others generally accept us for who we are but overwhelmingly want us to change in ways that are in our best interests.”

So I guess there’s a silver lining there. But what’s going on here?

Why do people not seem to care much about improving their moral character?

The researchers raise the possibility that people may see less room for improvement on their moral traits. A related possibility is that people are less motivated to improve on moral traits because they already see themselves as having “good enough” levels of morality, even if they acknowledge they could be more moral.

Another possibility is that it’s just part of human nature to be motivated to change in ways that will improve one’s own well-being (“The Personal Fulfillment Hypothesis”). People might think that becoming less anxious and more socially skilled has greater personal benefits on well-being than becoming a kinder, more compassionate human— especially if you think you’re already at the “good enough” level of those traits.

A follow-up paper by Jessie Sun and Jonathan Berman sheds more light on the issue. Indeed, they found that people were more interested in improving the traits that they believed would lead to greater happiness benefits.

Intriguingly, people were also interested in becoming more intelligent, efficient, organized, responsible, and self-controlled, despite not believing they are particularly low in those traits nor thinking that improving those traits will make them much happier. This tracks the self-help and biohacking focus on becoming more “disciplined” and “gritty” like David Goggins (who is widely considered a hero in the self-help world).

To be clear: It’s not that people think that improving moral traits will make them less happy: People reported that becoming more compassionate, honest, and moral would make them happier than they currently are. What seems to be the case is that people believe that less morally relevant improvements would lead to even greater increases in their day-to-day happiness.

In a second study, the researchers tested this idea further and generalized to other aspects of personal fulfillment, such as meaning in life, social connectedness, and goal attainment. Again, they found that people were more interested in improving the traits for which they perceived greater deficiencies in themselves, and which they believed would improve their goal attainment, happiness, meaning in life, social status, and social connectedness to a greater extent.

Consistent with all the other studies mentioned so far, they were less interested in improving more morally relevant traits. They perceived trade-offs between moral traits and nonmoral traits for their goal attainment and happiness.

Reflections

These findings may not seem all that surprising. People mainly want to improve aspects of themselves that will get them closer to reaching their personal goals and will bring them greater well-being. As the researchers conclude, “In the context of self-improvement, people seem to primarily be using, ‘What’s in it for me?’” Trust me, the self-help industry is very well aware of that fact.

However, are people correct?

I would like to challenge people’s perception that increasing their nonmoral traits would bring greater increases to their well-being than working on their moral traits. In our research on the “light triad”, we found that traits such as believing in the fundamental goodness of humans, treating everyone with dignity and respect, and not using people for your own personal gain is very strongly correlated with a wide ranging of well-being-related variables, including life satisfaction, meaning in life, awe, and spirituality. I think it’s very much worth prioritizing moral character, or at the very least paying more attention to it!

Which brings me to another point, and that’s the importance of values. Values are different than personality traits. You score higher than average in compassion but value others things, like power, more. Indeed, the researchers found that what domains of life people prioritized mattered. As the researchers note, “someone who is more interested in increasing their social status tends to be more interested in improving the traits that they believe would lead to larger increases in their social status.”

Their research is in line with a new theory of well-being called “Value Fulfillment Theory” that proposes that well-being should be defined as the fulfillment of well-integrated values, whatever they are. As Colin DeYoung and Valerie Tiberius note, “Well-being is the effective pursuit of a set of nonconflicting values that are emotionally, motivationally, and cognitively suitable to the person.”

I am well aware that my own writings and emphasis on creative self-actualization and self-transcendent values is not for everyone. The audience that religiously follows the latest biohacking news or certain self-help gurus who talk nonstop about happiness and agency is its own definite vibe. While the tribe of that vibe may be the predominant one, I’d like to believe there is still a large number of us who do prioritize our moral development and don’t see it as a trade-off for reaching our personal goals and attaining higher levels of well-being.

Maybe that’s you? Let us know in the comments.

Catch up on the last one…

We wrote about how massive inequality may have triggered class based identities (rather than traditional conflict between liberals and conservatives) in reaction to the tragic shooting of the UnitedHealthCare CEO.

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games are in full swing. With attachments to both Canada and the United States, Dom’s kids have no difficulty finding people to cheer for. But even when the Canadians or Americans aren’t in contention, they root for amazing athletes from many other nations. During the Women’s Skateboarding Street competition, they cheered for Coco Yoshizawa of Japan—erupting in glee as she secured the gold medal.…

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It isn’t merely a matter of vacation days. Very few US employees even used their very limited earned time off! This suggests the difference between Americans and Europeans is less about policy, than it is about social norms. When your peers take time off, you do too. When they don’t, you feel compelled to stare at a computer screen rather than the beach.

Among academics, it’s much worse. We like to brag by posting pictures of ourselves working on a manuscript from our laptop on the beach. It’s a sort of humblebrag “Look everyone, I’m hard at work from beautiful location!”

These cultural differences are so stark that they have become a popular punch line on social media. Our favorite is this observation about the Out of Office messages:

We think the issue is not merely a matter of norms, but identity. It is one thing to go on vacation, quite another to put away work and truly embrace it.

Dom was on his own vacation when he decided to make a change. He tossed aside the intellectual time he had deluded himself into thinking he would read on vacation and reached for something more exhilarating. The book that came to hand, battered and abandoned by a previous guest, bore the bracing title, 'Assignment in Brittany'.

Lion-hearted British secret service agent Martin Hearn parachutes into Nazi-occupied France on a mission to monitor the German invaders and aid the French resistance. For cover, he impersonates a wounded French soldier convalescing in England to whom he bears an uncanny physical resemblance.

Amazingly, Hearn's knowledge of the region is so deep and his ability to speak the language is so skilled that he convinces even the Frenchman's own mother and fiancée into believing he is the man himself!

Eventually, of course, a plot twist gives the game away.

The ability to inhabit different identities sufficiently to fool everyone around was a childhood fantasy. Wouldn't it be amazing to travel the world as a spies, we thought, able to blend in seamlessly every place we visited?

Childhood dreams get left behind. For better or worse, we grew up and became social psychologists rather than secret agents, and when we travel, we travel as ourselves. And yet, even for non-spies, travel is still very much about identity.

Where people travel, for example, is influenced by the fads and fashions of their peer groups—whether to fit in or secure photogenic bragging rights. Interviewing young Australians about their travel choices, Clifford Lewis and colleagues noted that destinations can serve as "symbolic brands" that "satisfy needs for self-expression and prestige". 

One interviewee said, "…you don’t find many people who are our age who haven’t gone to Europe [or] aren’t planning to go to Europe. If they say they don’t want to do it, you’re like WHY? It’s almost like why wouldn’t you want to go to Europe, why wouldn’t you want to do that? Everyone does it." 

Another noted, "It’s an achievement like you put it up on Facebook and then everyone can see it."

This commodification of travel is now common on Instagram or TikTok. It’s a way to signal social class, cultural sophistication, and a cosmopolitan identity.

At other times, people's destinations reflect a desire to connect with deeper aspects of their ethnic, cultural, or religious identities. They might wish to visit an ancestral homeland or undertake a pilgrimage to a hallowed religious site, steeped in ancient meaning. (Or, like Jay, watch hockey).

Travel is frequently a rite of passage, a transition between life stages. Graduates backpack around Asia, tour European cities, or drive across America to mark the transformation from carefree student life to the more serious identities of adulthood and career.

Undertaking one of the most dramatic rites of passage, some Amish youths go on the Rumspringa, during which they leave their closely-knit sect to spend a year or two in the secular world before deciding whether to return to the Amish community for life. (For a fascinating documentary about Rumspringa, we highly recommend Devil’s Playground).

Even a more modest annual vacation (like that which brought Dom to New England) is an identity involving event. When we turn on our "out of office" message and leave the cat or houseplants in care of a friend, it is not just a chance to escape the routines and hassles of normal life. It's an opportunity to briefly try on different ways of being—different possible selves.

As we tour museums and art galleries, we think, "We should do this sort of thing more often." When we eat in interesting restaurants or try new cuisines, we re-envision ourselves as foodies. After a couple of hours kayaking around the bay, Dom deluded himself into thinking, "I could totally become a boat person."

Many of us also take pains to project the right kind of identity when we’re away from home. We might, for example, be eager not to be classified as mere tourists—that category of camera-clad and phone-wielding visitors despised by locals. Instead, many of us want to be seen as travelers, worldly people in search of authentic food, real culture, the genuine experience.  

Google turns up plenty of advice about how to be a traveler, not a tourist. Be spontaneous. Avoid big attractions. Befriend a local. Don't eat at McDonalds!

Having analyzed blogs and online writing by people who self-identified as travelers rather than tourists, Lara Weeks concluded, "'Traveling' is often taken for granted as being an objectively better way of interacting cross-culturally, on the presumption that it does not cause the same problems as mass tourism." For some people, this is a crucial distinction:

"I am as off the beaten path as one can get when it comes to traveling. My interest is in experiencing the authentic culture and true nature of a place as opposed to visiting typical tourist destinations," wrote one blogger.

"I am not a tourist, I am a traveler and the difference between the two is this: one serves to suck energy, the other to share and to learn with cultures and experiences," said another.

It is easy to understand why people prefer to see themselves as travelers than tourists. It is a higher status identity. It is distinctive, yet bonds you to a group of similarly-minded others. It seems more meaningful. And the sorts of experiences sought by people embracing the traveler identity—far from the beaten path—may be associated with greater psychological richness.

The people most threatened by being misidentified as tourists are probably those who travel professionally and make their living from deep engagement with places and cultures other than their own. These include anthropologists, as well as writers for travel magazines who often adopt anti-tourist narratives, focusing on "authentic experiences that are immersed in traditional customs".

Travel can expand our sense of who we are or who we could be.

It can bridge life’s transitions. 

It can connect us to our histories or most cherished beliefs. 

It can be employed as a signal that we belong or an indicator of status.

Far from home, professional travelers and vacationers alike work to project certain kinds of identities. 

And sometimes traveling simply reminds us of past and younger selves who would have been thrilled at the identity-shifting possibilities of a secret agent's assignment in Brittany. 

If you have a chance this summer, try adopting the mindset of a traveler and not merely a tourist. Let us know if it changes your vacation experience.

News and Updates

We recently received an email from George Jacobs noting that he published a detailed review of our book in the Journal of Educational Sciences. We pasted the first page below, but you can read the entire review for free by following the link.

We are also extremely grateful for any reviews people have left on our Amazon or GoodReads book pages. If you’ve read our book, please, please do share your review on those sites. It only takes a couple minutes and it helps authors immensely—as well as future readers. Many algorithms on these sites recommend books based on the number and quality of reviews so please always leave a review if you love a book!

Catch up on the last column…

Last week, we shared some thoughts on Independence day and explained how national narcissism is realted to belief in conspiracy theories.

I am a lifelong Oiler fan and I’ll be anxious watching every play. Growing up in the chilly confines of Fox Creek in Northern Alberta there was little to do in the heart of winter. So we watched hockey.

One of my earliest memories as a kid is my grandfather shooing me and my brother out of the living room so my grandmother could “Watch her Boys”. Her boys were the 1980’s Edmonton Oilers—the most exciting team in the history of hockey.

Before long, I was curled up with my grandma on the couch watching Wayne Gretzky, Paul Coffee, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, and Grant Fuhr light up some overmatched opponent. That team won 5 Stanley Cups in 7 year…

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