Welcome
I am a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. My mission is to use research on moral psychology to help people understand each other and to help important social institutions work better. I co-founded Ethical Systems to help companies improve their ethical cultures; Heterodox Academy to help universities improve their ability to pursue truth; and the OpenMind Platform to help all groups function better in an era of rampant and destructive political polarization.
Bio
Articles
Areas of Research
Projects
Videos
Podcasts
Books
The Coddling of the American Mind
Gen Z is suffering from rapidly rising rates of anxiety, depression, and fragility. This book explains why, and how to reverse the trends.
The Righteous Mind
This is a comprehensive yet easily readable account of human morality, which enabled us to create civilizations, but set us up for constant conflict too.
The Happiness Hypothesis
This book analyzes ten great ideas, discovered across cultures and millennia, and uses them to lay out a path to flourishing today.
All Minus One
John Stuart Mill’s three timeless arguments for the value of viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech. This book is ch. 2 of On Liberty, condensed and illustrated for a modern audience.
Areas of Research
Videos
TED Interview: Can a Divided America Heal?
On Real Time with Bill Maher, Oct 2018
TED Talk: Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence
Bill Moyers Interview: Our Contentious Culture
Major Articles
The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail
Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians
in PLoS One, 2012, with Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, and Peter Ditto
Make Business Ethics a Cumulative Science
In Nature Human Behavior, (2017), with Linda Trevino
[ungated access coming soon]
Recent Essays
The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
with Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Why it feels like everything is going haywire.
By Mollycoddling Our Children, We’re Fueling Mental Illness in Teenagers
with Pamela Paresky
Rates of anxiety and depression are rising among teens. What are we doing wrong?
The Fragile Generation
with Lenore Skenazy, Reason
Bad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed.
Projects I Co-Founded
Ethical Systems
A collaboration of 26 leading researchers studying ethics in organizations
Open Mind
A psychology-based educational platform designed to depolarize campuses, companies, and communities
Heterodox Academy
A collaboration among 3500 professors promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement within universities
Let Grow
Helping parents and schools to let children learn and grow from experience by giving them more free play and autonomy, less fear and oversupervision
Moral Foundations Theory
A collaboration among social psychologists who study the foundations of morality, in hopes of reducing conflict and polarization