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David Berreby
Author, Us and Them: The Science of Identity
David Berreby is the author of "Us and Them: The Science of Identity." He has written about human behavior and other science topics for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Smithsonian, The New Republic, Nature, Discover, Vogue and many other publications. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Paris, a Science Writing Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a resident at Yaddo, and in 2006 was awarded the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the first edition of "Us and Them." David can be found on Twitter at @davidberreby and reached by email at david [at] davidberreby [dot] com.
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My neighborhood is a tranquil place—the sort of area where you watch images of war and oppression from far away. Those columns of black smoke, the men riding by with […]
One way to understand a nudge—a government policy that inclines you to make a particular choice, often without your awareness—is that it makes it easier for you to do what […]
In my motley career I have had long conversations with heads of state and Nobel Prize winners. I have hiked north of the Arctic Circle and watched humpback whales amble […]
"Nudge" policies are spreading across the globe because they supposedly offer a less expensive and more effective way to get people to make the "right" decisions. In the original formulation, such decisions are defined as those that people would like to have made, had they not been hobbled and blinkered at the time by irresistible irrationality.
Whatever your native language, you’ve probably noticed that city people speak it differently than do country folk. But so what? It’s also true that Chicagoans speak a bit differently than […]
Nudges, “choice architecture,” social marketing and other non-rational approaches to government are a pretty significant development. After all, these policies replace explicit arguments (“you should get more exercise for these […]
In my post last week I linked to some work by Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has been thinking hard about the ways seemingly […]