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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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When people use plastic to pay for food, they make more impulse-based purchases, like ice cream, donuts and chips, compared to those who pay with cash, as I wrote here […]
What kind of people confess to crimes they didn’t commit? You might imagine they’re sleepless and terrified, with cops telling them there’s already proof of their guilt. And you’d be […]
“I do not know whether I shall return from my long weekend trip alive,” the mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport once wrote. “But I do know that the number of traffic […]
Maybe digital technology is a neutral medium, conveying all our thoughts and feelings equally well. Or maybe, as tech hype tells us, our apps and gadgets skew positive, liberating us […]
Like many doting parents, I post about my son on Facebook, enjoying the few years I have left before he gets veto power. I don’t put up anything negative or […]
Fox News this week has the not very surprising news that the Obama Administration is looking for social scientists to help form a “Behavioral Insights Team” that, like the group […]
What’s the best way to hold people accountable for their actions on the job? Measure the results (though that might encourage them to break a few rules, or even a […]
“Morsi is an idiot,” says a friend of mine. “But he should have been voted out.” Like many people I know, he can’t endorse the military overthrow of a man […]
Pondering the worrisome prospect that all your quantified self data might not be private.
Is the pursuit of happiness, which we Americans will celebrate later this week, a worthy goal? Many have said no, on the grounds that happiness comes only to those who […]
For some years now I’ve been involved with a small community group. It’s a shoe-string organization that depends entirely on volunteers. These curious creatures have a predictable life-cycle. It begins […]
If there’s one thing that unites the good guys in movies and TV shows, it’s a hatred of “procedure”—those legal niceties that get the bad guys out of jail and […]
At the beginning of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes made a bold but logical prediction (pdf): In the long run, humanity was solving its economic problems, so that by […]
Imagine you have a friend who, like many high-achieving people, has a goal. In the service of that goal, your friend eats very little and ends up looking like skin […]
The term “Big Data” naturally conjures up images of Big Users, like the government or Google or Costco. It’s easy to see why big enterprises crunch data to learn, for […]
Post-rationalist government—where laws and regulations conform to human psychology rather than to the notion that each individual is a logical calculator—is a hot idea these days. Next to old-school policies […]
Is denial of climate change a fringe belief, like thinking the moon landing was fake? Or is it just one current of thought in our society, which deserves respectful engagement, […]
When I was a teen-age consumer of cheap paperbacks about worlds more interesting than this one, I noticed a clear and sharp split between readers who loved SF (spaceships, time […]
How, our grandchildren will ask, did we come to marriage equality in the United States? And we’ll answer, like Hemingway’s Mike Campbell: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” We can grasp […]
As recently as a decade ago, a common middle-class American interpretation of a father in a heterosexual couple was “Mom’s assistant,” as Louis C.K. called it. Parenting was a job […]