\,,CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Nalini Ambady
Ph.D. Professor of Psychology,
Stanford University
Nalini Ambady is a Professor of social psychology at Stanford University. She is an expert in
the area of person perception and nonverbal communication. Much ofher research has
focused on the accuracy of judgments from "thin slices" of behavior. She is the recipient of
the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (1999), the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Behavioral Science Research Award (1993), as
well as several awards for teaching and mentoring. Her work has been featured in several
national and international media reports and television and radio programs.
Summary of work on the accuracy of judgments
How do we glean information about others? How accurate are the judgments we make about others from fleeting glimpses or "thin
slices" of their behavior? How do our own mental states influence such judgments? How do cultural exposure and experience shape
our judgments? What are the neural correlates underlying thin-slicing? What traits can be judged accurately?
These are some of the questions we have been exploring in my lab for the last 20 years. We've examined a variety of thin-slice
judgments, including judgments of teachers, doctors, managers, politicians, and, most recently, Facebook pages. Such judgments can
sometimes be unexpectedly accurate, but accuracy is nuanced by factors such as exposure, expertise, sociocultural contexts and
mental states.
EFTA01089440
CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Max Bazerman
Ph.D. Jesse Isidor Straus Professor,
Harvard Business School
Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School. In addition, Max is
formally affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Psychology Department, and
the Program on Negotiation. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eighteen books
(includingBlind Spots [with Ann Tenbrunsel], Princeton University Press and Negotiation
Genius [with Deepak Malhotra], Bantam Books, September 2007) and over 200 research articles and
chapters. Max's recent awards include a 2006 honorary doctorate from the University of London
(London Business School), being named as one of Ethisphere's 100 Most Influential in Business
Ethics, one ofDaily Kos' Heroes from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco
trial, and the 2008 Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management. Details at www.people.hbs.eduimbazerman
Summary of work on Bounded Ethicality
Which option do you prefer?
If you die in an accident, your heart and other organs will be used to save other lives. In addition, if you ever need an organ transplant,
there will be a 90 percent chance that you will get the transplant.
If you die in an accident, you will be buried with your heart and other organs in your body and other lives that could have been saved will
not be. In addition, if you ever need an organ transplant, there will be a 45 percent chance that you will get the transplant.
Most of us have a reflective preference for Option A. That's a good thing, because Option A could save up to 6,000 lives per year in the
United States alone—roughly twice as many people than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Yet, collectively, the United States opts for an
organ donation policy that looks more like Option B. Why? Policymakers fall victim to the moral rule of "do no harm"; as a result,
thousands of citizens needlessly die each year. That is, in the United States, if you die in an accident, and have made no explicit decision
about your organs, you will be buried (or cremated) with your organs—an opt-in system.
In contrast, in many nations, if you make no explicit decision about organ donation, your organs are available for donation to others—an
opt-out system. In both cases, you have the choice, assuming you stop, think about it, and fill out the right form accordingly. But the
default option for those who don't go through this effort is different. In the United States, policy has resulted in Option B as the default
and hence the most chosen option, in marked contrast to the option most people prefer, Option A.
My work argues that, as in the example above, we often fail to mind our gap between our reflective preferences and our actual behavior.
While there may be people who will always oppose organ donation, ow focus is on the plethora of wise, ethical citizens, legislators, and
leaders who would prefer Option A, yet are comfortable watching our nation continue to fall back on Option B. More broadly, my work
explores the gap between our ethical preferences and our actions as individuals, organizations, and society.
My work highlights how our actions are often at odds with our more reflective preferences. I will introduce the core concept of bounded
ethicality, which is rooted in psychologist Herbert Simon's groundbreaking concept of bounded rationality, a framework that describes the
systematic, predictable, and biased psychological processes that contribute to the gap between our true preferences and our behavior.
Bounded ethicality leads to behavior that is widely viewed as unethical and is inconsistent with the decision maker's values.
EFTA01089441
CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Colin F. Camerer
Ph.D. Robert Kirby Professor of
Behavioral Finance and Economics at the
California Institute of Technology
Colin F. Camera is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech. He earned
a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981 and worked at Northwestern, Penn, and
Chicago before joining Caltech. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and
wrote or co-edited four books, including Behavioral Game Theory (Princeton Press, 2003).
Camerer's research group is interested in the psychological and neural basis of choice,
strategizing in games, and trading in markets. Recent neuroeconomic fMR1 projects involve
self-control in choosing tempting foods, why people like longshots and lottery tickets,
curiosity, choice overload, and the contrast between hypothetical and real choices.
Research on the cognitive hierarchy of strategic thinking
Analyses of strategic thinking using game typically assume a hyper-rational and emotionless Mr. Spock-like person who
considers every option. Behavioral game theory focuses on normal people and organizations who take shortcuts, don't think
through all the consequences of actions, learn by trial-and-error, and do not completely figure out what competitors and partners
are likely to think, feel and do.
One useful mathematical approach in behavioral game theory is to assume that there is a cognitive hierarchy (CH) of steps of
strategic thinking. Intuitive 0-level thinkers choose based on quick hunches (lucky numbers, what worked in the past, or what
others recommend). Level-1 strategic thinkers think others are intuitive and react optimally to what they think intuitive choosers
will do. Level-2 thinkers go a step further, anticipating what level-1 and level-0 thinkers will do.
The CH approach explains a lot of the variety of behavior in many different laboratory experiments, on games involving
competition, coordination given common interests, and games with hidden information (with bluffing). This model has also been
used to analyze choices in Swedish lotteries, and the market consequences of the increasing tendency for movie studios to
withhold mediocre movies from film critics before they are released.
Details of strategic thinking are also being seen in fMR1 scans of brain activity when subjects play simple competitive and
bluffing games for money. The CH approach also provides a language in which to understand psychiatric disorders as
malfunction of normal social value forecasts or computations (as in autism, social anxiety disorders, and antisocial personality
disorder).
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Where Social Meets Science
Laura L Carstensen
Ph.D. Professor of Psychology
and founding director of the
Stanford Center on Longevity
Laura Carstensen is Professor of Psychology and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public
Policy at Stanford University, where she is also the founding director of the Stanford Center on
Longevity, an interdisciplinary research center that explores innovative ways to solve the problems
of people over 50 while improving quality of life at all ages. She is best known for socioemotional
selectivity theory, which addresses the links between motivation and time horizons.
Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging for more than 20 years and is currently funded through a MERIT
award. Laura has chaired two studies for the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in The AgingMind and When I M 64. She has
won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of
America; earlier this year she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leuven. She is a member of the MacArthur
Foundation's Research Network on an Aging Society. Carstensen received her BS from the University of Rochester and PhD in
clinical psychology from West Virginia University.
Research statement:
We are approaching a watershed moment in human history. By 2015, the number of people over 65 in the U.S. will surpass the
number children under 15; and by the time our children reach old age, living to 100 will be commonplace. Mostly, discussions about
aging at the individual and societal levels are fraught with concern. True enough, there are major challenges associated with this
dramatic increase in life expectancy. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that long life presents unprecedented opportunities.
The sudden extension of life expectancy outpaced the ability of culture to accommodate longer lives. By culture, I refer broadly to the
crucible that holds science, technology and behavioral practices. The societies we live in today were literally built by and for young
people. Medical science searches for cures to acute diseases more than chronic diseases that develop slowly over decades. Employers
reward workers for agility and speed. Trains, automobiles and airports tacitly are designed for young users. Even hospitals are
difficult to navigate if users are in any way functionally disabled. Social norms that guide us through life, telling us when to get an
education, many, work and retire evolved around lives halfas long.
The demographic changes unfolding will reshape every aspect of life as we know it. At this point in time, individuals are worried and
policy makers are bracing for an inevitable crisis. Science and technology offer an alternative: design a world where the majority of
people arrive at old age mentally sharp, physically fit and financially secure. To this end, we need to develop "longevity science" an
interdisciplinary science that addresses practical problems of long-lived people and finds solutions that improve quality of life at all
ages. It is essential that we focus not only on age-related decline, but also identify strengths of older citizens.
My own research focuses on age differences in motivation and aspects of development that may improve across adulthood. Although
there are aspects of cognitive and physical functioning that decline with age, knowledge grows and emotional stability improves.
People come to be more selective in their focus, but increasingly invested in activities that are most meaningful to them. Indeed,
societies with large numbers of mature, emotionally stable, citizens, whose childrearing years are behind them, and who care deeply
about the world around them can be better societies than we have ever known.
At the Stanford Center on Longevity, I work with teams of scientists, including engineers, social scientists, physicians, and educators,
to advance and rapidly disseminate science that can form the basis of a culture that supports long life. Our aim is to apply science and
technology to the problems of aging, identify unique strengths ofolder people and join forces with policy makers and leaders in
business and communities to use this knowledge to improve quality oflife at all ages.
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Where Social Meets Science
Carol S. Dweck
Ph.D. Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor at
Stanford University
Carol S. Dweck. Ph.D.. is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and
Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Her research focuses on why people
succeed and how to foster their success. More specifically, her work has demonstrated the role of
mindsets in success and has shown how praise for intelligence can undermine motivation and
learning. She has also held professorships at Columbia and Harvard Universities, has lectured to
education, business, and sports groups all over the world, and has been elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Academy of Sciences, and has won the
Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association. Her work has been prominently featured
in the news and her bestselling book Mindser (published by Random House) has been widely acclaimed and has been translated into
20 languages.
My work has shown that people's mindsets about their abilities (whether they see them as fixed traits or as qualities that can be
developed) can have a profound impact. Those who believe their intelligence and talents can be developed take on more challenges,
bounce back from setbacks, and often achieve more—and when people are taught this "growth mindset" their resilience and
achievement are boosted. These issues are important for business, particularly in this economic climate, in which challenges and
setbacks are inevitable, and in which the constant growth of abilities is imperative.
We have shown that different ways of giving feedback can promote different mindsets--praising intelligence backfires by creating
a fixed mindset. Research has also demonstrated how quickly people can absorb these mindsets from organizations in ways that
affect their values and behavior, and how changing business managers' mindsets affects their effectiveness with their employees.
We've taken this research in many new and exciting directions, such as conflict resolution. We have now used the mindset
framework with Palestinians and Jewish Israelis to significantly improve their attitudes toward each other and their willingness to
compromise for peace.
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Where Social Meets Science
James H. Fowler
Ph.D. Professor of
Medical Genetics and Political Science,
U.C. San Diego
James H. Fowler earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 2003 and is currently Professor of Medical
Genetics and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His work lies at the
intersection of the natural and social sciences, with a focus on social networks, behavioral
economics, evolutionary game theory, political participation, cooperation, and genopolitics. James
was recently named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, one ofForeign Policy's
Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Most Original Thinker of the year by The McLaughlin Group. His research has been featured in
numerous best-of lists includingNew York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas, Time's Year in Medicine, Discover Magazine's Year in
Science, and HarvardBusiness Review's Breakthrough Business Ideas. Together with Nicholas Christakis, James wrote a book on
social networks for a general audience called Connected. Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award, it has been translated into twenty
languages, named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review, and featured in Wired, Oprah's Reading Guide, Business
Week's Best Books of the Year, and a cover story in the New York Times Magazine.
Summary, of work on social networks
James' research on social networks is wide-ranging, but the most notable work has involved the creation of a large network dataset in
the Framingham Heart Study that includes more than 12,000 people and spans 32 years. He and his collaborator Nicholas Christakis at
Harvard Medical School developed and analyzed the network data starting in 2004, and after three years they published their first article
in the New England Journal ofMedicine. This paper provided evidence for the spread of obesity from person to person in the social
network, in clusters that extend up to 3 degrees of separation (to a friend's friend's friend). Since then they have published articles on
similar dynamics in the spread of smoking, drinking, aspirin use, depression, happiness, and loneliness in the Framingham Heart Study,
and obesity, marijuana use, and sleep behavior in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They have also published
experimental studies, like one that shows generosity spreads to 3 degrees, and James has created large political science data sets and
applied network methods to the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, and even political scientists, themselves! He and Christakis
describe the breadth of this research on social networks in a book for general audiences called Connected.
James has also been actively investigating social preferences and the evolution of cooperation. He has published evolutionary game
theory articles on cooperation, altruistic punishment, and the evolution of overconfidence. He has also published behavioral economic
studies of other-regarding preferences like egalitarianism. He has connected these ideas to political behavior, as well, showing for
example that altruists are more likely to vote and that people who join political parties exhibit what evolutionary game theorists call
"strong reciprocity" (they cooperate with others and punish those who don't). And in his most recent work, he shows that the social
networks of hunter-gatherers look much like modern ones, and their giving behavior in public goods games is correlated between
connected individuals, helping to explain how altruists can survive over time.
James' research on social preferences led to his exploration of the genetic and neural basis for these behaviors. For example, he has
conducted several studies showing that genetic variation contributes to variation in turnout and political participation. He also joined
forces with a group in Sweden to show that genes contribute to variation in cooperative behavior in economics experiments. Since then,
he has published several articles that identify specific genes associated with political behaviors and attitudes. More recently James has
been applying ideas from behavior genetics to the study of social networks. In a pair of recent articles, he shows that genetic variation
contributes to variation in network structure, and specific genotypes show signs of both positive and negative correlation between
socially connected people. As should be apparent, James's work lies at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, and as a result
he frequently advocates the crossing of disciplinary boundaries. He has argued that biologists and political scientists must work together
if we want to better understand politics and what makes human beings unique as a species. He has also argued that social science will
be completely transformed in the 21st century by our ability to collect and analyze massive datasets that are passively collected (the
massive/passive revolution). He is currently working directly with Facebook on several papers that seek to explain planetary-scale
behavioral phenomena.
EFTA01089445
CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Daniel Gilbert
Ph.D. Professor of Psychology at
Harvard University
Daniel Gilbert is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won numerous
awards for his research and teaching, including the American Psychological Association's
DistinguishedSelena* Awardfor an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2008
he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His 2007 book, Stumbling on Happiness, spent 6 months on the New York Times bestseller list, has being translated into 30
languages, and was awarded the Royal Society's GeneralBook Prize for best science book of the year. In 2010, he hosted and
co-wrote the award-winning NOVA television series This EmotionalLife which was seen by more than 10 million viewers.
He is a frequent contributor to Time, The New York Times, and NPR's All Things Considered, and has been a guest on numerous
television shows including The Today Show, Charlie Rose, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.
Summary of Work
All animals learn from experience, but experience can be expensive. A mouse will learn a lot from its encounter with a cat, but
only if it survives. Wouldn't it be great if there were some way to learn from experience without actually having to have it?
Wouldn't it be great it if we could somehow learn from mistakes without making them?
Yes it would and yes it is. Because unlike all other animals, human beings are able to have experiences simply by simulating them
in their minds. We all know that chocolate tastes better with cinnamon than with garlic, that it would be painful to go an hour
without blinking or a day without sitting, that winning the lottery would be more enjoyable than becoming paraplegic—and we
know these things not because they've happened to us in the past, but because we can close our eyes and imagine these events
happening to us in the future. As a result, we can learn which things to approach and which to avoid without risking life or limb.
Mental simulation is an amazing and uniquely human ability, but as it turns out, the lessons we learn from it are not always right.
Trysts are often better when contemplated than consummated, and sweetbreads are often better the other way around. For the last
fifteen years, my research has focused on understanding how and how well people can mentally simulate their reactions to future
events. We've discovered that people make a fundamental error—namely, they overestimate the magnitude and duration of their
future pains and pleasures—and that this error is caused by four general features ofmental simulation. Our work has also shown
that there is a simple way to avoid making these errors, and that people generally refuse to believe it.
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CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Malcolm Gladwell
Author and a staff writer with
The New Yorker magazine
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile
of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time magazine's 100
Most Influential People. He is the author of four books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a
Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story
ofSuccess (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, What the
Dog Saw (2009) is a compilation of stories published in The New Yorker.
From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the
newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history.
He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.
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\CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Joshua D. Greene
Ph.D. John and Ruth Hazel Associate
Professor of the Social Sciences and the
director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory,
Department of Psychology,
Harvard University
Joshua D. Greene is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and the
director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory, Department ofPsychology, Harvard University. His
primary research interest is the psychological and neuroscientific study of moral judgment, focusing
on the interplay between emotion and reasoning in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersection of
philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes
ofHealth, and the MacArthur Foundation. His publications have appeared in Science, the Proceedings ofthe National Academy of
Sciences USA, Neuron, Cognition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society ofLondon. He is currently writing a book about the philosophical implications of our emerging scientific
understanding of morality.
Summary of work
"A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." This line—which is widely, but probably falsely, attributed to Joseph
Stalin—captures a deep truth about moral psychology. We care about others, but as the number of others rises, our moral sensitivities
are dulled. Why is that?
Amitai Shenhav and I recently conducted an experiment that hints at an answer. We scanned people's brains as they responded to a
series of "rescue dilemmas." For example, in one case, you're driving a rescue boat, headed toward a drowning man, when you receive a
distress signal telling you that a boat in the opposite direction has capsized. Stay on course, and you'll definitely save the man up
ahead. But if you reverse course, you could save a larger group of people. Should you change course?
Your answer will likely depend on at least two factors. First, how many people might you save by changing course? Second, what are
your odds of actually saving them? If you've a 95% chance of saving 40 people, you'll likely change course. If you've a 5% chance of
saving 2 people, you'll likely keep going.
In our experiment, we systematically varied the number of lives at stake (the magnitude) and the odds ofsaving them (the
probability). Our experiment was modeled on earlier experiments involving economic gambles: Will you choose a smaller, guaranteed
reward (e.g. $10), or take a chance on a larger, uncertain reward (e.g. a 30% chance at $50)? Researchers have conducted similar
experiments with primates and other mammals using food rewards.
We found that, from a neuroscientific perspective, these moral decisions look a lot like standard economic decisions. In both cases, a
brain region called the anterior insula keeps track of outcome probability; the ventral striatum keeps track of outcome magnitude; and
the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates information about probability and magnitude to compute something like "expected value."
These neural circuits didn't evolve for thinking about life-and-death decisions involving strangers. Rather, they evolved for things like
foraging for food. This may explain why "a million deaths is a statistic." For a foraging ape, diminishing returns kick in quickly. The
more food one has, the less additional food is worth. And without freezers and padlocks, a year's supply of food is worth little more
than a day's. Thus, the neural circuitry that we use for evaluating tradeoffs may have a principle of diminishing returns built in. This
makes sense for putting a neural price on things like fruit and meat. But does it make sense for human lives? Why should the hundredth
life, or the millionth life, that one saves be worth any less than the first?
At the policy level, relying on ow gut feelings to navigate complex tradeoffs may not work. To think well about big social problems—
from healthcare reform to global warming—we and our elected representatives may have to put our gut feelings aside and think more
like policy wonks.
This example concerns the influence of core, mammalian valuation mechanisms on moral thinking. My research, more generally, aims
to understand moral judgment as the product of diverse cognitive sub-systems with distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
EFTA01089448
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Where Social Meets Science
Eszter Hargittai
Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of
Communication Studies Northwestern
University
Harginai's research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a
particular interest in how people from different backgrounds adopt and use the Internet in
varying ways. She has developed methods to study people's Web-use skills and explores
how digital literacy influences what people do online.
Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the
Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use
Project. She is also Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society where she
spent the 2008/09 academic year in residence. Earlier, she was a Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. She has
published over 60 papers and has given over 120 invited presentations and over 70 conference talks on how people from varying
backgrounds incorporate digital media into their everyday lives. She is editor of Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems
Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have (University of Michigan Press 2009). Her work has received awards from the
American Sociological Association, the Eastem Sociological Society, the National Communication Association and the
Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. In 2010, the International Communication Association selected her to receive
its Outstanding Young Scholar Award. For more information, see eszter.com and webuse.org.
Current Research
Variation in Internet Skill and Online Behavior across the Population
Many of the questions being asked about whether or how digital media are changing our world and our lives assume universal
outcomes across population segments. Many inquiries tend to take for granted that there is one overarching answer that applies to
all cases. Questions such as "What are the Internet's political implications?", "Are digital media democratizing the public sphere?",
"How are new media changing cultural consumption?", "What is the relationship between playing video games and one's health?",
"How does one's online presence influence one's job prospects?" often disregard that the answers may not apply uniformly across
different population segments.
Hargittai's work has shown that users' background such as their gender, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are systematically
related to what online communities people join, how skilled people are with using the Internet, and how people spend their time
online. Given persisting inequality in online engagement across population groups, research on a myriad of topics must be
conscious of online disparities in order to avoid drawing mistaken conclusions about how digital media are influencing different
people's everyday lives.
The Promises and Perils of Online Data Opportunities
Increasingly scholars and others are turning to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as gaming sites
like World of Warcraft as data sources for addressing questions about human behavior. While the automatically generated logs
from such sites offer a wealth of data, they also come with notable shortcomings. Given that uptake of sites is not randomly
distributed across the population, relying on specific sites as data sources poses challenges when trying to generalize findings to a
population broader than certain users of a particular system. Depending on the questions of interest, researchers must make sure
that the study design they employ is not intertwined with their substantive questions of interest. This is crucial for avoiding the
systematic exclusion of certain populations from findings and thus walking away with flawed conclusions.
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\CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
David I. Laibson
Ph.D. Robert I. Goldman
Professor of Economics,
Harvard University
David Laibson is the Robert I. Goldman Professor ofEconomics at Harvard University. Laibson is
also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is Research Associate in the
Asset Pricing, Economic Fluctuations, and Aging Working Groups. Laibson serves on several
editorial boards, as well as the boards of the Health and Retirement Survey and the Pension
Research Council. Laibson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
Econometric Society. He is a recipient of the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for
Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.
Research Activities
Almost all important decisions involve intertemporal tradeoffs. Many of society's greatest challenges involve self-defeating
decisions in which people choose current rewards that come at a disproportionately large delayed cost: examples include dropping
out of high school, smoking cigarettes, exercising too link. saving too little, and failing to take prescribed medications. In most of
these cases the individual characterizes her own behavior as unsatisfactory and suboptimal. I use a mix of laboratory, neuroimaging,
and field methods to understand the reasons that we frequently make self-defeating intertemporal choices. I am particularly
interested in measuring and modeling the phenomenon of present bias (aka quasi-hyperbolic discounting), which provides one
account ofour tendency to prioritize present over future pleasures. I also study interventions — nudges in the language of behavioral
economics -- that enable people to align their good intentions (e.g., get a flu shot next fall) with their actions. Three sets of
interventions have proven to be highly efficacious across multiple behavioral domains: defaults (putting people in a desirable
outcome and giving them the option to opt out), active choice (requiring that people actively choose, thereby preventing
procrastination and passivity), and simplified choice (making choices easy and less time-consuming). I also study the ways that
firms attempt to exploit consumers' idiosyncratic behaviors, especially by shrouding the true costs of the products that they sell.
EFTA01089450
CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Robert W. Levenson
Ph.D. Professor of Psychology,
U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Institute for
Personality and Social Research
Robert W. Levenson received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in clinical psychology. He is
currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California—Berkeley where
he is a member of the behavioral neuroscience, clinical science, developmental, and social/personality
programs. He currently serves as Director of the Institute for Personality and Social Research and
Director of the Clinical Science Program. His research program is in the area ofhuman emotion,
studying the organization of physiological, behavioral and subjective systems; the ways that these
systems are impacted by neuropathology, normal aging, and culture; and the role that emotions play in the maintenance and disruption of
committed relationships. Dr. Levenson's research is supported by NIMH and NIA (including a recent MERIT award). He is past
President of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and past President of the Association for Psychological Science.
Summary of work on emotion and aging
Robert W. Levenson studies the mind-body relationship, focusing on the interplay between psychological and physiological processes.
Much ofhis work focuses on the nature ofhuman emotion, including its physiological manifestations; the variations in emotion that are
associated with age, gender, culture, and neuropathology; and the role that emotion plays in interpersonal interactions. Dr. Levenson's
current work is focused primarily on two major projects: a study ofhow our emotional lives change with normal aging and a study of the
impact of neurodegenerative diseases on emotional functioning,
Emotion and Aging
The centerpiece of this work has been an ongoing longitudinal study of a large sample of long-term first marriages in middle and old age.
This work uses an observational methodology in which couples come to the laboratory and engage in naturalistic discussions about
important topics related to their relationship. These interactions are studied to determine if there are signs in emotional experience,
behavior, language, and physiology that can be used to discrim-inate between the interactions of couples who are satisfied and
dissatisfied with their relationships, to discriminate between couples at different stages of the life span, and to predict what will happen
to the level ofcouples' relationship satisfaction over time. Couples are studied as they progress through prototypical later-life transitions
(children leaving home for middle-aged couples, retirement and health changes for older couples), trying to determine what kinds of
couples fare well as they cope with these transitions and what kinds of couples fare poorly.
The other focus of this work is to learn about normative changes in emotion that occur with age. Here, emotional reactivity, emotional
regulation, and emotional empathy are assessed in the laboratory in participants at different ages to determine how human emotions
change as we age. Unlike many other aspects ofhuman functioning which show pronounced declines with age (e.g., memory,
psychomotor skills), many aspects of emotional functioningappear to be relatively spared as we age, and some even show signs of
improve-ment and positive development in late life. Two new directions in this work examine the sources of individual differences in
emotional functioning(focusing on the role of genetics and of changes in cognitive abilities) and the consequences of these individual
differences for well-being, health, and successful aging.
Emotion In Neurodegenerative Disorders
In these studies, we are examining the ways that emotion, personality, language, and social behavior are altered in the early stages of
brain diseases and injuries (frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and orbitofrontal brain lesions).
Of particular interest are those patients who show neural loss in brain areas thought to be critical to emotional functioning. This work
builds upon our extensive prior work studying normal emotional pro-cesses in late life, which enables us to detect subtle changes in the
emotion system that are associated with the onset and course of neuropathology. This research is being conducted in collaboration with a
group ofneurologists at UCSF and is currently being expanded to include a component devoted to studying family caregivers of
dementia patients.
Other research
Over the years, Dr. Levenson's work has examined a number of other topics related to human emotion. These have included: (a) the
influence of culture on emotion, including studies of ethnic groups in the US and field studies in West Sumatra; (b) the role of emotion in
same-sex couples; (c) the influence of meditation on emotional functioning; and (d) genetic influences on emotional functioning.
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Where Social Meets Science
Elizabeth F. Loftus
Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, U. C. Irvine
Elizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She holds faculty
positions in three departments (Psychology & Social Behavior; Criminology, Law & Society; and
Cognitive Sciences), and in the School of Law. Since receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology from
Stanford University, she has published 22 books (including the award winning Eyewitness Testimony)
and 500 scientific articles. Loftus's research of the last 30 years has focused on the malleability of
human memory. She has been recognized for this research with six honorary doctorates (from
universities in the U.S., Norway, the Netherlands, Israel, and Britain), and election to the National
Academy of Sciences. She is past president of the Association for Psychological Science. Perhaps one
of the most unusual signs of recognition appeared in the Review of General Psychology, which
identified the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Not surprisingly Freud, Skinner,
and Piaget were at the top of that list. Loftus was 458, and the top ranked woman on the list.
Summary of work on malleable memory
My scholarly contributions helped to change professional and public conceptions of human memory, and led to a deepening appreciation
of the malleability of memory. My earliest studies demonstrated that innocuous procedures could alter memories ofpast events. Some of
the more widely known findings were produced in the mid and late 1970s, starting with an experiment in which witnesses to an event
were later interviewed with questions that insinuated novel (and incorrect) information into the memory record of the event. For example,
after witnessing a slide show depicting an auto accident, the question "Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was at the stop sign?"
might lead an interviewee who had seen a yield sign later to recall having seen a stop sign at the intersection. This was the modest
empirical beginning of a research program that has helped to shift the way in which both scientists and educated laypersons understand
the functioning of human memory. In the current view (to which my research pointed), memory is no longer likened to a faithful,
permanent recording device such as a camera or tape recorder. Rather, a more apt metaphor for the contemporary view is the rewritable
memory of a computer. Further, with the aid ofmy research contributions, it is now well understood that the rewriting of memory can be
precipitated by external agents, much as a worm or virus can precipitate changes in the computer's memory. I have published hundreds of
empirical articles and chapters on the malleability ofmemory, documenting the boundary conditions and individual differences variables
that are associated with such distortions. The basic phenomenon ofreduced memory after exposure to misleading information is now
known as the "misinformation effect."
Not long after conceiving and starting to pursue this research program on the malleability of memory, I realized that this work had
implications that called for consideration well beyond the covers ofscholarly journals. The alterations ofmemory that I demonstrated in
the laboratory had potential counterparts in criminal investigations, in which carelessly worded questioning by police and prosecutors
might modify witnesses' memories of events about which they would later have to testify. I occasionally provided consultation or expert
testimony on behalf oflitigants in court cases that hinged on eyewitness testimony, in hopes of minimizing the likelihood of wrongful
convictions or unfair verdicts. But, in hopes ofreaching a larger audience than 12 individuals at a time, I made efforts to write about the
findings for larger audiences. My book, Eyewitness Testimony (Harvard University Press, 1979/1996), continues to see extensive use in
training litigators as well as frequent citation in legal publications.
When news reports of adults discovering presumably long-repressed memories ofsexual brutalization began to appear in the early 1990s,
initial public reaction was predominantly to marvel at the malevolence of the accused parents or caretakers. Based on my own scientific
work, and that of colleagues, I had concerns that some of these purported recoveries of memory had the potential to precipitate injustices
predicated on mistaken assumptions about the veracity of memory. These concerns also led me to develop paradigms for exploring
extreme instances of a malleable memory. One of my first studies, now referred to as the lost in the mall' study, demonstrated the ease
with which one could create, in adults, 'recovered' unpleasant memories ofhaving been, as a child, separated from a parent on a shopping
trip, and after great distress being rescued and reunited with the family. My later studies showed how imagination, or exposure to other
people's stories, or dream interpretation, or a multitude of suggestive techniques could lead people to have wholly false beliefs and
memories about their past. Taken together, these studies show how very "rich false memories" can be planted in the minds of ordinary
people.
My sustained research on the recovered memory problem has been important in shedding scientific light on deeply disturbing phenomena
for which others in the profession were initially disinclined to consider taking a skeptical stance. Now, after numerous well publicized
cases in which accusations of past abuse have been discredited, reports of 'recovered memory of abuse' are treated with greater balance
by both the courts and by some members of the general public.
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CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Michael W. Macy
Ph.D. Current CASBS Fellow,
Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology,
Professor of Information Science, and
Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell
University
Michael W. Macy is Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology, Professor of Information Science, and
Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell. With support from the National Science
Foundation, his research team has used computational models, online laboratory experiments, and digital traces ofdevice-mediated
interaction to explore familiar but enigmatic social patterns such as diurnal mood changes, the emergence and collapse of fads, the
spread of self-destructive behaviors, the critical mass in collective action, the polarization of opinion, segregation ofneighborhoods,
and assimilation ofminority cultures. Recent research uses 509 million Twitter messages to track diurnal and seasonal mood changes
in 54 countries, and complete UK call logs to measure the economic consequences ofnetwork structure. His research has been
published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, American Journal ofSociology. American SociologicalReview, and Annual
Review ofSociology.
Summary of work on human behavior and social interaction
I have a dual appointment at Cornell in the Departments of Sociology and Information Science and am director of the Social Dynamics
Laboratory. The lab is focused on taking advantage of the new possibilities for data collection made possible by the growing
willingness of people all over the world to interact using devices that record their interactions. For example, we used worldwide
Twitter messages to measure diurnal and seasonal mood variations across diverse cultures (Science 333: 1878). From Africa to the
U.A.E, and from Asia to South America, we found that people are happiest in the morning and it is all downhill from there. Curiously,
the work-week pattern is the opposite of the work-day pattern: People are the most downbeat on Monday, with moods improving day-
by-day right through the weekend. The results indicate that periodic biological processes involving changes in cortisol levels are
closely associated with sleep cycles which in turn are constrained by cultural patterns, particular the structure of the work week. For
example, we found that people sleep in about 90 minutes on weekends (which suggests that people who use Twitter probably do not
have children :-). The next step is to investigate affective contagion and selection, that is, the extent to which affective states can spread
from one person to another through disembodied communication, and whether people choose to communicate with those who express
affect that corresponds to their own.
In another study, we mapped the social network of an entire country, using the nearly complete record of all telephone calls made in
the UK over a one-month period (Science 328: 1029). We used these data to investigate whether members of communities that differ
socio-economically have different social network structures. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that they do, with the causal
direction running both ways. The surprising result was not that the theories were wrong but that the differences in network structure
were so dramatic. People in advantaged communities have much more open network structures. The next step is to investigate the
causal mechanisms about which there is lots of theory but very little empirical data. A key question is whether open network structures
are more conducive to the spread of innovation. Our work using computational models, and a recent experimental study by one of my
former students (Science 329: 1194) suggests that open networks promote the spread of highly contagious information, while closed
networks (as in more parochial communities) promote the spread of behavioral changes that require high levels of social reinforcement.
We are in the process of testing this by tracking the spread of a virally marketed voice mail product over the UK social network.
In short, our research addresses longstanding scientific questions about human behavior and social interaction that are very difficult to
answer with surveys, lab experiments, or field observation, but which can now be addressed using the silicon traces of online
interaction — literally footprints in the sand.
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CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Clifford I. Nass
Ph.D. Current CASBS Fellow,
Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University
Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University. He is formally affiliated with
Communication; Computer Science; Education; Law; Science, Technology, and Society; Sociology;
and Symbolic Systems (cognitive science). He is Director of the Communication between Humans and
Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab and the Revs Program at Stanford. He is the author of three books (The
Media Equation; WiredJor Speech; and The Man Who Lied to His Laptop) and over 150 papers on the psychology of human-technology
interaction and experimental and statistical methods. His co-authored paper on multitasking was the most covered social science story of
2010. He has consulted on the design of over 250 technology products and services for companies including Google, Microsoft, Sony,
Philips, Visa, Hewlett-Packard, Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, Amazon, and Dell. Details at wwsv.stanford.edu/—nass.
Summary of work on Multitasking
The most important trend in the consumption of information in the 21st century is multitasking. Whether by using multiple devices at one
time (computer plus phone plus music plus ...) or using multiple screens on a single device (Email plus chat plus web browsing plus
Facebook plus Twitter plus writing plus ...), people of all ages, whether in the workplace or at home, are regularly consuming multiple
unrelated streams of information at one time.
Recent research suggests that the effects of multitasking are extremely powerful and pervasive. Multitasking affects the ways we think
and feel even when we are not multitasking: for example, the idea that "when I really have to concentrate, I don't multitask, so I'm fine"
is a myth.
My work explores the full range of the effects of both in-the-moment and chronic multitasking. Some of the questions that research now
addresses are:
What are the technological, psychological, societal, and historical drivers ofmultitasking?
Given this understanding, can we predict and/or prevent the growth ofmultitasking?
How pervasive is multitasking in different age groups?
Does music help or hinder concentration?
Are there certain categories of task that don't interfere with each other?
How can companies sell attention in an environment where attention is constantly fragmented?
Are there new strategies or approaches to advertising that will increase success?
How does multitasking affect teaching and learning?
Are there new strategies for teaching in a multitasking world?
Can chronic multitaskers stop their brains from multitasking even when there is only one stimulus?
How serious are the cognitive problems of chronic multitasking?
Does it affect the ability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information?
To manage short-term memory?
To focus on the primary task?
How does multitasking affect collaboration?
How does multitasking affect the social and emotional environment in the workplace?
What about the social and emotional environment in the home?
Are young children showing the effects of multitasking?
How do organizational policies encourage or discourage multitasking?
How does interface design encourage or discourage multitasking?
How can one "cure" the negative effects of multitasking?
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CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Steven Pinker
Ph.D. Harvard College Professor
and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology
at Harvard University
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor ofPsychology at
Harvard University. He has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition
and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the
Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American
Psychological Association.
He has also received six honorary doctorates, several teaching awards, and numerous prizes for his books The Language
Instinct,How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is the Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary,
and writes frequently for The New Republic, The New York Tunes, and other publications. He has been named Humanist of the
Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine's "The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals" and
in Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today." His latest book is The Better Angels ofOur Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined.
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Where Social Meets Science
Kenneth Prewitt
Ph.D. Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at the
School of International and Public Affairs at
Columbia University
Kenneth Prewitt is the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs and the Vice-President for Global Centers
at Columbia University. In addition to teaching for many years at the University of Chicago he has
served as the Director of the United States Census Bureau, Director of the National Opinion Research
Center, President of the Social Science Research Council, and Senior Vice President of the Rockefeller
Foundation. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon
and Southern Methodist University, a Distinguished Service Award from the New School for Social Research, the Officer's Cross of the
Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany, the Charles E. Merriam Lifetime Career Award, American Political Science
Association and a Lifetime National Associate of the NRC/NAS. Recent books: The Hard Count: The PoliticalandSocial Challenges of
Census Mobilization (2006), The Legitimacy ofFoundations (2006). America's StatisticalRaces: Do We Still Need Them? has been
submitted for publication. He is currently chairing a NAS/NRC standing committee on how scientific evidence is used in policymaking.
Summary of work on data and measurement
Science starts not after measurement but with measurement. Large-scale empirical social science emerged in a reciprocal relationship with
the government's capacity to measure the population. The method was census & survey data, the latter getting a substantial boost with the
development of random sampling theory. A government information system largely based on survey-data grew substantially starting in the
I960s: large-n surveys, longitudinal designs, randomized field experiments, RFP's & contract research, etc. A policy "industry" emerged,
based in specialized university centers and think-tanks. Today the federal government is spending approximately $5 billion annually on
statistical survey data, exclusive of the decennial census. (The private sector another $7 billion, with some of its products finding their way
into social science analysis.) Secondary analysis of these data underpins a lot of empirical social science: half of the articles in leading
social science journals draw on data from five statistical agencies.
Four key challenges to a democratic government's information order have been solved:
• Representativeness - census controlled sample survey data describes the entire population on key employment, health, income, housing,
etc. variables.
• Data Quality- advanced methods of detecting and adjusting for sample error and non- sample-error, even as data collection techniques
have shifted.
• Privacy/Confidentiality/Informed Consent- painstaking arrangements, bolstered by law, to assure protection of respondents.
• Accessibility— for public, media, and, especially, analytic use.
Despite this achievement, the system is in trouble: rapidly increasing costs; seriously declining response rates; and public concern about
privacy and confidentiality.
The tasks ahead, I believe, include sustained scientific attention to a steady, transformation of our current heavy reliance on survey data to
one increasingly based on administrative and electronic data. If this transformation is not managed scientifically—in particular, by the
federal statistical agencies working with social science —we will find ourselves with information that fails on the four challenges.
Administrative data are potentially of great value, but that has been realized only in countries with a national registration system. Absent a
national registration, the potential of administrative data is reached only through linkage across separate agencies, and this faces technical
and bureaucratic bathers.
Electronic data have their version of the four key challenges, which are compounded by the simple fact that the data are produced in the
private sector, and with profit-making rather than public interest motives.
It will take an intellectual and financial investment comparable in scope to that dedicated to survey methodology to realize the scientific
and policy opportunity provided by the vast administrative data generated as a by-product of government record keeping and by the
exponentially expanding electronic data.
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Where Social Meets Science
Robert J. Sampson
Ph.D. Henry Ford II Professor of the
Social Sciences at Harvard University;
Director of the Social Sciences Program at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Robert J. Sampson the is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and
Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is President
of the American Society of Criminology, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Sampson's research interests focus on crime, inequality, the life
course, neighborhood effects, nonprofit organizations, and the social structure of the modem city. His most recent book—Great
American City: Chicago and the EnduringNeighborhoodEffect—was published in January 2012 by the University of Chicago Press.
Summary of work on neighborhood effects and the social structure of the city
What do crime and low birth weight have in common? In our allegedly "placeless" and technologically advanced world, these are but
two phenomena that are surprisingly concentrated by place and in ways not reducible to material resources. I view this spatial
confluence as one element of "the neighborhood effect," a dynamic process that yields implications across the behavioral sciences and
for policy. Based on a large-scale program of research that began in 1995—the "Project on Human Development in Chicago
Neighborhoods" (PHDCN)—I have strived to develop new theoretical approaches and systematic metrics for studying ecological
contexts (what my collaborators and I call "eco-metrics"). The PHDCN involved a coordinated suite of original studies, including
repeated interviews with Chicago's citizens, a network panel ofChicago's key leaders, and a longitudinal cohort study of over 6,000
children and their families who were tracked wherever they moved in the U.S. over 7 years. I am following up a subset of these
children, now mostly adults, in 2012. The PHDCN also observed public spaces by mounting cameras in the backseat of SUVs and
filming each side of the street while driving slowly, in effect the early version of Google Street View. These films were used to code
detailed aspects of the physical and social structure of these neighborhoods.
My overarching thesis is that differentiation by neighborhood is pervasive and that it has durable properties—with cultural and social
mechanisms ofreproduction—and with effects that span a wide variety of behaviors. Whether it be crime, poverty, child health,
protest, leadership networks, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, residential sorting, collective efficacy, or
immigration diffusion, the city is ordered by a spatial logic ("placed") and yields differences as much today as a century ago.
Fascination with globalization has tended to deflect attention from the persistence of local variation, concentration, or more generally,
the spatial logic of inequality. The popular belief that the world is "flat," in particular, has clouded our thinking on neighborhood
effects. This is not to say that globalization theorists are wrong about economic markets or that the facts of ecological concentration
are incompatible with the placelessness of many aspects of life. To the contrary, one strand of globalization theory suggests that, if
anything, the reverse is true. The key to theoretical progress is to recognize that the stratification of people and resources across urban
areas remains entrenched and evolves in new ways as globalization proceeds. Paradoxically, in fact, inequality among neighborhoods
in life chances appears to have increased in salience.
I thus reject the common idea that technology, dispersed social networks, federal policy, and the accoutrements of modernity explain
away neighborhood inequality. At the Summit I will instead highlight durable forms of spatial organization along with new methods
for their measurement, drawing on results reported in Great American City: Chicago and the EnduringNeighborhoodEffect (2012).
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Where Social Meets Science
Barry Schwartz
Ph.D. Professor of Psychology at
Swarthmore College
Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, where he has
been since receiving his Ph.D. from the University ofPennsylvania in 1971. Among his many
publications are four books written for popular audiences. The Battlefor Human Nature (1986)
examines and criticizes the assumptions about human nature shared by evolutionary biology,
economics, and behavioral psychology. The Costs ofLiving (1994) argues that free-market
economic and social organization erode some of the best things in life. The Paradox of
Choice (2004) shows that whereas choice is liberating, too much choice is paralyzing.
And Practical Wisdom (2010, with Kenneth Sharpe) argues that to get the educational, medical,
legal and financial systems we want and need, we must nurture character—the will to do the right
thing—in practitioners. The Paradox ofChoice was named one of the top business books of the
year by both Business Week and Forbes Magazine, and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Schwartz has published articles in
sources as diverse as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle ofHigher Education, Parade Magazine, USA
Today, Slate, Scientific American, The New Republic, Newsday, the AARPBulletin, the HarvardBusiness Review, and the Guardian. He
has appeared on dozens of radio shows, including NPR's Morning Edition, Talk ofthe Nation, and All Things Considered, and has been
interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), the Lehrer News Hour (PBS), and CBS Sunday Morning. And he has spoken twice—once
about choice (2004) and once about wisdom (2009), at the well known TED conference.
Summary of work: The Choices Worth Having
"The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom people have, the better off they are." This view is
logically compelling, and consistent with the American commitment to political democracy and free-market economic organization. But a
decade of research, reviewed in The Paradox of Choke, has revealed that it isn't true. When people have too much choice, they are
paralyzed rather than liberated. They make poor decisions. And even when they overcome paralysis and manage to make good decisions,
they are dissatisfied with them. The "paradox" of choice is that even though some choice is essential for human well being, too much
choice can be its enemy. And the debilitating effects of too much choice are magnified when people follow another dictate from our
cultural ideology and seek out only the "best." People who look for the best are more paralyzed and less satisfied with decisions than
people who look for "good enough". Yet, despite these negative effects of too much choice, we continue as a society to operate as if the
answer to every policy question is to give people more choice.
But not always. In some areas of life, we respond to failures of our institutions by taking choice away from people. Instead of relying on
judgment and discretion, we create detailed scripts and procedures, and we design "smart" incentives to induce people to follow those
scripts and procedures. Carrots and sticks. Incentives and rules. We see this in the efforts currently being made to make sure that the
financial crisis of the last several years won't happen again. These efforts are doomed to fail. As argued in Practical Wisdom, neither
rules nor incentives can substitute for what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical wisdom—the will to do the right thing and the skill to
use judgment and discretion to figure out what the right thing is. Rules and incentives will never get us the schools, clinics, courts, and
financial institutions we want and need. Indeed, though they may make these institutions better in the short run, they will make them
worse in the long run.
Thus, we face a dual paradox: we give ourselves too much choice where we don't need it, and not enough choice where we do need it.
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CASBS Summit 2012
Where Social Meets Science
Robert I. Sutton
Professor of Management Science and
Engineering
at the Stanford Engineering School
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering
School. He is co-founder of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, which he co-
directed from 1996 to 2006. Sutton is also co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures
Program and the new Hasso Planter Institute ofDesign (which everyone calls "the d school"), a
multi-disciplinary program at Stanford that teaches and spreads - design thinking." He is an IDEO
Fellow, member of the Institute for the Future's Board Trustees, and a Professor of Organizational
Behavior, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Sutton received his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from The University of Michigan and has served on the Stanford faculty
since 1983. He has also served a professor at the Haas Business School, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences during the 1986-87, 1994-95, and 2002-03 academic years, and faculty at the World Economic Forum at
Davos in 2010. Sutton has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly publications, and as an editor for the
Administrative Science Quarterly and Research in OrganizationalBehavior. Sutton's honors include the award for the best paper
published in the Academy ofManagement Journal in 1989, induction into the Academy of Management Journals Hall ofFame,
the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching, the McGraw-Hill Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award, the
McCullough Faculty Scholar Chair from Stanford, selection by Business 2.0 as a leading "management guru" in 2002, the award
for the best article published in the Academy ofManagement Review in 2005, and his book, The No Asshole Rule, won the Quill
Award for the best business book of 2007. Sutton was also named as one of 10 "B-School All-Stars" by BtainessWeek in 2007,
which they described as "professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia."
Sutton is Academic Director of two executive programs at Stanford, Leading for Strategic Execution and Customer-Focused
Innovation, and teaches hundreds of executives, engineers, and other professionals each year who come to Stanford for
professional education. He has given keynote speeches to more than 100 groups in at least 18 countries- ranging from 300 city
administrators in San Jose, California, to 400 leaders and managers at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, to 3000 beer
wholesalers in New Orleans, to an audience 4000 people in Dubai that included leaders, government officials, and Sheikh
Mohammed and his entourage. Sutton's research and opinions are often described in the press, including The New York Times,
The Times (of London), Fast Company, BusinessWeek, U.S. News and World Report, Financial Times, Esquire, Fortune,
Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, NationalPost, The Observer, The Boston Globe, Computer World,
Entrepreneur,Industry Standard, Investor's Business Daily, Wired, ChiefExecutive, Strategy & Leadership, San Francisco
Chronicle,San Jose Mercury, and Time Magazine He has also been columnist for CIO Insight and a guest on numerous radio and
television shows, including ABC, Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, Fox, NBC Today Show, Connections, KGO, PBS, NPR,
Marketwatch, Tech Nation, CNS, CNN. Sutton's blog is Work Matters and can be found at www.bobsutton.net and he tweets
@work_matters.
Summary of work
Sutton studies the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action, leadership, innovation, and organizational
performance. He has published over 125 articles and chapters in scholarly and applied publications. He has published nine books
and edited volumes. In particular, Sutton (and Jeffrey Pfeffer) wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Finns Turn Knowledge
Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), which was selected as Best Management Book of 2000 by Management
General and included in Jack Coven and Todd Sattersten's 100 Best Business Books ofAll Time. Weird Ideas That Work: II /12
Practicesfor Promoting, Managing, andSustainingInnovation (Free Press, 2002) was selected by the HarvardBusiness Review
as one of the best ten business books of the year and as a breakthrough business idea. Sutton (and Jeffrey Pfeffer) then
published HardFacts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profitingfrom Evidence-Based Management, (Harvard
Business School Press, 2006), which was selected by Toronto's Globe and Mail as the top management book of 2006. The No
Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One ThatIsn't (Business Plus, 2007), was described by Publisher's
Weekly as "meticulously researched" and "direct and punchy" and is a The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com (as
the #1 non-fiction book), and Business Week bestseller His latest book, GoodBoss, BadBoss: How to be Best... andLearnfrom
the Worst (Business Plus, 2010) is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His current book project (with
Hayagreeva Rao) is tentatively titled: From the Few to the Many: Scaling-Up Excellence. His books have been translated in over
20 different languages.
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