recent research

More gems from Kevin Lewis:

• Red and blue states: not as different as the mean would suggest.
• In debate, we become less rational when faced with more extreme disagreement.
• Inter-group contact helps diminish prejudice - even for hard core bigots.
• More evidence that Americans continue to polarize.
• Designing questionnaires to get at respondent's true preferences.
• When it comes to media susceptibility, a little sophistication is a dangerous thing.
• Being in a diverse group makes us more open-minded, except when we've been cued to think about morality.
• Once we pick a political party, we stick with it.
• Citizens can be informed - if there's motivation to be so.
• Crowdsourcing: the bigger the crowd, the more active the crowd.
• Want to build trust? Use words not money.
• One counter-force to social hierarchies: generosity.
• Wise crowds get dumber when individuals are allowed to communicate.
• But groups are still smarter than individuals.
• If you want cohesion in a small group, make sure it has an odd number of members.
• Volunteer leadership makes leaders of us all.
• Experimental evidence that legitimacy makes it easier to govern.
• How to ward against "productivity losses in brainstorming, the common knowledge effect, group polarization, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and pressures toward uniformity" and make your intelligence group smarter. (One way may be to include dissenters.)
• How to solve global collective action problems? In very small groups.
• Confirming the obvious: you can make your social enterprise more effective by casting it as a protagonist.
• In larger societies we're more apt to punish people "altruistically" (for an affront they committed against another) than "spitefully" (for a personal affront). Not so in smaller societies.
• Does judicial activism polarize? Maybe not as much as some think.