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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.


“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.
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 […]
Doing any networking this week? If you aren’t, you probably feel you should. For a generation we’ve been hearing that rich social lives will find us jobs, get our chores […]
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 […]