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Becoming Nature Positive
“Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Future “, an open access book from the Nature Positive Initiative Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Futureis a collaborative effort from a wide range of authors, covering many sectors of society. ‘Nature Positive’ is a recently agreed upon global goal to “halt and…
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The immorality of too much money
“The immorality of too much money” Study across 20 countries shows extreme wealth seen as more immoral in richer, equal societies — tied to moral purity beliefs. “Filthy rich” takes new meaning. In Fast Company: ow.ly/zJBe50XsSWx In PNAS Nexus: ow.ly/JyJ950XsSWy In some societies, people find excessive wealth immoral, while others are structured so that having…
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Stubborn Goals: the adaptive value
“The adaptive value of stubborn goals” Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise…
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Decisions: Studying and Supporting
“Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices“ A lively, authoritative insider’s account of how we make decisions and how decision-making research has developed over the last half century. Decisions describes the evolution of decision science (also called behavioral decision research and related to behavioral economics) through its application to challenging personal and public policy decisions,…
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Harmony in the brain
“Harmony in the brain: A narrative review on the shared neural substrates of emotion regulation and creativity” The contribution of creativity in overall well-being through regulating emotions has sparkled research interest in employing artistic interventions recently for the improvement of mental health. Although the behavioural links between emotion regulation and creativity have been established, the neural networks reflecting…
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Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions
“Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions” People given written descriptions often learn and decide differently from those learning from experience, even in formally identical tasks. This paper presents two experiments detailing how telling participants about the value of one stimulus impacts a keystone learning effect – blocking. The paper investigates if descriptions can be…
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October 7, 2025
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” William Shakespeare Dear Friends and Fellow Humans, I turn 70 today. For 7 decades I’ve had the privilege of living out my childhood dream, which was simply to UNDERSTAND. After spending more than half a century meeting people from all over the world…
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End GDP mania
“End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity” Last week’s United Nations General Assembly, held in New York City, generated no shortage of headlines. But one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level…
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Fast, slow, & metacognitive
“Fast, slow, and metacognitive thinking in AI” Inspired by the ”thinking fast and slow” cognitive theory of human decision making, we propose a multi-agent cognitive architecture (SOFAI) that is based on ”fast”/”slow” solvers and a metacognitive module. We then present experimental results on the behavior of an instance of this architecture for AI systems that…
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