The psychology of why people turn to violence — and how they can be moved toward a safer, more sustainable world.
Our lab studies two challenges of our time: violent extremism and environmental sustainability. Through cross-cultural research in the lab and in the field, we work to understand the psychological processes that lead people toward political violence and toward pro-environmental behavior — and to design effective interventions that build safer, more sustainable societies.
The assumption underlying our work is that human judgment and behavior are goal-driven and dynamic: what people do depends on the salience and desirability of competing goals, the means available to them, and the networks they belong to.
Across religious, right- and left-leaning movements, we study how the loss of personal significance turns belief into obsession — and how restoring significance can reverse it.
Read more →From a meta-analysis of 3,000,000+ observations to global field experiments across 63 countries, we test which interventions genuinely move climate action.
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