Research

Published Research
Redirect by Timothy Wilson

Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

Authors: Timothy Wilson

What if there were a magic pill that could make you happier, turn you into a better parent, solve a number of your teenager’s behavior problems, reduce racial prejudice, and close the achievement gap in education? Well, there is no such magic pill-but there is a new scientifically based approach called story editing that can accomplish all of this.

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Published Research

Does Head Start Do Any Lasting Good?

Authors: Chloe Gibbs, Jens Ludwig, Douglas Miller, Martha Bailey, Sheldon Danziger

Head Start is a federal early childhood intervention designed to reduce disparities in preschool outcomes. The first randomized experimental study of Head Start, the National Head Start Impact Study (NHSIS), found impacts on academic outcomes of .15 to .3 standard deviations measured at the end of the program year, although the estimated impacts were no longer significant when measured at the end of kindergarten or first grade.

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Published Research

Software Agents, Anticipatory Ethics, and Accountability

Authors: Gary E. Marchant, Braden R. Allenby, Joseph R. Herkert (eds)

This chapter takes up a case study of the accountability issues around increasingly autonomous computer systems. In this early phase of their development, certain computer systems are being referred to as “software agents” or “autonomous systems” because they operate in a variety of ways that are seemingly independent of human control. 

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Published Research

Following the Money: EU Funding of Civil Society Groups

Authors: Christine Mahoney, Michael Beckstrand

The literature on EU integration has long recognized that the European Commission has promoted a pan‐European civil society in order to increase the legitimacy of the supranational institutions. While we know the Commission fosters EU civil society by encouraging their formal and informal participation in the EU policymaking processes and by directly funding them (Mahoney 2004), we have, until now, known very little about just how much money the Commission has been granting EU civil society organizations and to which segments of European civil society. 

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Published Research

The Economics of Risky Behaviors

Authors: Christopher J. Ruhm, Cawley J., Thomas G. McGuire, Mark V. Pauly, Pedro Pita Barros (eds.)

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky health behaviors. 

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Published Research

Winners love winning and losers love money.

Authors: Timothy Wilson, Karim S. Kassam, Carey K. Morewedge, Daniel T. Gilbert

Salience and satisfaction are important factors in determining the comparisons that people make. We hypothesized that people make salient comparisons first, and then make satisfying comparisons only if salient comparisons leave them unsatisfied. 

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Published Research

How we feel about the deal

Authors: Timothy Wilson, Hallam Movius

Recent experimental research suggests that humans are prone to systematic errors when determining how they currently feel, imagining how they will feel about future events, remembering how they have felt about past events, and understanding the preferences that underlie their decisions. In this article, we briefly review three basic assumptions that are called into question by recent findings regarding specific kinds of errors that people are prone to make. We suggest that this line of research has important implications for negotiation theory, research, advice, and practice.

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