This paper aims to acquaint researchers in the quantitative social and behavior sciences with recent advances in causal inference which provide a systematic methodology for defining, estimating, testing, and defending causal claims in experimental and observational studies. These advances are illustrated using a general theory of causation based on nonparametric structural equation models (SEM)...

1. Department of Psychiatry, Research Center of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran 2. Psychiatrist, Research Center of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran 3. Department of Cardiology, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran 4. Department of Psychiatry, Shiraz University of Medica...

1 HE CONTRIBUTIONS made by behavioral scientists to psychosomatic medicine have been exhaustively reviewed. Alexander reports from the viewpoint of the dynamic psychiatrist, Mirsky from the position of the experimenter, Grinker from the standpoint of the clinical researcher, and Wittkower and Cleghorn discuss the sociopsychological concomitants of various disease entities. Historical and theore...

Theories in the behavioral, social, and natural sciences are often formalized by equations involving unknown functions, i.e., by functional equations. For instance, a theorist may be reluctant tomake specific assumptions regarding the form of functions involved in a mathematical model, but the qualitative formulation of the model itself may impose constraints on the initially unknown functions....

In recent years, Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has revolutionized social science by providing a way to collect behavioral data with unprecedented speed and efficiency. However, MTurk was not intended to be a research tool, and many common research tasks are difficult and time-consuming to implement as a result. TurkPrime was designed as a research platform that integrates with MTurk and supports task...

This editorial provides a behavioral science view on gamification and health behavior change, describes its principles and mechanisms, and reviews some of the evidence for its efficacy. Furthermore, this editorial explores the relation between gamification and behavior change frameworks used in the health sciences and shows how gamification principles are closely related to principles that have...

Economics has typically been the social science of choice to inform public policy and policymakers. In the current paper we contemplate the role behavioral science can play in enlightening policymakers. In particular, we provide some examples of research that has and can be used to inform policy, reflect on the kind of behavioral science that is important for policy, and approaches for convinci...

In political science and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, there exists an unfortunate de facto divide between qualitative and quantitative empirical research. Sometimes this divide is purely a function of training and disciplinary socialization, but often it reflects a valid dispute over the philosophical foundations of inquiry. I argue here that the Bayesian approach ...

The behavioral sciences, including most of psychology, seek to explain and predict behavior with the help of theories and models that involve concepts (e.g., attitudes) that are subsequently translated into measures. Currently, some subdisciplines such as social psychology focus almost exclusively on measures that demand reflection or even introspection when administered to persons. We argue th...