People are faced with numerous decisions every day. Whether we must choose our outfit for the day, which cell phone brand to buy, what college to attend, to buy a car or house insurance, or even when or to whom to get married, decisions are a permanent presence in our daily activities. Behavioral economics is a multi-disciplinary field of study investigating how people make judgments and decisi...

Repeated games have a long tradition in the behavioral sciences and evolutionary biology. Recently, strategies were discovered that permit an unprecedented level of control over repeated interactions by enabling a player to unilaterally enforce linear constraints on payoffs. Here, we extend this theory of "zero-determinant" (or, more generally, "autocratic") strategies to alternating games, whi...

Neuropsychology has fallen reliant on outdated and labor intensive methods of data collection that are slow, highly inefficient, and expensive, and provide relatively data-poor estimates of human behavior despite rapid technological advance in most other fields of medicine. Here we present a brief historical overview of current testing practices in an effort to frame the current crisis, followe...

The purpose of this paper is to present an outline of student's practice of interviewing simulated patients at behavioral science in dentistry. This practice was initiated as part of a newly introduced behavioral science course at our school of dentistry, to enable students to acquire communication skills, comprehensive understanding, and a proper attitude vis-à-vis patients. Students as well a...

Few, if any, educational interventions intended to increase underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students in biological and behavioral sciences are informed by theory and research on career persistence. Training and Education to Advance Minority Scholars in Science (TEAM-Science) is a program funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...

In recent years a number of assessments of the non-Western consciousness disciplines have been undertaken by Western behavioral scientists. The author suggests that a variety of conceptual, methodological, experimential, and content inadequacies render the conclusions of these investigations of doubtful validity. He then describes the models of human nature postulated by these disciplines and t...

The words we use matter. The concept of a social norm exists in many social and behavioral science disciplines and research traditions (1). Because the general term “social norm” is a hypernym, an explicit definition is crucial to discussions of its place and usefulness in solving complex social–environmental issues (cf. ref. 2). In their discussion of incentives, Lubchenco et al. (3) suggest t...

A standard mode of inference in social and behavioral science is to establish stylized facts using statistical significance in quantitative studies. However, in a world in which measurements are noisy and effects are small, this will not work: selection on statistical significance leads to effect sizes which are overestimated and often in the wrong direction. After a brief discussion of two exa...

For the past 30 years, generations of scholars of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) have expressed concern that clinical practice has abandoned the close links with theory that characterized the earliest days of the field. There is also a widespread assumption that a greater working knowledge of theory will lead to better clinical outcomes, although there is currently very little hard evidence t...