Active project areas

These are project areas that currently give structure to the garden.

Reading as intervention

Popular nonfiction and psychology books may change how readers think, feel, and act toward others. This area asks whether books can shift prosociality, polarization, empathy, motivation, identity, or behavior.

See book-interventions-and-reading-selection, nonfiction-meta-reanalysis, reading-as-intervention, and narrative-transportation.

Meditation, self-help, and internalized change

Meditation and self-help interventions may matter most when they shift automatic tendencies, self-regulation, identity, stress, or social behavior in durable ways.

See loving-kindness-meditation-intervention, sam-resilience-socioeconomic-contexts, growth-orientation-and-self-help, and effortless-prosociality-and-cognitive-habits.

Identity-based polarization interventions

Shared social identities may reduce affective polarization by changing how people understand political outgroups. This area connects social identity theory, public health, political psychology, and intervention design.

See common-ingroup-identity, self-control-and-prejudice, and identity-expansion-and-social-change.

Dream behavior and low-control states

Dreams, private behavior, cognitive load, stress, intoxication, fatigue, and other low-control contexts may help distinguish effortful regulation from internalized tendencies.

See dream-behavior-and-waking-behavior, dreams-as-low-control-observation, and effortless-prosociality-and-cognitive-habits.

Research software and open science

Some projects are not intervention studies but infrastructure for more transparent, reproducible, and readable behavioral science.

See report-r-package, easystats-meta-package, missing-majority-dashboard, and team-science-reproducibility-and-ai.

Health, embodiment, and belief

Projects around placebo, body ownership, EEG, and attention connect social cognition to embodied experience.

See asthma-placebo, rubber-hand-eeg, video-attention-training-and-self-esteem, and placebo-belief-and-social-psychology.

Wise interventions and social change

Small psychologically precise interventions may sometimes produce meaningful changes in voting, sustainability, prosociality, prejudice reduction, or public health.

See wise-interventions-and-small-effects, identity-based-voter-turnout, and social-norms-and-environmental-behavior.