Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one. The Trump administration’s miscalculation of Iran is not an anomaly. It is the...
I had been with my boyfriend, Tyler, for almost 10 years when we finally agreed that we should get engaged and married. Up until then, our respective jobs – mine as an academic, his as a fisherman – had forced us to endure long stretches apart. But I had been offered a permanent academic job...
Colonialism has been a central part of history around the world, differing only in form over time and space. After all, whenever people have moved from one place to another, they have colonised spaces and other people or forms of life. In Africa, colonialism has mostly been studied as something imposed from outside, for example...
“Humble” is not a word my colleagues would use to describe me, especially early in my career. In fact, when word got around that I was researching humility, I suspect more than a few choked on their coffee. And even though I have spent over a decade exploring the concept as an attribute and as...
A new study in Public Opinion Quarterly shows that moral arguments appealing to care and fairness can persuade both liberals and conservatives in the United States. By contrast, arguments grounded in the “binding” moral foundations – loyalty, authority and sanctity – primarily influence conservatives. In the study, conducted by researchers at Stockholm University, Mälardalen University, and the...
Obituaries preserve what families most want remembered about the people they cherish most. Across time, they also reveal the values each era chose to honor. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we analyzed 38 million obituaries of Americans published from 1998 to 2024. We identified the values...
When Napoleon embarked upon a military expedition into Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a team of scholars, scientists and artists. Together, they produced the monumental “Description de l’Égypte,” a massive, multivolume work about Egyptian geography, history and culture. At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans...
Breakthrough reveals not just who’s connected—but who’s leading the pack As summer winds down, many of us in continental Europe are heading back north. The long return journeys from the beaches of southern France, Spain, and Italy once again clog alpine tunnels and Mediterranean coastal routes during the infamous Black Saturday bottlenecks. This annual migration,...
A review of Emilie A. Caspar, “Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience” (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Why do individuals obey commands to inflict terrible pain or even kill other people, sometimes people they may know personally? Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous—and controversial—studies in the 1960s suggested the answer lay in “agentic...
Ask someone what a calling is, and they’ll probably say something like “doing work you love.” But as a management professor who has spent two decades researching the history and impact of calling, I’ve found it’s much more than personal fulfillment. The concept of calling has deep roots. In the 1500s, theologian Martin Luther asserted...
