Projects

The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is an especially strong place for collaborative dialogue to flourish, particularly across disciplines. It is neutral ground, not tied to academic departmental life or any one academic discipline, yet it is part of a major university with a high global profile. Our mission is to advance the social and behavioral sciences. Convening a variety of short-term and long-term group projects at CASBS is one way we do this.

PROJECT THEMES

As a general organizing principle, the Center focuses on four overarching themes for purposes of identifying and prioritizing the most suitable projects for funding and support.

Moral Economies of the Future

We explore the reciprocal obligations of citizens, governments, and corporations today and in the past in order to prepare for the future. Our goal is to discover when and why the social compact changes and what the levers are for better policies to meet the objectives of the current moral economy.  

Technology and Society

How and when innovations occur reflect a series of societally produced prerequisites:  education and skills, economic opportunities and incentives, social networks, legal constraints, and geography.  Resulting new technologies raise social, political, and economic questions about the distribution of harms and benefits and how to use technology change to advance human welfare. 

Inequality and Inequity

Nearly all CASBS projects are concerned with issues of economic, political, and social inequities. We apply the best contemporary science to understand key questions, but our effort also necessarily includes how best to elaborate policies, practices, and institutions that would create a more inclusive society.

Democracy

A relatively new focus area for CASBS concerns the future of democracy. We focus on the underpinnings of democracy and how to make them more durable and responsive to the immediate needs of the populations they are meant to serve and to the long-term requirements of countries embedded in a globalized world. While we will pay attention to some of the current issues of populism, problematic electoral and legislative decision processes, the manipulation of media, and threats from terrorism, racism, and refugee crises, our primary emphasis is on determining where democracy is broke and how to fix it. At root, this area of focus concerns social cohesion and the future of democracy.

Evidence-based Policy

The academic work on which the evidence-based policy movement is based has seen spectacular improvements over the last several decades. This includes the science of causal inference and the computational, legal, and methodological issues of data sharing and informatics. These developments have been extremely important in bringing science to bear on public policymaking. Nevertheless, there is much room for improvement in both the methods and their application.

For more information, please contact CASBS program director Sarah Wert (wert@stanford.edu).