Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols

Here is the transcript of a talk I recently delivered at Nudgestock, the world’s biggest behavioral science festival. Let’s start with a question: What do top hats and “defund the police” have in common? Before we explore it, I’ll very briefly tell you about my unusual background. Currently, I’m a doctoral candidate in psychology at Cambridge and a faculty fellow at the University of Austin. And before this, I studied psychology at Yale as an undergraduate. But before entering these universities, my life was a lot different. I was born into poverty and grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and all around California. I fled as soon as I could at age 17, enlisting in the military right after high school. I then attended Yale on the GI Bill. That was a very different environment for me. At Yale, there are more students from families in the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent. Throughout my experiences traveling along the class ladder, I made a discove

Here is the transcript of a talk I recently delivered at Nudgestock, the world’s biggest behavioral science festival. Let’s start with a question: What do top hats and “defund the police” have in common? Before we explore it, I’ll very briefly tell you about my unusual background. Currently, I’m a doctoral candidate in psychology at Cambridge and a faculty fellow at the University of Austin. And before this, I studied psychology at Yale as an undergraduate. But before entering these universities, my life was a lot different. I was born into poverty and grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles an