Harvard University
For Support Of The Decision Sciences Laboratory
-
Amount$600,000
-
Program
-
Date Awarded11/15/2010
-
Term36.0 Months
-
Type of SupportGeneral Support/Program
Overview
Harvard’s Decision Sciences Laboratory (HDSL) is an interdisciplinary research facility, led by several distinguished social scientists*, that explores the intersection of psychology, economics, and neuroscience in an effort to better understand the pathways that shape judgment and decisionmaking. Using biometric as well as cognitive indicators, HDSL supports basic behavioral (as distinguished from brain imaging) research in human judgment and behavioral economics. At least equally important, its leaders are committed to translating this knowledge to improve the work of policymakers responsible for making high-stakes decisions. For example, HDSL will likely offer training to intelligence analysts at the Department of Homeland Security early next year. This proposed grant nicely parallels our grant for ideas42 , housed in Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and led by Sendhil Mullainathan, which applies behavioral economics to problems of poverty in developing countries as well as the United States.
About the Grantee
Grantee Website
www.harvard.edu
Address
Office for Sponsored Programs
1033 Massachusetts Avenue, 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Grants to this Grantee
for support of and learning from a community of practice focused on system transformation
The Deeper Learning Dozen is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The project supports a community of practice with 12 superintendents and their team members, all of whom are committed to making the changes necessary so that all young people and adults equitably experience deeper learning. The work will result in an understanding of how to create changes in systems, policies, practices, roles, beliefs, and assumptions. This grant will expand how the project shares its learnings, including through a book that reflects on past school reform approaches in contrast with some of the project’s work. (Substrategy: District Deep Dives and Networks)
for The Lab for Democracy Renovation
The Lab for Democracy Renovation sits within Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Members of the lab research and develop governance innovations needed to achieve healthy democracy in the 21st century — for massively scaled up, complex, digitally powered societies with significant social heterogeneity. The lab also investigates strategies for bringing those governance innovations into existence. This grant supports the general operations of the lab and its four focus work areas: governance of emerging technology, political economy for power-sharing liberalism, aspirational federalism, and the reimagining of American democracy.
for Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation’s Freedom Project
The HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation brings remarkable faculty together with global leaders in the democracy field to develop constructive dialogue, exceptional scholarship, and bold ideas. In an era of spiraling inequality and political polarization, the idea of freedom as a core political value has dropped from progressive discourse. The Center’s Freedom Project — in collaboration with the Boston Review — aims to recover the word from its distortions, and to reframe it as a cornerstone of post-neoliberal democracy. Convening philosophers and academics, together with practitioners, it will revisit foundational concepts toward changing the public conversation of what a just society looks like, and what it can accomplish.
