Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting sympathetic and relatable individuals with different political beliefs. We also identify several interventions that reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, most strongly by correcting misperceptions of outpartisans’ views – showing that anti-democratic attitudes, although difficult to move, are not intractable. Furthermore, both factor analysis and patterns of intervention effect sizes provide convergent evidence for limited overlap between these sets of outcomes, suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, different strategies are most effective for reducing partisan animosity versus anti-democratic attitudes. Taken together, our findings provide a toolkit of promising strategies for practitioners and shed new theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

Pedagogical environments are often designed to minimize the chance of people acting wrongly; surely this is a sensible approach. But could it ever be useful to design pedagogical environments to permit, or even encourage, moral failure? If so, what are the circumstances where moral failure can be beneficial? What types of moral failure are helpful for learning, and by what mechanisms? This chapter considers the possibility that moral failure can be an especially effective tool in fostering learning. It also considers the obvious costs and potential risks of allowing or fostering moral failure. It concludes by suggesting research directions that would help to establish whether, when, and how moral pedagogy might be facilitated by letting students learn from moral failure.

How do successful scholars get their best research ideas? An explorationThe MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. CitationCao, Cathy et al. "How do successful scholars get their best research ideas? An exploration." Marketing Letters 30, 3-4

<p>Sediment management is an important aspect of river reconnection projects, often driving costs and influencing community acceptance. At sites with uncontaminated sediments, downstream release is an attractive option because it is often the cheapest and most practical approach and the sediment can be ecologically beneficial to downstream areas deprived of it for years by the dam. To employ this option, project proponents must estimate the sediment quantity to be released and, if substantial, estimate how long it will take to erode, where it will go, and how long it will stay there. We investigated these issues for sediments released by the 2018 removal of Bloede Dam on the Patapsco River in Maryland, USA. The dam was about 10 m high and its impoundment filled with sand and mud. Taking the surface elevations of these sediments surveyed immediately before removal and subtracting estimates of the pre-dam valley elevations derived from 21 cores and post-removal surveys of exhumed pre-dam surfaces, we estimate there was approximately 186,600 m<sup>3</sup> of stored sediment composed of 70% sand and 30% mud. These proportions match estimates made during pre-removal engineering studies, but our total stored sediment estimate is about 20% less. The difference between estimates reflects a real change in stored sediment quantity between 2018 and 2012 when the engineering studies were completed, additional data available to us after removal, and different estimation methods. After removal, using elevation surveys generated by traditional methods as well as UAS-based aerial imagery and structure-from-motion (SfM) at high temporal resolution, we documented rapid erosion of the stored sediments in the first six months (~60%) followed by greatly reduced erosion rates for the next couple of years. A stable channel was developed in the impoundment during the rapid erosion phase. These results are similar to a two-phased erosion response reported for sediment releases at dam removals around the world across a range of dam and watershed scales, indicating what practitioners and communities should expect when reconnecting rivers in similar settings. Downstream, repeat surveys combined with discharge and sediment gaging show rapid transport of eroded sediments through a 5 km reach, especially during the first year when discharges were above normal, and little overbank storage.</p>

I develop a simple but principled method for measuring the amount of culturally-transmitted information from a written target work that is actually retained in human minds and capable of influencing behavior. Using procedures inspired by Claude Shannon’s 1951 method for estimating the entropy of written English, I estimate the entropy of samples from the target work with a treatment group (those that have read a target work) and a control group (those who are of the same culture but who have not read the target work), using human minds as encoders-decoders in the communication model. KL divergence quantifies the information that the treatment group already knows relative to the control group. This method controls for shared cultural inheritance and does not require commitments to what information from the target work is important. The general technique can be profitably extended to a variety of domains, including evolutionary theory, methods of teaching, and the study of music.