Behavioral Interventions Contributing to Reducing Poverty and Inequities.

Behavioral science has a long history of engaging in efforts to understand and address socially important issues. Poverty and inequities in health and development are among the most important and complex social issues facing the world today. With its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations (2015) has focused attention and guidance on addressing key global challenges, including to "end poverty" (SDG 1), "ensure good health and well-being for all" (SDG3), and "reduce inequality within and among countries" (SDG 10).

Out of the Lab: Shaping an Ecological and Constructional Cultural Systems Science.

Contemporary societies face critical, interlocking, "wicked" challenges, including economic inequities and marginalization, personal and collective violence, ethnic and religious conflicts, degradation of "the commons," climate change, and more, and all of these issues clearly are grounded in behavior. An adequate culturo-behavior science could be positioned to advance and leverage research and interventions supporting community well-being, and contribute to overcoming urgent societal and global challenges. The current state of cultural systems science, however, is limited by theory and methodology, and by competition for attention with well-established research and practice opportunities related to individual-level challenges.

Contributions of Behavioral Systems Science to Leadership for a New Progressive Movement.

We argue in this paper that we are in the midst of a period in which fundamental global change will be required if societies and many species, perhaps even our own, are to survive. The realities are inescapable, and the potential implications are likely to affect nearly every dimension of human life in the USA and globally. Current trends are discouraging and will be extraordinarily difficult to shift, given global structural realities.

Behavioral strategies for constructing nonviolent cultures with youth: a review.

Youth violence is widely recognized as a critical social issue in the United States, and many approaches to prevention have been developed in recent years. Emerging research suggests that only approaches that are deeply embedded in cultural, community, and organizational contexts are likely to be powerful enough to have a meaningful collective impact. No programs of this kind that are also truly practical and socially valid have yet reached a level where they can be regarded as well established, but data are beginning to appear that can guide community efforts.