Is violence a disease or the symptom of a disease? Gary Slutkin in his book The End of Violence (EoV, 2026) has argued that violence is, in itself, a disease. I agree with him that violence is a deviation from the normal function of the mind causing morbidity and mortality, per the definition of disease cited on page 43 of EoV. The question is whether the violent acts that everyone would agree are characteristically morbid should be thought of as the whole disease or as merely one symptom of a disease that encompasses more than just violence. The disease, which to my way of thinking could be called supremacism, encompasses harms that are more subtle than its worst and most salient symptom, violence.
Is the disease transmitted visually or culturally? EoV presents an argument that the disease is transmitted visually. I interpret this visual hypothesis as a behavioral approach, given the great conceptual leap that is made from perceptual processes to social consequences. I am familiar with behavioral approaches because I was trained in behaviorism and have a co-author credit for a behavioral study published in a leading behaviorist journal (Tan, et.al., 2014).
Behavioral approaches are usually adequate to address behaviors that can be presumed to have been uninfluenced by organizational, institutional, and/or societal policies. Rats, pigeons, infants, non-communicative people, and even some types of behavior such as the unconscious blinking of our eyes, can be explained without reference to the larger social contexts in which they are embedded. While conceding that all the organisms just listed may, arguably, have psychological selves in at least some sense (Damasio, 2010), with the particular kinds of selves they have (or in some cases due to the particular limitations on how their self is being expressed) most of their behavior can be adequately explained with regard to reinforcement contingencies in their immediate environment via behaviorism. However, the behavior of most children and adults are not adequately accounted for unless we know about and take seriously the psychological self which operates as a key mechanism of motivation to act in the world and engage with the world that the self believes itself to be acting within. The most successful scientific model of human motivation and engagement today is called Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and it is, according to philosopher and psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon, “[T]he world’s most comprehensive and best-supported theory of human motivation. SDT has been under development for over fifty years and is still going strong.”
The central tenet of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is that all humans have primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence (Ryan & Deci, 2019). SDT was built up from the idea of positing just a single entity within the black box of the human mind, a self. The self is a necessary mental entity because experiments starting in the 1970s showed that people did not behave according to behaviorist predictions in a variety of everyday situations. There was something inside the black box of their human minds (to use a phrase favored by behaviorism’s B.F. Skinner) that modified how they responded to reinforcement contingencies. Over decades SDT has proven that human psychological well-being is caused by the satisfaction of those needs. The cognitive processes within the human mind constantly assess the situation for opportunities to satisfy those needs or identify threats that may thwart them. Based on that assessment the mind allocates some level of energy, which is commonly called motivation. Based on where in the spectrum of motivation the self is located actions are taken, or refrained from, to produce some type of engagement.
Inspired by recent work from Rebecca Winthrop and her colleagues (Anderson & Winthrop, 2025; Winthrop, Shoukry, & Nitkin, 2025) I have summarized the science of SDT (applied to school settings) in the diagram on the next page. The four main boxes indicate discreet states as they are experienced and described by teachers and students in classroom settings. The vertical “Implicit Owner of the Goal” distinction is based on motivations being either autonomous, which will have positive effects on well-being, or controlled, which will have negative effects on well-being. The horizontal “Depth of Engagement” distinction is based on separating the merely behavioral, shallow engagement from the agentic, deep engagement. The mode most conducive to conceptual, transferable learning is the Explorer in the bottom right box. The mode most conducive to disrupting the conceptual, transferable learning of others is the Resister in the bottom left box. The modes that are most conducive to demands for unquestioned obedience are the Passenger and Fauxchiever. The Passenger is trying to be invisible and minimally engaged, likely avoiding punishment. The Fauxcheiver is trying to get the rewards on offer, but only engages to the point of getting the reward, not with sufficient intensity to achieve conceptual, transferable understanding of the subject being taught. The Fauxchiever is actually learning how to manipulate the system for rewards, to go through the motions, to jump through the hoops, but avoids doing any work beyond what is rewarded.
Before I return to the issue of violence I want to explain my perspective on levels of analysis. This is relevant because getting the levels of analysis problem wrong prevents us from properly understanding the nuances of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Slutkin appears to share a concern for achieving accuracy based on this quote:
“[T]o effectively treat disease of any kind, you need to diagnose it correctly — not just name it but deeply understand it and the mechanisms by which it operates.” [emphasis added, EoV, p.23]
If we misidentify the proper level of analysis we can send ourselves on a wild goose chase.
Consider the phenomenon of a whirlpool. It is a prime example of an emergent behavior in certain bodies of water. If we want to understand the causal factors that contribute to the existence of a whirlpool we have to examine it at the right level of analysis. Imagine if we encountered an alien life form that was not familiar with bodies of water. In the process of sharing what our world is like we send our new alien friend images of whirlpools and a tiny sample of water, just a few drops. Our alien is a member of an inherently skeptical species, so he casts doubt on the existence of whirlpools. He says that when he examines a few of the individual water molecules we sent him (only a small volume could be sent due to the cost), he can find no evidence of whirlpools. Based on his examination of water molecules he states that whirlpools are a figment of our imagination and that our images must have been AI hallucinations.
How should we address our alien friend’s concerns? He is correct that there is no evidence of whirlpools in water molecules. There is, in fact, no way to deduce the existence of whirlpools from the properties of water molecules. As I said before whirlpools are a paradigmatic example of an emergent phenomenon. Addressing his concerns would involve a more complete description of the physics of fluid dynamics and, short of sending him enough water to experiment with, a physics simulation software for him to play with would probably be a close second.
A similar confusion arises in the philosophical debates about the existence of free will. When a sophisticated scientist like Robert Sapolsky looks carefully at the various levels from biological to ecological he can not find any evidence that free will exists. In his book Determined (2024) he claims that the most important evidence to prove the existence of free will is to point out a neuron that makes a “choice” that was not already determined by the contextual factors surrounding it. Sapolsky’s book is particularly salient to this conversation because the central example that he returns to throughout the book is a potentially violent act, the pulling of a trigger. I cannot find any flaw in his analysis of almost all of the factors that he considered; however, I can also see that he failed to consider the role of the psychological self in the experience of free will that follows from SDT.
In his book Freely Determined: What the new psychology of the self teaches us about how to live (2022) Kennon M. Sheldon explains the three central arguments against free will: the reductionist (materialist) perspective, the doctrine of predetermination, and epiphenomenonlism. Reductionists claim “that there is nothing but matter obeying physical laws in the universe.” Predeterminists claim “that things couldn’t possibly turn out any differently than the way they did; the universe is a giant machine, clanking along toward an inevitable conclusion.” Epiphenomenonlists claim that “our experiences are always mere symptoms of prior causes; they are never causes themselves. They’re dead ends in the chain [of causality.] … [O]ur feelings of being intentional agents are delusional.” Sheldon also shares the three related capacities that philosopher Christian List argues are necessary for free will to be present in a system (human or artificial): 1) the capacity to consider several possibilities for action, 2) the capacity to form an intention to pursue one of those possibilities, and 3) the capacity to take action to move towards that possibility.
For my purpose now it is critically important to show that the central problem with dismissing free will from arguments about physics, chemistry, and biology (which are Sapolsky’s areas of expertise) is that the phenomenon does not occur at those levels of analysis. Free will is a psychological phenomenon that must be understood by accounting for other psychological processes that are relevant to that particular feature of the human experience. Specifically, a model of the self is necessary to connect the experience of free will with the physics, chemistry, and biology that makes that experience both possible and real.
When we recognize the role of the self in determining our behavior we can be sympathetic to both sides of the debate. The determinists who take materialist, predetermined, and/or epiphenomenonl perspectives have convincing evidence and arguments for almost all of their positions. The problem arises when they neglect to acknowledge that the self has a key role to play in modifying the reinforcement contingencies provided by the situations in which they are embedded. There is a key difference between water molecules interacting under physical constraints and humans operating within social constraints.
No one is foolish enough to argue that water molecules make freely willed choices about what formations to create as they flow through a sink. A whirlpool is a structural outcome of multiple dynamic forces interacting with each other at the body of water level. Molecules are largely irrelevant except for their mere presence as a substrate in which the structure can arise and the level of viscosity that they exhibit collectively. The macro-conditions (the shape of the container, flow speed, and gravity) organize the particles into the spiral pattern that becomes the vortex that is the central characteristic of a whirlpool.
Most of the time humans also respond fairly automatically, at least to some degree, to the macro-conditions that surround them. This is why a significant amount of human behaviors can be satisfactorily explained with behaviorism; see The Nurture Effect by Anthony Biglan (2015). However, there are times when the self takes the reins and alters the pattern of conditioned responses. Most of the time most people do not exercise their free will. But sometimes they do. They perceive their situation to be one that is no longer satisfactory for the kind of person they want to be or the goals and/or aspirations they have chosen to pursue. Their cognitive machinery goes to work on generating possibilities that would be a better match for their intentions. They form an intention to pursue one of those possibilities and, finally, they take action in pursuit of that possibility. If we examine all the lower levels of machinery we will not find evidence for the free will that was exercised. The waves of cognitive activity that this process entails did not ever rely on a single neuron to fire one time and not another. Free will is probably better described as a process within a distributed network, not a singular moment or a neural structure. Neurons are the necessary substrate, but they do not play any other other role in the existence of free will. The majority of the process was completed outside of consciousness, so introspection is not of much help. The story of this process is told in a manner that might be interpreted to suggest conscious activities, but that is debatable. Yes, there was likely some conscious processing involved, but it need not have been decisive in determining any given part of the process. It is possible that consciousness takes undue credit for the work of non-conscious patterns and processes in the course of exercising free will.
As I mentioned before, the initial evidence for the self as a necessary mechanism for explaining human behavior arose out of behaviorist experiments. Those studies produced results that contradicted the dominant behaviorist principles which were developed in the context of B.F. Skinner’s admonishment to be properly scientific by not attributing any cause of behavior to mysterious entities in the mind, until it is absolutely necessary. Back in the late 1960s and through the 70s many scientists arrived at the point of absolute necessity and, in the case of SDT, only posited one entity, a cognitive self.
The most famous experiment in this literature gave children reinforcement for doing things that they were otherwise known to do spontaneously without reinforcement. The central principe of behaviorism is that behaviors that get reinforced increase in frequency. However, when the children were reinforced for painting, drawing, and other inherently engaging activities, they did less, instead of more, exactly the opposite of what behaviorism predicts. This gave rise to a scientific formulation of the idea of intrinsic motivation based on the observation that supplying extrinsic reinforcements for intrinsically motivated behaviors can sometimes inspire the self to reevaluate the behavior. A child’s unconscious thought process might be something like, “If the adults are using their manipulative powers to induce me to do that behavior maybe it’s not as awesome as I thought it was and I should do less of it.” Over time the notion of a dichotomy of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation has given way to a more nuanced view. Today, it is better to refer to autonomous versus controlled motivations, as I have depicted it in the visual summary earlier. The autonomous motivations, which are more attributable to internal reasons (which include some types of extrinsic motivations), have positive effects on well-being, while the controlled motivations, which are more attributable to external or instrumental reasons, have negative effects on well-being.
The psychological self is not a distinct entity with its own brain area. It is not real in any physical sense. It is real in the same way that a center of gravity is real. Physicists discovered that they could make better predictions about the tipping point of a physical object by inventing the idea of the center of gravity. Note that centers of gravity only exist in the context of gravity. Where there is no gravity or in the subatomic realms where gravity is not a factor, the idea is not applicable. The center of gravity has no physical reality, it is meta-physical, but it is real nonetheless because every physical object on earth has one and it is the most reliable indicator of when that object will fall over. It is fictional, but it is not fantastical.
The psychological self is also a fictional meta-physical reality that is not fantastical. It will never be found in the brain, but it is observable in human behavior, as the SDT community has found over and over again for over 40 years. The self is found in a very specific level of analysis, and not in others. If you don’t know to look for it, you are unlikely to find it. With regard to violence, I believe that is why the EoV book failed to take the self, as conceived of by the SDT community, into account.
I agree with almost all of both Slutkin’s and Sapolsky’s points. However, there are a few key points that do not align with my SDT informed understanding of the science of how humans are in the world. Let’s examine the criminal pulling of a trigger, to borrow Sapolsky’s conceit.
As a psychologist I have to say that the disposition (a.k.a. personality) of the individual is one of the least powerful factors in the situation. There are a variety of biological, relational, organizational, and societal factors that are far more powerful determinants of each individuals’ behavior. Sapolsky ran through an impressive catalog of those influences in both his Determined book and in his Behave book, so I will focus on a few key experiences.
Let’s imagine how a sequence of events might contribute to the pulling of that trigger. First, let’s visit our trigger puller when he was two years old. Puller (as I will call him) is dropped off at a daycare, a highly respected professional operation that supports his needs pervasively just as his parents have been doing at home since he was born. Puller has never witnessed violence nor been the victim of it. Yet, one day he gets frustrated when another two-year old seizes a toy he had been playing with and he instinctively reacts to this threat by biting his compatriot. If you believe The End of Violence book on page 41, this is not possible. “We aren't born violent. Violence is not innate, congenital, or inherent to an individual or group. Nor is it a universal human urge.” On page 63 it says, “Without exposure to violence, there is no violence.”
Did I paint an impossible picture of Puller? Or, is it possible that as mammals who evolved in a world of predators that could eat us we may have some instinctive ability to inflict violence when threatened? Fight or flight is a well established instinctive response pattern, so contrary to the assertions in EoV, that “fight” part seems like a pretty straightforward universal starting point for violence. While it is true that human babies are ridiculously helpless, as they start to achieve early milestones of mobility and communication they can have their fight response triggered and have not yet achieved the cognitive skills to self-regulate their emotional reactions and the behaviors that follow.
Taking this fight mechanism as a starting point enables us to get a clearer idea of how Puller’s early instincts were also quickly moderated by socialization in the day care setting. He learned to handle his frustrations by using his words and developing more trusting relationships in the day care setting. The mechanism is dampened by a combination of social experiences and behavioral contingencies.
When he gets to be five years old his wonderfully loving and supportive parents do what most people do; they put him in a mainstream K-12 school system that sees itself as a crucially important societal institution responsible for delivering the skills and knowledge of literacy and numeracy. Puller is mostly told what to do and trained for obedience to the expectations of his teachers and the school administrators. His schools are all known for producing high achieving children. He learns that if he expresses his preferences, opinions, ideas, and passions the reception they get is entirely subject to the whims of the adults (or anyone else) in power. If they don’t like his notions or if they don’t like him, they have no obligation to treat him with respect and dignity (even though they will have written policies that say they do). They will follow the rules religiously, but they will also use those rules to belittle and annoy anyone they don’t like. He doesn’t learn this explicitly, he learns this through the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum is how brains interact with policies (in a broad sense) to create the limitations on what can happen in classrooms. The brain activities that embody his understanding are unconscious. The policies that taught him these lessons were not the written ones, they were the unwritten, implicit, and usually unconscious ones. They were taught through the high expectations and the unrelenting schedules that sacrifice sleep, relatedness, and autonomy. The school is proud that they produce such objectively competent scholars, but they ignore any evidence of the pervasive emotional and cognitive disengagement that plagues a majority of their students by the time they graduate. They proudly tout their anti-bullying policies, but they have never questioned the power structure that automatically generates those conflicts because the psychological needs of everyone in the system are mostly being neglected and/or thwarted.
By the time Puller is approaching graduation he has normalized the neglect of his psychological needs. He has developed what is technically called a controlled causality orientation. That means that he automatically views any institution that his mind unconsciously associates with school to be a place where he must fight for opportunities and fight against anyone who might be a threat to his power and influence. His schooling has taught him to access his toddler fight reaction and apply it in more subtle, non-physical, ways that are socially “acceptable.” His goals and aspirations as a member of the institution have been redirected from healthy and wholesome ends to establishing and maintaining power and control. He compensates for not having real autonomy by taking control of others. He considers joining the military because he is inspired by the obvious power wielded by soldiers and their commanders. He is confident from years of high achievement in school that he can attain a high rank through such a clear command and control structure. He looks forward to an institutional structure similar to the kind that he mastered in school, only with more clarity and purpose behind it. As a teenager preparing for his military service he begins to find online sources that romanticize military service and the hyper-masculine stereotypes that dominate portrayals of soldiers in movies and TV. At home his parents are proud of his accomplishments and only experience him as a confident athletic boy with leadership potential.
I could tell this story in a variety of ways from here, but we’ve already established that the outcome is the pulling of a trigger. It doesn’t matter whether it is before, during, or after his military service, or whether the final stage of his radicalization is online or in person. It doesn’t matter whether the gun was aimed at himself or someone else. The stage for the trigger pull was set by a school system that ignored or actively interfered with his ability to satisfy his psychological needs. A school system that normalized in him the dysfunctional “needs” for power and control rather than healthy expressions of the needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. The institution generated defensive psychological patterns and processes that became normalized in him as a worldview that made him distrustful of most, if not all, institutions and cynical about how other people would behave in them. The institution of school distorted his ability to perceive accurately, think clearly, and act effectively on self-selected goals and aspirations that would be appropriate to his situation. Due to his achievements he was able to parlay societal privileges into institutional roles that insulated him from most of the direct consequences of those distortions. He just went about his business until his case of the disease of supremacism became so acute that he pulled that trigger. Depending on what position he had acquired, he could be dead, in jail, or in a privileged place of honor with every (mostly implicit) expectation that he would never face a just accounting of the moral consequences of that particular trigger pull.
To review, Puller had a perfectly normal instinctive fight response as a two-year old and had that instinct suppressed by positive socialization. Then he began attending mainstream schools that maintained a public image of high achievement that he did his part to uphold. He obediently subsumed his psychological needs in pursuit of goals that the community thought would be good for him. He learned to normalize the neglect of his needs and developed a worldview that led him to expect the same of all institutions like school. When he turned his attention to military service he was exposed to attitudes and beliefs beyond school that added cultural overlays that intellectually and emotionally justified the power and control he craved as being good for him and everyone else as long as he was tough enough to endure, like a real man would. Those beliefs contributed to the worsening of his supremacism symptoms to the point that he pulled the trigger of a gun in an act of criminal violence. Etiologically we can say that the instinctive fight mechanism was present early on but was socialized into dormancy. His schooling began the process of reactivating that fight response through persistently neglecting and thwarting his psychological needs. He found institutional supports for his frustrations through taking control of other people through leadership positions, which reinforced the institutional patterns of need thwarting and neglect. When he encountered the military and the social reinforcement of supremacist beliefs, his mind more fully adapted to the disease which resulted in his ultimately enacting violence. The disease ran its course.
I want to address two other specific claims from the End of Violence. First, “[W]ith violence, there is nothing standing between exposure and infection” [EoV, p.45]. I doubt that this is true. This might seem true when taking the visual model as a given, but I don’t think it stands up to scrutiny under the SDT-based model. The visual model takes no account of the meaning-making processes that are required for the instinctive fight mechanism to be transformed into a cultural disease. The mechanism of exposure to the disease of violence is not the visual information in itself, it is the interpretation of that visual information as the thwarting of some needs. When violence is witnessed, the mechanisms that are constantly scanning for threats to need satisfaction would sound alarm bells. It is not the visual information that is triggering alarms, it is the interpretation of the consequences for need satisfaction. Dead and injured people have had obvious detriments to their most basic needs, and even if the harms were inflicted by your allies or friends you know that physical threats can do harms both intentionally and accidentally. The folks controlling the weapons inflicting harm are always a possible threat, so how you understand your relationship with them is critically important to how you respond. If you are thoroughly identified with and completely trusting of them, you will not feel threatened. You could, in fact, have your psychological needs satisfied by their actions if you have sufficiently close connections. Violence becomes associated with positive emotions through a combination of understanding your situation to be connected to important relationships and highly charged with meaning because of the autonomy and competence that can be expressed through it (even if those particular expressions are not healthy in themselves).
Those positive associations would likely be undermined by taking a bigger picture view of the situation, so the cultural reinforcement would usually entail narrow conceptions of righteousness and valor. Acute infections of supremacism reduce the world to black and white, good/bad scenarios in which the battle must be won through total control or utter annihilation. It is the disease that would say, “Your calling is fulfilled by triumph over the hard challenge of defeating evil enemies. Remember that only the weak and the evil will cast doubt on the righteousness of your cause.”
A cure for violence is not about preventing the visual input of violence, it is about reconnecting infected folks with their true needs and learning to reframe their lives around satisfying them while supporting everyone they care about to do the same, ideally in mutually supportive ways.
Before I conclude I will briefly point out that EoV takes an odd position on what counts as an “adequate” school on page 28; “[I]nadequate schools do not cause children to bully or beat up their classmates, but kids who fear being bullied or beat up at school will not be able to learn.”
The notion of “adequate” that is entailed by this statement is one that must focus exclusively on the delivery of skills and knowledge as the only true obligation of schools. If that is true then an adequate school would be exclusively defined by demonstrating the successful delivery of literacy and numeracy as reflected in grades and test scores. From my SDT-informed perspective I take exception to this notion and with a moment’s reflection on the moral issues at stake I suspect most folks would agree. Any school taking custody of a child, before any kind of interaction can take place, is both morally and legally responsible for fulfilling its duty of care. No school should be regarded as “adequate” as long as the needs of the children are not being met, independent of all grades and test scores. By these lights it is ONLY inadequate schools that have persistent or chronic bullying or violence between students. The disease of supremacism may be a proximate cause of bullying and interpersonal violence but the school is also a cause when it creates the conditions for the disease to spread unchecked. Neglecting or thwarting the primary psychological needs of students and/or teachers is the hot bed in which supremacism is cultivated.
In conclusion, I make the claim that violence is only the most salient symptom of the disease of supremacism. The natural precursor to the disease process naturally occurs in the form of the fight side of the famous fight or flight instinct. It sometimes manifests naturally and normally in toddlers who become frustrated or angry. While proper socialization normally and naturally suppresses the instinct for violence it can be reactivated and transformed into subtler expressions in institutional structures that normalize the neglect and/or thwarting of psychological needs of folks within the organization. The development of defensive attitudes and beliefs around those patterns of need neglect and/or thwarting are the cultural manifestation of the disease of supremacism, when they are shared and reinforced in organizational/institutional settings. Milder infections may involve only power structures that cause only psychological harms that do not rise to the level of physical violence (as appears to be the case in most mainstream schools today). If the disease process continues to develop it can reach a degree of intensity that can result in various forms of violence. More severe infections can result in a range of violent outcomes from interpersonal violence to countries at war. The cure for supremacism is need support at the personal level. The cure at the organizational level is to have participatory decision making and conflict resolution processes. Conflict resolution is the most important because decision making, independent of who makes the decisions, inevitably leads to conflicts. If they are not handled appropriately the result will inevitably thwart or neglect the needs of at least some of the parties to those conflicts. At the societal level the cure involves using the same kinds of cultural channels for meme propagation as the disease uses. The memes that cause the disease need to be driven out of the memetic codes of everyone in the population, both individually and organizationally.
The work of Slutkin’s organization Cure Violence when seen through the SDT lens provides abundant examples of the multi-level cure process. The numerous stories he tells about their methods and the numerous challenges they faced in getting their work done attest to how important the supporting of relatedness, autonomy, competence, and beneficence are to effectively addressing violence. The stories are compelling and well told.
When we examine the causes of both violence and free will we must take the psychological self into account. The science of the self is concerned with the metaphysical reality of how an individual person is able to modify the flows of energy and information in their environment for their own purposes. That self is not radically unconstrained, as some in the free will conversation might want or expect it to be. The psychological self involves a process of modifying the individual’s responses to contingencies in the environment, specifically by continuously, non-consciously evaluating their environment for opportunities or threats to need satisfaction.
The patterns of behavior are predictable when we understand both the contingencies and the systematic ways that individual minds evaluate those contingencies. The notion of free will is where the self makes a “choice” regarding the level of response that will follow from the contingencies that it is aware of. The exercise of the will is not in a singular decision; it is in the pattern of responses over many decisions. The self is an active participant in the construction and maintenance of the environment in which it responds. The central factors of this implicit consideration are needs. There can be other factors, but in a healthy individual the needs will be central. Unhealthy individuals pursue substitutes that may only roughly approximate the needs (e.g. power and control instead of autonomy).
Violence is a symptom of a cultural disease process that values power and control over healthy expressions of autonomy and relatedness. The disease builds on evolutionarily valuable instincts for fighting off predators. The disease process begins with normalizing need neglect, proceeds to normalizing need thwarting, and, at its most extreme, culminates with a system of beliefs and values that take violence to be both a necessary and desirable part of life.
References:
Anderson, J., & Winthrop, R. (2025). The disengaged teen: Helping kids learn better, feel better, and live better. Crown Publishing Group.
Biglan, A. (2015). The nurture effect: How the science of human behavior can improve our lives and our world. New Harbinger Publications.
Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2019). Brick by brick: The origins, development, and future of self-determination theory. In A. J. Elliot (Ed.), Advances in motivation science (Vol. 6, pp. 111–156). Elsevier Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adms.2019.01.001
Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.
Sheldon, K. M. (2022). Freely determined: What the new psychology of the self teaches us about how to live. Basic Books
Slutkin, G. (2026) The end of violence: Eliminating the world’s most dangerous epidemic. New York, NY: Little, Brown, & Company.
Tan, L., Sosa, F., Talbot, E., Berg, D., Eversz, D., & Hackenberg, T.D. (2014). Effects of predictability and competition on group and individual choice in a free-ranging foraging environment, Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior. 101(2):288-302. doi: 10.1002/jeab.76.
Winthrop, R., Shoukry, Y., & Nitkin, D. (2025). (rep.). The disengagement gap: Why student engagement isn’t what parents expect. Brookings Institute. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disengagement-gap/.
