The Science of Human Behavior, Measured.
Most of us belong to groups we feel proud of – a nation, a faith, a profession, a football club. Feeling good about your group is normal and, for the most part, healthy. But there is a particular way of relating to a group that looks like pride on the surface and works like something … Read more
Here is an uncomfortable fact about the science of human behavior: most of what we know about “people” was learned by studying a very particular, very unusual slice of people. For decades, psychology built its theories on one narrow population and quietly assumed the findings applied to everyone. They often don’t. This is the WEIRD … Read more
This week, Georgia’s State Audit Office opened an inquiry into the funding of the Tbilisi School of Political Studies, and government figures have publicly accused the School of promoting radicalism. Reading the coverage, I kept thinking about my own time there – because the place being described bears almost no resemblance to the place I … Read more
Buried inside the PISA questionnaire, alongside the reading passages and mathematics problems, is a deceptively simple question: What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old? Fifteen-year-olds answer in their own words, and their responses are coded using ISCO-08, the International Standard Classification of Occupations. The result is … Read more
On September 9, 2026, the OECD released the PISA 2025 results, and Georgia had good news to celebrate. The country improved across all three core domains compared to 2022. The government highlighted that Georgia ranked first among 91 participating countries for improvement in science, achieved its best mathematics and science results in a decade, and … Read more
On August 30, 2026, Georgia’s Minister of Education announced that 1,795 applicants who passed the minimum competency threshold on this year’s Unified National Examinations, but did not secure a place at any university, would be given a second chance. In the first half of September, registration will open for the vacant seats remaining at state … Read more
Every summer, thousands of Georgian school-leavers sit the Unified National Examinations, rank the university programs they want, and are placed according to their scores. The results are a goldmine of data about what students want, what they can access, and how a whole academic field is structured. This year I pulled together the numbers for … Read more
Say you’ve found a well-validated English questionnaire, a depression scale, a personality inventory, a measure of job satisfaction, and you want to use it in your own country, in your own language. The obvious first move is to translate it. Get a good translator, convert the items, and start collecting data. This is exactly the … Read more
Think about what happens when someone tells you they went to a restaurant. You don’t need them to explain that they were seated, looked at a menu, ordered from a waiter, ate, paid, and left. You already know all of that. You have a mental template, a script for how a restaurant visit unfolds, and … Read more
The p-value is the most used and most misunderstood number in all of statistics. It appears in nearly every empirical paper in psychology, medicine, and the social sciences. Researchers chase it, reviewers demand it, and careers are built on getting it below a certain threshold. And yet, if you ask most people who use p-values … Read more