This article was originally published in the Human Progress.
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Let’s start with the Progress Pulse Initiative, a project of yours that sets out to explore a fundamental question: do Americans believe humans will make significant progress on big societal and global challenges in the coming decades, making life better for future generations, or do they think we will fail?
Tell me about this project and what you found.
This initiative is part of a broader project I call “the psychology of progress.” In the progress space, there’s a lot of interest in economic policies, the technological and scientific drivers of progress, and institutional forces. All very important, of course. But when I started following the different thinkers in this space, I noticed there wasn’t a lot of talk about what’s happening inside individual human minds. But psychology is important to progress. Think about individual traits related to progress, like curiosity, openness, creativity, resilience, and motivation. And then there are questions like, how do you lead teams? How do you cultivate talent? And critically, culture matters a lot to progress.
