Three Recent Books on Social Media Manipulation, Misunderstanding Science, and Caring about Future People: Opportunities for Behavior Analysts

This article reviews three recent books that introduce challenging insights to and suggest critical implications for how behavioral science can address the broad, vexing social issues that challenge human well-being. The Chaos Machine (Fisher, 2022), How the World Really Works (Smil, 2022), and What We Owe the Future (MacAskill, 2022) offer provocative discussions of increasingly important social issues—the impact of social media, the consequences of misunderstanding science, and overcoming the delay discounting that will affect future generations, respectively—that can inform behavior scientists’ thinking about improving the future while presenting a multitude of opportunities to advance our science.