Persistent racial disparities in health represent a significant social and moral dilemma, as well as a serious public health concern. Racism is a fundamental cause of disease, and is physically embodied through social and psychobiological mechanisms. A social toxin, racism can be experienced environmentally at the area-level, as well as interpersonally through inter-personal experiences of racism, which impact biological processes underlying multiple disease pathways including via accelerated aging at the cellular level.

Most causal processes of interest to social researchers are likely to depend on the specifics of individuals, groups, and their social contexts. I will argue that much of this heterogeneity will be not be captured by conventional explanatory variables.The result will be unmodeled heterogeneity in causal effects. These, in turn, will lead to failures of replication and flawed tests of theoretical predictions. In this talk I lay out ways to tackle the problem using intensive longitudinal data and, in some cases, Bayesian methods of estimation.

Risk taking underlies many behavioral and health problems that contribute to the public health burden during the adolescent period. Recent advances in developmental neuroscience have identified key neurobiological underpinnings of adolescent risk taking, but there is little understanding of how these neural processes interact with key social processes. In this talk, I will present research unpacking the neural processes by which family and peers, the two most influential social relationships in adolescents’ lives, affect risk taking. A more nuanced understanding of how family and peers differentially modulate neurocognitive development and risk taking will help us to understand the situations that may hinder or promote successful decision-making, creating vulnerabilities or protection for risky behavior.

Citizens complete a survey the day before a major election; a change in the survey items’ grammatical structure increases turnout by 11 percentage points. People answer a single question; their romantic relationships improve over several weeks. At-risk students complete a 1-hour reading-and-writing exercise; their grades rise and their health improves for the next 3 years. Each statement may sound outlandish—more science fiction than science. Yet each represents the results of a recent study in psychological science (respectively, Bryan, Walton, Rogers, & Dweck, 2011; Marigold, Holmes, & Ross, 2007, 2010; Walton & Cohen, 2011). These studies have shown, more than one might have thought, that specific psychological processes contribute to major social problems. These processes act as levers in complex systems that give rise to social problems. Precise interventions that alter them—what I call “wise interventions”—can produce significant benefits and do so over time. What are wise interventions? How do they work? And how can they help solve social problems?