Our Mission
To effectively improve society
by helping people improve their decision-making and make positive behavior changes
with our research-based tools, articles, and other content.
How We Work Toward Our Mission
Free, research-based, interactive tools
To help you understand yourself, improve your mood, accomplish your goals, make better decisions, recognize faulty logic, understand the world, and improve relationships.
The Clearer Thinking Podcast
A weekly podcast about ideas that truly matter. Full of powerful, practical concepts and frameworks, and intellectual conversations!
Transparent Replications
Conducting rapid replications of recently published psychology and human behavior studies in prominent academic journals, to shift incentives towards more replicable, reliable methods.
The Clearer Thinking
Blog
Regular posts about new tools and mini-courses to help you, and articles articulating important ideas.
Our own research
We design and run studies to test claims made in academic literature, as well as the effectiveness of our own tools. This research helps us to build the best possible tools for helping people.
Why do we do this?
Shortcomings of the human mind inflict significant costs on just about every individual, organization, and government. For example, cognitive biases harm our ability to make helpful, rational decisions about the things we care about, while positive habits are vital for sustained progress towards long-term goals, but they can be difficult to form, and the best practices for creating them remain a matter of guesswork for most people.
Scientists in fields like psychology, neuroscience, and economics have developed effective tactics for countering many of these problems, but very few of us have integrated these insights and techniques into our personal and professional lives in a consistent way.
Our aim is to help you benefit from these insights, by building engaging, interactive tools that help you understand yourself more deeply, identify your biases, form new positive habits, and make better decisions.
Why don’t we charge for our modules?
When we say that it’s our aim to improve society effectively, that means we want to have the biggest impact we can given our focus area, abilities, resources, and other constraints. Here’s how we think about our impact:
Impact = number of people reached x average value we provide to each such person
We believe that, if we charged for our content, we would reach far fewer people without increasing the value of our content enough to compensate. This means that, as of right now, we believe we can best achieve our mission by providing all our content free of charge.
This project is financed by multiple sources of income, for instance, grants and funding from Spark Wave.
Privacy
Some of our tools ask personal questions, and we take your privacy very seriously. We do not sell (or otherwise make money from) your data.
As you make progress through our programs, we save data about your choices for you in our database. We will never share data about your usage of our programs in combination with any of your personally identifying information, unless you explicitly give us permission to do so. The most common reason for giving this permission occurs when someone loses their progress in a program and asks us to find their data and share it with them, so that they can re-enter their answers (this doesn’t happen often!).
We may use some data in aggregate – that is, in combination with other user information without any means of identifying you specifically – for research purposes. We use the data generated by programs in order to improve those programs and to help us build better programs in the future, as well as to help answer research questions. To give one example, we may analyze what percentage of people using our Tactics for Happier Living tool disagree with the statement “My purpose in life is clear” as this kind of information can direct our future efforts to make content that helps people.
For more details, you can read our full Privacy Policy and/or Terms of Service.
How do you use our Clearer Thinking tools? (a short video explainer)
