For Yet Better Science

The best science for better  lives. Explore the latest high-quality research from The Lancet Group.

Online jerks and offline jerks are largely one and the same. Here’s how to keep them from affecting your happiness.  

They're out there, everywhere. But who are they, where do they come from and how do you deal with them?  

Scientific progress has yielded technological innovations that have improved the lives of billions of people. But often, those people feel detached from how scientific research is done. EU-funded researchers aim to close the gap by involving citizens more directly in scientific research.  

Collaborations between the academy and governments promise to improve the lives of people, the operations of government, and our understanding of human behavior and public policy. This review shows that the evidence-informed policy movement consists of two main threads: ( a ) an effort to invent new policies using insights from the social and behavioral science consensus about human behavior and institutions and ( b ) an effort to evaluate the success of governmental policies using transparent and high-integrity research designs such as randomized controlled trials. We argue that the problems of each approach may be solved or at least well addressed by teams that combine the two. We also suggest that governmental actors ought to want to learn about  why  a new policy works as much as they want to know  that  the policy works. We envision a future evidence-informed public policy practice that ( a ) involves cross-sector collaborations using the latest theory plus deep contextual knowled