She added, sheepishly, “I guess I’ll go into consulting?” “I feel like the job I want doesn’t even exist,” Shankar told her. While there, she had tea with her college mentor, the Yale psychologist Laurie Santos. One day in 2012, she flew from California to a friend’s wedding in Connecticut. She didn’t want to spend her life in a suit, or in a lab, or on a remote island, dodging monkey excretions. Behavioral science’s bro-culture adaptations-the life hack, the quantified self-had proliferated. In the field of cognitive science, many of the opportunities for an aspiring researcher were of a particular type, geared toward helping to make big companies richer, or rich people thinner, or thin people more alluring on algorithm-based dating sites. (For several years, she was taught by Itzhak Perlman.) A hand injury derailed her musical aspirations, and, while recovering at home, in Connecticut, she happened upon a book by the psychologist Steven Pinker and became enamored of cognitive science.Īs an undergraduate at Yale, she conducted research on primates, travelling to a tropical island to study rhesus macaques, with the aim of mapping a feature of cognition known as “essentialism”: “Does a monkey know what makes a coconut a coconut, and an apple an apple?” (On the island, she learned to dodge monkey urine from the tree canopy overhead the macaques carried a version of herpes B that could be lethal to humans.) Later, as a Rhodes Scholar and doctoral student at Oxford, she visited a famous flavor factory in Ohio, where she tested whether she could hijack the sensory perceptions of professional flavorists: giving them a lime-tinted beverage, say, that had the taste of tangerines.Īfter Shankar did her postdoctoral research, at Stanford’s Decision Neuroscience Lab, she began looking for a job. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she once thought she’d become a classical violinist. Shankar got interested in the field as a teen-ager. How did you end up in such an offbeat, unconventional and unique career? Usually, the initiatives had, at their core, one question: Could the growing body of knowledge about the quirks of the human brain be used to improve public policy? Within two years, the small group of scientists had become a staff of dozens-including an agricultural economist, an industrial psychologist, and “human-centered designers”-working with more than twenty federal agencies on seventy projects, from fixing gaps in veterans’ health care to relieving student debt. Shankar held one of the more unorthodox jobs in the Obama White House, running the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, also known as the President’s “nudge unit.” When she launched the team, in early 2014, it felt, Shankar recalls, “like a startup in my parents’ basement”-no budget, no mandate, no bona-fide employees. A week after Donald Trump’s election, a thirty-year-old cognitive scientist named Maya Shankar purchased a plane ticket to Flint, Michigan.
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