ProSocial World

09/09/2026

Is AI making us all think the same?

A growing body of research is looking at whether generative AI is narrowing how we think and create.

Some findings: AI-generated stories cluster together stylistically far more than human-written ones do. People who brainstorm with AI tools often rate their own ideas as more creative, but the pool of ideas across a group becomes less diverse. Editing text through an LLM can strip out markers of an individual writer's personality and background. And in one study, people who'd had access to an AI tool were still giving more similar answers to each other two months later, even after the access was gone.

None of this means AI can't be useful… but it's a good prompt to ask whether a tool is expanding your thinking or actually flattening it.

Read the article here:

Researchers worry that generative AI is homogenizing culture and cognition.

08/17/2026

💡The Next Economy MBA from our friends LIFT Economy is a nine-month program designed to equip entrepreneurs and changemakers with the tools they need for transformative change.

Learn more and sign up for a free intro:
🔗 https://go.lifteconomy.com/nextmba

🎯Use Code PROSOCIALMB@ — and get 10% OFF!

08/12/2026

Only a few days left to access our self-paced course, Inner Transformation: An Introduction to Interspirituality, for free! It's a self-paced journey through three themes (Interconnectedness, Inner Transformation, and Social Engagement) drawing on the wisdom of diverse spiritual traditions to help you tend to your inner life and show up more fully in the world.
https://courses.prosocial.world/course/inner-transform-interspirituality
Use code TRANSFORM100 at checkout – offer ends August 14th.

07/31/2026

We're excited to share the launch of "Inner Transformation: An Introduction to Interspirituality", a self-paced course on inner transformation and how it shapes the way we show up in the world. It moves through three themes — Interconnectedness, Inner Transformation, and Social Engagement — with short videos, reflection, and simple daily practices throughout.

https://courses.prosocial.world/course/inner-transform-interspirituality

To celebrate the launch, we’re offering the course free to our community until August 14th: Use code TRANSFORM100 at checkout.

07/24/2026

Is there really a global crisis of trust in science? A new Nature feature digs into the data -- and the picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest.

Globally, trust in scientists remains high: a 68-country survey found a "moderately high" average trust score of 3.6 out of 5, and scientists consistently rank above journalists, business leaders, and politicians. But the headline numbers hide real fractures: trust is declining in specific groups, particularly along political lines in the United States, where confidence among Republican-leaning people fell from 85% to 65% between 2020 and 2025.

Researchers suggest the drop in trust in science in the US looks a lot like the drop in trust in other institutions -- police, business, government. "There's an institutional crisis that is being reflected in science."

Read the full article:

Some say there’s a global crisis of trust — but research reveals where the real problems lie.

07/24/2026

Helen Lewis's Atlantic essay on retracing Darwin's Galápagos voyage complicates the origin story you may have learned. Darwin spent just five weeks in the islands and landed on only four of the thirteen major ones. He didn't label most of his bird specimens by island — that painstaking work of proving finch variation came from Peter and Rosemary Grant, who studied one uninhabited island every year for four decades starting in 1973.

What actually made Darwin remarkable, Lewis argues, wasn't a lightning-bolt insight — it was that he was relentlessly empirical. He measured, cataloged, and observed everything, however tedious or unpleasant (he once drank tortoise bladder fluid "for science"). Decades later, he spent eight years dissecting barnacles just to be sure his theory could withstand scrutiny.

Big ideas rarely arrive as revelation. They accumulate through years of unglamorous work.

What Darwin saw in the Galápagos

07/15/2026

"We thrive not by competing, but by cooperating." – Elinor Ostrom

The strongest teams aren’t built on competition but on trust, shared purpose, and collaboration.

Learn how to create the right environments for cooperative in the Becoming ProSocial course this August!
Enroll now: https://courses.prosocial.world/course/becoming-prosocial-0826

Use code MIDYEAR26 for 25% off until July17th!

This guided learning journey will introduce the basics of the ProSocial method as an applied change process and welcome participants into our growing global ProSocial Commons community. This course provides weekly peer-group meetings to discuss, explore and deepen the work. Participants will be supp...

07/14/2026

What would an MBA look like for leaders who want to create a racially just, regenerative, and inclusive economy for all life? The Next Economy MBA from our friends LIFT Economy is a nine-month program designed to equip impact entrepreneurs and changemakers with the tools they need for transformative change, with a growing network of 800+ alumni.

Learn more about their upcoming spring cohort and sign up for a free intro:
🔗 https://go.lifteconomy.com/nextmba

07/10/2026

Did you know the way a group talks amongst itself — the language patterns, the self-rules people apply, the norms that keep showing up — can predict how that group is doing months before it shows up anywhere else.

That's the premise behind a free framework our research team has been working on: ROE-M'ing Prosocially. It's built for researchers working with groups in applied settings. And yes, it's pretty academic — but the core idea is simple: language carries more information about a group's health than most of us think to look for.

🔗 https://www.prosocial.world/special-publications

07/08/2026

Cooperation, not just coercion, built a lot of what came before us.

In Classical Athens, the council chamber was round. So was the council house the Muscogee people built centuries later, an ocean apart, with benches lining the walls so everyone in the room could see everyone else's face while they argued something out. Neither group copied the other. They arrived at the same design because the design allowed for transparency and a space for a group to decide something together.

Archaeologist David Carballo's new article looks at what the physical remains of ancient societies tell us about how they governed themselves — and it turns out the story of "small egalitarian bands slowly became big authoritarian empires" is much less universal than we thought.

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Archaeology shows cooperation, not just coercion, shaped early large-scale societies.