RESEARCH
Researching Positive Peace
Understanding how people, organizations, technologies, and institutions create measurable patterns of trust, reciprocity, cooperation, and human flourishing.
RESEARCH AGENDA
What We Study
We investigate peace as a behavioral phenomenon—something that can be designed for, measured, and scaled across boundaries of culture, politics, and identity.
Peace Data
How positive engagement can be measured, observed, and valued.
Peace Engineering
How systems, technologies, and institutions can be designed to strengthen social outcomes.
Peace Finance
How capital allocation influences trust, cooperation, opportunity, and human flourishing.
Peace Technology
How digital platforms, AI systems, and emerging technologies influence human behavior and collective wellbeing.
Human Flourishing
How dignity, belonging, agency, meaningful work, and wellbeing emerge within social systems.
CURRENT FOCUS
AI as Persuasive Technology
AI is the most powerful new form of persuasive technology in human history.
Just as social media reshaped behavior at scale over the last two decades, AI is now shaping how we work, learn, communicate, and collaborate—often invisibly.
Our research explores:
How AI is being designed to influence human decision-making, habits, and relationships.
How AI might inadvertently amplify bias, conflict, or exclusion.
How AI can instead be engineered to foster positive peace: empathy, cooperation, fairness, and sustainable flourishing.
The possibility of AI as Peace Tech—a co-pilot that augments human dignity and capability, rather than replacing people.
We are building the conceptual and measurement frameworks that allow policymakers, companies, and communities to see AI not only as a technology, but as a behavioral environment with profound peace and justice implications.
HOW WE WORK
Research Methods
Our research blends behavioral science, engineering, and data-driven design.
Behavior Design
Applying the Stanford Fogg Behavior Model and the Person-Action-Context (PAC) model to understand and shape pro-social behaviors.
Engagement Architecture
Using loops, feedback, and play dynamics to design environments that encourage repeatable, positive engagement.
Data Science for Peace
Developing new metrics and data standards, such as the Peace Data Standard, that allow us to quantify trust, cooperation, and cross-boundary interaction in real time.
Systems Prototyping
Building and testing interventions—digital, financial, civic, or organizational—that can be replicated and scaled.
Frameworks
Peace Data Standard— a practical and theoretical framework for measuring peace outcomes in digital interactions.
Pattern Language for Peace
Minimum Acceptable Peaceful Interactions (MAPIs) — metrics for detecting and scaling the smallest unit of peaceful engagement.
Peace Credits — an emerging concept analogous to carbon credits, designed to reward individuals, organizations, and communities for creating measurable positive peace.
From Research to Practice
Our research does not stay in the lab. It is continually tested in the field—through city labs, corporate partnerships, cultural transformation projects, and citizen diplomacy campaigns.
For examples of how our research becomes practice, see our Projects page.
For peer-reviewed outputs and conceptual frameworks, visit our Publications.