- Neil Lewis
- Communications, Cornell University
- “What Is ‘Reasonable’? How the Legal System Shapes Citizen Judgments”
Neil Lewis, Jr. is a behavioral, intervention, and meta-scientist at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medicine, where he is an assistant professor in the department of communication, division of general internal medicine, and graduate field of psychology. Lewis is also a science communicator who writes about the application of social and behavioral science research in policy and practice at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere. Lewis received his B.A. in economics and psychology from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Lewis’s research examines how people’s social contexts and identities influence their motivation to pursue their goals, and their success in goal pursuit efforts. He is particularly interested in the implications of these processes for (in)equity in education, health, and environmental outcomes, as well as their implications for the efficacy of interventions and policies to improve equity in these and other intersecting domains. Lewis has won numerous awards and honors for this research; in 2019 he was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science and in 2020 he won the SAGE Young Scholar early career award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.