By Asep Darmawan 
By Crystal Hall
“I knew quite well that equal justice was an aspiration. I knew that the force of the law was applied unevenly, sometimes by design. But I also knew that what was wrong with the system didn’t need to be an immutable fact. And I wanted to be part of changing that.”
These words, penned by Vice President Kamala Harris, serve as a foundational mission statement for her career. As she navigates the final, high-stakes stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign, these reflections have taken on new resonance. They represent a paradox that defines modern leadership and social progress: how does one work within a flawed, often inequitable system while simultaneously striving to dismantle its structural injustices?
As the first woman of color to lead a major U.S. party’s presidential ticket, Harris is under a microscope. Her opponents frequently leverage identity politics to challenge both her professional record as a prosecutor and the broader efficacy of the Biden-Harris administration. Yet, beneath the political theater, her career offers a profound case study for those of us in the behavioral sciences. Her approach—acknowledging the deep-seated flaws of institutional power while refusing to succumb to fatalism—is a necessary template for a field currently undergoing its own internal reckoning.
The Intersection of Policy and Individual Agency
To understand the current discourse surrounding Harris, one must view her through the lens of institutional complexity. The American criminal legal system is not a neutral arbiter; it is a repository of historical biases, socioeconomic disparities, and policy choices that have disproportionately impacted marginalized communities.
For the behavioral science community, Harris’s perspective on these institutions is illuminating. For decades, our field has operated under the assumption that social issues are isolated puzzles, solvable by identifying individual cognitive biases or decision-making patterns. We have mastered the "nudge"—a gentle push toward a "better" choice. However, a quote like Harris’s exposes the limitation of this narrow focus. Human behavior does not exist in a vacuum. It is inextricably interwoven with structural forces—institutional racism, economic stratification, and historical marginalization. If we are to truly influence behavior, we must expand our focus to the architecture that contains it.
Chronology of a Shift: From Nudge to Systemic Design
The history of applied behavioral science is a narrative of individual-level interventions. Since the early 2000s, the field has been dominated by the "nudge" theory, which posits that small, low-cost modifications to choice architecture can significantly improve outcomes in health, finance, and social welfare.
The Era of Individualism (2005–2015)
During this period, the "nudge" was the gold standard. Behavioral scientists partnered with government agencies to simplify tax forms, encourage retirement savings, and improve student loan enrollment. The premise was that the system was fundamentally functional, and the individual just needed a better "choice environment" to make optimal decisions.
The Awakening (2016–2022)
As global social movements—most notably the racial justice uprisings following the murder of George Floyd—brought structural racism to the forefront of the public consciousness, behavioral scientists began to question the "neutrality" of their work. A growing body of research suggested that ignoring the environment in which choices are made—the systemic barriers—rendered many interventions ineffective or, worse, exclusionary.
The Current Paradigm: Antiracist Design (2023–Present)
Today, a new wave of practitioners is arguing that behavioral science must move beyond the nudge. This current era is defined by a shift toward systems thinking. It is no longer enough to design a policy that "works" on average; we must design policies that account for the historical and structural realities of the people they are intended to serve.
Supporting Data and the "Contextual" Variable
The shift toward systemic awareness is backed by emerging research. A seminal paper by Joel Le Forestier and Neil Lewis, Jr., demonstrates that identity concealment patterns—the tendency for individuals to hide aspects of their race, sexuality, or identity—are not merely individual traits. Instead, they are direct responses to systemic environments.
When individuals occupy spaces that are perceived as hostile or unwelcoming, their cognitive load increases, and their behavioral choices shift toward self-preservation. For a behavioral scientist, this data is transformative. If we design a public health initiative without accounting for a community’s historical mistrust of the medical establishment, that initiative will fail, regardless of how "optimally" it is nudged. The problem is not the individual’s hesitancy; the problem is the system’s failure to establish the baseline safety required for trust.
Official Responses and the Political Crucible
The criticism leveled at Vice President Harris’s record is, in many ways, a microcosm of the skepticism applied to all institutional reformers. Her opponents argue that her past as a prosecutor is incompatible with her current platform of social equity.
However, this binary view—that one must be either "pro-system" or "anti-system"—is exactly what the field of behavioral science is now seeking to transcend. In our forthcoming book, Antiracist by Design: Reimagining Applied Behavioral Science, my co-author Mindy Hernandez and I argue that change is not a binary choice. It is a process of "redesigning from within."
We have seen that when leaders—or behavioral scientists—ignore the structural reality, they lose the ability to influence meaningful change. Conversely, when they acknowledge the system’s flaws while utilizing their position to adjust the levers of power, they create the potential for systemic evolution. Harris’s career serves as a political mirror for this scientific dilemma: the work is rarely clean, often contradictory, and perpetually incomplete.
Implications for the Future of Behavioral Science
If we are to evolve as a field, we must adopt three core mandates:
1. The Systems Analysis Requirement
Every intervention must begin with a comprehensive systems analysis. We must map the environmental constraints of the population we are studying. Who benefits from this intervention? Who is harmed? What historical biases are baked into the "default" settings of the policy? By identifying these factors, we can move from simple optimization to equitable design.
2. Participatory Research Methods
We must move away from the "ivory tower" model of design. Participatory methods, which bring the impacted communities into the room during the design phase, are essential. This is not just an ethical imperative; it is a scientific one. Lived experience provides data that surveys and focus groups cannot capture. By bridging the divide between researchers and the public, we build the trust necessary for our interventions to actually reach those who need them most.
3. Redefining "Success"
Currently, behavioral science defines success by the efficacy of a specific nudge. We need to expand this definition. Success should also include the mitigation of structural barriers and the promotion of institutional equity. If an intervention succeeds by nudging an individual but fails to address the systemic bias that necessitated the nudge in the first place, have we truly succeeded?
A Call to Action
The path forward is, as Harris noted, difficult. It requires us to look at the systems that shape human choice—not as static, neutral entities, but as dynamic, flawed, and improvable structures.
For those of us in the behavioral science community, the message is clear: the era of the isolated nudge is over. We have a moral and professional obligation to broaden our scope. We must move beyond the individual actor and confront the systemic forces that govern their lives. We must be willing to be "Antiracist by Design," which means accepting that our interventions will never be perfect, but they can always be more equitable.
As we look toward the future—both in the political landscape and in our research labs—we must embrace the complexity of the human experience. We must be willing to work within systems that are, by design, imperfect, while relentlessly pushing them toward a more just reality. If we can do that, we won’t just be nudging individuals; we will be redesigning the world.
Iffa Jayyana 
Ammar Sabilarrohman 
Neng Nana 