The Russell Sage Foundation is dedicated to the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States. It supports innovative research on social, political, and economic inequalities and aims to enhance the understanding and mitigation of factors contributing to inequalities. The foundation fosters projects exploring the distribution of outcomes across various groups and encourages methodological diversity and interdisciplinary collaboration in research.
The Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context program seeks to merge insights from behavioral economics and human behavior in context to enhance our understanding of decision-making processes and behavior in economic, social, political, and psychological realms. It emphasizes interdisciplinary research from economics, psychology, political science, sociology, law, public policy, and more, aiming to explore how individual, group, and institutional behaviors influence and are shaped by social structures. The program focuses on areas such as biases and misperceptions, institutions and policies, motivations and incentives, habits and preferences, and the role of emotions in social, economic, and political activities. It encourages research on how these factors affect attitudes and behaviors in various contexts like employment, criminal justice, housing, politics, and immigration, intending to inform more effective policies and interventions.