Who We Am is bad grammar to remind us that we humans are mostly irrational and that our individual and social dimensions are impressively intertwined. Besides that, we like saying “hooey-yam.”

For decades, there has been a growing disparity between what researchers and other keen observers of human nature understand, and the conventional and prevailing wisdom that determines policies affecting everything from education to public health, from the way companies are run to the ways parents raise their children. In short, our best knowledge is neither well integrated across disciplinary domains or into our public consciousness.

The purpose of the Who We Am project is to stimulate transdisciplinary discourse and research at intersection points in the wide landscape of human nature-related knowledge and research. We believe these areas represent the most fertile ground for sparking insights likely to lead to making real progress on our stickiest, longstanding social problems, as well as increasing our ability to reach our greatest human potential. Real-world problems are transdisciplinary by nature, particularly in the multi-layered, multi-factorial, and dynamic realm of human behavior.

The project has three aims:

• To attract and host multidisciplinary, multi-perspective discourse about human nature and behavior that will illuminate promising areas for research.
• To develop research projects that will add to the human-behavior knowledge base and result in effective, real-world interventions.
• To develop ways of weaving the key knowledge about human nature into the broader conventional and prevailing wisdom where it will have the best chance of doing good.