Institute of Behavioral Science

How late can you wait? Turns out, we still don’t know

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:28:07 +0000

How late can you wait? Turns out, we still don’t know Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/19/2026 - 14:28

Tiffany Plate

New research from �鶹��ý Associate Professor Amanda Stevenson uses math and demography to show women’s ability to get pregnant doesn’t necessarily decrease with age

Amanda Stevenson’s affection for her mentor, fellow demographer Jane Menken, is obvious. She’s quick to rave about Menken’s legacy, as well as her smarts: “She’s a super genius.”

Stevenson, associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, speaks especially reverently about a significant paper Menken published in 1985 while serving as president of the Population Association of America (Menken is now a distinguished professor emerita in sociology and director of the CU Population Center).

In the now-40-year-old paper, “Age and Infertility” (published in Science), Menken took a mathematical approach to synthesizing historical and contemporary data about fecundability; her models made it clear that we do not have enough evidence to link a woman’s age to her ability to get pregnant.

Amanda Stevenson is a �鶹��ý associate professor of sociology.

It boils down to the selection inherently involved in tracking aging women’s fecundability, Menken argued.

“Fecundability is a measure of your monthly probability of conception when you're trying,” Stevenson says. “But if you get pregnant really easily, then you may never actually have to try to get pregnant. So we would never observe your fecundability in any study, no matter how well designed. Demographers know this means data from conception-seekers cannot tell us when fecundability declines or by how much.”

This year, Stevenson, along with Menken and Leslie Root (who serves as associate director of the CU Population Center), set out to emphasize this fact through a clear mathematical simulation. The model they created illustrates that evidence for age-related fertility decline is weaker than most people—and medical societies—think. The results were published in a new paper in the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2026.

Righting a wrong

One of Stevenson’s key reasons for undertaking this study is that she constantly sees Menken’s paper cited incorrectly by major medical organizations. “They say that fertility falls off a cliff at 35 because they misinterpret one of the paper’s figures that includes birth data from the 1700s and 1800s,” Stevenson says. “This is, like, misinformation at the highest level.”

First, it’s important to distinguish between fertility and fecundability. “The thing we call fertility is a colloquial concept that cannot be well defined mathematically,” says Stevenson. “It’s basically all the factors that go into whether or not you can have a baby.”

Fecundability, on the other hand, is the statistical probability of a woman getting pregnant every cycle. It’s quantifiable, which makes it much easier for demographers like Stevenson to study.

Stevenson thus set out to create a mathematical simulation to demonstrate that we know less about fecundability than we think we do.

“It's not that I would say that fecundability doesn't decline with age,” she says. “The data can show us how much it declines due to selection and age together. But we don't know how much of that is from selection and how much of it is from age.”

She thinks this uncertainty is worth clarifying to women who could be structuring their whole lives around the suspected drop in fecundability around their mid-30s. “Women all over the world, particularly now in this country, are taught to be terrified of these particular ages,” she says.

A complex method to demonstrate a simple truth

The simulation Stevenson created to help clarify this concept is a complex mathematical model that illustrates how we could see fecundability “decline” with age in a world where no one’s fecundability ever actually declined.

The results show that, if every woman’s ability to become pregnant stays the same as she ages, conception will still appear to get harder with age simply because fecundability itself influences when someone tries to get pregnant, on average. In a population with more varied levels of fecundability, the age-related dropoff is more apparent.

“We see it changing with age, but that fact just tells us that people who are trying at different ages have different levels of fecundability,” says Stevenson. “Not that individuals’ fecundability declines as they age.”

It’s worth noting that there are still certain medical issues that can arise in pregnancy for women as they age. Women of “advanced maternal age”—over 35—still carry more risks for things like preeclampsia, gestational diabetes or low birthweight.

Taking selection out of the equation

Stevenson is actively seeking funding for the next stage of this project, which she believes will provide a clearer picture of age-related fecundability. The study subjects? Women who have not had substantial exposure to sperm prior to trying to become pregnant—in other words, non-heterosexual women. The project would be led by Stevenson and the rest of the team behind the current paper, along with a sociologist who studies queer families.

“If we had a population who were trying to get pregnant at different ages, but those ages weren’t influenced by fecundability itself, we could potentially uncover a real age pattern,” Stevenson says.

All of this work is aimed at dialing back the fear that aging women can experience when trying to conceive. “We need to figure out what the real pattern is, because obviously it matters,” Stevenson says. “People need to be able to make informed decisions about their lives.”

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New research from �鶹��ý Associate Professor Amanda Stevenson uses math and demography to show women’s ability to get pregnant doesn’t necessarily decrease with age.

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Scientists consider an AI-driven approach to generating disaster alerts

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Scientists consider an AI-driven approach to generating disaster alerts Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/08/2026 - 07:00

Tiffany Plate

Researchers at �鶹��ý’s Institute of Behavioral Science and the Natural Hazards Center are finding new ways to personalize alerts that could help people take more timely action in disaster scenarios

Wildfires. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Floods. The increased frequency of natural hazards and disasters cropping up all over the world is staggering—as is the potential loss of human life.

To limit casualties amid these disasters, emergency management organizations use a variety of methods to communicate warnings and evacuation alerts. Whether or not people comply with them is another story.

“We know that many individuals don’t really pay attention to disaster alerts until it's too late to take any kind of action,” says Amir Behzadan, professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and fellow in the Institute of Behavioral Science’s Natural Hazards Center. “We're trying to bridge this gap by ensuring that disaster warnings translate into timely action, particularly among communities, individuals and population groups that may have greater barriers to accessing, processing and responding to this type of risk information.”

�鶹��ý scholars Amir Behzadan (left) and Mary Angelica Painter (right) collaborated on research employing generative AI to explore a new approach to getting people to respond more quickly to disaster alerts.

In a new study, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Behzadan, Mary Angelica Painter (a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center) and a team of �鶹��ý graduate students employed generative AI to explore a new approach to getting people to take action more quickly.

Leveraging Google’s large language model (LLM), Gemini, the team generated and distributed more personalized alerts—which included reminders about pets, dependents and medications—to sample groups to determine how well they would be received and how they might motivate recipients to take action. Their findings were published in September in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Getting personal

Study participants were first asked a series of questions about their sociodemographic factors (i.e., gender, age, education level, language preference and prior disaster experience). Knowing these factors was key to understanding how people from different walks of life might perceive alerts.

Participants were then asked about personal traits that might impact their needs in a disaster scenario (e.g., whether or not they lived close to family, if they had dependent family members and/or pets, if they used medication and what type of home they lived in). The participants’ ZIP codes were also requested so the messages could be tailored to the types of disasters they would be most likely to experience, given their geographical location.

Their responses were then fed into the LLM, along with examples of the tone the messages should mimic. “The role of AI here was to focus on those personal traits and then try to cater the content and style of the message to the participants that possess those traits,” says Behzadan.

One portion of participants was given the AI-created messages, while another portion was given standard, human-written messages with no personalization.

After reviewing the message, participants were asked to rate it on six different metrics—clarity, trust, relevance, influence, confidence and certainty—that are common parameters known to influence a person’s behavior and decision-making intentions in disaster scenarios.

How AI could level the playing field

The results showed the clearest discrepancy between sociodemographic groups in relation to the standard alerts: women, people with lower education levels and older adults all rated the human-crafted alerts with higher trust and confidence than their counterparts (men, people with higher education levels and younger adults).

Infographic: Amir Behzadan

But that did not hold true among the AI alerts. “Across gender, age and education, what you noticed was that as soon as we introduced AI personalization, those differences tended to diminish,” Behzadan says.

The study also explored how the type of disaster might influence people (e.g., whether a tornado warning might be taken more seriously than a flood warning). “We found that the type of hazard is not that relevant to how people perceive the quality of the alert,” Behzadan says.

While it does seem as though the personalized alerts could engender more trust and inspire more action among all sociodemographic groups, Behzadan’s team does not recommend abandoning the use of conventional messaging formats.

“We're thinking that these two should work together to augment each other,” Behzadan says, adding that future personalized alerts could target specific subgroups within the population that are more likely to trust the customized messages.

Along those lines, Behzadan has already secured additional funding from the Natural Hazards Center and �鶹��ý’s Research and Innovation Office (RIO) to pursue work on the potential to use AI to translate disaster alerts into American Sign Language (ASL) for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals.

"Given that ASL is a completely different language than English, many Deaf people whose first language is ASL may prefer or need alerts in ASL," says Behzadan, adding that English literacy among Deaf people varies with access to language and educational experience. "So, alerts delivered only in written English may not be equally accessible."

The trust issue

Any broad use of AI is bound to face complications, especially when human lives are at stake.

For this study, the use of AI was not disclosed to participants so the team could gather more realistic reactions to the messaging. “We knew from past research that some people may think that AI-generated content is less legitimate and may have bypassed human agency,” says Behzadan, adding that disclosing the AI use most likely would have skewed people’s perceptions.

But in practice, FEMA and/or state and local disaster agencies would most likely be required to disclose their AI use. So, while personalized alerts could inspire more trust in the short term, the use of AI may inadvertently lead to longer-term distrust of generated alerts, Behzadan says.

Another hurdle in deploying more personalized disaster messaging? The personal information required from recipients.

“There's always a trade-off between privacy and accuracy,” Behzadan says. “If you want a highly accurate AI or technology output that genuinely reflects your specific situation, needs or expectations, you generally have to provide it with some additional context and personal information. Then, the real question is: How much personal information are you willing to give up in exchange for greater accuracy and personalization?”

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When leaving isn't a choice, staying becomes one

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:55:11 +0000

When leaving isn't a choice, staying becomes one Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/24/2026 - 14:55

Cody DeBos

�鶹��ý researchers ask who decides to stay behind when climate disaster strikes

“I don’t know when I floated to the river bank—but I survived. Remember, to live here, you have to be brave as crocodiles in water and tigers on land. But the peace of living here will not be found anywhere else.”

That’s how a grandmother in coastal Bangladesh once described surviving a flood to her 17-year-old granddaughter.

This type of survival knowledge, passed on from generation to generation, is one thread in a much larger tapestry of climate-driven migration. Lori Hunter, director of the University of Colorado Boulder Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS), has been working to better understand the phenomenon and how to support the people it affects.

Lori Hunter is a �鶹��ý professor of sociology and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, women are most commonly the ones who stay behind when disaster strikes. Hunter says this partially comes down to socialization and the process of “learning” gender and what’s expected of us.

“Some of what we learn through this process relates to migration—what is seen as ‘acceptable’ in terms of men and women relocating,” she says.

Of course, the full picture is more nuanced.

Connecting the pieces

Hunter’s interest in people, places, and their connection to the environment goes back more than 30 years to her days in the Pacific Northwest.

“I lived in Seattle for many years, and my original curiosity was fueled by seeing the region’s demographic change as related to high levels of in-migration back in the 1980s,” she says.

Environmental amenities were clearly a draw to the area, leading to a boom in population growth that has significantly altered the region and its natural resources.

Yet, as Hunter puts it, “migration researchers just weren’t integrating broader environmental context into their investigations of human movement.”

That initial spark eventually led to a more focused interest in gender and specifically how it relates to human migration driven by climate change.

After co-authoring a paper on the subject that was published in 2011, Hunter was asked to create a white paper that would be included in World Bank’s Groundswell report.

“At the time there was virtually no research on the three-way intersection of displacement, climate change, and gender. We pulled together scholarship on 1) disasters and gender, 2) disasters and migration, 3) gender and risk perceptions and other related sub-topics to inform a discussion of potential connections,” she says.

More than a decade later, Hunter’s work has evolved into an examination of not only who leaves when climate disaster upends normal life, but equally those who choose not to or are forced to stay.

Forgetting about those who stay

The gap in both relocation by gender and the study of non-migration itself is at the heart of Hunter’s newest work with lead author Bishawjit Mallick, a IBS Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow. Published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, the paper details a framework called Intergenerational Gendered Environmental Non-Migration, or IGEN.

Hunter explains that human populations change through three processes. Birth, death, and migration all have a part to play.

“Demographers have long studied migration as an outcome (just like births and deaths). Who moves? Why do they move? What are the implications of those moves?” Hunter says.

“Although some women aspire to leave, many lack the agency to make such mobility decisions,” says �鶹��ý researcher Lori Hunter. (Photo: Albert Gonzalez Farran/United Nations)

But despite all the research, there is a blind spot.

“The question of who doesn’t move just hasn’t been on the table. Perhaps because most people don’t move so it’s more interesting to consider who does,” she adds.

Yet, in locations facing repeated natural disasters, understanding who stays (and why) is anything but academic. Hunter’s IGEN framework suggests one reason for those decisions is the influence of gender roles that have been reinforced across generations.

“Living under a patriarchal social structure, in some cultural settings, women are often expected to move in with their in-laws after marriage. This can promote a situation where men become the primary decisionmaker, diminishing women’s agency,” Hunter explains.

“If women are more likely to remain at home as a result of cultural expectations but also have less access to income or other resources as a consequence of patriarchy, they become increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of disasters,” she continues.

As these factors compound, women living in high-risk areas may be pressed into staying somewhere they don’t really want to be regardless of their preference.

“Although some women aspire to leave, many lack the agency to make such mobility decisions,” Hunter says.

In her view, this is exactly why the research gap needs closing.

“The gap really does matter, and the example of climate-related disasters demonstrates why,” Hunter says. “It’s important to understand who is staying in risky areas—and why—in order to provide appropriate support within local communities and reduce vulnerabilities.”

Inherited ground

Of course, “staying” isn’t a decision defined by gender alone. Inheritance also plays a significant role in keeping someone rooted in place, despite logic and scientific evidence pointing them elsewhere.

“Some people choose to stay in a risky locale (voluntary non-migration), even if they understand the risk,” Hunter says.

During an earlier project’s fieldwork, one forty-three-year-old fisherman said “Our ancestors built this house for us. We want to stay here. It’s a very important part of our life. This village is our identity.”

This can help explain why, after devastating floods and cyclones, many families choose to rebuild on the exact same plot of land that was washed away.

Not everyone gets the choice, though.

“On the other hand, some stay in a risky locale because they’re unable to move (involuntary), such as perhaps lacking the funds to resettle elsewhere,” Hunter says.

This is often the case when changing environmental patterns have already lowered the value of a family’s home, or when affordability has put land elsewhere out of reach.

I think it’s important to consider the reasons why someone might be staying. We have a tendency to blame individuals if they remain in risky locales without considering why they remain."

Quoted from the paper, a seventy-one-year-old housewife from Bangladesh told the research team, “So many people are moving from here by buying land in other places, but we don’t have the ability to buy land.”

A 43-year-old housewife echoed the sentiment, saying, “If I had money, I would have bought land far away.”

For many in these communities, the reason for non-migration falls somewhere in the middle. The choice is often shaped as much by a lack of resources and agency as by attachment to a home.

Rethinking the motive

Hunter hopes that more research into non-migration amid the many challenges posed by environmental harm and gender norms will help reframe the conversation.

“I think it’s important to consider the reasons why someone might be staying. We have a tendency to blame individuals if they remain in risky locales without considering why they remain,” she says.

In the same vein, Hunter says much migration isn’t due to choice.

“Most people want to stay where they are. If climate-related pressures are combined with other economic and/or socio-cultural challenges, people might be forced to make a move they’d rather not,” she says.

Shifting the focus from blame to understanding is something for everyone to consider. Hunter also hopes this mindset is embraced by those with the power to enact change at the highest levels.

“I would love it if policymakers recognized that many people do not want to migrate but are forced to do so if climate pressures make their current lives untenable,” she says. “Supporting individuals and families to stay in their origin communities could reduce the tide of migration.”

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�鶹��ý researchers ask who decides to stay behind when climate disaster strikes.

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Top image: iStock

Ten years after Brexit, the consequences are clear…and complicated

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:28:02 +0000

Ten years after Brexit, the consequences are clear…and complicated Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/22/2026 - 16:28

Bradley Worrell

�鶹��ý political scientist Joseph Jupille says reverberations from the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union are still being felt a decade later

Ten years ago this week, British voters narrowly chose to leave the European Union, with about 52% voting in favor of leaving and 48% against. The result stunned many observers around the world, including Joseph Jupille, a University of Colorado Boulder political science professor who teaches courses on European politics and who is writing a book on the European Union.

“I woke up the next morning and saw the results, and it was shocking,” he says, recalling first hearing the results of the June 23, 2016, vote.

Still, Jupille is quick to point out that the shock was not the result of a sudden shift, noting that Britain’s uneasy relationship with the European continent had been building for decades.

Joseph Jupille is a �鶹��ý political science professor who teaches courses on European politics and who is writing a book on the European Union.

“In a historical sense, it wasn’t surprising at all,” he says. “If some country was going to leave the European Union, it was always going to be Britain.”

The decision to hold the voter referendum on exiting the European Union—popularly termed “Brexit”—was initiated by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who hoped it would settle longstanding divisions within his own Conservative Party. Cameron expected voters would ultimately choose to remain in the European Union, strengthening his political position.

Instead, the gamble reshaped the country—and Europe—almost immediately, Jupille says.

Why the British voted to leave the EU

To understand Brexit, Jupille says it’s important to understand that the motives behind the vote were never purely economic. At the core, he says, was a powerful, emotional appeal centered on control, sovereignty and identity.

“The main slogan was ‘taking back control,’” he explains. For many British voters, the European Union represented a remote and intrusive authority—one that regulated economic life in ways they felt diminished national sovereignty. Jupille says leaving the EU was framed as a way to restore Britain’s independence.

Closely tied to that message were concerns about immigration. As part of EU membership, Britain accepted free movement of labor—one of Europe’s “four freedoms,” along with the movement of goods, services and capital. While this openness created economic opportunities, Jupille says it also brought large numbers of migrants to Britain, particularly after the EU expanded into Central and Eastern Europe.

For many voters, that influx raised concerns about the country’s cultural change.

“There was a vision of what Britain is and about what it means to be British,” Jupille says. “Some people felt that was under threat.”

Another popular argument focused on the country’s National Health Service. During the campaign, Brexit proponents claimed that the money Britain sent to Brussels (home of the European Union) could instead be invested in the NHS—a symbol of national pride. That promise resonated widely, even though it would later prove difficult to fulfill, Jupille says.

Taken together, Jupille says, the three pillar arguments for leaving the European Union (popularly known as the “Leave” campaign) formed a compelling narrative: Britain could reclaim control, protect its identity and redirect resources toward its own citizens by leaving the EU.

Why the case for ‘Remain’ fell short

British supporters for remaining in the EU (popularly known as the “Remain” campaign) primarily focused on economic arguments. Membership, Remain supporters argued, gave Britain access to a vast single market, with lowered costs and boosted prosperity.

Those arguments were accurate, Jupille says, but he argues that they were difficult to communicate.

A pro-Brexit banner and demonstrator outside the House of Commons in London. (Photo: ChiralJon/Wikimedia Commons)

“Economic arguments can be hard to sell,” he explains. “People don’t always understand the benefits of open markets.”

In contrast, the cultural and identity-based arguments of the Leave campaign were more immediate and tangible. While Remain supporters promoted the idea of a “Global Britain” that thrived through international engagement, that vision struggled to compete with concerns about sovereignty and national identity, Jupille says.

What was happening in European and global markets leading up to the 2016 Brexit vote didn’t help the Remain cause, Jupille says. The global financial crisis starting in 2008 and the Eurozone crisis in 2009 cast doubt on the stability of European institutions.

“Media coverage often highlighted struggling economies in Southern Europe, which reinforced skepticism,” he says.

Jupille says it’s also important to understand the Brexit vote in the context of Britain’s long history of ambivalence toward European integration.

In the late 1950s, when the foundations were being laid for the European Economic Community, the precursor of the EU, Britain initially declined to participate, choosing instead to focus on its Commonwealth partners. The country eventually joined in 1973, but only after recognizing that its economic future lay more with Europe rather than distant partners, Jupille says.

Even then, he says, Britain opted out of certain agreements, including the Euro currency, and it repeatedly sought to renegotiate the terms of its participation.

“The British were always ‘awkward partners,’” he says, referring to a phrase coined by British political scientist Stephen George. “They were always sort of one foot out.”

Brexit vote lingers 10 years later

A decade later, Jupille says the consequences of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union have become both clearer—and more complicated.

From an economic standpoint, evidence suggests that Brexit has come at a cost. While estimates vary, Jupille says a widely circulated figure place Britain’s gross domestic product about 4% lower than it might have been had the country remained in the EU.

Meanwhile, the promises of Brexit have proved elusive. Immigration, for example, has not decreased overall. Instead, its composition has changed, with migrants primarily coming from India, Africa and China rather than EU countries, Jupille says.

Similarly, the much-anticipated windfall for the National Health Service has not materialized, as the NHS continues to face funding pressures and long wait times, he says.

At the same time, public opinion regarding Brexit has changed.

An anti-Brexit demonstrator at Westminster Green in London. (Photo: ChiralJon/Wikimedia Commons)

“It looks like about 60% of respondents in recent polls suggest that Brexit was a mistake and would lean toward rejoining, if that were an option,” Jupille says. While views remain divided, the needle has moved significantly since 2016, he adds.

“It (Brexit) hasn’t turned out the way it was promised. That underpins a lot of people’s regret.”

Another Brexit in the offing?

Could another European Union nation follow in the steps of Britain and stage its own Brexit?

For now, Jupille says he believes that risk is limited. Currently, no EU country is seriously discussing leaving—in part because of how the EU handled negotiations with Britain upon its departure. A revised trade agreement between the UK and the EU in 2025 has lowered some trade barriers but does not carry all of the advantages of EU membership, Jupille says.

“The EU has played hardball,” he says. “It wants Brexit to serve as an object lesson to other countries.”

By making the process of leaving complex and costly, EU leaders hope to discourage other member countries from following suit, Jupille says.

Meanwhile, the greater risk, he suggests, is not outright departures but attempts by major countries to renegotiate their terms of membership. Movements within France and Germany that push for more national control could create significant challenges for the EU’s future stability, he says.

At its heart, Jupille says Brexit illustrates a fundamental friction that is not limited to any one country.

“Our economic interests push us toward cooperation,” he says. In a globalized world, trade, investment and meeting worldwide challenges are best addressed at a broader, transnational level, he adds.

At the same time, political identity remains strongly rooted in the nation-state, as people feel a stronger attachment to their country than to larger entities like the EU, Jupille says. That attachment creates a powerful pull toward sovereignty and independence.

The result is a trade-off.

“You can have control over a smaller set of options,” Jupille explains, “or you can give up some control and have better options.”

In a sense, he says, Brexit is a case study in what happens when a country chooses the former.

Why Brexit still matters today

Ten years on, Jupille says Brexit continues to offer lessons not only for the United Kingdom but also for other countries grappling with similar questions related to sovereignty and the realities of an interconnected world.

“This is a central dilemma of the 21st century,” he says. “Brexit embodies the tension between rational economic cooperation and emotional attachments to national identity.”

Brexit also is instructive regarding the benefits of economic cooperation, Jupille says. For all of its flaws, the EU represents a remarkable transformation on the European continent, he says, noting that within the span of a century, Europe moved from two world wars that ravaged much of Europe to a time of relative peace and prosperity. He specifically credits institutions like the EU for playing a crucial role in that shift, helping to bind former rivals together, stating, “It remains the greatest example of countries that used to kill each other learning to live together.”

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�鶹��ý political scientist Joseph Jupille says reverberations from the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union are still being felt a decade later.

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One safety step sparks another

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:15:23 +0000

One safety step sparks another Rachel Sauer Tue, 02/10/2026 - 15:15

Bradley Worrell

Research from �鶹��ý environmental economist Grant Webster finds that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation preparation are complementary

The 2025 Los Angeles fires, the 2023 Lahaina Fire in Hawaii and the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California were rapid-moving wildfires that resulted in 196 combined fatalities, tens of thousands of displaced residents and billions of dollars in property damage.

Emergency preparedness experts have long recognized that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation efforts can both play important roles in lessening the risk of danger to people and property. And yet, previous research focused on those two efforts independently of one another, says Grant Webster, an environmental economist and postdoctoral research associate with the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Seeking to bridge that gap, Webster and his fellow researchers at the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey analyzed household survey data from the Wildfire Research Center (WiRē) collected in 25 wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities across five Western states, specifically examining both mitigation and preparedness measures.

Grant Webster, a postdoctoral research associate with the Institute of Behavioral Science and �鶹��ý PhD graduate in economics, and his research colleagues find that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation preparation are complementary.

“Our interest was looking at whether there’s a relationship between them. Is there a trade-off, like some people deciding, ‘I’m really prepared to evacuate but I’m not going to mitigate my home,’ or vice versa?” he says.

After evaluating their findings, Webster and his co-authors determined that those two strategies are not competing priorities but instead are mutually reinforcing behaviors. They explain their conclusion in a recently published paper in Ecological Economics,

“When people think about their risk and take action in one area, they are more likely to take action in the other,” he explains. “There’s a spillover between the two.”

Webster says this means that a homeowner who takes proactive mitigation measures—such as trimming the vegetation around their home, clearing the area of combustibles (such as chopped wood) and upgrading building materials to make their home more fire resistant—are statistically more likely to plan safe evacuation routes, prepare “to-go” bags, identify where the household will evacuate to and talk with neighbors about evacuation strategies.

The finding also holds in reverse: Households that take no action in one area often take no action in the other.

“That’s the troubling part,” Webster says. “People living in the riskiest properties are often the least prepared to evacuate.”

Why would a household neither mitigate nor prepare to evacuate?

Webster says his study controls for factors such as income, risk perception and information sources. None of these fully explains the gap.

“It’s likely something unobserved, potentially simply not thinking about wildfire risk,” he says. “If people aren’t engaged with the issue—if they haven’t talked with neighbors or professionals, or if they haven’t experienced a fire—they’re less likely to do either mitigation or evacuation planning.”

Experience is a powerful motivator

The study also examined which households were most likely to have evacuation plans in place. Webster says three patterns emerged. First, people who have evacuated before—or who have lived through a close call—are significantly more likely to prepare. Second, households that understand their vulnerability tend to be more proactive. And third, conversations with neighbors or wildlife professionals can prompt homeowners to act.

“Talking with others gets people thinking,” Webster says. Whether it’s a community meeting or a casual conversation about defensible space, social interaction increases preparedness, he adds.

Interestingly, income was not associated with evacuation planning. Webster says the research found wealthier households were no more likely to have evacuation plans than middle class or lower-income households.

While the study found that all mitigation actions correlate with evacuation preparedness, Webster says a few stood out more strongly: clearing vegetation, replacing combustible siding and addressing attached combustibles, such as wooden decks.

�鶹��ý researcher Grant Webster found that income is not associated with wildfire evacuation planning; wealthier households are no more likely to have evacuation plans than middle class or lower-income households. (Photo of 2023 Lahaina Fire: Wikimedia Commons)

Still, he cautions against viewing any single action as the “gateway” to preparedness.

“It’s not that there’s one magic measure that will make someone start planning,” he says. “It’s the overall process of thinking about risk and engaging with mitigation that appears to encourage evacuation preparedness.”

So, does that mean mitigation always naturally leads to evacuation preparedness, or does the evacuation preparedness sometimes lead to mitigation efforts? Webster says the question is a bit like the one posed as to which comes first: the chicken or the egg?

“In the paper, with our data, we look only at the direction of mitigation leading to evacuation preparedness. We can’t say anything causal the other way. Hazard literature suggests mitigation usually comes before preparedness, but in practice it could go either way,” he says. “We’re not saying it always does; we just estimate the causal effect in that direction.”

It’s also difficult to interpret from the study how large an impact risk mitigation has on evacuation preparedness for households, Webster says.

“For example, the results suggest that if a household were to change the distance to close vegetation around their home from 5 to 30 feet to over 100 feet, this would result in a household completing one more evacuation preparation action,” he says. “Although certain mitigation and evacuation actions require different levels of effort, making it difficult to quantify a typical effect.”

Implications for authorities and community organizations

Because the study reveals strong spillover effects, Webster says it offers validation for wildfire programs that address mitigation and evacuation together.

“There are teams out there talking to residents about both defensible space and evacuation plans,” he says. “Our findings show that is a good approach.”

Equally important, Webster says, is that even programs that focus on just one area—such as mitigation—are not crowding out the other.

“If you’re spending resources talking about evacuation preparedness, you’re not making people less likely to mitigate,” he explains. “And if you’re talking about mitigation, you’re not reducing the likelihood that they’ll plan for evacuation. People can—and do—take both actions.”

Webster emphasizes that the paper is written primarily for practitioners—fire departments, emergency managers and local governments—that need evidence-based guidance when designing public education programs. Webster’s research is designed to give those practitioners a road map to:

Pair mitigation messaging with evacuation preparedness, as they reinforce each other and improve overall community resilience.
Target outreach to households with no experience or engagement, as they are the most likely to be unprepared in both areas.
Encourage neighbor-to-neighbor conversations, as social networks are powerful tools for spreading risk awareness.
Recognize that income is not a predictor. Preparedness campaigns should include all demographics equally.

“Once we collect and aggregate the data and provide it to the practitioners—those people working on the ground—they can better inform their programs and their policies to deal with the risks in their specific community,” he says. For many at-risk communities, especially rural ones, budgets and personnel are limited, so practical advice that can be easily shared is especially valuable, he adds.

More fires, more need for research

For Webster, this research is particularly timely.

“It’s not that there’s one magic measure that will make someone start planning. It’s the overall process of thinking about risk and engaging with mitigation that appears to encourage evacuation preparedness.”

“Wildfire risk is definitely increasing throughout the country and around the world, due to a variety of factors, including climate change,” he says. “With these fast-moving fires, like in California, it’s really important for people to be ready to evacuate quickly and also to mitigate their home so it’s less likely to be destroyed.”

In addition to the danger of increasing temperatures associated with climate change, Webster says there are two other primary wildfire risk factors: the historical suppression of fires, which has resulted in an accumulation of fuels at risk of catching fire, and the expansion of communities into fire-prone areas, putting more people and properties at risk.

Meanwhile, Webster says he sees the potential for scholars to produce more research on this topic as new data becomes available.

“Our dataset is always growing,” he says. “That allows us to replicate earlier studies on a larger scale and understand the changing dynamics of preparedness.”

He says further research may explore how specific education strategies influence behavior, or how emerging technologies (such as real-time risk maps or AI-driven alerts) shape community responses.

For now, Webster says one message is clear: Proactive steps matter—and households that take action in one area are likely to take action in another. As Webster puts it, “Improving engagement—getting people to think about their wildfire risk—is one of the most powerful tools we have.”

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Research from �鶹��ý environmental economist Grant Webster finds that wildfire risk mitigation and proactive evacuation preparation are complementary.

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That iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima? CU prof, then a Marine, saw it happen

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:30:00 +0000

That iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima? CU prof, then a Marine, saw it happen Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/21/2025 - 07:30

Bradley Worrell

�鶹��ý distinguished professor and Marine veteran Richard Jessor reflects on what the planting of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945, meant for the country and for him personally

Eighty years later, Richard Jessor vividly recalls hitting the beach on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

“The island had been under severe bombardment from U.S. aircraft and our Navy ships offshore,” says Jessor. “Both types of bombardment had been going on for quite some time, and the sense was that Iwo Jima could be taken in three or four days because nothing could have survived such a massive bombardment from American forces.”

The first three waves of Marines landed on the beach without taking enemy fire.

Richard Jessor, a �鶹��ý distinguished professor emeritus of behavioral science, was a 20-year-old Marine fighting World War II on Iwo Jima in February 1945.

“By the time we in the fourth wave hit the beach, the Japanese—who were concealed, waiting for us—pulled their artillery out of the caves and had every inch of the beach registered, so when our tractor hit the beach, we were under severe fire,” recalls Jessor, then a 20-year-old Marine. “Our tractor got stuck at the beach edge and could not move us up, so we jumped out of the tractor into the water.

“As I hit the beach, I looked over and there was a Marine lying on his back, a bubble of blood coming out of his mouth. He died there, and that was my first exposure to combat.”

Jessor was hit in the back by shrapnel during the first day ashore but was able to continue fighting. After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled back from the front line and told they could write one letter.

He wrote a letter to his parents, thanking them for everything they had done for him. He also said his goodbyes, “because I didn’t think anyone was going to get off the island alive,” he says, explaining, “there was carnage all of the time, every day, and you felt every day that it was going to be your last day.

“We were constantly being fired upon by the Japanese, who would come to the openings of their caves and fire, and then withdraw, so we didn’t see the enemy, and that was a huge source of frustration,” he adds. As it turned out, the Japanese had heavily fortified the island and had a dense network of tunnels from which they could launch attacks.

The flag raised atop Mount Suribachi

Back on the line the morning of the fifth day, Jessor looked at the opposite end of the island to see something in the distance atop Mount Suribachi, the dominant geographical feature on Iwo Jima.

“As I looked, I suddenly saw the American flag flying. I couldn’t see anything else that was that far away, but I saw the flag flying and I started shouting, ‘The flag is up! The flag is up!’” he says. “The other Marines around me began turning around to look. Seeing that made us realize that our rear was now being covered, because we had been under attack from behind as well as in front.

“For me, it was a moment of being able to say to myself, ‘Maybe I will get out of this alive,’” he adds. “In that sense, it was transformative for me, and I remember it well.”

Richard Jessor (second from right) and his buddies taking a break behind the line while serving in World War II. (Photo: Richard Jessor)

The flag raising lifted the spirits of the Marines on the island, and later it did the same for a war-weary American public at home, when the image of Marines raising the flag was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Rosenthal won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for photography, and the photo is one of the most recognizable images of World War II.

Jessor says the photo symbolized the Marines’ perseverance in the face of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and it helped shape the public’s sentiment that victory in the Pacific was at hand. However, it also may have inadvertently created a false impression among the public, he says.

“Some people may think that when the flag went up the island was secure—and that was absolutely not the case,” Jessor explains. “When the flag went up, on day five, we still had 31 more days of fighting—and most of the casualties took place after the flag raising. Close to 7,000 Marines were killed in the 36-day battle.”

Meanwhile, as the Marines advanced, they sometimes came across the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers, whom they searched for souvenirs. Marines were particularly interested in Japanese “good luck flags,” which bore well wishes from friends and family and which were often tied around soldier’s waist.

“One morning, when I looked out my foxhole, I saw a dead Japanese soldier. I walked over to him to see whether he had a flag under his shirt, and as I bent over, I saw he had letters in his shirt pocket,” presumably from his family, he says. “Well, I had letters from family in my pocket—and suddenly I was struck by the fact that in so many ways we shared the same humanity. I couldn’t blame him any more than I could blame myself for being in the same situation. It gave me pause about how stupid it was to be engaged in this kind of activity (war).”

An epiphany amidst combat

Jessor called that moment an epiphany. He made two vows then and there: that he would never go to war again and that he would go on to do something meaningful with his life.

First, though, he had to get off the island alive.

His next challenge came a few days later, when he was ordered to take a Japanese soldier captured at the front lines under his guard to the beach, where interpreters could question the prisoner about the placement of weapons facing the Marines.

Richard Jessor (holding the Japanese "good luck flag") and buddies from the 4th Marine Division during the battle of Iwo Jima. (Photo: Richard Jessor)

“As I said, there was a great deal of frustration that we could not see the enemy we were fighting, so I anticipated there could be some attempts on my prisoner as I started walking him back through the rear lines,” Jessor recalls. “As we got through the rear of the lines, where our artillery was, a Marine jumped up, running toward me and my prisoner, saying, ‘I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch.’

“I had to point my rifle at his head and say, ‘I have orders to shoot anybody who touches my prisoner,’ and so he stopped and finally backed off. And the same thing happened a second time before I got the prisoner to the beach and turned him over to command headquarters,” he says.

“As I’ve ruminated these 80 years, I’m not sure whether I would have shot that fellow Marine if he had not desisted from his threat, and it worries me that I might have done that.”

Finally, the objective is achieved

After 36 days, the Marines secured Iwo Jima. A short time later, U.S. aircraft were able to use its runway, which—combined with the island’s proximity to the Japanese mainland—made it a strategic military objective.

“Capturing Iwo Jima had immediate consequences for the approach to Japan,” Jessor says. “What was happening was that our bombers were leaving from Saipan or Tinian, and some of those bombers would get hit over Japan and not be able to make it back, so they would have to ditch in the sea, and many were lost. So, the fact Iwo Jima had a landing strip on it was important for that reason, as well as serving as a base for the projected attack on Tokyo.”

But the victory came at a tremendous cost to the Marines.

“We were destroyed. As I said, almost 7,000 Marines were killed on that island,” Jessor says. The scale of the loss was on display when Jessor and fellow Marines retraced their steps to the landing beach, which was arrayed with crosses where Marines were temporarily buried after falling in combat.

The Marines were shipped back to their training grounds in Maui for their next mission—the planned invasion of Japan.

They spent their days practicing landing craft invasions. At night, Jessor says he and a few of his fellow Iwo Jima veterans would gather in their tent to relive details of the battle, which he believes had a cathartic effect.

Jessor also recalls being on Maui when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“When the bomb dropped, we all thought it was a great thing,” he recalls. “We were saying to each other, ‘No more war! We get to go home!’”

Among Richard Jessor's mementos from Iwo Jima are a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. (Photo: Glenn Asakawa/�鶹��ý)

However, in retrospect, as the scale of the death and destruction in those cities became known, Jessor says he reevaluated his opinion about that fateful decision. At the same time, Jessor says he developed a deep disdain for politicians who were so easily willing to put American troops in combat.

“They talk about it like it’s a game,” he says. “They haven’t the slightest sense of what combat is like and what it does to people and the destruction it causes. Even for the many people who survive the experience, their lives are changed forever.”

After the war

After he was discharged, Jessor made good on his promise to himself to make a difference for the better. After earning his doctorate, in 1951 he accepted a position as an assistant professor of psychology at �鶹��ý.

During his ensuing 70 years at �鶹��ý, he co-founded and later directed the Institute of Behavioral Science (its building was recently renamed in his honor); wrote an influential report in January 1970 critiquing the lack of diversity on campus and making suggestions for positive changes; wrote a report in the 1960s that took the CU Board of Regents to task for being unresponsive to students and faculty, which earned him the ire of former Regent Joe Coors; and wrote 10 books. He retired as a distinguished professor in 2021, which makes him the university’s longest-serving professor.

Like many World War II veterans, Jessor rarely spoke of his experiences during the war, even to close friends and his own family. That changed for him after he saw the World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, which opens with a scene of American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, France, under intense fire from German soldiers.

“As a trained clinical psychologist, I didn’t want to share my experiences with others, so I didn’t talk much about having been a Marine,” he says. “And then one day, my wife, Jane, and I were in Aspen. It was raining, so we couldn’t go hiking, so instead we went to the movies and saw Saving Private Ryan.

“The Steven Spielberg-directed movie was the real thing,” he says. “When the invasion scenes start at the beginning, I was sobbing, and the tears were running down my face. And while that was happening, I’m saying to myself, ‘You’re a psychologist and you didn’t know that you still had this inside you?’ And obviously, I didn’t.

“The movie brought it all back to me, and so I began talking about it from that point on.”

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

Jessor had hoped to return to Iwo Jima last year. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans offered to cover all expenses for him and his wife to attend a Pacific war theater travel lecture tour series it offers to patrons, which was to include a visit to Iwo Jima. However, the island is open to visitors only one day a year, and volcanic activity on the island at the time resulted in the tour being cancelled. Noting his age—he is 100—Jessor says he’s unsure he will ever have the opportunity to return to the island, despite his strong desire to do so.

Reflecting on the past

These days, Jessor keeps some mementos on his work desk to remind him of his time on Iwo Jima: a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. The jar of sand was given to him by a friend who visited the island in 2002.

“Sometimes I’m barely aware they are there, and then other times I’ll look over and see the grenade or the vial of sand and it all comes back to me. It’s a reminder that I value a great deal,” he says.

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

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�鶹��ý distinguished professor and Marine veteran Richard Jessor reflects on what the planting of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945, meant for the country and for him personally.

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Top photo: Joe Rosenthal/Associated Press

Eight decades later, Marine (and distinguished professor) to revisit Iwo Jima

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Eight decades later, Marine (and distinguished professor) to revisit Iwo Jima Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/01/2023 - 00:00

Clint Talbott

Richard Jessor, �鶹��ý distinguished professor of behavioral science and co-founder of IBS, records an oral history with the National World War II Museum and will return to the island in March, on the 79^th anniversary of the battle

Because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Richard Jessor joined the U.S. Marines and went to war. But when he came face to face with the enemy—a dead Japanese soldier on the island of Iwo Jima—he again recharted his life, turning away from war and toward education.

Jessor will return to Iwo Jima in March to observe the 79^th anniversary of the battle, one of the fiercest and most famous of World War II. He will join the Reunion of Honor ceremony, held annually for veterans from the United States and Japan, “honoring their service and sacrifice and fostering peace” as former adversaries meet near the landing beaches.

“I don’t know how it will feel to be standing once again on the black sand of the landing beach almost 80 years later, but I know there will be tears,” Jessor said recently.

After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled from the front line and allowed to write one letter. Jessor wrote to his parents. He thanked them for everything. And he said goodbye, writing: “I don’t think I’ll get off the island alive.”

As Veterans Day approached, Jessor spoke with this magazine about the indelible marks of war, his oral history interview with the National World War II Museum, his coming reunion with soldiers on both sides of the Iwo Jima battle and his disgust at leaders who blithely discuss war as an instrument of policy rather than a gruesome choice of last resort.

Jessor, who will turn 99 this month, is a distinguished professor emeritus of behavioral science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He served on the �鶹��ý faculty for 70 years before retiring in 2021. He co-founded and later directed the university’s Institute of Behavioral Science, and he wrote an influential 1970 report on the lack of ethnic diversity on campus.

But in February 1945, he was a 20-year-old Marine. Before then, Jessor had little conception of who the Japanese people were. “It was only really after we got overseas on our training base and on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands” that he realized how many servicemen viewed the Japanese as the “Yellow Peril,” a prejudice Jessor recalls with “a great deal of dismay.”

That prejudice, he suggests, was a way to dehumanize America’s foes.

For weeks before invading, U.S. forces shelled and bombed Iwo Jima, hoping to weaken the Japanese fighters, many of whom were holed up in miles of tunnels underneath the island’s only promontory, Mount Suribachi.

At the top of the page: Richard Jessor in his Boulder home in 2021. �鶹��ý photo by Glenn Asakawa. Above: Marines landing on the beach of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

On the evening of Feb. 18, 1945, Jessor was with the Fourth Marine Division on a tank-landing ship when the crew was summoned to the deck. There, a Marine commander said, “Tomorrow night at this time, a lot of you are going to be dead.”

The shocking message might have been tempered by a belief that the fight would be easier or quicker than it actually would be. Iwo Jima comprised only 8 square miles, and the plan was for U.S. forces to conquer the island in three to five days, then sail off to invade Japan.

Things did not go according to plan. Fighting lasted 36 days.

Chaos and death

Jessor was in the fourth wave of Marines to land on Iwo Jima.

“Our tractor hit the beach and got stuck in the loose sand. We were sitting there, artillery shells exploding all around, and we were immobilized. And so, we began to just jump out of the rear of the tractor into the water, run around the vehicle and hit the beach.”

His first sight was a fellow Marine lying on his back, blood bubbling from his mouth, dying.

“That was my introduction to war,” he said.

Jessor was hit in the back by shrapnel during the first day ashore, but he was able to continue fighting. After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled from the front line and allowed to write one letter. Jessor wrote to his parents. He thanked them for everything. And he said goodbye, writing:

“I don’t think I’ll get off the island alive.”

Back in battle, Marines were taking souvenirs from dead Japanese soldiers, and the Marines were particularly interested in Japanese “good luck flags,” which bore well wishes from friends and family and which were often tied around the soldiers’ waists.

Jessor remembers emerging from a foxhole one morning and seeing the body of a Japanese soldier. Jessor bent over to see if the man had a flag under his shirt.

“And as I’m bending over, I see that he has letters in a pocket on his shirt,” presumably from the man’s family. “I suddenly have this epiphany: I have letters in my pocket in my shirt.”

Richard Jessor (holding the Japanese "good luck flag") and 4th Marine Division buddies during the battle of Iwo Jima. Photo courtesy of Richard Jessor.

Like the soldier in Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed,” Jessor felt their shared humanity.

“I was like, what are we doing here? What is this about? What difference could it make?”

At that time, Jessor notes, he had already said goodbye to his parents. He vowed never to go to war again, whatever the reason. “I made a personal resolve that I wanted to do something that made a difference. And that has really animated me from that time on.”

For the moment, though, Jessor was still in battle. He recalls that enemy fighters were always hidden. “You fired your weapon when you saw that something was being fired at you, but you didn’t see the enemy. You didn’t see Japanese soldiers. You went to an opening of a cave, and the guy with the (flamethrower) would point his weapon into the cave opening and just fire away, hoping to incinerate any occupants of the cave,” Jessor said.

“But the enemy was not personified in actual persons.”

A live Japanese soldier, a hopeful flag-raising

That changed for Jessor about 10 days after landing, when a Japanese prisoner was caught alive by Marines in the front line. No one on the front line spoke Japanese, and Jessor was ordered to take the prisoner, at gunpoint, back to the beach, more than a mile away, to headquarters and a translator.

As Jessor and his prisoner walked through the rear lines of Marines, who had never seen a live Japanese soldier, a Marine leapt up and exclaimed, “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”

"I had to point my rifle at that Marine and say, ‘I have orders to shoot anybody who touches my prisoner.’” The Marine relented. Another Marine made the same threat, and Jessor responded the same way.

“I think back on it now, and I don't really know whether I would have been able to do what I was ordered to do. And I'm afraid that I might have been able to do it, because that's what you were trained to do.”

Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press captured this iconic image of the flag-raising on Suribachi. Richard Jessor saw the flag from below and yelled to his colleagues, who were buoyed by the apparent milestone. The battle raged on for weeks longer, however.

Earlier, five days after the Marines landed, Jessor’s division was striving to reach higher ground on Iwo Jima. As he faced enemy forces with his rifle, “I happened to turn around and looked over my shoulder, and I saw the American flag on top of Suribachi.”

This is the flag-raising captured in an iconic image of World War II, by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press. That picture won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1945 and inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia.

In that moment, Jessor was stunned and started screaming, “The flag’s up! The flag’s up!”

The flag-raising was significant, because it meant that Jessor and his fellow Marines had their flank covered. “And it animated me to begin to feel that maybe we could make it,” he said. Jessor did survive, but the battle wasn’t done. Weeks of fighting lay ahead.

When the Marines finally did secure the island, “we knew that the battle was essentially over,” he recalled. The Marines were ordered to return to the landing beach.

“I remember coming to the beach and seeing this long array of crosses where the temporary burials of Marines were, and I still have that vision of seeing and knowing. It just filled your vision, the rows of crosses on from Blue Beach, all the way down the beach, and in that one vision, you encapsulated the cost of the war.”

Back to Maui

With Iwo Jima secured, the Marines sailed back to Maui to train for their next mission—the planned invasion of Japan. After training during the day, Jessor recalled, he and five other men in a tent would drink beer in the evening and “relive every inch of the battle of Iwo Jima.”

“Somebody would say, ‘You remember we were in this bomb crater, and it hit so-and-so, and his intestines hit so-and-so?’ And we went through every aspect of our experience on Iwo, reliving it night after night. And as a psychologist, I think of that as sort of being cathartic and getting things out of your subconscious.”

But one man in the tent, a young recruit who had not yet seen battle, had heard enough. “Finally, he exploded at us and said, ‘I’m sick of listening to the same s—t night after night. I’ve just had it!’”

I find myself so offended when I hear representatives in Congress or in government speak so casually about war … about using war as an instrument of policy.”

Jessor rose and gave the recruit a lecture. “I said, ‘You know, we're fighting for free speech, and nobody's going to tell me that they've had enough of our talking.’”

Jessor added, “I've been a professor for 70 years, but I guess I was a pedant even before I became a professor.” As it happens, Jessor soon forgot this episode but was reminded of it decades later, when a fellow Marine, Red Kelly, contacted Jessor.

Kelly, now deceased, had become an American history teacher in a Boston high school. “He said to me, ‘Every one of the students I’ve had over these years knows about Dick Jessor.’” Kelly had used Jessor’s lecture to illustrate “good wars and reasonable wars.”

Jessor also recalls being on Maui when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We were thrilled. We thought it was a great thing,” he said. “This meant we wouldn’t have to go back into battle.”

The costs of war

However, “It wasn’t long after I got discharged before I realized that it was a horrendous event, the dropping of the bomb. I have come to the conclusion that it was unnecessary—even though most arguments are that it saved us further killing of Americans, in Japan this time. There were other ways of dealing with the emergence of a nuclear bomb.”

Interments of the 4th Marine Division on Iwo Jima. Suribachi is in the background. "It just filled your vision, the rows of crosses on from Blue Beach, all the way down the beach, and in that one vision, you encapsulated the cost of the war.”

He added: “I haven’t been able to resolve this. I can’t think of any war that I would support any more. And yet I supported the invasion of Europe and the attack on and the defeat of Nazi Germany—as a Jew, particularly, given the horrors of the Holocaust.”

There are times, Jessor said, when a nation must resort to making war on an enemy. “But the way I’ve resolved this in my own mind is there must always be some alternatives that would forestall what emerged.”

Jessor wishes more people, particularly those in power, shared his deep hesitation about war. “I find myself so offended when I hear representatives in Congress or in government speak so casually about war … about using war as an instrument of policy.”

“There is no real sense among so many who are in power about the absolute inhumanity of resorting to war and what it means, not just in the time of the events but in how it just continues its consequences,” shaping the lives of those who endured it, Jessor said.

His dismay about this is one reason he chose to do an oral history with the National World War II Museum, to further document the true face of war.

Meanwhile, he looks forward to traveling to Iwo Jima in March to commemorate the 79^th anniversary of the battle. He will travel with Jane Menken, a distinguished professor of sociology who succeeded Jessor as the director of the Institute of Behavioral Science. The two also happen to be married.

About meeting Japanese veterans of Iwo Jima, Jessor said, “I see myself embracing them. We are, as I think of it now, comrades.”

A vial of black sand from the beaches of Iwo Jima sits next to a disarmed Japanese hand grenade on Richard Jessor's desk. �鶹��ý photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Learn more about Jessor’s time at and effect on �鶹��ý in this short biography and at this link. Read his 1970 report on the lack of ethnic diversity at �鶹��ý at this link. See the National World War II Museum’s news release about next year’s visit to Iwo Jima here.

Richard Jessor, �鶹��ý distinguished professor of behavioral science and co-founder of IBS, records an oral history with the National World War II Museum and will return to the island in March, on the 79th anniversary of the battle.

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Workshop seeks to heal trauma by connecting individuals to their communities

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 19:26:43 +0000

Workshop seeks to heal trauma by connecting individuals to their communities Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/18/2021 - 12:26

Jaxon Parker

Upcoming workshop to address how individuals can heal their trauma, and the role of the community in preventing violence

On March 22, 2021, Boulder suffered one of the worst mass shootings to occur in the nation’s recent memory. The impact of the shooting at the Table Mesa King Soopers brought a profound wave of shock, anxiety and grief that reverberated across the city and the nation.

Colorado, like many cities across the United States, has seen a dramatic increase in violent crime in recent years. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, violent crime across the country has risen by 5% in 2020, and in Colorado, the rate is slightly higher.

Trauma from witnessing violence can be isolating, leaving survivors feeling alone in dealing with recurring thoughts, memories and anxieties. But a workshop jointly hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder and Naropa University intends to facilitate healing from trauma caused by violence through repairing a sense of community connection and belonging.

“Healing Colorado’s Collective Trauma: Honoring Shared Loss and Promoting Resilience"

Date: Wed., Dec. 1 and Thurs., Dec. 2

Time: 9 to 11 a.m. Mountain Time

This event is free of charge.

The workshop, titled “Healing Colorado’s Collective Trauma: Honoring Shared Loss and Promoting Resilience,” is hosted by Beverly Kingston, director of �鶹��ý’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) at the Institute of Behavioral Sciences and a senior research associate. It will take place virtually on Wednesday, Dec. 1 and Thursday, Dec. 2, from 9 to 11 a.m. Mountain Time. Those who wish to attend can RSVP here to reserve a spot. There is no cost to attend.

Kingston says the workshop, which is focused on healing from and preventing violence to help citizens expand their understanding of trauma and cultivate trauma-informed awareness, offers “an incredible opportunity (to) voice the pain we’ve all experienced from the violence in Colorado.”

“This is a chance for anyone who’s been impacted by violence, and who wants to make a difference in preventing future violence, to come together and learn some of these really great practices around how to heal, and how to… get into touch with parts of ourselves that may have been shut down” by trauma, Kingston says.

One result of trauma is a sense of disengagement and isolation from the community, Kingston says, which reflects broader social and cultural patterns that fail to actively prevent violence collectively.

At the CSPV, Kingston adds, researchers ask a critical question: “How do we prevent violence? We know lots of ways to prevent violence, (but) it’s really frustrating that what science says works is not really getting put into place. So, we ask ourselves, ‘why is that?’”

Kingston believes that one reason is the trauma of violence, in which feelings of numbness spread and propagate a “sense of apathy, like there’s nothing that can be done.”

Trauma can manifest in a myriad of ways, but common indicators of trauma include the feelings of being “shut down,” or even dissociation, where you feel like “you’re not in your body anymore.”

At the top of the page: A stone memorial for the ten victims of the King Soopers shooting earlier this year (Glenn Asakawa). Above: Thomas Hübl, a renowned teacher, author and international facilitator, will lead the workshop.

To address this sense of widespread apathy to violence, Kingston wanted to change how she and other experts approached violence prevention by engaging in practices that may help traumatized individuals and communities heal and build resilience.

These community-based practices for healing individual, generational and collective trauma are inspired by the work of Thomas Hübl, a renowned teacher, author and international facilitator who will lead the workshop. His teachings combine meditative practices of wisdom traditions with evidence-based research and modern sciences.

The workshop is also being hosted by Hübl’s non-profit organization, the Pocket Project, which focuses on examining the roots—and symptoms—of collective trauma throughout the world to promote greater healing.

Kingston believes Hübl’s work has helped how people around the world embrace community-centered practices for healing trauma. Kingston noted that Hübl’s work was widely received in Germany, where some communities still struggle with the residual traumas of the Holocaust.

“In communities that have experienced cycles of violence, it is critical that we attend to healing on both the individual and collective levels. In my work over the past 20 years in working with people who have lived through—or are descendants of—some of humanity’s worst atrocities, I’ve observed that critical steps in healing can take place as we learn to attune our nervous systems, practice self- and co-regulation, and experience the power of group resonance and coherence,” said Hübl.

Regina Smith, vice president of Mission, Culture, & Inclusive Community at Naropa and a workshop co-host, explains that “Naropa's mission is to unravel the conditions which create suffering. To do that, we must recognize that regardless of the manifestation of suffering—whether it be a personal loss, a traumatic event, or systemic oppression—we are all being impacted because we are intimately connected.”

“The Boulder shooting was yet another reminder of how intimately connected we actually are—we hope this collaboration, and Thomas Hubl’s work, will help us to recognize this connection and build our collective resiliency,” Smith says.

Kingston adds that, “we are living in a time that urgently needs new and innovative competencies and resources to support the well-being of our communities. Hübl’s work has been embraced by professors, physicians, psychologists and therapists with great acclaim throughout the world over the past 20 years, opening up new avenues for research.”

Beverly Kingston, director of �鶹��ý’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) and a senior research associate, will host the upcoming workshop.

Hübl’s work include practices that are a form of mindfulness and meditation techniques where individuals sense their own bodies, emotions and thoughts, and then open themselves to others in the group.

“Hübl’s work is about us first coming into ourselves to be able to sense (ourselves)… they’re embodied practices focused on sensing, where you're feeling your physical self, feeling your emotional self, and becoming aware of your thoughts and asking, ‘Are these parts of myself in sync?’” Kingston says.

In groups of three at the workshop, individuals will have the opportunity to learn self-regulation, and then extend this practice to co-regulation, learning to “attune to one another” as well as the larger group. “He'll start to work with us on being able to sense the entire group, an exploration of what it means to experience coherence and synchrony as one ‘shared nervous system.’”

“We'll focus on what's arising from everyone in the group, and together, become present to ‘what is,’ not what we think the experience ‘should be.’ Whatever is emerging is the truth of that moment that needs to be seen and acknowledged,” Kingston notes. Workshop participants can engage as much or as little as is comfortable in the process.

A critical aspect to supporting the healing of trauma in the community setting, Kingston believes, is becoming more conscious of how communities are traumatized and fragmented through racism, poverty and other persistent social inequalities and injustices.

“To quote Peter Senge, who's a great (social) systems thinker, ‘In order to change the systems, we have to be able to see the systems.’ And so this is how healing trauma also helps us address the fragmentation at the more collective, societal level,” explains Kingston.

Repairing the relationship between traumatized individuals and the community, Kingston believes, will help communities become more conscious about systemic violence, which will then foster more collective action to counter the causes and effects of trauma.

Mark Wilding, director of PassageWorks Institute, a non-profit focused on supporting equitable classrooms and emotional learning between educators and students, is also partnering with �鶹��ý and Naropa to promote this workshop.

“I believe that Healing Colorado’s Collective Trauma virtual workshop is happening at a critical time for our communities, our schools, and our organizations. Understanding how to recognize and respond to collective trauma is the most important challenge that we face personally, with family and friends and in our workplaces. Learning how to heal from traumatic experiences and events is essential to addressing racism and violence in Colorado,” Wilding says.

Kingston thinks it may take a long time before such a trauma-informed awareness becomes widely embraced. But Kingston believes that “it is possible to plant those seeds, to truly prevent violence, to truly start doing them now, even if it's going to take 500 years for these seeds to grow to fruition and to have the society we really want. Let's do it anyway.”

More information, including on how to register, is available on Naropa’s website

Upcoming workshop to address how individuals can heal their trauma, and the role of the community in preventing violence

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Sleep deficits linked to chronic cannabis use

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 19:12:10 +0000

Sleep deficits linked to chronic cannabis use Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/18/2021 - 13:12

Nicolette Edwards

Recent research from �鶹��ý finds that, rather than help, frequent cannabis use could induce further sleep problems

For some, the drowsiness and relaxation that comes from marijuana use can be helpful for sleep. However, research from the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that this potential sleep aid could instead be an impediment.

This is one of the implications of the research of Evan Winiger (PhDPsych’21), whose doctoral dissertation shows evidence connecting frequent cannabis use with a range of early and late sleep problems—which is the first direct evidence of cannabis use and sleep’s shared genetic relationship.

At the top of the page: Cannabis plant growing under LED grow lights. Photo by Esteban Lopez on Unsplash. Above: Evan Winiger is a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Colorado Anschutz examining the relationships of cannabis and sleep.

“There’s a kind of big misconception in the role that cannabis can have as a sleep aid. We see some evidence that when you use it frequently and you use it early, it might be associated with long-lasting or some potential drastic effects on your sleep quality,” Winiger, now a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Colorado Anschutz, said.

When consuming marijuana, the plant’s tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—or the substance that gets people high—and cannabidiol (CBD)—a chemical compound essential to many medical applications—are activated in the endocannabinoid system, an important bodily system for brain and nervous system function.

THC binds to CB1 and CB2 receptors, which are found in the nervous and immune systems, respectively. CB1 receptors, in particular, are thought to regulate sleep processes such as the sleep-wake cycle and seem to not be as successful with chronic cannabis use.

Furthermore, research has shown high-doses of CBD help sleep, but high-doses of THC seem to obstruct sleep.

“Our brain does a lot when we sleep: It repairs, organizes and consolidates memories. In terms of how cannabis influences sleep, very acute limited use has shown to help sleep, but when we see heavy chronic use, daily use, it’s associated with a host of sleep deficits, including insomnia, lower sleep duration, sleep-quality issues and longer sleep onset latency. It is thought that chronic or heavy use is associated with the desensitization of the CB1 receptors and CB1 activity and efficacy, which facilitates waking,” Winiger said.

Twin modeling was used in this collection of work, which allows researchers to look at biological twins to examine the degree to which genetic and environmental factors influence a trait or disorder, and is an initial step in pinpointing the genetic relationships.

Winiger and his team also utilized genomic methods to test many sleep traits and substance use traits to find significant genetic correlations.

Using a method called polygenic risk prediction, or a method to estimate an individual's lifetime genetic risk of disease, Winiger found that the genetics that potentially contribute to insomnia can also predict cannabis use traits such as age of first use and use behaviors.

Further application of genomic methods led Winiger to determine significant genetic correlations between lifetime cannabis use and evening chronotype (individual differences in sleep timing), as well as genetics links between cannabis use disorder and both short sleep duration and insomnia.

“If genetic variation accounts for the association (of cannabis and sleep), that then leads us to look at how genetic variants, such as in the endocannabinoid system, might affect sleep patterns; (how) genetic variants for sleep or circadian rhythms might influence propensity to use cannabis; or, indeed, whether some other system related to genetic determinants of impulsive behavior, for example, might influence both cannabis and sleep,” said John Hewitt, director of the Institute of Behavioral Genetics and professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Our brain does a lot when we sleep: It repairs, organizes and consolidates memories. In terms of how cannabis influences sleep, very acute limited use has shown to help sleep, but when we see heavy chronic use, daily use, it’s associated with a host of sleep deficits.”

“Motivated by the twin study results, Evan went on to also utilize genomic data to confirm these genetic associations.”

Along with the twin and genomic studies, Winiger also examined how cannabis use during pregnancy might affect sleep in children. The results suggest that general exposure to cannabis during pregnancy may be associated with childhood sleep deficits, which can lead to sleep disorders.

“The endocannabinoid system is very instrumental and operational in early pregnancy, and it holds a crucial role in both prenatal brain and embryonic development,” Winiger said. “The fetal brain is thought to be densely populated with CB1 receptors, and these escalate during gestation and are believed to actually impact brain development. So THC binds to these receptors and there's evidence that suggests it possibly alters neuro (brain) development.”

Winiger is continuing his research on cannabis and sleep with his current postdoc, looking at the further questions stemming from his dissertation.

“This body of work really is the first collected evidence of cannabis use having a genetic relationship with sleep deficit,” Winiger said.

Recent research from �鶹��ý finds that, rather than help, frequent cannabis use could induce further sleep problems.

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Researchers pinpoint behaviors underlying gambling addiction

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 17:24:51 +0000

Researchers pinpoint behaviors underlying gambling addiction Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/05/2021 - 11:24

Nicolette Edwards

Before putting $20 down on the table, audit your mental health, researchers from the Institute of Behavioral Science suggest.

Gambling activities are more readily available than ever, but the availability could play into potential problem gambling and addiction based off one’s genetics, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder.

In a study published in Addictive Behaviors, the researchers found that individual’s genetics, psychiatric diagnoses and behaviors influence the frequency in which a they gamble, the specific activities they participate in, and the probability that they will develop problems with gambling.

Spencer Huggett is a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University and an author on the paper. He is also a postdocral trainee at the Insitute of Behavioral Genetics.

Gambling addiction affects roughly two million people per year and yet much about what causes the addiction to arise is relatively unknown given the complexity of the data. This new research, though, provides some insight on the relationship of genetics and addiction.

"The types of gambling that you do and your current mental health matters, and how much you gamble all depends on whether you develop problematic outcomes from it," Spencer Huggett, (PhDPsych’19), a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University and an author on the paper, said.

“Certain people are more prone to develop problems gambling and/or to engage in certain types of gambling than others,” he said.

Huggett and Evan Winiger (PhDPsych’21), the study’s co-author and a postdoctoral fellow at Anschutz Medical Campus, were roommates as they both pursued their doctorates in behavioral, psychiatric and statistical genetics. Winiger studied cannabis and Huggett, studied cocaine. Through living under the same roof, scientific, technical and philosophical conversations on addiction and genetics ensued. One of these conversations led them to asking questions about gambling and its addictive properties.

“We hypothesized that there’s going to be some common feature to all types of gambling from playing poker and betting on slot machines to buying lottery tickets and day trading in the stock market. Although we did not think this would fully recapitulate the complexities and nuances across all forms of gambling,”. Huggett said. “We thus set out to study clusters of gambling behavior — particularly those involving an element of ‘skill’ — to investigate and characterize the developmental pathways of gambling behavior.”

Evan Winiger is the study’s co-author and a postdoctoral fellow at Anschutz Medical Campus researching cannabis and sleep.

To assess these potential phenomena, they utilized the Institute of Behavioral Genetics’ library of complex datasets and pulled the large twin and sibling sets. The sibling sample was selected based on externalizing behaviors, and the twin sample provided a general population overview. They used multi-dimensional statistical techniques on a sample of 2,116 twins and 619 siblings to understand the structure, typology and etiology of gambling frequency.

“This study is a genetically informed evaluation of different gambling profiles,” Winiger said. “There’s some research out there trying to categorize different kinds of gamblers, and our study is kind of another approach showing this might be a different way to look at these different subgroups as well as how certain classes or subgroups might correlate with various mental health or substance use.”

Their study identifies four gambling subtypes distinguished by their gambling behavioral profiles (or how often they gambled). According to the study, the gambling subtypes with the highest rates of psychiatric disorders had approximately two to six times higher rates of problem gambling than those with lower rates of mental illness. Genetics play an important role in the development of gambling behavior, the researchers said, noting that the gambling subtypes with highest rates of problem gambling were strongly predicted by genetic factors. The individual’s mental health, genetic risk plus their gambling behavioral profiles determined whether or not problematic gambling behaviors would arise, the researchers found.

The study also found that individuals participating in common gambling activities such as betting on slots, playing dice and buying lottery tickets were more likely to lead to problem gambling than gambling with a perceived element of skill gambling such as day trading and playing pool for money.

Huggett and Winiger applied the Pathways Model, an established model within gambling research that determines problem and pathological gamblers, which defines three possible pathways that individuals begin to experience problems with gambling. The three pathways are behaviorally conditioned problem gamblers, emotionally vulnerable problem gamblers, and antisocial impulsivity problem gamblers.

“What we really wanted to understand was, ‘is there a profile of certain gambling activities that clusters into broader mental health subtypes?’” Huggett said “We did find evidence that this was the case. Certain types of gamblers based off of the activities that they prefer tended to mimic some of these more popular pathways to gambling addiction.”

In the discussion of the study, the researchers mention that their examination of personality disorders and gambling should be approached with caution due to the wide spectrum of gambling activities and behaviors. This study does, though, supports the connection between genetics to personality disorders and gambling addiction.

“This is an extremely big pie of mental illness and gambling and the thing that we did was the smallest little sliver,” Huggett said. “We wanted to shed light in that pie so we can have a better understanding and hopefully use this information to tailor more proactive approaches and potentially tailored treatment profiles to the individual.”

Before putting $20 down on the table, audit your mental health, researchers from the Institute of Behavioral Science suggest.

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Institute of Behavioral Science

How late can you wait? Turns out, we still don’t know

Righting a wrong

A complex method to demonstrate a simple truth

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