Featured Publication: Somebody Should Do Something
Publication Title
Somebody Should Do Something
Co-Authors
Publisher
The MIT Press
Publication Date
September 16, 2025
About the Book
A novel and scientific approach to creating transformative social change, and the surprising ways that each of us can help make a real difference.
Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something, Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think.
The authors paint a new picture of how social change happens, arguing that our most powerful personal choices are those that springboard us into working together with others—warehouse worker Chris Smalls’s unionization at Amazon is one powerful example. Taking inspiration from the writer Bill McKibben, they stress how one “important thing an individual can do is be somewhat less of an individual.”
Organized into three main parts, the book first diagnoses the problem of “either/or” thinking about social change, which stems from the false choice of making better personal choices or changing the system. Then it offers a different way to think about social change, anchored in a new picture of human nature emerging across the social sciences. Finally, the authors explore ways of putting this picture into practice. Neither a how-to manual nor an activist’s guide, Somebody Should Do Something pairs stories with science (plus some jokes) to help readers recognize their own power, turning resignation about climate change and racial injustice into actions that transform the world.
About the Author
Daniel Kelly is a Professor of Philosophy, whose research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, moral theory, and evolution. He turned his dissertation into a book on the genetic and cultural evolution of disgust called Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, and has published on a range of topics that include moral judgment, moral progress, climate change, social norms and norm-guided activity, the psychology of group membership, racial cognition, implicit bias and responsibility, cross-cultural diversity, and David Foster Wallace and free will. While getting his PhD at Rutgers, he also became a founding member of the Moral Psychology Research Group, which includes like-minded philosophers and psychologists investigating morality from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. He has taught a variety of courses, and is currently putting together a new one on Fun and Games and the Life Worth Living.
Kelly’s research interests are stridently interdisciplinary. Since starting at Purdue in 2007, he has gotten involved with Purdue's larger environmental and sustainability community through the Sustainable Communities Research Community, which is now housed in the Institute for a Sustainable Future. He was recently a visiting scholar in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at Holland College at KU Leuven and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Much of Kelly's recent work has been exploring ways to apply the insights of the cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences to social issues like climate change, misinformation and polarization, and systemic injustice. He is currently co-authoring a public-facing book that explores how those insights can be used to integrate individual and structural approaches to social change. In addition to philosophizing he enjoys reading novels and making witty remarks.
He spends the summers with his wife and dog living that #vanlife and surfing along the California coast.