All Episodes

#742 Zoe Liberman: Infant Social Cognition, Social Categorization, Gossip, and Ritual

Feb 10, 2023

Dr. Zoe Liberman is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Liberman investigates the origins and development of human social cognition. She is particularly interested in how infants begin to understand our complicated social world, as well as how this understanding changes across development and is shaped by experience. Her research focuses on early social categorization. Dr. Liberman is also interested in the malleability of early social categorization, including the effects of growing up in a multilingual (or otherwise diverse) environment. More»
#741 Marya Schechtman: The Philosophy of the Self and Personal Identity

Feb 9, 2023

Dr. Marya Schechtman is an LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, as well as a member of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her main areas of interest are personal identity, practical reasoning, and bioethics. She is the author of books like The Constitution of Selves (Cornell 1996), and Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (Oxford 2014). More»
#740 Tibor Rutar - Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy

Feb 6, 2023

Dr. Tibor Rutar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, Researcher at the Center for the Study of Post-Socialist Societies in Maribor, and Researcher at the Research Center for Strategy and Governance at the University of Ljubljana. His scholarly work is currently focused on political, economic and historical sociology, particularly longstanding social issues related to democracy and capitalism. His lastest book is Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy (Routledge, 2022). More»
#739 Aaron Sell: The Evolution of Anger and Hatred, and Justice-Making Institutions

Feb 3, 2023

Dr. Aaron Sell is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Criminology at Heidelberg University. He is an evolutionary psychologist interested in anger and aggression, hatred, and formidability estimation. More»
#738 Antoine Marie: Moral Convictions, Politics, Misinformation, and Conspiracy Theories

Feb 2, 2023

Dr. Antoine Marie is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is an evolutionary political psychologist with a background in philosophy, sociology, political science, and social psychology. He conducts cross-cultural psychology experiments and develops evolutionary theory to better understand, and if possible, mitigate, the cognitive biases that arise from people having strong moral convictions on controversial topics, typically in contexts of perceived intergroup conflict. More»
#737 Christopher Burris - Evil in Mind: The Psychology of Harming Others

Jan 30, 2023

Dr. Christopher Burris is a Professor of Psychology at St. Jerome's University, one of the six faculties that makes up the University of Waterloo. Over the years, he has dabbled in religion/spirituality, the self, sexuality, and motivation and emotion. Current topics of his research include the exploring the mystical properties of erotic love as well as developing and testing a causal model to explain sadistically motivated behavior across the spectrum of severity. He is the author of Evil in Mind: The Psychology of Harming Others. More»
#736 Todd Kashdan: The Psychology of Well-Being

Jan 27, 2023

Dr. Todd Kashdan is Professor of Psychology at George Mason University. He has been named Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year at George Mason University and received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. A world recognized authority on well-being, strengths, social relationships, stress, and anxiety, Dr. Kashdan has published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why being your whole self - not just your “good” self - drives success and fulfillment, Curious? Discover the missing ingredient to a fulfilling life, and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively. More»
#735 Daniel Blumstein: Predator-Prey Research, Antipredator Behavior, and Conservationism

Jan 26, 2023

Dr. Daniel Blumstein is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He is a behavioral ecologist broadly interested in the evolution of behavior and the application of behavioral and evolutionary principles to policy, health, and defense. He has studied the behavior and ecology of mammals (including humans), birds, fish, lizards, hermit crabs, and sea anemone, and runs the 50+ year project studying the behavioral and evolutionary ecology of yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. He is the author of books like A Primer of Conservation Behavior, The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It), and The Nature of Fear: Survival Lessons from the Wild. More»
#734 Helena Miton: Cognitive Science, Cultural Transmission, and Tacit Knowledge

Jan 23, 2023

Dr. Helena Miton is Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Miton’s research agenda approaches culture as an emergent effect of human everyday life. It aims to understand how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit cultural systems. Aiming to redefine how we study culture, her research program includes both theoretical advances and empirical case studies. She studies cultural evolution using data from human and social sciences, with a strong emphasis on cognitive science. She plans on investigating how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices. More»
#733 Andrew Knoll - A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Jan 20, 2023

Dr. Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. Dr. Knoll’s research focuses on the early evolution of life, Earth’s environmental history, and, especially, the interconnections between the two. For the past decade, he has served on the science team for NASA’s MER mission to Mars. Professor Knoll’s honors include the Walcott Medal and the Mary Clark Thompson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science (for his 2003 book Life on a Young Planet), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Paleontological Society Medal, and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. Dr. Knoll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He is the author of A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. More»