All Episodes

#746 Simon Baron-Cohen: Autism, Systemizing, Empathy, and Sex Differences

Feb 20, 2023

Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre. He has made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synesthesia. Dr. Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to autistic people. His latest book is The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention. More»
#745 Christopher Ferguson - Catastrophe!; Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse

Feb 17, 2023

Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson is professor of psychology at Stetson University. He is interested in media violence and, in particular, video games. He’s the author of Catastrophe!: How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse. More»
#744 Sander van der Linden Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity

Feb 16, 2023

Dr. Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment, communication, and decision-making, including social norms and networks, attitudes and polarization, reasoning about evidence, and the public understanding of risk and uncertainty. He is the author of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity. More»
#743 Vibeke Ottesen: The Evolution of Violence, and the Consequences of Banning Abortion

Feb 13, 2023

Dr. Vibeke Ottesen is a Norwegian criminologist with an interest in how nature and nurture combined create human behavior. She has a popular science blog – Biosocial - where she comments on news, scientific findings and literature relevant to her subject – more often than not with an evolutionary informed approach to understanding the subject matter. She has held numerous lectures on the benefits of an evolutionary informed approach to understanding the cross-cultural sex and age differences in anti-social and criminal behavior. More»
#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»