All Episodes

#590 Thomas Costello: Authoritarianism on the Right and the Left, and Sexual Objectification

Feb 21, 2022

Thomas Costello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Emory University. Certain personality traits, thinking styles, and worldviews give rise to maladaptive political attitudes and behaviors, such as violence, extreme partisanship, and authoritarianism. Thomas’ research leverages the tools and expertise of personality psychology and clinical science to understand, measure, and statistically model the psychological causes and correlates of these attitudes and behaviors. More»
#589 Ashley Thomas: Naïve Sociology, and How Children Think About Hierarchies and Social Relations

Feb 18, 2022

Dr. Ashley Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow at the center for research on open and equitable scholarship at MIT. She is interested in humans as a social species. She investigates what infants, toddlers, and children think about social relationships (i.e., their naive sociology). She has studied how they think and feel about social hierarchy (i.e. situations where there is a 'winner' and a 'loser' or when someone is 'in charge.'). Currently, she is working with Elizabeth Spelke and Rebecca Saxe, and they are investigating how infants interpret social interactions that involve their own caregivers as well as how infants, toddlers, and children think about social intimacy. She has also studied people's moral judgments of parenting decisions. More»
#588 Jennifer Lackey: The Epistemology of Groups; Groups Assertions, Groups Lies, and Responsibility

Feb 17, 2022

Dr. Jennifer Lackey is Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Jennifer Lackey specializes in epistemology, with a particular emphasis on a broad range of issues in social epistemology. Her recent work focuses on false confessions, the criminal justice system, the duty to object, norms of credibility, the epistemic status of punishment, the epistemology of groups, expertise, and the distribution of epistemic goods. She is the author of several books, including The Epistemology of Groups. More»
#587 Victoria Dougherty: Nihilism, Horror, Depression, Love, and Writing

Feb 14, 2022

Victoria Dougherty is the author of The Bone Church, Welcome to the Hotel Yalta, and Cold. She writes fiction, drama, and essays that revolve around lovers, killers, curses, and destinies. Her work has been published or profiled in the New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. Earlier in her career, while living in Prague, she co-founded Black Box Theater, translating, producing, and acting in several Czech plays. Her blog – COLD – features her short essays on faith, family, love, and writing. WordPress, the blogging platform that hosts some 70 million blogs worldwide, has singled out COLD as one of the Top 50 Recommended Blogs by writers or about writing. More»
#586 Marianna Ganapini: Beliefs, Confabulations, Rationalizations, and AI Systems

Feb 11, 2022

Dr. Marianna Ganapini is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Union College (NY). She works primarily in contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology. She also has related interests in the ethics and epistemology of AI. More»
#585 Philippe Rochat Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White

Feb 10, 2022

Dr. Philippe Rochat is Professor of Psychology at Emory University. What is the nature and origins of human self-conscious psychology? Driven by this question, the main focus of Dr. Rochat's research in the Emory Infant and Child Lab is on the early sense of self, emerging self-concept, the development of social cognition and relatedness, and the emergence of a moral sense during the preschool years in children from all over the world growing up in different cultural environments and socio-economic circumstances. Dr. Rochat has published five books, including Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White. More»
#584 William Glod: Why It’s OK to Make Bad Choices

Feb 7, 2022

Dr. William Glod is Senior Program Officer at the Institute for Humane Studies, an educational non-profit affiliated with George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of Why It’s OK to Make Bad Choices. More»
#583 Peter Ditto: Motivated Reasoning, Morality, and Politics

Feb 4, 2022

Dr. Peter Ditto is Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine School of Social Ecology. He is interested in “hot cognition” — the interface between passion and reason. His research examines the role of motivation, emotion and intuition in social, political, moral, medical, and legal judgment. Most generally, he has sought to explain the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” — how the desire to reach a particular conclusion biases the processing of information related to that conclusion. His early work examined the role such biases play in responses to threatening medical information (e.g., denial). More recently, his work has focused on motivated moral reasoning, particularly how people selectively recruit general principles and factual beliefs to support desired moral conclusions. Another key focus of his current research is partisan political bias. This work examines the multiple ways that political ideology biases our political judgments and behavior. Finally, he is interested in a variety of psychological issues involved in end-of-life medical decision making. More»
#582 Mary Beth Willard: Why It’s OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists

Feb 3, 2022

Dr. Mary Beth Willard is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Weber State University. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and writes primarily in aesthetics and blogs at aestheticsforbirds.com. She is the author of Why It’s OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists. More»
#581 Robert Larzelere: Parenting Styles, Authoritative Parenting, and Spanking

Jan 31, 2022

Dr. Robert Larzelere is Professor and Research Methodologist in the College of Education and Human Sciences at Oklahoma State University. He is interested in collaborating with others who are concerned about the best scientific evidence on important questions about family and family-type relationships. He investigates specific disciplinary processes that account for the effectiveness of the authoritative parenting combination of warmth, communication, just-firm-enough control and increasing autonomy. He is interested in comparing the effectiveness of alternative disciplinary responses to misbehavior and searching for alternative tactics that are more effective than non-abusive spanking in situations where the latter has traditionally been used. More»