All Episodes

#374 Moshe Hoffman: Incentives, Preferences, and Reason

Oct 5, 2020

Dr. Moshe Hoffman is a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab & Lecturer at Harvard's Department of Economics. He applies game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods, to try to decipher the (often subconscious and subtle) incentives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. Dr. Hoffman obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and his B.S. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He also co-designed and teaches "Game Theory and Social Behavior" which lays out a lot of the evidence and models behind this approach. More»
#373 Melanie Mitchell: AI, Complex Systems, Human Cognition, and Algorithms

Oct 2, 2020

Dr. Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. Dr. Mitchell is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). More»
#372 Thibaud Gruber: Primates, Tool Use, and Communication

Oct 1, 2020

Dr. Thibaud Gruber is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, and he is also part of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. A primatologist halfway between Switzerland and the UK. Working with chimps, orangutans and bonobos, he is interested in the evolutionary origins of culture and language. More»
#371 Marc Bekoff: Ethology and Animal Conservation

Sep 28, 2020

Dr. Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He has won many awards for his scientific research including the Exemplar Award from the Animal Behavior Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, Dr. Bekoff was presented with The Bank One Faculty Community Service Award for the work he has done with children, senior citizens, and prisoners and in 2009 he was presented with the St. Francis of Assisi Award by the New Zealand SPCA. In 1986 He became the first American to win his age-class at the Tour du Haut Var bicycle race (also called the Master's/age-graded Tour de France). Dr. Bekoff has published numerous essays (popular, scientific, and book chapters), 31 books, and has edited three encyclopedias. More»
#370 Martie Haselton - Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones

Sep 25, 2020

Dr. Martie Haselton is Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Communication as well as the ISG (Institute for Society and Genetics) at UCLA. Her research focuses on evolution and human behavior, social psychology, interpersonal communication, and social endocrinology. Her empirical work explores intimate relationships, sexuality, olfactory communication, psychological sex differences, social inference, evolution and health, and the effects of reproductive hormones on human behavior. She’s the author of the book Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones -- How They Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, Influence Our Choices, and Make Us Wiser. More»
#369 Alberto Acerbi: Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age

Sep 24, 2020

Dr. Alberto Acerbi is a Lecturer in Psychology in the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. He is a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist with a particular interest in computational science. The main question that drives his research is: is it possible to find some general factors determining why some cultural traits succeed and others do not? He is interested in particular in contemporary cultural phenomena, and he uses a naturalistic, quantitative, and evolutionary approach with different methodologies, especially individual-based models and quantitative analysis of large-scale data. He published a book recently, Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age. More»
#368 Ian Tattersall: Human Evolution and Cognition

Sep 21, 2020

Dr. Ian Tattersall is currently curator emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He has carried out both primatological and paleontological fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen, and Mauritius. Trained in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and in geology and vertebrate paleontology at Yale University, Dr. Tattersall has concentrated his research since the 1960s in three main areas: the analysis of the human fossil record and its integration with evolutionary theory, the origin of human cognition, and the study of the ecology and systematics of the lemurs of Madagascar. He is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public, with numerous trade books to his credit, as well as several articles in Scientific American and the co-editorship of the definitive Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory. More»
#367 Christophe Heintz: Adaptive Cognition, Cognitive History, and Science

Sep 18, 2020

Dr. Christophe Heintz is Associate Professor at the Central European University, where he leads the research group ACE (Adaptive Cognition and Economics). Dr. Heintz is working on the role of adaptive cognition in shaping economic behavior, cultural evolution, and the history of science. Scientific practices and economic choices have traditionally been described as rational. He attempts to describe them as resulting from both environmental/contextual and psychological causal factors, with a focus on evolved cognition. More»
#366 Ann Druyan - Cosmos: Possible Worlds

Sep 17, 2020

Ann Druyan was the creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project and program director of the first solar sail deep space mission, launched on a Russian ICBM in 2005. With her late husband, Carl Sagan, she co-authored the original 1980s Emmy Award– and Peabody Award–winning TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and six New York Times bestsellers. Additionally, Druyan was co-creator and co-producer of the Warner Bros. feature film Contact, starring Jodie Foster and directed by Bob Zemeckis. Druyan was the lead executive producer, a director, and coauthor of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, produced for Fox and the National Geographic Channel, for which she won Peabody, Producers Guild, and Emmy Awards in 2014. The show, which received 13 Emmy nominations, has been seen in 181 countries. She is an executive producer, writer, director, and creator of Cosmos: Possible Worlds, first broadcast in 2020. The asteroids Sagan (2709) and Druyan (4970) are in perpetual wedding ring orbit around the sun. More»
#365 Dan McAdams: The Psychology of Donald Trump

Sep 14, 2020

Dr. Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. Dr. McAdams is most well-known for formulating a life-story theory of human identity, which argues that modern adults provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose by constructing and internalizing self-defining life stories or “personal myths.” He’s a leader in the recent emergence within the social sciences of narrative approaches to studying human lives – approaches that place stories and storytelling at the center of human personality. His theoretical and empirical writings focus on concepts of self and identity in contemporary American society and on themes of power, intimacy, redemption, and generativity across the adult life course. He’s also the author of nearly 300 scientific articles and chapters, numerous edited volumes, and seven books, including “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning”. More»