All Episodes

#225 Daniel Sznycer: The Evolutionary Psychology of Emotions

Sep 5, 2019

Dr. Daniel Sznycer is Assistant Professor in Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal, Canada. He is an evolutionary social psychologist conducting research on emotion and cooperation. He has multiple lines of cross-cultural evidence on shame, pride, compassion, and envy, and their roles in altruism, cooperation, social exclusion, and conflict. He’s also working to map the system that regulates how much weight one individual places on the welfare of another. He conducts research on how these emotions and motivations regulate political and moral attitudes, and how they shape communication. The methods Dr. Sznycer uses include experimental economic games, decision-making tasks, priming methods, cross-cultural and ethnographic data collection, large-scale representative surveys, and anthropometry. More»
#224 Michele Gelfand: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers; Tight And Loose Cultures

Sep 2, 2019

Dr. Michele Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture--as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, among other outlets. She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018). More»
#223 Pascal Boyer: Minds Make Societies, Religion, and Conspiracy Theories

Aug 30, 2019

Dr. Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He’s also the author of books like Religion Explained; Memory, Mind and Culture; and Minds Make Societies. More»
#222 Sven Nyholm: Self-Driving Cars, Love Enhancement, And Sex Robots

Aug 29, 2019

Dr. Sven Nyholm is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His main areas of research are applied ethics (especially the ethics of technology), ethical theory, and the history of ethics. More specifically, he has recently published on love-relationships and biomedical enhancements, sex robots, motivation-enhancements, accident-algorithms for self-driving cars, deep brain stimulation, happiness and well-being, meaning in life, and interpersonal respect and moral reasoning. His work also focuses on the ethics of automated driving, human-robot collaboration, deep brain stimulation (including its effect on the self), and disability and the goods of life. He is especially interested in how robotization and other types of automation affect traditional human values, as well as in existential questions raised by new technological developments. More»
#221 Peter DeScioli: The Evolution of Morality, Moral Judgment, and Common Knowledge

Aug 26, 2019

Dr. Peter DeScioli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University. His research investigates how the human mind uses principles of strategy to solve problems in the social world. Much of his work has focused on moral condemnation, especially the functions of morally judging other people, moralistic punishment, and moral impartiality. In another line of work, he studies how people form alliances, how they choose their loyalties to others, and how they display and conceal their loyalties. A third project looks at our sense of ownership by using a virtual environment to observe resource disputes in the laboratory. In recent years, he has been designing online games for experiments about politics, including redistribution of wealth, social safety nets, alliance formation, and political negotiation. More»
#220 Cory Clark & Bo Winegard: The Biggest Issues in Psychology

Aug 23, 2019

Dr. Cory Clark is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Durham University, UK. Dr. Clark does research in Moral Psychology, Political Psychology, Experimental Philosophy, and Motivated Cognition. More»
#219 Lee Cronk: Modern Cultural Anthropology, and Human Cooperation

Aug 22, 2019

Dr. Lee Cronk is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. His research and teaching interests include human evolutionary ecology, including behavioral ecology, cultural ecology, and cognitive ecology; signaling theory; culture; and cooperation. Dr. Cronk is also affiliated with the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, the Perceptual Science Graduate Training Program, and the Program in Evolutionary Biology. He is a member of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the International Society for Human Ethology. Dr. Cronk is also co-director, with C. Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University, of the Human Generosity Project. He is author or co-author of three books, That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior, From Mukogodo to Maasai: Ethnicity and Cultural Change in Kenya, and Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation, and co-editor of two more, Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, and Through the Looking Glass: Readings in Anthropology. More»
#218 Sabina Leonelli: Science in the World of Big Data

Aug 19, 2019

Dr. Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter. She pursues an approach to philosophy of science that is grounded on the empirical study of scientific practices, as informed by historical research, ethnographic methods used in the social and anthropological studies of science and technology, and collaboration with practicing scientists. She has a strong interest in topics like Data-Intensive Science and Practices of Data Sharing and Re-Use, Open Science and Open Data, Bio-Ontologies, and Historic and Epistemic Status of Model Organism Research. She’s the author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, and “La ricerca scientifica nell’era dei Big Data” (“Scientific Research in the Era of Big Data”). More»
#217 Maryanne Fisher: Evolutionary Psychology, Women, And Feminism

Aug 16, 2019

Dr. Maryanne Fisher is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, and a member of the Women and Gender Studies Program, at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada. Her research on how women compete for men has received international media attention, such as the BBC and Discovery Channel. She also investigates the determinants of women's physical attractiveness and what women want in a mate. She has published over 90 peer-reviewed journal articles primarily related to interpersonal relationships. She is an award-winning teacher, and was recognized by the Canadian Progress Club as a Woman of Excellent in the Division of Research and Education. She’s also the editor of Evolution's Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women. More»
#216 Thomas Morgan: Cultural Evolution And Transmission, And Cumulative Culture

Aug 15, 2019

Dr. Thomas Morgan is Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His background is in the evolution of animal social behavior and cognition. He graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor's in zoology in 2009, focusing on vertebrate evolution and behavioral ecology. He completed his doctorate in 2013 at the University of St. Andrews working with Kevin Laland to carry out a series of experiments testing evolutionary hypotheses about human social learning. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Tom Griffiths in the computational cognitive science lab at University of California at Berkeley where he developed a new platform for large-scale online social experiments called Dallinger. He joined the Adaptation, Behavior, Culture and Society group at Arizona State Unviersity in August 2016. He’s interested in the psychological mechanisms that support culture and evolutionary explanations for how humans came to be. More»