A disturbing thought - might it be impossible for us to directly observe the workings of our minds? Richard Nisbett joins Igor and Charles to discuss a life lived on the cutting edge of behavioral sciences in the second part of the 20th Century. He shares tales from his groundbreaking research into our faulty mindware, discussing various biases, cultural differences in cognitive processes, our inability to directly observe our mental processes, and why job interviews are not only unhelpful but potentially harmful to our ability to hire the best person for the job. Igor is keen to learn about the human beings behind some of the 20th Century’s academic idols in social psychology like Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Lee Ross, Richard explains why important work and interesting work are not necessarily the same thing, and Charles struggles to make sense of when we do and don’t intervene to help strangers in peril. Welcome to Episode 43.

Special Guest: Richard Nisbett.

Links:

• Richard Nisbett's Homepage
• World After Covid - Richard Nisbett Interview
• Thinking: A Memoir
• The Psychology of Thinking - with Richard Nisbett - Royal Institution Lecture (2016)
• Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes - Nisbett & Wilson (1977)
• The influence of culture: holistic versus analytic perception - Nisbett & Miyamoto (2005)
• Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments - Nisbett, Aronson, Blair, Dickens, Flynn, Halpern, Turkheimer (2012).