Adani chats with Tamar Kushnir, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Tamar’s research spans pretty much everything you can imagine: Cognitive development, causal learning, social cognition, moral cognition, cultural psychology, free will, imagination, counterfactual thinking, self-control, and more! In this conversation, we discuss Tamar’s fascinating review on imagination and social cognition in childhood alongside many fun tangents about superheroes, the Wright Brothers, and collective social change. Tamar also shares what she most enjoys about research in the first place, and what she’s excited for next!

Tamar’s faculty webpage: https://dibs.duke.edu/profile/tamar-kushnir/

Tamar’s lab website: https://ecclabduke.com/ 

Tamar’s paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1603

Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com 

Adani’s Bluesky: @adani

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

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In this re-air episode from 2022, Eric chats with Robin Dunbar, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford. Robin has famously studied the evolution of the human brain, arguing that our brain developed to understand the complex social world we have created for ourselves. Most know him for “Dunbar’s number,” or the limit to the number of individuals we can maintain stable relationships with. Robin has received more awards than could be counted, including the prestigious Huxley Memorial Medal. He has written various books, most relevant for this conversation a book called “Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationship.”

In this wide-ranging episode, Eric and Robin discuss why Dunbar’s number is actually a whole series of numbers. Robin explains how he arrived at this number, why it is so relevant to everything from our globalized world and big cities to maintaining friendships. Do psychopaths need friends to be happy? If you don’t like people, should you move into the woods and never talk to anyone again? He explains why we gossip and what makes something funny. Finally, he shares some personal stories about his career and why his discovery of Dunbar’s number was actually an accident.

Links:

Robin's Friendship book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/friends-robin-dunbar/1138785864
Robin's most recent book on religion: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/316135/how-religion-evolved-by-dunbar-robin/9780241431788

Eric's website
Eric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsy

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/
 
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Anjie chats with Dr. Nicky Sullivan, senior researcher at Impact Justice, a national non-profit innovation and research center focused on transforming the U.S. criminal justice system. Dr. Sullivan received his PhD from Stanford Psychology Department in 2024. During his PhD, he studied parents' and children's beliefs about race and racial inequality. In this episode, Nicky shares his journey from studying race in the lab to evaluating innovative initiatives like The Homecoming Project at Impact Justice. He offers practical advice for grad students on networking, while reflecting on the challenges of pursuing system reform in today’s shifting political landscape.

If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but helps us reach more people and get them excited about psychology.

Links:

Nicky’s linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicky-sullivan-phd/
Impact Justice: https://impactjustice.org/

Anjie’s website: https://anjiecao.github.io/

Podcast X @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Su chats with Dr. Steve Rathje. Dr. Rathje is an incoming Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an NSF and AXA postdoctoral fellow at New York University. Steve’s work centers on the psychology of technology. He studies how core psychological phenomena like polarization, intergroup conflict, the spread of information, and mental health interact with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media. Through a combination of behavioral science, computational methods, and large-scale data, his research sheds light on how our minds and our societies are being shaped in the digital age. In today's episode, we discuss his research background together with his recent review paper “The psychology of virality," in which they explore why certain content spreads rapidly online and offline, often involving a mix of emotional, social, and structural factors..

Steve’s paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.06.014 
Steve’s personal website: https://stevenrathje.com/ 

Su’s Twitter @sudkrc & Bluesky @sudkrc.bsky.social

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/
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Anjie chats with Dr. Ying Wong, founder and CEO of B.peachy and former cultural psychologist. Ying received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford in 2007, where she studied shame and guilt through a cultural lens. After academia, she built an impressive career across global business, and she now is the founder and CEO of B.peachy, a company dedicated to menstrual care.

In this episode, Anjie and Ying discuss Ying’s remarkable journey from academia into the business world, and how she has carried her training in social psychology into every stage of her career. They talk about what it was like to pivot into consulting and how her psychology training prepared her to build products and teams. 

If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but helps us reach more people and get them excited about psychology.

Links:

Dr. Wong’s company B.peachy: https://bpeachy.online/

Dr. Wong’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ying-wong/

Anjie’s website: https://anjiecao.github.io/

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Adani chats with Dr. Susan Engel, a Senior Lecturer and Senior Faculty Fellow in Psychology at Williams College. Susan’s research spans many areas, including the development of curiosity and invention, children’s ideas, the impact of college, and school reform. In this conversation, we discuss Susan’s seminal research on children's curiosity, how curiosity develops into adulthood, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of Children. Susan also shares the story behind how she first started in this field of research, and the projects she’s excited to work on next.

Susan’s website: https://psychology.williams.edu/profile/sengel/
Susan’s book The Hungry Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Mind-Origins-Curiosity-Childhood/dp/0674984110
Susan’s book The Intellectual Lives of Children: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-intellectual-lives-of-children-susan-engel/1136606329
Susan’s upcoming book American Kindergarten: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo258923309.html

Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com
Adani’s Bluesky: @adani

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

Su chats with Dr. Roger Levy. Dr. Levy is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. His work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, combining computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation, and analysis of large, naturalistic language datasets, to help design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language. In today's episode, we discuss his research background together with his recent work "The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI".

Roger’s review: https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/ak3evnmm/release/1 

Roger’s lab website: http://cpl.mit.edu/  

Roger’s personal website: https://www.mit.edu/~rplevy/ 

Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

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In today’s episode, Adani chats with Adam Benforado, a lawyer, writer, and professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law. Adam’s research, teaching, and advocacy are focused on children’s rights and criminal justice, and he brings insights from the mind sciences—most notably cognitive psychology—to law and legal theory. In this conversation, Adam tells us about his latest book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, laying out the multifaceted, complex context around children’s rights and parental authority in the U.S. Adam also shares how he first got to work on the issues he now champions and what his future vision is, for children and society more broadly.

Adam’s website: https://www.adambenforado.com/
Adam’s book, A Minor Revolution: https://www.adambenforado.com/a-minor-revolution
Adam’s twitter: @Benforado
Adam’s new organization, Minor Power: ​​https://www.minorpower.org/

Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com
Adani’s Bluesky: @adani

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod 
Podcast Substack 

Stanford Psychology Podcast - Newsletter for the official Stanford Psychology Podcast!

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Su chats with Dr. Yuan Chang (YC) Leong. YC is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Lab, which is a part of the Department of Psychology, a member of the Institute of Mind and Biology and the Neuroscience Institute, and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute. His research explores the neural and computational mechanisms underlying how goals, beliefs, and emotions influence human cognition, with a focus on why people interpret and respond to identical situations in different ways. In today's episode, we discuss what’s on YC intellectual radar these days, alongside with his recent paper "Dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal during naturalistic movie-watching," in which they show that we can decode arousal with open movie fMRI datasets.

YC’s paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215238/ 

YC’s lab website: https://mcnlab.uchicago.edu/ 

YC’s personal website: https://ycleong.github.io/ 

Su’s Twitter @sudkrc

Su’s Bluesky @sudkrc.bsky.social 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Bluesky @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

Su chats with Dr. Jennifer Hu. Jenn is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, directing the Group for Language and Intelligence. Her research examines the computational principles that underlie human language, and how language and cognition might be achieved by artificial models. In her work to answer these questions, she combines cognitive science and machine learning, with the dual goals of understanding the human mind and safely advancing artificial intelligence. We are discussing Jenn’s paper titled “Signatures of human-like processing in Transformer forward passes."

Jenn’s paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14107 

Jenn’s lab website: https://www.glintlab.org/ 

Jenn’s personal website: https://jennhu.github.io/ 

Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]