Anjie chats with Dr. Elika Bergelson. Elika is a Crandall Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.  Her research aims to understand the interplay of processes during language acquisition. In this episode, Elika shares a recent perspective piece titled: “The comprehension boost in early word learning: Older infants are better learners”. Elika talks about how babies learn words, and how researchers get to know what babies know. 

You can read the article we discussed here: 

https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdep.12373

To learn more about Elika’s research, you can visit her lab’s website: https://bergelsonlab.com/

or follow them on twitter @bergelsonlab). 

Eric chats with Michael Kraus, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. Michael’s lab studies what behaviors and emotions maintain and perpetuate economic and social inequality in society. Michael’s research has appeared in Psychological Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In this episode, Michael talks about his recent work on how much US-Americans overestimate how equal their country is. For example, why are some people motivated to deny the vast wealth inequality between Whites and African Americans? Michael then shares how he has successfully intervened to make people’s estimates somewhat more accurate. Finally, Eric asks Michael about advice for young researchers and how he comes up with interesting research ideas. If that is not exciting enough, Michael even performs a power analysis live on the podcast! But not of the statistical kind…

If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.

Links:

Michael's paper
Michael's Twitter @mwkraus

Eric's website
Eric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsy

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

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

Joseph chats with Dr. Kurt Gray about what drives our moral judgments, how we reason about the morality of non-human agents, the factors underlying moral disagreement and how we can bridge partisan animosity. Dr. Gray is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he runs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. His lab investigates people’s deepest beliefs and why they matter for society and organizations.

Here are ideas and resources referenced in the chat:
3:52 | Moral Foundations Theory
6:25 | Theory of Dyadic Morality
7:42 | The Myth of Harmless Wrongs
16:36 | Mind Perception of Robots
19:45 | Center for the Science of Moral Understanding
36:00:00 | Moral Character Judgements
37:15:00 | Moral Identity picture scale
38:00:00 | Personal experiences bridge divides better than facts
44:45:00 | Six Guidelines for Interesting Research

To learn more about Kurt and his research, check out his lab website:  https://www.deepestbeliefslab.com/

You can also follow him on twitter: https://twitter.com/kurtjgray

*We are currently conducting a survey to get to know our listeners better and to collect any feedback and suggestions so we can improve our podcast. If you have 1 minute, please click the link here to submit your anonymous response: https://forms.gle/dzHqnWTptW8pSVwMA. Thank you for your time and support!

Anjie chats with Dr. Nicholas Coles. Nicholas is a Research Scientist at Stanford University, the co-director of the Stanford Big Team Science Lab, and the Director of the Psychological Science Accelerator. He conducts research in affective science, cross-cultural psychology, and meta-science.

In affective science, Nicholas seeks to understand the social, cognitive, and physiological processes that underlie emotion. Much of his research here has focused on the facial feedback hypothesis, the idea that sensorimotor feedback from facial expressions can impact emotional processes (e.g., that smiling can make people feel happy). In meta-science, Nicholas works on building research infrastructure that allows researchers to more efficiently obtain knowledge about psychological phenomenon. In this domain, he directs the Psychological Science Accelerator: a globally distributed consortium of researchers who pool intellectual and material resources to accelerate the accumulation of generalizable knowledge in psychology.

In this episode, Anjie and Nicholas chat about a recent comment piece in Nature titled "Build up big team science".  They take a deep dive into an emerging trend in psychology – research done by a lot of people across a lot of labs. Nicholas shares the challenges, along with the promises of big team science.

You can read the comment we discussed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00150-2%0D?error=server_error
To learn more about Nicholas's research, you can visit his website: https://nicholas-coles.netlify.app/
Or you can also follow him on twitter: https://twitter.com/coles_nicholas_
To learn more about PSA, here's the link to its website: https://psysciacc.org/ 

In this episode, Eric chats with Dave about trust. Who do we trust? How accurate are we in assessing another’s trustworthiness? Why do we sometimes trust people we think to be selfish? Why do we distrust people who are actually kind? What does trust have to do with respect? Is our kindness actually driven be negative, not positive emotions? Finally, Dave shares how to find a research idea worth pursuing and gives general advice for young academics curious about a career in psychology.

If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.

Links:

Dave's paper on trust
Dave's paper on respect
Dave's Twitter @daviddunning6

Eric's website
Eric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsy

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

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

Joseph chats with Dr. Marlone Henderson about how people think about the burdens and benefits of giving time to charity. They also talk about people’s moral evaluations of volunteering and how journal guidelines may incentivize production of theoretical versus practical research. Dr. Henderson is an Associate Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. His research aims at understanding the role that basic cognitive processes play in promoting social harmony in the domains of social conflict, social judgment and prosocial behavior.

To learn more about Dr. Henderson’s research, you can visit his profile here https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/psychology/faculty/profile.php?eid=mdh2449

You can find the paper we discussed here:

Henderson, M. D., Jung, H., M Baker, E., & Wakslak, C. J. (2021). Anticipated effort and morality of segregated versus aggregated volunteering. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 34(5), 611-624

*We are currently conducting a survey to get to know our listeners better and to collect any feedback and suggestions so we can improve our podcast. If you have 1 minute, please click the link here to submit your anonymous response: https://forms.gle/dzHqnWTptW8pSVwMA. Thank you for your time and support!

Anjie chats with Dr. Tiffany N. Brannon, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. She directs Culture and Contact Lab. Her research examines socio-cultural identities in negatively stereotyped groups such as African-Americans and Latino-Americans; and she investigates the potential for these identities to serve as a psychological resource— one that can facilitate a variety of individual and intergroup benefits. In this episode, we discuss her recent article titled “Pride and Prejudice” Pathways to Belonging: Implications for Inclusive Diversity Practices Within Mainstream Institution”. We also chat about what insights qualitative methods could bring us.
 
You can check out the paper we discussed here: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-58577-001
To learn more about Dr. Brannon’s research, you can visit her lab’s website: https://ccl.psych.ucla.edu/

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Joseph chats with Dr. Lasana Harris about how using traits rather than stereotypes when thinking about strangers can help combat social bias. They also address questions like when is it useful to make a situational versus a dispositional attribution, what are the differences between social and personality psychology, and some advice for academics entering psychology.

Dr. Harris is a Professor of Social Neuroscience in Experimental Psychology at University College London. He got his undergraduate degree from Howard University and his phD from Princeton University. His research uses a social neuroscience approach to explore the neural correlates of person perception, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, social learning, social emotions, empathy, and punishment. He published a book in 2017 titled Invisible Mind: Flexible Social Cognition and Dehumanization. 

Paper link: Harris, L. T. (2021). Leveraging cultural narratives to promote trait inferences rather than stereotype activation during person perception. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 15(6), e12598

Dr. Harris’ personal website: https://lt-harris.info/

*We are currently conducting a survey to get to know our listeners better and to collect any feedback and suggestions so we can improve our podcast. If you have 1 minute, please click the link here to submit your anonymous response: https://forms.gle/dzHqnWTptW8pSVwMA. Thank you for your time and support!

Bella chats with Dr. Henrike (Henny) Moll.

Henny is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, where she directs the Minds in Development lab. Henny's primary research focus lies in children's understanding of perspectives and their ability to engage in joint attention. She studies how infants and young children come to understand the world and the role that others play in introducing them to the world. Her studies are informed by insights from philosophy of mind, education, and anthropology.

In this episode, we discussed Henny's research on theory of mind, young children's perspective taking, especially when other people's beliefs clash with their own beliefs or with reality, and how the concept of experiential record plays an important role in children's ability to understand other people's beliefs. Henny also shared the lab's future directions and some exciting upcoming projects. 

Henny's website: https://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/mid-la/

*We are currently conducting a survey to get to know our listeners better and to collect any feedback and suggestions so we can improve our podcast. If you have 1 minute, please click the link here to submit your anonymous response: https://forms.gle/dzHqnWTptW8pSVwMA. Thank you for your time and support!

Joseph speaks with Prof. Anuj Shah about a lab experiment on social perceptions, in particular how when we learn a few details about a stranger, we seem to feel like they know and understand us too. They also talk about a field experiment in the New York City housing developments which affected social perceptions and was linked to lower rates of crime after people were provided with some details about neighborhood police officers. 

Anuj is an associate professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. His research uses psychology and behavioral science to examine social issues such as poverty, youth violence, and crime.

Shah, A. K., & LaForest, M. (2022). Knowledge about others reduces one’s own sense of anonymity. Nature, 603(7900), 297-301.

Anuj’s personal website: http://theslab.uchicago.edu/anuj/
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