Eric chats with Abigail Marsh, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Georgetown. Her work has focused on phenomena as diverse as empathy, altruism, aggression, and psychopathy. In 2017,  Abby published her book, The Fear Factor, describing her fascinating research with extreme altruists on the one hand and individuals with psychopathy on the other. She is the former President of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society.

In this episode, Abby challenges the common assumption that individualism means selfishness. Instead, she has found that individualism predicts more kindness, just like being healthy and wealthy predicts being kinder to others. Eric and Abby discuss if our understanding of individualism is wrong, if kindness might look different in individualistic versus collectivistic cultures, and if people are too cynical these days.

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:

Abby's paper
Abby's book The Fear Factor
Abby's Twitter @aa_marsh

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]

Eric chats with Scott Barry Kaufman, cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist renowned for a series of groundbreaking books such as Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, Wired to Create, and, most recently, Transcend. Scott is founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Potential and has taught various classes at universities such as Columbia, Yale, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania. He hosts the #1 psychology podcast in the world, “The Psychology Podcast,” with over 20 million downloads. He has written for outlets such as The Atlantic, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review.

In this episode, Scott discusses his latest research on what he calls the “light triad.” While many researchers have been concerned with what is called the “dark triad,” encompassing features of everyday psychopaths, Scott and his co-authors have started to investigate what makes for an everyday saint. Eric and Scott discuss that we have more everyday saints among us than we think and that everyone is a mix of everyday saint and psychopath.

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:

Scott's article on the light triad in the Scientific American
Scott's paper on the light triad
Scott's Twitter @sbkaufman

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]

Eric chats with Erin Westgate, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida. The work from Erin’s lab has focused on topics such as thinking for pleasure and boredom and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC. Erin has famously found that people would rather shock themselves than sit alone with their thoughts for a few minutes!

In this episode, Erin discusses the question we all have in mind when we hear about this finding: Why? More precisely, what makes thinking often so unpleasant? And how can we make it more pleasurable? How can we avoid boredom? And should we avoid it in the first place?

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:

Erin's paper
Erin's Twitter @ErinWestgate

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]

Eric chats with Robert Sapolsky, Stanford Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery. Robert is a world-renowned academic and author of highly successful books such as A Primate’s Memoir, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. His Stanford lectures were among the first to be made available online across the entire university and have been watched tens of millions of times. Robert is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. He is a highly engaging teacher and lecturer, not least because of his wonderful sense of humor.

In this episode, Robert announces his upcoming (yet-to-be-written) book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.” Robert discusses when and how he came to give up his belief in free will, and why we all should if we want to live in a fairer society. However, Eric and Robert also discuss some alluring upsides of believing in free will, and Robert acknowledges he’d love to swallow the blue pill, allowing him to believe in free will again.

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:

Robert's latest book Behave

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]

In this episode, Anjie chats with Alison Gopnik, Professor at the Department of Psychology and Affiliate Professor at Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Alison is not only a great cognitive scientist and philosopher who has made many groundbreaking contributions to the field, but also a great science communicator. Alison authored multiple bestselling books, including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, The Gardener, and the Carpenter. She also writes widely about cognitive science and psychology for multiple national outlets including the NYT, the Atlantic, and so on. In this episode, we discussed one of her recent review pieces on the role of childhood in solving the explore-exploit dilemma, a challenge to contemporary artificial intelligence.   

Article: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2019.0502
To learn more about Alison's research or her writings, you can visit her personal website or her lab's website.  You can also follow Alison on Twitter (@AlisonGopnik).

Eric chats with Wade Davis, Professor of Anthropology at UBC. Wade has a fantastically diverse background: Next to being a prolific academic with 22 published books, he was also a long-time Explorer-In-Residence at the National Geographic Society, taking him to what seems like every country on this planet. He is a professional photographer and has produced 18 documentary films based on his travels. In 2018, he became an honorary citizen of Colombia. He has become famous around the world advocating for the diverse indigenous cultures of the planet.

In this episode, Wade talks about the importance of an open-minded anthropological mindset in everyday life, how anthropology has traditionally been fighting for tolerance and compassion, and briefly discusses his newest book: Magdalena, River of Dreams.

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:

Wade's Scientific American article
Wade's latest book 

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]

Eric chats with Tobias Gerstenberg, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford where he runs the Causality in Cognition Lab. His lab focuses on the cognitive processes involved in causal judgments: How are physical events caused? How do we use counterfactual thinking to attribute causation?

In this episode, Tobi talks about his recent paper summarizing these lines of research. In the second half, he discusses broader implications: how do we make causal judgments in the social and moral domain?

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:

Tobi's paper
Tobi's Twitter @tobigerstenberg

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]

For this week’s episode, we planned something special. Each year, the Stanford psychology department hosts Paths to Ph.D., a free, open-to-public information session on how to apply to Ph.D. programs and research positions in psychology. This year’s event is scheduled on Saturday, October 16th from 10:00 am-5:00 pm and the application deadline is on September 17th. In this episode, we invited Lauren Borchers, a rising 4thyear Ph.D. student in the department, and Dr. Camilla Griffiths, a recent graduate of the department. They are two pivotal figures in the shaping of this event. We talked about what this event is about, how it came to be, what will happen in the future, as well as the joy and challenges of organizing and planning Paths to Ph.D.

Paths to Ph.D. is an event initiated and organized by the diversity committee in the Psychology Department. The Diversity Committee consists of student members (Since 2020: Sai Auelua, Lauren Borchers, Akshay Jagadeesh, Sama Radwan, Andrea Sims, and Nicky Sullivan; New members: Anjie Cao, Leigh Chu, Nicole Corso, Emily Kubota, Catherine Thomas, and Jenny Yang) and faculty members (Kalanit Grill-Spector, Steven Roberts, Claude Steele, Greg Walton).

To learn more about the event, visit this website: https://psychology.stanford.edu/diversity/paths-phd

In this episode, Anjie chats with Hyo Gweon, an associate professor at Stanford Psychology Department. Hyo directs Social Learning Lab, where the research focus is our abilities to learn from others and teach others.  In this episode, she will share with us a very recent review article that came out on Trends in Cognitive Sciences titled "Inferential social learning: Cognitive foundations of human social learning and teaching". Is learning from others really that different from learning about other things in the world? What makes humans so good at learning from other people and enable others to learn from them?  Listen to this episode to find out. 


The paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661321001789
To learn more about Hyo's research, you can visit her lab's website: http://sll.stanford.edu/index.html

Eric chats with Alan Fiske, Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. Alan is the author of multiple books, including Structures of Social Life and Virtuous Violence. Alan discusses why labeling emotions can often lead us to misunderstand our emotions. He then makes the case for a new emotion: Kama Muta, or “being moved, touched, stirred, having a rapturous experience, or tender feelings toward cuteness.” Eric and Alan discuss newest work on Kama Muta, produced by the Kama Muta Lab at UCLA, and Alan introduces his newest book called “Kama Muta: Discovering the Connecting Emotion.”

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:

Alan's paper on labeling emotions
Alan's latest book on Kama Muta 

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]