Dr. Edward Hagen is a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University, where he directs the Bioanthropology Lab. 

In this episode, Ed and I discuss the recent controversy of the American Anthropological Association’s decision to censor a conference panel on sex differences, the reality and importance of understanding sex differences in evolutionary anthropology and biology research, and the complexity of sex beyond the binary, such as in the case of intersex disorders and different and conflicting gender norms cross-culturally. We then move on to discuss Ed’s research on the evolution of substance use, including humans’ bizarre taste for spices and bitter plant toxins such as coffee and tobacco. We also talk about the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages for the use of other psychoactive drugs, such as hallucinogens, the evolution of human intelligence, and modern computational neuroscientific theories of consciousness.

Dr. Jennifer Silvers is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Bernice Wenzel and Wendell Jeffrey Term Endowed Chair in Developmental Neuroscience at UCLA, where she runs the Social Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab. She is an expert in adolescent brain, cognitive, and emotional development, particularly in the development of emotion regulation strategies. 

In this episode, we talk about Jen’s background in developmental neuroscience, the use and limitations of animal models for understanding human brain development, and how adolescence is a particularly exciting window of brain development both due to puberty and other social and environmental changes. We talk about the role of stress and adversity influencing brain development, temperamental factors in emotion processing, emotion regulation as a learned skill, and how puberty interacts with all of these processes. We then discuss relatively recent effects on social and emotional development, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use, and the influence of online dating apps in young adults’ sexual development. Lastly, we talk about other windows of rapid change influencing socioemotional processing, such as pregnancy, and future directions linking our shared interests in hormones and brain development in large-scale consortium-based studies.

Dr. Cory Clark is a social psychologist and Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In this episode we talk about adversarial collaboration and open science, meta-psychology research on common biases in psychology carried by psychologists themselves, and its moralization. We also discuss gender differences in moral beliefs, how social media and culture shape moral norms, how rationality can combat this, and whether faith is compatible with rationality.

Dr. Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and Chair of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University, where he runs the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab. Joe is also the author of the WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success.