Setha Low on Public Spaces

Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener fo...

Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit

As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at Univ...

Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use

Let’s say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director...

Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain

Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, it can be a cardinal vi...

David Autor on the Labor Market

When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected...

Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness

Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood noted. Being an experimental psychologist who t...

Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence

Let’s cut to the chase: “The overwhelming majority of murders in the United States involve guns,” says economist Jens Ludwig. “And in fact, most of th...

Crystal Abidin on Influencers

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on stu...

Katy Milkman on How to Change

Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even if the way toward the goal is...

Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures

There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens -- i.e. their nation's children -- are happy, healthy and pr...

Joshua Greene on Effective Charities

Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism

As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as post...

Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System

The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that - relationships. And those relations generally start with...

Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior...

Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect.

That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor o...

Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work

Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That’s a big, and contentious, question. It’s also almost an existentia...

Rob Ford on Immigration

Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income

Here's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's a...

Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias

How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that t...

Alison Gopnik on Care

Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict

Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learnin...

Safiya Noble on Search Engines

The work of human hands retains evidence of the humans who created the works. While this might seem obvious in the case of something like a painting,...

Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual

Most of us recognize the presence of ritual, whether in a religious observance, an athlete’s weird pre-competition tics, or even the cadence of our ow...

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective

At the end of every interview that host David Edmonds conducts for the Social Science Bites podcast, he poses the same question: Whose work most influ...

Deborah Small on Charitable Giving

Is giving to a charitable cause essentially equivalent to any other economic decision made by a human being, bounded by the same rational and irration...

Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves

On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one s...

Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children

A common trope in America depicts a traditional family of a married husband and wife and their 2.5 (yes, 2.5) children as the norm, if not perhaps the...

Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management

While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence...

Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight

“We have been evolving into a species that is super-cooperative: we work together with strangers, we can empathize with people, we are really an empat...

Heaven Crawley on International Migration

In the Global North, media and political depictions of migration tend to be relentless images of little boats crossing bodies of water or crowds of pe...

Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Shinobu Kitayama was studying psychology at Kyoto University, Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attribution Theory we...

Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness

Everyone, it is said, is allowed their own opinion. But what if someone’s own opinion was in fact one foisted on them by someone else, and yet the ori...

Ayelet Fishbach on Goals and Motivation

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet Robert Browning once opined, “or what’s a heaven for?” That’s not a very satisfying maxim fo...

Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics and Educational Attainment

In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds asks psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden what she could divine about his educational ach...

David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect

In the most innocent interpretation, suggesting someone should ‘do their own research’ is a reasonable bit of advice. But in the superheated world of...

Claudia Goldin on the Gender Pay Gap

Historically and into the present day, female workers overall make less than men. Looking at college-educated women in the United States, Harvard Univ...

Will Hutton on the State of Social Science

Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We’re In, offers a state of the field report on the soci...

Batja Mesquita on Culture and Emotion

There’s the always charming notion that “deep down we’re all the same,” suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions.
B...

Bobby Duffy on Generation Myths

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials,...

Gerd Gigerenzer on Decision Making

Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them and it matters...