Harvard psychology professor Joshua Greene studies the back-and-forth between emotion and reason in how human beings make moral decisions. In this Social […]

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 of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research

Caring makes us human.  This is one of the strongest ideas one could infer from the work that developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik is discovering in her work on child development, cognitive economics and caregiving.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Deborah Small, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of Marketing at Yale University, details some of the thought processes and outcomes that research provides about charitable giving.

On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?”

Trained as a social psychologist, Leiden University social psychologist Carsten de Dreu uses behavioral science, history, economics, archaeology, primatology and biology, among other disciplines to study the basis of conflict and cooperation among humans.

Psychologist Shinobu Kitayama explores the cultural differences between Asia and America, the possible origins of those differences, and how the brain and body may reflect those differences.

We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” Petter Johansson and his partner Lars Hall have determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc.

“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 […]

Kathryn Paige Harden, director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project at the University of Texas, discusses how much influence our DNA has on our PhD.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, explains David Dunning, comes when “people who are incompetent or unskilled or not expert in a field lack expertise to recognize that they lack expertise. So they come to conclusions, decisions, opinions that they think are just fine when they’re, well, wrong.”

Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture.

Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them. That’s a key message from psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer.

A lack of ability of numbers is a serious issue in the world, in particular in the developed world, says Ellen Peters. And she’s trying to do something about that.

The idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. The act […]

There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person?

In the context of human action, management professor at HEC Paris and former McKinsey senior partner Olivier Sibony defines “noise” as the unwanted variability in human judgment.

Psychologist Mike Tomasello details how, while higher primates may be quite like humans in many respects, the ability to work together on projects is not one of them.