The Social Science Bites podcast hosts bite-size interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode offers a unique perspective on how our social world is created, and how social science can help us understand people and how they behave.
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Social Science Bites is now available as a book. Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems compiles the best episodes of the podcast in a pocket-size volume, with sections on identity, learning, human behavior, social change, and the unexpected.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book covers topics such as racial inequality, moral psychology, the pandemic, the prison system, and more. Contributors include Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology at LSE, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex, and Jennifer Richeson, Professor of Psychology at Yale University.
Past guests on the podcast include President Biden’s former deputy director for science and society, Alondra Nelson, world renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Nobel laureates Angus Deaton and Al Roth, pioneering geographer Doreen Massey, and Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy. Guiding us through these conversations is interviewer David Edmonds, a distinguished research fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and the author of 14 books.
Social Science Bites was launched and is produced in association with Sage – an independent, mission-driven academic publisher committed to supporting the dispersion of key ideas in the social sciences both within and beyond the academic sphere.
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.
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.
Tom Burns, whose combination of play — and plays – with teaching in higher education added a light, collaborative and engaging model […]
The creation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has led to a heated debate on the balance between peer review and evaluative metrics in research assessment regimes. Luciana Balboa, Elizabeth Gadd, Eva Mendez, Janne Pölönen, Karen Stroobants, Erzsebet Toth Cithra and the CoARA Steering Board address these arguments and state CoARA’s commitment to finding ways in which peer review and bibliometrics can be used together responsibly. Psychologists Jonathan St. B. T. Evans and Keith E. Stanovich have a history of publishing important research papers that resonate for years. The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research. Title of course: Space/Power/Species What prompted the idea for the course? A few years ago, I came across the architect Joyce Hwang’s […]
The slow, relentless creep of computing is currently in overdrive with powerful artificial intelligence tools impacting every aspect of our lives. What […]
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In this Social Science Bites podcast, cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas details how ritual often serves a positive purpose for individuals – synchronizing them with their communities or relieving their stress.
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 influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the social and behavioral science enterprise itself.
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?”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, economist Melissa Kearney reviews the long-term benefits of growing up in a two-parent household and details some of the reasons why such units have declined in the last four decades.
While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School …
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.
Heaven Crawley, who heads equitable development and migration at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, discusses how the current Western picture of migration is incomplete and lacks nuance, both of which harm efforts to address the issue.
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.”
