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

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School and author of the just-released “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It,” reviews the persistence of confirmation bias even among professors of finance.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Molefi Kete Asante offers an insiders view of the growth of the Afrocentric paradigm, from the founding of the Journal of Black Studies a half century ago to the debates over critical race theory today.

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?

The study of stigma, is, says Michèle Lamont, a “booming field.” That assessment can be both sad and hopeful, and in this Social Science Bites podcast the Harvard sociologist explains stigma’s manifestations and ways to combat it, as well as what it takes a for a researcher to actually study stigma.

“The brain is an association-seeking machine,” Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It puts things together that repeatedly get paired in our experience. Implicit bias is just another word for capturing what those are when they concern social groups.

Philosopher Tom Chatfield’s media presence – which is substantial – is often directly linked to his writings on technology. But his new book is on critical thinking, and while that involves humanity’s oldest computer, the brain, Chatfield explains in this Social Science Bites podcast that new digital realities interact with old human biases.

Thinking is hard, and most of the time we rely on simple psychological mechanisms that can lead us astray. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast, the Nobel-prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, talks to Nigel Warburton about biases in our reasoning.