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.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Amazon
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.
When Jim Scott mentions ‘resistance,’ this recovering political scientist isn’t usually talking about grand symbolic statements or large-scale synchronized actions by thousands or more battling an oppressive state. He’s often referring to daily actions by average people, often not acting in concert and perhaps not even seeing themselves as ‘resisting’ at all.
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.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Diego Gambetta, a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence, discussing his research around signaling theory and the applications of his work, whether addressing courtship, organized crime of hailing a cab.
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.
Forensic psychologist Belinda Winder wants society to understand one key aspect things about pedophilia. “Many people understand pedophilia to be both a sexual attraction to children but also the act of committing abuse against children,” she explains. “And that’s wrong.”
If differing groups could be brought together cooperatively – not competitively – in a manner endorsed by both groups and where each side met on an equal footing, perhaps we could, as Salma Mousa puts it in this Social Science Bites podcast, “unlock tolerance on both sides and reduce prejudice.”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, sociologist Alondra Nelson describes her particular interest in those root seekers whose antecedents were “stolen from African” in the slave trade who make up so much of the African diaspora.
As the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic increased, polling suggests counter-intuitively that resistance to a future vaccine has also risen. Anthropologist Heidi J. Larson identified several likely drivers of this, including scientists themselves.
Epidemiologist Sherman James outlines the hypothesis behind John Henryism – the idea that high-effort coping with expectations of achievement amid poverty or segregation can result in serious damage to the striver’s health.
Since its debut in 2012, the Social Science Bites podcast series every month has brought the voices of the world’s top social and behavioral researchers to the wider world. Looking over that body of work, we realized that mating sound with vision made excellent sense, and so enlisted scientific illustrator Alex Cagan to bring a select number of our podcasts to life via his pen.
An article in the journal Psychological Science, “The New Statistics: Why and How” by La Trobe University’s Geoff Cumming, has proved remarkably popular in the years since and is the third-most cited paper published in a Sage journal in 2013. The idea of an autonomous vehicle – i.e., a self-driving car – isn’t particularly new. Leonardo da Vinci had some ideas he […]
Social sciences can also inform the design and creation of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI development and for deployment into systems. Social scientists can contribute expertise: on data quality, equity, and reliability; on how bias manifests in AI algorithms and decision-making processes; on how AI technologies impact marginalized communities and exacerbate existing inequities; and on topics such as fairness, transparency, privacy, and accountability. If schools provide the proper support and resources, they will help educators move from anxiety to empowerment when integrating AI into the classroom. An article in the journal Psychological Science, “The New Statistics: Why and How” by La Trobe University’s Geoff Cumming, has proved remarkably popular in the years since and is the third-most cited paper published in a Sage journal in 2013. By carefully interrogating the system of economic incentives underlying innovations and how technologies are monetized in practice, we can generate a better understanding of the risks, both economic and technological, nurtured by a market’s structure.
EXPLORE
Impact
Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later
READ MORE
A Milestone Dataset on the Road to Self-Driving Cars Proves Highly Popular
READ MORE
Why Social Science? Because It Can Help Contribute to AI That Benefits Society
READ MORE
Innovation
AI Upskilling Can and Should Empower Business School Faculty
READ MORE
Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later
READ MORE
To Better Forecast AI, We Need to Learn Where Its Money Is Pointing
READ MORE
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.”
