Social Science Bites

Nov 04 2024 120 ep. 22 mins 17.5k

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Bite-sized interviews with top social scientists

Society & Culture Science

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Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism

Nov 04 2024 23 mins

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 postdoctoral researcher at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences at the University of Oxford) she have been proscribed from doing - posing as a recruit to study violent extremist groups. That, as you might expect, gave her

Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System

Oct 01 2024 22 mins

The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that - relationships. And those relations generally start with essentially one-on-one encounters between law enforcement personnel and individuals, whether those individuals are suspects, victims or witnesses. When those relations get off on the wrong foot - or worse, as in the case of a numb

Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence

Sep 03 2024 27 mins

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that’s not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Yea

Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

Aug 01 2024 16 mins

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. She notes that her students, for example, are “astonished” at how much of human behavior and reactions are innate.

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

Jul 01 2024 21 mins

Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That’s a big, and contentious, question. It’s also almost an existential question for the disciplines involved. It’s also a question that Megan Stevenson, a professor of law and of economics at the University of Virginia School of Law, grapples with as she explores how well randomized control trial

Rob Ford on Immigration

Jun 03 2024 32 mins

Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income

May 01 2024 21 mins

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 lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money -- "get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible." You and I might prefe

Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias

Apr 02 2024 19 mins

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 the part of the brain that activates when something contradictory is encountered in the amygdala - “that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. This is why confirmation can be so

Alison Gopnik on Care

Mar 04 2024 25 mins

Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict

Feb 01 2024 29 mins

Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learning – fits in. Is it a victim, suffering from the conflict or perhaps a target of violence or repression? Maybe you see it as complicit in the violence, a perpetrator, so to speak. Or perhaps you see it as a liberator, offering a w