Social Science Bites

Mar 03 2025 120 ep. 22 mins 17.6k

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Bite-sized interviews with top social scientists

Society & Culture Science

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Crystal Abidin on Influencers

Mar 03 2025 29 mins

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin, a professor at Australia’s Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research co

Katy Milkman on How to Change

Feb 03 2025 35 mins

Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even if the way toward the goal is generally apparent. If you want to know how to do a better job hitting those marks, whether its walking 10,000 steps, learning Esperanto, or quitting smoking, a good person to consult would be Katy Milkman. Working at the nexus of ec

Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures

Jan 06 2025 24 mins

There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens -- i.e. their nation's children -- are happy, healthy and productive, and that therefore governments have policies that work to achieve that. But good intentions never guarantee good policies. Here's where economist Janet Currie steps in. Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics an

Joshua Greene on Effective Charities

Dec 02 2024 25 mins

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