All Episodes

#425 Azar Gat - Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism

Feb 1, 2021

Dr. Azar Gat is the Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University, in Israel. He is the founder and head of the University's International Program in Security and Diplomacy Executive Master’s Program in Diplomacy and Security. He’s also the author of books like A History of Military Thought, War in Human Civilization, and Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. More»
#424 Stefaan Blancke: Science, Pseudoscience, Rationality, and Cultural Evolution

Jan 29, 2021

Dr. Stefaan Blancke is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University, Netherlands. He studies the diffusion of (pseudo)scientific beliefs from an epidemiological perspective. His research focuses on the psychological and environmental factors that shape and constrain the development and distribution of these beliefs in the history and philosophy of science, science education and the public understanding of science. He is also interested in the philosophy of cultural evolution and the role of reasons in cultural phenomena such as science, morality and the self. More»
#423 Andrew Delton: Evolution, Politics, the Welfare State, Partisanship, and Voting Behavior

Jan 28, 2021

Dr. Andrew Delton is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Center for Behavioral Political Economy at Stony Brook University. His research is at the intersection of political science, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics. Topics include collective action and public goods, generosity and redistribution, voting and political mobilization, partisanship, risk and time preferences, and emotions such as anger, compassion, and shame. Methods include behavioral economic games, population-based surveys, decision making tasks, implicit social cognition measures, game theoretic analysis, agent-based simulations, and cross-cultural data collection. More»
#422 Michael Tomasello: Interdependence, Shared Intentionality, Culture, and Morality

Jan 25, 2021

Dr. Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as linguist. He is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and professor of psychology at Duke University. Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition." He’s also the author of several books, including The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014), A Natural History of Human Morality (2016), and Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (2019). More»
#421 Steven Heine: Cultural Psychology, and How Psychology Varies Across Cultures

Jan 22, 2021

Dr. Steven J. Heine is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Heine’s pioneering research has challenged key psychological assumptions in self-esteem, meaning, and the ways that people understand genetic constructs. He is the author of many acclaimed journal articles and books in the fields of social and cultural psychology including Cultural Psychology, the top-selling textbook in the field. In 2016, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. More»
#420 Stephen Stearns: Life History Theory, and Evolutionary Medicine

Jan 21, 2021

Dr. Stephen Stearns is Edward P Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Yale University. Dr. Stearns specializes in life history evolution, which links the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, and in evolutionary medicine. His books include “Evolutionary Medicine” (Sinauer, 2015) with Ruslan Medzhitov, “Evolution, an introduction” (Oxford, 2000, 2nd Ed 2005) with Rolf Hoekstra, “Watching, from the Edge of Extinction” (Yale, 1999) with his wife Beverly Peterson Stearns, “The Evolution of Life Histories” (Oxford, 1992), and two edited volumes, “Evolution in health and disease” (Oxford, 1998, 2nd Ed 2008) and “The Evolution of Sex and its Consequences.” More»
#419 Christian List: Why Free Will Is Real

Jan 18, 2021

Dr. Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory at LMU Munich and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He’s the author of Why Free Will Is Real. More»
#418 Frederick Coolidge: Neuropsychology, Cognitive Archaeology, and Human Evolution

Jan 15, 2021

Dr. Frederick Coolidge is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of Undergraduate Education in Psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He teaches introductory and advanced undergraduate statistics, cognitive evolution, evolutionary neuropsychology, abnormal psychology, and sleep and dreams. He has received three teaching awards including the lifetime designation, University of Colorado Presidential Teaching Scholar, and he received the UCCS Letters, Arts, and Sciences Annual Outstanding Research and Creative Works Award, in 2004, and the UCCS Annual Faculty Award for Excellence in Research in 2006. For the month of March 2015, he was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Keble College, UK. For the past 6 years, he has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India, teaching courses on brain evolution and sleep and dreams. He’s the coeditor of Squeezing Minds From Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind. More»
#417 Rick Shenkman - Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics

Jan 14, 2021

Rick Shenkman is the founder of George Washington University's History News Network, the website that features leading historians' perspectives on current events. He is a New York Times best-selling author of seven history books. His latest book is Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics. Mr. Shenkman is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and the former managing editor of KIRO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Seattle. In 1997 he was the host, writer and producer of a prime-time series for The Learning Channel inspired by his books on myths. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He gives lectures at colleges around the country on several topics, including American myths and presidential politics. More»
#416 Evert Van de Vliert: Climate, Economics, Affluence, Social Organizations, and Culture

Jan 11, 2021

Dr. Evert Van de Vliert received his PhD from the Free University in Amsterdam in 1973 and held teacher and researcher positions at the same university, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and at the Royal Military Academy in the Netherlands. He served as chairman of the Dutch Research Association of Social and Organizational Psychologists (1984–1989) and as research director of the Kurt Lewin Institute (1993–1996). He has published more than 200 journal articles, chapters, and books including Complex Interpersonal Conflict Behaviour: Theoretical Frontiers (1997). In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association for Conflict Management. At present, he is professor emeritus of organizational psychology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. His current research concentrates on cross-national comparisons, with an emphasis on the impact of cold, temperate, and hot climates on national and organizational cultures. More»