All Episodes

#367 Christophe Heintz: Adaptive Cognition, Cognitive History, and Science

Sep 18, 2020

Dr. Christophe Heintz is Associate Professor at the Central European University, where he leads the research group ACE (Adaptive Cognition and Economics). Dr. Heintz is working on the role of adaptive cognition in shaping economic behavior, cultural evolution, and the history of science. Scientific practices and economic choices have traditionally been described as rational. He attempts to describe them as resulting from both environmental/contextual and psychological causal factors, with a focus on evolved cognition. More»
#366 Ann Druyan - Cosmos: Possible Worlds

Sep 17, 2020

Ann Druyan was the creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project and program director of the first solar sail deep space mission, launched on a Russian ICBM in 2005. With her late husband, Carl Sagan, she co-authored the original 1980s Emmy Award– and Peabody Award–winning TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and six New York Times bestsellers. Additionally, Druyan was co-creator and co-producer of the Warner Bros. feature film Contact, starring Jodie Foster and directed by Bob Zemeckis. Druyan was the lead executive producer, a director, and coauthor of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, produced for Fox and the National Geographic Channel, for which she won Peabody, Producers Guild, and Emmy Awards in 2014. The show, which received 13 Emmy nominations, has been seen in 181 countries. She is an executive producer, writer, director, and creator of Cosmos: Possible Worlds, first broadcast in 2020. The asteroids Sagan (2709) and Druyan (4970) are in perpetual wedding ring orbit around the sun. More»
#365 Dan McAdams: The Psychology of Donald Trump

Sep 14, 2020

Dr. Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. Dr. McAdams is most well-known for formulating a life-story theory of human identity, which argues that modern adults provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose by constructing and internalizing self-defining life stories or “personal myths.” He’s a leader in the recent emergence within the social sciences of narrative approaches to studying human lives – approaches that place stories and storytelling at the center of human personality. His theoretical and empirical writings focus on concepts of self and identity in contemporary American society and on themes of power, intimacy, redemption, and generativity across the adult life course. He’s also the author of nearly 300 scientific articles and chapters, numerous edited volumes, and seven books, including “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning”. More»
#364 Limor Raviv: Psycholinguistics, Child Development, and Language Acquisition

Sep 11, 2020

Dr. Limor Raviv is a research associate at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. Her research focuses on the cultural evolution of languages in different social environments. Specifically, she studies how the social structure of the environment affects the grammatical structure of languages. More»
#363 Nina Jablonski: The Evolution of Human Skin, and Racism

Sep 10, 2020

Dr. Nina G. Jablonski is Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. A biological anthropologist and paleobiologist, she studies the evolution of adaptations to the environment in Old World primates including humans. Her research program is focused in two major areas. Her paleoanthropological research concerns the evolutionary history of Old World monkeys, and currently includes an active field project in China. Her research on the evolution of human adaptations to the environment centers on the evolution of human skin and skin pigmentation, and includes an active field project examining the relationship between skin pigmentation and vitamin D production. More»
#362 Manvir Singh: Shamanism, Witchcraft, Religion, and Music

Sep 7, 2020

Dr. Manvir Singh just graduated with a PhD in human evolutionary biology from Harvard University, with a focus on cognitive and evolutionary anthropology. His research program aims to explain why societies develop complex, recurrent traditions such as shamanism, witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance, music, and gods, as these have appeared in all types of societies across the globe, from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex, industrial, mega-urbanized states. More»
#361 Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World

Sep 4, 2020

Dr. Joseph Henrich is Professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture affected our genetic development. He is also the author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. More»
#360 Bo Winegard: The Intellectual Elite, and Social Conservatism

Sep 3, 2020

Dr. Bo Winegard generally approaches psychological puzzles from an evolutionary perspective, applying Darwin's theory of natural selection to the human mind. He focuses mostly on status, group differences, individual differences, bias, methods, and political psychology. He’s also the cohost, together with Cory Clark, of the Psyphilopod podcast. More»
#359 Guy Madison: Gender Studies, and the Politics of Gender

Aug 31, 2020

Dr. Guy Madison is Professor at the Department of Psychology at University of Umeå, Sweden. Dr. Madison does research in Neuroscience, Genetics and Evolutionary Biology. More»
#358 Michael McCullough: The Kindness of Strangers

Aug 27, 2020

Dr. Michael McCullough is a professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego, where he directs the Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory. Most of the research they conduct in the lab is focused on extending an evolutionary analysis to some of the key psychological features of human social life. He is the author of several books, including “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct,” and, the most recent one, “The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code”. More»