All Episodes

#175 Nicole Barbaro: Mating, Life History, Attachment, And Mate Guarding

May 10, 2019

Nicole Barbaro is currently a PhD student in evolutionary psychology at Oakland University, studying under the advisement of Todd K. Shackelford. She serves as the Student Representative of the Executive Council for the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. She also serves on the Editorial Board as a Review Editor for Frontiers in Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, as well as a Section Editor for the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Her interests are in human sexual psychology and behavior, including application of life history theory and sperm competition theory. More»
#174 Michael Muthukrishna: Human Culture, The Cultural Brain, And Political Corruption

May 9, 2019

Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is an Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His other affiliations include Research Associate of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. His research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained, and modified. He’s interested in better understanding the dynamic relationship between “cultures” and individuals, where cultures emerge from the interactions of individuals over time, who are in turn shaped by the emergent cultures they constitute. He’s particularly interested in the application of research in cultural evolution to public policy. More»
#173 Belén López-Pérez: Cruel To Be Kind, Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Happiness

May 6, 2019

Dr. Belén López-Pérez is a Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University in the UK, where she also directs the ChildLab. She concluded her PhD in Social psychology at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 2012, and her Postdoctoral research in Social and Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology at Plymouth University. Her research interests include empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation across the lifespan, as well as happiness and wellbeing. Her current research projects are focused on interpersonal emotion regulation in childhood and developmental differences in emotion goals (i.e., what people would like to feel in different contexts). More»
#172 Joseph Carroll: Literary Darwinism, Postmodernism, and The Humanities

May 3, 2019

Dr. Joseph Carroll is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, where he has taught since 1985. Dr. Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory was one of the first literary studies to "take the cue from important developments in disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and sociobiology," seeing evolutionary biology as an alternative to poststructuralism and rejecting poststructuralism's textualism (the notion that world is made of words) and indeterminancy (the self-subverting character of "discourse"). He’s also the author of Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature, Reading Human Nature, Graphing Jane Austen, has also produced an edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review, and co-edited Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. More»
#171 Peter Smith: Bullying, Cyberbullying and Children's Development

May 2, 2019

Dr. Peter K. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research interest is children’s social development. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Association of Psychological Sciences, and the Academy of Social Sciences. More»
#170 Steven Hales: Philosophy of Luck, Relativism and Perspectivism, And Evolutionary Psychology

Apr 29, 2019

Dr. Steven Hales is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University, US. His areas of specialization include epistemology and metaphysics. He’s the author of books like Metaphysics, A Companion to Relativism, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, and This Is Philosophy. More»
#169 Bo Winegard: The Psychology of Group Differences and Political Bias

Apr 26, 2019

Dr. Bo Winegard is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College. He 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»
#168 Anthony Biglan: The Nurture Effect, Child Development, and Nurturing Societies

Apr 25, 2019

Dr. Anthony Biglan is a Senior Scientist at Oregon Research Institute and the Co-Director of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium. He has been conducting research on the development and prevention of child and adolescent problem behavior for the past several decades. His work has included studies of the risk and protective factors associated with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; high-risk sexual behavior; and antisocial behavior. He and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences published a book summarizing the epidemiology, cost, etiology, prevention, and treatment of youth with multiple problems, called Helping Adolescents at Risk (2004). He is a former president of the Society for Prevention Research. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Prevention. He’s also the author of The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World. More»
#167 Rani Lill Anjum: Philosophy of Causation, Scientific Models, and Medicine

Apr 22, 2019

Dr. Rani Lill Anjum is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) School of Economics and Business, and Leader of the CAPS – Center for Applied Philosophy of Science since 2018. She spent two years at the University of Nottingham, working with Professor Stephen Mumford on dispositions and causation from 2007 to 2009. Together they developed a new theory of causation. After Nottingham, she got funding from FRIPRO NFR for a 4-year research project, Causation in Science (CauSci), hosted by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) from January 2011. In May 2014 she was offered a permanent contract as Research Fellow at HH NMBU. In December 2014 her new research project Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth) got funded by FRIPRO and started up in the spring 2015 at NMBU. In 2018 she established NMBU CAPS – Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science. Dr. Lill Anjum has coauthored 4 books with Dr. Stephen Mumford: Getting Causes from Powers (2011), Causation: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery (2018), and What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (2018). More»
#166 Daniel Nettle: The Evolution of Personality, Individual Variation And Behavioral Flexibility

Apr 19, 2019

Dr. Daniel Nettle is Professor of Behavioural Science at Newcastle University, where he is a member of the cross-disciplinary Centre for Behaviour and Evolution. He studies a number of different topics relating to behaviour, ageing and wellbeing. He mainly studies humans, but sometimes other animals (especially starlings) too. Dr. Nettle is the author of several books, most notably, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile (2005), Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (2007), and Tyneside Neighbourhoods: Deprivation, Social Life and Social Behaviour in One English City (2015). More»