Anjie chats with Dr. Sho Tsuji, an Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo where she directs the IRCN baby lab. Her core research interests involve understanding how babies acquire language efficiently. In this episode, we chat about her recent work on approaching this question from a computational perspective, a paper titled “SCALa: A blueprint for computational models of language acquisition in social context”. Sho explained why a computational perspective is crucial for...

This week, Julia chats with George Mashour, the Robert B. Sweet Professor and Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan. Professor Mashour was the founding director of the University of Michigan Center for Consciousness Science and the Michigan Psychedelic Center.  In this episode, Julia and Professor Mashour discuss the reinvigorated study of psychedelics and the light it may shed on different dimensions of consciousness. Professor Mashour weighs in on the...

Eric chats with Matt Abrahams, leading expert in the field of communication and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Matt is a highly sought-after keynote speaker and communications consultant. He has helped numerous presenters prepare for high-stakes talks, including Nobel Prize award presentations, and appearances at TED and the World Economic Forum. His online talks garner millions of views and he hosts the popular, award-winning podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart,...

Welcome to Week 8 aka the LAST WEEK of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Kate chats with Gillian Sandstrom, a Senior Lecturer in the Psychology of Kindness at the University of Sussex and the Director of the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness. Gillian’s work focuses on the benefits of minimal social interactions with “weak ties” and strangers, and...

Welcome to Week 7 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Eric chats with Jon Jachimowicz, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. Jon studies people’s passion for work, specifically how people can pursue, fall out of, and maintain their passion over time. He also studies how people perceive inequality. Jon has won...

Welcome to Week 6 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Eric chats with Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center. Dacher has worked on many topics such as compassion, power, and social class. He has introduced hundreds of thousands of people to “The Science of Happiness” through his online...

Welcome to Week 5 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Joseph chats with Dr. Jay Van Bavel, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at the New York University. His research examines how collective concerns namely group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the mind, brain, and behavior. In this episode we chat about his...

Welcome to Week 4 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Kate chats with James Gross, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Lab. His work focuses on emotions: What they are, how they unfold over time, and how people regulate them in different contexts. In this episode, James shares insights from a...

Welcome to Week 3 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Eric chats with Juliana Schroeder, Associate Professor in the Management of Organizations at Berkeley Haas. She studies how people think about the minds of other people, and how they are often wrong trying to understand what others are up to. Her work has been discussed in outlets ranging from Vice...

Welcome to Week 2 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement! Eric chats with Abigail Marsh, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Georgetown. Her work has focused on phenomena as diverse as empathy, altruism, aggression, and psychopathy. In 2017,  Abby published her book, The Fear Factor, describing her fascinating research with extreme altruists on the...

Welcome to Week 1 of our REAIR SUMMER! From this week till September 21st, we will be revisiting some of our favorite episodes around topics related to personal development and self-improvement!  This week, we revisit the conversation between Eric and Josh Greene, Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Josh is a leading researcher of moral judgment and is the author of Moral Tribes. Several graduating classes have named him their favorite professor at Harvard!  In this chat, Eric asks Josh how...

Eric chats with Amit Goldenberg, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Amit studies emotions in social interactions, for example in political contexts and on social media. He was a journalist and author before becoming an academic. In this episode, Eric and Amit talk about how emotions operate in groups. Do crowds easily go “mad”? What emotions spread faster in groups? Why are we drawn to people more politically extreme than us? How is social media shaping...

Jo chats with one of the co-hosts of the podcast, Eric Neumann. Eric is a rising fourth year PhD student at Stanford, working with Jamil Zaki on trust and cynicism. He co-founded this podcast with Anjie in early 2020 during their first year of grad school. In this episode, Jo and Eric casually chat about overcoming social anxieties during podcasting and grad school, how Eric's research on trust is inspired by his own trust issues, and why Jo and Eric might actually be an artificial...

In this special episode, Anjie chats with Jordan Wylie and Eliana Hadjiandreou, who make up ½ of the incoming leadership of Marginalia Science. Marginalia science is a place to promote and learn about the work of social scientists who are women, gender non-conforming, BIPOC, LGBTQI, disabled, and/or in any other way not promoted by the status quo in academia. They send out monthly newsletters on their Substack highlighting the awesome work of their community, and they also hold events to...

Joseph chats with Neil Lewis, Jr., Assistant Professor of Communication and Social Behavior at Cornell University, and Assistant Professor of Communication Research in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Neil also co-directs Cornell’s Action Research Collaborative, an institutional hub that brings together researchers, practitioners, community members, and policymakers to collaborate on projects and initiatives to address pressing equity issues in society.  Neil’s research examines how...

Eric chats with one of the co-hosts of the podcast, Joseph Outa. Joseph is an incoming graduate student at Johns Hopkins where he will work with Dr. Shari Liu at the Liu Lab.  He was previously a research coordinator in the psychology department at Stanford University. In this episode, Eric and Jo have a casual chat about what Jo has been up to at Stanford and his plans going into graduate school. Jo also shares how he got into science communication and about life as an international...

Anjie chats with Dr. Natasha Chaku.  Natasha is an assistant professor at the Department of Psychological and Brain Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her core research interests involve understanding cognitive development in adolescence, its correlates, and the implications of its development for different populations, especially as related to puberty, psychopathology, and positive development. In this episode, Anjie and Natasha chats about Natasha’s recent work titled “100 Days of...

Eric chats with Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of seven books, including his latest “Psych: The Story of the Human Mind.” Countless people around the world have been introduced to psychology through his online courses “Introduction to Psychology” and “Moralities of Everyday Life.” In this chat, Eric and Paul discuss to what extent knowing about psychology actually helps us navigate everyday life with other people. Should psychology students...

In this episode,  Anjie chats with Deon Benton,   an assistant professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University.  Deon directs the Computational Cognitive Development  Lab, and he investigates causal learning in infants and children with a particular focus on those mechanisms and processes that support such learning. He uses both behavioral research and computational (connectionist) modeling to examine this topic. In this episode, he will share his recent research using...

Eric chats with Shinobu Kitayama, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on cultural differences and similarities in a variety of mental processes such as self, emotion and cognition. In this chat, Eric and Shinobu chat about how previous work in cultural psychology was limited mostly to differences between Westerners and East Asians. Shinobu summarizes work showing potential...

This week, we revisit one of our favorite episodes! Eric chats with Ovul Sezer, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at UNC Kenan-Flagler. Ovul’s research focuses on impression mismanagement, or the mistakes we make as we try to impress others. Her research has been featured in outlets such as Time Magazine and Forbes Magazine. In this episode, Ovul discusses her recent paper on Hiding Success: People are often reluctant to share good news with others, but Ovul’s research suggests...

Eric chats with Jon Freeman, Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia. Jon’s lab studies how we perceive other people, such as how we categorize others into social groups and infer their emotion or personality via facial cues. In this chat, Eric and Jon chat about how we rapidly make up our mind about another’s character in less than a second, and how such first impressions can be false and succumb to various biases. How do we perceive another’s personality and do people make the same...

Bella chats with one of the co-founders of the podcast, Anjie Cao. Anjie is a 3rd-year graduate student in the psychology department at Stanford University, where she works with Dr. Mike Frank in the Stanford Language and Cognition Lab.  In this episode, Anjie and Bella have a casual chat and talk about how Anjie and Eric started the podcast about two years ago and how this journey has been for her. Anjie also shares some behind-the-scene stories, such as where the name of the podcast comes...

Eric chats with Josh Greene, Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Josh is a leading researcher of moral judgment and is the author of Moral Tribes. Several graduating classes have named him their favorite professor at Harvard!  In this chat, Eric asks Josh how he has raised over 2 million $ for charity through Giving Multiplier. Listeners are invited to give to both their favorite and some of the most effective charities - and have their donation matched at a higher rate than usual at...

Rachel chats with Moshe Hoffman, a Lecturer and Independent Scholar at Harvard’s Department of Economics. Moshe uses game theory to explore the evolutionary bases of human behavior, from altruistic donations to our taste in music. His recent book, co-authored with Dr. Erez Yoeli, is “Hidden Games: The Surprising power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior.” In this episode, Rachel and Moshe discuss how incentives shape empathy, how saying "I love you" enables social...