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...

Eric chats with Paul van Lange, Professor of Psychology at the Free University of Amsterdam and Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford. He is well known for his vast work on trust, cooperation, and morality, applying these themes to everything from Covid to climate change. He has published multiple handbooks and edited volumes on these topics. In this chat, Eric and Paul talk about the psychological barriers that stop people from fighting climate change. What do trust and cynicism have to do...

Anjie chats with Dr.Casey Lew-Williams.  Casey is a Professor at Princeton University, where he also directs the Princeton Baby Lab. He studies how babies learn, with a particular focus on language and communication. In this episode, we chat about a recent preprint he co-authored with Dr. Jessica Kosie titled "Infant-Directed Communication: Examining the multimodal dynamics of infants’ everyday interactions with caregivers". Casey shares his thoughts on why it is important to study and how to...

Eric chats with Elliot Aronson, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. Elliot is one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century. He is known for his work on cognitive dissonance, where people do crazy things but not for crazy reasons, as he puts it, and the Jigsaw Classroom, intended to establish cooperation in competitive environments. He is the only person ever to receive all major awards from the American Psychological Association: for writing, research, and teaching. In...

This week, we revisit one of our favorite episodes from last year (with improved audio quality!).  In this episode, Anjie chats with Edouard Machery, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. Edouard's main research focuses on the intersection between cognitive science and philosophy. In this episode, Edouard shares his recent work on a topic that is...

Anjie chats with Dr. Christina Barbieri.  Christina is an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Education within the Educational Statistics and Research Methods Ph.D. program and the Learning Sciences specializations. Her work focuses on applying and evaluating the effectiveness of instructional strategies and materials based on principles of learning from cognitive and learning sciences on improving mathematical competencies.  In this episode, they chat about her...

Eric chats with Marilynn Brewer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Ohio State University. Marilynn is one of the world’s leading scholars on social identity, intergroup relations, and social cognition. She has been president of various psychological associations and former Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at UCLA. In this episode, Eric and Marilynn talk about why people care so much about belonging to a group. How do people balance belonging to a group and being a...

Bella chats with professor Cameron Ellis. Cameron is an assistant professor in the psychology department at Stanford University, where he leads the Scaffolding of Cognition Team. Cameron’s research focuses on understanding the infrastructure of human cognition and how it’s constructed during infancy. In other words, what is it like to be an infant? To study this, Cameron and his team use neuroscience and cognitive science methods such as fMRI. In this episode, Cameron discussed his research...

Anjie chats with Dr. Wayne Wu. Wanye is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on attention, perception, action, and schizophrenia at the interface between philosophy and cognitive science. In this episode, Wayne shares his recent work “On Attention and Norms: An Opinionated Review of Recent Work”. He also talks about attention in real life – for example, how do we thrive in a world where social media...

Eric chats with Martha Nussbaum, Distinguished Service Professor in law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is one of the most influential philosophers alive and has written about various topics such as Roman philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and emotions. She has won more awards than could be listed here, including the prestigious Berggruen Prize and Holberg Prize. Most recently, she is the author of “Justice for Animals.” In this chat, Eric asks Martha about what it means...

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 course and podcast with the same name. He has written multiple best-selling books, most recently on awe. In this chat, Eric asks Dacher about all things awe, from traveling to psychedelics to...