Stanford Psychology Podcast

This week, Katia Kriakova has a conversation with Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University. In this episode, we explore the neuroscience of decision-making, how brain activity can predict behavior and relapse in addiction, and why our choices don’t always align with how we want to live. Brian Knutson’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-knutson-8b87...

In this week’s episode, Julie and Adani chat with Tamar Schapiro, professor of philosophy at MIT! Tamar is interested in a wide range of things, from what it means to make good decisions in everyday life to ethical theory and the history of ethics (especially Kant and the British Moralists). We discussed Tamar’s work on why we treat children differently from adults, dig into whether and how reacti...

This week, Katia Kriakova has a conversation with William Damon, a professor at Stanford University. He is one of the world's leading researchers on human development across the lifespan and has pioneered the scientific study of purpose in life. In this conversation, we explore how we can make our own lives more purposeful and expand purpose beyond ourselves. William Damon’s book on purpose:...

This week, Katia has a conversation with Bill Burnett, an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He is the co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab and also the co-author of Designing Your Life and How to Live a Meaningful Life .  In this conversation, Bill shares how we can live in alignment with our values and compass, how prototyping can help us embrace uncertainty, and how to design a...

Adani chats with Nomisha Kurian, Assistant Professor in Education Studies at the University of Warwick, Associate Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and Associate at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research in Digital Education. Nomisha has been at the forefront of research on children’s safety and well-being, elucidating what it mean...

In this episode, Elizabeth chats with Dr. Andrew Lampinen as a part of our Alumni in Industry series. Andrew is currently a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. Prior to joining Anthropic, he worked as a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, and before that he earned his PhD here at Stanford and researched how humans are able to learn new things rapidly. His work bridges cognitive scienc...

Adani chats with Cynthia Osborne, Professor at Vanderbilt University and Executive Director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center. Prof. Osborne’s work focuses on translating developmental science into effective, evidence-based policies for families and young children in the U.S. We discuss what the field of Early Childhood Policy entails, the ongoing work that Prof. Osborne and the Impact Cen...

This week, Enna chats with Dr. Julia Nolte, Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology at Tilburg University. Julia’s research examines how information management, risk perception, and decision-making change across adulthood. She is particularly interested in what keeps people, especially older adults, from making well-informed and high-quality decisions, and how we can better support people in ma...

In this re-air (but more timely than ever!) episode from 2021, Anjie chats with Alison Gopnik, Professor at the Department of Psychology and Affiliate Professor at Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Alison is not only a great cognitive scientist and philosopher who has made many groundbreaking contributions to the field, but also a great science communicator. Alison authored multiple bestsel...

Adani chats with Elizabeth Bonawitz, Professor of Learning Sciences at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Elizabeth’s work focuses on basic theories of learning with the broader goal of informing educational practice. She uses computational, behavioral, and neural methods to study a broad variety of things within cognitive development, from children’s curiosity and belief revision to their expl...

Nick Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition—how thinking people think about other thinking people—to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. Nick is one of the “World’s Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors” by Poets and Quants...

In this reair episode from 2023, 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...

In this reair episode, 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 to The Atlantic and Forbes. Eric and Juliana review her exciting recent work...

Adani chats with Dr. Julia Chatain, Senior Scientist at the Singapore-ETH Centre of ETH Zürich. Julia is a computer scientist and learning scientist responsible for building a new research program, “Future Embodied Learning Technologies” (FELT), focusing on exploring AI-powered embodied learning interventions to support low-progress learners and learners with special needs, both at the cognitive a...

This week, Enna chats with Dr. Casey Kenyon Brown, Professor at Georgetown University in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the prestigious Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Aging and the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science. Casey’s research ex...

Marginalia Episodes are in collaboration with Marginalia Science! Marginalia Science is a community committed to promoting the work of scholars who are traditionally underrepresented in academia. In each Marginalia Episode, we feature a guest who has been featured in the Marginalia Science Monthly Newsletter. In this re-air episode from 2025, Enna chats with Professor Erica Bailey at UC Berkeley H...

Adani chats with Tamar Kushnir, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Tamar’s research spans pretty much everything you can imagine: Cognitive development, causal learning, social cognition, moral cognition, cultural psychology, free will, imagination, counterfactual thinking, self-control, and more! In this conversation, we discuss Tamar’s fascinating review on imagination...

In this re-air episode from 2022, Eric chats with Robin Dunbar, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford. Robin has famously studied the evolution of the human brain, arguing that our brain developed to understand the complex social world we have created for ourselves. Most know him for “Dunbar’s number,” or the limit to the number of individuals we can maintain stable relationships...

Anjie chats with Dr. Nicky Sullivan, senior researcher at Impact Justice, a national non-profit innovation and research center focused on transforming the U.S. criminal justice system. Dr. Sullivan received his PhD from Stanford Psychology Department in 2024. During his PhD, he studied parents' and children's beliefs about race and racial inequality. In this episode, Nicky shares his jou...

Su chats with Dr. Steve Rathje. Dr. Rathje is an incoming Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an NSF and AXA postdoctoral fellow at New York University. Steve’s work centers on the psychology of technology. He studies how core psychological phenomena like polarization, intergroup conflict, the spread of informatio...

Anjie chats with Dr. Ying Wong, founder and CEO of B.peachy and former cultural psychologist. Ying received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford in 2007, where she studied shame and guilt through a cultural lens. After academia, she built an impressive career across global business, and she now is the founder and CEO of B.peachy, a company dedicated to menstrual care. In this episode, Anjie and Yin...

Adani chats with Dr. Susan Engel, a Senior Lecturer and Senior Faculty Fellow in Psychology at Williams College. Susan’s research spans many areas, including the development of curiosity and invention, children’s ideas, the impact of college, and school reform. In this conversation, we discuss Susan’s seminal research on children's curiosity, how curiosity develops into adulthood, and her lat...

Su chats with Dr. Roger Levy. Dr. Levy is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. His work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, comb...

In today’s episode, Adani chats with Adam Benforado, a lawyer, writer, and professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law. Adam’s research, teaching, and advocacy are focused on children’s rights and criminal justice, and he brings insights from the mind sciences—most notably cognitive psychology—to law and legal theory. In this conversation, Adam tells us about his latest book, A Minor Revo...

Su chats with Dr. Yuan Chang (YC) Leong. YC is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Lab, which is a part of the Department of Psychology, a member of the Institute of Mind and Biology and the Neuroscience Institute, and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute. His research explores the neural and...