Stanford Psychology Podcast

Joseph chats with Dr. Jordan Starck. Jordan is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow at Stanford University. His research focuses on the reasons organizations embrace diversity, examining the psychological factors shaping people’s preferred approaches and the downstream consequences of different approaches. In this episode they chat about diversity. What reasons do entities like universities give for proclai...

Eric chats with Mina Cikara, Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, where she directs the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab. The lab uses social psychological and cognitive neuroscience approaches to study how group membership and prejudice change the course of social cognition, studying phenomena such as schadenfreude, empathy, and dehumanization. Mina’s work has been covered in outle...

Bella chats with professor Mimi Liljeholm. Mimi is an associate professor in the department of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Learning and Decision Neuroscience Lab. Mimi and her lab study a broad range of topics, including agency, causal induction, habits, altruism, and social transmission. She is interested in studying how humans discover and re...

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 new book titled “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase C...

Anjie chats with Dr. Elika Bergelson. Elika is a Crandall Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.  Her research aims to understand the interplay of processes during language acquisition. In this episode, Elika shares a recent perspective piece titled: “The comprehension boost in early word learning: Older infants are better learners”. Elika t...

Eric chats with Michael Kraus, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. Michael’s lab studies what behaviors and emotions maintain and perpetuate economic and social inequality in society. Michael’s research has appeared in Psychological Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science , and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . In this episode, Michae...

Joseph chats with Dr. Kurt Gray about what drives our moral judgments, how we reason about the morality of non-human agents, the factors underlying moral disagreement and how we can bridge partisan animosity. Dr. Gray is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he runs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Mo...

Anjie chats with Dr. Nicholas Coles. Nicholas is a Research Scientist at Stanford University, the co-director of the Stanford Big Team Science Lab, and the Director of the Psychological Science Accelerator. He conducts research in affective science, cross-cultural psychology, and meta-science. In affective science, Nicholas seeks to understand the social, cognitive, and physiological processes tha...

Eric chats with David Dunning, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Self and Social Insight Lab. The lab studies questions such as how well do people know themselves–and their competence and character? How and when do people successfully engage in self-deception? How good are people as amateur psychologists–trying to anticipate the thoughts, feelings, and act...

Joseph chats with Dr. Marlone Henderson about how people think about the burdens and benefits of giving time to charity. They also talk about people’s moral evaluations of volunteering and how journal guidelines may incentivize production of theoretical versus practical research. Dr. Henderson is an Associate Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. His research aims at unders...

Anjie chats with Dr. Tiffany N. Brannon, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. She directs Culture and Contact Lab. Her research examines socio-cultural identities in negatively stereotyped groups such as African-Americans and Latino-Americans; and she investigates the potential for these identities to serve as a psychological resource— one that can facilitate a variety o...

Joseph chats with Dr. Lasana Harris about how using traits rather than stereotypes when thinking about strangers can help combat social bias. They also address questions like when is it useful to make a situational versus a dispositional attribution, what are the differences between social and personality psychology, and some advice for academics entering psychology. Dr. Harris is a Professor of S...

Bella chats with Dr. Henrike (Henny) Moll. Henny is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, where she directs the Minds in Development lab. Henny's primary research focus lies in children's understanding of perspectives and their ability to engage in joint attention. She studies how infants and young children come to understand the world and the rol...

Joseph speaks with Prof. Anuj Shah about a lab experiment on social perceptions, in particular how when we learn a few details about a stranger, we seem to feel like they know and understand us too. They also talk about a field experiment in the New York City housing developments which affected social perceptions and was linked to lower rates of crime after people were provided with some details a...

Eric chats with Vanessa Bohns, social psychologist and Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University. Vanessa studies how people influence one another, and how they can underestimate how much influence they really have. Vanessa has been a Visiting Scholar at the NYU Stern School of Business and has taught at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Her writing has...

Joseph and Ashley talk about how infants, toddlers and children think about social relationships, how they track who is connected and how they are connected, what we can learn about children from studying animal behavior, and how children in other cultures might think differently about social relationships. Dr. Ashley Thomas is a postdoctoral researcher in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massa...

Eric chats with Robert Rosenthal, Professor of Psychology at University of California Riverside. Bob is the former Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Bob has gained worldwide fame for his work on self-fulfilling prophecies: “ When we expect certain behaviors of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely to occur .” Over 50 years ago, Bob introduc...

In this episode, Anjie chats with Dr. Angie Johnston, who is currently an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, where she directs the Canine Cognition Center and Social Learning Laboratory.  Her works take a comparative approach: comparing human learning to domestic dogs’ learning, as a way to examine which aspects of human learning are unique and which are shared among species. In...

 Eric chats with Molly Crockett, Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Molly studies how people make moral decisions, both in the lab and in everyday life. Their lab’s research has won numerous awards around the world, and Molly will be moving their lab to Princeton University in summer 2022. In this wide-ranging conversation, Molly first chats about their recent work on social med...

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 the barriers that prevent people from connecting with others. In this episode, Gillian tells Kate about the misconcept...

Eric chats with Diego Gambetta, social scientist and Carlo Alberto Chair at the University of Turin. Diego has studied topics as diverse as trust, the mafia, and violent extremism. His work has been widely cited around the world. Diego has held past appointments at numerous universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, and Stanford. In this episode, Eric and Diego chat about trust, distrust, a...

Joseph Outa chats with Professor Fiery Cushman, professor of psychology at Harvard University. Fiery directs the Moral Psychology Research Lab where he investigates how people make decisions in social contexts; he focuses on questions like why and how did punishment evolve, what are the emotional systems that prevent us from doing harm, and how do humans make sense of each other’s behaviors. He re...

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 numerous academic awards and was listed as a Poets & Quants 40 under 40 honoree and Forbes 30 under 30...

Kate chats with Ethan Kross, an award-winning professor of Psychology and Management & Organizations at the University of Michigan, and the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory . Ethan’s research focuses on the inner conversations people have with themselves and the impacts of such conversations on health and well-being.  In this episode, Ethan shares insights from his best-se...

Eric chats with Tom Gilovich, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. Tom’s Judgment and Belief Lab studies how people evaluate the evidence of their everyday experience to make judgments, form beliefs, and decide on courses of action. Why do people make seemingly wrong decisions? When do they misread evidence? Tom’s research has been widely cited around the world, and he is the author of m...