Rob Ford on Immigration

In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In the book, as in his career and in this Social Science Bites podcast, Bloom deconstructs what is popularly meant by empathy. "Everyb ... Show More

What does your accent – and yes, every speaker has one – say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that Devyani Sharma, a professor of language and communication at Oxford's Worcester College, asks every ... Show More

As a practical matter, how much effort do you put into pinning down the causes behind daily occurrences? To developmental psychologist Frank Keil, who studies causal thinking, that answer is likely along the lines of 'not enough.' A lack of causal thinking is both endemic, and, t ... Show More

<p>Theresa Marteau is a British health psychologist, professor, and director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. Her initial research concerned communicating risk information and found out that people usually don’t change their behaviours des ... Show More

Drug-related deaths are at their highest levels in England and Wales since records began 30 years ago.Scotland has had the highest number of drug deaths in Europe for at least seven years. And the UK has even seen opioid-related deaths surpass the number of people dying in road t ... Show More

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new ca ... Show More

Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State Un ... Show More

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a term ... Show More

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of ... Show More

The media fervor currently swirling the pandemic is a fever of conflicting data and performative politics. Black and white, it's either sequester ad infinitum or back to work now — a conversation devoid of nuance. How to discern fact from fiction? Separate opinion from data? Poli ... Show More

The Rising Risks of Cancel Culture & The Psychology & Language That Built It! In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Steven Pinker (renowned Harvard psychologist and author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows) joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen for a ... Show More

<p>Why The Delta Variant Will Make More Kids Sick</p> <p>As cases of the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 continue to spike around the U.S., <a href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/delta-variant-sick-kids/" target="_blank">children are one of the hardest-hit gr ... Show More

The Rising Risks of Cancel Culture & The Psychology & Language That Built It! In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Steven Pinker (renowned Harvard psychologist and author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows) joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen for a ... Show More