Joshua Greene

My name is Joshua Green, and I'm a professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, and I use he, him pronouns.

Gosh, I got here as a professor in 2006, so we're coming up on 19 years.

And then I was a wee undergrad here in the 90s as mostly a philosophy student.

Just nerd, you know, I think I was just really into it.

And I never had a sort of form of cool that went with being a philosopher.

What got you into it?

I mean, you could go way, way back asking lots and lots of questions as a kid.

I remember kind of being unsatisfied with a lot of the answers I was given in Hebrew school.

I was raised in a very sort of, you know, fairly reformed secular Jewish community.

family, you know, I always used to argue and someone was like, well, we got to put this to good use and suggested that I do debate.

So I started doing debate when I was like 12 and I was a pretty young 12 year old.

So I was like this little, little argumentative twerp with my, don't ask me why, yellow pants that I wore.

I think I didn't realize that was funky.

That was just the pants that I had.

And, you know, someone called me Mr. Banana Pants at age 12 as a debater.

That's harsh.

But I got interested in the questions.

And a lot of the questions were really about sort of fundamental social trade-offs.

You know, the rights of the individual versus the greater good kind of came up over and over again.

And this person said, you know, like in cross-examination, though it's very formal, it's like,