Social Science Bites
Episodes
Ellora Derenoncourt on the US Racial Wealth Gap
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This Social Science Bites podcast offers a dollop of good news and heaping helping of bad. The good news is that since the end of American Civil War ...
Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge
02 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There is a value to shared knowledge that tends to go unrecognized because it's so ubiquitous. Nonetheless, experimental psychologist Steven Pinker ex...
Mukulika Banerjee on Indian Democracy
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that -- at least in the India o...
Paul Bloom on Empathy
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In...
Devyani Sharma on Accents
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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? Th...
Frank Keil on Causal Thinking
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a practical matter, how much effort do you put into pinning down the causes behind daily occurrences? To developmental psychologist Frank Keil, wh...
Setha Low on Public Spaces
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener f...
Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at Uni...
Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Let's say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and directo...
Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, it can be a cardinal v...
David Autor on the Labor Market
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affec...
Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Are university students unhappy? We won't generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood noted. Being an experimental psychologist who ...
Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Let's cut to the chase: "The overwhelming majority of murders in the United States involve guns," says economist Jens Ludwig. "And in fact, most of t...
Crystal Abidin on Influencers
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of 'internet famous' celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on st...
Katy Milkman on How to Change
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even if the way toward the goal is...
Janet Currie on Improving Our Children's Futures
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens -- i.e. their nation's children -- are happy, healthy and p...
Joshua Greene on Effective Charities
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as pos...
Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that - relationships. And those relations generally start wit...
Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savio...
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you'd expect. That's the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor of psycholog...
Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don't Work
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That's a big, and contentious, question. It's also almost an existentia...
Rob Ford on Immigration
03 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Here's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's ...
Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that ...
Alison Gopnik on Care
04 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of lear...
Safiya Noble on Search Engines
08 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The work of human hands retains evidence of the humans who created the works. While this might seem obvious in the case of something like a painting,...
Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual
06 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us recognize the presence of ritual, whether in a religious observance, an athlete's weird pre-competition tics, or even the cadence of our ow...
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of every interview that host David Edmonds conducts for the Social Science Bites podcast, he poses the same question: Whose work most infl...
Deborah Small on Charitable Giving
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is giving to a charitable cause essentially equivalent to any other economic decision made by a human being, bounded by the same rational and irration...
Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves
03 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles's Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one ...
Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children
06 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A common trope in America depicts a traditional family of a married husband and wife and their 2.5 (yes, 2.5) children as the norm, if not perhaps th...
Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence...
Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight
05 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"We have been evolving into a species that is super-cooperative: we work together with strangers, we can empathize with people, we are really an empa...
Heaven Crawley on International Migration
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the Global North, media and political depictions of migration tend to be relentless images of little boats crossing bodies of water or crowds of p...
Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Shinobu Kitayama was studying psychology at Kyoto University, Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attribution Theory we...
Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone, it is said, is allowed their own opinion. But what if someone's own opinion was in fact one foisted on them by someone else, and yet the ori...
Ayelet Fishbach on Goals and Motivation
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," the poet Robert Browning once opined, "or what's a heaven for?" That's not a very satisfying maxim f...
Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics and Educational Attainment
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds asks psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden what she could divine about his educational ac...
David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the most innocent interpretation, suggesting someone should 'do their own research' is a reasonable bit of advice. But in the superheated world of ...
Claudia Goldin on the Gender Pay Gap
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Historically and into the present day, female workers overall make less than men. Looking at college-educated women in the United States, Harvard Univ...
Will Hutton on the State of Social Science
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We're In, offers a state of the field report on the soci...
Batja Mesquita on Culture and Emotion
04 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There's the always charming notion that "deep down we're all the same," suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions. Batja M...
Bobby Duffy on Generation Myths
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials...
Gerd Gigerenzer on Decision Making
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Quite often the ideas of 'risk' and of 'uncertainty' get bandied about interchangeably, but there's a world of difference between them and it matters ...
Ellen Peters on Numeracy
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"It's been said there are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can't count." So reads a sentence in the book Innumer...
Jonathan Haskel on Intangibles
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The knowledge economy. Intellectual property. Software. Maybe even bitcoin. All pretty much intangible, and yet all clearly real and genuinely valuabl...
Sheila Jasanoff on Science and Technology Studies
02 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sheila Jasanoff, the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is a pionee...
John List on Economic Field Experiments
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Any work in social and behavioral science presumably – but not necessarily immediately - tells us something about humans in the real world. To come ...
Kathelijne Koops on Chimps and Tools
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kathelijne Koops, a biological anthropologist at the University of Zurich, works to determine what makes us human. And she approaches this quest by i...
George Loewenstein on Hot and Cold Affect
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of walking a mile in someone else's shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. The act of imagining someone else's r...
Joel Mokyr on Economic Lessons from the Past
11 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"I tell my students, 'If somebody utters the sentence that starts with the words, "History teaches us" the rest of the sentence is probably wrong.' H...
Karin Barber on Verbal Arts
03 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Verbal arts, explains Karin Barber, emeritus professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham, are "any form of words that ...
Melanie Simms on Work
02 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
COVID-19 has changed everything, including how we work (and to be more precise, are employed). But in order to best understand how things have change...
Jeffrey Ian Ross on Convict Criminology
05 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
"Convict criminology," Jeffrey Ian Ross explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, is "a network, or platform, that's united in the perception th...
Molefi Kete Asante on Afrocentrism
07 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Molefi Kete Asante, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Philadelphia's Temple University, has long been at the forefront of dev...
Jennifer Richeson on Perceptions of Racial Inequality
02 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, ...
Jennifer Lee on Asian-Americans
02 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the 'China virus' and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dea...
Martha Newson on Identity Fusion
07 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Despite being someone who doesn't "particularly enjoy the game," cognitive anthropologist Martha Newson is drawn to football. "Football is one of the...
Olivier Sibony on Decision-Making
17 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When human judgment enters the picture, so too will errors in human judgment. Think of this as "noise," just as you might think of a signal-to-noise ...
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 4
10 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
"That's such a hard question," Gina Neff, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, responds when asked what social science research or thinker ...
Jim Scott on Resistance
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Jim Scott mentions 'resistance,' this recovering political scientist isn't usually talking about grand symbolic statements or large-scale synchro...
Michèle Lamont on Stigma
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The study of stigma, , says Michèle Lamont, is a "booming field." That assessment can be both sad and hopeful, and in this Social Science Bites po...
Diego Gambetta on Signaling Theory
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What we tell people about ourselves is not exclusively, or often not even majorly, what comes out of our mouths. A host of nonverbal messages emanate ...
Mike Tomasello on Becoming Human
04 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Consider two different, but similar situations. In the first, children are asked to pull ropes together. Candy cascades down, but in unequal distribut...
Belinda Winder on Pedophilia
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Forensic psychologist Belinda Winder, who founded and heads the Sexual Offences, Crime and Misconduct Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, wa...
Salma Mousa on Contact Theory (and Football)
02 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There's an intuitive attraction to the idea that if we could just spend some quality time with someone from another group, we'd both come to appreciat...
Alondra Nelson on Genetic Testing
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sociologist Alondra Nelson calls it "root-seeking" – individuals wanting to know their ethnic background. Knowing who your people were as a way to ...
Heidi Larson on Vaccine Skepticism
07 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic increased, polling suggests counterintuitively that resistance to a future vaccine has also risen. Anthropologi...
Sherman James on John Henryism
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Have you always felt that you could make of your life pretty much what you want to make of it? Once I make up your mind to do something, do you stay w...
Gurminder K Bhambra on Postcolonial Social Science
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"I grew up in this country," says Gurminder K Bhambra, a professor at the University of Sussex's School of Global Studies, "and [yet] I always thought...
Ashley Mears on the Global Party Circuit
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It's a scene you might recall from a music video or TV shows where a young alpha male goes to the club with his crew. They're parked at a table, order...
Anne Case on Deaths of Despair
07 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Political violence aside, the 20th century saw great progress. Looking at health progress, as one example, Princeton University economist Anne Case no...
Hetan Shah on Social Science and the Pandemic
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The current pandemic has and will continue to mutate the social landscape of the world, but amid the lost lives and spoiled economies in its wake has ...
Ruth Wodak on How to Become a Far-Right Populist
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Depending on your views, far-right populism can represent a welcome return to the past , or a worrying one. The former, argues sociolinguist Ruth Woda...
Richard Layard on Happiness Economics
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
ichard Layard remembers being a history student sitting in Oxford's Bodleian Library on a misty morning, reading philosopher Jeremy Bentham (he of the...
Susan Michie on Behavioral Change
07 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With each new year comes a wave of good intentions as people aim to be better. They want to lose weight, exercise more, be nicer, drink less and smoke...
Rupert Brown on Henri Tajfel
02 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Henri Tajfel's early life – often awful in the living, exciting in the retelling – gave the pioneering social psychologist the fodder for his life...
Michele Gelfand on Social Norms
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Living in a loosely regulated society, the very term "social norms" can be vaguely threatening, as if these norms are a threat to freedom always lurki...
Shona Minson on Children of Imprisoned Mothers
02 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When a mother with minor children is imprisoned, she is far from the only one facing consequences. Their children can end up cared for in multiple pla...
Harvey Whitehouse on Rituals
05 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that you can't tell from the actions themselves why they have to be done...
Kayleigh Garthwaite on Foodbanks
01 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the most recent 12-month period for which is has data, the Trussell Trust – the largest foodbank trust in the United Kingdom – the trust passed...
Jonathan Portes on the Economics of Immigration
01 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
"I cannot count the number of people who've told me on Twitter, 'Of course immigrants increase British unemployment! Of course immigrants drive down w...
Sam Friedman on Class
05 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Is education, by itself, the great equalizer? Will having the same education erase the benefit someone from a higher class has over someone from a low...
Monika Krause on Humanitarian Aid
01 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Humanitarian aid organizations often find themselves torn by reasonable expectations – to address a pressing crisis and to show that what they are d...
Erica Chenoweth on Nonviolent Resistance
02 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
You and a body of like-minded people want to reform a wretched regime, or perhaps just break away from it and create an independent state. Are you mor...
Gina Neff on Smart Devices
01 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Data about us as individuals is usually conceived of as something gathered about us, whether siphoned from our Facebook or requested by bureaucrats. B...
Les Back on Migrants
01 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sociologists Les Back and Shamser Sinha spent a decade following 30 migrants in London, a study that forms the narrative in their new book, Migrant C...
David Halpern on Nudging
02 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Placing more nutritious food on a more visible shelf, informing lagging taxpayers that their neighbors have already paid up, or asking job seekers wha...
James Robinson on Why Nations Fail
03 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Metrics on the average living standards from the best-off countries in the world (say, Norway) to the worst-off (perhaps the Central African Republic)...
Nick Adams on Textual Analysis
01 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. But apart from its propagandist prov...
Andrew Leigh on Randomistas
01 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Leigh would take a daily a multivitamin, he says, until he learned that a randomized controlled trial, or RCT, found no increase in lifespan li...
Diane Reay on Education and Class
04 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Diane Reay grew up in a council estate in a coal mining part of Derbyshire in England's East Midlands. Those working-class roots dogged her from the s...
Mahzarin Banaji on Implicit Bias
02 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Explicit statements of prejudice are less common than in the past (even if they are still easily found). "I see that as a mark of progress," says soci...
Richard Wilkinson on How Inequality is Bad
03 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
While generally accepted that inequality is a bad thing, how exactly is that so? Beyond philosophical arguments, what is it about inequality that make...
Celia Heyes on Cognitive Gadgets
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How did humans diverge so markedly from animals? Apart from physical things like our "physical peculiarities," as experimental psychologist Celia Heye...
Alison Liebling on Successful Prisons
01 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In determining what makes a successful prison, where would you place 'trust'? Alison Liebling, a criminologist at the University of Cambridge and the...
David Spiegelhalter on Communicating Statistics
02 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
While they aren't as unpopular as politicians or journalists, people who work with statistics come in for their share of abuse. "Figures lie and liars...
Sander van der Linden on Viral Altruism
01 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Use social media for any amount of time and eventually you will come across something that's designed to both appeal to the angels of your better n...