Stanford Psychology Podcast

In this episode, 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 bestselling books, including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, The Gardener, and the Carpenter. She also writes widely about cognitive science and psychology for multiple national outlets including the NYT, the Atlantic, and so on. In this episode, we discussed one of her recent review pieces on the role of childhood in solving the explore-exploit dilemma, a challenge to contemporary artificial intelligence.   Article: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2019.0502To learn more about Alison's research or her writings, you can visit her personal website or her lab's website.  You can also follow Alison on Twitter (@AlisonGopnik).

Eric chats with Wade Davis, Professor of Anthropology at UBC. Wade has a fantastically diverse background: Next to being a prolific academic with 22 published books, he was also a long-time Explorer-In-Residence at the National Geographic Society, taking him to what seems like every country on this planet. He is a professional photographer and has produced 18 documentary films based on his travels. In 2018, he became an honorary citizen of Colombia. He has become famous around the world advocating for the diverse indigenous cultures of the planet. In this episode, Wade talks about the importance of an open-minded anthropological mindset in everyday life, how anthropology has traditionally been fighting for tolerance and compassion, and briefly discusses his newest book: Magdalena, River of Dreams.If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.Links:Wade's Scientific American articleWade's latest book Eric's websiteEric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsyPodcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPodLet us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

Eric chats with Tobias Gerstenberg, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford where he runs the Causality in Cognition Lab. His lab focuses on the cognitive processes involved in causal judgments: How are physical events caused? How do we use counterfactual thinking to attribute causation? In this episode, Tobi talks about his recent paper summarizing these lines of research. In the second half, he discusses broader implications: how do we make causal judgments in the social and moral domain?If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.Links:Tobi's paperTobi's Twitter @tobigerstenbergEric's websiteEric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsyPodcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPodLet us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

For this week’s episode, we planned something special. Each year, the Stanford psychology department hosts Paths to Ph.D., a free, open-to-public information session on how to apply to Ph.D. programs and research positions in psychology. This year’s event is scheduled on Saturday, October 16th from 10:00 am-5:00 pm and the application deadline is on September 17th. In this episode, we invited Lauren Borchers, a rising 4thyear Ph.D. student in the department, and Dr. Camilla Griffiths, a recent graduate of the department. They are two pivotal figures in the shaping of this event. We talked about what this event is about, how it came to be, what will happen in the future, as well as the joy and challenges of organizing and planning Paths to Ph.D. Paths to Ph.D. is an event initiated and organized by the diversity committee in the Psychology Department. The Diversity Committee consists of student members (Since 2020: Sai Auelua, Lauren Borchers, Akshay Jagadeesh, Sama Radwan, Andrea Sims, and Nicky Sullivan; New members: Anjie Cao, Leigh Chu, Nicole Corso, Emily Kubota, Catherine Thomas, and Jenny Yang) and faculty members (Kalanit Grill-Spector, Steven Roberts, Claude Steele, Greg Walton).To learn more about the event, visit this website: https://psychology.stanford.edu/diversity/paths-phd

In this episode, Anjie chats with Hyo Gweon, an associate professor at Stanford Psychology Department. Hyo directs Social Learning Lab, where the research focus is our abilities to learn from others and teach others.  In this episode, she will share with us a very recent review article that came out on Trends in Cognitive Sciences titled "Inferential social learning: Cognitive foundations of human social learning and teaching". Is learning from others really that different from learning about other things in the world? What makes humans so good at learning from other people and enable others to learn from them?  Listen to this episode to find out.  The paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661321001789To learn more about Hyo's research, you can visit her lab's website: http://sll.stanford.edu/index.html

Eric chats with Alan Fiske, Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. Alan is the author of multiple books, including Structures of Social Life and Virtuous Violence. Alan discusses why labeling emotions can often lead us to misunderstand our emotions. He then makes the case for a new emotion: Kama Muta, or “being moved, touched, stirred, having a rapturous experience, or tender feelings toward cuteness.” Eric and Alan discuss newest work on Kama Muta, produced by the Kama Muta Lab at UCLA, and Alan introduces his newest book called “Kama Muta: Discovering the Connecting Emotion.”If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.Links:Alan's paper on labeling emotions Alan's latest book on Kama Muta Eric's websiteEric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsyPodcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPodLet us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

Judy Fan, Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, discusses her research on people learning from building block towers. The podcast explores converging solutions in tower reconstruction, intrinsic motivation in tower building, intuitive physics in children, and future directions in the research.

Ovul Sezer, a psychology professor, talks about her research on sharing good news. She discusses the negative consequences of withholding success, the importance of sharing success for relationships, and the role of impression management behavior. Ovul also explores the offense of protecting others from good news, the impact of cynicism on trust, and the importance of psychological safety. She suggests sharing good news through intermediaries and emphasizes the significance of studying human behavior.

Deon Benton, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, discusses his recent research using a connectionist model to study infants' understanding of morality. The podcast explores measures of babies' moral evaluation, the concept of domain in developmental psychology, the relationship between language and morality in babies, the value of computational modeling, and surprising findings in babies' second order correlation learning.

Eric chats with Linda Skitka, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Linda runs a very prolific lab on many things social, political, and moral psychology. Linda is a former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and her work has been covered in outlets such as Science Magazine, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times. In this episode, Linda and Eric chat about moral convictions: why are we so morally convicted about so many things these days? How are issues moralized and demoralized? How do emotions factor into this? How do we stop our moral convictions from disrupting our relationships? Also, what does it all have to do with overflowing toilets? Finally, Eric asks Linda the biggest of questions: is there moral truth?If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.Links:Linda's paper on moral convictionLinda's Twitter @LindaSkitkaEric's websiteEric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsyPodcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPodLet us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com