Social Science Bites

The Social Science Bites podcast hosts bite-size interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode offers a unique perspective on how our social world is created, and how social science can help us understand people and how they behave. 

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Social Science Bites is now available as a book. Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems compiles the best episodes of the podcast in a pocket-size volume, with sections on identity, learning, human behavior, social change, and the unexpected.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book covers topics such as racial inequality, moral psychology, the pandemic, the prison system, and more.  Contributors include Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology at LSE, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex, and Jennifer Richeson, Professor of Psychology at Yale University.

Past guests on the podcast include President Biden’s former deputy director for science and society, Alondra Nelson, world renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Nobel laureates Angus Deaton and Al Roth, pioneering geographer Doreen Massey, and Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy. Guiding us through these conversations is interviewer David Edmonds, a distinguished research fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and the author of 14 books.

Social Science Bites was launched and is produced in association with Sage – an independent, mission-driven academic publisher committed to supporting the dispersion of key ideas in the social sciences both within and beyond the academic sphere. 

Alison Gopnik on Care

Alison Gopnik on Care

Caring makes us human.  This is one of the strongest ideas one could infer from the work that developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik is discovering in her work on child development, cognitive economics and caregiving.

Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict

Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict

Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict around the world.

Safiya Noble on Search Engines

Safiya Noble on Search Engines

In an age where things like facial recognition or financial software algorithms are shown to uncannily reproduce the prejudices of their creators, this was much less obvious earlier in the century, when researchers like Safiya Umoja Noble were dissecting search engine results and revealing the sometimes appalling material they were highlighting.

Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual

Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual

In this Social Science Bites podcast, cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas details how ritual often serves a positive purpose for individuals – synchronizing them with their communities or relieving their stress.

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective 

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective 

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 influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the social and behavioral science enterprise itself. 

Deborah Small on Charitable Giving

Deborah Small on Charitable Giving

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Deborah Small, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of Marketing at Yale University, details some of the thought processes and outcomes that research provides about charitable giving.

Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves

Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves

On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?”

Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children

Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children

In this Social Science Bites podcast, economist Melissa Kearney reviews the long-term benefits of growing up in a two-parent household and details some of the reasons why such units have declined in the last four decades.

Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management

Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management

While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School …

Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight

Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight

Trained as a social psychologist, Leiden University social psychologist Carsten de Dreu uses behavioral science, history, economics, archaeology, primatology and biology, among other disciplines to study the basis of conflict and cooperation among humans.

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episode collections

  • SSB-Immigration
  • SSB-Bias
  • SSB-Technology
  • SSB-Conflict

Year

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Impact

Norman B. Anderson, 1955-2024: Pioneering Psychologist and First Director of OBSSR

Norman B. Anderson, 1955-2024: Pioneering Psychologist and First Director of OBSSR

Norman B. Anderson, a clinical psychologist whose work as both a researcher and an administrator saw him serve as the inaugural director of the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and as chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association, died on March 1.

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New Feminist Newsletter The Evidence Makes Research on Gender Inequality Widely Accessible

New Feminist Newsletter The Evidence Makes Research on Gender Inequality Widely Accessible

Gloria Media, with support from Sage, has launched The Evidence, a feminist newsletter that covers what you need to know about gender […]

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New Podcast Series Applies Social Science to Social Justice Issues

New Podcast Series Applies Social Science to Social Justice Issues

Sage (the parent of Social Science Space) and the Surviving Society podcast have launched a collaborative podcast series, Social Science for Social […]

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Innovation

Why Social Science? Because It Makes an Outsized Impact on Policy

Why Social Science? Because It Makes an Outsized Impact on Policy

Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric and Overton and currently Overton’s managing director, answers questions about the outsized impact that SBS makes on policy and his work creating tools to connect the scholarly and policy worlds.

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Why Don’t Algorithms Agree With Each Other?

Why Don’t Algorithms Agree With Each Other?

David Canter reviews his experience of filling in automated forms online for the same thing but getting very different answers, revealing the value systems built into these supposedly neutral processes.

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NSF Responsible Tech Initiative Looking at AI, Biotech and Climate

NSF Responsible Tech Initiative Looking at AI, Biotech and Climate

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s new Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDoT) program supports research, implementation, and educational projects for multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams

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Dimitris Xygalatas givong TED talk

Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual

In this Social Science Bites podcast, cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas details how ritual often serves a positive purpose for individuals – synchronizing them with their communities or relieving their stress.

0 comments

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective 

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 influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the social and behavioral science enterprise itself. 

0 comments
Headshot of Deborah Small

Deborah Small on Charitable Giving

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Deborah Small, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of Marketing at Yale University, details some of the thought processes and outcomes that research provides about charitable giving.

0 comments
Hal Hershfield in blue pullover against brick background

Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves

On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?”

0 comments
Outdoor picture of Melissa Kearney

Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children

In this Social Science Bites podcast, economist Melissa Kearney reviews the long-term benefits of growing up in a two-parent household and details some of the reasons why such units have declined in the last four decades.

0 comments
Headshot of Raffaela Sadun with Social Science Bites logo attached

Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management

While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School …

0 comments
Carsten de Dreu in office setting

Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight

Trained as a social psychologist, Leiden University social psychologist Carsten de Dreu uses behavioral science, history, economics, archaeology, primatology and biology, among other disciplines to study the basis of conflict and cooperation among humans.

0 comments
Heaven Crawley

Heaven Crawley on International Migration

Heaven Crawley, who heads equitable development and migration at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, discusses how the current Western picture of migration is incomplete and lacks nuance, both of which harm efforts to address the issue.

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Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology

Psychologist Shinobu Kitayama explores the cultural differences between Asia and America, the possible origins of those differences, and how the brain and body may reflect those differences.

1 comment
Petter Johansson

Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness

We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” Petter Johansson and his partner Lars Hall have determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc.

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Ayelet Fishbach on Goals and Motivation

“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 […]

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Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics and Educational Attainment

Kathryn Paige Harden, director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project at the University of Texas, discusses how much influence our DNA has on our PhD.

2 comments
David Dunning giving a talk

David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, explains David Dunning, comes when “people who are incompetent or unskilled or not expert in a field lack expertise to recognize that they lack expertise. So they come to conclusions, decisions, opinions that they think are just fine when they’re, well, wrong.”

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