Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
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.
Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness
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
Let’s cut to the chase: “The overwhelming majority of murders in the United States involve guns,” says economist Jens Ludwig. “And in […]
Crystal Abidin on Influencers
A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of […]
Katy Milkman on How to Change
Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even […]
Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures
There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens — i.e. their nation’s children — […]
Joshua Greene on Effective Charities
Harvard psychology professor Joshua Greene studies the back-and-forth between emotion and reason in how human beings make moral decisions. In this Social […]
Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism
As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she […]
Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that – relationships. And those relations generally start with […]
Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence
Economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses the history of technological revolutions in the last millennium and what they may tell us about artificial intelligence today.
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature
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 psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research
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Congolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on April 21, 2025 at the age of 83. He was in the US, […]
Christopher Jencks, known for his novel and inventive opinions on hot topic issues like income inequality, homelessness, and racial gaps in standardized […]
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences. Are you a researcher with an idea that could help solve one of today’s most pressing problems? A conference in Dubai this […]
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences. A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of […]
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Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, 1941-2025: The Philosopher on the ‘Invention’ of Africa
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Christopher Jencks, 1936-2025: An Innovative Voice on Inequality
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Long-Term Impact Requires Archiving Research Communication
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Ready to Tackle Global Challenges? Apply to Attend Dubai Showcase
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Long-Term Impact Requires Archiving Research Communication
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Crystal Abidin on Influencers
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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.”