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. 

An Archive to Be Proud Of: Social Science Bites Reaches 50 Podcasts

An Archive to Be Proud Of: Social Science Bites Reaches 50 Podcasts

On the occasion of the posting of the 50th Social Science Bites podcast, we’ve turned the tables and interviewed the interviewer, Dave Edmonds, about the series, empiricism, and even Jaffa cakes.

Gary King on Big Data Analysis

Gary King on Big Data Analysis

When looking at big data, says computational social scientist Gary King, “The data itself isn’t likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, he explains more about the importance of data analysis.

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective

In this first of three of montages from past Social Science Bites podcasts, 15 renowned social scientists reveal their pick for “Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you?”

Michelle Baddeley on the Herd

Michelle Baddeley on the Herd

People tend to herd together, whether it’s following the crowd or determining what news to accept. UCL economist Michelle Baddeley has studied this behavior and discusses what she’s learned in this latest Social Science Bites podcast.

Sandy Pentland on Social Physics

Sandy Pentland on Social Physics

In this Social Science Bites podcast, MIT’s Sandy Pentland tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about the origins of social physics in the barren days before the advent of widespread good data and solid statistical methods and how it blossomed as both a field and for Pentland’s own research.

Jennifer Hochschild on Race in America

Jennifer Hochschild on Race in America

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Harvard’s Jennifer Hochschild explains to interviewer David Edmonds some of the pertinent data points from her years of using quantitative and qualitative analysis to map the racial, ethnic and class cleavages in America’s demography.

Anna Machin on Romance

Anna Machin on Romance

Anna Machin’s research combine the study of neurochemistry, dating sites and waist-to-hip ratios to gives us the best understanding of the evolution of love and romance. In this Social science Bites podcast she details her research interests and findings.

Karenza Moore on Dance Culture

Karenza Moore on Dance Culture

Sociologist has studied the dance club scene — think of the lamented Fabric nightclub as a cultural touchstone — for years as a ‘participant observer.’ In this Social Science Bites podcast she talks about the scene’s obvious drug use and the mechanics of doing ethnography at a rave.

Michael Billig on the Royal Family and Nationalism

Michael Billig on the Royal Family and Nationalism

In his conversation with interviewer David Edmonds, Michael Billig — the author of landmark book ‘Banal Nationalism,’ dives deeply into one particular example of nationalism, the British royal family, and what the British themselves think about the royal family and the place of the royals in British ideology

Mirca Madianou on Technology and Everyday Life

Mirca Madianou on Technology and Everyday Life

It’s often remarked that technology has made the world a smaller place. While this has been especially true for those with the wherewithal to buy the latest gadget and to travel at will, but it’s also true for economic migrants. Those technological ties are one of the key research interests of Mirca Madianou who discusses her work on transnational families and social media in the latest Social Science Bites podcast.

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episode collections

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Year

Imagine a graphic representation of your research's impact on public policy that you could share widely: Sage Policy Profiles

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Impact

Survey Suggests University Researchers Feel Powerless to Take Climate Change Action

Survey Suggests University Researchers Feel Powerless to Take Climate Change Action

To feel able to contribute to climate action, researchers say they need to know what actions to take, how their institutions will support them and space in their workloads to do it.

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Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa

Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa

A longitudinal research project project covering 31 villages in rural South Africa has led to groundbreaking research in many fields, including genomics, HIV/Aids, cardiovascular conditions and stroke, cognition and aging.

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Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact

Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact

Drawing on the findings of a workshop on making translational research design principles the norm for European research, Gabi Lombardo, Jonathan Deer, Anne-Charlotte Fauvel, Vicky Gardner and Lan Murdock discuss the characteristics of translational research, ways of supporting cross disciplinary collaboration, and the challenges and opportunities of adopting translational principles in the social sciences and humanities.

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Innovation

To Better Forecast AI, We Need to Learn Where Its Money Is Pointing

To Better Forecast AI, We Need to Learn Where Its Money Is Pointing

By carefully interrogating the system of economic incentives underlying innovations and how technologies are monetized in practice, we can generate a better understanding of the risks, both economic and technological, nurtured by a market’s structure.

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Free Online Course Reveals The Art of ChatGPT Interactions

Free Online Course Reveals The Art of ChatGPT Interactions

You’ve likely heard the hype around artificial intelligence, or AI, but do you find ChatGPT genuinely useful in your professional life? A free course offered by Sage Campus could change all th

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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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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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