Dinner parties used to be where you avoided politics. Now talking about politics at dinner parties is the norm. Years ago, we avoided politics because we assumed the people at… Read the rest of the article: How politics became our identity

The facts don't speak for themselves. Someone always speaks for them. From the opioid crisis to vaccines, vitamin and health supplements to climate change — even the widespread use of… Read the rest of the article: How to fix the mistakes that celebrity scientists and charismatic doctors make

Parker Wiseman ran for student office in high school with photocopied flyers. He debated the public school system in social studies class. In college he took the courses and shook… Read the rest of the article: How debate changes minds, no matter who wins

When you think about your future health, career, finances, and even longevity — you imagine a rosy, hopeful future. For everyone else, though, you tend to be far more realistic.… Read the rest of the article: Why we are prone to optimism and hope over realism and the skepticism of experience

Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek evidence that supports our beliefs and that confirms our assumptions — when we could just as well seek disconfirmation of those beliefs and… Read the rest of the article: When future desires and past beliefs are incongruent, desire usually wins out

Psychology is working on the hardest problems in all of science. Physics, astronomy, geology — those are easy, by comparison. Understanding consciousness, willpower, ideology, social change – there's a larger-than-Large-Hadron-Collider… Read the rest of the article: Science is wrong about everything, but you can trust it more than anything

In medical school, they tell you half of what you are about to learn won't be true when you graduate — they just don't know which half. In every field… Read the rest of the article: The half life of facts

The cyberpunks, the Founding Fathers, the 19th Century philosophers, and the Enlightenment thinkers — they each envisioned a perfect democracy powered by a constant multimedia psychedelic freakout in which all… Read the rest of the article: Why we often choose to keep useful information out of our heads

In his book on the history of human progress, Our Kind, anthropologist Marvin Harris asked in the final chapter, "Will nature's experiment with mind and culture end in nuclear war?"… Read the rest of the article: Is progress inevitable?

The final show in my three-part series about the pitfalls associated with trying to debunk myths, battle fake news, and correct misinformation is up. In this episode I interview scientists… Read the rest of the article: How to fight back against the backfire effect

This is part two in my "The Backfire Effect" series. This one focuses on motivated reasoning, specifically something called motivated skepticism. In addition, it features interviews with the scientists who… Read the rest of the article: How motivated skepticism strengthens incorrect beliefs

This is the first of three You Are Not So Smart episodes about the "backfire effect." In it, I interview a team of neuroscientists who put people in a brain… Read the rest of the article: The neuroscience of changing your mind

Back in the early 1900s, the German biologist Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll couldn't shake the implication that the inner lives of animals like jellyfish and sea urchins must be… Read the rest of the article: Questioning the nature of reality with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman

In this episode of the YANSS Podcast, we sit down with legendary science historian James Burke, who returns to the show to explain his newest project, a Connections app that… Read the rest of the article: James Burke's new project aims to help us deal with change, think connectively, and benefit from surprise

Why do people cheat? Why are our online worlds often so toxic? What motivates us to "catch 'em all" in Pokemon, grinding away for hours to hatch eggs? In this… Read the rest of the article: Why are online worlds often so toxic?

In this episode we interview Dean Burnett, author of Idiot Brain: What Your Brain is Really Up To. Burnett's book is a guide to the neuroscience behind the things that… Read the rest of the article: The neuroscience behind the things that our brains do poorly

This episode's guest, Michael Bond, is the author of The Power of Others, and reading his book I was surprised to learn that despite several decades of research into crowd… Read the rest of the article: People in crowds do not spontaneously de-evolve into subhuman beasts

In this episode, psychologist Per Espen Stoknes discusses his book: What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming. Stoknes has developed a strategy for science… Read the rest of the article: What we think about when we try not to think about global warming

Oddly enough, we don't know very much about how to change people's minds on social issues, not scientifically. That's why the work of the a group of LGBT activists in… Read the rest of the article: How to change people's minds on social issues with "deep canvassing"

Common sense used to dictate that men and women should only come together for breakfast and dinner. According to Victorian historian Kaythrn Hughes, people in the early 19th Century thought… Read the rest of the article: How the "separate spheres" ideology is still affecting us today