How to Train Yourself to Work With Your Immediate Bias

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The preferred psych department, really arose from you could go online there and find out just how scarily implicitly biased you are about all sorts of stuff. But one of the useful things is when you make people consciously aware of the implicit biases that they are showing. It makes you put more conscious effort into slapping your hand over your mouth before you say something disastrous. And that's exactly what it is because bias is a heuristic shortcut for us to decide we know all about somebody who we have attached them to in our heads.

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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