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Episode 33: Monkeys, Smurfs, and Human Conformity (With Laurie Santos)

Very Bad Wizards

The Dangers of Public Dissemination

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Jesse bearings new book has just been released right It was released this past Tuesday I definitely buy it by it's available on Amazon and your local bookstore. We'll put a link to it also for those of you who like philosophy podcasts. There's a great resource called philosophers pipe calm They they just assemble all the latest podcasts from various sources. And if you don't know we we always put links to everything or lots of stuff that we talked about on the show at very bad Wizards, yeah, check out our web page Yeah,.

Special guest Laurie Santos (Psychology, Yale) joins us to talk about what animal cognition can tell us about human nature. Why are other primates better at resisting the misleading influence of others than humans? Is conformity a byproduct of our sophisticated cultural learning capacities? Are we more like Chimpanzees or Bonobos? Why does Dave spend so much time writing Smurf fan fiction? [Smurf you, Tamler. -dap]. Also, Dave and Tamler talk about a scathing review of Malcolm Gladwell's new book, and Eliza Sommers poses the question of the day. This was a fun one.

Links

Comparative Cognition Laboratory [yale.edu]
Laurie Santos and Jesse Bering on The Mind Report [bloggingheads.tv]
Buy Jesse Bering's latest book "Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us" [amazon.com affiliate link]
Philospher's Pipe (a directory of podcasts related to philosophy) [philosopherspipe.com]
Smurfette [wikipedia.org]
Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2005). Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal cognition, 8(3), 164-181.
KovÃ¡cs, Ã. M., TÃ©glÃ¡s, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to othersâ€™ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830-1834.
True Bonobo Love [youtube.com]
Bonobos vs. Chimps [youtube.com]
What does the fox say? [youtube.com]
"The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell." by Christopher Chabris [Slate.com].
"Christopher Chabris Should Calm Down" by Malcolm Gladwell [Slate.com]

Special Guest: Laurie Santos.

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