What a Great Honor to Have You on the Podcast Richard Nisbit

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Richard nisbit is one of the pioneers of studying the cultural differences between people, particularly northerners versus southerners here in the united states. We show how that probably happened, and then how we can apply that to our own issues of where raceism and discrimination still happens in the united States. Richard's new book is called thinking and memoir. If you appreciate the podcast, please do support it. That sceptic dot com slash donate.

In this wide-ranging conversation Shermer and Nisbett discuss Nisbett’s research showing how people reason, how people should reason, why errors in reasoning occur, how much you can improve reasoning, what kinds of problems are best solved by the conscious mind and what kinds by the unconscious mind, and how we should think about intelligence, along with the controversies over group differences and genetic influences on I.Q. scores and why Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) is wrong in inferring genetic causes for group differences in I.Q.. Nisbett also shows that self-knowledge can be dramatically off-kilter and points to ways to improve it, and demonstrates how different cultures have radically different ways of reasoning and feeling, and how this led to his most famous research showing the difference between Northerners and Southerners in rates of violence, the culture of honor, and a hair-trigger for slights and insults. The two also discuss the #metoo, BLM, antiracism, and woke movements today in context of his psychological research.