The Culture of Social Science

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I enjoyed your observation in the book about how much of the development of social psychology was by jews gon a post world war to immigrants chased out of antisemetic nose germany. How do you think about the kind of the culture of social science in that respecto? Well, it is, it is certainly a mystery. I mean, it's more of a mystery than most people real s,. because it was widely believed in 19 30, that germany was the least anti semitic country in europe. The intermarriage rate for jews in germany in 19 30 was 50 %. So this is b my way of making any attempt to explain the mystery.

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.