Shinobu Kitayama, a psychologist specializing in cultural differences, discusses the contrasting views of self in Western and Eastern cultures. He explores cultural variations in happiness perceptions and the diverse meanings of life. Additionally, he discusses the different perceptions and significance of the sacrificial bunt in baseball between Japan and the United States. The podcast also explores the distinction between independence and interdependence in American and Japanese contexts.

Everyone, it is said, is allowed their own opinion. But what if someone’s own opinion was in fact one foisted on them by someone else, and yet the original opinion holder in turn holds the changeling opinion as their own? Unlikely? Actually, not so unlikely, as the research of Petter Johansson and Lars Hall into ‘choice blindness’ shows. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Johansson – who with Hall runs the Choice Blindness Laboratory at Sweden’s Lund University – reveals some of the unexpected aspects of self-interpretation and how there’s been a very large natural example in the United States of this blindness in action. We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” he has determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc. Johansson starts his discussion with host David Edmonds by giving his and Hall’s first forays into the study of “how we come to know our own minds.” Their work built on others’ research into something called “change blindness,” which describes not noticing a change – even a major one – that occurs before your eyes. (Inattentional bias – such as the famous gorilla basketball video – is when we miss something obvious but unexpected right before us because we’re focusing on something else in the tableau. “I’ve seen this at conferences on monster-sized screens, when it is practically King Kong walking in the background, but still people miss this.”) Johansson describes how the research partners ‘magically’ morphed this line of inquiry into studies of what they call “choice blindness” using a card trick. “When you have the appearance of free choice,” he says, “when you have the magician say, ‘Pick a card, any card you want,’ the only thing you know is that the choice is no longer free. This was the aspect we wanted to incorporate into our experiments.” In the initial experiment, subjects were shown pairs of faces on cards, and asked to choose which they found more attractive. The researcher then handed them that card and asked why they chose it over the other. But sometimes, using sleight of hand, the researcher handed the subject the card with the other face, and asked again why they chose that face. “Even when the faces were drastically dissimilar, and the [subjects] could look at the cards for as long as they want, only 25 to 30 percent of the participants detect that the switch has been made,” Johansson reveals. “But it’s not only that they pick it up – they then must start constructing reasons why they picked this face,” justifying a choice they didn’t make. Subsequent experimentation found that opinions on taste, smell, consumer choice, and more could be subject to such blindness. The researchers, for example, set up a tasting station at a local supermarket, and after having the ol’ switcheroo played on their choice of jam, the subjects came up with “similar types of elaborate explanations” for why the jam they didn’t choose was in fact the better one. The researchers also worked with pairs of people, asking them who they might choose to flat with. And here the resulting confabulation was collective. The researchers also found choice blindness in politics (especially when the other opinion had a reasonable case that could be made). People on the street were asked to participate in survey about a policy position, and the interviewer would respond with “you clearly believe …” in a position they didn’t choose. And as you now will expect, the subjects defended their ‘new’ stance. “This says something about what a belief is, or an attitude is,” Johansson says. The source of the opinion matters: if you think it comes from you – even when it in fact did not – there must be good reason to hold the opinion. “People don’t like being told what’s right or wrong. But if you can tell yourself what’s right or wrong, it’s much more likely to stick.” And this can also be outsourced when your “team” makes a call, and partisans “quickly change their own attitudes to match.” Which brings us to former U.S. President Donald Trump. Under Trump, Johansson says, “It felt like there was four years of showing this point almost every day. Trump would change the policies or long-held beliefs almost every day and Fox and Friends and all these voters would just fall in line and quickly construct arguments why this was the right view all along.” While this might seem a dour outcome with opinion chameleons calling the shots, Johansson sees a brightside. “It does show we are probably more flexible than we think. We have the ability to change.”

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet Robert Browning once opined, “or what’s a heaven for?” That’s not a very satisfying maxim for someone trying to lose weight, learn a language, or improve themselves in general on this earthly plane. But there are ways to maximize one’s grasping ability, and that’s an area where psychologist Ayelet Fishbach can help. Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, studies goals and motivations. It's work that saw her serve as president of the Society for the Science of Motivation and the International Social Cognition Network and to pen the 2022 book, Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she tells interviewer David Edmonds that one tip for setting goals is to make them concrete. So, for example, resolving to ‘being a good husband’ works, but ‘being happy’ does not. ‘Being happy’ is just too abstract. “You need to get to the level of abstractness that is motivating … but not too abstract that it is no longer connected to an action,” Fishbach explains, adding that there must be “a clear connection between the goal and the means.” However, she continues, research suggests that people -- while focused on the ends -- tend to scrimp on the means. Fishbach notes research on MBA students found they were willing to pay $23 for a particular book – but only willing to pay $11 for a tote bag that they knew also contained the book. The value of the bag, which was negligible but still extra step to getting the book, was therefore negative. “Which makes no sense,” she acknowledges, “but it illustrates the point.” Goals, she says, should be things we can “do,” what we can achieve, as opposed to prohibitions on actions, those “do nots” that describe what we should avoid. “Do” prompts, she continues, “are more intrinsically motivating. You are more excited about them. It feels good and right.” Plus, focusing on what we’re avoiding puts that thing in front of mind – which makes it harder to ignore. Fishbach calls for measuring your “do” activities, setting targets. She cites a study that saw marathon running times in the United States were not being evenly distributed, but clumped around just-before milestone times like three-and-a-half or four hours, suggesting runners pushed themselves to hit their personal targets. And where there are targets, there can be rewards. “Rewards work better than punishments,” she says, “but they don’t always work in the way they were intended to work.” If we incentivize the wrong things, behavior bends toward the incentive rather than the underlying goal. Oddly enough, “uncertain incentives seem to work better than known ones." Fishbach was part of a research team that saw people would work harder for a $1 or $2 prize, with the amount determined by a coin flip, than they were for a $2 guaranteed prize. “The excitement of resolving uncertainty is always better than the reward you are getting.” Other topics Fishbach addresses in this episode include internal motivations (immediate returns trumped longer-term rewards), how to sustain motivation, and whether we truly learn more from failure than success.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds asks psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden what she could divine about his educational achievements if all she knew about him was his complete genome. “Based just on your genetic information,” she starts, “I would be able to guess about as well as I would be able to guess if I knew how much money your parents had made per year when you were growing up.” Based on current knowledge drawn from recent samples in the United States, Harden estimates an “educational attainment polygenetic score” accounts for 15 to 17 percent of the variance in educational attainment, which is defined by years of formal education. The strength of the relationship is similar to environmental factors such as that for family wealth and educational attainment, or between educational attainment and wages. Harden’s “guess” is as about as educated as someone in the realm could make – she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project at the University of Texas. Her first book was 2021’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. One thing she stresses is that genetic influence on human behavior is not the single-factor ideal youngsters learn about in their first brush with Gregor Mendel and his pea plants. “Almost nothing we study as psychologists is monogenetic, influenced by one gene. It’s all polygenetic, meaning that there are thousands of genetic variants, each of which has a tiny probabilistic effect. If you add up all of that information, all of that genetic difference, it ends up making a difference for people’s likelihood of developing schizophrenia or doing better on intelligence test scores or having an autism spectrum disorder – but none of these things are influenced by just one gene.” Plus, that “polygenetic score” varies based on environmental factors, such as whether you were raised in an authoritarian state. “If I had my exact DNA that I have now,” she details, “but I was raised in 1850s France compared to 1980s America, my educational output would be different, obviously, because my gender would have been interacting with those opportunity structures in a different way.” As those structures evolve into ladders instead of roadblocks, the more utility we can derive from knowing the role of genetics. “The more we ‘level the playing field,’ the more that people have environments that are rich and conducive to their individual flourishing, the more we should expect to see, and the more in empirical practice we do see, the role of genetic differences in people.” In the shadow of eugenics and other genetics-based pseudo-sciences legacy, is harnessing that genetic influence for policy use good or bad? As Harden has experienced since her book published, “you can’t really talk about genes and education without fairly quickly running into some contested issues about fairness and equality.” In fact, she argues that much of her on heritability doesn’t so much answer social science questions as much as it “poses a problem for the social sciences.” In the podcast Harden discusses the Genome-wide Association Study, which she describes with a laugh as “a giant fishing expedition” in which researchers measure the DNA – genotype – from thousands or even millions of individuals and then measure that across the genome, for what comes down to “ a giant correlational exercise. Which genes are more common in people who are high on a trait versus low on a trait, or who have a disease versus don’t have a disease?” Harden also addresses the reasons she studies identical twins in her research, the cooption of genetic tropes to advance toxic worldviews, and how race – which she rejects as a proxy for genetic differences — plays out in the real world as opposed to the lab.

In the most innocent interpretation, suggesting someone should ‘do their own research’ is a reasonable bit of advice. But in the superheated world of social media discourse, #DoYourOwnResearch is a spicy rejoinder that essentially challenges someone to Google the subject since they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. But Googling, social psychologist David Dunning pointedly notes, is not research. “The beauty and the terror of the internet,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is that there’s a lot of terrific information, but there’s also a lot of misinformation and sometimes outright fraud. “People often don’t have the wherewithal to distinguish.” This distinguishing is an area where Dunning, a professor at the University of Michigan, does his own research. While doing your own internet sleuthing isn’t toxic on its face, Dunning suggests that often “you don’t know when you’re researching your way into a false conclusion, and … you don’t know when to stop. The real hard problem with DYOR is when do you know when to stop: you go and you look at a couple of web pages, and ‘Well, you’ve learned something! Terrific!’ But you don’t know how much there is behind it that you still need to learn.” One driver of DYOR, Dunning adds, is the idea that gaining (and deploying) knowledge is one’s own responsibility, which pretty much runs counter to science, which sees gaining knowledge as a collective enterprise. One piece of collective effort in which Dunning has made a very public mark is in describing what’s come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for Dunning and fellow social psychologist Justin Kruger of New York University, after work they originally described two decades ago in “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The popular definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect, Dunning explains, is that “people who are incompetent or unskilled or not expert in a field lack expertise to recognize that they lack expertise. So they come to conclusions, decisions, opinions that they think are just fine when they’re, well, wrong.” Dunning and Kruger’s initial research was based on simple tests – of grammar, logical thinking, classical psychology quizzes, even sense of humor – asking subjects how well they think they’re doing relative to everyone else. They found that the bottom 25 percent of participants tended to think they were doing above average. “But no.” “To know what you don’t know,” he offers, “you need to know what you need to know to realize that your thinking diverges from that.” It’s not true in every endeavor, he adds. “I’m a terrible golfer,” Dunning says. “And I’m fully aware that I‘m a terrible golfer!” The effect tends to show up when the skill of assessing outcomes is roughly similar to the skill of achieving outcomes. So when your golf ball flies into the nearby body of water, you don’t need special skills to know that’s bad. Becoming an expert in everything is out of the question; the real skill will be in identifying who is a legitimate expert and drawing on their insights. (And the right expert, Dunning notes “is the right experts. With an S on the end.”) For the record, the pair – who just received the 2023 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for their Dunning-Kruger effect work - did not name the concept after themselves, although, as Dunning says, they’re “tickled pink that our names will forever be associated with the nincompoops, incompetent ignorant cranks, if you will.”

Historically and into the present day, female workers overall make less than men. Looking at college-educated women in the United States, Harvard University economic historian Claudia Goldin studies the origins, causes and persistence of that gap, which she discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Goldin, whose most recent book is Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity, details for host David Edmonds how the figures she uses are determined. Specifically, it’s the ratio of female-to-male weekly earnings for those working full-time and year-round, with the median woman compared to the median man. “Expressed in this way, there has been real progress” in the last century, she says. Today in the United States, where Goldin’s studies occur, that number is below 85 cents on the dollar. While that trend is good news, it’s not the whole story. “By expressing this gap in this single number we miss the really, really important dynamics, and that is that the gender earnings pay gap widens a lot with age and it widens a lot with [having] children, and it widens in the corporate, banking and finance, and law sectors.” And while the gap may have narrowed, it shows no evidence it’s about to close. Acknowledging the “persistent frustration” about the pay gap’s durability, Goldin pointed a finger at structural inequities, bias and sexual harassment, but she also argues that “greedy work” was a major factor. Greedy work “is a job that pays a disproportionately more on a per hour basis when someone works a greater number of hours or has less control over those hours.” Hence, the gap persists “not so much [because] men and women go into completely different occupations,” she explains, but that women are financially “penalized” for choosing work that allows flexibility within that occupation. “The important point,” she adds, “is that both lose. Men are able to have the family and step up because women step back in terms of their jobs, but both are deprived. Men forgo time with their family and women often forgo their career.” But losers can win – eventually. The more that workers say to their supervisors that “we want our own time” the more the labor market will change, she explains by pointing to current trends. One caveat, though, is that the situation is worse among women without college educations. Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and was the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017. She is a co-director of the NBER's Gender in the Economy group. She was president of the American Economic Association in 2013 and was president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists (which awarded her its Mincer Prize for life-time contributions in 2009), the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society. She received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2016, the 2019 BBVA Frontiers in Knowledge award, and the 2020 Nemmers award, the latter two both in economics.

Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We’re In, offers a state of the field report on the social sciences in this Social Science Bites podcast. Hutton, who was appointed in 2021 to a six-year term as president of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences, addresses various critiques of modern social science – especially in its British incarnations -- from host David Edmonds. As defined by the academy that he now heads, “social science is the understanding of society in all its dimensions,” and encompasses the societal, economic, behavioral and geospatial sciences. Despite that broad remit, the first question posed is whether social and behavioral sciences take a back seat to the natural sciences in the public imagination. Hutton, for his part, says no – although he does see them not always getting their due. He notes that in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, yeoman’s work was conducted by social and behavioral science. “It wasn’t called social science, but it was driven by social science.” The same, he continues, is happening as Britain confronts its economic demons. “Academic prowess is a kind of team,” he details. “You need your humanities, you need your physical scientists, your natural scientists, your medical scientists and your social scientists on the pitch. Sometime the ball falls to their feet and you look to them to make the killer pass.” One thing that might help in achieving that overdue recognition, he explains later, would be if the social sciences themselves shared their commonality as opposed to denying it. “[T]he Academy of Social Science was established 40 years ago, because we felt that good as the British Academy is, it couldn’t represent humanities and social science co-equally. Social science needed its own voice. Four decades on, I would say that social science’s standing in the world is higher than it was 40 years ago. But if [a score of] 100 is what you want to get to, we probably haven’t gotten beyond 20 or 30.” Impacting society, meanwhile, is how the sciences must improve their score (although Hutton acknowledges the vagaries of what impact looks like by saying “I’m not willing to castigate people if it looks as if what they are immediately doing is not impactful or having an impact.”) Asked what he sees as the “most fundamental issue” social science should tackle straightaway, Hutton offers four broad avenues to move down: Economics, governance, change behavior to keep the planet in good shape, and constructing a civil society of institutions that serve both individual and community needs.  Among those, he concludes, “I think combining ‘the we and the I’ is the most important thing that social science can do.” Hutton’s wide-ranging answers follow from a wide-ranging career. He served as editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper, was chief executive of the then Industrial Society, was principal of Hertford College, Oxford from 2011 to 2020, and has authored a number of bestsellers since The State We’re In: Why Britain Is in Crisis and How to Overcome It. Those books include 2008’s The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, 2011’s Them and Us, 2015’s How Good We Can Be, and 2018’s Saving Britain: How We Can Prosper in a New European Future (written with Andrew Adonis).

Batja Mesquita, social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven, challenges the notion of universal emotions. She explains how emotions are culturally determined, highlighting the differences in anger and parental love across cultures. The podcast explores the implications of cultural differences in emotional interactions and discusses the speaker's inspirations, influences, and personal background in psychological research.

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new? These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest book, Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends. “My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it’s been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media about these various differences between generations. My task is not to say whether it’s all nonsense or it’s all true; it’s really to separate the myth from reality so we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.” One thing he’s learned is that the template for generational conflict is fairly standard over time, even if the specifics of what’s being contested are not. “The issues change,” he explains, “but the gap between young and old at any one point in time is actually pretty constant. … We’re not living through a time of particularly ‘snowflake,’ ‘social justice warrior’ young people vs. a very reactionary older group – it’s just the issues have changed. The pattern is the same, but the issues have changed.” Taking a look at climate change, for example, he notes that there’s a narrative that caring young people are fighting a careless cadre of oldsters unwilling to sacrifice for the future good. Not so fast, Duffy says: “The myth that only young people care about climate is a myth. We are unthinkingly encouraging an ageism within climate campaigning that is not only incorrect, but it is self-destructive.” That example, he notes, adds evidence to his contention that “the fake generational battles we have set up between the generations are just that – they are fake.” In the podcast, Duffy outlines the breakdowns his book (and in general larger society) uses to identify cohorts of living generations: Pre-war generation, those born before the end of World War II in 1945. Duffy says this could be broken down further – the so-called Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, for example – but for 2022 purposes the larger grouping serves well. Baby Boomers, born from 1945 to 1965 Generation X, 1966 to 1979 (This is Duffy’s own generation, and so, with tongue in cheek, he calls it “the best generation”!) Millennials, 1980 to around 1995 And Gen Z, ending around 2012 He notes that people are already talking about Generation Alpha, but given that generation’s youth it’s hard to make good generalizations about them. These generation-based groupings are identity groups that only some people freely adopt. “We’re not as clearly defined by these types of groupings as we are by, say, our age or educational status or our gender or our ethnicity.” His research finds between a third and half of people do identify with their generation, and the only one with “a real demographic reality” (as opposed to a solely cultural one) is the Baby Boomers, who in two blasts really did create a demographic bulge. Duffy, in addition to his work at King’s College London, is currently the chair of the Campaign for Social Science, the advocacy arm of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences. Over a 30-year career in policy research and evaluation, he has worked across most public policy areas, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Before joining KCL he was global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute. His first book, 2018’s The Perils of Perception – Why we’re wrong about nearly everything, draws on Ipsos’s own Perils of Perception studies to examine how people misperceive key social realities.

Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them and it matters greatly when that distinction gets lost. That’s a key message from psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who has created an impressive case for both understanding the distinction and then acting appropriately based on the distinction. “A situation with risk,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is one where you basically know everything. More precisely, you know everything that can happen in the future … you know the consequences and you know the probabilities.” It is, as Bayesian decision theorist Jimmie Savage called it, “a small world.” As an example, Gigerenzer takes us a spin on a roulette wheel – you may lose your money on a low-probability bet, but all the possible options were known in advance. Uncertainty, on the other hand, means that all future possible events aren’t known, nor are their probabilities or their consequences. Rounding back to the roulette wheel, under risk all possibilities are constrained to the ball landing on a number between 1 and 36. “Under uncertainty, 37 can happen,” he jokes. “Most situations in which we make decisions,” says Gigerenzer, “involve some sort of uncertainty.” Dealing with risk versus dealing with uncertainty requires different approaches. With risk, all you need is calculation. With uncertainty, “calculation may help you to some degree, but there is no way to calculate the optimal situation.” Humans nonetheless have tools to address uncertainty. Four he identifies are heuristics, intuition, finding people to trust, and adopting narratives to sustain you. In this podcast, he focuses on heuristics, those mental shortcuts and rules of thumb that often get a bad rap. “Social science,” he says, “should take uncertainty seriously, and heuristics seriously, and then we have a key to the real world.” When asked, Gigerenzer lauds Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky for putting “the concept of heuristics back on the table.” But he disagrees with their fast-slow thinking model that gives quick, so-called System 1 thinking less primacy than more deliberative thinking. “We have in the social sciences a kind of rhetoric that heuristics are always second best and maximizing would be always better. That’s wrong. It is only true in a world of risk; it is not correct in a world of uncertainty, where by definition you can’t find the best solution simply because you don’t know the future.” Researchers, he concludes, should “take uncertainty seriously and ask the question, ‘In what situations do these heuristics that people use (and experts use) actually work?’ and not just say, ‘They must be wrong because they are a heuristic.’” Gigerenzer is the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam and partner at Simply Rational – The Institute for Decisions. Before that he directed the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research. His books include general titles like Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, and Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, as well as academic books such as Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Rationality for Mortals, Simply Rational, and Bounded Rationality. Awards for his work include the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research for the best article in the behavioral sciences in 1991, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences for The probabilistic revolution, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. He was a 2014 fellow at the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind University of California, Santa Barbara (SAGE Publishing is the parent of Social Science Space) and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2008.