The Nature & Nurture Podcast

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and co-author of the New York Times Bestseller Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. She is the recipient of countless awards including being one of APA’s William James Fellows for outstanding contributions to psychology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.  In this episode we talk about Mahzarin’s career in cognitive and social psychology, and the development of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). We discuss myths and facts about implicit bias, including how the brain forms automatic implicit associations based on statistical learning, and how these biases can be formed entirely independently of conscious prejudice. We discuss examples of this research ranging from moral psychology, to racial bias, and how IAT results differ cross-culturally. Lastly, we discuss Mahzarin’s ongoing research combining natural language processing research and geospatial data to estimate how regional IAT scores correlate with different biases expressed on social media posts coming from different areas. 

Dr. John Delony is a mental health and wellness expert with over two decades of experience working as a researcher, educator, and crisis responder. He is the host of the wildly successful, and live-changing advice-giving Dr. John Delony show, and bestselling author of Own Your Past, Change Your Future: A Not-So-Complicated Approach to Relationships, Mental Health, and Wellness. In this episode, John and I have a wide-ranging conversation centered around the neuropsychology research and personal anecdotes covered in Own Your Past, Change Your Future. We discuss big questions concerning nature and nurture, free will and determinism, child development and parenting, puberty and hormones, finding a balance between motivation and perfectionism, and the neuropsychology of anxiety, and hear a sneak preview of John’s next book.

Dr. Leah Somerville is the Grafstein Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and my very own PhD advisor! She runs the Affective Neuroscience & Development Laboratory, where we study how brain and pubertal development shapes motivation, cognition, emotion, and behavior during adolescence. In this special 100th episode, I interview Leah in person about her research background, the importance of adolescence as a sensitive period for brain development, myths and facts about puberty, hormones, sex differences, and teenage risk-taking, and where developmental neuroscience fits into juvenile justice and our legal conceptions of rational agency.

Dr. Karl Friston, a leading neuroscientist, discusses active inference and the brain's free energy principle. They explore the brain's predictive nature, minimizing prediction error to maximize information gain. The discussion delves into motivation, decision-making, and consciousness through the lens of active inference theory, comparing it with integrated information theory. The podcast also touches on the neurobiology of active inference and its parallels to cybernetic intelligence.

Dr. Lixing Sun is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Central Washington University, and author of The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World. In this episode we talk about the evolution of lying and deception as distinct strategies. Lying organisms actively alter truth by displaying false signals, whereas deception occurs by exploiting cognitive biases to trick others. We talk about lying and deception in a wide range of species, from insects, to fish, to reptiles, to primates, and finally, humans. We discuss the role of deception in sexual selection, evolutionary arms races between innovative methods to cheat and counter-cheating strategies, such as costly signaling and the evolution of human social intelligence, and how large-scale institutions and social media are both particularly threatening and promising to prosociality in humans.

Dr. Mark Moffett is an ecologist and author of several books including Adventures Among Ants and The Human Swarm.  In this episode we talk about social behavior in species ranging from ants, to lizards, to chimpanzees, to humans, and their similarities and differences. We talk about intelligence as typically individually-defined, as well as distributed “hive mind” intelligence in simple species like ants, where each ant can function like a neuron in a whole-brain network. We also discuss the evolution of human sociality and compare our propensity for peace and aggression to chimpanzees and bonobos, and our unique social intelligence. Lastly, we talk about cultural evolution and cross-cultural diversity in human societies, and how we both learn and can transcend group biases.

Dr. Ovul Sezer is a behavioral scientist, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University, and stand-up comedian.  In this episode we talk about the psychology of comedy and Ovul’s research on impression (mis)management. We discuss effective and ineffective forms of communication, balancing confidence and humility, and the importance of first impressions in social and professional relationships. We also talk about the psychology of virtue signaling, humble bragging, and navigating impression management in the modern social media age.

Dr. Edouard Machery is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He's published over 150 articles and book chapters on a diverse range of topics including the philosophy of cognitive science, moral psychology, the utility of evolutionary theory and neuroscience for understanding cognition, folk psychology, and experimental philosophy.  In this wide-ranging episode we talk about Edouard’s research on cross-cultural differences in conceptions of free will and determinism, free will and moral responsibility, and how we define a rational agent. We also talk about neuropsychological research on value and decision making, the free energy principle as a theory of cognition, and how statistical reasoning requires us to create probabilistic cutoffs for action, both in science and in decision making. Lastly, we talk about the development of cognition and emotion both within human lifespans and across our evolutionary phylogenetic tree. 

Dr. Scott Grafton is a Distinguished Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He directs the Action Lab, which focuses on the neuroscience of goal-directed movement.  In this episode we discuss Dr. Grafton’s background in neurology research, and the historical progression of integrating the neuroscience of movement, perception, and goal-setting. We talk about how modern neuroimaging techniques replicated and expanded upon findings from early neuropsychological studies of brain damage, and how Dr. Grafton uses dense-sampling techniques to scan individual’s brains repeatedly over short intervals, to study how learning changes the structural and functional organization of brain regions involved in perception and motor control. Lastly, we talk about Dr. Grafton’s ongoing research of how the brain interacts with the rest of the body during physical activity to maintain allostasis, and the implications this has for our understanding of the links between perception, action, and brain health. 

Dr. Deon Benton is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, where he runs the Computational Cognitive Development Lab. In this episode we talk about the interacting forces of nature and nurture that give rise to human children’s tremendous ability for learning, language development, causal reasoning, and social cognition. Deon describes his past and future research on cognitive development in infants and young children, as well as experimental paradigms for how to measure infant attention, such as through eye-tracking. We talk about how infant statistical learning can be modeled computationally, and the difficulties of decoupling innate knowledge about the physical and social world from learning in the postnatal or even prenatal environments. Lastly, Deon advocates for the importance of designing effective early-intervention studies to improve life outcomes for young children exposed to adversity. Learn more about Deon’s work at: https://theccdlab.com/