Is psychology too WEIRD? That's what this episode's guest, psychologist Steven J. Heine suggested when he and his colleagues published a paper suggesting that psychology wasn't the study of the human mind, but the study of one kind of human mind, the sort generated by the kinds of brains that happen to be conveniently located near the places where research is usually conducted - North American college undergraduates. They called them the WEIRDest people in the world, short for Western, Education, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic - the kind of people who make up less than 15 percent of the world's population. In this episode, you'll learn why it took so long to figure out it was studying outliers, and what it means for the future of psychology.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Is the person you believe to be the protagonist of your life story real or a fictional character? In other words, is your very self real or is it an illusion? According to psychologist Bruce Hood, the person at the center of your life isn't really there; it's all neurological smoke and mirrors. Sure, you have the sensation that you have a self, and that sensation is real, but the beliefs and ideas that spring from it are not. Learn all about it in this episode in which you'll hear some new material mixed with a rebroadcast of episode four's interview with the author of The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Can new computer programs rid us of the cognitive errors that lead to learned helplessness in the classroom? In this episode Ulrik Christensen, senior fellow of digital learning at McGraw-Hill Education, explains how adaptive learning tools are changing the way teachers approach students, empowering educators to provide the kind of attention required to pass along mastery in areas where traditional approaches don't seem to work.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Stuck in a bad situation, even when the prison doors are left wide open, we sometimes refuse to attempt escape. Why is that? In this episode learn all about the strange phenomenon of learned helplessness and how it keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it might be to escape any one of those scenarios with just one more effort. In the episode, you'll learn how to defeat this psychological trap with advice from psychologists Jennifer Welbourne, who studies attributional styles in the workplace, and Kym Bennett who studies the effects of pessimism on health.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Work often sucks, but it doesn't have to. In this episode we interview Lazlo Bock, head of People Operations at Google, who helped his company make work suck less, way less, by introducing new policies and procedures based on knowledge gained by psychology and neuroscience concerning biases, fallacies, and other weird human behavior quirks. In addition, Google has advanced our knowledge of such phenomena by conducting its own internal experiments and collecting mountains of data. The result has been a workplace where people are happier, more productive, and better able to pursue that which fulfills their ambitions. Learn all about Google's approach as Lazlo describes his new book, Work Rules, a collection of insights from Google's evidence-based, data-driven human relations juggernaut.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

It’s peculiar, your inability to predict what will make you happy, and that inability leads you to do stupid things with your money. Once you get a decent job that allows you to buy new shoes on a whim, you start accumulating stuff, and the psychological research into happiness says that stuff is a crappy source of lasting joy. In this rebroadcast, listen as psychologist Elizabeth Dunn explains how to get more happiness out of your money...with science!Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

What if you could give yourself a superpower? That's what Jia Jiang wondered when he began a quest to remove the fear of rejection from his brain and become the risk-taking, adventurous person he always wanted to be. Hear how he forced himself to feel the pain of rejection 100 times in 100 days in an effort to desensitize himself, and how he recorded every moment on his way to making himself a better person.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Can you change a person's mind on a divisive social issue? The latest science says...yes. But it will require two things: contact and disclosure. In this episode you'll travel to Mississippi to see how professional mind changers are working to shift attitudes on LGBT rights, and you'll learn how a man in Los Angeles conducted 12,000 conversations until he was able to perfect the most powerful version of contact possible. In one 22-minute chat, Dave Fleischer can change people's minds on issues they've felt strongly about for decades, and change them forever.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Public shaming is back. Once done in town squares, the subjects of our ridicule locked in pillories and unable to avoid the rotten fruit and insults we hurled at them, now the shaming takes place on the internet. No longer our neighbors, the new targets are strangers and celebrities, and instead of courts meting out justice, it is the aggregate outrage of well-meaning people on Twitter just like you. Listen as author Jon Ronson describes his new book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” in which he spends time with people who have had their lives ruined by modern, web-based public shamings in an attempt to reveal to each of us what can happen when, alone but together, we obliterate people for unpopular opinions, off-color jokes, offensive language, and professional faux pas.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

In this inbetweenisode you will hear an excerpt from a lecture I gave at DragonCon2014 and an interview with neurologist and host of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe Steven Novella who discusses the psychology and neuroscience behind conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart