Ethan Kross is a Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Michigan. His new book is "Chatter: the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it." In this episode, we talk about Ethan's early connection with meditation and other forms of inspecting inner life, his personal mantra, the influence of his father, how he got into psychology, the books that have had the greatest impact on him, and where his most influential ideas came from.INTERVIEW BEGINS—6:38Reading list: https://bookshop.org/lists/top-picks-ethan-kross/ Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Joseph Henrich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the co-author of one of the most influential social science papers of the previous decade. That paper described "WEIRD" people—those who are from a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic culture—and how overgeneralization based on WEIRD samples has skewed social science research. He recently published a book expanding on this idea and shedding further light on why WEIRD psychology is so peculiar, called "The WEIRDest People in the World." In this conversation, we talk about where these ideas came from, who really came up with with the acronym WEIRD, how Joe's early trajectory wound through aerospace engineering and anthropology, and much more. The resonating theme of this interview is that history matters. It matters for understanding the psychological make up of our own culture. It matters for how Joe developed his most influential ideas, based on his own unique educational history. Furthermore, psychology as a field has mostly done a poor judge of accounting for the history of people and cultures. Joe is co-author on a recent paper making an argument that this needs to change: see his recent "Psychology as a Historical Science" for more details.INTERVIEW BEGINS—8:55.Joe's website: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/Cody's website: https://www.codykommers.com/Cody's twitter: https://twitter.com/codykommers Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he is Director of the Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. Simon's work has been foundational in research into Theory of Mind (how we understand the contents of others' thoughts) and Autism. His most recent book is The Pattern Seekers—which connects his years of theorizing about the nature of Autism with how humans have developed over the course of our species' history. In this conversation, we go deep into the genesis of his most influential ideas. I've been a student of Simon's work for many years, and it was a great pleasure to hear more about the personal side of his work. Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

William Labov is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the field of sociolinguistics. In other words, he was the first person to build a modern study of linguistics based on what people actually say, rather than artificial sentences made up by researchers (yes, I'm talking about you, Chomsky). Bill recently won the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is given out every four years to a single scholar throughout all of the social sciences. I interviewed Bill in late 2020, and this episode is a bit different than anything I've done previously. Instead of releasing the entire conversation, I've recorded some thoughts about what initially drew me to Bill and his work, and interspersed his own words throughout. Bill (and his partner Gillian Sankoff) were also kind enough to send some of the original tapes from Bill's field interviews, including the one from Bill's most famous paper. Bill has really had a special career as a scholar—and it's not over yet. He's got a book in the works, reflecting on the thousands of linguistic interviews he's conducted throughout his career. Keep an eye out for it! Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

To say Nicholas Christakis has mastered a few skills throughout his career would almost certainly be underselling it. Nicholas is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. He has an MD from Harvard, a PhD in sociology from Penn, and a masters in public health from Harvard. Throughout the pandemic, he's been working tirelessly to bring reliable information to the public sphere. He's made numerous appearance as an expert on up-to-the-minute pandemic info on Sam Harris' podcast, and also managed to churn out an entirely new book contextualizing the current pandemic in our species' social history. This conversation puts all that in the bigger picture of his overarching career -- which spans everything from abstract analyses of social networks to hands-on care as a Hospice physician. We get into many different topics, mainly about how he brings together all these different perspectives to develop a holistic understanding of human social behavior as it plays out in the unfolding of historical events. You check out his new book, Apollo's Arrow. Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Tanya Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Much of her work has taken an anthropological perspective on psychological topics. For example, her most recent book: How God Becomes Real. It takes an ethnographic approach to understanding how individuals and cultures maintain belief in divine powers. Another of her book that's of special interest to me is Of Two Minds, an award-winning ethnographical perspective on American psychiatry. And it's not just her work that's compelling, so is she. She's essentially my new platonic ideal of an anthropology professor. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too. Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Anil Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His TED talk has over 10 million views, and he's been featured on many big-name podcasts such as Making Sense with Sam Harris and BBC's Life Scientific. Anil comes to the study of consciousness with the perspective of physics and the natural sciences. In this episode, we talk about his personal experiences, the influence of one-of-a-kind thinkers like Oliver Sacks and Gerald Edelman, and how to bring together perspectives from many disciplines to solve large problems. Anil has a new book coming out at the end of this year called "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Keep an eye out for it!Anil's website: https://www.anilseth.com/Anil's twitter: https://twitter.com/anilksethAnil's newsletter: https://www.anilseth.com/mailing-listCody's website: https://codykommers.comCody's Twitter: https://twitter.com/codykommers Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Denise Sekaquaptewa is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She did her PhD at the Ohio State University, and her research has focused on stereotype threat, implicit bias, and prejudice. In this conversation we talk about her family's heritage, her experience in community college, deciding between continuing in the service industry and becoming a psychologist, books she has loved, the changes she would like to make to help academic departments become places where lots of kinds of people can succeed, and why she believes becoming a good person comes before becoming a good scholar. Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Richard Nisbett is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is also the co-author of one of my favorite psychology papers of all time: "Telling More than We Can Know." In this conversation, Richard self-reports on what got him into psychology, the books that most impacted him, the influence of his mentor Stanley Schachter, and his best practices for collaboration and mentorship. Those self reports sure seem accurate, though I'm not sure either of us is in an especially good position to judge. We also digress a fair bit into psychological history, particularly about Freud, Gordon Allport, and Kurt Lewin. Another fun fact about Richard: he's Malcolm Gladwell's favorite psychologist. Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Michael McCullough is a professor of psychology at University of California, San Diego, where he runs the Evolution and Human Behavior Lab. Mike and I had a chat about his new book, "The Kindness of Strangers." The title for that book as originally conceived was "Why We Give a Damn" -- and even prior to that "Why We Don't Give a Damn." I happen to like those titles, though I can understand why the publisher didn't, and so I thought I'd trot them out to have a modest life of their own. In this conversation, we talk about Mike's first inspiration to study psychology, the influence of Christianity on his personal development and later his study of religion, his approach to mentorship, where he thought the conversation surrounding the biological basis of altruism went wrong, and rethinking the parable of the Good Samaritan.More info: codykommers.com/podcast Subscribe at codykommers.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com