Ariel Kalil on Parents’ Role in Child Development
Social Science Bites
When discussing youngsters’ life outcomes, school is often the first place someone starts investigating. And yet school time is dwarfed by the amount of time kids spend with their parents or other adult caregivers. Recognizing this, developmental psychologist Ariel Kalil, , focuses her child development research on parenting. “My argument, in a nutshell,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is that we spend a lot of time investigating what happens to kids during the school hours and thinking of school as the site for child skill development,...
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Mahzarin Banaji on Social Cognition
Social Science Bites
One of the promises of artificial intelligence is that it will mimic, and perhaps even improve, on human thinking. One of those hoped-for improvements was that AI would not exhibit human biases. Turns out that in one area, AI can indeed mimic human thinking, and it's in that field of bias. As Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji -- one of the creators of the widely used implicit bias test -- explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, AI platforms both mimic human bias and even amplify it. In on the podcast series, Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds that even she was surprised how...
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Daniel Yon on the Brain as Scientist
Social Science Bites
The human brain works very hard behind the scenes even in the most mundane aspects of daily life, like enjoying a nice day or determining the meaning of chit-chat with a friend. Ferreting out the basis and structures of our brain's labor is the domain of , a psychologist and neuroscientists and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Yon - author of the 2025 book -- details for interviewer David Edmonds why he feels that just as science itself represents a solid - but not "bullet-proof" way of interpreting the natural world,...
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Tom Gilovich On the Spotlight Effect
Social Science Bites
Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “We're dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, ‘Huh?’ That's interesting.” He adds, “At the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences,” which means understanding how understandings come about also has great import. “A lot of the research on judgment and decision making...
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Ellora Derenoncourt on the US Racial Wealth Gap
Social Science Bites
This Social Science Bites podcast offers a dollop of good news and heaping helping of bad. The good news is that since the end of American Civil War the economic condition of Back Americans has improved, using as a comparison the presumed status quo population of white Americans. According to Princeton University economist , this "wealth gap" has fallen from 60-to-one to six-to-one in the intervening 160 years. While that's heartening, as Derenoncourt details for interviewer David Edmonds, that six-to-one gap hasn't budged since the 1950s. The academic, the founder and faculty director for...
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Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge
Social Science Bites
There is a value to shared knowledge that tends to go unrecognized because it’s so ubiquitous. Nonetheless, explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, common knowledge underlies things like paper money, governance, and even coral reefs. And common knowledge, he makes clear to host David Edmonds, “does not have its ordinary sense of conventional wisdom or an open secret or something that everyone knows, but rather something that everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and everyone knows that, and so on, ad infinitum.” Possing that shared knowledge – and the...
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Mukulika Banerjee on Indian Democracy
Social Science Bites
A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that -- at least in the India of that moment -- elections were sacred. This was not a religious epiphany but a cultural one; at the center was not a figure, religious or political, but an ideal - democracy. Banerjee has explored her insights in the years since in a variety or formats, but academic and popular, ranging from her written work like 2021's Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India or 2014's Why India Votes? to a 2009 radio documentary for...
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Paul Bloom on Empathy
Social Science Bites
In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In the book, as in his career and in this Social Science Bites podcast, Bloom deconstructs what is popularly meant by empathy. "Everybody seems to have their own notion," he tells interviewer David Edmonds, "and that's totally fine, but we end up talking past each other unless we're clear about it." And so he outlines several widely used definitions -- think compassion, for example -- before offering several more scholarly ways of viewing empathy, such as "cognitive empathy" and "emotional...
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Devyani Sharma on Accents
Social Science Bites
What does your accent – and yes, every speaker has one – say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that , a professor of language and communication at Oxford’s Worcester College, asks every day, especially about the many English speakers around the world. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sharma takes a deep dive into the accents of Britain, where accents have famously been used as markers of social status for years. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, “the UK stands out as a country that's organized...
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Frank Keil on Causal Thinking
Social Science Bites
As a practical matter, how much effort do you put into pinning down the causes behind daily occurrences? To developmental psychologist Frank Keil, who studies causal thinking, that answer is likely along the lines of ‘not enough.’ A lack of causal thinking is both endemic, and, to an extent, hurtful these days, he argues, suggesting that lacking even simplified causal models makes things like the black box of artificial intelligence a potential problem. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Keil, , outlines for interviewer David Edmonds how causal thinking is a skill we seem to have at...
info_outlineHere's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's a lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money -- "get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible." You and I might prefer that, since we, of course, are reputable people and good stewards and understand our own particular needs. But what about, well, others?
Economist Tavneet Suri has done more than just think about that; her fieldwork includes handing out money across villages in two rural areas in Kenya to see what happens. Her experiments include giving out a lump sum of cash and also spreading out that same amount over time. The results she details for host David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast are, to be frank, heartening, although the mechanisms of disbursement definitely affect the outcomes.
Despite the good news, the idea of a universal basic income is by no means a settled remedy for helping the poor. For one thing, Suri says, "it's super, super expensive. It’s really expensive. And so, the question is, “Is that expense worth it?” And to understand that I think we need a few more years of understanding the benefits, understanding what people do with the incomes, understanding whether this can really kickstart these households out of poverty."
And perhaps the biggest question is whether the results of fieldwork in Kenya is generalizable. "I would love to do a study that replicates this in the West," she says. "The one thing about the West that I think is worth saying that's different is you wouldn't add it on top of existing programs. The idea is you would substitute existing programs with this. And that to me is the question: if you substituted it, what would happen?"
Suri is the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. She is an editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics; co-chair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL, at MIT; co-chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa; a member of the executive committee at J-PAL; and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.