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...
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Setha Low on Public Spaces
Social Science Bites
Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener for the young cultural anthropologist Setha Low. “I thought it was so cool that everybody was there together,” she tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “… Everybody was talking. Everybody knew their place. It was like a complete little world, a microcosm of Costa Rican society, and I hadn't seen anything like that in suburban Los Angeles.” That epiphany set Low, at the Graduate Center of the City...
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Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit
Social Science Bites
As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at University College London, his research has taken him from excavations of the New Stone Age site at , Turkey to studies of the modern suburbs of London to examinations of life on -- and in service to -- the International Space Station. It is in that later role, as principal investigator for a European Research Council-funded research project on the that he visits the Social Science Bites podcast. He details for interviewer David Edmonds some of...
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Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use
Social Science Bites
Let’s say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, , would urgently suggest you include anti-microbial resistance near the top of that list. “We're really in the middle of a crisis right now,” he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “Every year, about 5 million people die of infections that are associated with antibiotic resistance -- 5 million. That's nearly twice the number of people who die of HIV, TB and malaria, put together -- put together. Antibiotic resistance and...
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Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain
Social Science Bites
Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to , it can be a cardinal virtue in our mental health, too. How she came to that conclusion and how common rigid thinking can be are themes explored in her new book, . “I think that from all the research that I've done,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “I feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination.” And while she...
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David Autor on the Labor Market
Social Science Bites
When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Autor, , examines two momentous changes to global economics and how they play out for individuals. He explains to interviewer David Edmonds how the rise of China’s manufacturing dominance...
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Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness
Social Science Bites
Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something noted. Being an experimental psychologist who teaches at the University of Bristol, an opportunity presented itself. Why not start a course on the science of happiness, and while teaching it collect data from the students attending? The resulting course (created with advice from one his former students, ) proved popular, and Hood last year published a book, . In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hood explains to interviewer David Edmonds the scientific basis of happiness, some details on how...
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Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence
Social Science Bites
Let’s cut to the chase: “The overwhelming majority of murders in the United States involve guns,” says economist Jens Ludwig. “And in fact, most of the difference in overall murder rates between the United States and other countries are due to murders with guns.” This may seem intuitively obvious to outside observers, but studying guns within the United States has long been , and the amount of research isn’t commensurate with the impact on U.S. society. That said, Ludwig has taken on exploring the roots of American gun violence, work that serves as grist for the Crime Lab he...
info_outlineAs an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as postdoctoral researcher at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences at the University of Oxford) she have been proscribed from doing - posing as a recruit to study violent extremist groups. That, as you might expect, gave her special insight into how these groups attract new blood, and on the basis of that work, as well as more traditional research for groups such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, she has been hosted by the United Nations, national legislators, intelligence agencies and Big Tech.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Ebner details some of the mechanics of her undercover research for host David Edmonds before discussing the prevalence and characteristics of violent extremist groups. Given the variety of ways governments tally these groups and the groups' own amorphousness in an online age, determining whether such groups are on the rise - which seems to be a perennial fear - proves devilishly difficult to determine. "I would say," Ebner concedes, "it often comes and goes in waves, but now we are seeing a very strong wave of very young people, including minors, radicalizing towards violence."
That radicalization proves remarkably similar regardless of ideology, Ebner notes. Plus, it's not straightforward determining who might be open to recruitment. "Based on my research, I would say that everyone is potentially susceptible to radicalization, especially in vulnerable moments in our lives, and everyone has them."
Ebner serves up that potential universality in a different context to close the podcast. It's what keeps her up at night: "I think the mainstreaming of some of the extreme concepts and ideas and language that I used to observe only in the darkest corners of the internet, but that is now being heard in parliaments, that is now being seen in large social media channels of influencers or voiced by politicians."
Given her journalistic chops, it is no surprise that Ebner has written extensively on extremism in a series of well received books. The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, received the Bruno Kreisky Award for the Political Book of the Year 2018; Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists was a Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 and Germany publishing's Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020 ("Science Book of the Year") Prise as well as the Dr Caspar Einem Prize from the Association of Social Democratic Academics; and Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over, was published in 2023.