Andrew Devendorf joins Alexa and Yoel to discuss his work on "me-search" (or self-relevant research) within clinical psychology. He talks about the prevalence of mental health difficulties within the field, and the harmful taboos against speaki

RE-RELEASE: Against Mindfulness

Sep 27th, 2023 1h 23m

Playing devil's advocate, Yoel and Mickey mount a criticism against the scientific study of mindfulness. What is mindfulness? Can we measure it? Is mindfulness-based therapy effective? Can mindfulness improve the quality of attention beyond the

RE-RELEASE: We Need to Talk About Fraud

Sep 20th, 2023 1h 23m

Yoel and Alexa are joined by Joe Simmons to talk about fraud. We go in-depth on a recent high-profile fraud case, but we also talk about scientific fraud more generally: how common is it, how do you detect it, and what can we do to prevent it?

Against Anti-DEI Rhetoric

Aug 30th, 2023 1h 7m

Jennifer Gutsell joins Alexa to discuss the controversy surrounding Yoel's experience interviewing at UCLA. They focus on a post, written by Alexa, in which she pushes back against defenses of "viewpoint diversity" and argues that the graduate

We Need to Talk About Fraud Again

Jun 23rd, 2023 1h 8m

Harkening back to episode 73, Alexa and Yoel discuss recent evidence of fraud documented in the Data Colada blog post "Clusterfake." The post is the first in a series of four, which will collectively detail evidence of fraud in four papers co-a

Patchwork Politics

May 17th, 2023 58m 42s

In heated political debates, people are often accused of being hypocrites, lacking consistent foundational values. Today, Yoel and Alexa discuss a recent paper by David Pinsof, David Sears, and Martie Haselton, that challenges the commonsense n

Quantifying the Narrative of Replicable Science

Mar 29th, 2023 1h 9m

Yoel and Alexa discuss a recent paper that takes a machine learning approach to estimating the replicability of psychology as a discipline. The researchers' investigation begins with a training process, in which an artificial intelligence model

Psych (with Paul Bloom)

Mar 8th, 2023 1h 9m

Alexa and Yoel chat with Paul Bloom about his newest book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (https://amzn.to/3ZrycHk). The book, built from Paul's popular Introduction to Psychology course, is an opinionated overview of the field of psycholog

Destigmatizing Mental Health (with Andrew Devendorf)

Feb 8th, 2023 1h 19m

An Outside Perspective on Implicit Bias

Jan 18th, 2023 1h 15m

Alexa and Yoel discuss the much trodden topic of implicit bias from a less trodden perspective: that of the general public. Offering insight into the public's views is a paper by Jeffrey Yen, Kevin Durrheim, and Romin Tafarodi, which explores p

What Happened at Perspectives on Psychological Science?

Dec 23rd, 2022 1h 24m

Yoel and special guest Rachel Hartman discuss the recent ouster of Klaus Fiedler, the former Editor in Chief of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, over allegations of racism and abuse of power. They try to untangle a complicated

Is MTurk Too Good To Be True?

Dec 7th, 2022 1h 3m

In a recent article, psychologists Webb and Tangney document their experience collecting psychology data online using Amazon's crowdsourcing platform MTurk. Alarmingly, the authors conclude that ultimately only 2.6% of their sample was valid da

Inspired Science (with Spencer Greenberg)

Nov 23rd, 2022 1h 10m

Yoel and Alexa are joined by Spencer Greenberg, founder of the behavioral science startup incubator Spark Wave and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. He describes how he became fascinated with psychology and behavior change, and how he's bee

Getting Into Grad School

Nov 9th, 2022 57m 49s

With grad school application deadlines around the corner, Alexa and Yoel discuss how, exactly, that process works. Big picture, they talk about their goals in selecting graduate students to work on their labs, and whether they've gotten good at

So, What Do You Do?

Oct 26th, 2022 1h 12m

Yoel and Alexa discuss a recent paper, written by Hughes, Srivastava, Leszko, and Condon, that created and validated a new index of "occupational prestige." The index is intended to provide a tool to measure the third component of socioeconomic

What are Teachers Good For? (with Paul Bloom)

Sep 28th, 2022 1h 7m

Paul Bloom joins Yoel and Alexa to talk about the glamour and humiliation of teaching psychology at the college level. They discuss how they've changed their approaches to teaching over the years, and whether they've become more skilled or more

Individualism, Interdependence, and Student Loans

Sep 14th, 2022 59m 4s

Inspired by a recent Atlantic article ("The Myth of Independent American Families" by Stephanie H. Murray) Alexa and Yoel consider what it means to live in an indiviualistic society. At an abstract level, they discuss different visions for inte

Facing a Social Media Mob (with Stefan Uddenberg)

Aug 24th, 2022 1h 14m

Yoel and Alexa are joined by Stefan Uddenberg, a social perception researcher and author of the paper "Deep Models of Superficial Face Judgments." This paper was the focus of a previous episde - "A Face for Podcasting" - in which the co-hosts d

Should SPSP Stay Out of It?

Aug 3rd, 2022 1h 13m

As the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) starts gearing up for their 2023 conference, Alexa and Yoel debate some of the organization's recent efforts to be more anti-racist and politically engaged. First, the co-hosts discuss

Decriminalizing Mental Illness

Jul 20th, 2022 1h 21m

Yoel and Alexa chat with Jennifer Cox and Lauren Kois, co-directors of the Southern Behavioral Health and Law Initiative. Established in 2020, the initiative was created to address the dearth of mental health resources for people who become inv

Freelance Kinkology (with Aella)

Jul 6th, 2022 1h 26m

Independent researcher Aella joins Yoel and Alexa to talk about her experiences doing freelance social science. Their discussion touches on some far-ranging topics, from the upsides of Twitter microfame to the humbling experience of questioning

What's Wrong with Social Media?

Jun 22nd, 2022 1h 23m

Mickey returns with the hot takes you know and love. He joins Yoel and Alexa to discuss Jonathan Haidt's recent Atlantic article, "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid." Haidt claims the answer is social media, but t

Many Many Labs

Jun 8th, 2022 1h 14m

Earlier this year, the last of five "Many Labs" projects was accepted for publication at Collabra: Psychology, representating the culmination of a nearly-decade long series of multi-lab replication efforts. In this episode, Alexa and Yoel consi

The Distracting Nature of Nudges

May 18th, 2022 1h 11m

Originating within the behavioral sciences, "nudging" has received attention as a way to achieve broad societal change by promoting small, individual adjustments. We're told, for instance, that if we all do our part reduce our carbon footprints

A Face For Podcasting

May 1st, 2022 1h 5m

Yoel and Alexa discuss a recent study that examines the facial features that people perceive as "smart," "dorky," "trustworthy," or a number of other traits. The study quickly captured a lot of attention, eliciting both fascination and anger. T