Best Janet Hutton Podcasts (2025)

1
David Autor on the Labor Market 27:34

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13d ago27:34

27:34

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 …

1
Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness 24:23

2M ago24:23

24:23

Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood 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 c…

1
Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence 27:16

3M ago27:16

27:16

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 U…

1
Crystal Abidin on Influencers 29:11

3M ago29:11

29:11

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin, a professor at Australia’s Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropo…

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Katy Milkman on How to Change 35:21

4M ago35:21

35:21

Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even if the way toward the goal is generally apparent. If you want to know how to do a better job hitting those marks, whether its walking 10,000 steps, learning Esperanto, or quitting smoking, a good person to consult would be Katy Mi…

1
Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures 24:31

5M ago24:31

24:31

There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens -- i.e. their nation's children -- are happy, healthy and productive, and that therefore governments have policies that work to achieve that. But good intentions never guarantee good policies. Here's where economist Janet Currie steps in. Currie is the Henry P…

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Joshua Greene on Effective Charities 25:23

7M ago25:23

25:23

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Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism 23:58

7M ago23:58

23:58

As 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. Tha…

1
Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System 22:57

9M ago22:57

22:57

The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that - relationships. And those relations generally start with essentially one-on-one encounters between law enforcement personnel and individuals, whether those individuals are suspects, victims or witnesses. When those relations get off on the wrong foot - or …

1
Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence 27:33

9M ago27:33

27:33

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that’s not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power…

1
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature 16:48

11M ago16:48

16:48

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect. That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research. She notes that her students, for example, are “astonished” at how much of human behavior and…

1
Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work 21:23

12M ago21:23

21:23

Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That’s a big, and contentious, question. It’s also almost an existential question for the disciplines involved. It’s also a question that Megan Stevenson, a professor of law and of economics at the University of Virginia School of Law, grapples with as she explores how w…

1
Rob Ford on Immigration 32:01

1y ago32:01

32:01

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Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income 21:33

1y ago21:33

21:33

Here'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…

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Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias 19:32

1y ago19:32

19:32

How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that the part of the brain that activates when something contradictory is encountered in the amygdala - “that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. This…

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Alison Gopnik on Care 25:11

1+ y ago25:11

25:11

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Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict 29:09

1+ y ago29:09

29:09

Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learning – fits in. Is it a victim, suffering from the conflict or perhaps a target of violence or repression? Maybe you see it as complicit in the violence, a perpetrator, so to speak. Or perhaps you see it…

1
Safiya Noble on Search Engines 28:24

1+ y ago28:24

28:24

The work of human hands retains evidence of the humans who created the works. While this might seem obvious in the case of something like a painting, where the artist’s touch is the featured aspect, it’s much less obvious in things that aren’t supposed to betray their humanity. Take the algorithms that power search engines, which are expected to pr…

1
Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual 24:52

1+ y ago24:52

24:52

Most of us recognize the presence of ritual, whether in a religious observance, an athlete’s weird pre-competition tics, or even the cadence of our own morning ablutions. In general, most of these rituals are seen as harmless and probably a little unnecessary (or even silly). But according to cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, ritual ofte…

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Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective 23:57

1+ y ago23:57

23:57

At the end of every interview that host David Edmonds conducts for the Social Science Bites podcast, he poses the same question: Whose work most influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the socia…

1
Deborah Small on Charitable Giving 21:06

1+ y ago21:06

21:06

Is giving to a charitable cause essentially equivalent to any other economic decision made by a human being, bounded by the same rational and irrational inputs as any other expenditure? Based on research by psychologist Deborah Small and others working in the area of philanthropy and altruism, the answer is a resounding no. In this Social Science B…

1
Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves 24:34

1+ y ago24:34

24:34

On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?” In this Social Science Bites pod…

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Melissa Kearney on Marriage and Children 26:58

2y ago26:58

26:58

A common trope in America depicts a traditional family of a married husband and wife and their 2.5 (yes, 2.5) children as the norm, if not perhaps the ideal. Leaving aside the idea of a “traditional” coupling or what the right number of children might be, is there an advantage to growing up with married parents? Definitely, argues Melissa Kearney, …

1
Raffaella Sadun on Effective Management 25:12

2y ago25:12

25:12

While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-leader of the Digi…

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Carsten de Dreu on Why People Fight 27:06

2y ago27:06

27:06

“We have been evolving into a species that is super-cooperative: we work together with strangers, we can empathize with people, we are really an empathic flock,” begins Carsten de Dreu, a professor at Leiden University. “And at the same time, there is increasing evidence from archaeological excavations all around the world that already 10, 20 and 3…

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Heaven Crawley on International Migration 27:01

2y ago27:01

27:01

In the Global North, media and political depictions of migration tend to be relentless images of little boats crossing bodies of water or crowds of people stacking up at a dotted line on a map. These depictions presume two things – that this is a generally comprehensive picture of migration and that, regardless of where you stand, the situation aro…

1
Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology 28:25

2y ago28:25

28:25

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Shinobu Kitayama was studying psychology at Kyoto University, Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attribution Theory were “really hot topics” that he found “intellectually interesting” ways of describing human behavior. “But when I came here [to the University of Michigan] and looked at my graduate students, colleague…

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Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness 23:39

2y ago23:39

23:39

Everyone, it is said, is allowed their own opinion. But what if someone’s own opinion was in fact one foisted on them by someone else, and yet the original opinion holder in turn holds the changeling opinion as their own? Unlikely? Actually, not so unlikely, as the research of Petter Johansson and Lars Hall into ‘choice blindness’ shows. In this So…

1
Ayelet Fishbach on Goals and Motivation 24:32

2+ y ago24:32

24:32

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet Robert Browning once opined, “or what’s a heaven for?” That’s not a very satisfying maxim for someone trying to lose weight, learn a language, or improve themselves in general on this earthly plane. But there are ways to maximize one’s grasping ability, and that’s an area where psychologist …

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Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics and Educational Attainment 34:19

2+ y ago34:19

34:19

In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds asks psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden what she could divine about his educational achievements if all she knew about him was his complete genome. “Based just on your genetic information,” she starts, “I would be able to guess about as well as I would be able to guess if I knew how muc…

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David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect 19:22

2+ y ago19:22

19:22

In the most innocent interpretation, suggesting someone should ‘do their own research’ is a reasonable bit of advice. But in the superheated world of social media discourse, #DoYourOwnResearch is a spicy rejoinder that essentially challenges someone to Google the subject since they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. But Googling, social…

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Claudia Goldin on the Gender Pay Gap 23:04

2+ y ago23:04

23:04

Historically and into the present day, female workers overall make less than men. Looking at college-educated women in the United States, Harvard University economic historian Claudia Goldin studies the origins, causes and persistence of that gap, which she discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Goldin, whose most recent book is Career & F…

1
Will Hutton on the State of Social Science 21:48

2+ y ago21:48

21:48

Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We’re In, offers a state of the field report on the social sciences in this Social Science Bites podcast. Hutton, who was appointed in 2021 to a six-year term as president of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences, addresses various critiques of modern socia…

1
Batja Mesquita on Culture and Emotion 21:10

2+ y ago21:10

21:10

There’s the always charming notion that “deep down we’re all the same,” suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions. Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, begs to disagree. Based on her pioneering work into the field o…

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Bobby Duffy on Generation Myths 20:40

3y ago20:40

20:40

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new? These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute …

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Gerd Gigerenzer on Decision Making 22:44

3y ago22:44

22:44

Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them and it matters greatly when that distinction gets lost. That’s a key message from psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who has created an impressive case for both understanding the distinction and then acting appropriately…

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Ellen Peters on Numeracy 23:37

3y ago23:37

23:37

“It’s been said there are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can’t count.” So reads a sentence in the book Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The author of Innumeracy in the Wild is Ellen Peters, Philip H. Knight Chair and director of the Ce…

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Jonathan Haskel on Intangibles 17:35

3y ago17:35

17:35

The knowledge economy. Intellectual property. Software. Maybe even bitcoin. All pretty much intangible, and yet all clearly real and genuinely valuable. This is the realm where economist Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College London mints his own non-physical scholarship. “In the old days,” relates the co-author of Capitalism without Capital: The Rise…

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Sheila Jasanoff on Science and Technology Studies 27:20

3y ago27:20

27:20

Sheila Jasanoff, the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is a pioneer in the field of STS. That acronym can be unpacked as either ‘science and technology studies’ or ‘science, technology and society.’ Jasanoff -- who describes herself as a sociologist of knowledge and…

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John List on Economic Field Experiments 34:32

3y ago34:32

34:32

Any work in social and behavioral science presumably – but not necessarily immediately - tells us something about humans in the real world. To come up with those insights, research usually occurs in laboratory settings, where the researchers control the independent variables and which, in essence, rules out research ‘in the wild.’ Enter John List. …

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Kathelijne Koops on Chimps and Tools 17:16

3+ y ago17:16

17:16

Kathelijne Koops, a biological anthropologist at the University of Zurich, works to determine what makes us human. And she approaches this quest by intensely studying the use of tools by other species across sub-Saharan Africa. “Look at us now …” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “We are really the ultimate t…

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George Loewenstein on Hot and Cold Affect 24:17

3+ y ago24:17

24:17

The idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. The act of imagining someone else’s reactions may be hard, but based on the body of work by George Loewenstein, predicting how -- under varying circumstances -- we might walk in our own shoes may not be all that easier. Loewenstein is th…

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Joel Mokyr on Economic Lessons from the Past 20:06

3+ y ago20:06

20:06

“I tell my students, ‘If somebody utters the sentence that starts with the words, “History teaches us” the rest of the sentence is probably wrong.’ History has no direct lessons for almost anything. Our own age is sufficiently different, sufficiently unique, from what happened in the past that any facile lessons from history are more likely to misl…

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Karin Barber on Verbal Arts 22:24

3+ y ago22:24

22:24

Verbal arts, explains Karin Barber, emeritus professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham, are “any form of words that have been composed in order to attract attention or invite interpretation which is intended to be repeatable in some way.” They are, she continues, central to all sorts of social processes, “just as mu…

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Melanie Simms on Work 31:13

3+ y ago31:13

31:13

COVID-19 has changed everything, including how we work (and to be more precise, are employed). But in order to best understand how things have changed, and hopefully to grapple with how they will be, it helps to have studied how they were. Enter Melanie Simms, professor of work and employment at the University of Glasgow ‘s Adam Smith Business Scho…

1
Jeffrey Ian Ross on Convict Criminology 19:12

3+ y ago19:12

19:12

“Convict criminology,” Jeffrey Ian Ross explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, is “a network, or platform, that’s united in the perception that the convict voice has been either neglected or marginalized in scholarship or policy debates in the field of criminology in general, and corrections in particular.” Ross, a professor in the School o…

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Molefi Kete Asante on Afrocentrism 25:28

4y ago25:28

25:28

Molefi Kete Asante, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Philadelphia’s Temple University, has long been at the forefront of developing the academic discipline of Black studies and in founding the theory of Afrocentrism, “the centering of African people in their own stories.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, Asante offers…

1
Jennifer Richeson on Perceptions of Racial Inequality 23:21

4y ago23:21

23:21

There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person? This is one of the questions that Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale Universit…

1
Jennifer Lee on Asian-Americans 24:23

4y ago24:23

24:23

The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the ‘China virus’ and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States. Columbia University sociologist Jennifer Lee has been answering many of those questions her entire academic …

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Martha Newson on Identity Fusion 21:01

4y ago21:01

21:01

Despite being someone who doesn’t “particularly enjoy the game,” cognitive anthropologist Martha Newson is drawn to football. “Football is one of the most exciting games to watch as an anthropologist,” she explains in this Social Science Bites podcast. “I’m not watching the ball go around the pitch – I’m watching the fans. I’m transfixed by them! Y…