266. Jesse Singal on Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Science, Natural Sciences

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2022

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michal Shermer and Jesse Singal discuss: how social scientists determine causality • Primeworld: cognitive priming and how it works (and doesn't work) • The Malcolm Gladwell-effect (named after the 10,000-hour effect, by Anders Ericsson) • the self-esteem and self-help personal-empowerment movements • power posing and positive psychology • New Age self-help movements • Grit (stick-to-itiveness) (Darwin's "dogged as does it.") • Persistence is task specific and context dependent • Big 5 personality as determiners: Grit = Conscientiousness • Implicit Association Test and racism, misogyny, and bigotry • the replication crisis, what caused it, and what to do about it • choice architecture and the nudging of human behavior • race, gender, class, I.Q. and other radioactive topics in group differences • free will and determinism • nature/nurture and how lives turn out • abortion • and U.S. foreign policy.

Jesse Singal is a contributing writer at New York and the former editor of the magazine's Science of Us online vertical, as well as the cohost of the podcast Blocked and Reported. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He is a former Robert Bosch Foundation fellow in Berlin and holds a master's degree from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Shower Show.
0:17.0	Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host, Michael Sherman.
0:19.0	This episode is brought to you by Wondrium.
0:22.0	Wondrium is the company that brings you engaging. is brought to you by Wundrium.
0:22.6	Wundrium is the company that brings you engaging educational content
0:27.0	through short-form videos, long-form courses,
0:30.6	tutorials, how-to lessons, travel logs, documentaries, and more, covering every topic
0:36.8	you've ever wondered about and many you've never thought you'd wonder about.
0:40.5	I know I run into that all the time. Their vision is to make
0:45.4	lifelong learning and personal enrichment a fun and fulfilling experience for
0:49.7	everyone. I've talked about it a lot. You know I'm a big fan and a producer of two of my own
0:54.3	courses on there on skepticism 101 and on conspiracy theories and I just recently was talking about a new series called Solving for Zero, the search for climate innovation based on Bill Gates,
1:11.5	Bill Gates's latest book in his long lifelong research into solving specific problems with technology.
1:20.0	And this particular one is 10 different lectures or segments on this like how we got here.
1:30.0	That is the climate problem.
1:32.0	This will be hard. It's a hard problem to solve, clearly it's going to take a while.
1:38.0	How we plug into the system, how we make things, how we grow things, how we transport things how we grow things how we transport things the buildings we live in
1:45.8	Yeah, they have all this really interesting research on smart buildings
1:49.7	Not just buildings that are computerized to control their environment and that sort of thing,
1:54.0	but made out of materials, for example, concrete that absorbs greenhouse gases.
2:00.0	So that
2:05.0	would be pretty interesting as civilizations gets ever smarter so to by their buildings
	...

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