Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Kim Mills. Speaking of psychology is a podcast for anyone with an interest in the science of psychology.

We talk to psychological researchers, practitioners, and educators about any and every aspect of psychology and its application

to the world around us. Dr. Alex Pentland, also known as Sandy, is a professor of media arts and

sciences at MIT, where he directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics Labs. He is one of

the most cited scientists in the world.

And Forbes magazine recently named him one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world.

Dr. Pentland's research focuses on social physics, big data, and privacy.

His research helps people better understand the physics of their social environment and helps individual companies and privacy. His research helps people better understand the physics of their social environment

and helps individual companies and communities and people to reinvent themselves to be safer,

more productive, and more creative. Thank you for speaking with APA today. My pleasure. So let's start

with a definition.

Social physics, what do you mean by that?

Well, social physics is a word or phrase that's two centuries old.

In the beginning of the 1800s, alchemy turned into chemistry and an attempt to clean up its act,

and natural science turned into physics. And there was this dream of doing something similar with understanding culture.

And in France in particular, there was the idea of using data and statistics

to really understand the progression of culture.

And that spread to England very early on. And it's why we have the modern census, which asks all sorts of questions.

But until just recently it's been very difficult to do very much because it's been very expensive to get data.

You had to have surveys and so forth.

And statistics were really not that powerful. In the last

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