It's Monday, December 31st, 2018, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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2018 has been a difficult year for a lot of people, especially in the U.S., but across the world.

And as we put this year to bed, I thought it might be a good opportunity for us to check our own privilege, and to make sure that we are aware of all of the biases that we harbor and maybe leave them in 2018 instead of taking them with us in 2019. Well, you might think, I don't have any biases. And that, my friends, means that you

haven't listened to a previous episode of ours, in which I interviewed a good friend of mine

and colleague, David Amodio. He's an associate professor at NYU in psychology and

neural science, and his social neuroscience lab is all about understanding the neural basis of prejudice.

We all like to think that we make completely rational decisions. But if you're a long time

listener of the show, you'll know that time and time again we are faced with the fact that many of our decisions come from emotional places, not rational ones.

And one of the things our brains are really good at is recognizing patterns.

That means that we also can to categorize people, finding patterns that maybe aren't as ingrained as we assume them to be.

And when we make these categorizations,

we stereotype people, and of course that can have negative consequences. But lucky for us,

we also evolved a prefrontal cortex. So even though we might have a tendency towards making

decisions that are based on how we feel, we have a checkpoint that allows us to change

the decisions based on how we think. So let's take a short break and we'll be back with my

interview with Dave Amodeo. Welcome to Inquiring Minds, David Amodeo. Hi, thanks for having me on.

It's great to have you on the show. And just for full disclosure to our listeners, Dave and I are old

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