YANSS 185 – Why the reason some people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic has little to do with the masks themselves

In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we sit down with four experts on human behavior to try and understand how wearing masks, during the COVID-19 pandemic, became politicized. In the show, we take a take a deep dive into tribal psychology, which, in essence, says that humans are motivated reasoners who alter their thinking, feeling,...

Aug 2020

YANSS 184 – How to improve your relationships by systematically de-biasing your brain

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral economist and disaster avoidance expert who works with businesses and organizations to help them de-bias themselves. In the show, we will go through a few of the most-common cognitive biases and learn how to de-bias ourselves within our personal lives to improve relationships and our...

Jul 2020

YANSS 183 – A roundtable discussion of Black Lives Matter with the members of the Association of Black Psychologists

This episode is a roundtable discussion with members of the Association of Black Psychologists exploring Black Lives Matter and the related social movements related place right now in The United States at the time of this recording Dr. Marva Robinson Dr. Marva Robinson, is the Midwestern regional representative for the Association...

Jul 2020

YANSS 182 – Why we find A/B testing icky when it comes to policies, practices, medicine, and social media

In 1835, at a tavern in Bavaria, a group of 120 people once met to drink from a randomized assortment of glass vials. Before shuffling them, they divided the vials into two sets. One contained distilled water from a recent snowfall and the other a solution made by collecting 100 drops of that water and dropping into the pool a grain of salt,...

Jul 2020

YANSS 181 – The psychology behind why people defend the norms they secretly despise

Have you ever been in a classroom or a business meeting or a conference  and had a question or been confused by the presentation, and when the person running the show asked, “Does anyone have any questions?” or, “Does anyone not understand?” or, “Is anyone confused?” you looked around, saw no one else raising their hands, and then chose to pass on the...

Jul 2020

YANSS 180 – How too much efficiency coupled with too little slack can cause complex systems to fail and why we ran out of toilet paper because of it

In this episode we sit down with Chris Clearfield, author of Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It. He says about his book, “By understanding what lies behind these failures, we can design better systems, make our teams more productive, and transform how we make decisions at work and at home.” Chris is the founder of System...

May 2020

YANSS 179 – How a psychologist convinced 70 percent of subjects they were guilty of a crime they didn’t commit, and other stories about the fallibility of memory

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Shaw, the author of The Memory Illusion. Julia is famous among psychologists because she was able to implant false memories into a group of subjects and convince 70 percent of them that they were guilty of a crime they did not commit, and she did so by using the sort of sloppy interrogation techniques that some...

May 2020

YANSS 178 – Why conspiratorial thinking has gone mainstream, why facts don’t always persuade people, and other lessons we can learn from those of us who are pretty sure the Earth is flat

In this episode we sit down with the director and producers of the documentary film, Behind the Curve, an exploration of motivated reasoning and conspiratorial thinking told through the lives of people who have formed a community around the belief that the Earth is flat. Also in this episode, we spend time with political scientist Joseph E. Uscinski...

Apr 2020

YANSS 177 – Why people waited so long to take precautions against COVID-19, how to better persuade those who still refuse, and how to take bettercare of your mental health during isolation

Flatten the curve. That idea has spread through the population faster than COVID-19 ever could. That’s the power of culture, of human psychology, of brains interacting with brains. Of course, culture and human psychology and brains interacting with brains are also how the virus spread to begin to with, and that is what this show is about — the psychology...

Apr 2020

YANSS 176 – How a divisive photograph of a perceptually ambiguous dress led two researchers to build the nuclear bomb of cognitive science out of socks and Crocs – Part Two

When facing a novel and uncertain situation, the brain secretly disambiguates the ambiguous without letting you know it was ever uncertain in the first place, leading people who disambiguate differently to seem iNsAnE. This episode is about the science behind The Dress, why some people see it as black and blue, and others see it as white and gold....

Mar 2020