Stanford Psychology Podcast

Adani chats with Dr. Susan Engel, a Senior Lecturer and Senior Faculty Fellow in Psychology at Williams College. Susan’s research spans many areas, including the development of curiosity and invention, children’s ideas, the impact of college, and school reform. In this conversation, we discuss Susan’s seminal research on children's curiosity, how curiosity develops into adulthood, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of...

Su chats with Dr. Roger Levy. Dr. Levy is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. His work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, combining computational modeling, psych...

In today’s episode, Adani chats with Adam Benforado, a lawyer, writer, and professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law. Adam’s research, teaching, and advocacy are focused on children’s rights and criminal justice, and he brings insights from the mind sciences—most notably cognitive psychology—to law and legal theory. In this conversation, Adam tells us about his latest book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benef...

Su chats with Dr. Yuan Chang (YC) Leong. YC is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Lab, which is a part of the Department of Psychology, a member of the Institute of Mind and Biology and the Neuroscience Institute, and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute. His research explores the neural and computational mechanisms underlyin...

Su chats with Dr. Jennifer Hu. Jenn is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, directing the Group for Language and Intelligence. Her research examines the computational principles that underlie human language, and how language and cognition might be achieved by artificial models. In her work to answer these questions, she combines cognitive science and machine learning, with th...

Elizabeth chats with Dr. Dawn Finzi, a Machine Learning engineer on the Perception team at Zoox, and a recent alumni of our very own Stanford’s Department of Psychology, as a part of our new Psychologist in the Wild series. During her PhD, Dawn studied the functional organization of the human visual system, focusing on both the structural underpinnings and the overarching computational goals. In this episode, Dawn shares her scient...

Jane chats with Dr. David Almeida, a  Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He is the Principal Investigator of the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), the largest longitudinal diary study of daily experiences and health in the United States. Dr. Almeida’s work examines how daily experiences of stress are associated with health and well-being. 

In this episode, Jane and Dr. Almeida discuss the ways...

In this episode, Su chats with Diyi Yang, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, affiliated with the Stanford NLP Group, Stanford Human Computer Interaction Group, Stanford AI Lab, and Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is also leading the Social and Language Technologies Lab, where they study Socially Aware Natural Language Processing. Her research goal is to better unde...

This week, Misha chats with Katy Milkman, the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, her research explores how insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed to change consequential behaviors for good. Her work, published in journals like Nature and PNAS, has...

This week, Misha chats with Julian Jara-Ettinger, Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Yale University. Julian directs the Computational Social Cognition Lab, which aims to reveal the fundamental representations and computations that make complex human social behavior possible. His work combines computational modeling, developmental studies, and cross-cultural research to build a blueprint for more human-like s...

In this re-air episode from summer 2021 (one of our first!), Anjie chats with Judy Fan, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Judy’s research is at the intersection of computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. In this episode, she discusses a new line of research in her lab exploring how people learn about objects by trying to build them from scratch. She and her team recruited ...

This week, Enna chats with Dr. Mike North, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, at NYU Stern School of Business and founding director of the AGE Initiative. 

Mike’s research focuses on the challenges and opportunities of today’s multigenerational workforce. His work has shaped public conversations on aging and has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, TIME, a...

Bella chats with professor Laura Schulz.

Laura is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT. She is also the director and principal investigator of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab. Laura’s research focuses on understanding the infrastructure of human cognition and how it’s constructed during early childhood. For example, Laura and her lab study children’s causal reasoning, social cogni...

This week, Misha chats with Robert Hawkins, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Robert directs the Social Interaction Lab where he studies the cognitive mechanisms that enable human communication and collaboration. His interdisciplinary work combines interactive experiments with computational models to uncover how people flexibly coordinate with one another.

In this episode, we discuss his recent paper on comm...

In this episode, Elizabeth chats with Dr. Kendrick Kay, an Associate Professor in Radiology at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He directs the Computational Visual Neuroscience Laboratory, and aims to understand brain function by combining cognitive neuroscience, functional MRI methods, and computational neuroscience. In this episode, Kendrick shares his work on the groundbreaking Natural Scene Dataset and discusses the behind...

This week, Enna chats with Dr. Jenna Wells, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. Jenna’s research examines how emotion in close relationships contributes to mental and physical health over the life course, with a focus on late life. She is particularly interested in positive interpersonal processes and their associations with long-term health and well-being in individuals and dyads.

In our conversation,...

Anjie chats with Dr. Dorsa Amir, an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. She directs the Mind and Culture Lab, where she studies how culture shapes the developing mind. In this episode, Dorsa shares her papers that probe the many ways cultural environments can influence cognitive processes. She outlines a new framework proposing four possible “pathways” by which culture might (or might not) shape c...

Eric chats with 2024 Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Stanford Professor Jay McClelland, two pioneers who have spent nearly half a century laying the groundwork for modern-day AI, advancing research on neural networks long before it captured the world's imagination.

In fact, their early work faced significant skepticism from the scientific community - an experience they candidly discuss in this episode. This wide-ranging conv...

This week, Misha chats with Dr. Alex Shaw, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago's Department of Psychology. His research explores how children and adults navigate the complex world of social behavior, with a particular focus on morality, fairness, and social judgments.

In this episode, Dr. Shaw discusses his fascinating research on why attempts to stay neutral in moral and political disagreements can sometimes backf...