This is a re-release of Episode 95, which was recorded in September 2023. Paul Bloom joins Yoel and Alexa to talk about what they've learned about teaching. They swap stories, discuss goals, and speculate about whether they've gotten better or worse over time. This is a re-release of Episode 95, which was recorded in September 2023.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Paul Bloom takes over the show to interview Yoel about loss of faith: when to give up on a theory, and which of his own findings he no longer believes.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel is joined by a mysterious pseudonymous due called Slime Mold Time Mold, who are proposing a new paradigm for psychology. Using principles from cybernetics, can we explain emotion, motivation, personality, mental illness, and more?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Returning guest Spencer Greenberg joins the show to talk replications, what psychologist think of terror management theory (and other controversial topics), and a machine-learning tool he developed to predict correlations between psychological traits and survey questions.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
It's been a tumultuous time for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts in higher education. Whether due to political pressure, internal dissension, or both, many prominent institutions are revamping or even eliminating their DEI offices and rethinking DEI policies that once seemed unquestionable. Amori Mikami from the University of British Columbia re-joins the show to talk about the changes, what she thinks universities ought to be doing, and what she thinks we they can do better.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Moral psychologist David Pizarro joins the show to talk about "purity." When moral psychologists ask people about their judgments of sex with chickens, smearing yourself with cat feces, and sibling incest, what are we learning? Is it possible that "purity" isn't a coherent concept at all, or is there an underlying method to the madness?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
On-again off-again co-host Mickey Inzlicht joins the show to debrief about the recent SPSP conference, dissect a new paper purporting to show working memory deficits in heavy cannabis users, and evaluate some critiques of AI empathy.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Cultural psychologist and open science advocate Moin Syed joins the show to talk what he thinks people get wrong about ideology, diversity, and open science. We talk about what role, if any, researchers' ideology should play in their science, and what it means when people describe psychological research as "ideological." In the second half of the show, we talk about what people get wrong about preregistration, and why it seems some misconceptions just won't die.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Occasional co-host Mickey Inzlicht joins the show to talk about the 2024 election, Bluesky, and his crusade against yard signs.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Paul Bloom joins the show to talk about a recent paper in which he argues that much of developmental psychology is not worth doing.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Researcher and writer Adam Mastroianni joins the podcast to talk about why he left academia, what conventional scientific research might be missing, and how he ended up writing a succesful science blog instead of more journal articles.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
ADHD expert Amori Mikami joins the show to talk attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). What is it, how has our understanding of it changed over the years, and how accurate is the public discourse about it?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey joins Yoel for the first new episode in nearly a year. We talk what's been up with the show, plans for the future, and what it feels like to briefly be (almost) internet-famous. Oh, and we also talk about some research.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa is joined by Jennifer Gutsell to discuss the controversy surrounding Yoel's visit to UCLA. They critique the use of anti-DEI rhetoric in these conversations, and ask if psychology is in denial about the progress we've made.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa discuss the first of a series of four Data Colada blog posts documenting evidence of fraud in studies conducted by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. They consider the implications for co-authors, those who did the investigative work, and the field as a whole.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa discuss a recent paper that aims to estimate the replicability of psychology as a discipline by analyzing the words used to describe studies. After a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the methodology they discuss the factors that make for the most (and least) replicable science.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Paul Bloom joins Alexa and Yoel to talk about his new book. Their conversation touches on teaching, writing, the chutzpah required to think one can take on the task of summarizing a field, and the meaning of penis-shaped dream hats.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa are joined by Andrew Devendorf, who shares his work on the stigmatization of "me-search" (or self-relevant research) within the field of clinical psychology. They discuss ways that this stigma impacts clinical graduate students, and consider the strengths of doing research that is rooted in personal experience.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel explore how non-psychologists understand implicit bias and its most common measurement tool, the implicit association test (IAT). As their starting point, they discuss a paper, authored by Jeffrey Yen and colleagues, that tackles this question via the New York Times comments section.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel weigh in on recent debates about whether psychological researchers can get good data online. They consider criticisms and defenses of online participant-recruitment platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and throw a bit of their own experience into the mix.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Spencer Greenberg - founder of the behavioral science startup incubator Spark Wave and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast - joins Yoel and Alexa to provide an alternative perspective on open science and to reveal an exciting new project.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Who gets into grad school? Alexa and Yoel discuss the mechanics of the graduate admissions process, consider what they would change, and revisit the merits of the GRE.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
In a recent paper, authors Hughes, Srivastava, Leszko, and Condon asked participants rank over 1,000 jobs on their level of "prestige." We discuss this work, its implications, and what it reveals about the human traits we value.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Paul Bloom joins Yoel and Alexa to talk about what they've learned about teaching. They swap stories, discuss goals, and speculate about whether they've gotten better or worse over time.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel consider what it means to live in an individualistic society, and the various possible ways of depending on others. They also reflect on their own degree of individualism, and consider whether they'd prefer to depend on others (and be depended on) more. But first, Yoel explains his beef with student loan forgiveness.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa are joined by Stefan Uddenberg, who sheds new light on the past episode "A Face for Podcasting." Stefan, an author on the paper "Deep Models of Superficial Face Judgments," gives an insider's take on why the paper became controversial, how the response impacted him, and why he does the work that he does.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel are joined by Jennifer Cox and Lauren Kois, co-directors of the Southern Behavioral Health and Law Initiative. They discuss ways that those with mental illness face unique challenges within the legal system, and explain how their work pushes for a shift away from criminalization and towards more comprehensive mental health support.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel chat with Twitter pollster and freelance social scientist Aella. Their conversation raises some deep and perplexing questions: What experiences predict interest in BDSM? How do you know if you're truly open to being wrong? And are there some questions that shouldn't be asked?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey returns to join Alexa and Yoel in a discussion of the evils of social media (or lack thereof). The three cohosts dissect two articles - one by Haidt and another by Orben and Przybylski - in an effort to decide whether social media poses a serious threat to our well-being.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss what they've learned from Many Labs 1 through 5. They consider how these multi-lab replication projects have demonstrated, time and time again, the value of replication to the scientific enterprise.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
"Nudging" has received attention as a way to achieve broad societal change by promoting small, individual adjustments, like recycling, or counting our steps. Yoel and Alexa consider Chater and Loewenstein's claim that nudging fails by distracting us from more fruitful system-level change.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa discuss a study that examines how people infer traits from facial features. They consider various criticisms of the work, and evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the risks.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss an NPR article and APA report examining stress and decision-making during the pandemic. In the process, they consider how the original data is eventually shaped into a pop-psych-friendly narrative.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel debate whether or not science should be value free. They consider whether such a scenario would be possible or desirable, and how well it describes contemporary social psychology| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa respond to an APS survey identifying the "grand challenges" of psychological science. They consider whether they agree with the list - which includes diversity, theory building, and science communication - and how likely psychology is to make progress.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
We each list the top three social psychological effects that have the most potential to improve people's daily lives. And, we consider why they might not be having the impact they could.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss a recent article, solo-authored by Alexa, that argues for abandoning retribution as a goal of the criminal justice system. In the article, Alexa claims that "who is blameworthy?" is a question for the social sciences, but one they're ill-equipped to answer.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Personality psychologist and methodologist Julia Rohrer joins the show to talk about causal claims, strategic ambiguity, and how tough it is to tell what empirical claims many psychology papers are making.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel talk authenticity. What is it? Is it good to have it? And why does Alexa score higher on it than Yoel? Plus, Alexa drinks some listener-supplied beer, with favorable results.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel do a deep dive into Paul Meehl's paper on theory evaluation, "Appraising and Amending Theories: The Strategy of Lakatosian Defense and Two Principles that Warrant It." It's a classic of methodology and philosophy of science, but what can it tell us about how to do better research?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel tackle Paul Feyerabend, the wild man of philosophy of science. What can we learn from his provocative "anything goes" argument for methodological anarchy? And, more generally, what can working scientists learn from philosophers of science?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel talk about objections to preregistration. Does preregistration imply that researchers can't be trusted? Does it mean that they can't use their best judgment? When might preregistration be unhelpful? We also discuss how preregistration would have helped in a recent paper testing Cardi B's maxim that "hoes don't get cold."| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel talk about a paper purporting to show that winning the Nobel Prize increases your lifespan. In the process, they dip their toes into non-experimental causal inference.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Paul Bloom joins us to talk about why we want to suffer. Sometimes it's a means to an end, but sometimes we desire it for its own sake. Plus, a very special extra guest host.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa are joined by Joe Simmons to talk about fraud in behavioral science. How common is it, how do you detect it, and what can we do to prevent it?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
The story of how a graduate student climate survey at the University of Alabama led to a very contentious year.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss a new paper arguing that psychological richness is an overlooked aspect of the good life (well, overlooked by well-being researchers, anyway). Also, Alexa reviews an (accidentally-purchased) alcohol-free beer.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss "The Anticreativity Letters," a satirical article by Richard Nisbett that advises young psychology researchers to (among other things) avoid being overly critical. How does that advice hold up today? How does one combine appropriate skepticism with enthusiasm for research? Or are the two in conflict at all?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa discuss progress in open science over the past 10 years. Is the scientific reform glass half-full or half-empty? Where have we made progress, and what still needs work? Also, the true story of how Ashley Madison got its name.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Journalist and podcaster Jesse Singal joins the show to talk about the enduring popularity of social-psychological quick fixes and how they go wrong.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Neuroscientist and addiction researcher Carl Hart joins the show to talk drug legalization. Why does he think all drugs should be legal? What are some common myths about drug use and addiction? And how has his personal experience as a regular drug user influenced his views?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Lee Jussim joins the show to talk academic problems, including ideological bias, politically-motivated retractions, and more. Plus: is Lee bad at Twitter?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel follow up on two recent episodes ("Against Academia?" and "Racism and Sexism on Campus"). Then they review some of the less-bad aspects of 2020 and recommend some things that got them through a challenging year.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Psychologist Katie Kinzler joins the show to talk language. How do children and adults make judgments about people based on how they talk? Is there a "bilingual advantage"? And does Mickey sound Canadian?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Repeat guest Anne Wilson joins the show to talk about two recent papers about bias in psychology and on campus. Are gender and racial bias pervasive? Or are things better than many of us might think?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Psychologist Michael McCullough joins the show to talk forgiveness, punishment, and altruism towards strangers.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Psychologist and author Maria Konnikova joins the show to talk poker, life, and what one teaches you about the other.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey host Harvard University polymath Joe Henrich on the podcast to talk about his new book on why the west has become so prosperous, the secret of human's success, and the cognitive science of religion.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome Neil Lewis, Jr. to the podcast to talk about interventions, field research, stereotype threat, and open science.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey discuss the problems with orthodoxy and punishment of dissenting views in a fraught political climate.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey celebrate their 50th episode by welcoming Claudia Haase to the podcast to discuss relationships, life in East Germany before the fall of the Wall, admitting to mistakes, and the upside of failure.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome philosopher Evan Thompson to the show to talk about Buddhism, the self. embodied cognition, phenomenology, evolutionary psychology, and growing up on a commune.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome B-school professor Rachel Ruttan to the show to discuss life in a business school, differences between psychology and organizational behavior, and her research on sacred valued and radicalization.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome back returning guest Keith Maddox to talk about racism, shadeism, confronting prejudice, the perils of implicit bias training, and check-ins from White friends.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey grudgingly host their rivals from Very Bad Wizards, Tamler Sommers and David Pizarro, to talk shit about psychology, philosophy, and the Intellectual Dark Web.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Scott Barry Kaufman joins the show to talk about intelligence, humanistic psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and transcendence.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey discuss how their lives have have been impacted by the global pandemic and then ask what role psychology should play, if any, in informing the public discussion about COVID-19.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Nina Strohminger joins the show to talk about disgust, morality, the true self, death, academia, humor, and errant flatuses.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Joshua Tybur joins the show to discuss COVID-19, pathogen avoidance, disgust, measurement, evolutionary psychology, and baldness.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Elizabeth Page-Gould joins the podcast again to talk about motherhood, fatherhood, and people who choose to remain childless.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
In a grab bag episode, Yoel and Mickey talk movies, politics, replicator degrees of freedom, and effect sizes.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome Stanford sociologist and psychologist Robb Willer to the show, who serves up hot takes about the low replicability area in social psychology.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey discuss a new paper by Tal Yarkoni suggesting that quantitative research in psychology is suffering from a generalizability crisis. Before that, they discuss Contrapoints's new video on cancel-culture.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel declare war on Christmas, discuss US-Canada differences, and almost entirely avoid serious topics.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel chat with Nick Hobson, a psychologist who has moved from academia to applying behavioral science in the real world.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Are many classic social psychology experiments more theater than science? Mickey and Yoel discuss "The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology," a book by the sociologist Augustine Brannigan that makes this provocative claim.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel take advantage of the SESP (Society for Experimental Social Psychology) conference to ask guests some hard-hitting questions about the present and future of social psychology (and, of course, beers). We then answer the same questions ourselves.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel talk with Debra Mashek, the executive director of Heterodox Academy, an organization working to increase open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in academia. But what does that mean exactly? We talk to Debra to find out.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Jessica Flake joins Mickey and Yoel to talk measurement. What is it, how do you do it well, and do social psychologists care about it? What does measurement theory tell us about the validity of standardized tests like the GRE? Jessica also talks about how she went from high-school dropout to professor at McGill.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel quizzes Mickey about ego depletion. How did we start studying it? How has the replication crisis changed how we think about it? After more than a decade studying ego depletion, does Mickey still have any faith in the phenomenon?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey discuss the role of eminence in science. Is there a role for eminence in psychology? What makes a researcher eminent? Would we be better off doing away with eminence entirely?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey discuss sacred valued. What are the hallmarks of values that have become sacrilized? Do scientists who attended conferences sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein need to morally cleanse?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome Alexa Tullett from the University of Alabama to the podcast. Co-host of The Black Goat podcast and board member of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), Alexa talks about early career research, work-life balance, and starting the OG psychology podcast.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome returning guest Paul Bloom to the podcast to dispense terrible advice. We first talk about parenting—its impact on happiness and meaning, its transformation of the person; and then discuss perversity, including the enjoyment of doing transgressive things for no good reason.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey welcome social and political psychologist John Jost from New York University to the podcast. In a conversation centered on politics, John talks about the psychological underpinning of conservativism and why he’s not worried about the lack of conservatives in academia.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey take a deep dive into the Democratic primary field, asking what the field of judgment and decision making can teach us about the large and diverse field of Democratic candidates.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss a recent article that rejects the idea that political beliefs stem from people’s core values. Instead, the authors argue that these beliefs arise primarily from attempts to forge and maintain affiliations.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa are joined by Andrew Devendorf, who shares his work on the stigmatization of "me-search" (or self-relevant research) within the field of clinical psychology. They discuss ways that this stigma impacts clinical graduate students, and consider the strengths of doing research that is rooted in personal experience.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey push back against the hype to mount an argument against mindfulness meditation.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Alexa are joined by Joe Simmons to talk about fraud in behavioral science. How common is it, how do you detect it, and what can we do to prevent it?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Robb Willer and Simine Vazire join the podcast to debate whether social science, in its current state, can usefully contribute to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel tackle the most dreaded subject: getting older. Have they become better researchers and people over the years? Are they happier and more connected? Or are they just more forgetful and less good at stats?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel go deep on self-care. What is it, how do you do it, and why does the term raise Yoel's hackles? How hard do we actually work, and should we be trying to work less?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel welcome repeat guest Ted Slingerland to talk about his new book "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization," in which he makes the case for alcohol.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey, Alexa, and Yoel break down "Breaking the Social Media Prism," a new book arguing that social media reinforces our pre-existing political beliefs and polarizes us against the other side.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Psychologist Gordon Pennycook joins the show to talk bullshit and misinformation. What is bullshit, and why do some people fall for it more than others? Why does misinformation spread so readily, and what can be done to stop it?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Mickey and Yoel tackle the pros and cons of academia. As an academic, is it taboo to say you love your job? How hard do we work anyway? If we ran the world, how would we change academic hiring?| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and special guest Rachel Hartman discuss the recent ouster of Klaus Fiedler, the former Editor in Chief of the journal "Perspectives on Psychological Science," over allegations of racism and abuse of power.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Yoel and Mickey push back against the hype to mount an argument against mindfulness meditation.| Two Psychologists Four Beers
Alexa and Yoel discuss the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's (SPSP's) recent efforts to organize a more anti-racist and politically engaged conference. The co-hosts consider the debate around boycotting Georgia, as well as SPSP's new evaluation criteria that reward equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in submissions.| Two Psychologists Four Beers