As a practical matter, how much effort do you put into pinning down the causes behind daily occurrences? To developmental psychologist Frank Keil, who studies causal thinking, that answer is likely along the lines of 'not enough.' A lack of causal thinking is both endemic, and, to an extent, hurtful these days, he argues, suggesting that lacking even simplified causal models makes things like the black box of artificial intelligence a potential problem.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Keil, the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Yale University, outlines for interviewer David Edmonds how causal thinking is a skill we seem to have at an early age, but which diminishes as we grow up. "[K]ids, by the time they approach elementary school, are asking up to 200 'why' and 'how' questions a day," he explains. "Within a year or two up to starting school, they're down to two or three, often none."

Furthermore, Keil sees this diminishment continuing in society today – and this comes as a cost. "I think it's making kids today be pushed more towards surface understanding, being user interface understanders. I think it makes influences more influential. To just say 'This is cool' as opposed to 'This is how it works.' One of the negative consequences is that we can get fooled by misinformation more; one of the best ways to debunk an expert is to ask them to explain the mechanism."

At Yale, Keil directs the Cognition and Development lab. He has written several books, from academe-oriented books like Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior, to more general reader titles like Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science. His awards include the Boyd R. McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association (Developmental Psychology), the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research.

Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener for the young cultural anthropologist Setha Low. "I thought it was so cool that everybody was there together," she tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. "… Everybody was talking. Everybody knew their place. It was like a complete little world, a microcosm of Costa Rican society, and I hadn't seen anything like that in suburban Los Angeles."

That epiphany set Low, now a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, onto a journey filled with the exploration of public spaces and a desire to explain them to the rest of the world. This trek has resulted in more than a hundred scholarly articles and a number of books, most recently Why Public Space Matters but including 2006's Politics of Public Space with Neil Smith; 2005's Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity with S. Scheld and D. Taplin; 2004's Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America; 2003's The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture with D. Lawrence-Zuniga; and 2000's On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.

Low is also director of the Graduate Center's Public Space Research Group, and has received a Getty Fellowship, a fellow in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States.

She was president of the American Anthropological Association (from 2007 to 2009) and has worked on public space research in projects for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and was cochair of the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity's Public Space and Diversity Network.

As an anthropologist, Victor Buchli has one foot in the Neolithic past and another in the space-faring future. A professor of material culture at University College London, his research has taken him from excavations of the New Stone Age site at Çatalhöyük, Turkey to studies of the modern suburbs of London to examinations of life on -- and in service to -- the International Space Station.

It is in that later role, as principal investigator for a European Research Council-funded research project on the "Ethnography of an Extraterrestrial Society," that he visits the Social Science Bites podcast. He details for interviewer David Edmonds some of the things his team has learned from studying the teams -- both in space but more so those on Earth -- supporting the International Space Station.

Buchli describes, for example, the "overview effect." The occurs when which people seeing the Earth without the dotted lines and map coordinates that usually color their perceptions. "When you look down," he explains, "you don't see borders, you just see the earth in its totality, in a sense that produces a new kind of universalism."

He also reviews his own work on material culture, specifically examining how microgravity affects the creation of things. "It is the case within the social sciences, and particularly within anthropology, that gravity is just assumed. And so here we have an environment where suddenly this one single factor that controls absolutely everything that we do as humans on Earth is basically factored out. So how does that change our understanding of these human activities, these sorts of human institutions?"

Buchli has written extensively on material culture, serving as managing editor of the Journal of Material Culture, founding and managing editor of Home Cultures, and editor of 2002's The Material Culture Reader and the five-volume Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. Other books he's written include 1995's Interpreting Archaeology, 1999's An Archaeology of Socialism, and 2001's Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past.