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 been recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world’s most influential in management thinking.

In this episode, they discuss Katy’s influential work designing “megastudies” to generate new insights about behavior change, as well as lessons from her bestselling book, How to Change. Katy also shares her perspective on translating scientific findings for a broad audience and the vital role of mentorship in academia.

If you found this episode interesting, subscribe to our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second, but it will allow us to reach more people and excite them about psychology.

Links:
Katy's book: How to Change
Katy's Website: Link
Choiceology Podcast: Link
Behavior Change for Good Initiative: Link

Misha’s website: Link

Podcast Twitter: @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Bluesky: @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social
Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you think of this episode or the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

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 social intelligence.

In this episode, we discuss his recent paper, "Tracking minds in communication," which challenges the classical view of language and social reasoning as separate systems. They explore how our brains constantly run social "micro-processes" in real-time to track other minds, a fundamental ability that guides our communication. They also dive into Julian's academic journey, his vision for the future of computational social cognition, and how he successfully navigates the interdisciplinary landscape of cognitive science.

If you found this episode interesting, subscribe to our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second, but it will allow us to reach more people and excite them about psychology.

Links:

Julian's paper "Tracking minds in communication": https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(24)00312-7

Julian's Lab Website: https://compdevlab.yale.edu/

Julian's Faculty Page: https://psychology.yale.edu/people/julian-jara-ettinger

Misha's website: https://www.mishaokeeffe.com/

Podcast Twitter: @StanfordPsyPod Podcast Bluesky: @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you think of this episode or the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

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 people online to play a game where they aimed to reconstruct various block towers and analyzed the types of mistakes they made, as well as how they got better at the game over time. Insights from experiments like these may help reveal the cognitive principles that govern how people "reverse-engineer" how things are made — from how an unfamiliar dish was prepared to how a song was composed.

You can learn more about this project by visiting this site: https://github.com/cogtoolslab/block_construction and read their paper here: https://cogtoolslab.github.io/pdf/mccarthy_cogsci_2020.pdf

To learn more about Judy Fan's research, check out her lab's website: https://cogtoolslab.github.io/.

You can also follow her on Twitter (@judyefan).