Category Archives: Psychology

The MWS Podcast 80: Steven Heine on the Weirdest People in the World

Culture, Psychology, , ,

Our guest today is Steven Heine, a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and a leader in the field of cultural psychology. In 2010, he, along with his colleagues Joseph Henrich and Ara Norenzayan wrote the ground-breaking paper ‘The WEIRDest’ people in the world?’ with WEIRD meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. The paper suggests that the view we have of the mind derived from the research of behavioural scientists is distorted due to the majority of studies in this field being done on only a small and not particularly representative sector of the human population. This will be the topic of our conversation today.

Also for anyone interested, here’s the link to the paper The Weirdest People in the World and the paper Steve mentioned near the end of the talk by Adam Galinsky and Will Maddux on The Relationship between Living Abroad and Creativity


MWS Podcast 80: Steven Heine as audio only:
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The MWS Podcast 78: Marc Lewis on why addiction is not a disease

Brain, Psychology, Science,

Our guest today is Dr Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist and currently a professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. For many years his work centred on dynamic systems approaches to understanding the development of emotions and personality but recently he has perhaps become most well known for his account of his own personal experience of drug addiction Memoirs of Addicted Brain and merging that with the neuroscience of addiction. In his latest book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease he argues that seeing addiction as a disease is not only incorrect but also harmful and this will be the topic of our discussion today


MWS Podcast 78: Marc Lewis as audio only:
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The MWS Podcast 76: David Mcraney on how to beat your brain

Brain, Psychology,

Our guest today is David Mcraney, an internationally bestselling author, journalist, and lecturer who created the You Are Not So Smart blog, books, and podcast. David, who lives in Mississippi, cut his teeth covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and across the Deep South. Since then, he has been a beat reporter, editor, photographer, voiceover artist and television host. Before that, he had a varied working life, waiting tables, working construction, selling leather coats, building and installing electrical control panels, and owning pet stores. He’s here to talk to us today about his latest book ‘How to Beat your Brain’, an attempt to help us overcome our quirks and make decisions more effectively.


MWS Podcast 76: David Mcraney as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_76_David_Mcraney

If you’d like to listen to the full unedited version of the talk in which we go into the Middle Way in a bit more depth and talk a bit more about David’s hopes for the book, you can do so here:

MWS Podcast 76: David Mcraney full version as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_76_David_Mcraney_full_version

Here’s also the link to David’s blog post on Brand Loyalty that we talked about

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