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Welcome to The Psychology Podcast with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. Each episode will feature a guest who will stimulate your mind, and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully, we’ll also provide a glimpse into human possibility! Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.

Apr 4, 2019

Today it’s a pleasure to have Molly Crockett on the podcast. Dr. Crockett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Prior to joining Yale, Dr Crockett was a faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology and a Fellow of Jesus College. She holds a BSc in Neuroscience from UCLA and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zürich and University College London.

In this episode we discuss:

  • The discrepancy between outrage in real life vs. online outrage
  • Cultural evolution and the selection and amplification of online content
  • How basic reinforcement learning principles drive the design of online systems to maximize the amount of time we spend on the platforms
  • Is the “habitual online shamer” addicted to outrage?
  • Habitual behavior vs. addiction
  • Is “outrage fatigue” happening en masse?
  • Should we be thinking about rationing our outrage (reserving it for issues we find most important)?
  • The costs and benefits of outrage
  • Why people punish and the discrepancy between the actual reasons why we punish (inferred from behavior) vs. self-reported motives
  • The difficulty doing science on topics that are incredibly heated in public social discourse
  • The intractably intertwined nature of science and social justice
  • What technologies might be doing to the way that young people construe the social world
  • The human capacity for forgiveness
  • Twitter Q & A