Fluent Psych

What findings and concepts in neuroscience and psychology help us better understand our friends and neighbors? Our families and ourselves? Our partisan politics and weakening social bonds?

Fluent NeuroPsych invites experts to convey the most insightful and relevant knowledge in these fields to a general audience of readers, listeners and viewers like you. Far from abstractions, concepts like “social identity and “motivated reasoning” help us process differing viewpoints while communicating our own views more effectively. After all, objectively speaking, we’re all so very subjective.

Featured

No posts

No posts

posts

podcasts

Holiday Survival Kit (Part 3)

Identity With All The Trimmings Celebration & Polarization: Part 3 Can a German town be socially divided by sneakers? Or the Canadian landmass united by a beer commercial? And is US individualism more a group identity than its ardently individualistic citizens would ever admit?  Read More Tune in to the third and final episode in…
Read More Holiday Survival Kit (Part 3)

Holiday Survival Kit (Part 2)

When Anti-Science Makes The Menu Celebration & Polarization: Part 2 It’s tempting to think of anti-science sentiments, such as the current pushback against COVID vaccination, as the disparate sum of misinformed individuals. But Lee McIntyre, author of the recent book How to Talk To A Science Denier has found otherwise.  “All science denial is really…
Read More Holiday Survival Kit (Part 2)

Holiday Survival Kit (Part 1)

Deflating Political Football Celebration & Polarization: Part 1 Are we Americans trapped in our end zones of polarized bubbles ever more motivated to reason away conflicting information or viewpoints? Our featured guest, psychologist Tania Israel, thinks not and she should know. Dr. Israel has been holding workshops over the past two-plus decades to help participants…
Read More Holiday Survival Kit (Part 1)

Nicest Troll in Town

Nicest Troll in Town On- and Offline identity, Extremism, and Polarization Social media is not fundamentally a source of information or a competition of ideas, but a competition of identities.  With that and other provocative findings, Dr. Chris Bail, Director of the Duke University Polarization Lab and author of Breaking the Social Media Prism (Princeton…
Read More Nicest Troll in Town

Embrace Complexity To Overcome Polarization

Embrace Complexity To Overcome Polarization Discussing a Way Out with Dr. Peter Coleman of The Difficult Conversations Lab Police reform, gun violence, global warming… When did you last have a civil, informative, productive conversation with someone of differing opinions on any of these hugely important but instantly polarizing topics? In the current U.S. political climate,…
Read More Embrace Complexity To Overcome Polarization

Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults

Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults Part 2: Celebrity Makes The World Go Flat Do we live in an age where online conspiracies and cults proliferate ever more frequently and powerfully? We continue to explore this question, focusing this episode on the tremendous growth of the flat earth movement in “Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults, Part…
Read More Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults

The Brain on Partisan Politics

The Brain on Partisan Politics  Why Not So Great Minds Polarize Alike with NYU Scientist, Dr. Jay Van Bavel  Let’s say, for the sake of Episode 9 (The Brain on Partisan Politics), that identical twins are separated at birth and raised in very different families, politically speaking: one deep blue, the other deep red. They’re…
Read More The Brain on Partisan Politics