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.

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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Tom Nichols

The United States of Narcissism?

The United States of Narcissism? Author Tom Nichols on the risk Americans present to our own democracy “If we believe democracy has failed us,” writes author and scholar Tom Nichols in his latest book, Our Own Worst Enemy, “we should first ask ourselves whether we have failed the test of democracy.”   In this Purple Principle…
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purple principle episode artwork for part I of season finale featuring the top guest insights for 2021

Speaking Truth in Polarized Times

Top Guest Insights From 2021 Speaking Truth In Polarized Times The year 2021 would certainly be worth forgetting if its worst elements weren’t so clearly continuing on into the New Year 2022 and very likely beyond: the Omicron surge, the worst U.S. inflation in decades, and the maelstrom of misinformation swirling around the clear benefits…
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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Dr. Dominique Packer

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…
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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Dr. Lee McIntyre

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…
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purple principle episode artwork featuring headshot of podcast guest Tania Israel

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…
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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Chris Bail

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…
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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Dr. Peter Coleman

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,…
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purple principle episode artwork featuring headshot of podcast guests Daniel Clark and Nick Andert

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…
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purple principle episode artwork with headshots of podcast guests dr. doni whitsett, dr. steven hassan, and rachel bernstein

Online Conspiracies and Virtual Cults

Online Conspiracies and Virtual Cults Social Extremes In Our Hyperpartisan Age Our digital universe is full of information, and misinformation, swirling about constantly, sampled in bits and bytes, most of it rarely gaining more than passing attention.  How then does misinformation swirl up into a popular conspiracy theory? How do some conspiracy theories, such as…
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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Dr. Jeanine Guidry

What combats Vax Skepticism?

What combats Vax Skepticism? An Interview with Dr. Jeanine Guidry, Director of VCU’s Health & Media Lab Battling the COVID pandemic has been a war on many fronts – disease management, the race to develop safe, effective vaccines, and now the equally trickly public relations battle against vaccine misinformation and committed skeptics of all kinds….
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purple principle episode artwork with headshot of podcast guest Dr. Andrew Smith

2020 Election Polling

2020 Election Polling  The Science & Psychology Of Polls In A Partisan Age During this 2020 election season, not a day goes by without another new Presidential poll result blaring from the cable networks and rebounding across the Web. But how accurate are these polls? What has been learned from the 2016 polling fiasco where many…
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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…
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episode artwork for the purple principle season 1 episode 4, titled heard from the herd, featuring dr. abigail marsh of georgetown university. image is of her headshot, the purple principle logo, and the episode number

Heard from the Herd

Heard from the herd Psychology and Partisanship, featuring Dr. Abigail Marsh, author of The Fear Factor; Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Georgetown University Are we all getting a little too musk ox these days?  In this interview-based episode, Dr. Abigail Marsh explains the centrality of fear in human behavior, motivating any social species (whether musk…
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