You Are Not So Smart

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Dr. Steven Franconeri explains the powerful insights and opportunities offered by a game he and his team at Northwestern University created for having better disagreements, better debates, better conversations, and better dialogues about just about anything, but especially about the sort of topics that often lead to fights and terrible holiday dinners.

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Jordan Ellenberg, a world-class geometer, takes us on a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything.

Ellenberg is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His writing has appeared in Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, and he is the New York Times bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong – but in this episode we will discuss his new book, Shape: The hidden geometry of information, biology, strategy, democracy and everything else.

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Philosopher, neuroscientist, and psychologist, Joshua Greene tells us how the brain generates morality and how his research may have solved the infamous trolley problem, and in so doing created a way to encourage people to contribute to charities that do the most good, and, in addition, play quiz games that can reduce polarization and possibly save democracy.

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We sit down with Dr. Madeleine Beekman, a professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia, whose new book, The Origin of Language, presents a completely new and fascinating theory for how language emerged in homo sapiens, in human beings, in you and me and the rest of us.

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In this episode, we discuss the landmark 1959 study that popularized the term “cognitive dissonance,” and we dive into the current state of dissonance research with Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. Lubrano is the co-host of a podcast about activism called What Do We Want? She also wrote a book that’s coming out in May of 2025 titled Don’t Talk About Politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.

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In this episode, the story of a doomsday cult that predicted the exact date and circumstances of the end of the world, and what happened when that date passed and the world did not end.

Also, we explore our drive to remain consistent via our desire to reduce cognitive dissonance.

When you notice you’ve done something that you believe is wrong, you will either stop doing that thing or stop believing it is wrong.

And if you come across some information that disconfirms one of your beliefs, you’ll either change your belief, challenge the validity of the challenging information, or go looking for some information that suggests no, in fact, you are totally right.

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