Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. = Join us tonight as twins researcher Dr. Nancy Segal tells fascinating stories about twins and explains what her research on twins has to tell us about how we come to be the people we are. Some of the questions she'll answer: •How much do our genes determine who we are? •Can we shift our environment to make the best of the genes we have? •Where do our personalities come from?...

HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. Noted social scientist Dr. Adam Galinsky takes on the long-running debate about whether it's best to be self-interested or other-interested--a question Galinsky says misses the mark. Delving into recent research, Galinsky explains why maximizing our potential for success takes doing both -- sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing (and sometimes doing a little of each). He'll also offer some...

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. We have a depression epidemic in this country, now affecting more than 15% of the population, and it’s striking people at younger and younger ages. It seems clear that our current modes of understanding and treating depression just aren’t working. My guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg, draws on research to show why we are failing to help depression sufferers and turns...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, interviewing the luminaries of behavioral science. Developmental psychologist Dr. Peter Gray explainswhy our current educational system is actually counterproductive to educating kids. Our way of schooling kids ignores our evolved psychology and how children actually learn, and removes children’s natural joy of learning from them in the process. It turns out that schooling based on the principles of a democracy -- applied to children...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. We like to believe our decisions are rationally driven and make sense. But constantly, our perception and decision-making are clouded by illusions we aren't even aware we have. Some of these include illusions of accuracy in our attention, memory, confidence, and knowledge. These illusions can lead us to make costly - and even deadly - errors. The good news is, by understanding...

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. Tonight’s show is on why friendships matter more now than ever, the ways friends can make us better people, and how to have more satisfying friendships and ditch the dark ones. My guest is Carlin Flora, the fantastic editor I worked with at Psychology Today, and her book is Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are. Flora is one of the few non-scientists to appear on...

Why low-carb, high-fat eating is the healthiest kind and how to go about it Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. Dietary researcher Dr. Jeff Volek lays out the science behind why you should declare your independence from dietary carbohydrates -- sugar, flour, starchy vegetables like potatoes, apple juice -- that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. Not only that, he explains why eating enough fat -- the...

HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. Psychologist Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, who researchest happiness, explains that we are actually very poor predictors of what makes us happy or unhappy. Of course, it doesn’t help that we’ve been stuck with a lot of cultural myths about what things and situations should and shouldn’t. On this show, which focuses mainly on relationships, Dr. Lyubomirsky lays out the realities shown in the research and...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. This is a show on how the negative can be positive -- on how we actually need the emotions that make us uncomfortable. They make us whole, balancing the "positive" emotions. Dr. Todd Kashdan will lay out the science on how anger, anxiety, and other "negative" feelings can actually be motivating, illuminating, and helpful -- giving us our best shot at success and fulfillment....

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. On this show, Dr. Jonathan Gottschall talks about his foray from bummed out adjunct English professor to the Mixed Marshall Arts world and his big cage fight -- along with the psychology driving violence and the fight rituals that actually contain it. His fascinating book we'll be discussing on the show: The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch. Join me...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. On this show, Dr. Jonathan Gottschall talks about his foray from bummed out adjunct English professor to the Mixed Marshall Arts world and his big cage fight -- along with the psychology driving violence and the fight rituals that actually contain it. His fascinating book we'll be discussing on the show: The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch. Join me...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science...and this week, a top investigative science journalist. Saturated fat is your friend. Really. It turns out everything we've been told about eating fat is wrong. On tonight's show, meticulous journalist Nina Teichholz will lay out the scientific errors, bias, and dangerous misrepresentations that have underpinned the dietary dogma of the past 60 years. She'll also lay out the...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science...and this week, a top investigative science journalist. Saturated fat is your friend. Really. It turns out everything we've been told about eating fat is wrong. On tonight's show, meticulous journalist Nina Teichholz will lay out the scientific errors, bias, and dangerous misrepresentations that have underpinned the dietary dogma of the past 60 years. She'll also lay out the...

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, featuring the luminaries of behavioral science. It turns out some of the ways parents think they’ll get their kids to behave -- by berating, threatening, and punishing them -- are actually the least effective. My guest tonight, Yale University psychology professor, Dr. Alan E. Kazdin, who is also director of the Yale Parenting Center, has a parenting template that is not only effective at changing behavior in children, it does it by cutting...

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, featuring the luminaries of behavioral science. It turns out some of the ways parents think they’ll get their kids to behave -- by berating, threatening, and punishing them -- are actually the least effective. My guest tonight, Yale University psychology professor, Dr. Alan E. Kazdin, who is also director of the Yale Parenting Center, has a parenting template that is not only effective at changing behavior in children, it does it by cutting...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. Joshua Wolf Shenk uses science, fascinating true stories of creative partnerships, and historical evidence to dispel the myth of the lone genius and show that creativity is not the work of an individual mind. It is, in fact, a social activity, and two people, working together, are truly "greater than the sum of their parts." Join us tonight to find out what it takes to be a...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, with Amy Alkon interviewing the luminaries of behavioral science. There have been two major schools on negotiating -- Ury, Fisher and Patton's "win-win"/"relationships are everything" approach and Roger Cohen's "nail 'em to the wall" hardball approach. Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler finds that these rigid, one-size-fits-all strategies often clash with the real-world realities of negotiating. Drawing on his and his...

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. What do men want? In bed and out? What do women want? How does this all tie together? (And who’s getting tied up?) These are just a few of the questions I’ll be asking and sex therapist Dr. Brandy Engler will be answering on tonight’s show. Dr. Engler is unique in that she opened a sex therapy practice for women -- expecting to slowly get some clients -- and quickly amassed a...

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. On tonight's show, noted sociologist Dr. Eric Klinenberg discusses why remaining unmarried and living alone have increasing appeal and what the problems of living solo tend to be -- and how we might solve them. We'll touch both on living solo as a younger person (whether romantically single or "living apart together" with a partner), and how we can live alone as we age. Dr. Klineberg's...

HumanLab: The Science Between Us, with Amy Alkon interviewing the luminaries of behavioral science. Unlike the guests on almost all of my shows, my guest tonight is actually not a scientist -- he's business consultant, public speaker, and best-selling author Mark Sanborn. But this is the second time I've made an exception and had him on the show, because his thinking is so extraordinary, inspiring, and helpful. To bring up that word again -- "extraordinary" -- being extraordinary means...