David Berreby
Author, Us and Them: The Science of Identity
David Berreby is the author of "Us and Them: The Science of Identity." He has written about human behavior and other science topics for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Smithsonian, The New Republic, Nature, Discover, Vogue and many other publications. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Paris, a Science Writing Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a resident at Yaddo, and in 2006 was awarded the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the first edition of "Us and Them." David can be found on Twitter at @davidberreby and reached by email at david [at] davidberreby [dot] com.
Last week’s New Yorker contained this mind-opening piece by Atul Gawande, who argues that muddling through with small-bore trial projects is not a bad response to the crisis in U.S. […]
People do many things without knowing why: buy stuff they didn’t think they wanted, vote differently when they’re in one setting than they would in another, order a different lunch […]
If you want to speculate about an alternate-universe world without intelligent primates (and who doesn’t?), then your thoughts must turn to the octopus. Because the octopus has a large and […]
A key assumption in many social sciences is that people have preferences, and that these are both knowable and stable. That’s the point of surveys on every subject from whipped […]
People who have suffered from major depression are significantly better than other people at seeing a metaphorical forest, while the non-depressed are more alert to the trees, according to this […]
In American folklore, testosterone is supposed to cause rage, lust, competitiveness, nuclear arms races, beer hats and other indicators of whacked-out excess masculinity. Andrew Sullivan, for example, wrote years ago […]
Psychologists often joke that their insights into human nature come from experiments with American university students, on duty for required credit or beer money. “So we see that human beings–or […]
Nearsightedness has become ever more common in rich nations, most dramatically in Asia–80 percent of young adults in Taiwan and Singapore are myopic, where a couple of generations ago only […]
I’ve always been fascinated by the Pedestrian Do-Si-Do, that dance where you dodge to your left on the sidewalk to avoid colliding with a person walking toward you, and she […]
“I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike,” wrote William Blake. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in […]
The Royal Society was founded in 1650, and has been a vital hub of scientific research and exchange ever since. In fact, as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have shown, […]
The looming menace of widespread chronic disease is a lot like the prospect of major climate change. Both future crises are expected on the basis of imperfect projections which don’t […]
It’s Black Friday here in the U.S., the worst shopping day of the year. Do yourself a favor and check out an alternate reality: the Rev. Billy’s Church of Life […]
Maureen Dowd has all the steadiness and heft of a tin weathervane, but like a weathervane she can point which way the wind is blowing in Washington. And her column […]
Writing about intelligence is like running a ferry service between two different planets. On one, everyone assumes that g, general intelligence, is a real and important trait, in which heredity […]
“You know what the greatest talent in the world is?” asks the Hollywood bigshot in John Guare’s terrific play The House of Blue Leaves. “To be an audience. Anybody can […]
Creepiest incentive ever to exercise: Peruvian cops have arrested a gang that, they say, kills people for their fat. The extracted adipose tissue was then allegedly sold for cosmetics made […]
Footnote about the Pinker-Gladwell kerfuffle: To discredit Gladwell, Pinker takes advantage of a truly embarrassing mistake (the science-writer’s nightmare) in which Gladwell misspelled “eigenvalue” as “igon value.” (It seems a […]
The United States’ Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act takes effect on Saturday. Subsequently, it will be illegal for employers to use genetic test results to make decisions about their employees, or […]
Expectations for the Copenhagen summit next month are dropping like a cartoon anvil. Where once there was talk of a comprehensive international accord on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, now the great […]
Steven Pinker’s attack on Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times Book Review was more lucid and entertaining than it was intellectually honest. Pinker’s take-away claim is that Gladwell’s work […]
If you want to see some key symptoms of unconvincing journalism about social science, look no further than this New York Times piece on the effect of unemployment on families. […]
Here’s a curious study, which reports that “a multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans.” The authors […]
People see what their tools let them see. Case in point: How different the world looks when it’s mapped according to unfamiliar principles. Even more striking than a reverse-pole map […]
Writing for an academic journal? If your prose doesn’t sound importantly recondite enough, you could just let this auto-pedant do it for you.
Models of the mind are never “just theories” — ideas about human nature shape the rules and habits that guide daily life. A case in point: If people were purely […]
Wrestling with any decisions today? Wondering whether to move to Minnesota or dump that guy or change your Facebook profile picture? Maybe you’ve also wondered what’s going on when you […]
A.N. Wilson, the arch-conservative English litterateur, doesn’t like scientists. They are “gods of certainty” and people who respect them, he writes today, are responsible for killing most of Britain’s cows […]
So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Ernest Hemingway replied, “yes. They have more money.” Could they one day end up having more fingers? Toes? Brains? The economist Robert Frank […]
