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.
For Good Science Journalism, Blogs Are a Better Bet Than “Old Media”
Imagine you are a scientist who has just received the latest issue of the most important journal in your field. As you look through the papers published there, you’ll probably […]
Lack of Willpower? Nope, Just a Realistic View of the World
Sometimes the urge for instant gratification makes perfect sense.
How The NY Times New Social-Media Policy Overreaches
Years ago, when I was a young reporter working for a New England newspaper, I was told, more than once, that our city editor had “the personality of a door […]
OK, So Mitt Romney Despises Us. But Maybe Other Pols Do Too.
Shakespeare’s Caius Martius Coriolanus isn’t really suited to politics, but his family and friends urge him on, and so he makes a game effort at putting up with the smelly […]
We Want Good Journalistic Practices. We Just Don’t Want to Pay for Them
Last week, the last vestiges of the pop-science writer Jonah Lehrer’s journalistic respectability evaporated. Wired, which had stuck with him through a summer of revelations about his self-borrowing, plagiarism and […]
Is Information Technology a Threat to Equality?
James Taranto is a Wall Street Journal writer now internationally famous as a self-important jerk because of this tweet yesterday about the Aurora killings: “I hope the girls whose boyfriends […]
Study: Media Reports of Violence Make Patients Feel More Pain
The notion of “painful news” is a common metaphor, but this Israeli study suggests there might be literal truth in the cliché. In a study of chronic-pain patients, it found […]
Psychologists Assume It’s Possible to Know A Person. What If They’re Wrong?
Science rests on the assumption that the world can be known: that causes have effects, and logic applied on Thursday in Katmandu is valid still on Friday in Geneva. Psychology, […]
Want To Feel Less Pressed For Time? Try Giving More Hours to Others
In his superb essay about his years as a Mormon (one of the best pieces about faith I have read in a long time) Walter Kirn notes that he said […]
Study: The More Altruistic You Are, The Bigger Will Be This Part of Your Brain
In pursuit of the biological basis of morality, researchers are interested in an area of the brain at the boundary of the right temporal lobe and the right parietal lobe […]
When Old, Slow and Boring Beats New, Fast and Exciting
Last night I heard Fred Guterl talk about his cheery new book, The Fate of the Species, which describes various ways we could do ourselves in, including heating up the […]
Female or Male, You People Trying to ‘Have It All’ Are Seriously Creeping Out The Rest of Us
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new piece in The Atlantic about how women cannot “have it all” has provoked a wave of commentary, but none that I have seen has mentioned the article’s […]
What Can Journalists Learn From Jonah Lehrer’s Mistakes? Nothing They Didn’t Already Know
“Self-plagiarism” is the grandiose new term for the re-use of one’s own words in several journalistic articles, for which Jonah Lehrer became famous last week. Lehrer’s problems then expanded to […]
The Mystery That Is Phantom Cell Phone Vibration
OK, so I thought I was alone in this, and that it was due to incipient neural disorders or too many drugs back in the 80s, but no: It turns […]
Psychopundits: A Consumer Guide
Right after my recent post on “psychopunditry,” I came across signs of this kerfuffle between the writer Jonah Lehrer and the psychologist Christopher Chabris (not to be confused with this […]
How Far is Tehran From Your Door? Your Estimate May Depend on How Scared You Are
Feeling threatened changes people’s perceptions of other people. Before World War II, for example, American university students described the Japanese as artistic and progressive, while the Chinese were supposedly treacherous […]
Human Irrationality is a Fact, not a Fad
Once upon a time, we were taught that people are basically rational—at least when they have to be, at the stock market, the voting booth, the courtroom, the hospital, the […]
Study: Decisions Made in a Foreign Language Are More Rational
Struggling with a foreign language is practically the definition of mental strain: what is the word for “screwdriver” again? did I produce that “ĥ” sound correctly? are they laughing with […]
More On Entitlements-Versus-Kids
Responding to my post the other day (about the claim that entitlement programs discourage people from having kids) Ramesh Ponnuru replies here with the fair point that cultural differences among […]
Bloomberg Versus Giant Sodas: It’s Not the Nanny State, It’s Democracy At Work
Mayor Bloomberg’s latest anti-obesity proposal—ban sales of giant flagons of sugary drinks by next spring—has been criticized as bad politics in support of good policy. In fact, it is the […]
Why Americans See Racism Where The French See No Problem
In some ways the United States and France are unusually similar nations—still enchanted with their 18th century revolutions, eager to export their ideals (via pamphlets, speeches, language schools, paratroopers, whatever […]
Why Great Television Is More Like A Novel Than A Play
Why do we still watch plays by Euripides, born some 2,500 years ago, or Shakespeare, who is nearly 450 years old? Writer orthodoxy says it’s because the fundamental rules for […]
Are Childless People Freeloading on the World’s Parents?
A few days ago, Ramesh Ponnuru made an interesting case for a massive U.S. tax break for childrearing—not a piddly deduction, but a honking big $5,000-per-kid credit. His reasoning (to […]
Why Smart People Deny Climate Change
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
Why Morality Is Entwined With Our Sense of “Us and Them”
In his interesting review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind last month, the philosopher John Gray makes an important point about evolution-based attempts to account for human morality. To explain […]
What Your Brain Looks Like When You’re Selling Out
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” asks the gospel of Mark. Verily, I know not. But in […]
Study: Want to Look Aggressive? Wear Black
Psychology is rich in findings that emerge from complex statistics done on the behavior of college students behaving for money or course credit. It’s fair to wonder, then, how well […]
Take This Data And Shove It
Take some standard tools for graphing data. Add the power of three-dimensional printing. Result: Data rendered not as a graph or chart, but as an object. A new frontier in […]
Should Psychologists Just Butt Out of Politics?
Strictly speaking, a “psychopundit” is William Saletan’s term for a scholar who uses psychology to explain what’s wrong with people who don’t vote for Democrats or recycle or otherwise agree […]
When Bad Actions Have Good Consequences
Phoney-baloney outrage. Black-hat, white-hat exaggeration. Every day, I get emails some activist organization or other, suggesting that the nation hangs by a thread, about to drop into a bottomless pit […]