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.
The motorcycle gang pulled in to the parking lot in a small town in upstate New York. They put down their glistening kickstands and sauntered into the grocery store, one […]
Birds do it. Bees do it. But primate species don’t sing and dance, except for Homo sapiens. Why is music-making part of human nature, then? Why do we enjoy singing […]
In the study of uniquely human traits—language, mathematics, moral behavior—there are few academic stars as bright as Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard. His collaborators in academia are top-shelf (they […]
According to Ole Ole Olson at The Public Record, over the past year an invitation-only Yahoo group called “Digg Patriots” has been systematically pushing right-wing content and “burying” liberal views […]
Providing adequate and sustainable sources of energy isn’t a geophysical problem of finding supplies or a technological challenge of using sun, wind or gas more efficiently. It’s a psychological problem: […]
At the University of Salford in England, Charlie Mydlarz is working on a sound-map of the entire globe. He is asking people all over the world to contribute 10 to […]
Good communication is a matter of getting “in sync” with others, as you’ve probably noticed when you’ve seen people match their steps perfectly as they walk, and imitate each other’s […]
How do you persuade people to eat less and exercise more? We love to think it’s a matter of getting them to see facts and make good decisions, because that […]
Ever have a tune run through your mind, with no name or words attached? When you squawk out what you think might be the melody, people just shrug in perplexity. […]
The big cognitive and emotional news in the Mind Matters household is that it is expecting the arrival in a few weeks of a demanding, very long-staying guest, whose personality […]
If people realized how different they are from their fellow citizens, the country would fall apart in a weekend. Working as a journalist taught me that. I can’t help noticing, […]
Sometimes it seems that everyone has abandoned the notion that rational self-interest drives people’s decisions. It’s high time for some answers to the next obvious question: If Reason doesn’t rule […]
The vuvuzela is not a popular instrument outside of South Africa. World Cup players from other nations complain that it breaks their concentration, broadcasters have trouble making their commentaries heard […]
Is World Cup soccer moving away from the sort of team=country nationalism that leads to flare-ups like 1969’s “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras? It’s often remarked that the […]
One of the eerier themes in psychology papers is the extreme susceptibility of people’s thoughts and acts to incidental details in their surroundings. For instance, this paper from a recent […]
If I want you to give time or money to my cause, I’ll say your sacrifice is for “people just like you, just like me,” for “communities like yours, all […]
One of industrial life’s strange traditions is the pinup calendar that shows nubile young women posing provocatively around tractor parts and turbines. Eizo, a maker of medical-imaging technology, decided to […]
Should the government protect society from the bad effects of violent videogames? Game-makers invoke freedom of speech to stave off such laws—including California’s 2005 attempt to ban violent-game sales to […]
There was a philosopher once who had no patience with geekish hype about information technology. This application, he wrote, would never make people smarter or better. In fact, it made […]
Here’s a shocking bit of news: Plans for a big, shiny Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem are not going smoothly. This multi-part attack last month in the newspaper Haaretz blames […]
An Amazon product review with ellipsis … like this … and a lot of extra punctuation??!? That is, like, so likely to be sincere. I totally mean that, except that […]
Americans may talk a good game about “work-life balance,” but according to this study, they’re biased against working mothers. More surprisingly, those who liked working moms less also liked the […]
Different species have their different tricks for getting by. Human beings are smart, quick-moving and numerous. We’re also pretty large, as mammals go. Sloths, on the other hand, take a […]
Standardized tests are supposed to measure innate abilities. The subject of your last conversation, the lead story on the news last night, the pictures on the wall at the test […]
Human beings give their attention readily to people who already have it. It doesn’t matter if a guy won fame for his action movies, people will listen to his advice […]
“Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in […]
Nick Kristof has an idea for fixing the Catholic Church: Turn it “upside down”! Take power away from the “old boys’ club” at the Vatican, where a dark cloud hovers […]
Empathy is a complicated emotion, even for mice. On seeing another in pain, a mouse will act as if it itself is also hurting—much more, though, if it knows the […]
Here’s what’s great about Janet Malcolm’s piece this week about the murder trial of Mazultov Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev in The New Yorker: It captures a truth about trials that […]
If David Cameron wants to beat Gordon Brown next month, he might want to play a lot of tennis. According to this paper, anyway, gestures and small movements are enough […]