I’m currently finishing a co-authored, interdisciplinary book on human belief and delusions (titled “The Social Roots of Delusions”), as well as several essays I’ll be publishing here over the next few weeks on a wide range of topics, including political disagreement, social media, tribalism, and ideology.

In this brief post, I will highlight and comment on several podcasts I appeared on recently.

Humans are evolved apes!

One respect in which I’m extremely unusual as a humanities academic is in taking seriously the fact that humans are apes that evolved through a process of natural selection in ways that are highly relevant for understanding our psychology, behaviour, and societies. That is, I endorse the core idea behind evolutionary psychology, which is extremely and inexplicably controversial throughout much of the humanities and the social sciences.

Given this, I was really grateful to be invited onto “Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)", hosted by the great Dave Pietraszewski and David Pinsof, two of my favourite social scientists. David Pinsof also writes one of my favourite Substacks.

We talked about the evolutionary psychology of belief, self-deception, “misinformation”, and the role of strategic, social forces in shaping human psychology, including the most puzzling and paradoxical aspects of our psychology. We also discussed the challenges (and perhaps impossibility) of achieving objectivity in domains like politics, as well as the question of whether it is ever legitimate to object to ideas not on their merits but because they might be “weaponised” by bad people. I think that such objections are generally really harmful to political debate and academic culture, but it’s a complex issue that we tried to grapple with in good faith.

David introduced me to the term and concept of “pseudo-belief”, which I love!

The Good Fight

I was honoured to be included as a panellist on The Good Fight Podcast to discuss politics and current affairs with Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, and Sabina Ćudić. We discussed the health of American democracy, the politics and impact of misinformation, especially in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and how RFK Jr’s remarks about autism, Tylenol, and vaccines help to illustrate how the left/right divide in American politics increasingly involves a more fundamental epistemological divide over the nature and sources of knowledge.

Yascha Mounk

The Good Fight Club: Hounding Political Opponents, Misinformation, and Autism

In this week’s conversation, Yascha