Episode · You Are Not So Smart
YANSS 333 - Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel
16 Feb 2026 · 38 min
Episode · You Are Not So Smart
16 Feb 2026 · 38 min
How can two people watch the same video yet see two different things? How can two people witness the same event but arrive at two different truths about what they witnessed? How can the same evidence lead people to drastically different realities? In this episode, Dr. Jay Van Bavel at NYU explains.
by You Are Not So Smart · English · Tech & Science
You Are Not So Smart is a show about psychology that celebrates science and self delusion. In each episode, we explore what we've learned so far about reasoning, biases, judgments, and decision-making.
30 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
If you want to create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don't need half the country, you only need 3.5 percent of the population to join – but there are some caveats.
16 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
Using parts work, psychologist Britt Frank offers a road map for understanding, befriending, and leading the multiple voices within yourself.
2 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 19 min
We explore the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.
2 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
In this episode, we sit down with three disinformation researchers whose new paper found something surprising about both our resistance and our susceptibility to both true news we wish was fake and fake news we wish was true.
19 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Dr. Martin Carcasson tells us how he, as the Director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State, trains people how to facilitate deliberation and overcome wicked problems so that they can "spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best."
5 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Warren Berger has made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of the many varieties of questions that we ask and in this episode he explains how we can ask more beautiful questions that can lead to all manner of better outcomes.
28 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
Jesse Richardson wants to improve our critical thinking about AI risk through the gamification of our rampant speculation. In this episode he explains AI safety isn't just one thing, there are a bunch of different risk profiles and each needs to be considered critically.
14 Sep 2026 · 44 min
We return to The Dress and the psychological lessons offered by one of the most viral moments in the history of the internet via an episode of Decoder Ring in which David McRaney shares some insights from his book, How Minds Change, with Willa Paskin, the host of Decoder Ring.
31 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 10 min
Astronomer Phil Plait joins us to discuss his book, Under Alien Skies, in which he describes what it would actually be like to travel to Saturn, Mars, asteroids, and distant stars.
17 Aug 2026 · 1 hr
The suffering is real, but the source may not be what you assume. That's the essence of the nocebo effect, the placebo effect's evil twin. As neuroscientist Dr. Helen Pilcher explains, illness is not simply a matter of biology. Our thoughts, conscious or otherwise, can make lead to symptoms in unexpected ways.