In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In the book, as in his career and in this Social Science Bites podcast, Bloom deconstructs what is popularly meant by empathy. "Everybody seems to have their own notion," he tells interviewer David Edmonds, "and that's totally fine, but we end up talking past each other unless we're clear about it." And so he outlines several widely used definitions -- think compassion, for example -- before offering several more scholarly ways of viewing empathy, such as "cognitive empathy" and "emotional empathy."

A key to understanding his work is that Bloom is not actually against empathy, at least not in general, even though he tells Edmonds, "I think empathy is -- in some way -- a great cause for our worst behavior." But the use of what he terms "emotional empathy" concerns him because, as he explains, it's not evenly distributed or applied, and thus allows harm to occur under the guise of benevolence. "Empathy is sort of vulnerable to all the biases you would think about. This includes the traditional in-group, out-group biases -- race, nationality, religion. It includes attractiveness -- it's easier to feel empathic for somebody who's cute versus someone who's ugly."

Bloom and Edmonds also discuss how empathy leaches into the realm of artificial intelligence, where what might be judged empathetic responses from AIs can devolve into a humanity-extracting feedback loop.

In his work as a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and as the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University, Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with, as his website notes, "special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art." He is editor of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and has written a number of public-facing books, including 2016's Against Empathy, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, and The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

What does your accent – and yes, every speaker has one – say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that Devyani Sharma, a professor of language and communication at Oxford's Worcester College, asks every day, especially about the many English speakers around the world.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sharma takes a deep dive into the accents of Britain, where accents have famously been used as markers of social status for years. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, "the UK stands out as a country that's organized its whole social system around accent for a very long time."

While that's been true historically, Sharma's own research and public service – through projects like Generations of London English, Dialect Development and Style in a Diasporic Community, and the Accent Bias Britain online resource – has helped reduce the negatives around that.

As she details for Edmonds, "Interestingly, just a reminder that 'you might be relying on accent as a shortcut and please don't' was enough to change recruiters' behavior. It doesn't always happen with gender and race anymore, and my sense is that's because the message has been saturated. People are annoyed to be reminded before doing a recruiting task, but they haven't thought as much about how much they use accent when judging people."

As a practical matter, how much effort do you put into pinning down the causes behind daily occurrences? To developmental psychologist Frank Keil, who studies causal thinking, that answer is likely along the lines of 'not enough.' A lack of causal thinking is both endemic, and, to an extent, hurtful these days, he argues, suggesting that lacking even simplified causal models makes things like the black box of artificial intelligence a potential problem.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Keil, the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Yale University, outlines for interviewer David Edmonds how causal thinking is a skill we seem to have at an early age, but which diminishes as we grow up. "[K]ids, by the time they approach elementary school, are asking up to 200 'why' and 'how' questions a day," he explains. "Within a year or two up to starting school, they're down to two or three, often none."

Furthermore, Keil sees this diminishment continuing in society today – and this comes as a cost. "I think it's making kids today be pushed more towards surface understanding, being user interface understanders. I think it makes influences more influential. To just say 'This is cool' as opposed to 'This is how it works.' One of the negative consequences is that we can get fooled by misinformation more; one of the best ways to debunk an expert is to ask them to explain the mechanism."

At Yale, Keil directs the Cognition and Development lab. He has written several books, from academe-oriented books like Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior, to more general reader titles like Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science. His awards include the Boyd R. McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association (Developmental Psychology), the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research.