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.
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Jay Van Bavel is a Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, an affiliate at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations, Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, and Director of the Center for Conflict & Cooperation. He is also an Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus. Jay completed his PhD at the University of Toronto and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Ohio State University.
Jay studies how collective concerns—group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the mind, brain, and behavior. His work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, intergroup conflict & polarization, cooperation, beliefs & misinformation, moral judgment & decision-making, social media, and public health using a wide variety of methods.
Jay has published over 150 academic papers (including in Science, Nature, PNAS) and is a Clarivate highly cited researcher (in the top 1% of researchers worldwide). He co-authored The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony (winner of the APA William James Book Award). His work has also been cited in the US Supreme Court and Senate and he has consulted with the White House, United Nations, European Union, and World Health Organization.
Jay is an active science communicator with over 100,000 social media followers. He writes the Power of Us newsletter and has written for The New York Times, BBC, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, Guardian, LA Times, TIME, and The Washington Post. He has given talks at dozens of psychology departments and business schools, as well as academic conferences, professional events, and non-academic organizations (including the World Science Festival, Aspen Ideas Festival, The Atlantic Festival, World Bank, and TEDx).
Jay teaches courses on Social Psychology, Social Neuroscience, Attitudes and Evaluation, Intergroup Relations, Group Identity, Moral Psychology, Professional Development, and Introduction to Psychology. He received the NYU Golden Dozen Teaching Award for teaching excellence. He also co-founded a mentoring column for Science Magazine and has created several educational videos (e.g., TED-Ed).
He has received several awards, including the Young Investigator Award for distinguished contributions in social neuroscience from the Society for Social Neuroscience, the Young Scholars Award for outstanding achievements in social and personality psychology from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, the Janet T. Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, the F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Prize from the American Psychological Foundation, the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize, and the SPSP Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize.
Jay’s work has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, American Psychological Foundation, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, John Templeton Foundation, Templeton World Charity Foundation, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, AE Foundation, Google Jigsaw, and Norwegian Research Council.
TWITTER: @jayvanbavel
BLUESKY: https://bsky.app/profile/jayvanbavel.bsky.social
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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.
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