Search
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.
Read Less
In some ways the United States and France are unusually similar nations—still enchanted with their 18th century revolutions, eager to export their ideals (via pamphlets, speeches, language schools, paratroopers, whatever […]
Why do we still watch plays by Euripides, born some 2,500 years ago, or Shakespeare, who is nearly 450 years old? Writer orthodoxy says it’s because the fundamental rules for […]
A few days ago, Ramesh Ponnuru made an interesting case for a massive U.S. tax break for childrearing—not a piddly deduction, but a honking big $5,000-per-kid credit. His reasoning (to […]
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
In his interesting review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind last month, the philosopher John Gray makes an important point about evolution-based attempts to account for human morality. To explain […]
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” asks the gospel of Mark. Verily, I know not. But in […]
Psychology is rich in findings that emerge from complex statistics done on the behavior of college students behaving for money or course credit. It’s fair to wonder, then, how well […]
Take some standard tools for graphing data. Add the power of three-dimensional printing. Result: Data rendered not as a graph or chart, but as an object. A new frontier in […]
Strictly speaking, a “psychopundit” is William Saletan’s term for a scholar who uses psychology to explain what’s wrong with people who don’t vote for Democrats or recycle or otherwise agree […]
Phoney-baloney outrage. Black-hat, white-hat exaggeration. Every day, I get emails some activist organization or other, suggesting that the nation hangs by a thread, about to drop into a bottomless pit […]
For the past few days I’ve been thinking out loud about the importance of narrative form to the mind—that way we have of being much more impressed by information in […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it is a very popular idea in psychology, philosophy and various social sciences that people experience their lives as a story or collection of […]
Literary types used to run the world. To understand life and society, people counted on great orators and poets and interpreters of sacred texts. Political, moral and literary power were […]
Deriding the Democratic Party’s “Julia” propaganda yesterday, Ross Douthat recycled a conservative truism. Unlike those admirable (because safely extinct) old-timeliberals, he wrote, today’s Democrats want the government to do what families should: “The liberalism […]
A lot of ink has been spilled over the inconsistent and illogical ways that human beings make choices. Not as much attention has been paid to the decision to make […]
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, from which many of us get the notion that when a ship goes down, it’s […]
If I were trapped in a burning building, here’s who I would want to see coming up the smoke-filled stairwell: A trained professional firefighter in full gear. Not Mayor Bloomberg. […]
We may think we're free to choose what to eat and how to eat it, but food companies maximize their profits by restricting our choices
For a certain kind of economic conservative, the cardinal sin of modern governments is printing money whenever they please. Currency’s value should be tied to something real, they say, as […]
Human irrationality is an important and fascinating subject, especially when it’s pitted against the assumption that people are rational, which still dominates modern life. Sometimes though evidence of human irrationality […]