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
An Amazon product review with ellipsis … like this … and a lot of extra punctuation??!? That is, like, so likely to be sincere. I totally mean that, except that […]
Americans may talk a good game about “work-life balance,” but according to this study, they’re biased against working mothers. More surprisingly, those who liked working moms less also liked the […]
Different species have their different tricks for getting by. Human beings are smart, quick-moving and numerous. We’re also pretty large, as mammals go. Sloths, on the other hand, take a […]
Standardized tests are supposed to measure innate abilities. The subject of your last conversation, the lead story on the news last night, the pictures on the wall at the test […]
Human beings give their attention readily to people who already have it. It doesn’t matter if a guy won fame for his action movies, people will listen to his advice […]
“Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in […]
Nick Kristof has an idea for fixing the Catholic Church: Turn it “upside down”! Take power away from the “old boys’ club” at the Vatican, where a dark cloud hovers […]
Empathy is a complicated emotion, even for mice. On seeing another in pain, a mouse will act as if it itself is also hurting—much more, though, if it knows the […]
Here’s what’s great about Janet Malcolm’s piece this week about the murder trial of Mazultov Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev in The New Yorker: It captures a truth about trials that […]
If David Cameron wants to beat Gordon Brown next month, he might want to play a lot of tennis. According to this paper, anyway, gestures and small movements are enough […]
Imagine how different your life would be if next Earth Day a year from now, you supplied the power to this computer—by pedaling, churning or dancing. The way these students […]
If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are “harder,” more fundamentally “sciencey” sciences than hers. […]
Here at Mind Matters we strive to be your full-service source of octopus-cognition news. And in my last post on that, I described humans making videos for octopuses. So it’s […]
The other day I pointed out the conflicting motives of corporations that sell soda, snacks and fast food: They promote “wellness” because they want manageable health-care costs, but they also […]
The other night I was watching ABC’s remake of “V” and wondering: What if the space-boot was on the other foot? What if we human beings were the “advanced” species, […]
A rapidly forming stereotype about autistic people is that they can’t use stereotypes. In the words of this site about kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, for instance, “they are usually free […]
Seeking the hidden causes of behavior, some scientists work on the scale of brain regions and neurons, searching inside people’s heads. Others work on the scale of crowds, neighborhoods and […]
A while back I linked to a couple of studies in which scary public-health messages had the opposite of their intended effect: These anti-drinking and anti-smoking ads made people want […]
Iphone meets blender. Blender wins. Story of all our lives, isn’t it? I mean, given that we’re all heading for an inevitable blending of our constituent atoms with the universe’s flotsam […]
Organic chemistry’s an intricate subject. Media chatter about wellness, though, is an action movie, where “good” molecules (like Omega-3 fatty acids) battle “bad” ones (like LDL cholesterol). If they could, […]