This week’s episode hosted by Andrea Krauss and Alex Truelove features UM Professor Joe Arvai and special guest PaulSlovic, President of Decision Research and Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. Paul has dedicated his career to studying human risk perception and how it applies to our decision-making. From the studio to our favorite lunch spot nearly next door, we discuss pressing environmental and social challenges and why the social construction and emotional response to human suffering and risk matters as much as scientific assessment. Our dialogue equally considers the the perspectives and responsibilities of policy-makers, market actors, and citizen consumers. Enjoy!
Consumption is necessary for survival but also produces negative consequences for human health, society, and the environment. Research across domains (addiction, obesity, debt, consumer behavior, material waste, hoarding) finds overlapping biological and psychological bases for consumption-related phenomena, suggesting the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach. Our guests Scott Rick and Stephanie Preston joined us in the studio right before the holidays to unpack these themes of societal consumption.
Scott Rick is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the University of Michigan, with a Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon. He has written papers with such provocative themes as “Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction; Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Marriage.”
Stephanie Preston is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Michigan, with a focus on cognition and cognitive neuroscience. Her laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach to study the interface between emotion and decision making. They work to determine the proximate (what the brain and body are doing) and ultimate (why they exist, how they evolved) bases of the complex behaviors.
Co-hosts Rebecca Hardin and Kat Superfisky take us through another great hour of environmental radio — with some smashing tunes from Madonna to Erykah Badu!
