Why will you make different moral decisions in similar circumstances? Why do some people make different choices than you? What happens when ancient moral instincts collide with modern problems such as pandemics, AI alignment, and political tribalism? Could a simple online game reduce polarization? Could you contribute to charities more effectively if you understood how your moral brain decides? Join Eagleman this week with guest Joshua Greene as we open the hood of human morality.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

Donate to families in Rwanda heregivedirectly.org/cosmos

Greene J. Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin; 2014 Dec 30.

 Woodley L, DeFilippis E, Ravi S, Greene JD. Defusing political animosity in the United States with a cooperative online quiz game. Nature Human Behaviour. 2025 Jun 3:1-4.

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN ON:

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand
"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian
"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal
"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times
"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald
"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker
"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer