Sip & Learn "Our social brain in an anti-social age"

Why did humans evolve such outsized brains compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? We often think of our intelligence as our capacities for logic and reason, but the Social Brain Hypothesis argues that it arose to meet the demands of group living, managing trust, cooperation, and reputation.

This lecture looks at how navigating the complexities of social life shaped our biology. From the evolutionary power of gossip to the modern epidemic of loneliness, it asks what happens when brains built for one kind of social world are forced to live in another.

Dr. Azim Shariff is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Psychology at the University of British Columbia, where he studies how our social and moral instincts evolved and how they shape the way we live today. His work has earned him a UBC Killam Research Prize and election to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. He has also given a TED Talk on why we attach moral value to hard work.