Event Listing
Food Therapy: How our psychology affects how we eat – Pixie Turner
How does food make you feel? We need food to survive, but often we don’t stop to think about why we eat the way we do. From birth, we are shaped by our early psychological environment, which ultimately affects what, where, when, and why we eat. Are your parents really to blame for everything? Can you actually eat your way out of depression? Or is it perhaps a bit more complicated than that?
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.
From fuck to microorganism – why do words sound the way they do? – Dr Shiri Lev-Ari
One of the characteristics of language is that there is no relationship between the way that words sound and their meaning. In this talk, Dr Shiri Lev-Ari will discuss cases where the sounds of words are not arbitrary, show what characterises the sounds of swear words across the world’s languages, discuss which languages have more words whose sounds express their meaning, and why, and show that our intuition regarding whether the sounds of certain words express their meaning can be very wrong.
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.
The social and cultural factors influencing attitudes to abortion – Dr Lora Adair and Dr Nicole Lozano
Scientific approaches to understanding reproductive choice typically position decision-makers as rational. What is missing is a description of the internal, psychological process when someone is making a choice about their reproduction, their family constellation, and their future. Are these choices rational? Do people really view children as a calculus of financial gains and losses? We explore these questions by emphasising the role that our social world plays in shaping our reproductive decisions and attitudes.
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.
Evolutionary Perspectives On Religion — Dr Kat Ford
From an evolutionary perspective, religion presents something of a challenge. It is ubiquitous, but can be costly, while serving no obvious function. Is it just a collection of highly successful memes? Is it an inevitable but largely benign by product of minds highly evolved for social living? Or are there some real evolutionary benefits to religious cognition?
Mental Health Pseudoscience on Social Media – Carrie Poppy
Trauma, gaslighting, narcs, multiple personalities, and the rest of the human mind. Where better to learn about these things than TikTok, Instagram and Twitter? Carrie Poppy (Oh No, Ross and Carrie) takes you on a tour of some of the most popular social media pseudoscience, how to spot it, and what you can say when you see it.
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.
February Social
Casual chatting over drinks and optional food (as in, when we individually feel like ordering).
Ivermectin for COVID-19: A Tale of Science Gone Wrong? – Jack Lawrence
If you missed our Ivermectin talk with Jack Lawrence, then good news — he's giving the talk for Skeptics in the Pub Online.
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.
Building bridges – how to talk to conspiracy believers – Ulrike Schiesser
In the last two years conspiracy theories seemed to have spread even to people we would never have expected to be susceptible. We lost friends, saw family members drifting away and experienced an increasing radicalization. How can we connect despite such different world views?
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.
January Social
Casual chatting over drinks and optional food (as in, when we individually feel like ordering).
The Skeptics’ Guide to Vexillology – Dr Tom Williamson
Flags! They’re everywhere, from battlefields to Pride marches to the World Cup. But what secrets and mysteries do flags hold? Why do some people get upset if you say Union Flag instead of Union Jack? Are remainers right when they say they want their star back?
This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.