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Just how good are humans at assessing risk? If you take a close look at some of what most worries people in the developed world – terrorism, plane crashes, child kidnappings, animal attacks – the answer appears to be ‘not so good’. In this animation from The Royal Institution in London, the US scientist and author Jared Diamond recalls how time spent living with a Papua New Guinea tribe made him reassess how he viewed risk in his everyday life, and led him to scrutinise and re-evaluate his Western views of risk.
Video by the Royal Institution
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Anthropology
Margaret Mead explains why the family was entering a brave new world in this 1959 film
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Archaeology
At a prehistoric pigment mine, researchers glimpse our earliest moments in the Americas
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Social psychology
What happened when a crypto scam swept over a sleepy town in the Caucasus
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
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Anthropology
For an Amazonian female shaman, ayahuasca ceremonies are a rite and a business
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
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Childhood and adolescence
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Anthropology
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Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
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