The Human Zoo is a place to learn about the one subject that never
fails to fascinate - ourselves. Are people led by the head or by the
heart? How rational are we? How do we perceive the world and what lies
behind the quirks of human behaviour?
Michael Blastland presents a
curious blend of intriguing experiments to discover our biases and
judgements, conversations, explorations and examples taken from what's
in the news to what we do in the kitchen - all driven by a large slice
of curiosity.
Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick University, is on hand as guide and experimenter in chief.
Our
thoughts, John Milton said, are a kingdom of infinite space and they
might take us anywhere -whether our subject is writ large, like the
behaviours of public figures or the contradictions of politics, or
located in the minutiae of everyday life. We can show how what happens
on the big stage is our own behaviour writ large - like the old Linda
Smith joke about the Iraq-war coalition's failure to find chemical
weapons: "I'm the same with the scissors".
The Human Zoo explores
why it is that our judgements are so averse to ambiguity, how mental
energy is linked to our legs, why we don't want to be in the dock when
the judge is hungry - and other thoughts that have nothing to do with
anything much beyond the ironing.
Producer: Toby Murcott
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