Alix Spiegel
Alix Spiegel has worked on NPR's Science Desk for 10 years covering psychology and human behavior, and has reported on everything from what it's like to kill another person, to the psychology behind our use of function words like "and", "I", and "so." She began her career in 1995 as one of the founding producers of the public radio program This American Life. While there, Spiegel produced her first psychology story, which ultimately led to her focus on human behavior. It was a piece called 81 Words, and it examined the history behind the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
In January 2015, Spiegel joined forces with journalist Lulu Miller to co-host Invisibilia, a series from NPR about the unseen forces that control human behavior — our ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and thoughts. Invisibilia interweaves personal stories with fascinating psychological and brain science, in a way that ultimately makes you see your own life differently. Excerpts of the show are featured on the NPR News programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The program is also available as a podcast.
Over the course of her career in public radio, Spiegel has won many awards including a George Foster Peabody Award, a Livingston Award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Spiegel graduated from Oberlin College. Her work on human behavior has also appeared in The New Yorker magazine and The New York Times.
-
A man committed a horrible crime. Then he decided he no longer wanted to be a bad person. It is possible to change our personalities, psychologists say, even though we like to think they're innate. -
When McDonald's came to the Soviet Union in 1990, it insisted that workers smile. That didn't come easy. But customers grew to like it — and workers did, too. What happens when you change a norm? -
The latest episode of NPR's Invisibilia takes us online. Some people think interacting with these machines is changing us all — for better and worse. -
Human relationships are entanglements, and those connections often aren't clear to us at all. When Maria Bamford impersonated her mom, she realized what she loved about her — and about herself. -
Jason Comely's fear of rejection was so strong that he'd become completely isolated. So he set out to get himself rejected at least once a day, every day. Funny thing is, it worked. -
We're all seduced by repetition, music research suggests — 90 percent of the music we listen to, we've heard before. Beyond music, this bias toward familiarity holds up in every culture. What gives?
-
Later this month, a Chicago based company called Fig will ship out a new product that it believes will help keep people motivated to meet their life goals. It's an alarm clock, but an unusual one.
-
A computer-simulated woman named Ellie is designed to talk to people who are struggling emotionally and take their measure — 30 times per second. Researchers hope their technology, which reads a person's body language and inflections, will yield diagnostic clues for clinical therapists. -
Psychologists have long known that children often model their behavior on the actions of parents or peers. But science has only recently begun to measure the influence of siblings. An older brother's or sister's behavior can be very contagious, it turns out — for good and for bad. -
Since most of the faces we encounter are emotionally ambiguous, we're forced into interpretations. And in the case of troubled teens, the perception of hostile faces all around can lead to aggressive behavior. In an experiment, researchers tried to retrain the way those kids interpreted faces.
