Career
He is Associate Professor in Science Communication at the University of Otago, as well as a frequent contributor to Scientific American, Slate, and Das Magazin (Switzerland). His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic, and has been featured on National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Playboy Radio and elsewhere. Bering is the former director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen"s University Belfast and began his career as a psychology professor at the University of Arkansas.
After a period as a full-time writer, he took up a science communication post at the University of Otago in 2014.
Bering is notable for his frank and humorous handling of controversial issues in psychological science, especially those dealing with human sexuality. He is also a Project Partner in the Oxford University-based "Explaining Religion" project, a three-year, €2 million project funded by the European Commission.
He attended graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he earned his Master of Arts degree (1999) studying chimpanzee social cognition under the guidance of comparative psychologist Daniel J. Povinelli. He then transferred to Florida Atlantic University, where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in developmental psychology (2002).
His doctoral advisor was the evolutionary developmental psychologist David F. Bjorklund.
Bering"s formal academic research is in the area of the cognitive science of religion. In his book Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us he has expressed support for Virtuous Pedophiles, an anti-child sexual abuse group.
