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The Cornell Seven, Frat Chats, and the Rape Pipeline: How Institutions Protect Men Who Harm Women Dr. Leslie Poston returns from a two-week break to work through the Cornell Seven case and what it tells us about how institutions handle men who harm women. The episode opens with the facts of the 101-page lawsuit filed September 14, including the Snapchat chat that advertised the assault to the rest...

Beyond Blame and Savior: Why Systems, Not Individuals, Drive Outcomes When something goes wrong, we look for the person who caused it. When we want something fixed, we look for the person who can save us. Host Dr. Leslie Poston breaks down why both of those instincts are the same cognitive shortcut, what they protect us from seeing, and how superhero narratives, religious traditions, and political...

War, Power, and the Psychology of Leaders: Dark Traits, Moral Disengagement, and AI-Driven Distance Dr. Leslie Poston argues that war is a predictable failure of leadership selection: the traits that help people gain power, Dark Triad and Tetrad traits like narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism, are the same traits that make leaders dangerous when it comes to decisions about confli...

Terror Management Theory, Replication, and How Science Updates What We Think We Know Dr. Leslie Poston discusses Terror Management Theory (TMT) as a framework for understanding how death anxiety shapes social and political behavior, and uses it to illustrate how science updates its conclusions as evidence changes. She contrasts open replication with cases like Dan Ariely's retracted work. She trac...

Why MBTI Took Over Corporate Culture Despite Weak Science, and What to Use Instead Dr. Leslie Poston traces how the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator became a multi-million-dollar corporate fixture despite decades of research challenging its psychometric quality, from Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers' Jung-inspired typology to its commercialization by the Myers-Briggs Company. The episode o...

Why Some People Bounce Back: Narrative Identity, Redemption Stories, and Getting Unstuck PARTICIPATE IN MY POST DOC RESEARCH! CLICK HERE . Dr. Leslie Poston explains that resilience after hard experiences often depends less on toughness or event severity and more on the narrative people construct about what happened. Drawing on 30+ years of narrative identity research from researchers like Dan McA...

Body Policing as Authoritarian Power: From Fascist Propaganda to TikTok Pipelines In Part One, we asked who gets to decide what a woman's body should look like. In Part Two, Dr. Leslie Poston follows that question into political history, tracing a line from Mussolini's propaganda offices to the fashion industry to TikTok's algorithm. The distance between fascist body archetypes and a teenage girl'...

Why Society Feels Entitled to Comment on Women’s Bodies, and the Harm It Causes Jenna Ortega sat down to talk about her career. Within a day, the internet was only talking about her body. Dr. Leslie Poston traces this pattern across decades of public scrutiny aimed at women in the spotlight, examines the psychology behind why people feel entitled to comment on women's bodies at all, and looks at w...

Be Cringe, Be Free: Authenticity, Shame, and the Cost of Performing the Self "Be cringe, be free" sounds like a joke about dancing badly in public. Dr. Leslie Poston makes the case that it's actually a question psychology has been thinking about for decades: why does being yourself in public feel so dangerous, and can dropping the performance actually change anything beyond your own life? This epi...

The Psychology Behind AI Call-Outs and False Certainty Dr. Leslie Poston examines why people react with such gleeful certainty when an AI detector flags someone's writing, even though these tools are wrong often enough to falsely implicate one in five students in a single class. The satisfaction people feel rarely tracks whether the accusation is true. It tracks something else entirely, and this e...

Algospeak and the Cost of Speaking Under Algorithmic Suppression When millions of creators have to say 'unalive' instead of suicide and use a grape emoji instead of talking about rape, something has gone wrong. In this episode, Dr. Leslie Poston discusses her dissertation research on the psychological impact of algospeak, the deliberate language modifications social media creators use to evade alg...

Education’s Value Beyond Jobs: Critical Thinking, Humanities, and the Real Jobs Crisis Host Dr. Leslie Poston argues that education’s value is not defined by whether it leads directly to a job, criticizing the “elite overproduction” framing that treats employment outcomes as the only metric and shift systemic economic failures onto individuals. She emphasizes that a good education builds durable c...

Why Love Languages Went Viral Without the Science to Support Them Millions of people can name their love language. Almost none of them know the man who invented the concept wasn't a psychologist, never ran a study, and built the whole thing from his own irritation with how his wife loaded the dishwasher. Host Leslie Poston traces "The Five Love Languages" back to its actual origins, checks Gary Ch...

Moral Panics as Effort Shields: Why Outrage Replaces Action Why do we grab onto moral panics so eagerly, and then quietly drop them the moment they stop being convenient? In this episode, host Leslie Poston, Ph. D., introduces the concept of the 'effort shield' and argues that moral panics serve a psychological function most people never examine. Drawing on Stanley Cohen's foundational work, syste...

The Semmelweis Effect, COVID Cognitive Decline, and Why Evidence Struggles to Spread Host Leslie Poston explains the Semmelweis effect (reflexively rejecting strong evidence because it threatens identity or established norms) through Ignaz Semmelweis’ 1840s discovery that chlorinated handwashing slashed childbed-fever deaths, despite fierce professional backlash and decades-long delay before adopt...

Sustained Uncertainty at Work: Why It Hurts Your Brain and What Helps Host Leslie Poston discusses sustained workplace uncertainty and its psychological effects, citing an APA Monitor on Psychology article and survey data showing widespread job insecurity, low engagement, and feelings of being replaceable or invisible—especially among workers under 25. She explains research finding peak stress at...

Bullshit Receptivity: Why We Trust the Wrong Words Host Leslie Poston discusses “bullshit receptivity,” a peer-reviewed construct describing susceptibility to impressive-sounding but meaningless language. She highlights Cornell cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell’s studies in which over 1,000 office workers rated AI-generated corporate jargon alongside real executive quotes; those most impressed...

The Credibility Trap: Why Confidence Beats Correctness Host Leslie Poston is back after a hiatus to move PsyberSpace to a new weekly Thursday schedule and explains why people often trust confident speakers over accurate ones, calling it the “credibility trap.” She outlines the confidence heuristic (certainty feels like evidence), why it works through verbal cues across all media, and how Dunning-K...

How Propaganda Uses Your Values Against Your Brain: The Passport Revocation Example Host Leslie Poston explains that no one is immune to propaganda, using her own initial approval of a proposal to revoke passports for unpaid child support as an example of how emotional framing can short-circuit deeper thinking. She argues effective propaganda relies on a grain of truth and an emotional trigger, us...

Moral Licensing: Why Doing Good Can Make Us Behave Worse Host Leslie Poston explains the phenomenon of moral licensing: after people do something that affirms their identity as a good person, the brain registers progress toward a moral goal, reducing self-regulatory effort and making later unethical choices more likely, sometimes in unrelated domains. Using a fitness “daily budget” analogy, the ep...

The Cost of Losing Serendipity in Algorithmic Discovery Host Leslie Poston discusses how algorithmic recommendation systems have replaced everyday accidental discovery, reducing serendipity and narrowing what people encounter. The episode explains psychological and neuroscience research showing novelty’s role in motivation, attention, learning, and memory (including locus coeruleus activation), th...

Semantic Derailment and the Social Permission That Sustains Organized Sexual Violence Host Leslie Poston discusses a CNN investigation into an “online rape academy,” including a Telegram group called ZZZ where nearly 1,000 men allegedly coordinated drugging and sexual assault, shared footage, discussed substances and dosages, and advertised paid live streams; while ZZZ was taken down, the U.S.-hos...

The Ethics of Reality TV: Deception, Conflict, and What We Normalize Host Leslie Poston examines the ethical and psychological costs of reality and reality-adjacent TV that relies on deception or engineered conflict, arguing the key issue is whether harm is built into a show’s format rather than whether it is scripted. Using Jury Duty as an example of compromised informed consent and Survivor as a...

AI Slop and Your Brain: Attention, Fatigue, and the Erosion of Meaning Host Leslie Poston explains how “AI slop” is industrial-scale synthetic content optimized for volume and fast reactions rather than accuracy or usefulness, ranging from keyword-stuffed articles and fake reviews to fabricated quotes, fake images, and targeted deepfake audio/video. She argues it exploits cognitive shortcuts like...

Meta Verdicts, Kids’ Harm, and the Push for Age Verification Host Leslie Poston reviews two jury verdicts finding Meta liable for harming children: a New Mexico case ordering $375 million in civil penalties for concealing knowledge about child sexual exploitation and mental health impacts, and a Los Angeles negligence case where Meta and YouTube were found liable and Kaylee was awarded $6 million...