Psychology
Why people do what they do. New research, old instincts, and the patterns that explain us.
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Face blindness affects millions who quietly build elaborate systems to fake recognition — memorizing voices, haircuts, and gaits. This episode follows one woman's decades of secret compensation and the moment a brain scan finally named what she'd hidden her whole life. It reveals how much of 'knowing someone' happens below conscious awareness.
In 1971, a Stanford basement became a fake prison where student guards turned cruel and prisoners broke down within days. This episode follows one participant's descent and the mounting evidence that the experiment's famous conclusions were partly staged, forcing a reckoning with what it really proved.
In 1970s Los Angeles, scientists discovered a 13-year-old girl locked in a room her whole life, unable to speak. Researchers competed to study her as a test of whether language can still be learned after childhood — and in doing so, repeated the neglect that damaged her. This is the story of Genie, and the ethical wreckage of treating a child as an experiment.
In 1518 Strasbourg, a woman began dancing in the street and within a month hundreds had joined her, some collapsing and dying from exhaustion. This episode unpacks the psychology of mass hysteria and how stress, belief, and social contagion can seize an entire community.
A woman known in science as SM has a rare condition that destroyed her amygdala, leaving her unable to experience fear — she'll pet snakes, walk through haunted houses, and stay calm at knifepoint. Her case rewrote what neuroscientists thought fear was for, until researchers found the one thing that could still terrify her. This is the story of what fear protects us from, and what happens when the alarm goes silent.
In 1975, scuba divers memorized word lists on land or beneath the sea, then tried to recall them in each setting. The results revealed that memory is secretly tethered to the place where it was formed, reshaping how we understand learning, exam performance, and even eyewitness testimony.
In 1966, researchers phoned hospital nurses posing as unknown doctors, ordering a dangerous overdose of an unfamiliar drug. Almost all of them complied, revealing how authority and hierarchy can override professional judgment and common sense.
The idea that the least competent are the most overconfident became an internet punchline. Explore what the original research actually found, the statistical debate around it, and what it really says about self-knowledge.
Why people do what they do — the research behind the instincts. The stream re-examines the famous studies (Milgram's obedience experiments, the bystander effect and the real Kitty Genovese story, Dunning-Kruger beyond the meme) and explores the forces working on you right now: variable rewards and the infinite scroll, cognitive dissonance, how memory rewrites itself every time you recall it. Old classics, new findings, and the replication crisis that sits between them.
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