Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

Most of us who use AI tools live with a quiet contradiction: the tools are genuinely useful, and using them raises real ethical problems — work that might have gone to a person, the energy and water that data centers consume, and models trained on creators' content that was never paid for. This episode of The Psych Files sits in that uncomfortable middle and asks what psychology can tell us about it, drawing on Festinger's cognitive dissonance, the trivialization research of Simon, Greenberg, and Brehm, Bandura's moral disengagement, and Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning to show how we quietly talk ourselves into staying comfortable. Along the way Michael turns the lens on himself — as someone whose own YouTube videos have been scraped to train these systems — weighs whether local AI models actually resolve any of the ethical problems, and lands on the idea that the discomfort may be worth keeping rather than rushing to explain away.

Why did more than a dozen people walk past Steven McCluskey as he lay trapped in a Boston subway escalator? On the surface it seems to refute the newest research on bystander intervention — Richard Philpot's cross-national CCTV study showing that at least one bystander helps in roughly nine out of ten public conflicts. In this episode of The Psych Files, Michael Britt explains why this tragic case doesn't contradict that finding at all. The key is ambiguity: Philpot studied public conflicts, which are loud and unmistakable, while a still figure in a transit station is exactly the ambiguous situation where the classic bystander research — John Darley and Bibb Latané's work on interpreting the emergency, pluralistic ignorance, and diffusion of responsibility — predicts that helping breaks down. Michael also unpacks why a larger crowd raises the odds of help in clear situations but can lower them in ambiguous ones, why the situational explanation is more useful than blaming bad character, and the specific, research-backed steps that make you more likely to act. A content note: this episode describes a real death. A social psychology episode for students, teachers, and anyone who has ever wondered whether they would step in.

Why would anyone step out of an airplane — and why, after a fatal accident, would they go back up the very next day? In this episode I talk through that question using a recent New York Times feature on a brutal weekend in extreme sports, paired with my own interview with Dr. Kenneth Carter of Emory University, author of Buzz. It turns out "adrenaline junkie" mostly gets it wrong. The trait at the center of this is sensation seeking, and high sensation seekers actually process risk differently — running on less of the stress hormone cortisol and more dopamine — so the moment that floods most of us with panic gives them clarity instead. I break down Marvin Zuckerman's four components of the trait, explain why it's tied to openness but surprisingly not to extraversion, share my own (low) score on Carter's scale, and land on the practical point Carter made to me: the danger usually isn't the activity itself, it's doing it impulsively — so look before you leap, especially if you're leaping off a bridge.

We hear the word "closure" everywhere — in true crime shows, in news coverage of trials, and in the well-meaning advice of friends after a loss. But where did this idea come from, and does the research actually support it? In this episode I trace the surprising history of closure, from the Gestalt psychologists of the 1920s, to Arie Kruglanski's research on the "need for cognitive closure," to its takeover by talk shows, the victims' rights movement, and even the funeral industry in the 1990s. Along the way we look at what the science really shows: the craving for answers is real and measurable, and confirming the reality of a death does help people grieve. But sociologist Nancy Berns, family therapist Pauline Boss (who coined the term "ambiguous loss"), and a striking study comparing homicide survivors in death penalty and life-sentence states all point to the same conclusion — grief doesn't have a finish line, and expecting one may do more harm than good.
And then there's my cat. After I brought one of my cats to be euthanized, several people asked whether I'd brought my other cat along "so she could have closure." That question sent me into the research on animal grief: recent studies show that surviving dogs and cats really do change their behavior after a companion dies — seeking attention, eating less, even searching the house for their missing friend. But the one study that looked directly at whether viewing the body makes a difference found no effect at all. So is pet closure real science, or are we projecting a contested human concept onto our animals? Listen in and decide — and then ask yourself who that goodbye ritual is really for.

I've worked from home for about fifteen years, and I like it. I'm a writer, I'm fine being on my own, and I've got the cats for company. But there's one thing I miss, those little water-cooler conversations with colleagues, and a new study published in the journal Science speaks to exactly that. Economist Natalia Emanuel and her colleagues at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what does remote work actually do to our mental health? The catch is that you can't ethically grab a thousand workers and order half of them to stay home for two years, so they had to get clever about how they studied it. In this episode I walk through that workaround, comparing "remotable" jobs to "non-remotable" ones, and what they found about isolation, anxiety, and well-being.
I also put my skeptic hat on, because there's a real question hiding underneath the findings. Maybe working from home makes people lonelier, or maybe people who are already a bit more solitary are the ones who gravitate toward jobs they can do alone, in which case it's personality doing the work, not the office setup. That's the self-selection problem, and it's the reason random assignment matters so much in research. Along the way we get into why losing daily human contact can affect not just your mood but your immune and cardiovascular health, why I think community theater is part of what keeps my own solitude from tipping into isolation, and what both employers and remote workers might do about all of this.