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Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Michael Britt
Learn how theories in psychology affect you in everyday life. Upbeat and interesting podcasts from experienced psychology teacher Michael Britt give you a bit more insight into you and your life.
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- Yesterday13 min
One Simple Habit for a Happier Marriage? Not So Fast
A new study of about 1,700 married couples found that partners who exercise together, usually by walking, tend to have stronger marriages, and the headlines quickly turned that into "one simple habit for a happier relationship." In this short episode I use that study to walk through one of the most useful ideas in all of psychology: correlation is not causation. The same finding fits three very different stories (walking improves the marriage, a good marriage is what gets couples out walking in the first place, or some third factor like shared free time, health, or less money stress drives both), and the study cannot tell them apart. I explain how researchers could actually settle it with a randomized trial, point to the real experiments from Arthur Aron's self-expansion research showing that novel, exciting shared activities can genuinely strengthen a relationship (and why a calm evening walk may not be the same thing), and leave you with two questions to ask the next time you see "one simple habit" for a better anything: compared to what, and how do they know which way the arrow points?
- 1 weeks ago22 min
I'm Not the Person I Used to Be (and Why Your Brain Wants You to Believe That)
Why do your good deeds feel like "still me" while your bad ones feel like "a different person back then"? Research from Felipe De Brigard's lab at Duke University, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and in Memory and Cognition, shows that people judge their own past lies and hurtful acts more harshly the further back they happened, and that remembering a wrong act makes you feel like you have changed, while remembering a right act makes you feel like the same person you have always been. The effect holds after controlling for how long ago the event occurred, and it disappears when people remember other people's behavior, which points to a self-protective bias rather than a general belief about change. In this episode I explain how this relates to the self-serving bias, walk through how the studies were designed, and look at the limitations. Terms and citations are on the website at thepsychfiles.online.
- 2 weeks ago24 min
You've Got Dopamine Backwards (and I Can Prove It On Piano)
What do a false ending to the Star Spangled Banner, a food delivery website where nothing ever arrives, and a monkey waiting for a squirt of juice have in common? In this episode I sit down at the piano to demonstrate the deceptive cadence, the musical trick of setting up the "home" chord and then stepping sideways instead. I use it to explain a new trend: "dopamine sites," where people order meals that never come and take smoke breaks with cigarettes that don't exist. The popular story says dopamine is the brain's pleasure chemical, released when you get the reward. The research says otherwise. I walk through Wolfram Schultz's work on reward prediction error, Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson's distinction between wanting and liking, and Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre's study showing that dopamine is released in the seconds before the musical peak that gives you chills. I also cover George Loewenstein's question about how much you'd pay to kiss a movie star (and when), and a study from Carey Morewedge and colleagues showing that imagining eating 30 M&Ms led people to eat fewer real ones. Along the way, Mr. Spock turns out to have been right about wanting and having. References and definitions of key terms are on the website.
- Aug 30, 202641 min
Science Corrects Itself: The Embodied Cognition Story
What is embodied cognition, and did it survive the replication crisis? This episode of The Psych Files examines the famous embodied cognition and social priming studies — power posing, the hot coffee study, the Macbeth effect, the facial feedback (pen-in-the-teeth) study, elderly priming, and the action-sentence compatibility effect — and the large-scale replication studies that failed to reproduce them. Learn how small samples, publication bias, researcher degrees of freedom, and experimenter expectancy effects produced findings that later evaporated, and how psychology responded with pre-registration, multi-lab replications, and adversarial collaborations like the Many Smiles project. A clear, sourced guide to the replication crisis in psychology for students, teachers, and anyone who watched the power posing TED talk and wondered what happened next.
- Aug 13, 202616 min
The Secret to a Good Joke Is Silence
This episode looks at why comic timing works, using a 2026 study from Yuxi Ma, Yongqian Peng, and colleagues at Peking University, presented at the Cognitive Science Society. The researchers analyzed 828 professional stand-up sets from Chinese comedy competitions, about 86 hours of material, and measured what actually predicted the laughs: the content of each line, or the delivery. Timing won, and not by a little. The length of a comedian's pauses and how much those pauses varied beat every content measure, and slower delivery helped rather than hurt. The reason comes down to how the brain handles expectations: a setup builds a prediction (assimilation), the punchline breaks it and forces a fast mental revision (accommodation), and the pause gives you time to encode the setup so the twist lands harder, with the payoff running partly on dopamine. The most useful finding is that top comedians stretch the pause before a big laugh far more than weaker ones do, which means timing is a trainable skill, not a mysterious gift. The practical takeaway for anyone telling a story, giving a toast, or teaching a class is simple: set your best line up clearly, then stop, and let the silence sit a beat longer than feels comfortable, because that pause is you loading the spring.
- Jul 30, 202623 min
AI: Mixed Feelings, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
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.
- Jul 6, 202614 min
Why Nobody Pushed the Button: The Psychology Behind a Subway Tragedy
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.
- Jun 26, 202610 min
Why People Step Out of the Plane — and Go Back Up the Next Day
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.
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About Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files
Learn how theories in psychology affect you in everyday life. Upbeat and interesting podcasts from experienced psychology teacher Michael Britt give you a bit more insight into you and your life.
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