HeyJaredPsychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files
The Psych Files is a podcast for anyone interested in the topic of psychology and how ideas in this field apply to everyday life. Michael Britt brings you an upbeat, fun podcast of interest to everyone from psychology majors to those just interested in why people do what they do.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Aug 30, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest episodes
Science Corrects Itself: The Embodied Cognition Story (opens the original)
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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 e
The Secret to a Good Joke Is Silence (opens the original)
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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 cont
AI: Mixed Feelings, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves (opens the original)
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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, an
Why Nobody Pushed the Button: The Psychology Behind a Subway Tragedy (opens the original)
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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, whi
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