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Wicked Smart w/ Lucas Bean: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Lucas Bean
Sharing insights on psychology, History, human behavior, politics, new technology and business | Author, Scientist, Podcast Host | I make videos & I try to tell good stories. lucasbean.substack.com
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- Today1 min
MAGA Cult is Over
They were sure Texas belonged to them. They were sure Ohio was safe. They were sure South Carolina, Iowa, and North Carolina would hold. They were sure that real America stood behind them, that the rallies were proof, that the energy was on their side, and that the media was lying about the polls.On Tuesday night, Democrats took the House. They took the Senate. They flipped Texas for the first time in over three decades. They flipped Ohio. They flipped South Carolina, Iowa, and North Carolina. They beat Susan Collins in Maine. Trump’s approval sat at 38%. And 89% of voters said cost of living was a major factor in their vote.MAGA didn’t just lose an election. They lost the story they’ve been telling themselves for years. The story that they were the majority. The story that the country was behind them. The story that everyone outside the rally parking lot was just afraid to say what they really thought.That story was never true. And there is research that explains exactly why they believed it.The MAGA Cult is Over. The Bias That Built the BubbleIn 1977, psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University published a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that identified one of the most powerful cognitive distortions in human psychology. He called it the false consensus effect.Ross and his colleagues David Greene and Pamela House ran four experiments with Stanford undergraduates. In the first studies, participants read short scenarios describing a conflict and were given two possible responses. They were asked to guess which option most other people would choose, to say which option they would choose, and to describe the personality traits of people who would choose the opposite.The results were consistent across every scenario. People who chose Option A believed most other people would also choose Option A. People who chose Option B believed most other people would also choose Option B. Both groups were certain that their position was the majority position. And both groups described people who chose the other option as having unusual or extreme personality traits. It wasn’t just that they overestimated agreement. They pathologized disagreement. Anyone who thought differently wasn’t just wrong. They were abnormal.In a second experiment, Ross and his colleagues took it out of the hypothetical. They asked students whether they would agree to walk around campus wearing a large sandwich board sign that read “EAT AT JOE’S.” Some agreed. Some refused. The students who agreed to wear the sign estimated that about 62% of other people would also agree. The students who refused estimated that about 67% of other people would also refuse. Both groups believed they represented the majority. Both were wrong.The false consensus effect is not about stupidity. It is about exposure. People form their estimate of what “most people think” based on the people they spend time with. If your friends all think the same way, your coworkers all think the same way, your news sources all say the same thing, and your social media feeds all confirm the same beliefs, your brain takes that sample and projects it onto the entire population. You aren’t lying when you say “most people agree with me.” You genuinely believe it. Because every signal in your environment is telling you it’s true.Why MAGA Couldn’t See It ComingThe false consensus effect operates in any closed information environment. But MAGA built the most airtight consensus bubble in modern American political history.Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio, Truth Social, Telegram channels, church groups, rally circuits, Facebook algorithms tuned to engagement. Every input in the system confirmed the same reality: America is with us. The media is lying. The polls are rigged. The silent majority is real. When everyone you talk to agrees with you, and the only people who disagree are people you’ve already been told to distrust, the false consensus isn’t just a bias. It becomes the only reality available.Ross’s original research found that the false consensus effect was strongest when the issue was personally important to the person. The more someone cared about a belief, the more certain they were that most people shared it. For MAGA, the beliefs aren’t just opinions. They are identity. Challenging the idea that most Americans support Trump isn’t a factual correction. It is an existential threat. Their sense of self depends on being the majority. Being the minority means they are the fringe. And the fringe doesn’t get to call itself a movement. It’s just a crowd.Tuesday night wasn’t just a political defeat. It was the collapse of a consensus that never existed. The “silent majority” turned out to be a loud minority that had been talking only to itself for years. And when the rest of the country finally answered, the answer
- Yesterday2 min
Why MAGA Loves Hurting Experts: Why We Vote
Somewhere in America right now, a man with a badge and a flashlight is making someone walk a straight line on the side of the road. The driver isn’t drunk. The cop knows the driver isn’t drunk. But the cop has the authority to make it happen, and the driver doesn’t have the authority to refuse. So the driver walks the line, touches his nose, stands on one foot in front of passing traffic, and hopes the man with the badge gets bored before things get worse.That interaction has nothing to do with public safety. It is a man who barely passed an exam using the one piece of authority he has in this world to humiliate a stranger who drives a nicer car. It is not a failure of the system. For certain people, it is the entire point of having the badge.In 1994, researcher Blake Ashforth at Concordia University in Montreal published a study in Human Relations that gave this behavior a clinical name. He called it petty tyranny: the tendency to lord one’s power over others.Ashforth wasn’t studying dictators or heads of state. He was studying middle managers, supervisors, small-authority figures in ordinary organizations. People with limited power over a limited number of people. His research identified six specific behaviors that defined the petty tyrant: arbitrariness and self-aggrandizement, belittling subordinates, lack of consideration for others, a forcing style of conflict resolution, discouraging initiative, and the non-contingent use of punishment. In plain language: making up rules as you go, humiliating the people underneath you, refusing to listen, crushing anyone who tries to solve a problem on their own, and punishing people not because they did something wrong but because it feels good.Ashforth’s model proposed that petty tyranny isn’t about having too much power. It is about the collision between a small amount of power and a specific kind of person. The key variable is the leader’s beliefs about themselves. People with low self-esteem find the seductive qualities of power especially attractive. They feel less constrained from using power in socially harmful ways. The badge, the title, the corner of authority they’ve been given becomes the only domain in their life where they matter. And so they squeeze every drop of control out of it, because everywhere else they are nobody.The Vicious CircleWhat made Ashforth’s 1994 model especially useful was his identification of a feedback loop. Petty tyranny doesn’t just damage subordinates. It sustains itself.When a petty tyrant belittles someone, the subordinate’s self-esteem drops. Their performance declines. Their initiative disappears. They stop pushing back. They stop offering ideas. They become passive. And the petty tyrant interprets that passivity as evidence that the subordinates are incompetent and need more control. So the tyranny increases. The subordinates become more helpless. The tyrant becomes more convinced that force is necessary. The cycle doesn’t correct itself because the tyrant is getting exactly what they want: a room full of people who are afraid to challenge them.In a 1997 follow-up study at Arizona State University, Ashforth tested this model empirically with 63 sets of managers and subordinates. The results confirmed the pattern. Petty tyranny caused low self-esteem, poor performance, reduced cohesiveness within work teams, high frustration, stress, helplessness, and work alienation among the people being managed. The subordinates didn’t perform badly because they were bad workers. They performed badly because the management style was designed to crush them.Ashforth also connected petty tyranny to the broader literature on the authoritarian personality. The petty tyrant shares psychological DNA with the authoritarian follower identified by researchers going back to the 1950s. The same insecurity, the same need for rigid control, the same intolerance for ambiguity, the same compulsion to punish anyone who questions the hierarchy. The only difference is scale. The authoritarian personality in a position of national power produces fascism. The authoritarian personality in a position of minor power produces the petty tyrant.The Appeal of Unearned AuthorityThe standard theory of political leadership assumes that people want qualified leaders. Voters evaluate candidates on competence, experience, policy knowledge, and temperament. The most prepared candidate wins because the electorate is rational enough to recognize who is best suited for the job.Ashforth’s research destroys that assumption for a significant portion of the electorate. If petty tyranny is driven by low self-esteem, and if people with low self-esteem find the seductive qualities of power particularly attractive, then there is a large population of voters who don’t want a qualified president at all. A qualified presid
- 2 days ago2 min
MAGA Hates Thinking: It Hurts Their Head
Most people hear a claim and do something with it. They weigh it. They compare it to what they already know. They ask themselves whether it sounds right. That process happens automatically. It doesn’t require effort or education. It’s just what a working brain does when it encounters new information.But not everyone’s brain works that way. Some people hear a claim and have no internal process for evaluating it. Nothing fires. No comparison. No filter. The information just sits there, unprocessed, until someone they trust tells them whether to believe it or not.In 1962, psychologist Herman Witkin at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, published Psychological Differentiation, the result of nearly two decades of research into how people perceive and process information. He called the concept field dependence.Witkin didn’t start with politics or persuasion. He started with a dark room, a glowing rod, and a tilted frame.Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The ExperimentIn the late 1940s, Witkin and his colleague Solomon Asch built a device called the Rod and Frame Test. The setup was simple. A person sat in a completely dark room. In front of them was a glowing square frame that could be tilted to the left or right. Inside the frame was a glowing rod, also tilted. The person’s only job was to adjust the rod so it was perfectly vertical.Here is where it got interesting.Some people ignored the tilted frame entirely. They used their own sense of gravity and balance to set the rod straight. The frame could be tilted at any angle and it didn’t matter. Their internal reference point worked on its own.Other people couldn’t do it. When the frame was tilted, they tilted the rod with it. Their brain treated the frame as reality. Whatever the surrounding environment told them was true, that became their truth. They couldn’t separate the rod from the frame. They couldn’t separate a single piece of information from everything around it.Witkin called the first group field independent. They could pull a signal out of the noise. They could evaluate a single piece of information without being distorted by its surroundings.He called the second group field dependent. They couldn’t separate information from its context. Their perception of reality was determined by the field around them.Beyond PerceptionWhat made Witkin’s work important wasn’t just the rod test. It was what came after. He developed a second test called the Embedded Figures Test, where participants had to find a simple shape hidden inside a complex pattern. Field-independent people found it quickly. Field-dependent people struggled because the surrounding pattern overwhelmed the target.But Witkin wasn’t just studying visual perception. He was studying something much deeper. Over the next two decades, his research demonstrated that field dependence wasn’t limited to how people see lines and shapes. It extended into how people process information, form judgments, and navigate social situations.Field-dependent people didn’t just lean on visual context. They leaned on social context. They were more likely to adopt the opinions of people around them. They were more influenced by authority figures. They were more compliant in group settings.In 1969, researchers tested Witkin’s prediction directly. They paired field-dependent and field-independent participants and asked them to work together on the rod test. Every single time, the field-dependent person shifted toward the field-independent person’s answer. Not the other way around. The field-dependent participants conformed to whoever was more certain, even when that person was wrong.In 1963, researcher Sue LeFebvre Nordquist at Texas Christian University tested the connection between field dependence and three types of conformity: peer conformity, authoritarian conformity, and religious conformity. For both men and women, field dependence correlated with religious conformity at a statistically significant level. The same pattern showed up for conformity to authority figures. People who couldn’t separate the rod from the frame also couldn’t separate their own beliefs from the beliefs of whatever authority was standing in front of them.Where It Comes FromWitkin didn’t stop at describing the pattern. He wanted to know what built it.In 1965, researchers Ruth Dyk and Herman Witkin published a study on family experiences and cognitive differentiation in children. They identified what they called a “socialization cluster” of parenting behaviors that predicted field dependence. Parents who exercised strict, dominant control over their children produced children who
- 3 days ago10 min
The Fall of the Far Right and MAGA Cult
In April 2026, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after 16 years. On October 25, students in Serbia toppled Aleksandar Vučić. On the same day, Lula beat Bolsonaro in Brazil. Within a single month, three far-right leaders on three continents were finished.This feels like a wave. But it is not a wave. It is a pattern. And the pattern has been studied for decades.The far right has a structural problem. Not a messaging problem. Not a branding problem. A design problem. The way authoritarian movements are built is the reason they always break. The very mechanics that make them powerful in the short term are the same mechanics that guarantee their collapse. Five distinct lines of research explain why.The Illusion of SupportEvery authoritarian leader believes they are more popular than they are. This is not arrogance. It is a structural blindness built into the system they created.In 1995, political economist Timur Kuran at Duke University published Private Truths, Public Lies, a book-length study of what he called preference falsification. The concept is simple: people misrepresent their real opinions when they believe the social cost of honesty is too high. They tell pollsters what feels safe. They tell neighbors what won’t start a fight. They perform loyalty in public while holding the opposite position in private.Kuran’s insight was that preference falsification doesn’t just affect individual behavior. It distorts entire information systems. When everyone is lying about what they believe, nobody can accurately assess how much real support a leader has. The leader included. The regime’s own intelligence apparatus feeds on the same contaminated data. Advisors tell the leader what he wants to hear because the system punishes honesty. And so the leader builds strategy on numbers that don’t exist.What makes this so dangerous for authoritarian systems is the cascade effect. Kuran showed that when one crack appears, when one visible defection signals that dissent is safe, it doesn’t produce a gradual shift. It produces a collapse. The opposition doesn’t need to be built. It was always there. It just needed permission to become visible.This is what happened in East Germany in 1989. The Stasi had files on millions of citizens. They monitored churches, workplaces, neighborhoods. And they could not see that the entire population was ready to walk. Because the monitoring itself was what kept people performing loyalty. The moment the Berlin Wall opened, the performance stopped and the regime was finished within weeks. Not because the opposition grew. Because the opposition was revealed.Kuran’s framework explains why authoritarian collapses always seem sudden. From the outside, they look like overnight revolutions. From the inside, they were decades in the making. The support was falsified from the beginning. Nobody could see it because the system was specifically designed to prevent anyone from seeing it.Orbán governed Hungary for 16 years with what looked like an iron grip. His Fidesz party controlled the courts, the media, the election apparatus. And when a credible challenger finally gave voters a real option, the country voted him out by a margin that shocked every analyst in Europe. The support had been performance. The opposition had been waiting.The Engine of ResistanceAuthoritarian leaders have one tool. Force. They restrict speech. They arrest protesters. They shut down media. And every time they use that tool, they create the exact thing they were trying to destroy.In 1966, psychologist Jack Brehm at Duke University published A Theory of Psychological Reactance. His core finding was that when a person perceives a threat to their freedom, they don’t just want that freedom back. They want it more intensely than they did before the threat. The act of restricting a behavior makes that behavior more desirable, not less.Brehm tested this with experiments as simple as giving children a choice of candy bars and then taking one option away. The removed candy bar immediately became the one they wanted most. It wasn’t about the candy. It was about the restriction. The human brain treats a loss of freedom as an attack, and the automatic response is to fight harder for the thing that was taken.What Brehm described in a lab, authoritarian movements produce at scale. Every censored journalist creates a hundred people who want to read what was censored. Every arrested protester makes the people who stayed home feel like cowards for not showing up. Every banned organization becomes more attractive than it was when it was legal.In Serbia, Vučić controlled every major television station. He sent police to beat students. He arrested organizers. And those students did not stop. They turned a protest into a political party and won a parliamentary majority. Four
- 4 days ago0 min
A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy
A skateboarder went to France during the riots.Not to document the uprising, not to support the protesters and definitely not to understand why people were in the streets fighting for their rights. He went to make a skate video. He skated through burning streets and clashing crowds, filmed himself doing tricks against a backdrop of civil unrest, and posted it for likes. He laughs as he runs from street to street trying to avoid the violence. The apathy is so obvious and ugly it hurts me to watch it. This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pattern. And the psychology behind it explains something much larger than one skateboarder with a camera.The empathy collapse is measurable.In 2010, researcher Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan published a meta-analysis of 72 studies spanning 30 years, covering nearly 14,000 American college students. Her finding was stunning and precise. Empathy among young adults had dropped 40 percent compared to their counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s. The largest decline occurred after the year 2000, exactly when social media began reorganizing how young people relate to each other and the world.Konrath measured two specific dimensions. The first was empathic concern, the ability to feel tenderness and concern for people less fortunate. The second was perspective-taking, the ability to imagine how things look from someone else’s point of view. Both declined sharply. Students were less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”That 40 percent decline isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between seeing a riot and feeling something about the people in it, and seeing a riot and thinking about what it would look like as a background for your skate video. The empathy that would make someone stop and say “this isn’t about me” has been measurably and empirically reduced. And the generation most affected is the one that grew up performing their lives for cameras.How social media turned empathy into a liability.Empathy requires one specific cognitive act: the temporary suspension of self-focus. To feel what someone else is feeling, you have to stop thinking about yourself long enough to think about them. Social media trains the exact opposite. Every platform is built around one question: how do I present myself? What do I post? How will this make me look? How many people will engage with my content?Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, spent two decades tracking this shift. Her research, conducted with Keith Campbell and published across multiple studies, showed that narcissistic traits among college students rose steadily from the late 1970s through the 2000s. Two-thirds of contemporary students scored above the narcissistic average of students tested in the early 1980s. Twenge and Campbell published their findings in the book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, arguing that American culture had created a self-reinforcing system where self-promotion was rewarded, self-absorption was normalized, and self-focus became the default mode of existence.Social media didn’t create narcissism. But it created an economy that runs on it. Every like, every comment, every share, every follow is a unit of attention converted into a unit of perceived self-worth. And the platforms are designed, deliberately and with billions of dollars of engineering, to make that feedback loop as addictive as possible. Variable reinforcement, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive, powers every notification. You don’t know when the next burst of attention is coming, so you keep posting. You keep performing. And the performance becomes the only thing that feels real.This is how a person skates through a riot and feels nothing about the riot. The riot is not a human event to him. It is content. It is background. It is production value. And the only feelings that register are the ones connected to the performance: will this get views? Will this go viral? Will this make me famous?Ethical fading: when the moral dimension disappears.In 2004, researcher Ann Tenbrunsel at the University of Notre Dame published a paper that identified a cognitive process she called ethical fading. Tenbrunsel found that people frequently make unethical decisions not because they consciously decide to do something wrong, but because the ethical dimension of the decision literally disappears from their awareness. When people focus heavily on some other aspect of a decision, such as winning, profit, or in this case, content, they stop seeing the ethical issue at all.Ethical fading is different fr
- 5 days ago1 min
Why MAGA Wants a Dictator
In this week’s video, I talked about Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism and how people who score high on his scale grew up in households that trained them to see the world as dangerous. The video covers the basics. This piece goes deeper into the research, because the science behind the authoritarian brain is one of the most well-documented findings in all of political psychology. And it explains nearly everything about what we are watching right now.The researcherIn 1981, psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba published Right-Wing Authoritarianism, a book that refined decades of earlier work on the authoritarian personality. The original research started back in the 1950s at UC Berkeley, where a team of researchers created what they called the F-scale (F for fascism) to try to measure the kind of personality that goes along with authoritarian movements. That scale had serious problems. It was unbalanced, poorly validated, and easy to game. Altemeyer spent over a decade fixing it.What he built in its place was the RWA scale. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. He tested it across thousands of participants over the course of his career, from college students to sitting legislators. And it worked. It predicted behavior, attitudes, and political alignment with a consistency that surprised even other researchers.A note on the name. “Right-wing” in this context doesn’t mean Republican or conservative in the American political sense. Altemeyer used “right-wing” to describe submission to established authority, as opposed to left-wing authoritarianism, which is submission to authorities trying to overthrow the establishment. In practice, though, the political conservatives in North America consistently scored higher on his scale. That finding held up for decades.The three clustersAltemeyer didn’t find one trait. He found three. And they always showed up together. He called them the three attitudinal clusters of right-wing authoritarianism.The first is authoritarian submission. This is a reflexive willingness to obey whatever authority figure a person sees as legitimate. Not thoughtful agreement. Not carefully evaluated trust. Uncritical, automatic compliance. The kind of obedience that doesn’t ask questions because questions themselves feel like betrayal.The second is authoritarian aggression. This is hostility directed at whoever the authority figure identifies as a target. It doesn’t come from personal experience with the target. It comes from the authority’s say-so. If the leader says immigrants are the problem, immigrants become the enemy. If the leader says it’s the media or the schools or the trans community, the aggression shifts instantly. The aggression isn’t principled. It’s outsourced.The third is conventionalism. This is a rigid attachment to traditional social norms and a belief that everyone else should be forced to follow them too. Not a personal preference for tradition. A demand that it be imposed. In parenting, high-RWA individuals value obedience, neatness, and good manners in children above curiosity, independence, or creativity.These three traits don’t just correlate with each other. They predict prejudice, intolerance, and support for anti-democratic policies. Altemeyer spent his career documenting exactly how.The engine underneathIn his later research, Altemeyer identified three personality traits sitting underneath those three attitudinal clusters. They are the engine that makes the whole system run.The first is self-righteousness. High-RWA individuals believe they are morally superior to others. Not in a quiet, internal way. In a way that gives them permission to punish. They see themselves as the last decent people in a world that has gone to rot, and that belief is what licenses the aggression.The second is fear of a dangerous world. This is the one I focused on in the video, because it is the fuel supply. High-RWA scorers genuinely believe the world is a more dangerous place than it actually is. They walk through life with an elevated threat response. New people, new ideas, new norms all feel like incoming danger. Not because they’ve evaluated any of it. Because their baseline fear is already running so high that anything unfamiliar registers as a threat.The third is mean-spiritedness. This one is uncomfortable, but it showed up in the data over and over. People who score high on RWA are more willing to inflict harm on others when they believe authority approves of it. They are less empathetic toward out-group members. They report more willingness to punish people who violate norms, even when the punishment is clearly disproportionate.Self-righteousness gives them permission. Fear gives them a target. Mean-spiritedness gives them enthusiasm.Fear is
- 6 days ago0 min
MAGA is Obsessed with Other Men
This week, Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in North Carolina and told the crowd he’d been studying Jon Husted’s body. He described the senator’s backside as “like a pile of muscle.” He went through his shoulders, his jawline, his legs, his hands. He said tapping Husted’s shoulder actually hurt his hand. A few days before that, at a rally in Kentucky, he told the audience he’d “examined his ass.” At another rally in Georgia, he spent time comparing how attractive one male candidate was compared to another. This has been happening at rally after rally all month. The New York Times called his fixation on male bodies “puzzling.” Anderson Cooper aired a montage of all of it back to back. Seth Meyers looked into the camera and asked him directly, “Why are you so weird?”And not a single Republican said a word about any of it.In 1996, psychologist Henry Adams at the University of Georgia designed one of the most uncomfortable experiments in the history of psychology. He recruited 64 men who all described themselves as exclusively heterosexual, meaning they reported no homosexual arousal and no homosexual experiences. He then divided them into two groups based on their scores on a standardized homophobia scale. One group scored high in homophobia. The other scored low. Then he showed both groups three types of sexually explicit videos: heterosexual, lesbian, and gay male.He measured their physical arousal using a penile plethysmograph, a device that measures changes in penile circumference with clinical precision. There was no ambiguity in the data. There was no room for interpretation. The device measured what the body did regardless of what the mouth said.Both groups responded similarly to the heterosexual and lesbian content. The difference showed up only when the gay male content played. In the non-homophobic group, 66% showed no measurable arousal to the gay male video, and less than 25% showed a significant physical response. In the homophobic group, those numbers flipped. Over 54% of the men who scored highest on the homophobia scale showed a significant physical response to the gay male content. Only 20% of the homophobic men showed no arousal at all.And here’s the part that makes the study devastating: when the men were asked afterward to rate how aroused they felt during each video, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their arousal to the gay male content. Their bodies responded. Their conscious minds denied it. The data didn’t care.Adams published his findings in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, one of the most respected journals in the field, under the title “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” The answer, according to the plethysmograph, was yes.The defense mechanism that explains everythingThe concept that explains Adams’ findings is not new. It was first described by Anna Freud in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. She called it reaction formation, and it works like this: when a person experiences a feeling or impulse that produces intense anxiety or shame, they don’t just suppress it. They attack the opposite. They become the loudest, most aggressive opponent of the very thing they feel inside themselves.Reaction formation is not the same as simple disagreement or discomfort. The hallmark of reaction formation is disproportionate intensity. A person who is simply not attracted to the same sex doesn’t spend their career crusading against it. They don’t draft legislation about it. They don’t bring it up in every speech. They don’t think about it at all, because there is nothing to defend against. Reaction formation reveals itself through obsession. The volume of the outrage is the tell.What makes reaction formation so effective as a disguise is that it looks like conviction. It looks like moral clarity. The person performing it often doesn’t know they’re doing it. The defense mechanism works precisely because it operates below conscious awareness. The man who stands at a podium and delivers a passionate speech about the threat of homosexuality to the American family may genuinely believe every word he’s saying. His body, as Adams demonstrated, may be telling a completely different story.The study that connected it to childhoodAdams’ 1996 study established the physical link between homophobia and homosexual arousal. Sixteen years later, a team of researchers led by Netta Weinstein at the University of Essex and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester went deeper and asked a follow-up question that Adams never addressed: where does this internal conflict come from?In 2012, Weinstein, Ryan, and their colleagues published a series of six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most rigorous journals in the field. They recruited 784 college students across the United States and
- 1 weeks ago9 min
The Psychology of Halloween
I needed a short break from politics, so I researched and made this video instead. I hope you like it. Back to politics tomorrow. Almost everyone has some degree of morbid curiosity, and most people don’t want to admit it. We slow down at car accidents. We binge true crime podcasts. We watch horror movies that we know will keep us up at night. And every October, we turn an entire holiday into a celebration of death, fear, and disguise. The question isn’t whether we’re drawn to dark things. The question is why.In 2021, behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago published a paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences that introduced the first psychometric tool for measuring this trait. He called it the Morbid Curiosity Scale, a 24-item assessment designed to measure how drawn a person is to information about things that are dangerous, threatening, or related to death.What Scrivner found is that morbid curiosity isn’t rare, and it isn’t a disorder. It’s a normally distributed psychological trait, which means most people fall somewhere in the middle. Almost everyone has some degree of it. The people who binge true crime podcasts, slow down to look at car accidents, and watch horror movies on purpose aren’t broken. They’re normal. And Scrivner’s research suggests there’s an evolutionary reason for that.Scrivner identified four dimensions of morbid curiosity: curiosity about the minds of dangerous people, curiosity about the supernatural, curiosity about body violation, and curiosity about violence. Each one maps onto a category of threat that would have mattered to our ancestors. Paying attention to predators, understanding what dangerous people might do next, and learning about physical harm without having to experience it firsthand would have given early humans an advantage. The people who paid attention to threats survived. The ones who looked away didn’t. Morbid curiosity is leftover survival wiring that most of us still carry.Halloween activates every single one of those dimensions at once. Monsters and ghosts hit the supernatural dimension. Gore and horror movies hit body violation. Scary costumes and jump scares hit violence. Haunted houses are designed to trigger all four. The reason millions of people line up to experience it every October is that the brain is already wired to seek it out. Halloween didn’t create our fascination with death. It just gave it a date on the calendar.Halloween vs. Día de los MuertosOne of the most revealing things about Halloween is what it looks like when you put it next to another culture’s version of the same thing.Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is celebrated in Mexico on November 1st and 2nd, just one day after Halloween. Both holidays exist at the same time of year. Both are built around death. Both involve costumes, decorations, and gatherings. And they solve the exact same problem in completely opposite ways.Halloween was born from fear. The Celts believed the dead were dangerous. They lit fires to keep the darkness back. They wore disguises so the spirits wouldn’t recognize them. They sacrificed animals hoping their gods would protect them through the winter. The entire structure of Samhain was built on the idea that the dead were a threat and the living needed to defend themselves.Día de los Muertos was born from love. Its roots trace back to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, including the Aztecs and Maya, who viewed death not as an ending but as a continuation. When the Spanish arrived and brought Catholicism, those indigenous traditions blended with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day into what the holiday is today. Families build altars called ofrendas and decorate them with marigolds, candles, food, and photographs of the people they’ve lost. They visit cemeteries, clean the graves, and sit with their dead. They tell stories about them. They cook their favorite meals. Sugar skulls and painted skeleton faces aren’t meant to frighten anyone. They’re meant to normalize death and celebrate the people who lived.Halloween hides from the dead. Día de los Muertos sits down to dinner with them.Both holidays are doing the same psychological work. They’re giving people a structured way to process the reality that everyone they love, and they themselves, will die. The difference is in the approach. Western cultures, and the Celtic tradition that became Halloween, tend to treat death as the enemy. Something to ward off, distract yourself from, and avoid thinking about for as long as possible. Mesoamerican cultures, and the traditions that became Día de los Muertos, tend to treat death as part of the family. Something to acknowledge, accept, and carry with you.Neither approach is wrong. But the contrast is striking. One culture builds a holiday around running from death. The other builds a holiday around sitti
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