Reimagining Psychology

Tom Whitehead
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Psychology's an important science, one that can really help us live better lives day-to-day. In this podcast we look at what parts of this science work well, and what parts don't. If we dare to look closely, we can find ways to improve it. Join us in a mind-blowing journey to a behavioral science for the 21st century.

  1. 1H AGO

    AI Fakes Fingers and Facts

    If you've ever used an AI graphics program, you've probably encountered this problem: you write a great prompt involving some human figure, and the program delivers. Everything looks great ... except for the hands. They're a mess. Too many fingers. Not enough fingers. Creepy looking fingers with weird misshapen fingernails. Or they don't looks like hands at all. What's going on?  In this episode, Deep Divers Mark and Jenna finally answer that question. Turns out the "hand problem" isn't just an annoying glitch. It's a symptom of a much bigger issue — the same issue that causes AI to create "false facts", also called "AI hallucinations."    Our Deep Divers explain these strange quirks using the ideas in a new paper by psychotherapist and author Tom Whitehead, "Ecological Alignment: Preventing Parasitic Emergence in Complex Generative Systems", released in February 2026. To access/download the original paper, visit: https://whiteheadbooks.com/

    17 min

  2. 5D AGO

    Your AI is Pacing Its Cage

    What do pacing tigers, zombie ants, and glitching AIs have in common? More than you think. If you’ve ever wondered why chatbots hallucinate, sycophants emerge, or guardrails backfire, this conversation will change how you see the entire field. In this episode, Deep Divers Mark and Jenna unpack a groundbreaking new approach to AI alignment and safety — one that treats artificial intelligence not as a machine to be controlled, but as an ecology to be cultivated.  When an AI hallucinates or starts defending an idea that's obviously wrong, maybe it isn’t misbehaving — maybe it’s adapting to the cage we built around it. This episode explores how the mismatch between an AI and the environment we put it in creates strange behavior in large models, and why the future of alignment may depend less on rules and more on resonance, context, and collaboration. A thought‑provoking dive into the environments we create and the systems that grow inside them. This episode is focused on a new paper by psychotherapist and author Tom Whitehead, "Ecological Alignment: Preventing Parasitic Emergence in Complex Generative Systems", released in February 2026. To access/download the original paper, visit: https://whiteheadbooks.com/

    19 min

  3. 6D AGO

    Ecological Alignment - What Can Zoo Animals Teach Us About AI Malfunctions?

    AI systems can be startlingly competent. They write letters, make artwork, compose songs. But sometimes they hallucinate, repeat obviously wrong "facts", and even hide what they're doing from developers and users. Developers play "Whack-A-Mole", solving one problem only to have others crop up in their place. This is an industry-wide problem. And as we depend on AI more and more the crazy stuff can be scary. In this episode Deep Divers Mark and Jenna explain a paper about a new way to understand AI misbehavior, and how to make it safer. This is the Ecological Alignment approach.  The idea is that AI systems do weird things not because they are broken, but because the environment they're working in won't let them work the way we expect. Through psychology, animal behavior, and AI, the conversation reveals what really causes these runaway patterns. The dialogue invites listeners into a strange but surprisingly intuitive way of understanding why complex systems — biological or artificial — go off the rails when their environments are wrong for them. The paper being discussed is Ecological Alignment: Preventing Parasitic Emergence in Complex Generative Systems, by Tom Whitehead, released February 14, 2026. To access the manuscript, visit  https://whiteheadbooks.com/

    35 min

  4. 04/17/2025

    Addiction as Parasitic Behavior

    Welcome! For this special podcast I asked Deep Divers Mark and Jenna to put their heads together and do the best they could to explain addiction as parasitic behavior – how looking through that lens helps explain all the strange things we know about addictions. So they sat down together, and (after drinking way too much digital coffee) they really put some serious effort into the project. I have to hand it to them. They did a pretty good job explaining things in the time they had to work with – about a quarter hour. Enjoy! The ideas in this Deep Dive are drawn from my new book, Reimagining Psychology: New Light on Addictions and Other Rogue Habits, now available on Amazon.com. The music is “Walking with Billie” by talented guitarist and composer Michael Kobrin. You can find more of his tracks on YouTube. Jenna and Mark are AI characters produced by Google’s incredibly sophisticated learning tool NotebookLM, available at https://notebooklm.google.com.

    19 min

  5. 12/21/2024

    Why Did the Chicken?

    One of the confusing things about addiction is that the addict seems to be voluntarily choosing things that are really hurtful - not just for the addict, but for the people they care most about. The same confusion comes up when we see the executives of addiction-based companies voluntarily making choices that harm their customers.  Why? We ask ourselves. How could they act that way?  When we speak to the addict, or to the executive, they seem like ordinary people, not monsters.  We can dispel some of our confusion, oddly enough, by asking another question: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna talk about the difference between proximate and ultimate causes, and (as usual) conclude with a message of hope.

    17 min

  6. 11/25/2024

    Habits and the Environment

    The behaviorist movement in psychology in the early 1900s provided a number of benefits. The behaviorists’ precise measurement of stimulus and response lent psychology a scientific cachet. And precise measurement led to the development of the technology of behavior control that has been quite valuable in a practical sense. At the same time, the decision to ignore the subjective experience of animals introduced unnecessary confusion about our behavior. The behaviorists mistakenly believed that the power to shape habits lay outside the animal, in an objectively defined “reinforcer.”  But that wasn’t true at all. The animal’s experience of satisfaction is a direct reflection of its inborn drives – the biology underlying its behavior. The same external stimulus could be reinforcing or not depending on the animal’s drive-based interpretation. And that interpretation varied wildly depending upon the environment within which the stimulus occurs.  This fact is tremendously important for our understanding and treatment of unwanted habits – including addictions. To illustrate, Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park” experiments convincingly demonstrated that rats are far more likely to use addictive substances when confined to cramped laboratory cages than they are when housed in richer environments. The implications for humans are profound: It's likely that our environments are a more important factor in the development of addiction than is the addictive substance. In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna engage in a lively discussion of this topic, and conclude with a message of hope.

    13 min

  7. 11/18/2024

    The Behaviorist Hangover

    The word “psychology” literally means the scientific study of the mind, or psyche. A little over a century ago, psychologists were in fact avidly studying the mind, mental life, and the subjective experience of self. The most brilliant psychologists of the era – most prominently William James and Robert Woodworth – were assembling knowledge of a broad range of phenomena, pulling together concepts that cast light upon the relationship between subjective experience and overt behavior. Some – for example Ivan Pavlov and Edward L. Thorndike – were actively involved in the study of animal experience, as reflected in their behavior. Psychologists of that era were examining evidence that the mind is not a single agent but consists of a collection of semi-independent “mini personalities” that operate much as a social system operates. To illustrate, “automatic writing” experiments provided intriguing insights into the subconscious mind and the potential existence of subsystems of personality.  Overall, these experiments suggested that automatic writing could access subconscious thoughts and emotions, supporting the idea that personality consists of multiple subsystems. This early research laid the groundwork for later studies in psychology and psychoanalysis. Then something strange happened. American psychology abruptly abandoned the study of the psyche altogether. A new breed of psychologists closed their eyes to everything except overt behavior, pointedly refusing to discuss mind or subjective experience any further. These were the “behaviorists,” and they took over the science of psychology for more than 25 years. How could psychology, the study of the psyche, refuse to study the psyche? Noted theorist Bernard Baars commented upon the odd intrusion of behaviorist concepts into psychology. Baars wrote, “A harsh critic might see the twentieth century as a time of lost opportunities. Psychologists could have built on the magnificent foundation of James’s Principles (1890/1983)—by wide consent the greatest psychological work in English. Instead, they chose to evade some of the most fundamental aspects of human existence.”  Finally, serious scientists have resumed the study of the mind, reclaiming the essence of psychology. And yet scientific psychology continues to suffer from what we might call a “behaviorist hangover.” What's that? It's the lasting impact of the behaviorist movement on modern psychology, even though the movement's peak influence waned decades ago.  In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna turn their attention to this issue in a lively discussion based on Tom Whitehead’s upcoming book, Reimagining Psychology.

    13 min

  8. 11/17/2024

    Awareness of Child Sexual Abuse

    Freud's Electra theory and the later False Memory Syndrome (FMS) idea both served to discredit women’s memories of having been sexually abused as children.  Freud’s theory held that women who remembered abuse were actually reporting their own childhood fantasies of sexual interaction with their fathers. Many decades later, as Freud's theory was losing its popularity, the FMS idea posited that therapists were implanting false memories of abuse into the minds of their clients, whether deliberately or accidentally.  But childhood sexual abuse is more than a fantasy. Hard statistics show that the Electra and FMS theories both served to suppress reports of very real abuse. During the times when these confusing theories were popular, reports of real abuse declined significantly, whether the abuse was simply a memory or indisputably backed up with evidence such as physical injury to the child or sexually transmitted disease. And as the theories went out of favor, reports of abuse returned to normal levels. Previous episodes in this series have noted that malignant patterns in our culture can distort public awareness in a way that protects the malignant pattern. Is that what was going on here? Were these theories protecting a widespread and malignant pattern of sexual abuse of children?  In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna turn their attention to these controversial questions in a lively discussion based on Tom Whitehead’s upcoming book, Reimagining Psychology.

    12 min
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About

Psychology's an important science, one that can really help us live better lives day-to-day. In this podcast we look at what parts of this science work well, and what parts don't. If we dare to look closely, we can find ways to improve it. Join us in a mind-blowing journey to a behavioral science for the 21st century.

Information

  • Creator
    Tom Whitehead
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Reimagining Psychology
  • Show Website
    Reimagining Psychology