The Lucas Bean Show

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

  1. 5h ago

    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 Bubble In 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 Coming The 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 was overwhelming. The Personality Attribution Problem One of the most revealing findings in Ross’s 1977 research wasn’t about how people estimate consensus. It was about what they concluded about the people who disagreed with them. Participants who chose one option didn’t just assume most people agreed. They made extreme personality judgments about the people who chose differently. They didn’t say “those people see things differently.” They said “those people are the kind of people who would do that.” The disagreement became a character diagnosis. The other side wasn’t just wrong. They were fundamentally different kinds of people. This is the core mechanic of MAGA’s relationship with the rest of America. Liberals aren’t people with a different policy preference. They are evil. They are groomers. They are pedophiles. They hate America. They want to destroy the country. The personality attributions are extreme precisely because the false consensus is so total. If you are certain that everyone agrees with you, then the people who visibly don’t must have something deeply wrong with them. Normal people don’t disagree with the majority. So anyone who disagrees isn’t normal. This is why MAGA could not process what happened on Tuesday night. A real majority just showed up and voted, in numbers that can’t be explained away by fraud, by media manipulation, or by ballot harvesting conspiracy theories. The country spoke clearly. And MAGA has no framework for understanding a country that disagrees with them this completely, because for years, every voice they listened to told them the opposite was true. What Consensus Actually Looks Like MAGA confused volume for consensus. They confused rally attendance for popular support. They confused algorithm-boosted engagement for real-world agreement. They built a closed information system so effective at reinforcing their beliefs that they genuinely believed they represented the country. They didn’t. They represented a parking lot. And on Tuesday night, the rest of the country drove past. The false consensus effect isn’t permanent. It breaks when the person encounters undeniable evidence that their estimate was wrong. An election is that evidence. The numbers are public. The seats have flipped. The map has changed color. The math cannot be argued with. For some MAGA supporters, Tuesday will begin the slow, painful process of realizing they were never the majority. That the people around them were a bubble, not a sample. That the country they claimed to speak for was speaking for itself all along and saying something completely different. For others, the false consensus will simply rebuild itself. The election was stolen. The votes were fake. The machines were rigged. The deep state interfered. Because admitting that you are the minority, that the country rejected you, that the majority thinks you are the problem, requires a level of self-awareness that the false consensus effect was specifically designed to prevent. But the results are the results. Democrats hold the House. Democrats hold the Senate. Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, Iowa, North Carolina, Maine. State after state after state, t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  2. 1d ago

    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 Circle What 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 Authority The 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 president reminds them of every boss who knew more than they did, every teacher who corrected them, every expert who made them feel small. A qualified president is a mirror that reflects their own inadequacy. An unqualified president does the opposite. An unqualified man exercising authority over the most qualified people in the country is the fantasy of every person who has spent their life resenting the people who were better than them. Trump doesn’t govern. He lords. He humiliates generals on television. He fires scientists for contradicting him. He calls federal judges names. He punishes career professionals for doing their jobs correctly. That isn’t a failure of governance. For his supporters, it is the entire product. The DUI stop analogy isn’t a metaphor. It is a structural description of what MAGA voters are paying for. They are watching a man who went bankrupt six times boss around people who spent decades earning their seats. And they love it for the same reason the insecure cop loves making the sober driver touch his nose. Because for a few minutes, the hierarchy is inverted. The person who never earned anything gets to humiliate the person who earned everything. And that inversion is the most satisfying feeling available to someone whose self-concept depends on dragging other people down. Why They Pick Losers Ashforth identified that petty tyrants tend to take credit for other people’s work, punish questions, change rules whenever they feel like it, and surround themselves with people who won’t challenge them. Every one of those behaviors maps directly onto the Trump administration. Credit for economic trends he inherited. Punishment for whistleblowers who told the truth. Executive orders that change direction weekly. A cabinet selected entirely for loyalty rather than competence. But the deeper connection is in what Ashforth found about the subordinates. In a petty tyranny system, the people underneath the tyrant stop functioning independently. They lose initiative. They stop taking risks. They become dependent on the tyrant for direction, approval, and identity. The system produces helplessness by design. That is the MAGA voter. Not a citizen evaluating policy. A subordinate in a petty tyranny system who has stopped functioning independently. They don’t evaluate whether Trump’s decisions help them. They watch whether Trump hurts the people they resent. As long as the generals are being humiliated, as long as the scientists are being fired, as long as the judges are being called names, the system is working. The product isn’t governance. The product is the pleasure of watching qualified people get punished by an unqualified man. This is why facts don’t penetrate. You are not arguing with a person who chose a leader based on qualifications. You are arguing with a person who chose a leader specifically because he lacks qualifications. The incompetence is the feature. It tells every insecure person in the audience that you don’t need to know anything, accomplish anything, or earn anything to hold power over the people who did. The Scale of the Problem Ashforth studied petty tyranny in organizations. An office. A… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  3. 2d ago

    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 Experiment In 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 Perception What 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 From Witkin 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 tested as more field dependent. Parents who punished curiosity, demanded obedience, and discouraged independent decision-making raised children who could not evaluate information on their own. Parents who did the opposite, who encouraged questions, allowed autonomy, and tolerated disagreement, produced field-independent children. In 1977, Witkin and his colleague Donald Goodenough published a comprehensive review of the research. Their conclusion was direct: the development of field independence is enhanced by child-rearing practices that encourage separation from parental authority and by social structures that permit individual autonomy. Tight social structures that demand conformity produce field-dependent people. Loose structures that reward independence produce field-independent people. In 1974, Witkin led a cross-cultural study across three countries: Holland, Italy, and Mexico. In each country, two villages were selected. One village stressed conformity to family, religious, and political authority. The other did not. In every single comparison, children from the conformity-heavy village scored as more field dependent and showed less differentiated cognitive functioning than children from the village that allowed autonomy. The pattern held across every country and every age group tested. It wasn’t cultural. It wasn’t genetic. It was environmental. The degree to which a community demanded obedience directly predicted the degree to which its children grew up unable to think for themselves. What This Means for Persuasion In 1983, researchers studied how field dependence affected responses to persuasion. They gave field-dependent and field-independent participants speeches that were either well-argued or poorly argued, delivered by sources with either high or low credibility. Field-independent participants evaluated the arguments on their merits regardless of who delivered them. If the argument was weak, they rejected it, even from a credible source. Field-dependent participants responded differently. They only distinguished between strong and weak arguments when the source was highly credible. When a trusted authority delivered a weak argument, they accepted it. The quality of the evidence didn’t matter. What mattered was who said it. This is the cognitive profile of a Fox News viewer. This is the cognitive profile of a person who believes something because Trump said it. The argument doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t even need to make sense. It just needs to come from the right mouth. The Assembly Line What Witkin’s research describes isn’t a political phenomenon. It is a developmental one. Millions of American adults were raised in homes where obedience was the highest value and questioning authority was punished. Evangelical households. Military households. Strict traditional households where children were told what to believe and never taught how to evaluate whether those beliefs were true. Those children grew into adults with no internal mechanism for processing information independently. They can hear a claim, but they can’t weigh it. They can repeat an argument, but they can’t evaluate whether the argument holds up. They need someone to tell them what’s true the same way they needed the… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  4. 3d ago

    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 Support Every 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 Resistance Authoritarian 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. Fourteen years of suppression didn’t weaken the resistance. It was the fuel. This is the paradox that every authoritarian leader fails to understand. They believe force works because it produces immediate compliance. And it does. In the short term. But compliance is not the same as submission. Reactance operates underneath compliance like pressure building behind a dam. The longer the suppression continues, the more powerful the eventual break. Brehm and his wife Sharon expanded the theory in 1981, showing that reactance is not a personality trait. It is a universal motivational state. Anyone, in any culture, under any political system, experiences it when their freedom is threatened. Which means that every authoritarian regime in history has been generating resistance in the people it was trying to control, whether those people showed it or not. The Governance Trap Authoritarian movements are not designed to govern. They are designed to distribute resources to the people who keep the leader in power. The public is not part of that arrangement. In 2011, political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita at New York University published The Dictator’s Handbook with his colleague Alastair Smith. Their framework, called selectorate theory, explains why authoritarian systems always fail at governing, and why that failure is a feature, not a bug. Every political system has three groups. The selectorate is everyone with some theoretical say in who leads. The winning coalition is the smaller group whose support the leader actually needs to stay in power. And the leader’s job, in Bueno de Mesquita’s framework, is to keep the winning coalition happy at the expense of everyone else. In a democracy, the winning coalition is large. Millions of voters. So leaders have to provide public goods. Roads, schools, hospitals, functioning courts. Things that benefit large numbers of people. Because if they don’t, the coalition replaces them at the next election. In an authoritarian system, the winning coalition is tiny. A handful of generals, oligarchs, media owners, and loyalists. The leader doesn’t need to build roads. He needs to keep those few people rich and protected. Public goods become a waste of resources that could be going to the coalition. So services decline. Infrastructure rots. Prices rise. Promises break. And the leader stays in power because the ten people who matter are still getting paid. The problem is that this arrangement is visible. Citizens can see the inner circle getting richer. They can see the leader’s allies buying properties and flying private while wages stagnate and grocery prices climb. The performance of populism collides with the reality of corruption, and over time, the gap becomes impossible to ignore. Bueno de Mesquita showed that this is not a moral failure. It is a logical outcome. Leaders in small-coalition systems are not behaving irrationally when they loot the state. They are following the only strategy that keeps them alive. A dictator who starts spending on public goods at the expense of his coalition gets replaced by someone who won’t. The system selects for corruption the same way evolution selects for survival trait… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  5. 4d ago

    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 from moral disengagement, where people actively restructure reality to justify harmful behavior. In ethical fading, the person doesn’t even register that there’s a moral question on the table. The ethics don’t get overruled. They get erased. This is what’s happening when someone skates through a riot and genuinely does not understand why people are upset. He isn’t suppressing guilt. He isn’t justifying his behavior by weighing it against some higher purpose. The ethical dimension of the situation, that real people around him are fighting for their lives and dignity, has faded completely from his awareness. All that remains is the content frame: will this clip work? Is the lighting good? Is the backdrop dramatic enough? Social media accelerates ethical fading because it trains people to see every moment through the content frame first. The question is never “what is happening here?” The question is “how can I use what’s happening here?” And once the content frame becomes the default, the ethical frame doesn’t stand a chance. It fades before it ever forms. The death toll of the content frame. This isn’t just about tone-deafness. People are dying for content. A study published in 2018 in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care documented over 250 verified deaths from selfie-related incidents between 2011 and 2017, with an average age of 23. People falling from cliffs, drowning, being struck by trains, all while trying to get the shot. The researchers noted that the desire to be perceived as cool and the pursuit of likes and comments were primary motivators. But the selfie deaths are only the most literal version of the problem. The deeper damage is what happens when the content frame colonizes every human experience. Funerals become photo opportunities. Natural disasters become backdrops. Riots become aesthetic. Other people’s suffering becomes your production value. And the person doing it often has no awareness that anything is wrong, because ethical fading has done its work so completely that the moral dimension of the moment never enters their consciousness. The skateboarder in France is a perfect case study. He didn’t go to the riot and decide to ignore the suffering. He went to the riot and never perceived the suffering in the first place. In his world, the riot was always just a setting. The people were always just extras. And the star of the show was always him. How we got here. The question isn’t really why this one skateboarder did this. The question is how we built a world where this behavior makes sense to anyone. The answer is that we built an economy around attention and taught an entire generation that attention is the most valuable thing they can possess. We built platforms that reward self-promotion and penalize nuance. We built algorithms that amplify the most extreme, most provocative, most boundary-crossing content because that content generates the most engagement. And then we handed those platforms to people whose empathy had already been declining for decades and whose narcissistic traits had already been rising for just as long. The skateboarder is not an aberration. He is the system working exactly as designed. He is what you get w… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

    A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy

  6. 5d ago

    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 researcher In 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 clusters Altemeyer 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 underneath In 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 the strongest predictor Altemeyer was not the only researcher who found the fear connection. In 1998, psychologist Mark Eigenberger studied 522 participants using both the RWA scale and a separate fear assessment tool. He found that people who scored high on the RWA scale also reported significantly higher levels of fear, particularly fears related to social exclusion and the behavior of people outside their group. The fear item with the single highest correlation to RWA scores was “people associated with a cult.” The irony there writes itself. A later study published in Political Psychology asked 463 participants to rate their feelings of fear, concern, and anxiety across 93 potential threats, broken down into personal and social categories. The researchers found that all fear categories correlated with RWA scores. But the strongest correlation was with threats to the in-group. Social fears predicted RWA scores more strongly than personal fears. These people aren’t afraid for themselves. They’re afraid of what might happen to their group. And “their group” is defined by whoever the authority says is in it. What makes the fear finding so important is what it tells us about how authoritarian movements recruit and retain followers. You don’t need to convince these people that a specific policy is bad. You just need to make them afraid. The policy argument is irrelevant. The fear is the point. Manufacture a threat, point at a scapegoat, and the submission, aggression, and conventionalism activate on their own. The machine runs itself once you turn the fear on. Where the fear comes from Altemeyer’s original theory was that right-wing authoritarianism develops through social learning. Children raised in strict, punishment-based households where obedience was the highest value and the world was described as dangerous learned to adopt those attitudes. The parents modeled submission to authority. They punished questioning. They told the child the world was full of threats and that the only safety came from staying in line. The child learned that lesson not as a belief, but as a survival strategy. Research on the authoritarian personality going all the way back to Adorno and the original Berkeley team in the 1950s found similar patterns. People who scored high on authoritarianism reported being raised in strict, authoritarian households where fathers were distant and punitive. But the science didn’t stop there. A large twin study published in 1999 found that genetic factors account for approximately 50 percent of the variation in authoritarian attitudes, with unshared environmental factors making up about 35 percent. The childhood-rearing hypothesis didn’t hold up as the complete explanation. What this means is that some people are born with a temperament that makes them more fear-reactive, more submission-oriented, and more rigid. Upbringing matters. But it isn’t the whole story. Some of this is baked in. This is the part that makes the problem harder to solve. You can’t reason someone out of a fear response that’s partly neurological. You can’t fact-check someone into feeling safe. And you can’t debate someone out of an emotional architecture that was shaped before t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  7. 6d ago

    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 everything The 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 childhood Adams’ 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 Germany, measured their explicit sexual orientation by simply asking them, and then measured their implicit sexual orientation using a reaction-time computer test. In the test, participants sorted images and words associated with heterosexuality and homosexuality, and the speed of their sorting revealed unconscious associations that their self-reports might not. What they found was a population of people whose explicit identity and implicit identity didn’t match. People who described themselves as straight but whose unconscious reactions revealed significant same-sex attraction. And those people, the ones with the biggest gap between what they said and what the test revealed, were significantly more likely to express hostility toward gay people, support anti-gay policies, and assign harsher punishments to people they believed were homosexual. But the most important finding had nothing to do with sexuality itself. It had to do with parents. Weinstein and Ryan found that the participants who grew up with controlling, authoritarian parents were far more likely to show a discrepancy between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation. These were the people whose internal conflict was the deepest and whose homophobia was the most intense. Participants who grew up with supportive, accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit orientation, whatever it was, and showed significantly less anti-gay hostility. The implication is that reaction formation doesn’t begin in adulthood. It begins in childhood, in homes where certain feelings are made so dangerous that the only option is to bury them and build an identity on top of the burial site. The louder the parents’ rejection, the deeper the child buries. And the deeper they bury, the harder they attack what they see in other people, because other people walking freely in the world with the same feelings they were forced to destroy is unbearable. The pattern that keeps repeating If reaction formation only existed in laboratories, it would be an interesting finding and nothing more. But the real world keeps producing evidence that no laboratory could replicate. In 2007, U.S. Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, who had spent his entire career voting against gay rights and earning praise from organizations like the American Family Association, was arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom after an undercover officer reported that Craig had solicited sex from him through a series of signals in an adjacent stall. Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. In 2006, Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and one of the most prominent anti-gay voices in American Christianity, was accused by a male escort of paying for sex and methamphetamine over a three-year period. Haggard initially denied everything. Then he admitted to some of it. His church removed him. George Rekers, a co-founder of the Family Research Council, one of the most powerful anti-gay lobbying organizations in the United States and a man who built a career publishing research claiming homosexuality was a mental illness, was photographed in 2010 returning from a … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Oct 28

    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 Muertos One 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 sitting with it. And both cultures have kept doing it for thousands of years because the need is the same. The only thing that changes is whether you face it with fear or with flowers. Horror makes you stronger The script covers Marc Malmdorf Andersen’s recreational fear research and Margee Kerr’s work on how scary experiences boost confidence. But there’s a finding that goes even further, and it came from one of the most unexpected laboratories in recent psychology: the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, while the world was shutting down, Scrivner and his colleagues at the University of Chicago noticed something strange. Horror fans were reporting lower levels of psychological distress during the early months of the pandemic than people who didn’t watch horror. They weren’t just coping. They were coping better. Scrivner’s research found that people who regularly watched horror movies reported feeling more prepared for the pandemic and showed greater psychological resilience than people who avoided scary content. And fans of pandemic-specific movies like Contagion showed even higher levels of preparedness. They had already rehearsed the scenario in their heads. When it actually happened, their brains had a framework for it. This supports a theory that researchers in the field have been building for years: horror works as threat simulation. When you watch a scary movie or walk through a haunted house, your brain isn’t just getting a dopamine hit. It’s running a practice drill. It’s learning what fear feels like, how your body responds, and what it takes to get through it. The more you practice, the better you get at handling real fear when it actually shows up in your life. This reframes Halloween in a way that most people have never considered. Every haunted house, every horror movie, every moment of chosen fear is the brain rehearsing for something it hopes will never happen but knows it needs to be ready for. The Celts understood this instinctively when they built Samhain around the fear of death. They weren’t just performing rituals for the spirits. They were preparing their own minds for the darkest season of the year, when death was not symbolic but real. The digital mask The script covers Edward Diener’s 1976 Halloween study, where kids in costumes and groups stole candy at dramatically higher rates than kids who were alone and identifiable. The concept is deindividuation, and it explains one of the most powerful effects that Halloween has on human behavior. But what’s worth exploring is where that mask went after Halloween ended. In 1976, the mask came off on November 1st. Kids went back to school. Adults went back to work. Everyone returned to being identifiable and accountable, and their behavior went back to normal. That’s not how it works anymore. The internet gave everyone a permanent mask. Anonymous accounts, screen names, burner profiles, and faceless avatars create the same psychological conditions that Diener documented in his Halloween study, except they never turn off. You don’t need to wait for October 31st to become anonymous. You can do it every day from your pho… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Lucas Bean
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    227
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Lucas Bean
  • Show Website
    The Lucas Bean Show

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