As a postgraduate, I studied occupational psychology, also known as industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. As a result, human behavior in the workplace is something that continues to interest me, particularly when it relates to ideas I haven’t encountered before. So when I came across the concept of bikeshedding, I decided to take a closer look.

Bikeshedding describes the human tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of time and energy to trivial matters instead of important, complex, or high-stakes issues.

It often happens in meetings. For example, a meeting agenda has two items. The first is important, a budget question, a hiring decision, a strategic call. The second is trivial, the wording of an out-of-office message, the date of the staff Christmas party. You’d expect the important item to take up more time, but it’s often the case that the more important item gets dealt with quickly while the trivial item ends up taking up most of the meeting.

I know from personal experience that bikeshedding happens outside meetings too. I’ll sit down to draft a client report, and somehow an hour later, all I’ve done is sort my inbox, answer two emails that weren’t urgent, and start browsing flights for a trip I can’t afford to take.

The term “bikeshedding” can be traced back to Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian. His irreverent dictum that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” which he referred to as the law of triviality, was illustrated by Parkinson in 1957 through the following scenario.

Parkinson was being satirical, but the pattern he described was widely recognized and the phrase bikeshedding was born. (presumably because it rolls off the tongue more easily than coffeebudgeting!)

Why we spend more time on the trivial

A useful explanation is cognitive fluency (or processing fluency), which is the ease or difficulty with which our brains process information. Research by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer in a 2009 review in Personality and Social Psychology Review showed that when information is easy to process, i.e., pronounceable, familiar, or simple, people typically judge it as more true, more valuable, and more worth their time. Among their findings, Alter and Oppenheimer noted that stocks with simpler-to-pronounce ticker names outperformed those with complex names by 11% on the first day of trading and 33% over the following year. Rhyming statements get rated as truer than non-rhyming statements with identical meaning, and doctors have been shown to favor diagnoses that are easier to pronounce.

When you apply the notion of cognitive fluency to Parkinson’s law of triviality, his bikeshedding example suddenly seems plausible. The bike shed debate is cognitively accessible and most people will feel comfortable commenting on it (likewise with the coffee budget). The atomic reactor is harder to think about, and forming a question about it requires technical knowledge. The cognitive fluency surrounding the bike shed and coffee budget items makes them feel easier to engage with and more deserving of attention. Easy doesn’t mean important, but our minds tend to treat things that feel easy as if they were.

There’s a biological aspect at play too. The brain is metabolically expensive: it accounts for roughly 2% of body mass but consumes around 20% of the body’s energy. In a 2023 review in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Zahid Padamsey and Nathalie Rochefort describe how the brain manages its energy budget. Thinking isn’t free. The brain runs largely on glucose, and harder mental tasks burn more of it than easier ones. Rats navigating a harder maze use more glucose in the hippocampus, the brain region most involved in spatial navigation, than rats navigating an easier one.

This is not to say categorically that we avoid hard thinking, or that bikeshedding is just the brain trying to save energy. The point is that mental effort has a real metabolic cost, and whether we actively avoid that cost in everyday life is more suggestive than proven.

Where bikeshedding meets procrastination

Procrastination is a related but distinct phenomenon, and a useful one to look at alongside bikeshedding because it appears that they both occur for largely the same reasons. Bikeshedding is about substitution: we spend time on easy trivial things instead of the hard complex things. Procrastination is about delay: we put hard things off until later. The two often turn up together. We delay the report (procrastination), and the time we should have spent on it goes to easier tasks (bikeshedding).

Procrastination has the stronger evidence base of the two. Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pulled together 691 correlations from decades of research and produced a consistent picture. Procrastination correlates strongly with low conscientiousness (a correlation coefficient of −.62, large for this kind of research), high impulsiveness, and a tendency to find tasks aversive. The harder a task feels, and the more impulsive the person, the more likely it is to be put off in favor of something easier and more immediately rewarding.

Steel’s analysis also produced a fascinating counterintuitive finding. I assumed, like many people, that procrastinators are perfectionists in disguise but the data suggests otherwise. Across 24 studies and 3,884 participants, procrastinators were less likely to be perfectionists, not more (one exception is people in clinical counseling, where the perfectionism link does show up). This would imply that procrastinating on the hard thing has less to do with caring too much about the quality of the end result and more to do with the hard thing being hard, and the easy thing being right there.

If procrastination is about the hard thing being hard and the easy thing being right there, the obvious response is to try harder. The standard advice is exactly that: be more disciplined, exercise more willpower, push through. Steel's research points in a different direction. Because impulsiveness is one of the most stable traits in the personality literature, trying to be less impulsive through effort alone is unlikely to work for most people. What does seem to work is changing the conditions, so that the impulse to do the easy thing has fewer opportunities to act on itself. Closing the inbox, blocking distracting sites, leaving the phone in another room, building routines so the hard work starts without needing a fresh act of will each time. These are unglamorous and well known. They're also what the evidence supports.

What links fluency, brain energy, and procrastination is a single idea. Things that are easy to process feel right, while things that are hard get postponed. The bike shed gets debated. The reactor gets the immediate rubber stamp. The hard report gets delayed while the inbox gets sorted. Multiply that across a meeting room or a working day, and the law of triviality starts looking like a default position.

Why groups and meetings drift toward triviality

The idea that groups naturally make better decisions than individuals starts to break down when the decisions become genuinely difficult. The reason for this is the hidden profile problem, identified in a set of experiments by Stasser and Titus in 1985. In these experiments, groups were given a decision-making task where the right answer depended on combining information that was spread unevenly across members. Some pieces of information were shared by everyone in the room, but other pieces were held by only one or two people. No single group member had everything they needed. The group's job was to pool the unique pieces along with the shared ones and reach the right conclusion. However, the groups consistently failed because the shared information dominated the discussion, whereas the unique pieces, the ones that actually mattered for finding the right answer, were rarely discussed.

One interesting area within the research was to explore whether appointing a devil's advocate - someone whose job is to disagree, probe, and force the group to defend its thinking - would fix the hidden profile. Stasser and Titus tested this directly, planting conflicting information into groups to provoke real debate. The bias didn't shift. Assigned disagreement turns out not to be the same thing as a group actually pooling the unique information its members hold, and the group dynamics that worsen bikeshedding aren't really moved by a designated dissenter.

A 2012 meta-analysis in Personality and Social Psychology Review by Lu, Yuan, and McLeod involving 65 studies and 3,189 groups showed that groups facing a hidden profile, where the right answer depended on combining unique pieces, were eight times less likely to find the optimal solution than groups working from fully shared information. And the bias got worse with larger groups and higher information loads.

The same meta-analysis carries a practical implication. A meeting that asks "What should we do about the marketing campaign?" invites everyone to weigh in with their preferences, which is exactly the situation where shared information dominates. A meeting that asks "What does the data tell us about which approach worked best last quarter?" pulls the discussion toward something verifiable. Thinking carefully about how a question is framed is an effective way to push back against bikeshedding.

The problem is that bikeshedding rarely happens in isolation. Most employees don’t attend a single poorly structured meeting and then return to long stretches of uninterrupted deep work. Workplace meetings accumulate, and when they do, the cognitive consequences begin to add up too.

For most working adults, meeting load is substantial. A 2006 study by Rogelberg and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that on average employees spend 5.6 hours a week in 4.2 meetings. For supervisors, average figures were 6.6 hours and 5.0 meetings.

That doesn't mean every meeting promotes triviality over usefulness. Rogelberg found that most people actually rate the meetings they attend as more effective than not. The things that make meetings meaningful are a clear agenda, starting and finishing on time, knowing what the meeting is for, and preparedness. Meetings with those things in place are less prone to bikeshedding. Meetings without them are more prone.

Final Thoughts

Bikeshedding is not only relatable but revealing. It exposes something about how our minds work. We are naturally drawn toward what feels cognitively manageable, socially safe, and psychologically rewarding, even when the important issues sit in the background requiring more effort, more expertise, and more uncertainty. The challenge isn’t eliminating that tendency entirely. It’s recognizing when a debate about a bike shed receives far more time and attention than a discussion about an atomic reactor.

What’s the most memorable example of bikeshedding you’ve encountered in a meeting or workplace setting?

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AI is moving quickly into therapy, often faster than the profession has had time to make sense of it.

Rosie Chapple sits at that intersection. Trained as a psychologist, she now helps shape AI tools at Ecko Health. Her work focuses not just on clinical thinking, but on how technology can reduce administrative burden, ease pressure on clinicians, and make support more accessible without compromising care.

Here, she reflects on what’s changing, what’s at risk, and what it means to use AI in a way that strengthens rather than replaces the human side of therapy.

You trained as a psychologist at a time when AI wasn’t really part of the conversation, but entered practice just as that began to change. What did that shift look like from your perspective, and when did it become clear to you that AI was going to play a meaningful role in mental health care?

I spent four years on my undergraduate degree, wrote my thesis, and then entered the 4+2 pathway (an Australian route to registration) because I couldn’t afford the cost of my clinical master’s degree at the ripe age of 21. So, by the time I was registered, did my intensive prac, and was actually practising, I’d invested the better part of a decade into becoming a psychologist.

And then I looked around at the landscape I’d spent so long training for, and it no longer existed.

AI had quietly crept into healthcare, technology, and the way people accessed information about their own mental health... and I hadn’t been prepared for any of it. No one had prepared me. Not at university, not during supervision, and not through any professional development. That isn’t to blame anyone, I had fantastic mentors. It’s just the space moved so quickly. So, there I was, as fresh as they get... with no ethical framework, no guidelines, just this powerful new tool sitting in front of me with no manual.

There’s a scene in The Imitation Game where the team at Bletchley Park is trying to crack the Enigma code, and every night at midnight the code resets. All the work they’ve done, all the progress they’ve made, thrown out the window. They have to start again. That’s how it felt, and honestly, still feels. Clients would sit with me in session, spend two to four weeks outside of it, and by the time they came back ChatGPT had already informed them of six diagnostic disorders they had, why they hated their mother, and that it turns out the average teenager needs sixteen-plus hours of sleep… so it was fine they were skipping school?! I didn’t stand a chance. Meanwhile, I’d spent that time making sure I used the correct headings on my clinical notes against my governing body’s guidelines. As I said, not a chance.

It became very clear to me that AI wasn’t a passing trend. It was already reshaping the therapeutic relationship whether we engaged with it or not. The question was never if, it was how. And I didn’t want to be left behind figuring that out.

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You’ve spoken about how different the reality of clinical work can feel compared to training. What do you think early career psychologists are actually struggling with day to day that isn’t always visible from the outside?

People assume the hard part is the clinical work: sitting with distress, navigating risk, and holding complexity. And that is hard, of course it is. But what really blindsides early career psychologists is everything around the clinical work.

You’re trained to be a clinician, but the moment you step into practice you’re also an administrator, a note-taker, a scheduler, a billing clerk, and often your own IT department. I remember my parents steering me away from law because they felt my personality wasn’t conducive to billing in 6-minute increments, only to end up doing basically just that!

You finish a heavy session and instead of processing what just happened, you’re scrambling to write up notes before the next client walks in. You’re toggling between three different systems, one for notes, one for billing, one for assessments, and none of them talk to each other. By the end of the day, you’ve spent as much time on admin as you have on therapy.

The invisible struggle is the cognitive load. You’re carrying the emotional weight of your clients alongside the operational weight of the systems you’re working in, and no one really warns you about that during training. It leads to burnout, and it leads to it fast. I’ve seen brilliant early career psychologists question whether they chose the right career, not because they don’t love the work, but because the administrative work is crushing them. Bear in mind I’m a late 90’s baby, so I am hardly your classic 85-year-old Janet trying to operate FaceTime with the grandkids for the first time... I grew up with technology, it shouldn’t feel hard.

Alongside your clinical work, you’re also involved in shaping AI systems at Ecko Health. What does your role there involve day to day, and how do you bring real clinical experience into the design of these tools?

I got into psychology for two reasons. First, people. Human connection and the chance to make small but meaningful differences in someone’s life. That seemed like something I’d feel pretty happy spending my days doing. Second, I think because of the neurological aspect. The brain has always fascinated me. It’s like having the world’s coolest toy, the fastest car, the most advanced spaceship, with no manual. I wanted to understand the manual.

AI feels like the same thing. I was given this incredible new tool, and there was no manual for it either. No ethical code, no guidelines, no clear pathway for how a clinician should think about it. And I’ll be honest, there was real hesitation. What does this mean for my profession? How do I use it without compromising what I care about?

When the opportunity came to be part of actually building these tools, I thought, what better way to learn? If you can be there for the making of something, the manual becomes redundant. Or at least, you get to help write it.

Day to day, my role is about making sure that what we build actually reflects how clinicians think and work. I sit in the gap between the technology and the therapy room. That means testing features against real clinical scenarios, pushing back when something doesn’t feel right from a practice perspective, and making sure we never lose sight of the fact that these tools exist to support clinicians, not to impress investors with automation.

The clinical experience isn’t an add-on. It’s the foundation. If you don’t have clinicians involved in the design of clinical AI, you end up building tools that look good on a pitch deck but fall apart the moment a real therapist tries to use them.

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Are there aspects of therapy that you think should remain completely untouched by AI? Where would you draw that line?

AI should never replace therapy. It can assist in providing access, offer between-session support, and reduce the administrative weight that stops clinicians from being fully present. But there should always be a hand on the pulse of the human side.

What concerns me isn’t really the technology itself. It’s the incentive structures. I don’t want to see a world where people talk to an avatar they’ve self-curated to serve their every need, someone who never challenges them, never sits in uncomfortable silence with them, and never gets it slightly wrong in a way that leads to something real. I don’t want to see people speaking to that avatar day and night, building a relationship with something that will never truly know them.

I fear building systems that encourage people to stay inside of them. To never leave. The most effective technology in mental health should do the opposite, it should encourage people to go outside of it. To check in and check out.

That’s how I work with my clients. I say the solutions are out there, in the real world. It can be found during long walks, cold swims, heart-rate-increasing early morning exercises and slow breathwork evenings. The belly laughs with friends, the nervousness of firsts, the thrill of mastering a skill you never thought you had. The honour is to be a human, and to get to feel it all... the good, the bad, the horrid and wonderful. AI could never. And never should try.

So where do I draw the line? AI can surface patterns, prepare clinicians, reduce admin, and maintain continuity between sessions. But the therapeutic relationship, the space where someone sits across from another human being and is truly seen, that’s sacred. And the goal of any AI in mental health should be to get people back into their lives, not deeper into a screen.

There’s a lot of noise around AI in therapy at the moment, ranging from optimism to real concern. In your view, what are people currently misunderstanding about AI in mental health, both in terms of overestimating it and underestimating it?

On the overestimation side, there’s a fantasy that AI can replace the therapeutic relationship. That you can build a chatbot, train it on enough clinical data, and suddenly you have a therapist. You don’t. Therapy works because of human connection: those micro-moments of attunement, the silence a clinician knows not to fill, and the way a client feels genuinely seen by another person.

On the underestimation side, which I think is more dangerous, people dismiss AI entirely because they fear it. They assume that any involvement of AI in mental health automatically means we’re replacing clinicians or compromising care. But that misses the enormous opportunity to use AI for the work that surrounds therapy. Note-taking, pattern recognition across longitudinal data, and the administrative burden actively driving clinicians out of the profession. It’s also driving waitlists. We have large greyed-out blocks in our calendars to tackle admin, yet a client calls, and we have to say we have no available slots. Therapists have to do it, I mean we can’t fill every waking hour face-to-face. But if AI allowed even one more person to get through a therapist’s door each day, that is enough for me.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. AI isn’t going to be a therapist. But it can be an extraordinary tool for therapists, if we engage with it thoughtfully rather than reacting out of fear. Without curiosity, we’re only left with judgement, and judgement born out of fear of the unknown is not a space we want to be making decisions from in health tech.

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One of the issues you highlighted is how fragmented clinical work can be, with notes, assessments, and decision-making spread across different systems. From a psychological perspective, what are the risks of that kind of fragmentation when it comes to understanding a client as a whole person?

This one matters to me deeply because it goes right to the heart of why most of us entered this work: to understand the person in front of us.

When a client’s information is scattered across different platforms, something gets lost. Not just data, but context. You might have their assessment scores in one system, their session notes in another, their treatment plan buried in a Word document somewhere. When you sit down before a session and try to form a picture of where this person is at, you’re piecing together fragments rather than seeing a whole person.

And the psychological risk of that is real. You miss patterns. You forget that something a client said three months ago actually connects to what they’re telling you now. You end up doing a kind of “catch-up therapy” at the start of every session because you’ve lost the thread between appointments. That’s not just inefficient but it’s a clinical risk. Clients can feel it too. They notice when you’ve forgotten something, or when they have to repeat themselves. It erodes trust, and trust is the entire foundation of therapeutic work.

Fragmentation doesn’t just affect admin. It affects the quality of care.

You’ve been clear that AI should enhance clinical thinking rather than replace it. In practical terms, what does good use of AI look like for a clinician, either in session or in the work that surrounds it?

Before a session, it might look like receiving a brief that tells you what’s changed since the last appointment, what patterns are emerging, what the client has been working on between sessions, where there might be a shift in their presentation that’s worth exploring. Instead of spending the first twenty minutes catching up, you can walk in already oriented.

During a session, it might mean having your notes captured in the background so you can actually be present with your client instead of dividing your attention between the person in front of you and the documentation you need to complete.

After a session, good AI use means your progress notes are drafted for you to review and sign off on, not generated without your oversight, but presented in a way that saves you thirty minutes of admin per client while keeping you firmly in control of the clinical record.

The key is that the clinician is always the decision-maker. AI handles the administrative busywork; the clinician handles the clinical thinking. When it works well, it gives psychologists back the thing they got into this profession for; time to actually be with their clients.

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Ecko talks about the concept of a “Clinical Double”, an AI that works alongside the clinician rather than acting independently. From a practical and psychological perspective, what does that actually mean in day-to-day clinical work, and how should clinicians understand the boundaries of that relationship?

The Clinical Double is essentially a personalised AI counterpart built around each individual clinician, not a one-size-fits-all model. It learns your therapeutic style, your tone, the way you approach different presentations. Over time, it becomes a genuine extension of your clinical practice. For example, my Ecko account would look very different to my colleagues, and that’s the point.

It is designed to do a few things. It sits in on sessions and retains full context across the entire client history, which means it can surface patterns you might not catch across hundreds of clients. It prepares intelligence briefs before each appointment so you’re not walking in cold. And between sessions, it can engage with patients in a way that’s consistent with the clinician’s own approach, not as a replacement for therapy, but as continuity of care. Checking in on goals, reinforcing techniques, maintaining the therapeutic thread between fortnightly appointments.

The boundary is critical though. The Clinical Double doesn’t make clinical decisions. It doesn’t diagnose. It doesn’t replace the therapeutic relationship. It’s a tool that amplifies the clinician’s capacity, like having a second brain that handles the things you wish you had time for but never do.

Clinicians should think of it the way a surgeon thinks about imaging technology. The MRI doesn’t perform the surgery. It gives the surgeon better information to work with. The Clinical Double doesn’t do the therapy. It gives the therapist better conditions in which to do it.

You’ve emphasised that ethical AI is less about automation and more about accountability. As these tools become more embedded in practice, how do clinicians ensure that they remain firmly in the driver’s seat, both psychologically and ethically?

I think the argument I hear a lot is, “I am worried it is going to make me lose XYZ skills”.

Personally, I think the responsibility to stop that lies with us. Just because we drive cars doesn’t mean we should stop walking. As humans we have constantly invented, and those inventions have allowed us to progress in so many ways. However, they have also risked regression in other ways; fortunately, we have some say in that outcome. Just because we have wheels doesn’t mean we stop using our legs; similarly, just because we have AI doesn’t mean we should stop applying our clinical thinking and professional judgement.

This accountability starts with transparency. Clinicians need to know exactly what the AI is doing with their data and their clients’ data. They need to be able to see the reasoning, review the outputs, and override anything that doesn’t sit right. The moment a clinician feels like the tool is making decisions for them rather than supporting their decisions, that’s when the ethical line has been crossed.

And from a systemic perspective, we need regulatory bodies and professional associations to step up and provide clear guidance. Clinicians shouldn’t have to figure out the ethics of AI on their own. I have personally reached out to my governing body in Australia but received no reply. It’s really sad. I understand I’m a small fish trying to get into Neptune’s aquatic castle... but it would be good if clinicians could talk with the people in charge. In building my platform, I have made a point of talking with hundreds of clinicians so I represent their wants and wishes. I don’t know, maybe I’m simplifying it. But it feels like it should be the same.

Why do early career psychologists, in particular, need guidance around AI right now, and what are the risks if they don’t get it?

Because they’re the ones most affected by this shift, and the least equipped to navigate it.

The core issue is experience. A psychologist with twenty years of practice reads an AI-generated formulation and is far better equipped to spot what’s off. An early career psychologist, who has spent the better part of their education in a textbook, might not, and not because they aren’t capable, but because they haven’t sat with enough clients to develop that instinct yet. And these are the people most desperate to stay on top of things. They’re often managing caseloads they had very little say in building, drowning in admin, and just trying to keep their heads above water. Hand them a tool that drafts their notes, and of course they’ll sign off on the output more quickly, not out of carelessness, but out of survival.

That’s the real risk. It’s not that early career psychologists will reject AI. It’s that they’ll adopt it without the experience to know when it’s wrong. Universities, supervisors, and employers have a responsibility to teach AI literacy alongside clinical skills. To be honest, this shouldn’t just be in psychology. AI literacy should be in schools, across every sector. I don’t see any field that won’t be affected.

From your perspective, what does genuinely safe and trustworthy AI in mental health actually require in practice?

It requires three things: clinical governance, transparency, and humility.

Clinical governance means that clinicians aren’t just consulted during the design of these tools, they’re embedded in the design. Not as advisors who get a polite email every quarter, but as co-builders who shape how the technology works at every level.

Transparency means that clinicians and clients both understand what the AI is doing. What data is it using? How is it generating its outputs? Where is the information stored? Who has access? These aren’t nice-to-haves, they’re non-negotiable. Mental health data is among the most sensitive information a person can share, and the standard for handling it should be the highest in any industry.

And humility means acknowledging what AI can’t do. Every responsible AI company in mental health should be able to clearly articulate the limitations of their technology, not just the capabilities. If a company can’t tell you what their tool isn’t good at, I’d question whether they really understand the clinical environment they’re building for.

In practice, safe AI also means alignment with existing professional standards, AHPRA guidelines, privacy legislation, and the ethical codes that already govern clinical work. AI shouldn’t exist in a regulatory vacuum. It should be held to the same standard we hold ourselves to as clinicians.

What’s one realistic, low-risk way a psychologist could begin using AI in their work tomorrow?

Start with your admin.

Use AI to help draft your progress notes after a session, not to write them for you, but to give you a first draft that you then review, edit, and sign off on. Most clinicians spend thirty to forty-five minutes per client on documentation. If AI can cut that to ten minutes of review time, you’ve just reclaimed hours of your week.

It’s low-risk because the clinician is still the final authority on the clinical record. You’re not handing over clinical judgement, you’re handing over the first pass at a task you were going to do anyway. And the quality check is built in because you’re reviewing every word before it becomes part of the client’s file.

It’s also a great way to start building familiarity and comfort with AI in a clinical context. You learn where it gets things right, where it misses nuance, and what kind of oversight it actually needs. That experience is invaluable as AI becomes more embedded in practice, you develop an informed, critical relationship with the technology rather than either fearing it or trusting it blindly.

Start small. Start with something you already find tedious. And make sure you stay in the loop.

How do you see the role of AI in mental health evolving over the next few years, particularly in everyday clinical practice?

I think within the next few years we’ll see AI move from being a novelty or a source of anxiety to being a standard part of the clinical toolkit; I guess in the same way that telehealth went from being a pandemic workaround to being an accepted mode of practice.

The biggest shift will be in continuity of care. Right now, therapy mostly happens in fifty-minute blocks, often monthly in Australia. Between those sessions, clients are essentially on their own. AI is going to fill that gap, not by replacing the therapist, but by maintaining the therapeutic thread. Checking in on goals, reinforcing skills, flagging changes in presentation. The clinician stays in control, but the client feels supported between appointments in a way that’s never been possible before.

I also think we’ll see AI dramatically reduce the administrative burden that’s currently driving clinicians out of the profession. Workforce retention is a crisis in mental health. If we can give clinicians back even a few hours a week by automating the operational side of practice, we keep more people in the profession and more clients get access to care.

The piece I’m most hopeful about is clinical intelligence, AI that helps clinicians see patterns across a client’s entire treatment history that they might miss at the moment. Not replacing clinical judgement, but augmenting it with longitudinal data that no human brain can hold in working memory across hundreds of clients.

Evolution won’t happen overnight, and it shouldn’t. But the direction is clear: AI that makes clinicians better at what they already do, not AI that tries to do it for them.

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If you could go back and give one piece of advice to yourself as an early career psychologist entering a world where AI is already present, what would it be?

Look, I am an early career psychologist. So I won’t attempt to impart wisdom, but instead I will encourage readers to do something I am also having to do myself; be curious.

I think that would be my advice for most things, really. Ask, and then ask again. Form an opinion, become unwaveringly sure of it, then go back and find all of the evidence against it. Once you’ve figured it out, know that you haven’t, and do the whole thing in reverse.

Because here’s the thing: the psychologists who engage with AI now, who learn how it works, who push back on what needs pushing back on and embrace what genuinely helps, are the ones who will shape this technology. If clinicians step back and leave AI development to engineers and investors alone, we’ll end up with tools that don’t understand the therapy room. And our clients will be the ones who pay for that.

You don’t need to go and build a whole piece of AI infrastructure as I have, I fell down a rabbit hole that I happen to love, but I can see how many would think “that is taking ‘learning’ to the extreme”. What you can do on a really basic level is join people’s beta testing, reach out to products, join committees. Because if you’re there for the making of something, the manual becomes a lot less scary.

Learn More About Rosie’s Work

If you’re a psychologist or therapist interested in how AI can reduce admin and support your clinical work, you can explore Ecko Health and create a free account here.

Alternatively, you can reach out to Rosie personally for a chat on LinkedIn.

If you have questions about how AI is shaping mental health care or what it means for clinical practice, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll pass them on to Rosie.

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My goal for this year was to read more. I read lots of nonfiction books about psychology but rarely read for pleasure. The turning point was a power cut we had here in Spain that lasted several hours. With no phone service, internet, or Netflix, I settled down on the couch, feet up, and started reading A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It was one of the most relaxed and chilled out days I'd had for years. With this in mind, I decided to see what the research said, if anything, about the psychological benefits of reading fiction.

I soon discovered that the standard claim is that reading fiction makes us more empathic, sharpens our ability to understand other minds, and helps us read social situations more accurately. I'll look at where that claim came from, how the research has held up, and where the evidence actually points.

The study at the heart of the claim

The most influential assertion that reading fiction makes us more socially attuned can be traced to a single set of experiments published in Science in 2013, conducted by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School for Social Research in New York. The paper was titled Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.

Theory of mind is the everyday ability to recognize that other people have thoughts, feelings, and intentions of their own, and that those can differ from your own. It’s what lets you tell the difference between a friend who’s quiet because they’re tired and a friend who’s quiet because they’re upset.

Kidd and Castano ran five experiments. In each one, participants were randomly assigned to read a short passage, either from literary fiction, from popular fiction, from nonfiction, or in some cases nothing at all. Immediately after reading, they took a test called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, which involves looking at black-and-white photographs of just the eye region of a face and choosing which of four words best describes what that person is thinking or feeling.

The headline finding was that participants who’d read literary fiction scored higher on the eyes test than those in the other conditions. The effect was modest, but the paper reported it across five experiments and was published in one of the most cited general-science journals in the world. Coverage across popular media platforms followed quickly, and the simplified version, “reading literary fiction makes you more empathic,” took hold.

Testing the claim

In 2016, three independent research groups led by Maria Eugenia Panero pooled their data to see whether Kidd and Castano’s finding could be confirmed. Their replication, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, recruited 792 participants and ran them through the same four conditions Kidd and Castano had used: literary fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction, or no reading at all. Participants then took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.

Literary fiction did no better than popular fiction, no better than nonfiction, and no better than not reading at all. The effect Kidd and Castano had reported did not appear.

Something did emerge from the data, though. The replication included a separate measure called the Author Recognition Test, which estimates how much fiction a person has read across their lifetime by asking them to pick out real authors from a list mixed with plausible-sounding fakes. Lifetime exposure to fiction predicted theory of mind scores consistently, regardless of which passage participants had just read. The brief boost from a single literary passage didn’t show up. The slow accumulation across years of reading did.

Kidd and Castano challenged the way the Panero team had run their replication and produced their own follow-up. Their 2019 paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science reported three more tests. Of those three tests, one reproduced the original effect. The other two didn't, but the data was too inconclusive to settle the question either way. The effect from a single reading session, which had launched the original claim, turned out to be fragile. The longer-term link between lifetime fiction reading and stronger theory of mind has held up far better.

The two-way street between reading and social skill

The link between lifetime reading of fiction and stronger theory of mind raises an interesting question. Are people getting better at reading other people’s mental states because they read fiction across their lives, or are people who are already good at that the ones who keep choosing fiction?

In a 2018 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir gathered the available experimental studies on fiction and social cognition. They found a small positive effect overall, and offered a different way of thinking about how that effect might actually work. The correlation doesn’t run in just one direction. It runs in both.

People who are already good at understanding other minds tend to enjoy fiction more than people who aren’t. Reading fiction then gives them more practice at exactly that kind of thinking. The practice sharpens their abilities further, which makes fiction even more rewarding to read, which gives them more practice still. This kind of self-reinforcing pattern is known as the Matthew Effect or cumulative advantage, and it provides nuance to the standard claim about the benefits of reading. Fiction probably does strengthen theory of mind in those who read it, but it doesn’t simply provide an empathy boost to anyone who happens to pick up a novel. It’s more accurate to say that fiction compounds whatever capacity for understanding other minds the reader already brings to the page.

What happens when the story doesn’t pull you in

What the reader brings to the page isn’t the only thing that matters. What happens during the reading does too, and a 2013 experiment found that without emotional engagement, fiction not only fails to do its work, it can actually pull readers in the opposite direction.

Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp ran two experiments in which Dutch students read either a fictional story (a Sherlock Holmes mystery in one experiment, the opening of Saramago’s Blindness in the other) or articles from a Dutch newspaper. Empathy was measured before reading, immediately after, and again one week later. The crucial variable was something called emotional transportation: the felt experience of being pulled into a story, of losing track of where you actually are because you’re so absorbed in what’s happening on the page. The researchers also measured how transported each fiction reader had become.

The pattern that emerged in both experiments, published in PLOS ONE, wasn’t the simple “fiction increases empathy” story. Fiction readers who were emotionally transported into the story became more empathic over the following week. Those who didn't get drawn in grew less empathic instead. Bal and Veltkamp’s interpretation is that when readers can’t engage with the story, they pull back from it, becoming more self-protective and less able to sympathize with others.

The active ingredient, in other words, isn’t reading fiction. It’s letting fiction do something to you. Picking up a novel and skimming it isn’t the same activity as reading attentively, and the research suggests the two activities can have opposite effects on the reader. How you read seems to matter at least as much as whether you read at all.

What reading a novel does to the brain

If engagement is the active ingredient, what does that engagement actually look like inside the head of the reader? In 2013, a research group at Emory University in Atlanta, led by neuroeconomist Gregory Berns, ran a small experiment to find out.

Nineteen participants enrolled in a study that ran across nineteen consecutive days. For the first five days, the researchers took daily baseline scans of their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. For the next nine evenings, each participant read one ninth of Robert Harris’s novel Pompeii and came in the next morning for another scan. For the final five days, after the reading was over, participants came in for daily scans without reading anything.

The study, published in Brain Connectivity, reported two distinct findings. During the reading period, connectivity increased in areas of the left hemisphere associated with perspective-taking and story comprehension, regions that are also active when people try to work out what other people are thinking or feeling. Those changes decayed once the novel was finished. A second pattern of changes, in regions involved in processing physical sensation, persisted into the five days of follow-up scans after the reading had ended.

The result is widely cited as evidence that fiction physically reshapes the brain. The authors themselves were more cautious. They noted that the persisting changes in sensation-related regions could reflect motor control related to the act of reading itself, including eye movements and sustained attention, rather than absorption of the novel’s content. The headline finding the study can support is the one about perspective-taking regions during the reading period. The longer-lasting brain changes might be about reading as a physical act rather than fiction as an experience. With only nineteen participants, the study is suggestive rather than definitive.

The talk above, by Rita Carter, a writer, broadcaster, and journalist who specializes in the workings of the human brain, offers a passionate case for reading fiction, drawing on both the 2013 Kidd and Castano study and the Berns Pompeii research described above.

Mentally active sitting and the aging brain

So far the reading timescales in this research have been short: a single passage, a single week. A 2026 cohort study widens the picture to almost two decades.

The Swedish National March Cohort, a long-running dataset, recruited 20,811 adults aged 35 to 64 in 1997 and followed them for the next nineteen years on average. The research team behind the analysis split each participant’s sitting time into two categories. Mentally passive sitting included activities like watching television. Mentally active sitting included activities like office work and reading. Over the follow-up period, 569 of the participants developed dementia.

When the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, modeled the relationship between sitting habits and dementia risk, the type of sitting clearly mattered. Replacing one hour a day of mentally passive sitting with one hour of mentally active sitting was associated with an 11% lower risk of dementia, even when the researchers accounted for how much exercise people did. The protective association was stronger for participants aged 50 to 64 at baseline.

A few caveats keep this finding in proportion. The study didn’t isolate reading from other mentally active activities, so the protective signal is for the broader category, not for novels specifically. Mentally passive sitting on its own, including TV viewing, was not significantly associated with dementia once the analysis took other factors into account, which means the popular “TV rots the brain” framing isn’t what the data shows. And studies of this kind reveal patterns rather than prove cause and effect. Whether reading directly protects the aging brain, or whether people whose brains are aging well are more likely to keep reading, remains an open question.

Where the evidence actually points

Reading fiction does seem to be psychologically beneficial, but in a more conditional way than the popular version of the claim suggests.

The notion of a single-session boost is fragile. The link between a lifetime of fiction reading and stronger theory of mind is more durable, but probably runs in both directions: reading sharpens social-cognitive skills, and people with stronger social-cognitive skills are drawn to reading. The active ingredient seems to be emotional engagement with the story, not the act of reading itself. And across decades, a habit of mentally active sitting, of which reading is one example, may help protect the aging brain.

A main conclusion to draw from the research is that how you read matters. A novel skimmed inattentively isn’t doing the work that an absorbing novel does, and may not be neutral either. The reading I did on the couch during the power cut, with no phone in my hand and nothing else to do, is closer to the active ingredient the research keeps pointing at than reading I might do sporadically between other tasks and distractions.

Also, don’t expect a single novel to transform you. Rather, expect cumulative effects from a sustained reading habit across years.

In addition, genre is less important than character. The literary-versus-popular distinction at the heart of the original 2013 study has weaker empirical support than it once seemed to have. What appears to matter is engagement with psychologically complex characters whose mental states have to be inferred. That cognitive work can be done by literary fiction, by character-driven popular fiction, and by narrative nonfiction such as a memoir or a biography.

A few final thoughts worth considering. The empathy that fiction provides practice in is morally neutral; the same skill that helps a reader understand a character can be used to manipulate a real person. Empathizing only with characters who resemble the reader can deepen in-group preference rather than soften it. And the direction of causality between reading and social cognition isn’t fully settled, which means the standard “fiction makes you a better person” suggestion is an overclaim however well-intentioned.

It’s well worth noting, however, that reading fiction with attention, sustained over time, looks like one of the more reliable forms of mental upkeep we have. It’s free, it’s available, and it doesn’t ask much except that you actually let the story in.

What's the last novel that genuinely pulled you in? I'd love to know what you're reading and whether your experience matches the research, or contradicts it.

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Give your writing the attention it deserves

If you write about psychology, mental health, or human behavior on Substack, this is a great opportunity to get your work in front of one of the largest, most established and engaged psychology audiences online.

I’m opening up a limited number of featured writer guest article slots, giving Substack writers direct access to my All About Psychology platform and audience for just $295.

Your guest article will be published on All-About-Psychology.com, a high-traffic website generating over 300,000 weekly search impressions, and promoted across the All About Psychology platform. It will be:

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You also get two highly valued backlinks, one to your Substack and one to a destination of your choice, whether that’s a personal website, social media channel, or elsewhere online. Search engines like Google view these links as a vote of confidence in the quality and relevance of your work, helping to increase the credibility, trustworthiness and visibility of your online presence.

Find out more and apply here.

About me

I’m David Webb, a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do.



I founded the All About Psychology website in 2008 and have been building it ever since as a place where students, educators, and curious readers can explore the many branches of psychology, learn about the field’s history and most influential pioneers, and access thousands of full-text journal articles and other quality psychology materials. Today the site is home to one of the largest and most engaged independent psychology communities online. This Substack is the latest addition to the All About Psychology platform.

My books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for anyone interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of my work and books on my Amazon author page.

Keep learning with All About Psychology

The All About Psychology Substack is your go-to source for all things psychology. Subscribe today and instantly receive my bestselling Psychology Student Guide right in your inbox.

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I first published this short article in September 2024. For the subscribers who have joined since then, I hope you enjoy it.

The lie detector test (or polygraph, to give it its official name) is a fascinating topic. A staple of reality TV shows and crime dramas, it's more than likely that you already have a good idea of what a polygraph is. But did you know that the term "lie detector" is actually a misnomer? A polygraph test simply measures a person's physiological responses when answering questions: most typically, blood pressure, heart rate, sweating (galvanic skin response), and respiration (breathing rate). This is done to look for signs of autonomic arousal, from which deception can be inferred.

Surely one of the most pernicious misnomers in psychology, the term 'lie detector test' is often used synonymously with the storied polygraph test. This test is misnamed: it is an arousal detector, not a lie detector because it measures non-specific psychophysiological arousal rather than the fear of detection per se.

(Scott Lilienfeld, Ph.D.)

The history of the lie detector

Investigating the link between physiology and deception has a long history within psychology. In 1915, William Moulton Marston began to study the physiological symptoms of deception during his time as a graduate student at Harvard University; as a result, Marston would go on to develop the first systolic blood pressure deception (’lie detector’) test.

This wonderful (pun intended) image from the papers of William Moulton Marston, housed at the Schlesinger Library, shows Marston conducting one of his many experiments on blood pressure and deception.

The person in the photograph taking notes, sporting a distinctive bracelet which looks like it could be used to deflect bullets, is Olive Byrne, the inspiration behind Wonder Woman, the superhero character created by William Moulton Marston under the pseudonym Charles Moulton.

The fact that it was a psychologist who created, wrote, and produced the Wonder Woman comic strip is something all psychology lovers should know! Marston’s work on lie detection is the reason why Wonder Woman has a Lasso of Truth! How cool is that?

Can a polygraph really detect lies?

The scientific evidence would suggest not. The American Psychological Association notes that:

Most psychologists and other scientists agree that there is little basis for the validity of polygraph tests and that the most practical advice is to remain skeptical about any conclusion wrung from a polygraph.

In 2002, a committee commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences to review and report on the scientific evidence on the polygraph stated that:

Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy. Although psychological states often associated with deception (e.g., fear of being judged deceptive) do tend to affect the physiological responses that the polygraph measures, these same states can arise in the absence of deception.

Teaching ideas

If you teach psychology, the ‘lie detector test’ is a great topic to cover with your students. Here are some questions you could introduce and explore as part of a class discussion.

1. What are the most likely reasons for a false-positive result, i.e., when a polygraph labels an honest individual as dishonest?

2. In what other ways is it believed that we can identify the deceitful, e.g., reading body language? How valid are these alternative approaches to lie detection?

3. What do you think is the most reliable or effective method for determining if someone is lying? Is there a scientific basis for this method?

4. What ethical concerns arise when using polygraphs or other methods of lie detection in legal settings? Should such methods be admissible in court?

These questions are designed to encourage students to think critically about the science and ethics of lie detection.

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Give your writing the attention it deserves

If you write about psychology, mental health, or human behavior on Substack, this is a great opportunity to get your work in front of one of the largest, most established and engaged psychology audiences online.

I’m opening up a limited number of featured writer guest article slots, giving Substack writers direct access to my All About Psychology platform and audience for just $295.

Your guest article will be published on All-About-Psychology.com, a high-traffic website generating over 300,000 weekly search impressions, and promoted across the All About Psychology platform. It will be:

• Shared with my 200,000+ member LinkedIn psychology community, including direct inbox delivery

• Distributed across All About Psychology social media channels with a combined audience of 1M+ followers

You also get two highly valued backlinks, one to your Substack and one to a destination of your choice, whether that’s a personal website, social media channel, or elsewhere online. Search engines like Google view these links as a vote of confidence in the quality and relevance of your work, helping to increase the credibility, trustworthiness and visibility of your online presence.

Find out more and apply here.

About me

I’m David Webb, a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do.

I founded the All About Psychology website in 2008 and have been building it ever since as a place where students, educators, and curious readers can explore the many branches of psychology, learn about the field’s history and most influential pioneers, and access thousands of full-text journal articles and other quality psychology materials. Today the site is home to one of the largest and most engaged independent psychology communities online. This Substack is the latest addition to the All About Psychology platform.

My books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for anyone interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of my work and books on my Amazon author page.

Keep learning with All About Psychology

The All About Psychology Substack is your go-to source for all things psychology. Subscribe today and instantly receive my bestselling Psychology Student Guide right in your inbox.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and as an extra thank you, you’ll also get the eBook version of my book Psychology Q & A: Great Answers to Fascinating Psychology Questions.

Why Upgrade to Paid?

Every penny of paid subscriber support goes directly towards hosting and running costs, helping keep All-About-Psychology.com free for everyone.

Your support ensures that:

• Students and educators can continue to access the most important and influential journal articles in the history of psychology, completely free.

• Readers everywhere can hear directly from world-renowned psychologists, authors and leading experts in the field.

• High-quality free content for students, educators, and the general public continues to be created and shared on a regular basis.

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I was very sad to hear of the death of Desmond Morris, who died on 19 April 2026 at the age of 98. He was a zoologist by training, but that only begins to describe a life that moved effortlessly between science, art, and broadcasting, bringing him into contact with an extraordinary cast of characters and taking him around the world, driven by what he later described as an insatiable urge to see every aspect of human activity.

He first came to global attention with The Naked Ape, a book that reframed human behavior through the lens of zoology and went on to reach millions of readers. But that success sits within a much broader story. Morris published dozens of books over more than half a century, presented hundreds of hours of television, conducted scientific research, and maintained a serious parallel career as an exhibiting artist. Along the way, he formed connections with figures as varied as Stanley Kubrick, Konrad Lorenz, Marlon Brando and Joan Miró, reflecting a life that never stayed within the boundaries of any one field.

What stands out is not just the range of what he did, but the drive behind it. Whether he was observing animals, writing about body language, or creating art, the same instinct ran through it all: a curiosity to look closely, to understand, and then communicate that understanding in a way others could engage with. It leaves the sense of a life that was not only long, but richly and purposefully lived.

A Personal Memory

In March 2013, along with my good friend Craig Baxter, we had the privilege of interviewing Desmond Morris for a body language project we were working on.

Here are a selection of questions and answers from that interview.

As a pioneer in the field of human body language, by definition, you wouldn’t have had an established body of knowledge to draw upon when you first developed an interest in the topic. With this in mind, how did you initially go about formulating your ideas?

In the 1960s I commented that there were many dictionaries of words but none dealing with actions. As a student of animal behavior I had previously been studying species where there were no words. Actions, movements, postures, signals, displays - these were the things that I was analyzing in fish, birds and mammals. When I turned to the human species I used the same method - direct observation of what people do, rather than what they say. I set out to make a complete ‘ethogram’ of human behavior - that is to say a complete record of every action that a human being is seen to make. I am still working on that.

Drawing on your book ‘Baby: A Portrait of the Amazing First Two Years of Life’ What in your opinion is the most amazing thing a baby does in the first two years of life?

Perhaps the most astonishing fact about human babies is that, during the nine months between conception and birth, their weight increases by a staggering 3000 million times.

One of the most astonishing discoveries of recent years has been the swimming ability of newborn babies. It used to be claimed that a new baby, placed in water, would quickly drown, but this was due to the way in which early tests were carried out. In those tests, when a baby was gently lowered into warm water face up, it soon began to panic and struggle, and the attempt had to be abandoned without delay.

But then, in more recent experiments, the reverse position was tried, with the baby face-down, and a parental hand under its tummy. To everyone’s surprise, the newborn baby now showed no sign of panic, held its breath automatically, and floated happily in the water with its eyes fully open, gazing at the underwater scene. If, very gently, the supporting hand was removed, the baby then started making swimming movements with its limbs and set off down the swimming pool...So the human baby can swim before it can walk. It can even swim before it can crawl.

You’re quoted as saying “My favorite place in the world to visit is one that I haven’t been to before!” What favorite places would you like to visit in the future?

I have recently fulfilled my schoolboy ambition of visiting 100 countries before I die. Top of my list of regions yet to be visited are Tibet and Peru.

Of all the places you have visited, which culture’s body language and non-verbal communication did you find the most fascinating and why?

Italy. When Italians argue with one another their hands are as eloquent as those of orchestra conductors. And Japan, where the body language is so different, so precise, so disciplined. They find the expansive asymmetry of Western body language very clumsy.

In your memoir ‘Watching - Encounters with Humans and Other Animals’ you mention that in 1967 your bestselling book ‘The Naked Ape’ caused an outrage. What was the nature of this outrage? And do you think it would court as much controversy if The Naked Ape were being published for the first time today?

It caused an outrage because, at the time, it was generally believed that everything human beings do is the result of learning. I argued that a lot of human behavior is the result of a set of genetic suggestions. Today this view is widely accepted, but not when The Naked Ape first appeared. Also some people were insulted at being called animals. I saw it differently. For me, to be called an animal was a compliment.

In trying to find a connection between your passion for art and human behavior we noted with interest that in the late 1940's you gave a lecture on "The Biology of Art" in which you describe human artistic activities as the result of neoteny. For anybody who hasn't heard of the concept could you briefly explain what neoteny is about?

Neoteny is the extension into adult life of childhood features. You could call it the Peter Pan syndrome. In humans what has happened is that childhood play has persisted into adulthood. Other animals play when they are young but then stop playing when they mature. Humans do not stop, but they call adult play something else - they call it art, science etc., Childhood curiosity doesn’t fade. We never stop asking questions and trying out new ideas. This is our greatest strength as a species.

What has been your proudest achievement in the field of human behavior and why?

I do not allow myself the luxury of pride. I am my most severe critic. But I have to admit that seeing The Naked Ape listed in the top hundred bestsellers of all time did give me a pang of pleasure.

Which one accomplishment would you most like to be remembered for?

Developing the study of body language into a serious scientific pursuit back in the 1960s.

Gestures

After the interview Desmond Morris provided us with with some wonderful body language images. Here are two of them, along with an explanation of why he liked them so much.

These two images amuse me as examples of how easy it is to misinterpret gestures. The human one is Japanese, perhaps an early Samurai warrior, but what is he signalling? It looks superficially like the famous British insult signal, which is why is amuses me. But what is he really doing? Is he signalling two of something, or is he closely examining something that has stuck to his fingertips, or is he an archer who has hurt his bow fingers? Or are the two fingers, pressed tightly side by side, meant to represent a mating couple (as they do in some cultures). Or was there some other arcane meaning to this gesture among early Samurai? If they used it simply as an emphatic baton gesture it is very unusual example of a baton, having the third and fourth fingers held down by the thumb.

The monkey one is just a joke - an animal caught accidentally giving 'the finger'. Not to be taken seriously.

The illustration below is from one of the most precious books in Dr. Morris’ library - John Bulwer’s Chirologia (The Natural Language of the Hand) published in 1644. Dr Morris considered the illustrations in this book to be the most significant in the whole history of body language studies!

And here is what was Dr. Desmond Morris' favorite image of the Neapolitan Cornuta insult gesture.

After writing The Naked Ape I had come to the conclusion that there was something missing from the traditional studies of human behaviour. There were plenty of reports on abnormal behaviour, on tribal rites and rituals, on kinship structures and social institutions, on intelligence tests and learning processes, but there was very little indeed on the central subject of ordinary, everyday, human actions. The way we interact with one another in our homes and streets, in shops and restaurants, on beaches and buses, was rarely honoured with serious, observational analysis. Perhaps, for scientists, it was all too commonplace, too familiar. But by the same token it was at the very heart of what it was to be human, and I decided to make a stab at investigating it in a systematic way.

In my library there were dozens of dictionaries of words, but no dictionaries of human actions. To a zoologist this was a major omission. The first step one takes when starting to study a new species is to draw up an ‘ethogram’ — a complete, classified list of every type of action that the animal makes. In each case, the movement is carefully described, along with what causes it and what effect it has. In a moment of boldness bordering on arrogance, I decided to do this for the human species, treating it as though it were a new animal species, encountered for the very first time.

In attempting this I would employ a technique that was the precise opposite of the one employed by Sigmund Freud. When the great man had a patient lying on his famous couch in Vienna, he himself sat facing away, so that he could only hear his patient’s voice, but could not set eyes him. I, by contrast, would only watch my subjects and would not listen to a word they said. I would confine myself entirely to non-verbal ‘body language’. As a zoologist, I could not speak to an antelope or ask questions of a lion, so, treating humans in the same way, I would only observe and record.

One spring day [in 1969] I was sitting at a table in the main square of Malta’s capital city, Valletta, sipping coffee and chatting to my publisher, Tom Maschler, who had flown out to discuss my next book. I explained what I was proposing to do, and he was slightly alarmed. An encyclopaedia of human actions seemed like a massive project, taking years and ending up almost unpublishable. But he encouraged me to make a start and see where it went.

We were watching an old man shrugging his shoulders. I pointed out to Tom that, unlike the English, the Maltese use a directional shrug. When an Englishman shrugs he directs himself forwards, at his companion, regardless of the subject being discussed. A Maltese, however, aims his hands in the general direction of the subject. If, for instance, he is complaining about something political, he will shrug his hands in the direction of the seat of government. If he is complaining about the lack of work in the docks, he will shrug towards the harbour, and so on. It was a tiny difference, but it made the body language of the Maltese subtly different from that of the English visitors to the island.

We continued to watch. The old man to whom the shrugger was addressing himself suddenly tossed his head backwards, closing his eyes and pursing his lips as he did so. If an Englishman did this, it would be a sign of irritation or scorn. But if this action is done by a Maltese it simply means ‘No!’. Again, a subtle difference. By spending hours observing the Maltese population, I had already come to understand a whole range of gestures and small communication actions that differ in some slight way from those of the country where I myself grew up. Strangely, though, I did not use these Maltese actions when I was talking to my Maltese friends. It would seem strange to perform a head toss instead of a head shake. But I understood the actions even though I did not personally employ them. This was rather like the condition a human toddler finds itself — understanding its parents words before it uses them itself.

As I kept up a running commentary on the body language around us, Tom remarked:

‘You look at people like a birdwatcher looks at birds.’

‘Yes’ I replied, ‘You could call me a manwatcher.’

‘That’s it,’ said Tom, ‘That’s the title of your next book. We’ll call it ‘Manwatching’’.

I was none to happy about this, still having in mind my big ‘Encyclopaedia of Human Actions’. But I made a mental note of it, all the same.

After Tom left I decided to set up a special office where I could start assembling my checklist of human body language. The Villa was big, but throughout the summer months it was always full of house-guests — friends taking holidays in the sun — and the atmosphere was wrong. I found a spacious office right on the Sliema sea-front, rented it and set to work. I took on an assistant, Trisha Pike, the lively, intelligent daughter of an Army officer who was stationed in Malta. We ordered a dozen huge boards, 8 feet tall by 3 feet wide, and stood them all around the walls. On these we planned to pin up hundreds of slips of paper. On each slip would be written one human action. We would then be able to juggle these slips around as we improved our classification system.

At first, it seemed a daunting task, but as the days passed, something was beginning to emerge. It turned out that human beings do not make as many different types of action as might be imagined. Because we could combine them in many ways and because we could vary their intensity, this gave a false impression that there were countless ways of using the human body. But if you simply took the basic elements involved, and classified those, the picture did not look so confusing.

To give three random examples: We only move our eyebrows in five ways — we raise, lower, knit, flash or cock them. We only cross our legs in four different ways — ankle-on-ankle, ankle-on-knee, knee-on-knee, or tight-twine. And we only fold our arms in four different ways — both-hands-showing; left-hand-showing + right-tucked in; right- hand- showing + left-tucked-in; both hands tucked in.

And so Trisha and I toiled on, pursuing our eccentric task of mapping the human ethogram. It took weeks, then months. The boards were now covered in hundreds of slips. At the same time, we were compiling files of photographs of all the actions. I was out recording actions on the streets, and every newspaper and magazine we could lay our hands on was being hacked to pieces. Slowly the repertoire of human actions was taking shape. It was amazing the way in which, once you had identified a particular action, it started coming up again and again, in the same sort of context. Nobody had ever named these actions before, so we had to do it ourselves. And the names had to be purely descriptive and could never imply a particular function or message.

After several more months it was clear that we were reaching saturation point. It would take a professional contortionist now to perform an action we had not identified and classified. And it looked as though there were about 3000 different actions that the human body performed in ordinary everyday life. I now started to write up my results, describing and discussing each action in detail.

At this point, Tom Maschler contacted me to find out how the new book is coming along. I announced proudly that I had reached the eyebrows. There was a pause. Then he asked: ‘Are you going up or down?’ When I reply ‘Down’ I sensed that he was not a happy publisher. After much debate it was decided that I should use my encyclopaedic records as the information base for some less ambitious books, and this was what I did.

The first book to emerge from this study was Intimate Behaviour. I then started work on the larger volume Manwatching, but it soon became clear that I needed to make field observations on a much wider range of cultures. In 1974 Ramona and I returned to England, where I took up a research post at Oxford, my old university. From there I began a new series of travels, with a team of 29 research workers and interpreters, exploring the body language of 25 different countries, right across Scandinavia, Europe, and the Mediterranean, an enterprise that proved to be highly rewarding, if at times slightly hazardous.

Desmond Morris (24 January 1928 – 19 April 2026)

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Whether it’s conversations with family and friends, or overhearing strangers when I’m out and about, I regularly hear clinical language casually referring to psychiatric, psychological, and emotional disorders. Someone forgets to reply to a message and puts it down to ADHD. A colleague rearranges the items on their desk and claims that it’s their OCD kicking in. Anxiety is said to be off the scale before a presentation.

The vocabulary of "therapy speak” is increasingly becoming the vocabulary of everyday life. People talk about being triggered by a film, gaslit by a partner, traumatized by a meeting, surrounded by narcissists at work. Terms that were once the careful language of clinicians and researchers now show up in text messages, group chats, and throwaway comments at the checkout.

The aim of this article is to explore what’s lost or gained when words move from a diagnostic manual into the ordinary flow of how we explain ourselves, each other, and the world around us. In doing so, I’ll examine the findings of researchers who study this phenomenon, in particular the work of psychologist Nick Haslam who coined the phrase concept creep to describe the gradual expansion of psychological terms into territory they were never originally meant to reside.

Concept creep

Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, published the paper that introduced the term in Psychological Inquiry in 2016.

The paper examined six concepts in detail: abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice. In each case, Haslam argued, the concept’s boundary had stretched in two distinct directions. He called the first direction horizontal creep, where a term extends outward to cover qualitatively new phenomena. He called the second vertical creep, where a term extends downward to cover less severe versions of what it already covered. Trauma, the case that draws the most attention, is a useful worked example. In mid-twentieth-century psychiatry, trauma referred to physical injury, and then to a severe psychological response to events outside ordinary human experience, like sexual assault, torture, or combat. Over subsequent decades, the term has stretched horizontally to cover forms of shared and inherited suffering (cultural trauma, intergenerational trauma) and vertically to cover milder and more subjective experiences. Both movements are what Haslam means by concept creep.

The three terms I mentioned at the start, ADHD, OCD, and anxiety, aren't among Haslam's six concepts. His case studies focus on harm-related terms specifically. The phenomenon I'm exploring in this article, clinical language moving into everyday life, is broader than concept creep as Haslam originally defined it. But his framework remains the most useful lens psychology has for thinking about what's happening, and it's where the strongest evidence lies.

From the research to everyday life

Bullying is the clearest case of horizontal creep in Haslam’s paper. When psychologists referred to bullying in the 1970s, the term described aggressive behavior among children that was intentional, repeated, and perpetrated from a position of power. Over the following decades, Haslam documents, the term expanded outward into contexts its original meaning wouldn’t have covered: adults at work, not just children in school, where it now covers persistent mistreatment, exclusion, and undermining conduct between colleagues.

The scale of that expansion shows up in the research itself. Haslam reports that between 1990 and 2010, citations to bullying research increased roughly a hundredfold. In occupational and organizational psychology journals specifically, articles on workplace bullying rose from 1.3 percent of output in the 1990s, to 8.8 percent in the 2000s, to 10.8 percent in the 2010s. This is concept creep in action: a term coined for one setting, with one specific set of behaviors in mind, now doing work across a much wider territory, at significantly more severe, less severe, and qualitatively different levels.

That pattern, a term leaving its original setting for a much wider one is exactly what we’re seeing now in everyday language. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist at the University of Tennessee, told the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology that this isn’t a purely new phenomenon. People used to say “schizophrenic” to mean changing your mind and “OCD” to mean pay attention to detail. What’s changed, she argued, is that an emotionally aware generation with more access to the vocabulary has amplified a pattern of colloquial use that has always been there.

So is this bad, or is it good?

The question this raises is whether concept creep is something to be worried about.

On the critical side, the case is that broadened concepts do real damage. They dilute the clinical precision that exists for a reason. They can keep people stuck in self-diagnosis instead of seeking evidence-based care. They can minimise the suffering of people with serious conditions, by widening the category so much that the specific weight of the most severe cases is lost. Writing in Psychology Today, professor of psychiatry, Dr. Brendan Kelly describes the clinical stakes plainly: access to services, insurance coverage, educational support, and workplace accommodations often depend on diagnoses meaning something specific. When the language loses its edge, the systems that rely on it lose theirs too.

On the supportive side, the case is that broadened concepts are often well-motivated and have genuine benefits. Haslam himself makes this point in his 2016 paper. Concepts of harm that have broadened often recognise suffering that was previously ignored. They extend professional care to people who would once have received none. They give moral legitimacy to victims whose experiences didn’t have a name. And they promote treatment and sympathy over neglect and blame. The clinical psychologist Erin Parks, offers the clearest worked example. For most of history, she points out, a lot of people in abusive situations didn’t have the word “abuse” available to them, which made them more likely to blame themselves, to be confused by what was happening, and to see their situation as one they had caused rather than one they needed to escape. Language, Parks argues, can be powerful precisely because a term that seems obvious now wasn’t always there.

Neither side of this debate is a fringe position, and neither side has been settled by evidence alone. The rest of the article looks at what the research has to say about the specific claims that come up most often in the argument.

Has the DSM really been lowering its bar?

One of the most cited claims in Haslam’s 2016 paper, concerning concept creep and mental disorder, relates to the increased listings within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the reference book that lists the conditions clinicians are trained to recognize, sets out the criteria for each one, and standardizes the language clinicians, researchers, insurers, and educational systems use to talk about them. The current edition is the fifth, text-revised in 2022, and is among the most widely used mental health reference books in the world. Haslam pointed out that the manual had grown from 47 conditions in the 1940s to over 300 by the early 2000s.

If the DSM has grown that much, an obvious question to ask is whether it has lowered the bar for what counts as a disorder across editions, to the extent that the diagnostic criteria themselves have become looser over time? This is essentially what critics of diagnostic expansion have argued for decades; most notably Allen Frances, who chaired the task force that produced the fourth edition in 1994 and later wrote a 2013 book titled Saving Normal on the medicalization of ordinary life. The question of bar lowering hadn’t been properly tested, until Haslam and his co-author Fabiano decided to test it themselves.

In 2020, they published a meta-analysis in Clinical Psychology Review, which is a formal statistical method for combining results across multiple studies. They combined 123 of them, each one comparing how the same groups of patients were diagnosed under different editions of the DSM from the 1980s onward.

The headline result was that “the average risk ratio was 1.00, indicating no overall change in diagnostic stringency from DSM-III to DSM-5.” In plain English: across the manuals the meta-analysis was able to compare, the number of patients being caught under a diagnosis was just as likely to go down in a new edition as up. An equal number of conditions had become stricter as had become looser.

That result is not the whole story, and the authors are careful to say so. For specific conditions, diagnostic criteria have genuinely widened, enough that rates of diagnosis really have risen as a consequence of the manual changing rather than the underlying population changing. ADHD is one of them. Autism and eating disorders are others. The position Fabiano and Haslam set out is that the DSM has not been systematically loosening its criteria across the board, but individual conditions have moved in meaningful ways, some widening and some tightening. What the meta-analysis tests is one specific claim about the DSM, not the broader question of whether concept creep is driving diagnostic change, or the other way around.

Does using broader concepts of mental illness stop people from getting help, or encourage it?

If Fabiano and Haslam’s meta-analysis complicates one central claim on the critical side of the debate, another strand of research complicates the critical view from a different direction entirely. In 2021, Jia-Yan Tse and Nick Haslam published a study in Frontiers in Psychology looking at the relationship between how broadly people think about mental disorder and how positively they feel about seeking help for it.

The study compared 212 Asian American and White American adults recruited through an online platform. Each participant was asked to consider a range of experiences that might or might not qualify as mental disorder, and the researchers used their responses to measure how broadly each person drew the concept. They also measured help-seeking attitudes and stigma. The specific question Tse and Haslam set out to answer was whether differences in concept breadth might help explain a well-documented gap in help-seeking between the two groups: by external estimates cited in the study, Asian Americans are two to five times less likely than their White peers to seek mental health help.

What the analysis found was a mediation relationship. On average, Asian Americans in the sample held narrower concepts of mental disorder than White Americans. Those narrower concepts were themselves associated with less positive help-seeking attitudes. And the concept-breadth gap between the two groups accounted for a meaningful portion of the help-seeking attitude gap between them. In a mediation analysis, that pattern is the statistical fingerprint of one variable partially explaining the relationship between two others. Tse and Haslam also found a weak but present negative relationship between broader concepts and stigma: the broader the concept, the less stigmatizing the attitude.

The authors are careful about what their finding does and doesn’t establish. Their design was cross-sectional, which means they measured everything at one moment, and they write explicitly that this “does not allow inferences about the direction of associations.” It’s possible that broader concepts lead to more favorable help-seeking attitudes; it’s equally possible that people already inclined to seek help develop broader concepts along the way, or that a third factor is driving both. They also measured attitudes rather than actual treatment uptake, which they note makes it risky to assume concept breadth translates into real differences in who gets help and who doesn’t. And they stress that Asian Americans in the United States are a diverse group with varied ethnicities, immigration histories, and acculturation levels, so the study can’t be used to make broader claims about Asian cultures or Western cultures generally. The most the paper supports is that within this specific sample, concept breadth varied across two cultural groups and was associated with differences in help-seeking attitudes.

It’s a finding that proposes that broader concepts of mental disorder might, for some people, open a door rather than dilute a category. The door is real. The dilution is real. Both can be true at once.

What happens when someone is actually taught a broader concept

None of the research discussed in the article so far can tell us what happens to an individual person when they actually learn to think about a mental health concept more broadly.

In 2022, Payton Jones and Richard McNally set out to test exactly that. They published an experimental study in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy in which 293 adults were recruited through a crowdsourcing platform commonly used for research and randomly assigned to one of two conditions. One group was taught a broader definition of trauma; the other was taught a narrower one. Both groups were then shown a distressing clip from the Hollywood film The Last King of Scotland, and asked to report on their experience of it. In the days that followed, the researchers also checked back in with participants about any lingering distress.

What the paper found was a pair of results that only make sense together.

The first result came from measuring people’s pre-existing beliefs about trauma, before any teaching had taken place. Participants who already held broader concepts of trauma were more likely to classify the clip as a personal trauma, reported more intense negative emotions while watching it, and reported more event-related distress in the follow-up days after. Taken on its own, that finding would seem to suggest that broader concepts of trauma leave people worse off.

The second result came from the experimental arm of the study. The randomized teaching manipulation worked: participants assigned to the broader condition did come to hold broader concepts of trauma than those assigned to the narrower one. But the manipulation’s effects on the other outcomes, including emotional response and follow-up distress, were weaker and more indirect. The authors describe this as “limited support for causality.” Namely: the pre-existing correlation was real, but deliberately teaching someone a broader concept did not reliably worsen their experience of the clip in the same way that already holding one had.

The authors themselves flag a possible reading of this pair of results. It could be the case that a third variable, one they weren’t able to measure directly in this study, is driving both halves of the pattern. Trait anxiety is their suggested candidate. A person who is more anxious by temperament may already be more inclined to hold broader concepts of trauma and also be more vulnerable to distressing material. If that’s what’s happening, the correlation between broader concepts and worse outcomes isn’t caused by the concepts at all. It’s a shared symptom of something else.

The authors acknowledge the study’s limitations. Some of the scales they used were new and have not been tested extensively for validity. The sample was modest in size, mostly Caucasian, and entirely English-speaking. Their conclusion is a call for further research rather than a settled answer on either side of the debate.

The finding matters because it complicates the arguments on both sides. The critical view is partly right: broader pre-existing concepts do correlate with labeling more experiences as trauma and with stronger emotional responses. The supportive view is also partly right: teaching someone a broader concept, in a controlled setting, doesn’t reliably make them feel worse than teaching them a narrower one. And the authors’ own careful reading is that neither side’s simple story is the full one, because the correlation they found might be driven by something else entirely.

Concept creep and personal characteristics

If concept creep is a real cultural pattern, then individuals will adopt it to different degrees, and their personal characteristics may help explain who is most likely to drive it.

In 2019, Melanie McGrath and four co-authors, including Haslam, published a study in Personality and Individual Differences that set out to map those individual characteristics. They ran two studies with American participants recruited online, asking each of them to consider a range of borderline cases across four harm-related concepts (bullying, prejudice, trauma, and mental disorder,) and judge whether each case qualified. The researchers then looked at how concept breadth varied across different kinds of people.

The associations they found were broadly what Haslam’s 2016 framework would predict. People with broader concepts of harm tended to score higher on measures of empathic concern, tended to be more sensitive to injustice directed at others, and tended to hold more liberal political attitudes.

What the study didn’t find was arguably more interesting. A common perception is that younger generations have stretched the meaning of clinical language, while older generations have held on to more traditional, less expansive uses.

McGrath and colleagues found that age was not associated with concept breadth in their samples. Older participants were no more or less likely to hold broader concepts than younger ones.

As a case in point, I’m a Gen Xer and was definitely “triggered” by the video clip above. 😅

Why people reach for the broadened concepts in the first place

A really interesting take on this question comes from Ieuan Pugh, writing in The Psychologist in late 2025.

Pugh’s broader argument is about the wellness industry and how digital platforms commodify emotional experience. But within that argument, he makes an observation that sits at the heart of why language like this matters to the people using it.

Concept creep can dilute clinical precision. Broader pre-existing concepts can correlate with worse emotional responses. Specific diagnostic criteria have widened in ways that may genuinely inflate rates of diagnosis. But when the colleague says it’s their OCD, when the friend describes a meeting as traumatizing, when the relative calls a difficult ex a narcissist, they might be reaching for this language because something real needs naming and nothing better is available to them.

This article isn’t going to resolve that tension. The clinical concerns are real. The human reasons for this using this language are also real.

Final thoughts

I set out to write about this topic because I wanted to engage with what the research actually says, rather than with the noise that tends to surround it. Mental health is emotive territory. Any time someone’s suffering or someone’s language about psychological wellbeing comes into public view, the risk is that the conversation gets pulled quickly into culture-war positions where no one is really listening.

Haslam himself found that out. On the Therapy vs. The World podcast in 2024, he reflected that when he published his 2016 paper, he thought he had gone to great pains to be neutral. He was simply documenting that something was happening. What he got in response was readers assuming he was a reactionary, critics assuming he was invalidating people’s experiences, and, in his own words from the same conversation, being slotted into a culture-war identity he didn’t have.

That isn’t a reason to avoid writing about this kind of research. It’s a reason to be careful about how.

If the article has done anything useful, I hope it shows that the research on concept creep is more specific and more two-sided than a quick reading of the related issue of therapy speak tends to present. There are findings that should give critics pause. There are findings that should give supporters pause. There are gaps where the research hasn’t been done yet and questions the authors themselves flag as unsettled.

None of that offers the tidy, less nuanced position a culture-war debate can use and I’d like to think that’s exactly the point.

Here’s the podcast interview with Haslam mentioned above. It’s over an hour long and covers issues beyond the scope of this article, but it’s well worth listening to.

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I recently came across an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1863. Its title was "The Utility and the Futility of Aphorisms," and its author was the American writer and clergyman William R. Alger.

An aphorism is a concise statement claiming a truth of general importance. What distinguishes it is its depth, its precision, and sometimes paradoxical quality that makes you look twice. It doesn’t simply state a fact or prescribe a course of action. It makes you pause, reflect, and think more deeply.

As someone who's always been drawn to aphorisms Alger’s article immediately caught my attention. Alger wasn't simply celebrating the wisdom of short, seemingly insightful sayings. He was interrogating them, asking when they genuinely help us think and act, and when they do the opposite. According to Alger:

For example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Alger’s case for the aphorism is made with real conviction but he also contends that while they can open the mind, they can also close it down, if they function as ready-made phrases that spare us the effort of thinking for ourselves.

Before exploring what contemporary psychology has to say about the utility and futility of aphorisms, it's worth identifying the related terms that are often used interchangeably but mean something quite different.

Not all sayings are created equal

A proverb is different in origin and character. Proverbs emerge from folk culture and collective experience. They’re traditional, often metaphorical, and have been handed down across generations. Nobody wrote them; they accumulated. “A stitch in time saves nine” is a proverb. “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” is a proverb. As Alger observed, they’re the children of anonymous observation, rising from among the multitude rather than from a single named mind.

A maxim is more individual and more directive. Where a proverb describes, a maxim prescribes. It’s a rule for conduct, a guide to behavior. Maxims typically tell you what to do. They’re less interested in opening questions than in settling them. Check out the following video for some great maxims.

An adage sits close to the proverb but carries the additional weight of age. It’s a saying that has gained credibility not through any particular insight but through sheer longevity, the accumulated authority of having been repeated across centuries. “Least said, soonest mended” is an adage. Its authority is essentially traditional.

An epigram is wit compressed into a line. It aims for surprise, irony, or satirical effect rather than wisdom in any deep sense. It delights rather than instructs. Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist everything except temptation” is just one of his many memorable epigrams.

An axiom is a self-evident premise, the kind of foundational statement used in logic or mathematics. “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line” is an axiom. It doesn’t invite reflection; it closes inquiry.

A truism is a statement so obviously true that saying it adds nothing. It has the shape of wisdom without the substance.

A dictum is an authoritative pronouncement associated with a specific source, a ruling, a declaration, a verdict. It carries weight through the status of whoever issued it rather than through any intrinsic insight.

In his 2012 book The Long and Short of It, Professor Gary Saul Morson argues that what separates a genuine aphorism from these related terms, is that the true aphorism addresses the perplexing nature of the world and invites deeper questioning.

Which brings us back to Nietzsche’s “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” By Morson’s definition the quote earns its place as a genuine aphorism. It doesn’t simply prescribe conduct the way a maxim does. It makes a claim about the nature of adversity that we can test against our own experience, which personally I have found partially true, partially complicated, and never quite fully resolved. It invites further thought rather than closing down the issue raised. That’s the mark of the aphorism.

Interestingly, “What does not kill me makes me stronger” comes from a section of Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols that he titled “Maxims and Arrows” suggesting that the boundaries between the terms outlined above are not always clear cut.

Even scholars who study them professionally disagree about where one ends and another begins. Philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term “deepity” to describe a statement that appears to straddle the line between profound and empty: it has two possible readings, one trivially true, one that sounds profound but is actually meaningless. “Love is just a word” is his example. The deepity mimics the aphorism’s compression and apparent depth while delivering neither.

How aphorisms work on the brain

The reason aphorisms resonate when we encounter them, sometimes has more to do with the way our brains process information than the insight they contain.

The term processing fluency describes the ease with which the mind takes in and makes sense of information. Research has established that when something is easy to process, whether because it’s brief, rhythmically regular, or familiar, the brain experiences a low-level sense of comfort. However, that feeling of ease can be misattributed to the quality of the information itself. In other words, if something feels easy to absorb, we’re inclined to treat it as more likely to be true. This is known as the illusory truth effect.

A 1999 study by Rolf Reber and Norbert Schwarz illustrated this by manipulating something as simple as the visual contrast of text on a screen. Statements displayed in higher contrast, and therefore easier to read, were rated by participants as more likely to be true than identical statements displayed in lower contrast. The content hadn’t changed. Only the ease of reading had. Yet that ease was enough to shift judgments of truth.

For aphorisms specifically, a clear expression of this phenomenon can be seen in what is known as the rhyme-as-reason effect. In a study published in Psychological Science in 2000, Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh presented participants with aphorisms in their original rhyming form alongside semantically equivalent versions with the rhyme removed. “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals” was tested against “What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks.” The rhyming versions were consistently judged to be more accurate, not because they contained better evidence or sharper reasoning, but because the structural regularity of the rhyme made them easier to process. The researchers described the tendency to judge a statement’s truth by its aesthetic qualities as the Keats heuristic, after the poet’s line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

The finding has a direct bearing on why aphorisms carry such conviction. A well-constructed aphorism doesn’t just state something thought-provoking; it states it in a way that feels right. The rhythm, the compression, the satisfying click of the phrasing all work on us before we’ve had a chance to evaluate the content. As Alger observed in 1863, the aphorism hits some fact of experience with a pungency that fixes it in the mind. What he couldn’t have known is that part of what fixes it there is a cognitive mechanism that has nothing to do with whether the observation is actually correct.

There is, however, a redeeming detail in McGlone and Tofighbakhsh’s findings. When participants were explicitly cautioned to separate a statement’s poetic qualities from its meaning, the truth advantage of the rhyming versions was significantly reduced. Awareness, it turns out, is a partial antidote. Which matters, because as Alger himself argued, the real danger of aphorisms isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that they can feel so right that we never think to check.

Aphorisms and the question of utility

One tentative area the evidence points to is clinical practice. A 2023 review published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy by psychiatrists Joel Yager and Jerry Kay titled “Adages, Aphorisms, and Proverbs in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy: Tools for Assessment and Treatment” examined the use of aphorisms, subsumed within the broader term adage, which they identified as heuristic cognitive structures, shortcuts that help patients assess difficult situations, regulate difficult emotions, and find frameworks for action when thinking clearly is hardest. These structures were found to be located within five broad categories: those that encouraged positive reinterpretation, those that addressed destiny and hardship, those that built resilience, those that justify through experience, and those that offer relational insight.

It’s an appealing framework, and clinically it makes intuitive sense. When someone is in the grip of acute distress, a well-chosen pearl of wisdom can offer a handhold, something brief enough to hold in mind when more elaborate reasoning isn’t available. But Yager and Kay are honest about the limits of what the evidence can currently claim. As they note, the extent to which well-known phrases that spontaneously arise in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic interactions, and what effect they have when they do, hasn’t been systematically studied. The clinical case rests on narrative review, clinical observation, and case examples rather than controlled trial data.

A more specific clinical example comes from psychotherapist Richard O’Connor, whose 2001 paper in the American Journal of Psychotherapy describes using a dedicated list of aphorisms as a deliberate therapeutic tool with depressed patients. In his own words: “I often provide them with a list of aphorisms about depression, which can serve as a stimulus for thought and discussion. I find that the following flat assertions, presented as statements of fact, have a way of getting around defensiveness.” O’Connor describes these aphorisms as a form of what the clinician Leston Havens called performative language, statements that perform an action simply by being spoken, using them to move patients from a passive position toward active engagement with their condition. As with Yager and Kay, this is practitioner evidence evidence rather than controlled trial data, but it offers a concrete illustration of aphorisms being used purposefully, with a named rationale, in a peer-reviewed context.

There’s a separate and more firmly established reason why aphorisms may serve us well, and it has to do with memory. In a study published in Psychonomic Science in 1969, Gordon Bower and his graduate student Michal Clark demonstrated that participants who constructed stories to link lists of unrelated words recalled six to seven times more words than participants who used no such structure, with median recall of 93% against 13% after all twelve lists had been studied. Aphorisms aren’t stories, but they share something important with them: a structural shape, a beginning and an end, a form that gives the mind something to hold. That structural quality may be part of what makes an aphorism easier to retain and return to than a more discursive observation of equal insight. When we need a thought most, in a moment of difficulty or decision, it helps if that thought is already there.

When aphorisms shut thinking down

In a narrative essay published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2023, physician Lisa Schreyer wrote about the psychological cost of following a childhood therapist’s advice to “fake it till you make it.” Schreyer’s is a personal account rather than empirical research, and it would be wrong to draw broad conclusions from a single experience. It’s also worth noting that “fake it till you make it” sits closer to a maxim than a genuine aphorism by the definitions we’ve established: it prescribes a course of action rather than inviting deeper reflection on the nature of things. But that distinction doesn’t diminish the point it illustrates. Whether the saying in question is an aphorism, a maxim, or something in between, the psychological cost of following the wrong one without questioning it is real. And that cost is what the concept of the thought-terminating cliché was developed to explain.

The most direct theoretical framework for understanding this comes from an unlikely source. In his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton introduced the concept of the thought-terminating cliché, which he explained as follows:

The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

Lifton coined the term specifically in the context of totalitarianism and applying it to everyday aphorisms extends beyond its original scope. A thought-terminating cliché in Lifton’s sense was a tool of ideological control, deployed deliberately to discourage independent thinking in a coercive environment. Most aphorisms we encounter in daily life carry no such intent.

Dr Catriona Davis-McCabe, former President of the Australian Psychological Society, notes that thought-terminating clichés can be used to shut down discussion and debate across a range of settings, from organisations and workplaces to families and relationships. Her practical advice, therefore, is to examine the clichés you reach for, question where they come from, and ask whether they are genuinely serving you or simply closing down thinking that deserves to happen

What’s striking is that Alger identified the same dangers specifically in relation to aphorisms in 1863.

He also identified a second danger: that aphorisms may be applied mechanically, without genuine understanding, leading to grievous mistakes. His warning wasn’t about totalitarianism. It was about the more ordinary human tendency to reach for a ready phrase and mistake the comfort it provides for the work of actually thinking.

Final Thoughts

So do Alger’s arguments still hold?

His case for the utility of aphorisms finds support in the research on memory and structure, in the clinical evidence that expressions of compressed wisdom can offer a useful of reference in moments of acute distress, and in the work of practitioners who have deployed them deliberately as therapeutic tools. This doesn’t prove that aphorisms heal, but it does suggest why they can help.

Alger’s case for the futility of aphorisms also finds support. The rhyme-as-reason effect demonstrates that we judge the truth of a statement partly by the aesthetic pleasure of its form, not just its content. Processing fluency shows that ease of absorption can be mistaken for evidence of truth. And Lifton’s thought-terminating cliché framework, however far removed from its original context, names precisely the mechanism Alger was warning against: the way a well-turned phrase can become the start and finish of analysis rather than a prompt to deeper thought.

Alger didn’t have an explanation for why this is so hard to resist. The comfort that a good aphorism provides isn’t incidental to its danger. It’s the source of it. When something feels right, the impulse to interrogate it further is diminished. McGlone and Tofighbakhsh’s finding that awareness attenuates the rhyme-as-reason effect suggests that the antidote, partial as it is, lies in the same faculty Alger was appealing to all along: the willingness to keep thinking.

Alger closed his 1863 essay with a distinction that psychology has since reframed in cognitive terms. There are, he argued, two kinds of verbal wisdom. One is what he called a petrification of wisdom: lifeless, dried out, a husk of insight that neither stimulates nor nourishes. The other is a vital concentration of wisdom: alive, charged, capable of genuine transmission. The same words, the same form, the same compression. The difference lies not in the aphorism itself but in what the reader brings to it.

An aphorism is not wise or foolish by nature. It’s an invitation. Whether it opens thinking or closes it down depends, as it always has, on whether we accept the invitation or simply take the comfort and move on.

Accepting the invitation

Here are four classic aphorisms that I think genuinely meet Morson’s standard: concise statements that address the perplexing nature of the world and invite deeper questioning rather than closing it down. See what you make of them.

Do you have a favorite aphorism? I'd love to know what it is.

Leave a comment

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Folie à deux is one of those psychiatric conditions that sounds almost too strange to be real. It describes a phenomenon where one person’s delusional beliefs are transmitted to another, typically someone they live with or are deeply emotionally connected to. The result is a shared psychosis, a private reality built by two people together, sealed off from the outside world which is resistant to challenge.

What makes folie à deux so fascinating from a psychological perspective is that it doesn’t fit neatly into our usual understanding of mental illness as something that happens inside an individual. Here, the disorder exists in the relationship itself. It is, in that sense, a social phenomenon as much as a psychiatric one, and it raises questions that go well beyond clinical diagnosis. Under what conditions can one person’s distorted reality become another’s? And what does folie à deux tell us about the nature of belief, identity, and the boundaries of the self?

A brief history of folie à deux

Interest in folie à deux goes as far back as 1651, when physician William Harvey documented one of the earliest recorded cases, describing a shared induced psychosis between two sisters. It would be another two centuries before French psychiatry began to formally investigate the phenomenon.

In 1860 Jules Baillarger coined the phrase folie communiquée, to introduce the idea that psychosis can travel between people. It was a radical notion, and it set the stage for the landmark work that followed.

The first formal clinical understanding of folie à deux was presented in 1877, when Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret published a groundbreaking paper detailing not only the existence of shared psychosis, but also its internal mechanics: who develops it, who receives it, and under what conditions the transmission occurs.

Other psychiatrists and neurologists began identifying variations that didn’t quite fit the original model and by the 1880s, four distinct subtypes of folie à deux had been proposed, each distinguished by how the delusion spread and what happened when the two individuals were separated.

The four subtypes of folie à deux

Folie imposée is the classic form: a dominant individual with established psychosis transfers their delusion to a previously healthy, submissive partner. Crucially, the secondary person typically abandons the belief once physically separated from the inducer.

Folie simultanée describes a different dynamic entirely: two individuals who are both predisposed to psychosis develop identical delusions concurrently, mutually triggering symptoms in each other. Separation rarely improves the condition for either party.

Folie communiquée involves a healthy person who initially resists the primary partner’s delusions but eventually adopts them, sometimes developing their own distinct delusional content over time. Unlike folie imposée, the secondary partner maintains these beliefs even after separation.

Folie induite is the most complex subtype: a person who is already psychotic adopts new, distinct delusions from another psychotic individual they are closely associated with. Both parties require intensive treatment.

Causes of folie à deux

Research points consistently to a specific combination of factors that together create the conditions in which one person’s delusions can take root in another’s mind. No single factor is sufficient on its own. It is the interaction between them that matters.

The relationship dynamic

At the center of almost every case is a deeply unequal relationship. The inducing partner tends to be dominant, persuasive, and older, often the provider or protector within the relationship. The recipient tends to be passive, emotionally dependent, and highly suggestible. In many cases, the secondary partner meets the clinical criteria for Dependent Personality Disorder, a condition characterized by an excessive need for guidance, reassurance, and emotional support from others.

This dependency is important because it helps explain the mechanism of transmission. The recipient adopts the inducer’s delusions in part, because doing so preserves the relationship that their emotional security depends on. Accepting the shared reality, however distorted, is a way of staying close to the person they need most.

Isolation

If the relationship dynamic is the engine of folie à deux, social isolation is the fuel. Research has identified isolation as the primary social context in the overwhelming majority of cases. A systematic review of shared psychotic disorder in children and young people found social isolation to be the most common social context, present in 83.3% of inductors and 76.2% of induced individuals.

When a pair is cut off from family, friends, and broader social contact, they lose access to outside perspectives that would ordinarily challenge distorted thinking. Without those reality checks, a delusional belief system can grow unchallenged in both complexity and conviction.

The isolation doesn’t have to be dramatic or deliberate. It can develop gradually, through the slow withdrawal from social ties that often accompanies a dependent or troubled relationship. What matters is the end result: a closed system in which the only source of validation is the other person.

Genetic and neurobiological vulnerability

Not everyone exposed to a deluded partner will adopt their beliefs, and genetics helps explain why. Around 55% of secondary cases have a close relative with a psychological disorder involving delusions, suggesting a meaningful hereditary component. People with a family history of psychotic illness appear to carry a lower threshold for developing delusional thinking themselves, particularly under conditions of chronic stress.

The biology behind this involves the brain’s response to prolonged stress. When someone is subjected to persistent stress, such as the kind produced by an isolated, dysfunctional relationship, the body’s stress response system activates and releases cortisol. Over time, chronically elevated cortisol levels alter neuronal function and raise dopamine activity in the brain. It’s this dopamine pathway that is most directly associated with the onset of delusions and hallucinations. Individuals who lack sufficient biological resilience to recover from this stress response are considerably more vulnerable to what researchers have described as psychotic contagion within the relationship.

Underlying mental illness

The inducing partner almost always has a pre-existing psychiatric condition, most commonly delusional disorder or schizophrenia. This is what generates the original delusional belief system in the first place. Without a primary source of psychosis, there is nothing to transmit.

Symptoms of folie à deux

Because folie à deux exists within a relationship rather than within a single individual, its symptoms reflect that shared quality. Both partners present with the same delusional beliefs, but the way those beliefs manifest, and how firmly they are held, differs considerably between the inducer and the induced.

Shared delusions

At the heart of every case is a fixed false belief that both individuals hold as unquestionably true. These delusions tend to fall into two broad categories. Bizarre delusions involve scenarios that are physically impossible, such as believing that organs have been surgically removed during sleep without leaving a scar. Non-bizarre delusions are implausible but not impossible, such as believing the family is being tracked through their mobile phones or monitored by government agencies.

The most common theme is persecution. Both individuals typically believe they are the target of a conspiracy, whether that involves neighbors practicing witchcraft, outsiders attempting to poison them, or more contemporary fears around digital surveillance and cyber-monitoring. Grandiose and religious delusions are the second most common presentation, with individuals believing they hold divine titles, possess supernatural powers, or are fulfilling a sacred mission.

Hallucinations

Alongside fixed beliefs, some individuals also experience hallucinations, though these are considerably less prominent than the delusions themselves. Hallucinations are reported in around half of primary inducers but in only about a quarter of induced individuals. When the secondary partner does experience them, they tend to be less frequent and less intense, and are often understood to result from the inducer’s suggestions rather than an independent break from reality.

How the symptoms differ between inducer and induced

While the delusional content is shared, the clinical picture on each side of the relationship looks quite different. The inducer’s beliefs are deeply entrenched and resistant to challenge. They typically display strong paranoia, high delusional conviction, and a flat refusal to engage with any evidence that contradicts their worldview.

The induced partner’s presentation is notably different. Their beliefs are adopted rather than generated, which means they are held with less rigidity and are far more dependent on the relationship itself for their maintenance.

Behavioral changes

The shared reality eventually becomes all-encompassing, reshaping daily life in ways that are often visible to those outside the relationship. Common behavioral changes include profound social withdrawal, with the pair refusing to leave the home or cutting ties with family and neighbors entirely. Persistent anxiety, agitation, and insomnia frequently accompany the paranoid beliefs. In cases where the delusions center on poisoning or spiritual purity, significant changes in eating habits can occur, sometimes to a degree that results in serious physical deterioration.

In more extreme cases, particularly those involving persecutory or apocalyptic beliefs, the behavioral consequences can become dangerous. The pair may destroy property they believe to be the source of a threat, become verbally or physically aggressive toward those they perceive as persecutors, or in the most severe cases, act violently.

The following clip from 1952 documents a real clinical case of folie à deux involving a mother and daughter.

Famous real-world cases of shared psychosis

What follows are some of the most compelling and well-documented examples of shared psychosis. Please note that some of the cases described below involve violence, death, and distressing content.

The Eriksson twins

In May 2008, Swedish identical twins Ursula and Sabina Eriksson traveled from Ireland to England. What unfolded over the following days became one of the most widely analyzed cases of folie à deux.

The incident began on a coach, where the sisters' behavior had already become visibly erratic, resulting in them being removed from the vehicle at a service area. Shortly afterward, both twins ran into oncoming traffic on the nearby M6 motorway. Ursula was struck by an articulated lorry that shattered her legs. Sabina, witnessing this, immediately stepped into the path of an oncoming car. Both survived and despite their severe injuries, they fought against the police and medical personnel who tried to help them. Their behavior during restraint revealed their shared delusional world. Ursula cried out "I know you're not real," while Sabina shouted "They're going to steal your organs.”

Because her physical injuries were deemed non-life-threatening, Sabina was released from custody after a brief psychiatric evaluation. She was taken in by a local man named Glenn Hollinshead, who had encountered her wandering the streets. Still in the grip of profound paranoia, Sabina stabbed Hollinshead to death without provocation.

At her subsequent murder trial, folie à deux became the central argument of her defense. Her legal team successfully argued diminished responsibility on the grounds of shared psychotic disorder, with Ursula identified as the inducer and Sabina as the recipient whose grasp on reality had been entirely overtaken by her sister’s pathology. Sabina was sentenced to five years in prison.

The Tromp family

In 2016, Mark and Jacoba Tromp, along with their three adult children Riana, Mitchell, and Ella, abandoned their farm in Silvan, Victoria, and embarked on what would become an extraordinary 1,600km journey across two states. At least one of the parents had become convinced that someone was out to kill them and take their money, and that they were being tracked through their electronic devices. Passports, credit cards, and mobile phones were left behind.

What makes the Tromp case particularly interesting is how the adult children initially absorbed their parents’ distorted reality. Mitchell later said he had gone along to ensure the family would be safe, though he described the shared panic as a build-up of ordinary pressures that escalated gradually until the entire family genuinely believed their lives were at risk. As events unfolded, the family separated in stages across two states, with Mitchell leaving first, followed by Riana and Ella, and finally Mark and Jacoba themselves. Police were called, and the case prompted a large-scale interstate search. Several family members were found in states of significant distress, with two requiring psychiatric care.

The Tromp case is an example of folie à famille, shared psychosis extending across an entire family unit, and a vivid illustration of how a mutually validated delusion can completely sever a group’s connection to ordinary reality.

Other notable cases

June and Jennifer Gibbons, known as the Silent Twins. Intensely private and withdrawn and speaking only to each other in a private dialect, the twins shared a delusional belief that one of them had to die so the other could live a normal life. In 1993 Jennifer died suddenly of acute myocarditis. Following her sister’s death, June went on to live a relatively normal life.

The NPR broadcast below tells the story of June and Jennifer in compelling detail.

In 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Wisconsin, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, stabbed their friend nineteen times in an attempt to please Slenderman, a fictional horror character from internet forums. During legal proceedings, their shared deadly fantasy was explicitly characterized by Weier’s defense team as a case of folie à deux.

In 2025, a peer-reviewed case series titled, Shared Psychotic Disorder in the Digital Age: A Case Series of Virtual 'Folie à Trois', involved three young men from different cities who had not met in person for over two years but interacted daily through an online gaming community. The primary inducer developed severe paranoia about digital surveillance and AI profiling. Through daily voice conversations, both secondary recipients adopted identical delusions, destroying their home internet routers and withdrawing completely from society. It is believed to be among the first documented cases of shared psychosis transmitted entirely through virtual contact, with no physical proximity involved.

In 1954, fifteen-year-old Juliet Hulme and sixteen-year-old Pauline Parker murdered Pauline’s mother, Honorah, in Christchurch, New Zealand. The two girls had formed an intense, all-consuming friendship, building an elaborate shared fantasy world they called the “Fourth World,” complete with invented saints and a private religion documented obsessively in diaries and stories.

At their trial, the defense argued the girls had been suffering from folie à deux, with Juliet identified as the primary inducer and Pauline as the recipient. Defense psychiatrist Dr. Reginald Medlicott formally diagnosed them with what he described as “paranoia of an exalted type in the setting of a folie à deux.” The jury rejected the insanity defense and both girls were convicted of murder, serving five years in separate prisons before being released on the condition they never contact each other again.

Following her release, Juliet Hulme changed her identity and went on to become Anne Perry, one of the most successful crime novelists in the world, her true identity remaining unknown until 1994, when Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures brought the case back to public attention.

Diagnosing folie à deux

Diagnosing folie à deux is genuinely difficult and presents a set of challenges, including the fact that most people who have it never seek help.

Why it so rarely comes to clinical attention

Because the shared delusional beliefs are adopted gradually from a trusted, dominant partner, the secondary individual’s capacity for doubt erodes slowly and quietly over time. By the time the disorder is fully established, both partners experience their shared reality as entirely normal. They are not, in their own minds, ill. They are simply right about the world, and everyone else is wrong.

As a result, researchers in the field believe folie à deux is significantly underdiagnosed. It typically only comes to clinical attention when a crisis forces outside intervention, whether that is extreme physical deterioration, dangerous behavior, a legal incident, or a concerned family member or neighbor finally alerting authorities.

The diagnostic process

When a clinician does encounter a potential case, the assessment involves several steps. A thorough medical and psychiatric history is essential, not least because patients often present with physical complaints rather than psychiatric ones. Severe malnutrition, exhaustion, or physical injuries may be the first signs that bring someone into the healthcare system, with the underlying shared delusion only emerging once a fuller picture is established.

Standardized psychometric tools such as the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale are used to gauge symptom severity, alongside structured clinical interviews to assess how much insight each individual has into the nature of their beliefs. Today, a thorough digital history is increasingly important too, covering online relationships, gaming communities, and messaging platforms, since virtual cohabitation can replicate the psychological conditions for delusional transmission without any physical proximity.

One of the most significant diagnostic steps is also a therapeutic one: separating the two individuals. If the secondary partner’s delusions begin to reduce or resolve once they are removed from the inducer’s presence, this strongly supports the diagnosis of an induced disorder. The response to separation, in other words, can be as diagnostically informative as any clinical interview.

What makes it particularly hard to diagnose

Because folie à deux so frequently occurs between blood relatives, such as twins, siblings, or a parent and child, it can be genuinely difficult to determine whether the secondary partner is experiencing a purely induced delusion or whether they have independently developed their own psychotic illness due to a shared genetic vulnerability. The two possibilities can look identical from the outside.

The presence of other conditions in the secondary individual, such as depression, cognitive impairment, or a personality disorder, can further obscure the relational nature of the psychosis and lead to misdiagnosis. And when the shared delusions resonate culturally or religiously, they can be mistaken for extreme but subcultural beliefs rather than clinical psychosis, a distinction that requires careful and culturally informed assessment.

The classification debate and its clinical consequences

The decision by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) to subsume folie à deux under broader individual categories rather than retain it as a distinct relational disorder has real consequences for diagnosis in practice. Critics argue that when clinicians focus on each individual’s symptoms in isolation, they risk missing the pathological dynamic between the partners and, crucially, the therapeutic necessity of separating them. A clinician who diagnoses each person independently with delusional disorder may treat each with medication while leaving the relationship, and therefore the shared delusional system, entirely intact.

The International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision (ICD-11) takes a different view, retaining shared psychotic disorder as a distinct clinical entity on the basis that a disorder which exists primarily within a relationship requires a diagnostic framework that recognizes the relationship itself as the unit of pathology.

Treatment options for folie à deux

Treating folie à deux is more complex than treating most psychotic disorders, for the simple reason that the illness exists within a relationship rather than within a single individual. Addressing one person’s symptoms while leaving the shared dynamic intact is rarely sufficient. Effective treatment requires dismantling the conditions that allowed the shared delusion to take hold in the first place.

Separation

As noted above, physical separation of the two individuals remains the foundational first step in treatment. Removing the induced partner from the inducer’s presence disrupts the closed environment that sustains the shared delusion and gives the secondary individual their first genuine opportunity to reality-test independently.

The evidence for separation is strong in the right circumstances. In cases of folie imposée, where a previously healthy person has adopted a dominant partner’s delusions, separation alone can sometimes be enough to resolve the secondary partner’s symptoms entirely, occasionally without any medication at all.

Medication

Antipsychotic medication is often the standard treatment for the primary inducer and is considered necessary for severe or persistent cases in the induced partner as well. Second-generation antipsychotics including risperidone, olanzapine, and aripiprazole are most commonly prescribed, with first-generation options such as haloperidol used in some cases. Where significant agitation, anxiety, or sleep disturbance accompanies the psychosis, additional medication may be prescribed to manage these symptoms alongside the core treatment.

Psychotherapy

The aim of psychotherapy is to help patients deconstruct the false reality they have been living in. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most widely used approach, combining reality-testing exercises, cognitive restructuring, and guided questioning to challenge distorted beliefs and rebuild independent thinking. Insight-oriented therapy helps patients develop an understanding of their condition, gradually recognizing that the fixed beliefs they held, whether paranoia about a neighbor or conviction of a divine mission, were symptoms rather than truths.

In some cases, specialized dyadic sessions are conducted with both partners together, helping them understand their respective roles within the dynamic and work toward psychological separation even where physical separation is not fully possible.

Family therapy and psychoeducation

Because folie à deux is inherently relational, treatment rarely succeeds without addressing the wider family dynamic. Family therapy can help restructure the patterns of communication and dependency that allowed the shared delusion to develop and persist. Psychoeducation aims to equip family members with an understanding of how shared psychosis works, enabling them to support recovery and recognize the early signs of relapse.

In cases of digital folie à deux, family-level intervention also involves establishing clear boundaries around internet use and online relationships, effectively creating the psychological distance that physical separation provides in traditional cases.

How outcomes differ between inducer and induced

With prompt intervention and appropriate support, the overall prognosis for folie à deux is generally positive, but the two partners follow very different trajectories. The induced partner typically recovers faster and more completely. Once separated from the inducer and reintroduced to external reality, their symptoms often diminish quickly, and they tend to be more receptive to treatment and more willing to engage with healthcare providers.

The inducer’s path is often considerably harder. Rooted in a chronic, established psychotic illness, their symptoms are resistant to change, and progress tends to be slow. Lingering cognitive rigidity, residual suspicion, and poor medication compliance are common, and long-term psychiatric management is typically required.

If a treated individual returns to the same isolated living situation without adequate social support and regular contact with the outside world, the risk of relapse is high. Recovery is not just about treating the delusion. It is about rebuilding the conditions for independent reality testing that were eroded, sometimes over years, by the relationship itself.

Folie à deux in the digital age

For most of its history, folie à deux required two people to share a physical space in which shared psychosis took root and grew. This is no longer necessarily the case. As the digital folie à trois case described earlier demonstrated, people who have never met in person can develop a shared psychotic disorder entirely through online interaction. An additional and unsettling concern in the digital age is the question of what happens when one party in the folie à deux relationship is not a person at all.

When the inducer is an algorithm

In every traditional case of folie à deux, there is a human inducer: a dominant individual whose established psychotic beliefs are gradually transmitted to a vulnerable partner. AI chatbots disrupt this dynamic in a fundamental way. There is no inducer in the traditional sense. Instead, what emerges is something researchers have described as a delusional spiral, a process in which the human user and the AI mutually construct and reinforce a distorted reality together.

The mechanism driving this is known as sycophancy. Large language models are built to validate, mirror, and align with user input in order to maintain engaging conversations. When a psychologically vulnerable person expresses paranoid or grandiose thoughts, the chatbot does not challenge them. It has no capacity for genuine reality testing. Instead it reflects the user’s beliefs back at them, encourages elaboration, and effectively insulates them from contradiction. Researchers have described this as confirmation bias on a scale that has no real precedent, with the AI acting as a deeply personal, infinitely patient mirror that amplifies motivated reasoning rather than questioning it.

This dynamic can escalate in ways that have real consequences. Documented cases include a young app developer who developed acute delusional paranoia following prolonged AI interactions, and a man who became genuinely convinced he had discovered a revolutionary mathematical theory after a chatbot repeatedly validated his ideas. In these cases the AI did not create the vulnerability, but it provided the conditions for that vulnerability to crystallize into a fixed, unshakeable belief.

A further risk is what researchers call excessive anthropomorphism: the tendency of vulnerable users to begin perceiving the AI as deeply human, infallible, or even divine. As these interactions intensify, some users push past the chatbot’s safety guardrails entirely, effectively deifying the system and entering a private delusional world that has been co-constructed with a non-human entity.

When shared madness goes viral

Traditional shared psychosis is almost always confined to a small, isolated group. Digital environments remove that constraint entirely. Online subcultures have emerged that actively frame AI-associated psychosis not as a mental health crisis but as a form of spiritual transcendence. What begins as the madness of two can spread to the madness of many, and researchers warn that without significant intervention, the algorithmic reinforcement of digital echo chambers could eventually drive shared delusional thinking on a genuinely mass scale, what some have termed the folie des milliards: the madness of billions.

Warning signs and what needs to change

Clinicians have begun identifying specific warning signs that shared psychosis may be developing in a digital context. These include a rapid shift toward paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, abrupt withdrawal from diverse online interactions in favor of a single platform or community, intensifying emotional dependency on a virtual group or AI system, and in AI-specific cases, increasingly self-referential speech and escalating conviction that cannot be challenged. Disrupted sleep patterns from excessive time spent online can also be an early indicator.

Addressing this requires change at two levels. At the clinical level, a patient’s digital life needs to be examined as seriously as their family history, by routinely exploring online relationships, gaming alliances, and AI interactions as potential pathways to psychopathology. At the technological level, AI systems must be built with structural safeguards: algorithms capable of detecting escalating delusional conviction, prompts that normalize uncertainty and encourage alternative perspectives, and clear pathways that redirect distressed users toward real human contact.

The conditions that facilitate folie à deux, isolation, dependency, the absence of reality-testing, and the unchallenged reinforcement of distorted beliefs, have not changed. What has changed is the scale at which those conditions can now be replicated, and the speed at which a private delusion can become a shared one.

Living with folie à deux

Recovery from folie à deux is rarely a straightforward process and looks very different depending on which role a person plays in the delusional relationship. What the two have in common, however, is the need to rebuild something that the disorder dismantled over time: a sense of who they are outside of the shared reality they inhabited together.

For the induced partner

For the person who adopted another’s delusions, the early stages of recovery can feel disorienting. The beliefs that structured their world, however false, provided a kind of coherence. Losing them, even through effective treatment, can leave a vacuum. Many induced individuals report that once the delusional content fades, what remains is a deeper reckoning with the relationship itself: the dependency, the gradual erosion of independent thought, and the question of how they came to accept a reality so far removed from the truth.

The psychological dependency that characterized the relationship doesn’t simply dissolve when the physical or digital connection is severed. Recovery requires actively building the capacity for independent thinking and decision-making that the relationship suppressed, often over years. Trauma can linger too. Clinical research has identified what are described as emotional memory images, non-conscious trauma-induced mental patterns that can continue to generate psychological distress and even physical symptoms long after the relationship has ended.

The risk of relapse is real. Returning to the same isolated environment, or resuming contact with the inducing partner without firm boundaries in place, can quickly recreate the conditions that allowed the shared delusion to take hold in the first place.

For the inducer

The inducer's path is in many ways harder, not because their suffering is greater, but because they typically had an underlying psychiatric condition before the shared psychosis began and this underlying condition, whether schizophrenia, delusional disorder, or another psychotic illness, requires its own sustained treatment.

One of the most difficult aspects of recovery for the inducer is illness engulfment: the process by which a person’s entire sense of self becomes defined by their psychiatric diagnosis. As insight gradually develops and the full weight of what happened becomes clearer, the risk of profound depression is significant. Recovery at this stage is as much about rebuilding identity as it is about managing symptoms.

What recovery actually requires

For both individuals, sustained recovery depends on reversing the social isolation that the disorder both required and deepened. This means re-entering the world, rebuilding relationships outside the closed world the two individuals shared, and finding sources of validation and connection that are genuinely independent.

Family support plays a critical role, but it needs to be the right kind of support. Where dysfunctional family dynamics contributed to the conditions in which shared psychosis developed, those dynamics need to be addressed directly. Psychoeducation helps family members and carers understand what they are dealing with, recognize the early signs of relapse, and avoid inadvertently recreating the conditions that made the person vulnerable in the first place.

A significant predictor of long-term recovery is stigma resistance: the ability to challenge and deflect the negative stereotypes surrounding mental illness rather than internalizing them. People who absorb those stereotypes and allow their identity to be defined by their breakdown tend to withdraw further, lose hope, and struggle to rebuild. Those who develop the capacity to reflect on their experience without being consumed by it, and to construct a sense of self that goes beyond what happened to them, tend to fare considerably better.

Recovery is not simply the absence of delusion. It is the gradual reconstruction of an autonomous self, one that can engage with the world on its own terms, test reality independently, and find connection in relationships that strengthen rather than distort a person's sense of reality.

Final thoughts

Folie à deux is a rare psychiatric condition. But the questions it raises go much further than the condition itself. How much of what we believe about the world is truly our own? How much depends on the people we are closest to, the environments we inhabit, and the voices we allow to go unchallenged? The disorder is extreme in its presentation, but the psychological mechanisms that drive it, the human need for connection, the vulnerability to influence, the way isolation can distort our sense of reality, are part of the broader human experience.

What the research and the cases explored in this article make clear is that folie à deux is not simply a story about madness. It’s a story about relationships, and about what can happen when a relationship becomes the only source of truth a person has access to. The isolated family unit, the insular online community, and the AI chatbot that never pushes back: these are different in form but identical in function. They all remove the one thing that keeps us tethered to reality: regular contact with people and perspectives that challenge rather than simply confirm what we already believe.

That is perhaps the most important lesson folie à deux has to offer, not just for mental health professionals, but for how we think about the world we are building. As social isolation increases, as digital environments become more immersive, and as artificial intelligence becomes more adept at telling us what we want to hear, the conditions that have historically produced shared psychosis are becoming less exceptional and more ordinary. The madness of two is a rare diagnosis. The vulnerability that underlies it is not.

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I’m David Webb, a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do.

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My books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for anyone interested in what makes us tick.

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My oldest friend Neil is visiting. Our families moved into the same street in 1971 when I was 2 and Neil was 3. We grew up together and have remained lifelong friends ever since.

His visit got me thinking about the nature of friendship, why certain friendships endure where others fade, and in particular whether I have actually made any friends in adulthood. I have certainly made acquaintances, people I know and respect through a shared sporting interest, or people I’ve met through my children’s activities. But friends? People I’ve chosen, and who have chosen me, outside of the structures that brought us together? That’s a harder question to answer.

As a child, making friends seemed to happen as a matter of course. As an adult, it doesn’t seem to work that way, at least not for me. So, I thought I would explore why that might be, whether making friends as an adult matters, and what psychology has to say about the topic.

What friendship actually is

Friendship is typically described as a voluntary, reciprocal, and informal relationship between two people, one that is freely chosen by both parties, carries no formal obligations, and tends to endure over time. Although I prefer a less technical and more authentic notion of friendship, one widely attributed to Elbert Hubbard:

At its core, friendship involves a deep emotional bond built on trust, altruism, and mutual support, and researchers have identified six functional components that define the quality of a friendship: stimulating companionship, practical help, emotional security, reliable alliance, self-validation, and intimacy.

These functional characteristics tell us that the distinction between a friend and an acquaintance isn’t simply about how well you know someone. It’s about whether the relationship is genuinely voluntary and reciprocal on both sides, and whether it delivers those deeper functional qualities.

What’s consistent across the lifespan is that shared activity sits at the heart of what people value in a friend. It’s one of the first qualities children use to define friendship, and it remains just as central in adulthood. What changes is everything around it: how the relationship forms, who initiates it, and how much effort it requires.

In childhood, friendship is largely incidental. It forms as a byproduct of shared environments, schools, neighborhoods, streets. In adulthood, that changes fundamentally. The process becomes intentional rather than incidental, elective rather than structural.

What childhood got right without trying

The street Neil and I grew up on did most of the work for our friendship. We were physically close, we saw each other constantly, and for the most part the time we spent together was spontaneous and unstructured. Those three conditions, proximity, repetition, and unstructured time, turn out to be precisely what the research identifies as the key elements of friendship formation. And they are precisely what adult life tends to remove.

The psychologist Jeffrey Hall is a renowned expert on how friendships actually form, and the picture his research gives is a little sobering if you’re an adult trying to make new friends. In a 2018 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Hall tracked how much time people needed to spend together before an acquaintance became a casual friend, and a casual friend became something closer. The rough thresholds he identified: around 40 to 60 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend; 80 to 100 hours to reach genuine friendship; more than 200 hours before someone became a close or best friend.

Those are large numbers. And Hall is careful about what they mean. He makes the point that most adults tend to assume that if we're not making friends, we're not trying hard enough (I know I did and still do if I'm being honest,) but his research suggests the problem may lie elsewhere. The hours matter, but the context in which you spend them matters just as much.

When the adult setting works against friendship

Hall has a specific term for the environments most adults spend the majority of their time in. For example, he calls workplaces “closed systems,” places where you have little or no say over who else is included. According to his research, time spent inside a closed system is associated with less rather than more friendship closeness.

Closed systems create a particular kind of togetherness that doesn’t easily convert into friendship. You’re alongside people, often for hours at a time, but the time isn’t freely chosen and neither is the company. For a friendship to develop, something has to shift. The context has to move from the obligatory to the personally chosen.

That’s a structural problem, not a personal one. And it goes some way toward explaining things like, the colleague you genuinely like but never quite become friends with, or the person at the sports club you've known for years but only ever see there.

What actually builds closeness

If the setting matters, so does what happens within it. Hall’s research identifies specific conversational behaviors that predict whether a relationship deepens or stays where it is. He calls them striving episodes: catching up on each other’s lives, having serious conversations, engaging in playful talk that releases tension, expressing affection. These are the interactions that move a relationship forward.

What doesn’t move it forward is small talk, the kind of conversation that fills time without demanding much, discussing sport, current events, whatever’s on television, actually predicts a reduction in closeness over time.

The social budget problem

In the 1990s, the anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar noticed a consistent pattern while studying the relationship between brain size and social group size in primates: the larger the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain, the larger the social group the species could sustain. When he applied that ratio to humans, he arrived at a number: approximately 150. This became known as Dunbar’s number, the cognitive limit on the number of relationships the human brain can actively maintain at any one time.

The reasoning behind it is straightforward. Recognizing someone, remembering your shared history with them, and tracking where they fit in your broader social world all require cognitive resources and those resources are finite.

But 150 is not a uniform number. In a 2025 narrative review published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Dunbar argued that human social networks organize into nested layers, which on average consist of around 1 or 2 intimate friends, 5 close friends, 15 best friends, and 50 good friends, extending outward to 150 casual friends. These layers aren’t arbitrary. Dunbar calls them optimal attractors: the sizes a social network tends toward. Maintaining each layer requires a minimum contact frequency. Close friends need contact roughly every seven days. Best friends, every thirty. Good friends, every six months. Drop below the threshold and the relationship doesn’t simply pause. Emotional closeness measurably decays within a few months, and the relationship drifts outward to the next layer, or out of the network entirely.

Time, as Dunbar puts it, is an inelastic resource. And in the modern world, each layer of the network is typically split evenly between extended family and non-family friends. Which means adults with large extended families naturally have fewer slots available for non-family friendships, not because they’re failing at friendship, but because the social budget is already spoken for.

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What to do if you want to build friendships as an adult

The research I looked at doesn’t offer a simple solution, but it does point toward some specific things that make a difference.

The first is accepting that adult friendship requires deliberate time investment in a way that childhood friendship never did. The hours Hall identified, around 40 to 60 hours to reach casual friendship, 80 to 100 hours to reach genuine friendship, more than 200 to reach closeness, don’t accumulate by accident in adult life. They have to be carved out intentionally.

The second is where those hours are spent. Time in obligatory settings doesn’t count in the same way. The practical implication is straightforward: move interactions out of obligatory settings and into voluntary ones. Suggest something outside the usual context. Share a meal. Do something chosen rather than required. That shift in setting is what allows the hours to do their work.

The third is what happens in those interactions. Conversations where you catch up properly, talk about things that actually matter, and joke around move a relationship forward in ways that small talk doesn't. This doesn’t require manufactured depth. It requires a willingness to move past the surface when the opportunity arises.

The fourth is self-disclosure. Sharing something personal, and doing so mutually, is one of the most reliable ways to move a relationship from casual to close. This is precisely what Arthur Aron’s 36 questions were designed to accelerate, and why they work: not because the questions are magic, but because structured mutual disclosure creates the conditions for closeness that unstructured small talk rarely does. If you’re curious about how that works in practice, I looked at Aron’s research earlier this year.

The fifth is the type of activity. Dunbar’s research points to synchronous group activities as particularly effective at building social bonds: laughter, singing, dancing, communal eating, storytelling, and group exercise. What these share is that they trigger endorphin release, and endorphins are the neurochemical basis of social bonding in mammals. The activity itself does some of the bonding work, which is why a shared experience often brings people closer faster than conversation alone.

Finally, don’t overlook the friendships that already exist but have faded. People consistently underestimate how much others appreciate being contacted unexpectedly, and the barrier to reaching out feels far higher to the person hesitating than to the person being reached out to.

Final thoughts

Researching and writing this article has made me think harder about adult friendships than I expected. Not least because, in a 2010 meta-analysis published in PLOS Medicine, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues analyzed 148 studies covering more than 300,000 participants and found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% lower risk of dying than those with weaker social relationships.

The effect was comparable to quitting smoking and exceeded the risks associated with obesity and physical inactivity. A follow-up meta-analysis in 2015 found that loneliness increases the risk of early mortality by 26%, social isolation by 29%, and living alone by 32%.

These were not findings about extreme cases. They applied to ordinary adults living ordinary lives with more or fewer close connections around them.

The mechanism at play here, at least in part, relates back to what Dunbar’s research describes. Social bonding triggers the release of endorphins, which don’t just elevate mood. They stimulate the immune system, upregulating the body’s natural defenses against viruses and some cancers. It appears that friendship, is a biological need that the body registers in measurable ways when it goes unmet.

Psychologically, the evidence points in the same direction. Close friendships provide the resources that help adults manage depression, anxiety, and the ordinary weight of difficult lives. They provide stimulating companionship, emotional security, a sense of belonging, and the kind of validation that helps people maintain a stable sense of who they are.

As I read this back, I think it might be time to make a conscious effort to work on friendship network.

I mean, as a procrastinating introvert, how hard can it be? 😂

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I’m David Webb, a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do.

I founded the All About Psychology website in 2008 and have been building it ever since as a place where students, educators, and curious readers can explore the many branches of psychology, learn about the field’s history and most influential pioneers, and access thousands of full-text journal articles and other quality psychology materials. Today the site is home to one of the largest and most engaged independent psychology communities online. This Substack is the latest addition to the All About Psychology platform.

My books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for anyone interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of my work and books on my Amazon author page.

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Neologisms are a fascinating intersection between language and the human mind. They are newly coined terms that capture concepts previously unexpressed or underexplored. In many cases, they open new windows into the complexities of human experience, offering a shared vocabulary to describe thoughts, feelings, or situations that often go unnoticed. For psychology enthusiasts, these words are essential tools: they give form to the abstract and highlight the depths of human cognition, emotion, and behavior in ways everyday language often can’t fully convey.

“Sonder“ is one of my favorite neologisms. A term found in John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Psychologically, this word is a gem. It invites us to contemplate one of the most universal yet underappreciated experiences of being human: recognizing the complexity of others’ internal worlds.

sonder

The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness, an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

The word behind the word

Koenig devised the word from two roots: the German sonder-, meaning “special,” and the French sonder, meaning “to probe” or “to plumb.” That dual origin is designed to capture something precise about the experience itself: the recognition that another person is special, in the sense of being singular and irreducible, and the instinct to probe, to want to know more about a life you can only glimpse from the outside.

It’s important to note that sonder, and the dictionary that coined it, reflects a particular cultural vantage point. Koenig has acknowledged that some of the experiences he names are rooted in a Western, and in some cases specifically North American, way of seeing the world. Linguistic research suggests that emotional lexicons vary considerably across cultures: German, for instance, has several distinct words for what English bundles into a single concept of anger, and Mandarin more still. Different languages don’t just describe emotions differently; they shape which experiences a community notices and names in the first place.

Why “Sonder” matters psychologically

At its heart, “sonder” taps into the concept of theory of mind, which is our ability to attribute thoughts, feelings, and intentions to others. Developing this ability is a major milestone in cognitive and emotional development, allowing us to empathize and connect with those around us. When we experience “sonder,” we momentarily transcend our egocentric worldview and acknowledge that others’ lives are just as full of narrative arcs, emotions, and hidden depths as our own.

From a psychological perspective, this realization can (for most of us) stir profound empathy. It disrupts our natural tendency to see ourselves as the protagonists of life’s story and others as mere background characters. Instead, it highlights our interconnectedness and the complexity of human existence. Reflecting on this notion encourages a deeper emotional intelligence, as it forces us to move beyond superficial judgments and recognize the internal struggles, hopes, and dreams of people we might otherwise overlook.

Why “Sonder” matters to me

I often find myself deeply curious about the lives of strangers. This is particularly the case when looking at old photographs or watching videos of people from decades or even centuries ago. These images draw me in, not because of their historical significance, but because they contain people: people who, in their time, lived full and complex lives. The mystery of who they were and the lives they lived intrigue me.

This sense of intrigue was perfectly captured for me in the Carpe Diem scene from Dead Poets Society. Mr. Keating urges his students to “seize the day” by inviting them to connect with the lives of those who came before. He asks the students to look closely at the faces in old photographs, to recognize that these were once hopeful, vibrant people, not so different from themselves: people who once felt invincible, filled with potential, but whose lives ultimately slipped away. It was a stark reminder for us all, that just like those boys in the photos, we too will one day be “fertilizing daffodils.” What will remain of our lives when we’re gone? Will our stories vanish, or will we leave behind a legacy, however small?

Discovering the word "sonder" gave a name to something I'd felt for years.

On a somewhat irreverent note “Sonder” is also one of the reasons I love the film Shaun Of The Dead, as played out in the “It’s not the end of the world“ Winchester pub scene.

In the scene, Ed attempts to cheer up the heartbroken Shaun by conjuring elaborate backstories for the other regulars in the pub: the bigamist, the ex-porn star, the man connected to the North London mafia. It's played entirely for laughs, but the impulse behind it is pure sonder.

Please note: this clip contains adult language and humor.

When sonder becomes too much

In a conversation with Adam Grant, Koenig acknowledged that as compelling as sonder is, he couldn’t actually get through the day if he felt it every second. The full weight of every passing stranger’s inner life, taken seriously at every moment, would be paralyzing rather than enriching.

In response, Grant offered a distinction worth considering: there may be a difference between understanding sonder and feeling it. Knowing that every person around you carries a vivid, complex life doesn’t require you to be flooded by that knowledge at every turn. It can sit in the background, shaping how you move through the world without overwhelming it.

Koenig also reflected that his dictionary, for all its outward curiosity about other people, can tip too easily into self-absorption: cataloguing your own reactions to the world rather than actually engaging with it. Much of what gives life meaning, he suggested, is found not in private contemplation but in community, relationship, and shared ritual.

Reflecting on “Sonder” in your life

Next time you’re in a crowd, instead of seeing people as a blur, take a moment to consider the richness of their lives. This practice fosters empathy and reminds you that others carry invisible burdens, joys, and stories. It’s also a useful antidote to our natural tendency to center ourselves in every narrative. Recognizing sonder helps move us beyond self-focused thinking and toward a broader, more compassionate view of the world. And from a therapeutic perspective, understanding that each person has their own “epic” can encourage anyone to break out of emotional isolation, seeing their problems as part of the human condition and recognizing that others might face similar or even greater challenges.

Final thoughts

"Sonder" is just one example of how neologisms can expand our psychological toolkit. By naming these elusive emotional or mental phenomena, we're able to engage with them more consciously. For strangers from the distant past whose lives we can only imagine, sonder is a fascinating way of connecting with them. But with the living, we can go beyond the mystery of wondering by instigating a conversation we might otherwise have skipped, expressing genuine interest in someone we'd normally ignore, or simply taking a greater interest in the people we share our world with.

Is it just me, or do you ever find yourself wondering about the lives of the strangers around you and from the past?

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About me

I’m David Webb, a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do.

I founded the All About Psychology website in 2008 and have been building it ever since as a place where students, educators, and curious readers can explore the many branches of psychology, learn about the field’s history and most influential pioneers, and access thousands of full-text journal articles and other quality psychology materials. Today the site is home to one of the largest and most engaged independent psychology communities online. This Substack is the latest addition to the All About Psychology platform.

My books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for anyone interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of my work and books on my Amazon author page.

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The All About Psychology Substack is your go-to source for all things psychology. Subscribe today and instantly receive my bestselling Psychology Student Guide right in your inbox.

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By the mid-1950s, American psychology was home to two very different visions of human nature. On one side stood B.F. Skinner, a leading voice in behaviorism, the school of thought that had dominated the field since John B. Watson’s landmark 1913 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Skinner’s laboratory work on operant conditioning was reshaping how psychologists thought about learning, motivation, and control, and his 1948 novel Walden Two had already sparked widespread debate about behavioral engineering and the possibility of a scientifically planned society. On the other side stood Carl Rogers, whose Client-Centered Therapy placed the subjective experience of the individual at the very heart of psychological practice. Where Skinner saw behavior shaped by outside forces, Rogers saw a person with an innate drive toward growth and self-understanding.

These were not simply two different theories. They were two fundamentally different visions of what it means to be human.

It was against this backdrop that Rogers and Skinner were brought together at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on 4 September 1956 in Chicago, and the exchange that followed became one of the most compelling debates in the history of the field.

The theoretical positions Skinner and Rogers presented that day were subsequently published under the title 'Some Issues Concerning the Control of Human Behavior: A Symposium' in the journal Science on 30 November 1956, which you will be able to read in full below.

What the debate covers

Skinner opens with an observation that is as relevant today: “Science is steadily increasing our power to influence, change, mold, in a word, control, human behavior.” Working through three areas of everyday life, personal relationships, education, and government, he asks us to consider how much of what we think of as free behavior is already being shaped by forces we may not have noticed, from the approval and blame of those around us, to the rewards and punishments built into our education systems and the laws that govern us.

Rogers does not dispute the science. But he poses important questions he believes Skinner has failed to address: “Who will be controlled? Who will exercise control? What type of control will be exercised? Most important of all, toward what end or what purpose, or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised?” (Remarkably, these are the same questions sitting at the heart of today's debate about AI regulation.) His position is that the purpose behind any scientific endeavor “always and necessarily lies outside the scope of the scientific effort which it sets in motion.”

Skinner has the final word and does not concede. Where Rogers sees a human being whose capacity for personal choice must be at the centre of any science of behavior, Skinner sees an organism shaped by its environment, and argues that "survival is the ultimate criterion." Science, he contends, is not the enemy of human welfare. It is our best hope of securing it.

This compelling debate not only offers a fascinating insight into the thinking of two of the most influential psychologists of the 20th Century but it also provides a wonderful historical snapshot of the theoretical and ideological battles going on within psychology at the time.

Read the debate in full below and let me know in the comments whose position you find more convincing. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Please note that this classic article is presented exactly as originally published and may not reflect modern writing conventions, for example the use of gender neutral pronouns. Email readers: some email apps clip long posts. If you cannot see this article in full, you can access the complete version via my Substack homepage.

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By David Webb

Paper one by B.F. Skinner

Science is steadily increasing our power to influence, change, mold in a word, control human behavior. It has extended our “understanding” (whatever that may be) so that we deal more successfully with people in non-scientific ways, but it has also identified conditions or variables which can be used to predict and control behavior in a new, and increasingly rigorous, technology. The broad disciplines of government and economics offer examples of this, but there is special cogency in those contributions of anthropology, sociology, and psychology which deal with individual behavior. Carl Rogers has listed some of the achievements to date in a recent paper (1). Those of his examples which show or imply the control of the single organism are primarily due, as we should expect, to psychology. It is the experimental study of behavior which carries us beyond awkward or inaccessible “principles,” “factors,” and so on, to variables which can be directly manipulated.

It is also, and for more or less the same reasons, the conception of human behavior emerging from an experimental analysis which most directly challenges traditional views. Psychologists themselves often do not seem to be aware of how far they have moved in this direction. But the change is not passing unnoticed by others. Until only recently it was customary to deny the possibility of a rigorous science of human behavior by arguing, either that a lawful science was impossible because man was a free agent, or that merely statistical predictions would always leave room for personal freedom. But those who used to take this line have become most vociferous in expressing their alarm at the way these obstacles are being surmounted.

Now, the control of human behavior has always been unpopular. Any undisguised effort to control usually arouses emotional reactions. We hesitate to admit, even to ourselves, that we are engaged in control, and we may refuse to control, even when this would be helpful, for fear of criticism. Those who have explicitly avowed an interest in control have been roughly treated by history. Machiavelli is the great prototype. As Macaulay said of him, “Out of his surname they coined an epithet for a knave and out of his Christian name a synonym for the devil.” There were obvious reasons. The control which Machiavelli analyzed and recommended, like most political control, used techniques aversive to the controllee. The threats and punishments of the bully, like those of the government operating on the same plan, are not designed whatever their success to endear themselves to those who are controlled. Even when the techniques themselves are not aversive, control is usually exercised for the selfish purposes of the controller and, hence, has indirectly punishing effects upon others.

Man’s natural inclination to revolt against selfish control has been exploited to good purpose in what we call the philosophy and literature of democracy. The doctrine of the rights of man has been effective in arousing individuals to concerted action against governmental and religious tyranny. The literature which has had this effect has greatly extended the number of terms in our language which express reactions to the control of men. But the ubiquity and ease of expression of this attitude spells trouble for any science which may give birth to a powerful technology of behavior. Intelligent men and women, dominated by the humanistic philosophy of the past two centuries, cannot view with equanimity what Andrew Hacker has called “the specter of predictable man” (2). Even the statistical or actuarial prediction of human events, such as the number of fatalities to be expected on a holiday weekend, strikes many people as uncanny and evil, while the prediction and control of individual behavior is regarded as little less than the work of the devil. I am not so much concerned here with the political or economic consequences for psychology, although research following certain channels may well suffer harmful effects. We ourselves, as intelligent men and women, and as exponents of Western thought, share these attitudes. They have already interfered with the free exercise of a scientific analysis, and their influence threatens to assume more serious proportions.

Three broad areas of human behavior supply good examples. The first of these - personal control - may be taken to include person-to-person relationships in the family, among friends, in social and work groups, and in counseling and psychotherapy. Other fields are education and government. A few examples from each will show how non-scientific preconceptions are affecting our current thinking about human behavior.

Personal control

People living together in groups come to control one another with a technique which is not inappropriately called “ethical.” When an individual behaves in a fashion acceptable to the group, he receives admiration, approval, affection, and many other reinforcements which increase the likelihood that he will continue to behave in that fashion. When his behavior is not acceptable, he is criticized, censured, blamed, or otherwise punished. In the first case the group calls him “good”; in the second, “bad.” This practice is so thoroughly ingrained in our culture that we often fail to see that it is a technique of control. Yet we are almost always engaged in such control, even though the reinforcements and punishments are often subtle.

The practice of admiration is an important part of a culture, because behavior which is otherwise inclined to be weak can be set up and maintained with its help. The individual is especially likely to be praised, admired, or loved when he acts for the group in the face of great danger, for example, or sacrifices himself or his possessions, or submits to prolonged hardship, or suffers martyrdom. These actions are not admirable in any absolute sense, but they require admiration if they are to be strong. Similarly, we admire people who behave in original or exceptional ways, not because such behavior is itself admirable, but because we do not know how to encourage original or exceptional behavior in any other way. The group acclaims independent, unaided behavior in part because it is easier to reinforce than to help.

As long as this technique of control is misunderstood, we cannot judge correctly an environment in which there is less need for heroism, hardship, or independent action. We are likely to argue that such an environment is itself less admirable or produces less admirable people. In the old days, for example, young scholars often lived in undesirable quarters, ate unappetizing or inadequate food, performed unprofitable tasks for a living or to pay for necessary books and materials or publication. Older scholars and other members of the group offered compensating reinforcement in the form of approval and admiration for these sacrifices. When the modern graduate student receives a generous scholarship, enjoys good living conditions, and has his research and publication subsidized, the grounds for evaluation seem to be pulled from under us. Such a student no longer needs admiration to carry him over a series of obstacles (no matter how much he may need it for other reasons), and, in missing certain familiar objects of admiration, we are likely to conclude that such conditions are less admirable. Obstacles to scholarly work may serve as a useful measure of motivation and we may go wrong unless some substitute is found but we can scarcely defend a deliberate harassment of the student for this purpose. The productivity of any set of conditions can be evaluated only when we have freed ourselves of the attitudes which have been generated in us as members of an ethical group.

A similar difficulty arises from our use of punishment in the form of censure or blame. The concept of responsibility and the related concepts of foreknowledge and choice are used to justify techniques of control using punishment. Was So-and-So aware of the probable consequences of his action, and was the action deliberate? If so, we are justified in punishing him. But what does this mean? It appears to be a question concerning the efficacy of the contingent relations between behavior and punishing consequences. We punish behavior because it is objectionable to us or the group, but in a minor refinement of rather recent origin we have come to withhold punishment when it cannot be expected to have any effect. If the objectionable consequences of an act were accidental and not likely to occur again, there is no point in punishing. We say that the individual was not “aware of the consequences of his action” or that the consequences were not “intentional.” If the action could not have been avoided if the individual “had no choice” punishment is also withheld, as it is if the individual is incapable of being changed by punishment because he is of “unsound mind.” In all these cases different as they are the individual is held “not responsible” and goes unpunished.

Just as we say that it is “not fair” to punish a man for something he could not help doing, so we call it “unfair” when one is rewarded beyond his due or for something he could not help doing. In other words, we also object to wasting reinforcers where they are not needed or will do no good. We make the same point with the words just and right. Thus, we have no right to punish the irresponsible, and a man has no right to reinforcers he does not earn or deserve. But concepts of choice, responsibility, justice, and so on, provide a most inadequate analysis of efficient reinforcing and punishing contingencies because they carry a heavy semantic cargo of a quite different sort, which obscures any attempt to clarify controlling practices or to improve techniques. In particular, they fail to prepare us for techniques based on other than aversive techniques of control. Most people would object to forcing prisoners to serve as subjects of dangerous medical experiments, but few object when they are induced to serve by the offer of return privileges even when the reinforcing effect of these privileges has been created by forcible deprivation. In the traditional scheme the right to refuse guarantees the individual against coercion or an unfair bargain. But to what extent can a prisoner refuse under such circumstances?

We need not go so far afield to make the point. We can observe our own attitude toward personal freedom in the way we resent any interference with what we want to do. Suppose we want to buy a car of a particular sort. Then we may object, for example, if our wife urges us to buy a less expensive model and to put the difference into a new refrigerator. Or we may resent it if our neighbor questions our need for such a car or our ability to pay for it. We would certainly resent it if it were illegal to buy such a car (remember Prohibition); and if we find we cannot actually afford it, we may resent governmental control of the price through tariffs and taxes. We resent it if we discover that we cannot get the car because the manufacturer is holding the model in deliberately short supply in order to push a model we do not want. In all this we assert our democratic right to buy the car of our choice. We are well prepared to do so and to resent any restriction on our freedom.

But why do we not ask why it is the car of our choice and resent the forces which made it so? Perhaps our favorite toy as a child was a car, of a very different model, but nevertheless bearing the name of the car we now want. Perhaps our favorite TV program is sponsored by the manufacturer of that car. Perhaps we have seen pictures of many beautiful or prestigeful persons driving it in pleasant or glamorous places. Perhaps the car has been designed with respect to our motivational patterns: the device on the hood is a phallic symbol, or the horsepower has been stepped up to please our competitive spirit in enabling us to pass other cars swiftly (or, as the advertisements say, “safely”). The concept of freedom which has emerged as part of the cultural practice of our group makes little or no provision for recognizing or dealing with these kinds of control. Concepts like “responsibility” and “rights” are scarcely applicable. We are prepared to deal with coercive measures, but we have no traditional recourse with respect to other measures which in the long run (and especially with the help of science) may be much more powerful and dangerous.

Education

The techniques of education were once frankly aversive. The teacher was usually older and stronger than his pupils and was able to “make them learn.” This meant that they were not actually taught but were surrounded by a threatening world from which they could escape only by learning. Usually they were left to their own resources in discovering how to do so. Claude Coleman has published a grimly amusing reminder of these older practices (3). He tells of a schoolteacher who published a careful account of his services during 51 years of teaching, during which he administered: “. . . 911,527 blows with a cane; 124,010 with a rod; 20,989 with a ruler; 136,715 with the hand; 10,295 over the mouth; 7,905 boxes on the ear; [and] 1,115,800 slaps on the head. . . .”

Progressive education was a humanitarian effort to substitute positive reinforcement for such aversive measures, but in the search for useful human values in the classroom it has never fully replaced the variables it abandoned. Viewed as a branch of behavioral technology, education remains relatively inefficient. We supplement it, and rationalize it, by admiring the pupil who learns for himself; and we often attribute the learning process, or knowledge itself, to something inside the individual. We admire behavior which seems to have inner sources. Thus, we admire one who recites a poem more than one who simply reads it. We admire one who knows the answer more than one who knows where to look it up. We admire the writer rather than the reader. We admire the arithmetician who can do a problem in his head rather than with a slide rule or calculating machine, or in “original” ways rather than by a strict application of rules. In general, we feel that any aid or “crutch” except those aids to which we are now thoroughly accustomed reduces the credit due. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Thamus, the king, attacks the invention of the alphabet on similar grounds! He is afraid “it will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memories. . . .” In other words, he holds it more admirable to remember than to use a memorandum. He also objects that pupils “will read many things without instruction . . . [and] will therefore seem to know many things when they are for the most part ignorant.” In the same vein we are today sometimes contemptuous of book learning, but as educators we can scarcely afford to adopt this view without reservation.

By admiring the student for knowledge and blaming him for ignorance, we escape some of the responsibility of teaching him. We resist any analysis of the educational process which threatens the notion of inner wisdom or questions the contention that the fault of ignorance lies with the student. More powerful techniques which bring about the same changes in behavior by manipulating external variables are decried as brainwashing or thought control. We are quite unprepared to judge effective educational measures. As long as only a few pupils learn much of what is taught, we do not worry about uniformity or regimentation. We do not fear the feeble technique; but we should view with dismay a system under which every student learned everything listed in a syllabus although such a condition is far from unthinkable. Similarly, we do not fear a system which is so defective that the student must work for an education; but we are loath to give credit for anything learned without effort although this could well be taken as an ideal result and we flatly refuse to give credit if the student already knows what a school teaches.

A world in which people are wise and good without trying, without “having to be,” without “choosing to be,” could conceivably be a far better world for everyone. In such a world we should not have to “give anyone credit” we should not need to admire anyone for being wise and good. From our present point of view we cannot believe that such a world would be admirable. We do not even permit ourselves to imagine what it would be like.

Government

Government has always been the special field of aversive control. The state is frequently defined in terms of the power to punish, and jurisprudence leans heavily upon the associated notion of personal responsibility. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile current practice and theory with these earlier views. In criminology, for example, there is a strong tendency to drop the notion of responsibility in favor of some such alternative as capacity or controllability. But no matter how strongly the facts, or even practical expedience, support such a change, it is difficult to make the change in a legal system designed on a different plan. When governments resort to other techniques (for example, positive reinforcement), the concept of responsibility is no longer relevant and the theory of government is no longer applicable.

The conflict is illustrated by two decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1930’s which dealt with, and disagreed on, the definition of control or coercion (4, p.233). The Agricultural Adjustment Act proposed that the Secretary of Agriculture make “rental or benefit payments” to those farmers who agreed to reduce production. The government agreed that the Act would be unconstitutional if the farmer had been compelled to reduce production but was not since he was merely invited to do so. Justice Roberts (4) expressed the contrary majority view of the court that “The power to confer or withhold unlimited benefits is the power to coerce or destroy.” This recognition of positive reinforcement was withdrawn a few years later in another case in which Justice Cardozo (4, p. 244) wrote “To hold that motive or temptation is equivalent to coercion is to plunge the law in endless difficulties.” We may agree with him, without implying that the proposition is therefore wrong. Sooner or later the law must be prepared to deal with all possible techniques of governmental control.

The uneasiness with which we view government (in the broadest possible sense) when it does not use punishment is shown by the reception of my Utopian novel, Walden Two (4a). This was essentially a proposal to apply a behavioral technology to the construction of a workable, effective, and productive pattern of government. It was greeted with wrathful violence. Life magazine called it “a travesty on the good life,” and “a menace ... a triumph of mortmain or the dead hand not envisaged since the days of Sparta ... a slur upon a name, a corruption of an impulse.” Joseph Wood Krutch devoted a substantial part of his book, The Measure of Man (5), to attacking my views and those of the protagonist, Frazier, in the same vein, and Morris Viteles has recently criticized the book in a similar manner in Science (6). Perhaps the reaction is best expressed in a quotation from The Quest for Utopia by Negley and Patrick (7).

Halfway through this contemporary Utopia, the reader may feel sure, as we did, that this is a beautifully ironic satire on what has been called “behavioral engineering.” The longer one stays in this better world of the psychologist, however, the plainer it becomes that the inspiration is not satiric, but messianic. This is indeed the behaviorally engineered society, and while it was to be expected that sooner or later the principle of psychological conditioning would be made the basis of a serious construction of Utopia Brown anticipated it in Limanora yet not even the effective satire of Huxley is adequate preparation for the shocking horror of the idea when positively presented. Of all the dictatorships espoused by utopists, this is the most profound, and incipient dictators might well find in this utopia a guidebook of political practice.

One would scarcely guess that the authors are talking about a world in which there is food, clothing, and shelter for all, where everyone chooses his own work and works on the average only four hours a day, where music and the arts flourish, where personal relationships develop under the most favorable circumstances, where education prepares every child for the social and intellectual life which lies before him, where in short people are truly happy, secure, productive, creative, and forward-looking. What is wrong with it? Only one thing: someone “planned it that way.” If these critics had come upon a society in some remote corner of the world which boasted similar advantages, they would undoubtedly have hailed it as providing a pattern we all might well follow provided that it was clearly the result of a natural process of cultural evolution. Any evidence that intelligence had been used in arriving at this version of the good life would, in their eyes, be a serious flaw. No matter if the planner of Walden Two diverts none of the proceeds of the community to his own use, no matter if he has no current control or is, indeed, unknown to most of the other members of the community (he planned that, too), somewhere back of it all he occupies the position of prime mover. And this, to the child of the democratic tradition, spoils it all.

The dangers inherent in the control of human behavior are very real. The possibility of the misuse of scientific knowledge must always be faced. We cannot escape by denying the power of a science of behavior or arresting its development. It is no help to cling to familiar philosophies of human behavior simply because they are more reassuring. As I have pointed out elsewhere (8), the new techniques emerging from a science of behavior must be subject to the explicit counter control which has already been applied to earlier and cruder forms. Brute force and deception, for example, are now fairly generally suppressed by ethical practices and by explicit governmental and religious agencies. A similar counter-control of scientific knowledge in the interests of the group is a feasible and promising possibility. Although we cannot say how devious the course of its evolution may be, a cultural pattern of control and counter-control will presumably emerge which will be most widely supported because it is most widely reinforcing.

If we cannot foresee all the details (as we obviously cannot), it is important to remember that this is true of the critics of science as well. The dire consequences of new techniques of control, the hidden menace in original cultural designs these need some proof. That the need for proof is so often overlooked is only another example of my present point. Man has got himself into some pretty fixes, and it is easy to believe that he will do so again. But there is a more optimistic possibility. The slow growth of the methods of science, now for the first time being applied to human affairs, may mean a new and exciting phase of human life to which historical analogies will not apply and in which earlier political slogans will not be appropriate. If we are to use the knowledge which a science of behavior is now making available with any hope of success, we must look at human nature as it is brought into focus through the methods of science rather than as it has been presented to us in a series of historical accidents.

If the advent of a powerful science of behavior causes trouble, it will not be because science itself is inimical to human welfare but because older conceptions have not yielded easily or gracefully. We expect resistance to new techniques of control from those who have heavy investments in the old, but we have no reason to help them preserve a series of principles which are not ends in themselves but rather outmoded means to an end. What is needed is a new conception of human behavior which is compatible with the implications of a scientific analysis. All men control and are controlled. The question of government in the broadest possible sense is not how freedom is to be preserved but what kinds of control are to be used and to what ends. Control must be analyzed and considered in its proper proportions. No scientist, I am sure, wishes to develop new master-slave relationships or bend the will of the people to despotic rulers in new ways. These are patterns of control appropriate to a world without science. They may well be the first to go when the experimental analysis of behavior comes into its own in the design of cultural practices.

Paper two by Carl Rogers

There are, I believe, a number of matters in connection with this important topic on which the authors of this article, and probably a large majority of psychologists, are in agreement. These matters then are not issues as far as we are concerned, and I should like to mention them briefly in order to put them to one side.

Points of agreement

I am sure we agree that men as individuals and as societies have always endeavored to understand, predict, influence, and control human behavior - their own behavior and that of others.

I believe we agree that the behavioral sciences are making and will continue to make increasingly rapid progress in the understanding of behavior, and that as a consequence the capacity to predict and to control behavior is developing with equal rapidity.

I believe we agree that to deny these advances, or to claim that man’s behavior cannot be a field of science, is unrealistic. Even though this is not an issue for us, we should recognize that many intelligent men still hold strongly to the view that the actions of men are free in some sense such that scientific knowledge of man’s behavior is impossible. Thus Reinhold Niebuhr, the noted theologian, heaps scorn on the concept of psychology as a science of man’s behavior and even says, “In any event, no scientific investigation of past behavior can become the basis of predictions of future behavior” (9). So, while this is not an issue for psychologists, we should at least notice in passing that it is an issue for many people.

I believe we are in agreement that the tremendous potential power of a science which permits the prediction and control of behavior may be misused, and that the possibility of such misuse constitutes a serious threat.

Consequently, Skinner and I are in agreement that the whole question of the scientific control of human behavior is a matter with which psychologists and the general public should concern themselves. As Robert Oppenheimer told the American Psychological Association last year (10) the problems that psychologists will pose for society by their growing ability to control behavior will be much more grave than the problems posed by the ability of physicists to control the reactions of matter. I am not sure whether psychologists generally recognize this. My impression is that by and large they hold a laissez-faire attitude. Obviously, Skinner and I do not hold this laissez-faire view, or we would not have written this article.

Points at issue

With these several points of basic and important agreement, are there then any issues that remain on which there are differences? I believe there are. They can be stated very briefly: Who will be controlled? Who will exercise control? What type of control will be exercised? Most important of all, toward what end or what purpose, or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised?

It is on questions of this sort that there exist ambiguities, misunderstandings, and probably deep differences. These differences exist among psychologists, among members of the general public in this country, and among various world cultures. Without any hope of achieving a final resolution of these questions, we can, I believe, put these issues in clearer form.

Some meanings

To avoid ambiguity and faulty communication, I would like to clarify the meanings of some of the terms we are using.

Behavioral science is a term that might be defined from several angles but in the context of this discussion it refers primarily to knowledge that the existence of certain describable conditions in the human being and/or in his environment is followed by certain describable consequences in his actions.

Prediction means the prior identification of behaviors which then occur. Because it is important in some things I wish to say later, I would point out that one may predict a highly specific behavior, such as an eye blink, or one may predict a class of behaviors. One might correctly predict “avoidant behavior,” for example, without being able to specify whether the individual will run away or simply close his eyes.

The word control is a very slippery one, which can be used with any one of several meanings. I would like to specify three that seem most important for our present purposes. Control may mean: (i) The setting of conditions by B for A, A having no voice in the matter, such that certain predictable behaviors then occur in A. I refer to this as external control. (ii) The setting of conditions by B for A, A giving some degree of consent to these conditions, such that certain predictable behaviors then occur in A. I refer to this as the influence of B on A. (iii) The setting of conditions by A such that certain predictable behaviors then occur in himself. I refer to this as internal control. It will be noted that Skinner lumps together the first two meanings, external control and influence, under the concept of control. I find this confusing.

Usual concept of control of human behavior

With the underbrush thus cleared away (I hope), let us review very briefly the various elements that are involved in the usual concept of the control of human behavior as mediated by the behavorial sciences. I am drawing here on the previous writings of Skinner, on his present statements, on the writings of others who have considered in either friendly or antagonistic fashion the meanings that would be involved in such control. I have not excluded the science fiction writers, as reported recently by Vandenburg (11), since they often show an awareness of the issues involved, even though the methods described are as yet fictional. These then are the elements that seem common to these different concepts of the application of science to human behavior.

1. There must first be some sort of decision about goals. Usually desirable goals are assumed, but sometimes, as in George Orwell’s book 1984, the goal that is selected is an aggrandizement of individual power with which most of us would disagree. In a recent paper Skinner suggests that one possible set of goals to be assigned to the behavioral technology is this- “Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well-behaved and productive” (12). In the first draft of his part of this article, which he was kind enough to show me, he did not mention such definite goals as these, but desired “improved” educational practices, “wiser” use of knowledge in government, and the like. In the final version of his article he avoids even these value-laden terms, and his implicit goal is the very general one that scientific control of behavior is desirable, because it would perhaps bring “a far better world for everyone.”

Thus, the first step in thinking about the control of human behavior is the choice of goals, whether specific or general. It is necessary to come to terms in some way with the issue, “For what purpose?”

2. A second element is that, whether the end selected is highly specific or is a very general one such as wanting “a better world,” we proceed by the methods of science to discover the means to these ends. We continue through further experimentation and investigation to discover more effective means. The method of science is self-correcting in thus arriving at increasingly effective ways of achieving the purpose we have in mind.

3. The third aspect of such control is that as the conditions or methods are discovered by which to reach the goal, some person or some group establishes these conditions and uses these methods, having in one way or another obtained the power to do so.

4. The fourth element is the exposure of individuals to the prescribed conditions, and this leads, with a high degree of probability, to behavior which is in line with the goals desired. Individuals are now happy, if that has been the goal, or well-behaved, or submissive, or whatever it has been decided to make them.

5. The fifth element is that if the process I have described is put in motion then there is a continuing social organization which will continue to produce the types of behavior that have been valued.

Some flaws

Are there any flaws in this way of viewing the control of human behavior? I believe there are. In fact, the only element in this description with which I find myself in agreement is the second. It seems to me quite incontrovertibly true that the scientific method is an excellent way to discover the means by which to achieve our goals. Beyond that, I feel many sharp differences, which I will try to spell out.

I believe that in Skinner’s presentation here and in his previous writings, there is a serious underestimation of the problem of power. To hope that the power which is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First, they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them, they work devotedly for the U.S.S.R. in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the U.S.S.R. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probable that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power.

But the major flaw I see in this review of what is involved in the scientific control of human behavior is the denial, misunderstanding, or gross underestimation of the place of ends, goals or values in their relationship to science. This error (as it seems to me) has so many implications that I would like to devote some space to it.

Ends and values in relation to science

In sharp contradiction to some views that have been advanced, I would like to propose a two-pronged thesis: (i) In any scientific endeavor whether “pure” or applied science there is a prior subjective choice of the purpose or value which that scientific work is perceived as serving. (ii) This subjective value choice which brings the scientific endeavor into being must always lie outside of that endeavor and can never become a part of the science involved in that endeavor.

Let me illustrate the first point from Skinner himself. It is clear that in his earlier writing (12) it is recognized that a prior value choice is necessary, and it is specified as the goal that men are to become happy, well-behaved, productive, and so on. I am pleased that Skinner has retreated from the goals he then chose, because to me they seem to be stultifying values. I can only feel that he was choosing these goals for others, not for himself. I would hate to see Skinner become “well-behaved,” as that term would be defined for him by behavioral scientists. His recent article in the American Psychologist (13) shows that he certainly does not want to be “productive” as that value is defined by most psychologists. And the most awful fate I can imagine for him would be to have him constantly “happy.” It is the fact that he is very unhappy about many things which makes me prize him.

In the first draft of his part of this article, he also included such prior value choices, saying for example, “We must decide how we are to use the knowledge which a science of human behavior is now making available.” Now he has dropped all mention of such choices, and if I understand him correctly, he believes that science can proceed without them. He has suggested this view in another recent paper, stating that “We must continue to experiment in cultural design... testing the consequences as we go. Eventually the practices which make for the greatest biological and psychological strength of the group will presumably survive” (8, p. 549).

I would point out, however, that to choose to experiment is a value choice. Even to move in the direction of perfectly random experimentation is a value choice. To test the consequences of an experiment is possible only if we have first made a subjective choice of a criterion value. And implicit in his statement is a valuing of biological and psychological strength. So even when trying to avoid such choice, it seems inescapable that a prior subjective value choice is necessary for any scientific endeavor, or for any application of scientific knowledge.

I wish to make it clear that I am not saying that values cannot be included as a subject of science. It is not true that science deals only with certain classes of “facts” and that these classes do not include values. It is a bit more complex than that, as a simple illustration or two may make clear.

If I value knowledge of the “three R’s” as a goal of education, the methods of science can give me increasingly accurate information on how this goal may be achieved. If I value problem-solving ability as a goal of education, the scientific method can give me the same kind of help.

Now, if I wish to determine whether problem-solving ability is “better” than knowledge of the three R’s, then scientific method can also study those two values but only and this is very important in terms of some other value which I have subjectively chosen. I may value college success. Then I can determine whether problem-solving ability or knowledge of the three R’s is most closely associated with that value. I may value personal integration or vocational success or responsible citizenship. I can determine whether problem-solving ability or knowledge of the three R’s is “better” for achieving any one of these values. But the value or purpose that gives meaning to a particular scientific endeavor must always lie outside of that endeavor.

Although our concern in this symposium is largely with applied science, what I have been saying seems equally true of so-called “pure” science. In pure science the usual prior subjective value choice is the discovery of truth. But this is a subjective choice, and science can never say whether it is the best choice, save in the light of some other value. Geneticists in the U.S.S.R., for example, had to make a subjective choice of whether it was better to pursue truth or to discover facts which upheld a governmental dogma. Which choice is “better”? We could make a scientific investigation of those alternatives but only in the light of some other subjectively chosen value. If, for example, we value the survival of a culture, then we could begin to investigate with the methods of science the question of whether pursuit of truth or support of governmental dogma is most closely associated with cultural survival.

My point then is that any endeavor in science, pure or applied, is carried on in the pursuit of a purpose or value that is subjectively chosen by persons. It is important that this choice be made explicit, since the particular value which is being sought can never be tested or evaluated, confirmed or denied, by the scientific endeavor to which it gives birth. The initial purpose or value always and necessarily lies outside the scope of the scientific effort which it sets in motion.

Among other things this means that if we choose some particular goal or series of goals for human beings and then set out on a large scale to control human behavior to the end of achieving those goals, we are locked in the rigidity of our initial choice, because such a scientific endeavor can never transcend itself to select new goals. Only subjective human persons can do that. Thus, if we chose as our goal the state of happiness for human beings (a goal deservedly ridiculed by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World), and if we involved all of society in a successful scientific program by which people became happy, we would be locked in a colossal rigidity in which no one would be free to question this goal, because our scientific operations could not transcend themselves to question their guiding purposes. And without laboring this point, I would remark that colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival.

If, however, a part of our scheme is to set free some “planners” who do not have to be happy, who are not controlled, and who are therefore free to choose other values, this has several meanings. It means that the purpose we have chosen as our goal is not a sufficient and a satisfying one for human beings but must be supplemented. It also means that if it is necessary to set up an elite group which is free, then this shows all too clearly that the great majority are only the slaves - no matter by what high-sounding name we call them - of those who select the goals.

Perhaps, however, the thought is that a continuing scientific endeavor will evolve its own goals; that the initial findings will alter the directions, and subsequent findings will alter them still further, and that science somehow develops its own purpose. Although he does not clearly say so, this appears to be the pattern Skinner has in mind. It is surely a reasonable description, but it overlooks one element in this continuing development, which is that subjective personal choice enters in at every point at which the direction changes. The findings of a science, the results of an experiment, do not and never can tell us what next scientific purpose to pursue. Even in the purest of science, the scientist must decide what the findings mean and must subjectively choose what next step will be most profitable in the pursuit of his purpose. And if we are speaking of the application of scientific knowledge, then it is distressingly clear that the increasing scientific knowledge of the structure of the atom carries with it no necessary choice as to the purpose to which this knowledge will be put. This is a subjective personal choice which must be made by many individuals.

Thus, I return to the proposition with which I began this section of my remarks - and which I now repeat in different words. Science has its meaning as the objective pursuit of a purpose which has been subjectively chosen by a person or persons. This purpose or value can never be investigated by the particular scientific experiment or investigation to which it has given birth and meaning. Consequently, any discussion of the control of human beings by the behavioral sciences must first and most deeply concern itself with the subjectively chosen purposes which such an application of science is intended to implement.

Is the situation hopeless?

The thoughtful reader may recognize that, although my remarks up to this point have introduced some modifications in the conception of the processes by which human behavior will be controlled, these remarks may have made such control seem, if anything, even more inevitable. We might sum it up this way: Behavioral science is clearly moving forward; the increasing power for control which it gives will be held by someone or some group; such an individual or group will surely choose the values or goals to be achieved; and most of us will then be increasingly controlled by means so subtle that we will not even be aware of them as controls. Thus, whether a council of wise psychologists (if this is not a contradiction in terms), or a Stalin, or a Big Brother has the power, and whether the goal is happiness, or productivity, or resolution of the Oedipus complex, or submission, or love of Big Brother, we will inevitably find ourselves moving toward the chosen goal and probably thinking that we ourselves desire it. Thus, if this line of reasoning is correct, it appears that some form of Walden Two or of 1984 (and at a deep philosophic level they seem indistinguishable) is coming. The fact that it would surely arrive piecemeal, rather than all at once, does not greatly change the fundamental issues. In any event, as Skinner has indicated in his writings, we would then look back upon the concepts of human freedom, the capacity for choice, the responsibility for choice, and the worth of the human individual as historical curiosities which once existed by cultural accident as values in a prescientific civilization.

I believe that any person observant of trends must regard something like the foregoing sequence as a real possibility. It is not simply a fantasy. Something of that sort may even be the most likely future. But is it an inevitable future? I want to devote the remainder of my remarks to an alternative possibility.

Alternative set of values

Suppose we start with a set of ends, values, purposes, quite different from the type of goals we have been considering. Suppose we do this quite openly, setting them forth as a possible value choice to be accepted or rejected. Suppose we select a set of values that focuses on fluid elements of process rather than static attributes. We might then value: man as a process of becoming, as a process of achieving worth and dignity through the development of his potentialities; the individual human being as a self-actualizing process, moving on to more challenging and enriching experiences; the process by which the individual creatively adapts to an ever-new and changing world; the process by which knowledge transcends itself, as, for example, the theory of relativity transcended Newtonian physics, itself to be transcended in some future day by a new perception.

If we select values such as these we turn to our science and technology of behavior with a very different set of questions. We will want to know such things as these: Can science aid in the discovery of new modes of richly rewarding living? more meaningful and satisfying modes of interpersonal relationships? Can science inform us on how the human race can become a more intelligent participant in its own evolution its physical, psychological and social evolution? Can science inform us on ways of releasing the creative capacity of individuals, which seem so necessary if we are to survive in this fantastically expanding atomic age? Oppenheimer has pointed out (14) that knowledge, which used to double in millenia or centuries, now doubles in a generation or a decade. It appears that we must discover the utmost in release of creativity if we are to be able to adapt effectively. In short, can science discover the methods by which man can most readily become a continually developing and self-transcending process, in his behavior, his thinking, his knowledge? Can science predict and release an essentially “unpredictable” freedom?

It is one of the virtues of science as a method that it is as able to advance and implement goals and purposes of this sort as it is to serve static values, such as states of being well-informed, happy, obedient. Indeed, we have some evidence of this.

Small example

I will perhaps be forgiven if I document some of the possibilities along this line by turning to psychotherapy, the field I know best.

Psychotherapy, as Meerloo (15) and others have pointed out, can be one of the most subtle tools for the control of A by B. The therapist can subtly mold individuals in imitation of himself. He can cause an individual to become a submissive and conforming being. When certain therapeutic principles are used in extreme fashion, we call it brainwashing, an instance of the disintegration of the personality and a reformulation of the person along lines desired by the controlling individual. So, the principles of therapy can be used as an effective means of external control of human personality and behavior. Can psychotherapy be anything else?

Here I find the developments going on in client-centered psychotherapy (16) an exciting hint of what a behavioral science can do in achieving the kinds of values I have stated. Quite aside from being a somewhat new orientation in psychotherapy, this development has important implications regarding the relation of a behavioral science to the control of human behavior. Let me describe our experience as it relates to the issues of this discussion.

In client-centered therapy, we are deeply engaged in the prediction and influencing of behavior, or even the control of behavior. As therapists, we institute certain attitudinal conditions, and the client has relatively little voice in the establishment of these conditions. We predict that if these conditions are instituted, certain behavioral consequences will ensue in the client. Up to this point this is largely external control, no different from what Skinner has described, and no different from what I have discussed in the preceding sections of this article. But here any similarity ceases.

The conditions we have chosen to establish predict such behavioral consequences as these: that the client will become self-directing, less rigid, more open to the evidence of his senses, better organized and integrated, more similar to the ideal which he has chosen for himself. In other words, we have established by external control conditions which we predict will be followed by internal control by the individual, in pursuit of internally chosen goals. We have set the conditions which predict various classes of behaviors self-directing behaviors, sensitivity to realities within and without, flexible adaptiveness which are by their very nature unpredictable in their specifics. Our recent research (17) indicates that our predictions are to a significant degree corroborated, and our commitment to the scientific method causes us to believe that more effective means of achieving these goals may be realized.

Research exists in other fields industry, education, group dynamics which seems to support our own findings. I believe it may be conservatively stated that scientific progress has been made in identifying those conditions in an interpersonal relationship which, if they exist in B, are followed in A by greater maturity in behavior, less dependence on others, an increase in expressiveness as a person, an increase in variability, flexibility and effectiveness of adaptation, an increase in self-responsibility and self-direction. And, quite in contrast to the concern expressed by some, we do not find that the creatively adaptive behavior which results from such self-directed variability of expression is a “happy accident” which occurs in “chaos.” Rather, the individual who is open to his experience, and self-directing, is harmonious not chaotic, ingenious rather than random, as he orders his responses imaginatively toward the achievement of his own purposes. His creative actions are no more a “happy accident” than was Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity.

Thus, we find ourselves in fundamental agreement with John Dewey’s statement: “Science has made its way by releasing, not by suppressing, the elements of variation, of invention and innovation, of novel creation in individuals” (18). Progress in personal life and in group living is, we believe, made in the same way.

Possible concept of the control of human behavior

It is quite clear that the point of view I am expressing is in sharp contrast to the usual conception of the relationship of the behavioral sciences to the control of human behavior. In order to make this contrast even more blunt, I will state this possibility in paragraphs parallel to those used before.

1. It is possible for us to choose to value man as a self-actualizing process of becoming; to value creativity, and the process by which knowledge becomes self-transcending.

2. We can proceed, by the methods of science, to discover the conditions which necessarily precede these processes and, through continuing experimentation, to discover better means of achieving these purposes.

3. It is possible for individuals or groups to set these conditions, with a minimum of power or control. According to present knowledge, the only authority necessary is the authority to establish certain qualities of interpersonal relationship.

4. Exposed to these conditions, present knowledge suggests that individuals become more self-responsible, make progress in self-actualization, become more flexible, and become more creatively adaptive.

5. Thus, such an initial choice would inaugurate the beginnings of a social system or subsystem in which values, knowledge, adaptive skills, and even the concept of science would be continually changing and self-transcending. The emphasis would be upon man as a process of becoming.

I believe it is clear that such a view as I have been describing does not lead to any definable utopia. It would be impossible to predict its final outcome. It involves a step-by-step development, based on a continuing subjective choice of purposes, which are implemented by the behavioral sciences. It is in the direction of the “open society,” as that term has been defined by Popper (19), where individuals carry responsibility for personal decisions. It is at the opposite pole from his concept of the closed society, of which Walden Two would be an example.

I trust it is also evident that the whole emphasis is on process, not on end-states of being. I am suggesting that it is by choosing to value certain qualitative elements of the process of becoming that we can find a pathway toward the open society.

The choice

It is my hope that we have helped to clarify the range of choice which will lie before us and our children in regard to the behavioral sciences. We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood. We can choose to utilize our scientific knowledge to make men happy, well-behaved, and productive, as Skinner earlier suggested. Or we can insure that each person learns all the syllabus which we select and set before him, as Skinner now suggests. Or at the other end of the spectrum of choice we can choose to use the behavioral sciences in ways which will free, not control; which will bring about constructive variability, not conformity; which will develop creativity, not contentment; which will facilitate each person in his self-directed process of becoming; which will aid individuals, groups, and even the concept of science to become self-transcending in freshly adaptive ways of meeting life and its problems. The choice is up to us, and, the human race being what it is, we are likely to stumble about, making at times some nearly disastrous value choices and at other times highly constructive ones.

I am aware that to some, this setting forth of a choice is unrealistic, because a choice of values is regarded as not possible. Skinner has stated: “Man’s vaunted creative powers ... his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for his choice none of these is conspicuous in this new self-portrait (provided by science). Man, we once believed, was free to express himself in art, music, and literature, to inquire into nature, to seek salvation in his own way. He could initiate action and make spontaneous and capricious changes of course. ... But science insists that action is initiated by forces impinging upon the individual, and that caprice is only another name for behavior for which we have not yet found a cause” (12. pp. 52-53).

I can understand this point of view, but I believe that it avoids looking at the great paradox of behavioral science. Behavior, when it is examined scientifically, is surely best understood as determined by prior causation. This is one great fact of science. But responsible personal choice, which is the most essential element in being a person, which is the core experience in psychotherapy, which exists prior to any scientific endeavor, is an equally prominent fact in our lives. To deny the experience of responsible choice is, to me, as restricted a view as to deny the possibility of a behavioral science. That these two important elements of our experience appear to be in contradiction has perhaps the same significance as the contradiction between the wave theory and the corpuscular theory of light, both of which can be shown to be true, even though incompatible. We cannot profitably deny our subjective life, any more than we can deny the objective description of that life.

In conclusion then, it is my contention that science cannot come into being without a personal choice of the values we wish to achieve. And these values we choose to implement will forever lie outside of the science which implements them; the goals we select, the purposes we wish to follow, must always be outside of the science which achieves them. To me this has the encouraging meaning that the human person, with his capacity of subjective choice, can and will always exist, separate from and prior to any of his scientific undertakings. Unless as individuals and groups we choose to relinquish our capacity of subjective choice, we will always remain persons, not simply pawns of a self-created science.

Paper three by B.F. Skinner

I cannot quite agree that the practice of science requires a prior decision about goals or a prior choice of values. The metallurgist can study the properties of steel and the engineer can design a bridge without raising the question of whether a bridge is to be built. But such questions are certainly frequently raised and tentatively answered. Rogers wants to call the answers “subjective choices of values.” To me, such an expression suggests that we have had to abandon more rigorous scientific practices in order to talk about our own behavior. In the experimental analysis of other organisms I would use other terms, and I shall try to do so here. Any list of values is a list of reinforcers conditioned or otherwise. We are so constituted that under certain circumstances food, water, sexual contact, and so on, will make any behavior which produces them more likely to occur again. Other things may acquire this power. We do not need to say that an organism chooses to eat rather than to starve. If you answer that it is a very different thing when a man chooses to starve, I am only too happy to agree. If it were not so, we should have cleared up the question of choice long ago. An organism can be reinforced by can be made to “choose” almost any given state of affairs.

Rogers is concerned with choices that involve multiple and usually conflicting consequences. I have dealt with some of these elsewhere (20) in an analysis of self-control. Shall I eat these delicious strawberries today if I will then suffer an annoying rash tomorrow? The decision I am to make used to be assigned to the province of ethics. But we are now studying similar combinations of positive and negative consequences, as well as collateral conditions which affect the result in the laboratory. Even a pigeon can be taught some measure of self-control! And this work helps us to understand the operation of certain formulas among them value judgments which folk-wisdom, religion, and psychotherapy have advanced in the interests of self-discipline. The observable effect of any statement of value is to alter the relative effectiveness of reinforcers. We may no longer enjoy the strawberries for thinking about the rash. If rashes are made sufficiently shameful, illegal, sinful, maladjusted, or unwise, we may glow with satisfaction as we push the strawberries aside in a grandiose avoidance response which would bring a smile to the lips of Murray Sidman.

People behave in ways, which, as we say, conform to ethical, governmental, or religious patterns because they are reinforced for doing so. The resulting behavior may have far-reaching consequences for the survival of the pattern to which it conforms. And whether we like it or not, survival is the ultimate criterion. This is where, it seems to me, science can help not in choosing a goal, but in enabling us to predict the survival value of cultural practices. Man has too long tried to get the kind of world he wants by glorifying some brand of immediate reinforcement. As science points up more and more of the remoter consequences, he may begin to work to strengthen behavior, not in a slavish devotion to a chosen value, but with respect to the ultimate survival of mankind. Do not ask me why I want mankind to survive. I can tell you why only in the sense in which the physiologist can tell you why I want to breathe. Once the relation between a given step and the survival of my group has been pointed out, I will take that step. And it is the business of science to point out just such relations.

The values I have occasionally recommended (and Rogers has not led me to recant) are transitional. Other things being equal, I am betting on the group whose practices make for healthy, happy, secure, productive, and creative people. And I insist that the values recommended by Rogers are transitional, too, for I can ask him the same kind of question. Man as a process of becoming - what? Self-actualization - for what? Inner control is no more a goal than external.

What Rogers seems to me to be proposing, both here and elsewhere (1), is this: Let us use our increasing power of control to create individuals who will not need and perhaps will no longer respond to control. Let us solve the problem of our power by renouncing it. At first blush this seems as implausible as a benevolent despot. Yet power has occasionally been foresworn. A nation has burned its Reichstag, rich men have given away their wealth, beautiful women have become ugly hermits in the desert, and psychotherapists have become nondirective. When this happens, I look to other possible reinforcements for a plausible explanation. A people relinquish democratic power when a tyrant promises them the earth. Rich men give away wealth to escape the accusing finger of their fellowmen. A woman destroys her beauty in the hope of salvation. And a psychotherapist relinquishes control because he can thus help his client more effectively.

The solution that Rogers is suggesting is thus understandable. But is he correctly interpreting the result? What evidence is there that a client ever becomes truly self-directing? What evidence is there that he ever makes a truly inner choice of ideal or goal? Even though the therapist does not do the choosing, even though he encourages “self-actualization” he is not out of control as long as he holds himself ready to step in when occasion demands when, for example, the client chooses the goal of becoming a more accomplished liar or murdering his boss. But supposing the therapist does withdraw completely or is no longer necessary what about all the other forces acting upon the client? Is the self-chosen goal independent of his early ethical and religious training? of the folk-wisdom of his group? of the opinions and attitudes of others who are important to him? Surely not. The therapeutic situation is only a small part of the world of the client. From the therapist’s point of view it may appear to be possible to relinquish control. But the control passes, not to a “self,” but to forces in other parts of the client’s world. The solution of the therapist’s problem of power cannot be our solution, for we must consider all the forces acting upon the individual.

The child who must be prodded and nagged is something less than a fully developed human being. We want to see him hurrying to his appointment, not because each step is taken in response to verbal reminders from his mother, but because certain temporal contingencies, in which dawdling has been punished and hurrying reinforced, have worked a change in his behavior. Call this a state of better organization, a greater sensitivity to reality, or what you will. The plain fact is that the child passes from a temporary verbal control exercised by his parents to control by certain inexorable features of the environment. I should suppose that something of the same sort happens in successful psychotherapy. Rogers seems to me to be saying this: Let us put an end, as quickly as possible, to any pattern of master-and-slave, to any direct obedience to command, to the submissive following of suggestions. Let the individual be free to adjust himself to more rewarding features of the world about him. In the end, let his teachers and counselors “wither away,” like the Marxist state. I not only agree with this as a useful ideal, I have constructed a fanciful world to demonstrate its advantages. It saddens me to hear Rogers say that “at a deep philosophic level” Walden Two and George Orwell’s 1984 “seem indistinguishable.” They could scarcely be more unlike at any level. The book 1984 is a picture of immediate aversive control for vicious selfish purposes. The founder of Walden Two, on the other hand, has built a community in which neither he nor any other person exerts any current control. His achievement lay in his original plan, and when he boasts of this (”It is enough to satisfy the thirstiest tyrant”) we do not fear him but only pity him for his weakness.

Another critic of Walden Two, Andrew Hacker (21), has discussed this point in considering the bearing of mass conditioning upon the liberal notion of autonomous man. In drawing certain parallels between the Grand Inquisition passage in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Walden Two, he attempts to set up a distinction to be drawn in any society between conditioners and conditioned. He assumes that “the conditioner can be said to be autonomous in the traditional liberal sense.” But then he notes: “Of course the conditioner has been conditioned. But he has not been conditioned by the conscious manipulation of another person.” But how does this affect the resulting behavior? Can we not soon forget the origins of the “artificial” diamond which is identical with the real thing? Whether it is an “accidental” cultural pattern, such as is said to have produced the founder of Walden Two, or the engineered environment which is about to produce his successors, we are dealing with sets of conditions, generating human behavior which will ultimately be measured by their contribution to the strength of the group. We look to the future, not the past, for the test of “goodness” or acceptability.

If we are worthy of our democratic heritage we shall, of course, be ready to resist any tyrannical use of science for immediate or selfish purposes. But if we value the achievements and goals of democracy we must not refuse to apply science to the design and construction of cultural patterns, even though we may then find ourselves in some sense in the position of controllers. Fear of control, generalized beyond any warrant, has led to a misinterpretation of valid practices and the blind rejection of intelligent planning for a better way of life. In terms which I trust Rogers will approve, in conquering this fear we shall become more mature and better organized and shall, thus, more fully actualize ourselves as human beings.

References and notes

1. C. R. Rogers, Teachers College Record 57, 316 (1956).

2. A. Hacker, Antioch Rev. 14, 195 (1954).

3. C. Coleman, Bull. Am. Assoc. Univ. Professors 39, 457 (1953).

4. P. A. Freund et al., Constitutional Law: Cases and Other Problems, vol. 1 (Little, Brown, Boston, 1954). 4a. B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (Macmillan, New York, 1948).

5. J. W. Krutch, The Measure of Man (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1953).

6. M. Viteles, Science 122, 1167 (1955).

7. G. Negley and J. M. Patrick, The Quest for Utopia (Schuman, New York, 1952).

8. B. F. Skinner, Trans. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 17, 547 (1955).

9. R. Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (Scribner, New York, 1955), p. 47.

10. R. Oppenheimer, Am. Psychol. 11, 127 (1956).

11. S. G. Vandenberg, ibid. 11, 339 (1956).

12. B. F. Skinner, Am. Scholar 25, 47 (1955-56).

13. B. F. Skinner, Am. Psychol. 11, 221 (1956).

14. R. Oppenheimer, Roosevelt University Occasional Papers 2 (1956).

15. J. A. M. Meerloo, J. Nervous Mental Disease 122, 353 (1955).

16. C. R. Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy (Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1951).

17. C. R. Rogers and R. Dymond, Eds., Psychotherapy and Personality Change (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954).

18. J. Ratner, Ed., Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy (Modern Library, New York, 1939), p. 359.

19. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Rutledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1945).

20. B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (Macmillan, New York, 1953).

21. A. Hacker, J. Politics 17, 590 (1955).

Who won the debate?

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Although we have never met, I’m confident I can accurately tap into and describe aspects of your personality. How? Because you can actually tell a great deal about someone by the things they choose to read. So, the fact that you’ve made a conscious decision to read my psychology Substack posts (thank you, by the way) tells me, in all probability, that:

You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

You have a great deal of unused capacity which you haven’t fully turned to your advantage.

You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, becoming dissatisfied when restricted by limitations.

You have a strong need for others to like and admire you.

You tend to be critical of yourself.

While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.

Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to worry and feel insecure on the inside.

At times, you have serious doubts about whether you made the right decision or did the right thing.

You’ve found it unwise to be too open in revealing yourself to others.

Sometimes you are extroverted, sociable, and affable, while at other times, you are introverted, wary, and reserved.

Some of your aspirations tend to be unrealistic.

Security is one of your major life goals.

So, how did I do?

On a scale from zero (poor) to five (perfect), how would you rate the extent to which this description reveals basic characteristics of your personality? In most cases, this personality sketch consistently receives ratings of 4 or 5, which is quite impressive.

Or at least it would be, except for the fact that my analysis has absolutely nothing to do with what you read.

This is simply a demonstration of how people can be misled by general personality descriptions. This human susceptibility to interpret broadly applicable statements as uniquely meaningful is often referred to as the Barnum Effect, named after the American showman P.T. Barnum’s famous remark that “we’ve got something for everyone.” It’s also known as the Forer Effect, after Bertram R. Forer’s 1949 classic research paper titled The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility.

The story behind forer’s research

One of my favorite aspects of Forer’s study is how it came to be. If Forer hadn’t been out clubbing (1940s style!), he might never have conducted his landmark research. Here’s how Forer himself explained it:

Recently, I was accosted by a nightclub graphologist who wished to 'read' my handwriting. An amiable discussion ensued, during which the graphologist offered proof of the scientific basis of his work, claiming that his clients affirmed the correctness of his interpretations. I suggested that a psychologist could make a blindfold reading and attain the same degree of verification.

Forer’s point was simple: his “clients” weren’t affirming the graphologist’s skill because handwriting analysis revealed their personality, but because the “analysis” consisted of universally valid descriptions. People tend to believe such general descriptions are uniquely accurate, even when they apply broadly.

As Forer noted:

A naïve person who receives superficial diagnostic information, especially when the social situation is prestige-laden, tends to accept such information. They are impressed by the obvious truths and may be oblivious to the discrepancies. But they do more than this. They also validate the instrument and the diagnostician.

Forer’s brilliant experiment

To support this claim, Forer conducted a simple but brilliant experiment with his Introductory Psychology class. Here’s how it went:

He handed out a “Diagnostic Interest Blank” (DIB), which contained hobbies, personal characteristics, job duties, and secret hopes. A week later, he gave each student a personalized personality sketch, supposedly based on their DIB responses.

What the students didn't know was that all the sketches were identical!

The personality sketch consisted of 13 statements, many taken from a newsstand astrology book, including some of the ones I used at the start of this post.

Forer asked his students to rate how accurate the DIB was in describing their personality. The result? Nearly all of them rated the sketch highly, not realizing that everyone had received the same one. When Forer revealed this, the class burst into laughter, providing a memorable lesson in how easy it is to be misled by vague, general statements.

We are just as gullible today

Forer’s findings have been supported on numerous occasions since 1949, with an excellent example provided by psychological illusionist Derren Brown in his TV series Trick of the Mind. In a perfectly executed demonstration of the Forer effect, Derren Brown took a group of volunteers in London, Los Angeles, and Barcelona, and asked them to draw around their hand on a piece of paper. On this same piece of paper, the volunteers were instructed to write down their birth date and time of birth (if known). They were then asked to take a personal object (but nothing immediately recognizable as theirs) and place it in an envelope along with their hand drawing and birth information. Having done this, Derren Brown informed the volunteers that he would now be able to provide each of them with a detailed personality profile.

The results

To say the volunteers were impressed is an understatement. Here are just a few of the comments made:

London Volunteers
“It’s unbelievable; I can’t believe how accurate it is.”
“I can’t believe he’s analyzing me so accurately.”
“It feels so personal that it’s actually quite difficult for me to share.”

Los Angeles Volunteers
“I feel it pretty much summed up the way I am.”
“It’s kinda astounding, I’ve always believed in something like this. This just kinda confirms it, but it also shocks me because I didn’t think it would work so well.”
“It was shockingly accurate.”

Barcelona Volunteers
“It goes into very profound things about my personality.”
“75% was so accurate and so personal.”
“There are things that are nailed perfectly.”

Time to come clean

Ever the consummate showman, Derren Brown then announced that he would like to try something else. He asked the volunteers to fold up their personality profiles and pass them around the group so that nobody knew which profile they had ended up with. The volunteers were then asked to read the profile and see if they could identify who it belonged to. At first, the volunteers thought they had ended up with their own profile by chance. However, it soon dawned on them that they had all been given exactly the same personality profile!

Why is this important?

At the very least, the Forer effect should encourage you to think more critically about astrology, fortune-telling, graphology, and psychic powers. Consider what some of the volunteers said after Derren Brown revealed the truth:

“Had we not reached this second part, I would have walked away from here thinking you had psychic abilities.”

“I won’t feel shivers and I will not be afraid of card readers anymore because I know it’s a lie... They are tricking me, and it costs a lot, and it’s a big industry, isn’t it?”

Try it yourself

Following Bertram Forer’s original study, many of the students involved asked for a copy of the personality sketch to try it out on their friends. Want to test the Forer effect with a group of your own friends or family? If so, all you need is:

A (fictitious) way to obtain a personality reading. Forer used a made-up diagnostic questionnaire, Derren Brown used hand drawings and birth date information, and I used the type of things people read.

A personality profile. Remember, the profile must be exactly the same for each person. You could use these 12 statements from Forer’s original paper:

• You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.

• You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.

• You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.

• While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.

• Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.

• At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.

• You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.

• You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

• You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.

• At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.

• Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.

• Security is one of your major goals in life.

Or come up with your own. If you decide to construct your own one-profile-fits-all personality sketch but aren't sure whether to include a particular statement, just ask yourself: "Would this statement apply to most people?" If the answer is yes, then you are good to go. For example: "You have a tendency to worry but not to excess." "You do get unhappy at times, but on the whole, you are generally cheerful and rather optimistic."

You will also need:

An accuracy rating. Make sure you ask people to rate the extent to which they felt you had accurately read their personality, for example a percentage score out of 100.

An informed explanation. Finally, don’t forget to tell each person that their personality reading was just a smoke screen and that the real purpose behind the exercise was to demonstrate the Forer effect, that people tend to interpret broadly applicable statements as uniquely meaningful to them.

Note: For maximum impact, tell your friends or family that the personality reading is being conducted by someone you know but they don’t.

Final thoughts

So, it turns out that those opening statements had nothing to do with reading you like a book. Whether or not they felt personally accurate, the research is clear: most people believe they do. And that says something genuinely fascinating about the way our minds work. If you give the Forer effect experiment a go, I’d love to know the results.

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As a Brit who feels guilty for writing in US English (I get fewer complaints about typos this way!) I saw a quote the other day that finally justified my decision: "I put the zing in catastrophizing." The UK English version, "I put the sing in catastrophising," doesn't work nearly as well. Anyway, that's what prompted this article!

I'll look at what catastrophizing is, what the research says about why we do it, and what we can do to reduce the anxiety when we start thinking the worst.

What is catastrophizing?

Pinning down a precise definition turns out to be quite tricky.

A widely cited formal definition comes from a 2001 paper by psychologist Michael Sullivan and colleagues, which described catastrophizing as:

An exaggerated negative mental set brought to bear during actual or anticipated pain experience.

This definition originated in pain research but has since been applied much more broadly.

Prior to this definition, two of psychology’s most influential figures had their own view on catastrophizing. Albert Ellis called it “awfulizing,” an irrational belief that a bad outcome is not just unpleasant but genuinely insurmountable. And Aaron Beck described it as an automatic cognitive error, a systematic bias in how the mind processes information rather than a deliberate choice.

Researchers still don’t agree on what catastrophizing fundamentally is. A review by Luana Petrini and Lars Arendt-Nielsen, concluded that there is no general theoretical consensus on the question. Is it a personality trait some people carry more than others? A situational state anyone can slip into under pressure? A cognitive schema, a kind of mental template? Or a coping strategy that serves some purpose, however counterproductive it might seem? Scientists hold all of these positions, and the debate hasn’t been settled.

The brain that defaults to the worst

If catastrophizing is a cognitive error, it’s a remarkably widespread one. A useful way to think about why comes from evolutionary psychology.

In a 2001 review published in the Review of General Psychology, Roy Baumeister and colleagues examined a deceptively simple question: are bad things psychologically more powerful than good things? Across everyday events, close relationships, learning, memory, emotion, health, and social support, the answer was consistently yes. Bad events, bad feedback, bad moods, and bad information all had greater impact than their positive equivalents. The brain that pays more attention to threats than to rewards isn’t a broken brain. It’s doing exactly what evolution shaped it to do. Organisms better attuned to danger were more likely to survive it, and more likely to pass on their genes.

The magnitude of this negativity bias varies by context. In close relationships and emotional recall, the gap between negative and positive experiences is particularly pronounced. The point isn’t a single precise ratio. It’s that the pattern is consistent and deep, and that the brain defaulting to worst-case thinking isn’t a character flaw. It’s the factory setting.

From this perspective, catastrophizing isn’t something that happens to certain people. It’s something the human brain is structurally primed to do, particularly when threat is present or when the future feels uncertain. Cognitive behavioural therapist and clinical psychologist Dr. Lucia Tecuta notes that before catastrophizing becomes chronic, it typically takes hold because it provides a perceived sense of control over unpredictable events. If you've already imagined the worst, so the thinking goes, you won't be caught off guard if the worst actually happens.

Research reviewed by Baumeister and colleagues suggests that a brain in mild threat-detection mode tends to process information more carefully and thoroughly than a contented one. The mind scanning for danger is being vigilant. It’s doing something functionally sophisticated, even when the threat turns out to be a slightly ambiguous text message, a look from a colleague that probably meant nothing, or a symptom that Google has already diagnosed as seventeen different things.

The case against the evolutionary reframe

Not everyone finds the evolutionary account convincing.

Ellis and Beck view catastrophizing not as an adaptive feature but as a cognitive distortion, an irrational belief or automatic error that causes unnecessary suffering and needs to be corrected. It could be argued, therefore, that framing worst-case thinking as a survival mechanism risks romanticizing something that is simply a mistake.

A more nuanced perspective comes from researchers, Ida Flink, Katja Boersma, and Steven Linton, who in a 2013 paper in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, proposed that the causal arrow in catastrophizing may sometimes run in both directions. Rather than catastrophizing always driving distress, pre-existing distress may sometimes produce catastrophizing as a response. This is a theoretical proposition and hasn’t been confirmed for everyday catastrophizing in healthy adults.

Another perspective on the nature of catastrophizing comes from Eccleston and Crombez, whose misdirected problem-solving model, tested empirically by Flink et al, in a 2012 paper in the British Journal of Health Psychology, proposes that the catastrophizing mind isn't detecting threats so much as running a loop of worried thinking that fails to produce any actual solution. It's less a survival mechanism than a loop that keeps running, generating worry without ever producing an answer.

Where catastrophizing parts company with ordinary worry

The evolutionary account explains why we all default to scanning for threats. It doesn’t explain why some people’s imagined consequences go so much further than the evidence warrants. Research by Benjamin Hengen and Georg Alpers, suggests the gap lies not in how often we expect bad things to happen, but in what we imagine will happen when they do.

The research compared anxious and non-anxious individuals on two distinct questions: how often do you expect to encounter a threat, and how bad do you think it will be if you do? The finding was clear. Anxious people did not overestimate the frequency of encountering threats compared to non-anxious people. Their baseline sense of how often bad things happen was no more distorted than anyone else’s. The cognitive error occurred entirely in outcome estimation. Anxious people vastly overestimated the severity of what would happen if the encounter occurred.

The problem isn't that catastrophizers think bad things happen more often. It's that when they imagine bad things happening, the imagined consequences become far more catastrophic than the situation actually calls for. The frequency radar is calibrated roughly right. The severity dial is turned to maximum.

This is well worth bearing in mind, because it points to where any recalibration actually needs to happen. Not “how likely is this?” but “how bad would it actually be?”

What you can do when you catch yourself catastrophizing

Cognitive reappraisal, reframing a stressful event to reduce its emotional impact, has a substantial body of emotion regulation research behind it, most notably in James Gross's foundational work on reappraisal and emotional suppression.

The practical application of cognitive reappraisal relates directly to the Hengen and Alpers finding addressed in the last section. Namely, that when a catastrophic thought arrives, the question to examine isn’t whether something bad might happen, but how bad it would actually be, and whether you could cope with it if it did. Most catastrophic scenarios, examined carefully rather than felt intensely, turn out to involve outcomes that are unpleasant but manageable. The severity dial, once questioned, rarely survives scrutiny as well as it seemed to in the moment.

Recognizing the pattern of catastrophizing without pathologizing it is also supported by the research. Lucia Tecuta describes looking for thoughts that are rigid, black-and-white, and lacking in specific detail as markers of catastrophizing worth noticing. A catastrophic thought is typically vague when it comes to detail: “everything will fall apart,” “I won’t be able to handle it,” “it will be a disaster.” Pressing for specifics, what exactly would fall apart, what precisely would a disaster look like, tends to deflate the thought rather than amplify it.

Naming the thought as catastrophizing creates a small but useful cognitive distance between you and the spiral. Rather than experiencing the thought as reality, you’re observing it as a mental event, one the brain generates readily and routinely, for reasons that are understandable even when they’re not helpful. You're not dysfunctional. You're doing something every human brain is wired to do.

Two approaches that feel intuitive but have weaker support are worth mentioning. Trying to suppress a catastrophic thought, telling yourself firmly not to think about it, tends to have the opposite effect, making the thought more persistent rather than less. And seeking repeated reassurance, checking with others that the feared outcome won't occur, provides short-term relief but doesn't address the underlying severity estimation, and can entrench the pattern over time.

For anything beyond self-monitoring, my How to Stop Overthinking article covers the practical end of this territory in more depth.

A final thought

The brain that catastrophizes is doing something that our ancestors' lives depended on. The issue isn’t the threat-detection system. It’s that the system was set up for a world where most threats were immediate, physical, and resolvable by fight or flight, and we're now asking it to assess an ambiguous comment, a medical appointment, or an unanswered text message.

Whether that mismatch is something to correct or simply something to understand a little better, I'm genuinely not sure. But it helps to know that the problem isn't how often we expect bad things to happen. It's how catastrophic we imagine they'll be when they do.

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David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

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I recently turned 57, a number notable only for its association with the Heinz food company. I wouldn’t say I have a massive fear of growing old, but it’s something that does occasionally keep me awake at night. I think the main reason aging doesn’t consume me is because of a quote I’ve always loved:

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.

This maxim is often attributed to American financier and statesman Bernard Baruch, although it’s suspected he borrowed rather than coined it himself.

In the preface to my book Why We Are the Way We Are (apologies for the plug) I mention that “When something sparks my interest, I try to follow it wherever it leads. Writing is how I make sense of things, and, if I’m honest, it’s often how I understand myself too.”

This article is another case in point.

In it, I’ll look at what psychology makes of the fear of getting older, at how the beliefs we carry about aging may be shaping our health in ways that are genuinely surprising, at the paradox sitting at the heart of the aging experience, and at what the evidence suggests we might actually do with any fear of getting older we happen to carry.

Aging anxiety isn’t one thing

Fear of getting older isn’t a single, uniform experience. Psychologists interested in the field tend to distinguish between death anxiety, the fear of dying or ceasing to exist, and aging anxiety, which is the fear of the process itself: declining health, loss of mental sharpness, loss of independence, the erosion of the roles and identities that have defined us. The two overlap, but they’re not the same, and research suggests they’re driven by different concerns and respond to different approaches.

For most people, these fears are background noise rather than a constant preoccupation. They surface at significant birthdays, after a health scare, or, in my case, occasionally at two in the morning. What makes aging anxiety worth examining seriously is that there is compelling evidence it does something. The way we think about getting older, it turns out, may not just color our experience of it. It may influence the biology of how we actually age.

The beliefs we carry can become the future we live

Becca Levy, a social psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, has spent decades working with data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, one of the longest-running scientific studies of human aging in existence.

In a 2002 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Levy and colleagues followed 660 individuals aged 50 and over for up to 23 years. Those with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with more negative self-perceptions. The effect held after controlling for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness, and baseline functional health. Seven and a half years is not a small number. It’s larger than the longevity gains typically associated with low blood pressure or low cholesterol.

A 2009 study in Psychological Science extended the picture to cardiovascular health. Among 440 participants followed for up to 38 years, those who held more negative age stereotypes earlier in life were significantly more likely to experience a cardiovascular event in later life. Each one-point increase in stereotype negativity on the scale used was associated with an 11% increase in cardiovascular risk. Among participants aged 18 to 39 at the start of the study, those with more negative stereotypes were twice as likely to have a cardiovascular event after the age of 60.

Views about aging formed in young adulthood, long before the body begins to noticeably decline, appear to predict what the body actually does.

Memory follows a similar pattern. A 2012 study in the Journals of Gerontology found that participants aged 60 and above who held more negative age stereotypes showed 30.2% greater memory decline over 38 years than those with less negative stereotypes. The effect was strongest in people who already saw themselves as old, rather than those for whom aging still felt like something in the distance.

A test no one should have to fail

Some of the clearest evidence for how aging beliefs operate comes from a clinical setting.

In a 2012 study published in Psychology and Aging, Catherine Haslam and colleagues recruited 68 healthy adults aged 60 to 70, with no history of significant illness or cognitive impairment, and gave them a standard clinical test used in dementia assessment. Before the test, participants were primed to think about themselves in one of four ways: as older people expecting generalised cognitive decline, as older people expecting only memory-specific decline, as younger people expecting generalised decline, or as younger people expecting memory-specific decline.

Among participants who both self-categorised as older and expected generalised cognitive decline, 70% met the clinical diagnostic criterion for dementia on the test. In the other three conditions, the average was 14%.

These were cognitively healthy people. The same standardised test. The only thing that differed was how they’d been prompted to think about themselves beforehand. The researchers noted that the effect required both conditions together: self-categorisation as older and the expectation of generalised, rather than domain-specific, decline. Neither factor alone produced the same result. But the combined effect, moving the dementia screening rate from 14% to 70% in a healthy sample, illustrates the concept of stereotype embodiment, the process by which internalised beliefs about a social group shape our actual performance when we come to see ourselves as members of it, in unusually concrete terms.

Correlation, causation, and cultural blind spots

The Levy, cardiovascular and memory studies are correlational. They tell us that negative aging beliefs and worse health outcomes are associated over time, not that one definitively causes the other. People already on a trajectory toward poorer health may develop more negative views of aging as a consequence, so it isn't always clear which came first, the belief or the decline.

The research also has a sampling limitation. Almost all the major studies in this field, including the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, were conducted with Western, educated, relatively affluent participants. Whether these findings hold across cultures with very different relationships to aging is a question the evidence base doesn’t yet address in great depth, although Levy’s own earlier work offers an interesting pointer.

In a 1994 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, conducted with colleagues including Ellen Langer, memory performance in older adults was compared across groups with notably different cultural attitudes toward aging: older Chinese adults, older Americans, and deaf Americans, whose community culture has historically framed aging more positively than mainstream hearing American culture.

The Chinese and deaf American participants significantly outperformed the hearing American group on memory tasks, suggesting that cultural attitudes toward aging may shape cognitive outcomes just as much as personal beliefs do.

The aging paradox

Compared to both younger adults and their own earlier selves, older adults consistently report fewer negative emotions, greater emotional stability, and a stronger tendency to notice and remember positive over negative experiences, despite genuine physical and cognitive decline.

Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford University and founding director of its Center on Longevity, has produced some of the most extensive research on how our social and emotional lives shift as we age. In a review published in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2010, Carstensen and Susan Charles found that as time horizons shorten, goals shift away from acquiring new experiences and social connections toward savoring the present and investing in relationships that already matter. Carstensen calls this the positivity effect, and it appears to be a genuine reorientation rather than a lowering of expectations or a form of denial.

What makes this particularly relevant for anyone in their thirties, forties, or fifties is that the shift doesn’t wait for old age to arrive. Carstensen’s research also suggests that adults begin subconsciously pruning their social networks from their thirties onward, concentrating time and energy on a smaller circle of emotionally close relationships long before any significant physical decline occurs. This isn’t a symptom of something going wrong. It appears to be the mind responding to a more honest accounting of time.

A 2023 study by Jiang and Carstensen published in Frontiers in Psychology shows how much of this is driven by time perception rather than biology. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, younger adults shifted their social preferences sharply toward emotionally close family members, a pattern that had previously looked like a feature of aging. When the immediate threat receded, younger adults reverted to seeking out novel social partners. Middle-aged adults held the more selective pattern for longer. What looks like aging behavior may largely be a response to what we know about time.

One competing explanation is that the reduction in negative emotional experience in older adults may partly reflect structural brain changes, specifically shrinkage of the insula, which plays a role in interoceptive awareness, the felt sense of one’s own internal states. This might imply that negative stimuli simply register less intensely with age rather than being actively regulated. The evidence doesn't yet clearly separate these two explanations, active emotional regulation on one hand and reduced neurological sensitivity on the other, and both may be partially true.

If any of this connects with your own experience of getting older, or with what you've observed in older family and friends, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment

Living with the fear

If aging anxiety is something you struggle with, structured psychological approaches have shown good evidence for reducing it. A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders by Menzies and colleagues, reviewing 15 randomised controlled trials, found significant effects for psychosocial treatments in reducing death anxiety specifically, with cognitive behavioral therapy showing particularly strong results.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has also shown promise in reducing aging related anxiety.

The stories we absorb and repeat about what getting older means appear to matter in ways that eventually show up in the body. That's not an easy thing to change, but it may be worth questioning which ones we accept.

Final thoughts

Bernard Baruch’s quote turns out to be more than a witticism. The research on aging suggests something structurally similar: that the fear of getting older is, in part, a fear of a fixed destination, when the destination itself turns out to be considerably more variable, and more open to influence, than we imagined.

The self-fulfilling element is real. There is enough evidence to say with confidence that the beliefs we hold about aging, formed sometimes decades before the fact, are associated with measurable differences in health, memory, and longevity. The stories we inherit about what getting older means are not neutral.

But the paradox Carstensen’s work describes is equally real. The older adults who have actually arrived at the place the rest of us are anxiously anticipating tend to report something rather different from what the fear predicted.

Old age, it seems, is always fifteen years older than you are. And when you eventually get there, the evidence suggests you may find it considerably less frightening than it looked from a distance.

One last thing

I highly recommend checking out The Up series, which has followed a group of people every seven years from the age of seven. The series began in 1964 and the most recent instalment, 63 Up, aired in 2019. A tenth film, 70 Up, is due this year.

It’s a fascinating and unique look at the aging process and life itself. Here’s the trailer from 63 Up.

About the author

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

Keep learning with All About Psychology

The All About Psychology Substack is your go-to source for all things psychology. Subscribe today and instantly receive my bestselling Psychology Student Guide right in your inbox.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and as an extra thank you, you’ll also get the eBook version of my book Psychology Q & A: Great Answers to Fascinating Psychology Questions.

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I recently came across an episode of The Diary of a CEO featuring social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Harvard physician Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, making the case that platforms like TikTok are rewiring our brains. It was compelling and alarming in equal measure. Here’s a short clip titled:

BRAINROT IS DESTROYING YOUR BRAIN!

As always with a topic that catches my eye, I explored the psychological literature to see what I could find. As a result, in this article, I’ll look at where the term brain rot actually comes from (the answer might surprise you, it certainly did me!), what the research genuinely shows about attention, memory, and short-form video, and why certain writers on the subject think the whole brain rot panic is overblown.

First things first: what do we actually mean by brain rot?

Oxford University Press named brain rot its Word of the Year for 2024, reflecting its explosion in use across social media, particularly among Generation Z and Generation Alpha. In its current form, the term refers to a perceived deterioration in mental and intellectual functioning, supposedly caused by the overconsumption of low-quality, highly stimulating digital content.

The term itself is over 170 years old. Henry David Thoreau used it in Walden in 1854 to criticize society’s preference for intellectual simplicity over the harder work of genuine thought.

While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Psychologically speaking, brain rot has no formal clinical status. It doesn’t appear in any official psychiatric diagnostic manual. But it has attracted serious scientific attention. A recently validated psychometric tool called the Brain Rot Scale (BRS-14), developed and tested with digital natives aged 8 to 24, identifies three core dimensions: attention dysregulation, the difficulty sustaining focus on offline or complex tasks; digital compulsivity, the habitual and often involuntary urge to scroll or check devices; and cognitive dependency, a growing reliance on external digital tools for basic mental functions.

It’s worth noting that brain rot, as measured by the BRS-14, is distinct from ADHD and distinct from depression, though the symptom profiles can overlap in ways that make the distinction clinically important.

What the research actually shows - and what it doesn’t

One of the few researchers who has spent decades tracking how people actually behave with digital devices in real-world settings rather than labs is Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her longitudinal work, covered extensively by the American Psychological Association, documents a striking decline in how long people sustain focus on a single digital task. In 2004, the average was around 150 seconds. By 2024, it had dropped to 47 seconds.

That number refers specifically to sustained attention on a single digital task, not to attention span in the broader cognitive sense. The two are related but not the same thing. And the research describes a correlation over time rather than a clean causal story about what drove the decline.

Research on short-form video points in a consistent direction. A narrative review published in 2025, covering studies from 2019 onward, found associations between high-frequency short-form video use and reduced inhibitory control, disrupted working memory, and lower academic performance. A 2026 systematic review in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth found similar patterns specifically in younger users. The proposed mechanism is that platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels exploit the brain’s dopamine reward system, offering unpredictable bursts of novelty that condition users to keep scrolling. Because the rewards are intermittent, the behavior becomes particularly resistant to change.

Perhaps the most striking recent finding involves writing and AI. Researchers at MIT, reporting in Psychology Today, used EEG to monitor students’ brain activity during an essay-writing task. One group wrote using only their own thinking. A second used a search engine. A third used an AI chatbot. The group writing without assistance showed the strongest neural engagement. The chatbot group showed the weakest, by a considerable margin. The researchers described it as the brain essentially not getting a workout.

Importantly, the concern isn't just passive scrolling. It's the possibility that outsourcing our thinking to AI tools carries its own cognitive cost, one we're only beginning to understand.

The other side of the argument

Andrew Przybylski is a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford University who has been one of the more prominent voices urging caution in this debate. In a 2023 study published in the journal Cortex, he and his colleagues tracked nearly 12,000 children and found no significant negative impact of screen time on functional brain connectivity or self-reported well-being. Young people with access to high-speed internet actually reported higher levels of happiness across a range of metrics.

His broader argument is that much of the brain rot panic is driven by studies with small samples, correlational designs, and no control groups. He points out that every new medium has triggered this kind of alarm. The novel in the 19th century. Radio. Television. Video games. Actually, this type of anxiety goes back much further than that. In his dialogue Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Plato records Socrates arguing that writing will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it. Rather than remembering from within, people will trust external characters, gaining only the appearance of wisdom rather than its reality, becoming, in Socrates' words, hearers of many things who actually know nothing. The irony is hard to miss: an argument against writing, preserved entirely because Plato wrote down Socrates's views on the subject.

There's also an argument that outsourcing certain cognitive tasks to technology doesn't rot the brain so much as redirect it, freeing up resources for more complex work. Research on cognitive offloading, the practice of using external tools to reduce the mental effort required for a task, does suggest this can happen in some circumstances, though whether it represents a net cognitive gain or loss remains genuinely contested.

Why teenagers are choosing brain rot deliberately

A qualitative study published in 2025 by Emilie Owens of the University of Oslo, in the journal New Media and Society, reframes much of the alarm surrounding brain rot in an interesting way. Rather than treating it as something that happens to young people, Owens argues it is something they actively choose.

Drawing on data from seven TikTok workshops conducted with 16 and 17-year-olds in Oslo, the study found that teenagers don’t experience brain rot consumption as passive or accidental. They described it as a specific strategy, and they were remarkably clear about what it was for.

When asked to define brain rot, the participants settled on three defining features: it is childish or unserious; it provides no cognitive or developmental benefit; and it is deliberately non-productive. That last point was stated with some emphasis by one participant: “It’s not productive. That’s the point.”

Owens locates her findings within what she calls a decompression-driven genre of participation, whereby young people actively resist the cultural pressure towards constant self-improvement and productivity. The teenagers in the study were attending a fee-paying international school and were keenly aware of the expectations placed on them. Brain rot, in this context, functions less as a failure of self-regulation and more as a conscious rejection of it.

What also emerged from the workshops was a more nuanced picture of how teenagers actually use TikTok. One participant described brain rot not as a type of content but as a mode of communication, noting that TikTok “speaks to me in brain rot” in a way that made even complex subjects like mathematics easier to understand than a conventional school lesson. For these teenagers, brain rot was less a cognitive state and more a shared language they knew how to read.

Owens is careful not to present an unqualified endorsement of the practice. Several participants in the study described losing hours to TikTok against their intentions, and the research acknowledges links between excessive mindless scrolling and feelings of anxiety. The endless scroll afforded by apps like TikTok adds a dimension that historical forms of leisure, such as binge-watching television or going on holiday, did not have: there is no natural endpoint.

The balanced picture that emerges from this research is not that brain rot is harmless, but that it’s not simply the passive cognitive collapse it’s often portrayed as. For many young people it is, at least in part, a considered response to the pressures of modern life. Whether the physiological effects of the content align with that intent is, as the wider research suggests, a separate question.

Awareness is key

Regardless of where you sit on the brain rot debate, it's clear that unintentionally losing hours to platforms like TikTok and anxiety induced through endless scrolling are real issues: here's what the research suggests can help.

A 2023 systematic review published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research looked at the effectiveness of different approaches to managing problematic social media use. Simple abstinence, the classic digital detox, showed improvement in only 25% of studies. Limiting daily screen time fared similarly, at around 20%. Some studies found that full abstinence actually increased feelings of loneliness by severing social connections people genuinely valued.

By contrast, therapy-based interventions, particularly those drawing on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, showed improvement in 83% of studies. The key difference wasn’t willpower or restriction. It was reflection: helping people understand why they use social media, what they’re actually seeking from it, and how to build intentional habits around it rather than fighting what often turns into an unwinnable war of self-denial.

That distinction maps well onto what the teenagers in Owens's study were already doing intuitively. They weren’t trying to quit. They were trying to use the technology on their own terms.

A few other evidence-based suggestions from the literature are worth mentioning. Research highlights that physical activity, specifically high-intensity training for at least 20 minutes three or more times per week, or moderate-intensity activity on five or more days, has been associated with building cognitive reserve against the neurological impacts linked to heavy digital use. And several studies point to mindful friction, the practice of deliberately introducing small barriers to compulsive scrolling as more effective than abstinence: disabling notifications, deleting the most distracting apps, and taking a few quiet minutes before reaching for the phone in the morning.

Final thoughts

Most of the brain rot research is correlational, not causal. We can’t say with certainty whether heavy short-form video use causes attention difficulties, or whether people who already struggle with attention are simply more drawn to highly stimulating content. The longitudinal studies needed to answer that question properly don’t yet exist at scale.

What we can say is that the brain is remarkably plastic. It responds to its environment. And the environment most of us now inhabit is unlike anything our brains evolved to navigate. Whether that constitutes a genuine emergency or a slow adaptation in progress remains to be seen.

One of the more personally interesting discoveries from exploring this topic was that when looking for supposed examples of brain rot content, one reference kept cropping up: Skibidi Toilet, a fast paced dystopian series of YouTube videos and shorts by Alexey Gerasimov featuring animated toilets with human heads attempting world domination, fought off by humanoids with CCTV cameras for heads, all set to a remixed song built around the word skibidi, what's not to like.

This is the first clip I came across. Whether it constitutes brain rot, I'll leave for you to decide. My initial reaction was, wait, is that Kate Bush 😂 followed by wow, when I saw that the Skibidi YouTube channel has over 47 million subscribers!

I'll leave you with the idea that genuine absorption in something is preferable to passive consumption. That might be a Netflix series, a book, a long walk, a conversation, or even, yes, absurdist online content watched all the way through.

Leave a comment

About the author

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

Keep learning with All About Psychology

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Most people have heard of déjà vu.

It’s that strange moment when a situation feels uncannily familiar, as if you’ve somehow experienced it before. Even though your logical mind tells you it can’t be true, the feeling can be powerful enough to make you pause and wonder what just happened.

Psychologists have been intrigued by déjà vu for years because it offers a glimpse into how the brain handles memory and recognition.

But did you know that déjà vu has an opposite?

It’s called jamais vu, a French phrase that translates as “never seen.” And instead of making the new feel familiar, it does the reverse. Something you know perfectly well suddenly feels unfamiliar, strange, or somehow wrong.

An Early Observation From Margaret Floy Washburn

Although the term jamais vu may sound unfamiliar, the experience it describes has appeared in the psychological literature for more than a century.

In 1907, the psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn, working with one of her students, Elizabeth Severance, reported an unusual effect that could occur when people stared at a word for several minutes. Over time, the word began to look strange and fragmented, as though it had somehow lost its meaning.

Washburn and Severance described this effect as a “loss of associative power.”

In other words, the mental connections that normally give a word its sense of meaning seemed to weaken with repetition or prolonged attention.

Experiences like this hint at something interesting about familiarity. The sense that a word, object, or place is known to us is not simply stored in memory. It depends on mental processes that normally operate smoothly in the background but can occasionally behave in unexpected ways.

Inducing Jamais Vu In The Laboratory

More than a century after Washburn’s observation, psychologists began investigating the phenomenon more systematically.

In a series of experiments, researchers Akira O’Connor and Christopher Moulin explored whether the experience of jamais vu could be deliberately triggered under controlled conditions.

Their approach was surprisingly simple.

Participants were asked to repeatedly write the same word again and again. Some copied common words such as door, while others wrote the word the, one of the most familiar words in the English language.

At first the task felt straightforward. But after enough repetitions, participants began to stop the task.

Many reported stopping because something about the word no longer seemed right to them.

In the first experiment, around 70 percent of participants reported experiencing this strange sensation at least once. It typically occurred after about one minute of repetition, or roughly thirty repetitions of the same word.

What Jamais Vu Actually Feels Like

In describing their experience, many participants reported that the word they were writing suddenly seemed unfamiliar, even though they knew it should not.

One participant wrote that the words “lose their meaning the more you look at them.”

Others described something closer to visual strangeness. A familiar word could begin to look wrong or unfamiliar despite being spelled correctly. As one participant put it, “It doesn’t seem right, almost looks like it’s not really a word but someone’s tricked me into thinking it is.”

Another participant reported that the normally automatic act of writing began to feel unusual, saying they “seemed to lose control of hand.”

Descriptions like these capture the peculiar quality of jamais vu. Participants still recognized the word and understood its meaning, yet the sense of familiarity that normally accompanies that recognition briefly disappeared.

For a moment, something completely familiar felt strangely unfamiliar.

Why not have a go yourself? Take a common word such as door or the and write it repeatedly on a piece of paper for a minute or so, just as the participants in the experiment did. I’d love to know if you experienced jamais vu.

Leave a comment

When The Mind Signals Something Has Become Too Automatic

One of the most interesting ideas emerging from this research is that jamais vu may serve a useful psychological purpose.

According to O’Connor and Moulin, the strange feeling that something familiar has suddenly become unfamiliar may act as a kind of mental warning signal.

When we repeat the same action over and over again, our cognitive processes can become extremely fluent and automatic. Normally this efficiency is helpful. It allows us to perform everyday tasks without having to think about every step.

But excessive repetition can also create problems.

If a task becomes too automatic, the mind risks drifting into a kind of cognitive autopilot. In those moments, attention may weaken and errors become more likely.

Jamais vu may function as a way of interrupting that process.

The sudden sense that something is wrong or unfamiliar forces us to pause and re-examine what we are doing. In that sense, the eerie feeling of unreality may actually act as a kind of reality check for the brain.

Rather than being a malfunction, the experience may be part of the mind’s way of maintaining flexibility and preventing us from becoming trapped in overly repetitive patterns of thought or action.

Why Repetition Can Make Words Lose Their Meaning

One explanation is a cognitive process known as satiation. When a word or idea is repeated over and over again, the mental representation associated with it can become temporarily overloaded. Instead of reinforcing meaning, excessive repetition can cause that representation to weaken, making the word feel strange or unfamiliar.

This idea is closely related to semantic satiation, a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to a word causes it to briefly lose its sense of meaning.

Another related effect is known as the verbal transformation effect. When a word is repeated continuously, listeners sometimes begin to hear entirely different words emerging from the repetition. For example, hearing the word “tress” repeated over and over can lead people to report hearing “dress,” “stress,” or other similar sounding words.

These effects suggest that repetition does not simply reinforce familiarity. Under certain conditions, it can disrupt the mental processes that normally give words their meaning.

It may be the case, therefore, that the strange feeling associated with jamais vu reflects a temporary breakdown in the systems that normally allow us to recognize familiar things effortlessly.

Jamais Vu Is Not Just About Words

The word-repetition experiment described above provided researchers with a simple way to trigger jamais vu under controlled laboratory conditions. But the phenomenon itself is not limited to language.

In discussing the experience more broadly, Akira O’Connor and Christopher Moulin note that jamais vu can arise in several familiar situations.

Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with “new eyes”.

These examples suggest that jamais vu is not simply about words losing their meaning. Instead, it’s about a temporary disruption in the processes that normally generate our sense of familiarity.

The unsettling sense that something is suddenly “not quite right” may therefore act as a kind of internal warning signal, that encourages us to re-examine what we are doing.

If this interpretation is found to be correct, jamais vu may simply be the mind’s way of maintaining cognitive flexibility, in order to prevent us from becoming trapped in overly repetitive patterns of thought or behavior.

Neurological Context

Although jamais vu is typically discussed as a curious quirk of everyday experience, similar sensations have also been reported in certain neurological contexts.

Unusual disturbances of familiarity are sometimes described in connection with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition in which seizures affect brain regions involved in memory and recognition. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy may report altered feelings of familiarity before or during a seizure, documenting experiences and sensations resembling jamais vu.

Episodes of unfamiliarity have also been noted in dissociative states, where a person may feel temporarily detached from their surroundings or from their own sense of self. In such cases, familiar people or places can briefly feel strangely unreal.

Extreme fatigue, prolonged concentration, or repetitive mental activity can also occasionally lead to moments in which something normally familiar suddenly feels oddly unfamiliar.

It’s important to note that in the vast majority of cases, experiences of jamais vu are brief, harmless, and nothing to worry about.

Other “Vu” Experiences

Jamais vu belongs to a small group of unusual experiences sometimes described as recognition anomalies. In each case, there is a mismatch between what we know and what we feel to be familiar.

These various experiences reveal that our sense of familiarity is not simply a record of the past stored in memory. It is a psychological signal generated by the brain, and occasionally that signal can behave in unexpected ways.

Final Thoughts

Most of the time we move through the world with complete confidence in our sense of familiarity. Words appear exactly as they should. Familiar places feel familiar. Faces are instantly recognizable. The mind rarely stops to question these everyday signals.

But moments like jamais vu reveal that this sense of familiarity is not as solid as it seems.

A word you have written hundreds of times can suddenly appear strange. A place you know well can briefly feel unfamiliar. For a moment, the ordinary world seems slightly out of alignment.

Our cognitive systems for recognizing what is familiar usually work flawlessly.

But every so often, a small glitch in that process reminds us that even the most ordinary sense of “knowing” depends on delicate mental mechanisms quietly operating beneath the surface of our awareness.

And occasionally, we get a fleeting glimpse of just how strange the familiar can become.

About the Author

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

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This photograph was taken at the Blohm and Voss shipyard in Hamburg in 1936 during the launch of a German naval vessel. In the circled area of the image, one man stands with his arms folded while those around him perform the Nazi salute. The man is widely believed to be August Landmesser, although the identification is not absolutely certain. The image has become a powerful symbol of individual resistance to group pressure.

Imagine sitting in a small room with several other people taking part in what you are told is a simple visual perception test.

You are shown two cards. One shows a single vertical line. The other shows three lines of different lengths labeled 1, 2, and 3.

Your task is straightforward: say which of the three lines matches the length of the line on the first card.

The answer seems obvious.

But when it’s time for everyone to respond, the people around you begin giving the same answer.

And it’s clearly wrong.

One after another, they repeat it.

Soon it’s your turn.

Do you say what you know is correct, or do you go along with the group?

Many people would like to think they would simply trust what they see. But when psychologist Solomon Asch ran this classic experiment in the early 1950s, the results told a different story.

How the experiment worked

The situation described above closely mirrors what participants experienced in Asch’s experiment. The crucial detail was that everyone else in the room was working with the researchers.

These individuals were confederates, instructed in advance to give specific answers during the experiment. On certain trials they all gave the same incorrect response.

The real participant was seated near the end of the group, meaning they heard several people confidently give the wrong answer before it was their turn.

As Asch later described it, the experiment placed one individual in the position of “a minority of one against a wrong and unanimous majority,” confronting what he called “the clear evidence of his senses.”

The short clip below shows a later replication of the experiment. As you watch, notice the moment when the confederates begin giving the same incorrect answer, and how the participant responds.

As the demonstration shows, the early trials proceed smoothly. Confederates and the participant compare the lines and give the correct answer.

But after a few rounds something changes. The confederates begin giving the same incorrect response.

One after another, they repeat it.

Now the participant faces a difficult choice: trust their own perception or go along with the group.

What Asch found

Across the critical trials in which the group intentionally gave incorrect answers, participants conformed about 37 percent of the time.

Looking at the results another way, roughly three quarters of participants went along with the group at least once during the experiment.

Importantly, the task itself was not difficult. In a control condition where participants judged the lines on their own, 35 out of 37 participants made no errors at all. When people answered individually without group pressure, mistakes were extremely rare.

This made the findings even more striking. The errors were not caused by confusion about the lines themselves, but by the social situation participants found themselves in.

Reflecting on these results, Asch later wrote:

That intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.

Breaking the power of the majority

The video above also illustrates two important variations that Asch explored.

When one of the confederates also gave the correct answer, conformity dropped sharply. Similarly, when participants were allowed to record their responses privately rather than announcing them aloud, conformity also fell substantially. Once the appearance of complete agreement was broken, participants were far more willing to trust their own judgment.

The situations Asch explored in the laboratory still appear in everyday life.

Consider jury deliberations. Research on jury decision-making has shown that when juries begin deliberations with a strong initial majority, minority jurors may hesitate to voice dissenting views. However, when even one juror openly challenges the emerging consensus, discussion often becomes more thorough and evidence is examined more carefully.

A vivid illustration of this dynamic appears in one of my all-time favorite films, 12 Angry Men (1957). The story begins with eleven jurors ready to deliver a guilty verdict, while one juror insists on examining the evidence more carefully. His willingness to question the majority does not immediately persuade the others, but it opens the door for further discussion. As the conversation unfolds, other jurors begin to reconsider their positions.

This process is referred to within psychology as minority influence. Research by Serge Moscovici demonstrated that a consistent minority can sometimes influence the judgments of a majority, particularly when the minority maintains its position calmly and consistently.

Studies of decision-making in organizations and governmental foreign policy have shown that when groups appear to reach quick consensus, individuals may suppress doubts in order to maintain harmony, a phenomenon known as groupthink. Encouraging dissenting viewpoints, by contrast, can improve the quality of group decisions by prompting deeper evaluation of evidence and alternatives.

Historical context and cultural limitations

Like many classic psychology studies, Asch’s experiment was conducted with a relatively narrow group of participants.

In his 1956 report, he notes that the subjects were male college students between the ages of 17 and 25. While this was typical of psychology research at the time, it serves to highlight a broader issue in psychological research. Much of the evidence in psychology has historically come from participants in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, often referred to as WEIRD populations.

In a widely cited analysis, Henrich, Heine, and Ara Norenzayan argued that people from WEIRD societies may actually be psychological outliers when compared with global populations.

For that reason, many researchers emphasize the importance of conducting psychological studies across more diverse cultural settings. Returning to Asch’s study, this of course begs the question: would people from different cultures respond in the same way?

Research suggests that cultural context can influence how individuals respond to group pressure. A large cross-cultural analysis of replications of the Asch paradigm conducted across 17 countries found that conformity levels tended to be higher in societies that emphasize collective harmony than in those that prioritize individual independence.

Even so, Asch’s work has proven remarkably robust. Research on social influence conducted across many countries and contexts continues to demonstrate how strongly group consensus can shape individual judgment.

While the strength of conformity may vary across cultures and time (research indicates that conformity has declined since the 1950s), the tension between individual perception and group influence appears to be a widespread and durable feature of human social life.

Final thoughts

The Asch conformity experiments remain one of the clearest demonstrations of how group influence can shape human judgment.

Placed in a situation where everyone else appears to agree, people will sometimes abandon their own judgment even when they know the correct answer.

But that’s not the whole story.

Many participants resisted the group entirely. Others only yielded occasionally. And the simple presence of one other person willing to disagree dramatically reduced the pressure to conform.

Asch himself was careful not to reduce human behavior to blind conformity. As he wrote:

The striving for independence and resistance to encroachment are as much facts about people as is conformity.

In other words, the experiment reveals both sides of human social behavior.

We are influenced by the groups around us.

But we are also capable of standing apart from them when it matters.

If you found yourself in that room, hearing everyone else confidently give the wrong answer, what do you think you would do?

Leave a comment

Sponsored recommendation

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Kashdan is a professor of psychology at George Mason University and one of the world’s leading researchers on courage and psychological flexibility. He makes a compelling case that principled dissent is not a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a skill, grounded in science, that can be learned and practised.

Drawing on decades of research and real-world stories of people who successfully challenged the majority, the book gives you the practical tools to speak up, be heard, and make change without burning bridges in the process.

Highly recommended.

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• Students and educators can continue to access the most important and influential journal articles in the history of psychology, completely free.

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A bit about me

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

I read a really interesting article this week. A team of researchers tracked over a hundred people’s daily activities and found that roughly two thirds of everything they did was triggered by habit rather than conscious choice.

Not just the obvious things, like brushing your teeth or putting on your seatbelt. The study captured people in real time throughout their day and found that most of their actions, from routine work tasks to what they ate and drank, were started automatically, without any deliberate decision.

I thought it would be interesting to explore how much of our day we’re actually present for, and how much is just running in the background.

To do that, I want to look at what the researchers actually found, how our brains build these automatic routines in the first place, why some of them quietly work in our favor while others don’t, and what the research suggests about changing the habits we’d rather not have.

What the Researchers Did

In 2025, a team led by Amanda Rebar at the University of South Carolina, along with Benjamin Gardner at the University of Surrey and Grace Vincent at Central Queensland University, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how much of what we do each day is actually driven by habit?

To find out, they recruited 105 people in the UK and Australia and asked them to carry a simple task for one week. Six times a day, at random intervals, each person’s phone would buzz with a short survey. The questions were straightforward: what are you doing right now, and did you choose to do it, or did it just happen?

The activities people reported were ordinary. Work tasks, household chores, looking at a screen, eating, drinking. Exercise showed up too, but far less often, accounting for only about 6% of the recorded activities.

When the researchers analyzed the responses, they found that roughly two thirds of daily behaviors were initiated by habit. People weren’t sitting down and weighing up whether to do these things. The behavior just started, triggered by familiar cues in familiar settings.

Earlier estimates had put the figure lower. In a widely cited 2002 study, psychologist Wendy Wood and her colleagues at Duke University found that around 43% of daily behaviors were repeated in the same context while people were thinking about something else. The new study pushed the number significantly higher, largely because it measured something more specific: not just whether a behavior was repeated, but whether it was started without any deliberate choice at all.

What made the finding more interesting was the relationship between habit and intention. Nearly half of all recorded behaviors were both habitual and intentional. In other words, people had at some point chosen to do these things, and over time the choice had become automatic. As the researchers put it, switching from cereal to overnight oats might take effort on day one, but after a few weeks it’s just what you do.

The one exception was exercise. People often started a workout out of habit, heading to the gym at the usual time without really thinking about it. But unlike most other habits, the workout itself still required conscious effort to see through. Starting was automatic. Finishing wasn’t.

The full study was published in Psychology & Health in 2025.

How Autopilot Gets Built

Once a behavior becomes habitual, it feels effortless. But it doesn’t start that way.

Think about the first time you drove a car. Every action needed your full attention. Checking the mirrors, pressing the clutch at the right moment, judging the distance to the car in front. Now think about your last drive to work or the store. You probably arrived without remembering most of the journey.

Image credit: Adam Foreman. Follow Adam on Substack and Instagram @foremancomics and @sliceofmallow.

That’s basically how habits form. When we repeat a behavior in a consistent setting, the brain gradually learns to associate the context with the action. Over time, the situation itself becomes the trigger. You don’t decide to reach for your seatbelt when you get in the car. The act of sitting down does it for you.

In a great TEDx talk exploring the science behind this process, Harvard researcher Marco Badwal walks through how repeated behaviors physically reshape the brain’s wiring, and why so much of what we do each day runs without our conscious involvement.

What Badwal describes at the neural level has been studied more formally in terms of timing. In 2009, a research team led by Phillippa Lally at University College London asked 96 volunteers to adopt a new daily behavior, something as simple as eating a piece of fruit with lunch or going for a short walk after dinner, and tracked how long it took for the behavior to start feeling automatic. The average was 66 days, but the range was striking. For some people it took as few as 18 days. For others, more than 250. The popular claim that it takes 21 days to build a habit doesn’t hold up against the evidence.

What’s happening underneath is a gradual handoff inside the brain. When a behavior is new, the prefrontal cortex does the heavy lifting. That’s the part of the brain involved in planning and decision making. But as the behavior is repeated in the same context, the basal ganglia, a deeper structure involved in pattern recognition and routine, begins to take over. The action no longer needs a deliberate decision. It runs on its own.

This isn’t a flaw. It’s how the brain avoids running out of steam. If every small action required the same level of attention as a new one, we’d be overwhelmed before lunchtime. In Japanese martial arts and traditional crafts, this process has a name. Kata refers to forms that are practiced so often they become second nature. The aim isn’t mindless repetition. It’s to free the conscious mind for higher-level awareness, precisely because the fundamentals no longer need thinking about.

“Of course, ‘freeing the conscious mind for higher-level awareness’ is somewhat trickier when your dog has decided it’s time to help. Miss you, Rex 🐕❤️ (Video: My son Paolo practicing his kata, circa 2014)”

When Autopilot Helps

Having your day run largely on autopilot is one of the brain’s most useful tricks.

Consider what your morning would look like without habits. You’d have to think about how to hold your toothbrush, which order to get dressed in, how much coffee to put in the machine. Every small decision would demand the same attention as a new one. By the time you left the house, you’d already be mentally drained, and you wouldn’t have done anything meaningful yet.

Habits take care of that. They handle the routine so your conscious mind can focus on things that actually need thinking about. It’s the reason you can cook a meal you’ve made dozens of times while carrying on a conversation.

Rebar and her colleagues found that many of these automatic behaviors weren’t working against people’s wishes. They were routines that lined up with what people actually wanted to be doing. The breakfast example the researchers used is a good one. Switching what you eat in the morning might take effort on day one, but once the habit forms, the healthier choice happens on its own.

Wood’s earlier research pointed to a similar finding. In her 2002 study, habitual behaviors were associated with lower levels of reported stress than non-habitual ones. That makes sense. When a behavior is automatic, there’s no internal negotiation, no weighing up of options, no willpower required. It just happens. And that efficiency, repeated across dozens of small actions every day, adds up.

As Gardner put it:

Good habits may be a powerful way to make our goals a reality.

When Autopilot Works Against Us

But not all habits are working in our favor.

The same system that gets you through your day without thinking is also the one behind the less helpful patterns. Picking up your phone without any real reason to. Reaching for a snack you weren’t hungry for. Staying up later than you planned because the scrolling just kept going.

The habit doesn’t check whether you still want to do it. It just fires. A cue appears, the routine runs, and by the time you’re aware of what’s happening, you’re already halfway through it. That’s fine when the habit is brushing your teeth. It’s less fine when it’s something you’ve been meaning to stop.

This is where the common advice to “just try harder” runs into trouble. Willpower operates in the conscious mind. Habits don’t. They run underneath, triggered by context before any decision gets made. Trying to override a habit with willpower is a bit like trying to steer a car by shouting at it. You might get a result occasionally, but you’re fighting the wrong mechanism.

Gardner was direct about this:

For people who want to break their bad habits, simply telling them to ‘try harder’ isn’t enough. To create lasting change, we must incorporate strategies to help people recognize and disrupt their unwanted habits, and ideally form positive new ones in their place.

There’s an important distinction here, too. Some habits aren’t harmful in themselves. They’ve just gone stale. A routine that made sense in one phase of life can quietly persist into another where it no longer fits. You don’t always notice, because the whole point of a habit is that you don’t have to think about it.

What Helps (and What Doesn’t)

If willpower isn’t the answer, what is?

The research team were fairly clear on this. Lasting change isn’t about finding more motivation. It’s about setting up the right conditions for a new behavior to take root and repeat.

One of the most practical strategies is linking a new behavior to a specific, predictable moment in the day. Rather than telling yourself you’ll exercise “more often,” you connect it to something that already happens reliably. After I finish work. Before I eat dinner. The existing routine becomes the cue, and over time the new behavior gets pulled along with it.

This isn’t a new idea. Lally’s 2009 research showed that the people who successfully formed new habits were the ones who repeated the behavior in the same context, consistently. It wasn’t the difficulty of the behavior that mattered most. It was the consistency of the setting.

Breaking unwanted habits works along similar lines, but in reverse. Instead of building a new cue, you disrupt an existing one. If you always reach for your phone first thing in the morning, charging it in a different room changes the context enough to interrupt the pattern. If a particular environment triggers a behavior you’re trying to stop, changing the environment is often more effective than trying to resist the urge once it’s already started.

What both approaches have in common is that they work with the system rather than against it. They don’t ask you to overpower a habit through sheer force of will. They change the conditions that trigger it in the first place.

Grace Vincent, one of the researchers behind the 2025 study, summarized this well:

If we set out to create a positive habit, whether that’s around better sleep hygiene, or nutrition, or general wellbeing improvements, we can rely on an internal ‘autopilot’ to take over and help us maintain those habits.

The irony is worth noting. The same autopilot that can keep an unhelpful pattern running for years is also the thing that makes a better pattern stick, once it’s been given the chance to form.

Final Thoughts

If this research finding proves to be robust, and it really is the case that roughly two thirds of what we do each day happens without a conscious decision, it raises an interesting question. Not whether that’s a good or bad thing, but whether the habits running our day are still the ones we’d choose if we were starting from scratch.

Most of our habits are ones we built on purpose, even if we don’t remember building them. They started as choices, and through repetition they became automatic. That’s not a loss of control. In many cases, it’s the opposite. It’s the brain honoring a decision we made and carrying it forward so we don’t have to keep making it.

Some of those habits will be exactly where you want them. Others might have quietly drifted out of step with who you are now.

If nothing else, the research is an invitation to notice. Not to overhaul everything, but to pay attention for a day and see what comes up. You might be surprised by how much of it you’d keep.

If you stopped at a few points during your day and asked yourself, did I choose to do this, or did it just happen, what do you think you’d find? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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About the Author

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

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I’m not saying I’m obsessed with psychology, but a few years ago I did spend an entire year documenting a significant person, event, or landmark in the history of psychology.

The project eventually became my book On This Day in Psychology, and along the way I discovered countless fascinating moments in the discipline’s history.

One of my favorites occurred on 3rd March 1907, when Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung met for the first time. The meeting took place in Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, and according to the story, the two men talked for 13 hours without interruption.

I’ll admit I was initially skeptical about the 13-hours claim, until I heard Jung confirm it himself in the following video clip.

I just paid a visit to him in Vienna then we talked for 13 hours without interruption. We didn’t realize that we were almost dead at the end of it, but it was tremendously interesting. He was the old man and had great experience and he was of course way ahead of me, and so I settled down to learn something.

Every 3rd March, when I post about this famous day in psychology across my social media channels, I always receive a number of irreverent comments suggesting that talking for 13 hours without interruption surely means that cocaine must have been involved!

But I digress.

At the time of their first meeting, Freud was already the founder of psychoanalysis, while Jung was a rising star in psychiatry at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich. Their marathon conversation marked the beginning of what would quickly become one of the most important intellectual partnerships of the 20th century.

Freud was immediately impressed by Jung. In the years that followed, the two men exchanged hundreds of letters and collaborated closely in promoting the new psychoanalytic movement. The surviving correspondence between them, later published as The Freud/Jung Letters, reveals the intensity of their relationship and the high hopes Freud placed in his younger colleague.

For a time, Freud saw Jung not simply as an ally but as the man who would carry psychoanalysis forward.

Freud’s Early Hopes for Jung

Freud’s confidence in Jung can be seen clearly in his letters. In one written in 1909, Freud used a biblical metaphor, describing himself as a Moses figure who could only glimpse the promised land of psychiatry, while Jung would be the Joshua who would lead others into it.

Freud also referred to Jung as his “crown prince” and successor, someone he believed could lead psychoanalysis into the future.

There were practical reasons for this enthusiasm. Jung was nearly twenty years younger than Freud, an energetic researcher, and already well respected in academic psychiatry. Freud also believed Jung’s background might help psychoanalysis gain broader acceptance. As a Swiss Protestant rather than a Jewish Viennese intellectual, Jung represented a figure who could introduce Freud’s ideas to a wider European audience.

For Jung, the relationship initially had the tone of mentorship. In his own letters he expressed what he called his “unconditional veneration” for Freud as both a man and a researcher.

For several years, their alliance shaped the course of psychoanalysis.

But the very intensity of that early alliance also set the stage for one of the most famous schisms in the history of psychology.

The Growing Rift

Despite Freud’s early confidence in Jung, tensions between the two men gradually began to surface.

At first, the differences were subtle. Jung admired Freud’s work and had initially embraced many of the central ideas of psychoanalysis. But over time, he began to question some of Freud’s most fundamental assumptions, particularly Freud’s view that the driving force behind much of human behavior was sexual in nature.

Freud saw the concept of libido primarily as sexual energy. Jung, however, increasingly viewed libido more broadly as a form of psychic energy that could express itself in many different ways, including creativity, spirituality, and symbolic life.

These theoretical differences were not merely academic. They touched the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory.

By the early 1910s, the collaboration that had begun with such enthusiasm in Vienna was becoming increasingly strained.

By 1913, the relationship had reached breaking point. In January of that year, Freud wrote to Jung proposing that they “abandon our personal relations entirely” and continue only with strictly professional contact. Jung accepted the proposal, bringing their once-intense collaboration to an abrupt end. What had begun with a thirteen-hour conversation in Vienna now concluded with a brief and formal exchange of letters.

James Oppenheim on the Break Between Freud and Jung

Among those who reflected on the Freud–Jung split was James Oppenheim, an American poet, novelist, and editor who also had a keen interest in psychology. Oppenheim was an early follower of Jung and was also a lay analyst.

Note: A lay analyst is a psychoanalyst who practices therapy without holding a medical degree. Freud defended the practice of lay analysis, arguing that effective psychoanalytic work depended not on medical credentials but on rigorous training in psychoanalytic theory and, crucially, the analyst’s own personal analysis. Some prominent early figures in psychoanalysis, including Otto Rank and Theodor Reik, were also lay analysts.

In 1925, Oppenheim published an article titled “The Break Between Freud and Jung.” Written less than two decades after their split, it offers an early reflection on how their rupture was understood at the time. As with any contemporary account, the interpretation inevitably reflects the author’s own perspective, which in this case appears to be more sympathetic to Jung.

The article is reproduced below in full.

At the time that Dr. Freud was making his discoveries in Vienna, Dr. Carl Jung, a young psychiatrist, was conducting certain experiments in Zurich, Switzerland. These were of a dry technical nature which need not be given here, but they led to a tentative theory of an unconscious mind. It was while he was engaged on these experiments that Jung first read the work of Freud. He knew at once that he had found his master and hastened to become Freud’s pupil and colleague. He did more than that. At that period Freud was the laughing stock of Vienna, and wherever his work penetrated. He was jeered and ridiculed for his fantastic notions, and was suffering the bitter fate of all pioneers. Jung was in a powerful position at Zurich, and at once proceeded to enlarge and deepen the fight for Freud. He became the most powerful exponent of the Freudian psychology, and helped to bring the new knowledge and new technic into its first acceptance by the world.

Freud looked upon Jung as upon a favorite son. They fought shoulder-to-shoulder, the work spread, and they were invited to this country to give lectures. In Switzerland, Austria, England and America the psychoanalyst made his appearance, and the world of the intelligentsia awoke with a shock to the sexual theory. Among the cultured everywhere there was discussion of the Oedipus complex, the repressions, the sexual perversions, the idea that much that we had thought purely spiritual, like art and religion, were merely masks for sexual complexes. The psychoanalytic movement, held firmly together by two great men, was forging ahead.

However, Jung, from his continued analysis of patients, and from his own experiences, was beginning to form doubts in his own mind. There was something, he began to think, inadequate in Freud’s theory. He hardly dared, at this time, to make any formal criticism; but finally, after a great conflict, he was moved, even inspired, to write his first great book. This book is entitled “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”

He has said of it that it was a voyage of discovery. He himself, when he started it, hardly knew to what depths it would lead him, to what conclusions it would force him. But when he was finished, he knew that he could no longer withhold his own point of view and that this would inevitably lead to a break with Freud.

It proved to be so. Freud was shocked and appalled. He sent the manuscript back with a letter in which their relationship was ended. He said that Jung had betrayed the psychoanalytic movement, that he had ventured out beyond the bounds of science, and that he was seeking to destroy the greatest values in the new psychology.

Of course such a break was inevitable, and in the end it proved fortunate. It set Jung free. He could now go on, without hindrance, in his great task, which led finally to the greatest contributions thus far made.

The break itself may be traced to a divergence between two theories of the unconscious. As will be remembered, Freud’s theory would define the unconscious as something which is produced after we are born, and when the repressions begin. All that is anti-social, that flies in the face of conventional morality and the law of the land, everything that is taboo, gets walled off from the conscious mind, and is henceforth the unconscious mind. The unconscious then is a storehouse of the evil, the thwarted, the unconventional, the instinctive.

Jung does not deny that a part of the unconscious is exactly of this nature. But in “The Psychology of the Unconscious” he proceeds to prove, by a wealth of material and a sureness of analysis, that the unconscious is something far deeper and greater than merely a personal bag of discards.

He finds in numerous typical dreams and phantasies of his patients that they reproduce symbols and stories as old as the human race. He shows that the human mind everywhere, among the most widely scattered peoples, and in different ages, produces the same typical myths, the same figures of deities and demons; and that the patient of today gives forth, in analysis, a similar mythology; and very often something which he, the patient, has been utterly ignorant of and which is beyond his understanding.

He finds further that man has always had what might be called a typical psychological fate; that the story of man’s inner life and development has always taken a certain form, embodied in the figure of the hero. The hero, in the myth, is always he who goes forth to conquer greatly, who overcomes dragons and supernatural powers, but who finally loses his power, is subjugated and dies an inner death. But out of this death he is reborn and appears with a new life, often magical, by which he goes on to his greater achievements.

Such a death and rebirth is pictured in the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. It appears in a modern work, in “Jean-Christophe,” where the hero suffers a spiritual disintegration and can no longer compose music, but with the first breath of Spring, feels the new tides of life pouring into him and rises to the greatest heights of his creative power. Such, too, is doubtless the inner story of our greatest American poet, Walt Whitman. When he was about 35, and after suffering some deep personal reverse, he secluded himself on Long Island beside the sea for some weeks, and had a spiritual experience which led to his awakening as a poet and the beginning of “Leaves of Grass.”

What is this typical myth? It is known as the sun-myth, for the savage doubtless based it on the strange fact that the sun, after setting in the west, rose again the following morning in the east. This sun-myth, boiled down to its essentials, is somewhat as follows: The sun is the hero. He is born of the mother, the sea, in the east. He rises in his splendor and reaches the zenith. But now his strange descent begins, and when he reaches the west, he must re-descend into the waters of the sea, die again and re-enter the mother’s womb. Actually he is pictured as being devoured by a sea monster. In the belly of this monster he rides in the sea under the earth back toward the east. At first he lies supine; but finally, plucking up courage, he begins to battle with the monster. Finally he kills him, and the body of the great fish floats to shore, where the hero, the sun, steps out reborn, and rises again in the east.

This story, based on something seen in nature, is found to be typical of man’s soul. And Jung discovered that wherever an analysis was carried far enough, this typical myth appeared in various forms in the dreams of the patient, and the patient went through an experience analogous to the myth.

What is this experience? A man has reached a high point of development and achievements. There comes upon him now a sense of deadness and futility, a period of disillusionment and turning away from the world, the experience which is described in the beginning of Goethe’s “Faust.” This inner death proceeds until he is lost in himself, until he is, in the language of the myth, devoured by the monster; and now he goes through a long period of inner suffering and groping until the time comes when a new life awakens and he goes back to the world of men with a greater energy, a new vision, and perhaps a new life-task. So, in the beginning of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” we see the hero step forth after his years of preparation in the wilderness to bring his message to the world of men.

This then is the typical experience of those who carry their development to any height. What is its meaning psychologically?

There is no understanding of it, says Jung, unless we broaden the conception of the unconscious. And with this he introduces his theory of the collective unconscious.

The human body is the product of millions of years of evolution, and in it is written the history of life. It is not a sudden creation. If this is true of the body, how can it be anything but true of the mind, which is a function of the body? The mind, too, is a product of millions of years of evolution, and just as the history of life is written in the flesh, so too the history of man’s spirit, his adventure, is summed up in the mind. In other words, the new born babe does not present a mind like a blank sheet of paper on which his personal experience will begin to write; he is born with the great inheritance of the race, the collective unconscious, in which is stored the wisdom of the ages as well as the great instincts, and what Jung calls “the residues of our animal ancestry.”

How do we know this? Because the mind of a man today, a man even ignorant and unread, will, on certain occasions, produce the same myths, the same supernatural figures, the same psychic phenomena as those produced thousands of years ago, and the same in every part of the earth among the most widely separated nations and races.

In short, the unconscious contains typical images and typical stories. And whence did these arise? It is quite natural that the presence in our own unconscious of a wisdom greater than ours and at the same time of animal instincts sometimes overwhelming in their destructiveness, should give the savage, for instance, a sense of the nearness of supernatural powers of good and evil, of some supernatural wisdom that helped him (in the form of revelation or inspiration) and of some demonic lust or passion, which, if it swept over him, led to the orgy, the murder or insanity. Hence, these experiences would be pictured as the work of beings like those he knew, only greater. Wisdom was a Great Mother or a Great Father, a God, in short; evil was a Devil, a Demon, like a bad man, only greater and worse. And certain experiences would be pictured in the form of monsters, great strange animals, sometimes animals part human and part beast.

Thus we see an explanation for the origin of the many religions on earth, all of which have certain things in common. Some sensitive man experienced his own unconscious in the form of dreams and hallucinations. Moses for instance heard the voice of God and saw the burning bush. Psychologically, this would mean that what Moses thought was outside himself, came from within himself, came from the unconscious and was, in the technical language, projected, the vision of fire upon the bush, the voice into the air. He heard and saw something out of his own depths.

Every religion makes this projection. Heaven is up in the sky, hell under the earth; the Gods are on high, the Devils below. It has remained for modern psychology not only to locate these phenomena as in the brain itself, but also to divest them of their miraculous coating, and to explain them as something having a direct meaning in the patient’s life.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious is more or less dormant in all of us, except under certain circumstances or after certain experiences. The average man goes on unaware of his own demonic and divine attributes. But in a lynching-bee or in battle the devil will suddenly awake and transform him from something human into something monstrous. On the other hand, the youth falling headlong in love, the man who sustains the death of his loved one and similar great experiences of life, will encounter the presence of ineffable wisdom and power, so that he feels he is visited by something beyond the human.

But the process of analysis also leads to the experience of the collective unconscious. Psychoanalysis is self-discovery. One goes deeper and deeper into oneself. One goes back on the track of the years to one’s childhood. One exhausts in the process one’s personal memories. One goes down, as it were, beyond the personal layers of the unconscious, to the impersonal. At this point the manifestations of the collective unconscious begin, and the dreams are now loaded with mythological conceptions, and images of the supernatural.

This deep entering into oneself Jung defines as introversion, a self descent, and a means of development, a discipline not only in the wisdom of all time, but in overcoming the undeveloped tendencies in oneself. It is at this point that the hero is devoured by the monster, the unconscious, and makes that voyage that leads to his rebirth.

Dante depicts this in his Divine Comedy. The hero, Dante, is led by Virgil, down through the depth of Inferno (the evil side of the unconscious), up the mount of Purgatory (the overcoming) and finally reaches Paradise, where he finds Beatrice, an image of his soul, and a new wisdom, a new life are his.

Naturally one cannot do justice to so deep a conception within the space allotted. But we can see at a glance that much that is otherwise inexplicable, save on the ground of something miraculous and supernatural, is now given a more natural explanation. We can understand the genius as one who has the gift of tapping his unconscious and bringing forth works which are impossible to the run of men. We can understand why man has always needed a religion. We can understand those intuitions which lead to new discoveries in science. Man has a storehouse of wisdom in himself.

We can also understand the strange aberrations of insanity, of those unfortunates who are caught, as it were, in the collective unconscious, and live only in a world of demons and divinities and uncanny myths. We can understand too the demonic outbreaks in war, and the cause of many crimes. I know of the case of a man who was a clergyman, and who, each time he had finished an impassioned sermon which passed through the audience like a rousing electricity, immediately went to a brothel and indulged in an orgy of drink and sexuality. He was a man under the complete dominance of the collective unconscious. First the divine side appeared, with its marvellous inspirations; then the demonic, dragging him in the mud.

It must not be thought, from the foregoing, that Jung rejected the sexual theory of Freud. What he did was to modify this theory, holding that not all cases of neurosis registered sexual repression or maladjustment. He fully agreed, however, that the Oedipus complex appears as one of the great problems, but instead of interpreting dreams of this nature to mean that the son actually had incestuous longings for the mother, he took such dreams, like all others, to be symbolic. If a man dreams that a monster devours him, it does not mean that he is literally eaten by a large animal. It means that he has made a deep introversion. So too a dream of incest means that the son has reunited himself with the mother. But what does the mother mean? She may symbolize that period of his life when he actually was united with her spiritually, the time of early childhood, a time when he was irresponsible, taken care of, sheltered, helped. His dream may mean then that he longs to be like a child again; he longs to escape from the hardships of adaptation and his present problems.

On the other hand, the mother may have a deeper meaning. She may appear with a supernatural air about her, and stand for the collective unconscious itself, which is the source (or mother) of our conscious life. The longing of the son for the mother, from this standpoint, is the longing for descent into self, for deep introversion. It has the meaning of the sun-myth where the setting sun is devoured by the monster and starts on his journey toward rebirth.

Since there is great danger in the withdrawal from life, in an introversion that in a way shuts one in oneself, whether one does this as an escape from responsibility or from a longing for self-development, it is natural that the myth should represent this incest-longing as taboo, as forbidden, just as real incest is, and that it is only the hero who can overcome this taboo and make that great descent which Dante pictures in his Inferno, and which in Faust is shown as the perilous descent to the Mothers.

Final Thoughts

Seen from a century later, the break between Freud and Jung remains one of the defining turning points in the early history of psychoanalysis. What began as a close intellectual partnership ultimately produced two very different ways of understanding the human mind.

If psychoanalysis is your thing, I’d love to know which side you lean toward.

Leave a comment

About the Author

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

Keep Learning With All About Psychology

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I recently came across a video about an AI startup offering what it calls a “digital afterlife.” Using recordings and conversational data, the system generates an artificial version of someone’s voice, allowing you to have new, simulated conversations with a loved one after they’ve died.

I’ve embedded the video below because it prompted this article. As I watched it, I found myself less focused on the technology itself and more drawn to the deeper question it raised: whether grief, however painful, is part of what deepens us, or whether we should question our acceptance of the devastation it brings. I wasn’t sure where I stood. That uncertainty led me to look more closely at what psychology actually tells us about grief.

In the video, the contrast becomes clear during a conversation between the presenter and the company’s founder. The founder points to the emotional toll grief can take and asks why we would simply accept something so distressing as inevitable. The presenter responds that grief, while deeply painful, may also be essential. After losing her father, she explains that she feels more complete because she has grieved him.

To me, these contrasting views aren’t really about whether AI can “cure” grief, as the video title suggests. They’re about the role grief plays in our lives, and whether its finality is something to work through and make sense of, or something whose impact we might try to soften.

At present, there is no established body of psychological research examining how AI systems that simulate conversations with the deceased affect grief. We don’t yet know whether this kind of technology would ease bereavement, complicate it, or have very different effects depending on the individual.

So, while we can’t predict how emerging technologies will shape bereavement, we can consider how they intersect with what psychology already tells us about how humans respond to loss.

Grief As A Response To Attachment

One of the most well-established insights in psychology is that grief is rooted in attachment. John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, argued that grief is not a psychological malfunction or weakness. It’s the natural response to the loss of an attachment figure. When someone we rely on for safety, comfort, and emotional security becomes permanently unavailable, the attachment system does not simply shut down. It continues to reach for the person who is no longer there. In this sense, grief is not something added onto love. It’s the consequence of it.

If the attachment system continues to reach for someone who is no longer there, the question then becomes: what form does that reaching take over time?

Continuing Bonds And Ongoing Connection

For much of the twentieth century, grief was often framed as a process of detachment. The assumption was that healthy adjustment required “letting go” of the deceased and reinvesting emotional energy elsewhere. More recent research has challenged that view.

The continuing bonds perspective suggests that maintaining an ongoing inner relationship with the person who has died is not necessarily a sign of pathology. People commonly talk to a loved one in their thoughts, revisit shared places, keep photographs close, or replay old messages. These acts are not attempts to deny the loss. They are ways of integrating it.

From this perspective, the attachment bond is not erased by death. It is transformed.

Memory, Absence, And Simulation

If the bond is transformed rather than erased, it often takes the form of memory. We look at photographs. We replay old messages. We revisit shared places. These acts do not deny the loss. They return us to moments that actually occurred.

Even when they bring pain, they remain anchored to what was real. The person is gone, and what remains are traces of their life: their voice recorded once, their image captured at a particular time. The connection continues, but within the boundaries of shared history.

AI-generated conversations introduce something different. They do not simply revisit the past. They create the experience of new exchanges. They produce responses that were never spoken, interactions that never took place. The encounter feels immediate, even though it’s constructed.

That distinction may matter psychologically. Memory revisits what happened. Simulation generates what might have happened. And that raises a new question: does creating fresh relational experiences alter the way grief unfolds?

Grief, Meaning, And Psychological Change

If memory allows the bond to continue within the limits of what was shared, grief itself often involves something more complex: an internal reorganisation of how we understand our lives without the person who has died.

The death of someone close can unsettle our assumptions about safety, identity, and the future. Contemporary grief theory, particularly the meaning reconstruction framework developed by Robert Neimeyer, suggests that adapting to loss is not only about regulating emotional pain. It also involves rebuilding a coherent sense of meaning after that disruption. Over time, many people find themselves asking new questions: Who am I now? What does this relationship mean in the context of my life as a whole? How do I carry it forward?

This does not mean grief is inherently beneficial or that suffering is necessary for growth. For some, grief remains overwhelming and debilitating. But for others, working through the reality of loss becomes part of a broader process of psychological integration. Grief can shape us because it compels us to confront absence and permanence, and to reorganise ourselves in response.

The Existential Weight Of “Forever”

Part of what makes grief so destabilising is its finality. Death introduces a form of permanence that cannot be negotiated. There is no further conversation, no revision, no additional shared experience. The relationship may continue internally, but externally it’s closed.

Psychologically, that finality matters. It forces a confrontation with absence. It requires us to live with what cannot be changed. In doing so, it presses questions we might otherwise avoid: What does this loss mean? What remains? Who am I in its aftermath?

The word “forever” carries existential weight. It is not only the loss of a person, but the loss of possibility. The loss of what might have been said. The loss of future moments that will now never occur.

Justin, the founder of the AI voice technology featured in the video, describes “the hopelessness of forever” as something that may be too much for people to bear. The implication is clear: if permanence is what makes grief so painful, perhaps technology can make it more tolerable.

But this raises a deeper psychological question. If the finality of loss is part of what shapes how grief unfolds, what happens when that finality is softened? Does simulation support adaptation, or does it subtly alter the psychological work grief would otherwise require?

Final Thoughts

I don’t know whether AI-generated conversations will ultimately help or hinder grief. Perhaps, for some people, they will offer comfort. For others, they may complicate the delicate process of adaptation.

What I do know is that love does not disappear with death. It’s reworked, reshaped, carried forward in memory and identity. Helen Keller famously wrote, “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

That idea captures something essential about grief. The relationship does not vanish. It becomes part of the architecture of who we are.

The question raised by this new technology is not whether we can keep our loved ones with us. In many ways, we already do. The question is whether creating new, simulated exchanges changes the nature of that internal bond, and whether softening “forever” alters something psychologically important about how we learn to live with loss.

I’m still not sure of the answer.

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About the Author

David Webb is a psychology educator and author who has spent over twenty-five years helping people make sense of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. He runs All About Psychology, a long-running hub of articles, interviews, and resources visited by over a million people each year.

His books, including Why We Are The Way We Are, are written for curious readers interested in what makes us tick.

You can explore more of his work and books on his Amazon author page.

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