Posts tagged Shane
190 | Why We Believe in Money

Money is at the crux of most wonders and evils in the world. While we like to think our values are centered around culture, religion, family, etc, money has a clever way of interjecting on our priorities.

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189 | Conversion "Therapy" is a No

Conversion “therapy” is a sexual identity and orientation intervention that needs to be banned. It doesn’t work, and it causes harm. Just over a century old, this harmful “treatment” was torture not unlike the witch trials. A handful of nations and some other smaller municipalities have taken the appropriate step to ban this, but it is otherwise still allowed. Learn more as we throw this intervention all the way under the bus.

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188 | Real Fake Medicine

As Green Day once sang, “Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me…Am I just paranoid, or am I just stoned?” Great question, and one worth investigating. We do a lot of things to feel better, but what about taking a whole lot of nothing? It’s called a placebo, and there are many components and interesting effects of such treatment that may help those dealing with pain and discomfort from a variety of illnesses. We’ll shed some light on the Placebo Effect and see how an initial phenomenon has evolved into a potentially strategic and cost-effective future for pain management.

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187 | Gaslighting

This form of abuse and manipulation is particularly insidious because of how comprehensively it can affect people in all aspects of their lives. We talk about whether people know that they are gaslighting, why it works, why people do it, and what you can do about it.

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186 | Translating Reality

Interpretation in all its glorious forms. This episode explores the nuances of interpretation as they relate to translation of language, explanation of natural and behavioral phenomena, and data analysis. A complex history of exposure to different circumstances may have a substantial impact on how you interpret data, language, or any event. We explore the variables that contribute to how one’s interpretation forms and what it may be swayed in any direction by.

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185 | Drunk Tank Pink

Does the color red make you think of food? Does blue make you patriotic? Are the marketers and government controlling our minds with subtle manipulations in color? No. But many PR people have figured out how to leverage and create associations between our feelings and certain colors or color patterns to modestly influence our mood and preconceptions. This is how they do it…

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184 | Holding Back Tears: How to Resist Crying

Probably more about the lacrimal system and dacryology than you would have thought…. Proposed by a listener we explore: do women cry more than men? Why do we cry? Do animals cry? and many more issues. This was much more interesting than one would have thought!

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183 | Handedness and Personality or Just Handedness

What does your hand dominance say about your personality? What about your brain? Probably very little. Either way, we dig into the research and implications of hand and foot preference.

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182 | How to Protest Safely

[Hopefully] Happy post-election day! If you are going to go out on the streets and protest for any reason, here is how you can do so safely. We discuss the history of protests, why people protest, and we stand firmly in support of a citizen’s right to protest. Liberty means being able to protest your government without repercussions. Grab your signs, masks, loudspeakers, and running shoes and stand for something you believe in.

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181 | The Dead Preserved

Tied up deep beneath layers of wraps and chemicals and oils and lotions is a practice the dates back thousands of years—mummification. This practice has mystified historians and found a special place in entertainment in many forms, but how exactly did the process work and for what purposes? This episode will detail the careful procedures performed by embalmers to preserve the body in a unique state that was believed to maximize the dead individual’s chance for a fruitful afterlife.

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180 | Possessed: Exorcisms

This Halloween season is well underway and we have this, and one episode left after this one. In this episode, we review the process of exorcisms. But much more importantly, exorcisms are dangerous and ethically questionable at best. We dive into why people believe them and the effect that they have had on the culture at large.

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179 | Witch Trials

The second installment of our spooky psychology month! Witches and witchcraft have a long and complex lore. But one of the creepiest things about witches is how the fear of witches was used to bring harm against so many people for so long. This episode explores the terrifying history of the persecution of people accused of practicing witchcraft. Also, turns out “witch hunts” aren’t as outdated as they might seem….

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178 | Afraid of the Dark

It’s time for spooky psychology month! We are kicking off our creepy topics with a discussion about what gives us the creeps about the darkness! Like many things, we have reasonable hypotheses but little firm evidence. Nevertheless, it is worth digging into what we think we know and why!

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174 | Why I Am A Democrat

This is the first in a series of episodes we are going to release in which we interview some non-political everyday citizens about why they have aligned themselves with their particular political party. Everyone requested to remain anonymous. So today we interviewed a democrat about why she is a democrat.

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173 | Euphemisms: You Know What This Means

Euphemisms have a significant place in cultures around the world, offering playful substitutions to mask otherwise offensive, uncomfortable, and dodgy terms. Why such alternatives are chosen by society will be discussed, and the positive or negative impact it may place in certain communities.

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172 | How to Learn Anything!

Strategies for picking up new skills and habits as well as some myth-busting. Shane and Abraham provide a general algorithm for how to get good at anything! The “secret” is basically to break anything down into small steps and commit to them. Furthermore, have some kind of payoff for succeeding. As it turns out, learning to do anything overlaps considerably with how to teach anything. Do something new today!

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170 | The Hawthorne Effect

This episode explores the Hawthorne Effect, a famous psychological phenomenon that arose in the 1920s and 1930s and has been continuously debated by scientists since then. Once regarded as a simple relation between the presence of experimenters affecting worker performance, it has more recently been refuted as an excessively liberal, if not lazy, interpretation of data. Human behavior is complicated, but it can always be directly attributed to something in the environment.

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169 | Artificial Intelligence

So many references to Isaac Asimov’s books on robots. A ton of pop culture references. A ton of jokes. Throwing public figures under the bus. How behavior analysis can save us from AI. And an update to the laws of robotics. Your general awesome WWDWWD podcast episode

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168 | Syphilis Part 2

In this second and final part, we bust a bunch of syphilis myths. Also, we talk about some behavioral health strategies to decrease the risk of catching syphilis at various levels of prevention and intervention. Oddly one of our funnier episodes.

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167 | Syphilis Part 1

The illustrious history of an old friend that humanity doesn’t miss: syphilis. Origins of its global spread and the path toward its eventual treatment with penicillin will be explored. We talk mainly about the course of the disease and methods of contact and how it affects the brain. In the next episode, we will take on myths about syphilis as well as strategies to increase safe practices to prevent its spread.

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