War, Power, and the Psychology of Leaders: Dark Traits, Moral Disengagement, and AI-Driven Distance

Dr. Leslie Poston argues that war is a predictable failure of leadership selection: the traits that help people gain power, Dark Triad and Tetrad traits like narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism, are the same traits that make leaders dangerous when it comes to decisions about conflict. She traces this pattern through current wars including the US-Iran strikes, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Afghanistan-Pakistan. The episode explores how Bandura's moral disengagement operates in modern warfare, how technologies like autonomous weapons and AI targeting systems are widening the accountability gap between leaders and consequences, and why violence is cognitively simpler than peace. She draws a structural parallel between military and corporate leadership failures, particularly in the AI industry's treatment of creative workers, and closes with research-backed interventions for changing who ends up in positions of power and what they bring with them.

00:00 Why Leaders Start Wars
03:10 Dark Tetrad in Power
06:05 Ego Escalation Pattern
07:25 Moral Disengagement Explained
09:03 AI Weapons and Distance
13:38 Violence Beats Complexity
14:56 Groupthink and Sunk Costs
17:20 Corporate Violence via AI
20:53 What Real Leadership Is
22:29 Fixing the Selection Problem
24:58 Closing Thoughts

Terror Management Theory, Replication, and How Science Updates What We Think We Know

Dr. Leslie Poston discusses Terror Management Theory (TMT) as a framework for understanding how death anxiety shapes social and political behavior, and uses it to illustrate how science updates its conclusions as evidence changes. She contrasts open replication with cases like Dan Ariely's retracted work. She traces TMT from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death to early experiments showing harsher punishment after mortality reminders, explains the anxiety buffer (worldview, self-esteem, relationships) and proximal vs. distal defenses, and reviews findings linking mortality salience to prejudice, nationalism, consumerism, and support for confident leaders. She then covers replication challenges, including Many Labs 4, competing re-analyses, independent failed replications, and a major meta-analysis showing publication bias likely inflated the effect. Alongside TMT, she reviews neuroscience and physiology research on threat sensitivity and political ideology, which shows smaller but consistent associations. The episode connects constant ambient threat in modern media and authoritarian rhetoric to these dynamics and discusses buffering strategies like bolstering self-esteem, relationships, shared humanity, and recognizing fear priming.

00:00 Welcome and TMT Introduction
00:47 Dan Ariely and Bad vs. Good Science
01:34 Ernest Becker and The Denial of Death
03:05 The First Mortality Salience Study
03:52 How TMT Works
05:31 Death Cues in Daily Life
06:41 What the Research Found
09:28 Threat Sensitivity in the Brain
11:31 Replication and Re-analysis
13:42 Understanding Publication Bias
14:46 What We Actually Know
16:58 Why This Matters Now
17:46 What Helps
18:28 Science as an Updating Process
19:00 Outro

Why MBTI Took Over Corporate Culture Despite Weak Science, and What to Use Instead

Dr. Leslie Poston traces how the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator became a multi-million-dollar corporate fixture despite decades of research challenging its psychometric quality, from Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers' Jung-inspired typology to its commercialization by the Myers-Briggs Company. The episode outlines core problems with the MBTI, including poor test-retest reliability, arbitrary binary categorization despite normally distributed traits, and weak predictive validity for workplace outcomes. Poston covers why it still feels accurate through the Barnum/Forer effect, motivated reasoning, preference for simple categories, and social identity dynamics reinforced by online communities and corporate incentives. She contrasts the MBTI with evidence-based personality science such as the Big Five and HEXACO, notes the growing commercial availability of validated tools, and examines why the MBTI persists through ease of use, positivity, institutional inertia, and cultural saturation.

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00:00 MBTI Everywhere
01:31 Origins and Jung
03:30 The Business Machine
04:33 Reliability and Validity Issues
07:55 Why It Feels True
12:27 Big Five and Better Models
17:04 Why MBTI Still Dominates
20:08 What You Can Do
22:15 Bigger Lesson and Wrap