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

Why Some People Bounce Back: Narrative Identity, Redemption Stories, and Getting Unstuck

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Dr. Leslie Poston explains that resilience after hard experiences often depends less on toughness or event severity and more on the narrative people construct about what happened. Drawing on 30+ years of narrative identity research from researchers like Dan McAdams, she contrasts “redemption sequences” (negative-to-positive meaning) with “contamination sequences” (positive overtaken by negative), noting links to well-being and depression. She cites evidence that narrative is an active ingredient: long-term sobriety predicts redemption framing of the last drink, increases in narrative agency precede mental health gains in therapy, and expressive writing improves outcomes when it creates coherent story structure. She discusses developmental roots in parent-child elaborative reminiscing, the risk of event centrality in PTSD/CPTSD and collective trauma (e.g., post-9/11 America), and how cultural “master narratives” shape which stories feel possible, with cross-cultural differences. Practical takeaways include therapy, structured writing, supportive listening, and reframing adversity as a chapter, plus a note about upcoming paid courses and no ads.

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00:00 Why We Get Stuck
01:28 Narrative Identity Basics
02:20 Redemption vs Contamination
03:47 Stories Change Outcomes
06:56 How Kids Learn Stories
09:49 When Trauma Becomes Identity
11:35 Collective Trauma Filters
13:21 Culture and Master Narratives
14:39 When Redemption Doesn’t Fit
17:12 Practical Tools to Reframe
21:24 Closing and Housekeeping

Body Policing as Authoritarian Power: From Fascist Propaganda to TikTok Pipelines

In Part One, we asked who gets to decide what a woman's body should look like. In Part Two, Dr. Leslie Poston follows that question into political history, tracing a line from Mussolini's propaganda offices to the fashion industry to TikTok's algorithm. The distance between fascist body archetypes and a teenage girl's feed in 2026 is shorter than you'd think. Drawing on the work of Sabrina Strings, Da'Shaun Harrison, and Lois Shearing, this episode examines how and why body control has functioned as a tool of authoritarian power, and what makes it so effective at recruiting women and girls today.

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00:00 Part Two Setup
01:16 Fascist Body Archetypes
03:49 Fear and Conformity
05:03 Racial Origins of Fatphobia
07:11 Modern Body Fascism
09:33 Fashion Industry Data
12:38 Ariana Grande Case Study
13:36 Skinny Talk Pipeline
17:09 Why It Works Psychologically
21:34 Closing Resources

Why Society Feels Entitled to Comment on Women’s Bodies, and the Harm It Causes

Jenna Ortega sat down to talk about her career. Within a day, the internet was only talking about her body. Dr. Leslie Poston traces this pattern across decades of public scrutiny aimed at women in the spotlight, examines the psychology behind why people feel entitled to comment on women's bodies at all, and looks at what the research says those comments actually do. Part one of a two-part series.

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00:00 Welcome and Setup
01:55 Jenna Ortega Scrutiny
03:43 Ariana Grande Pattern
04:58 2000s Tabloid Era
07:11 Why Commentary Persists
09:57 Concern Trolling Explained
11:28 Parasocial Entitlement
12:58 Research on Harm
15:21 Stress and Health Effects
16:52 Ozempic Culture Shift
19:51 Coping and Bigger Question
20:52 Wrap Up and Part Two

For those who asked about reading my dissertation, I made it open access for you.

Be Cringe, Be Free: Authenticity, Shame, and the Cost of Performing the Self

"Be cringe, be free" sounds like a joke about dancing badly in public. Dr. Leslie Poston makes the case that it's actually a question psychology has been thinking about for decades: why does being yourself in public feel so dangerous, and can dropping the performance actually change anything beyond your own life? This episode draws on Goffman's front stage and back stage selves, Winnicott's true self and false self, Brehm's reactance theory, Gilbert's social rank theory, Tangney's research on shame and guilt, Gilovich's spotlight effect, Meyer's minority stress theory, Keltner's work on embarrassment, and Deci, Ryan, and Neff on autonomy and self-compassion, to ask what it actually costs to keep performing, and what it takes to stop.

00:00 Be Cringe Be Free
01:07 Life as Theater
02:48 True vs False Self
04:37 Reactance and Pushback
06:14 Where Cringe Fear Comes From
08:04 Spotlight Effect Reality Check
09:03 Minority Stress and Real Risk
10:23 Embarrassment vs Defiance
11:57 Autonomy and Self Compassion
13:57 Freedom as Collective Change
14:33 Outro and Research Invite

LINK TO PARTICIPATE IN DR. POSTON'S NEXT RESEARCH STUDY: https://bit.ly/4fCx52d (linked form will deactivate when study is full)

The Psychology Behind AI Call-Outs and False Certainty

Dr. Leslie Poston examines why people react with such gleeful certainty when an AI detector flags someone's writing, even though these tools are wrong often enough to falsely implicate one in five students in a single class. The satisfaction people feel rarely tracks whether the accusation is true. It tracks something else entirely, and this episode breaks down five distinct psychological motives hiding underneath that feeling, from protecting a shaky self-image to genuine hypocrisy to anger that belongs somewhere else altogether. Along the way: why detectors fail the way they do, what several centuries of public exposure rituals have in common with a modern callout post, and how to catch yourself doing this before you hit send.

00:00 Why AI Callouts Feel Good
01:08 Schadenfreude and Deservingness
03:10 Algorithms Reward Accusations
04:19 Five Motives Behind Callouts
04:27 Downward Comparison Relief
05:31 Imposter Syndrome Trigger
06:28 Secret Users and Hypocrisy
08:08 Moral Grandstanding Performance
09:00 Misdirected Anger at AI
10:03 Why Detectors Fail
12:12 Historical Parallels and Exposures
14:33 How to Respond Responsibly
17:06 Closing and Subscribe