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The Lucas Bean Show

The Lucas Bean Show

著者： Lucas Bean
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Sharing insights on psychology, History, human behavior, politics, new technology and business | Author, Scientist, Podcast Host | I make videos & I try to tell good stories.

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  • A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy

    A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy
    2026/10/31
    A skateboarder went to France during the riots.Not to document the uprising, not to support the protesters and definitely not to understand why people were in the streets fighting for their rights. He went to make a skate video. He skated through burning streets and clashing crowds, filmed himself doing tricks against a backdrop of civil unrest, and posted it for likes. He laughs as he runs from street to street trying to avoid the violence. The apathy is so obvious and ugly it hurts me to watch it. This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pattern. And the psychology behind it explains something much larger than one skateboarder with a camera.The empathy collapse is measurable.In 2010, researcher Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan published a meta-analysis of 72 studies spanning 30 years, covering nearly 14,000 American college students. Her finding was stunning and precise. Empathy among young adults had dropped 40 percent compared to their counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s. The largest decline occurred after the year 2000, exactly when social media began reorganizing how young people relate to each other and the world.Konrath measured two specific dimensions. The first was empathic concern, the ability to feel tenderness and concern for people less fortunate. The second was perspective-taking, the ability to imagine how things look from someone else’s point of view. Both declined sharply. Students were less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”That 40 percent decline isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between seeing a riot and feeling something about the people in it, and seeing a riot and thinking about what it would look like as a background for your skate video. The empathy that would make someone stop and say “this isn’t about me” has been measurably and empirically reduced. And the generation most affected is the one that grew up performing their lives for cameras.How social media turned empathy into a liability.Empathy requires one specific cognitive act: the temporary suspension of self-focus. To feel what someone else is feeling, you have to stop thinking about yourself long enough to think about them. Social media trains the exact opposite. Every platform is built around one question: how do I present myself? What do I post? How will this make me look? How many people will engage with my content?Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, spent two decades tracking this shift. Her research, conducted with Keith Campbell and published across multiple studies, showed that narcissistic traits among college students rose steadily from the late 1970s through the 2000s. Two-thirds of contemporary students scored above the narcissistic average of students tested in the early 1980s. Twenge and Campbell published their findings in the book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, arguing that American culture had created a self-reinforcing system where self-promotion was rewarded, self-absorption was normalized, and self-focus became the default mode of existence.Social media didn’t create narcissism. But it created an economy that runs on it. Every like, every comment, every share, every follow is a unit of attention converted into a unit of perceived self-worth. And the platforms are designed, deliberately and with billions of dollars of engineering, to make that feedback loop as addictive as possible. Variable reinforcement, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive, powers every notification. You don’t know when the next burst of attention is coming, so you keep posting. You keep performing. And the performance becomes the only thing that feels real.This is how a person skates through a riot and feels nothing about the riot. The riot is not a human event to him. It is content. It is background. It is production value. And the only feelings that register are the ones connected to the performance: will this get views? Will this go viral? Will this make me famous?Ethical fading: when the moral dimension disappears.In 2004, researcher Ann Tenbrunsel at the University of Notre Dame published a paper that identified a cognitive process she called ethical fading. Tenbrunsel found that people frequently make unethical decisions not because they consciously decide to do something wrong, but because the ethical dimension of the decision literally disappears from their awareness. When people focus heavily on some other aspect of a decision, such as winning, profit, or in this case, content, they stop seeing the ethical issue at all.Ethical fading is different from moral disengagement, where people actively restructure reality to justify harmful behavior. In ethical fading, the person doesn’t even register that there’s a moral ...
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  • Why MAGA Wants a Dictator

    Why MAGA Wants a Dictator
    2026/10/30
    In this week’s video, I talked about Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism and how people who score high on his scale grew up in households that trained them to see the world as dangerous. The video covers the basics. This piece goes deeper into the research, because the science behind the authoritarian brain is one of the most well-documented findings in all of political psychology. And it explains nearly everything about what we are watching right now.The researcherIn 1981, psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba published Right-Wing Authoritarianism, a book that refined decades of earlier work on the authoritarian personality. The original research started back in the 1950s at UC Berkeley, where a team of researchers created what they called the F-scale (F for fascism) to try to measure the kind of personality that goes along with authoritarian movements. That scale had serious problems. It was unbalanced, poorly validated, and easy to game. Altemeyer spent over a decade fixing it.What he built in its place was the RWA scale. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. He tested it across thousands of participants over the course of his career, from college students to sitting legislators. And it worked. It predicted behavior, attitudes, and political alignment with a consistency that surprised even other researchers.A note on the name. “Right-wing” in this context doesn’t mean Republican or conservative in the American political sense. Altemeyer used “right-wing” to describe submission to established authority, as opposed to left-wing authoritarianism, which is submission to authorities trying to overthrow the establishment. In practice, though, the political conservatives in North America consistently scored higher on his scale. That finding held up for decades.The three clustersAltemeyer didn’t find one trait. He found three. And they always showed up together. He called them the three attitudinal clusters of right-wing authoritarianism.The first is authoritarian submission. This is a reflexive willingness to obey whatever authority figure a person sees as legitimate. Not thoughtful agreement. Not carefully evaluated trust. Uncritical, automatic compliance. The kind of obedience that doesn’t ask questions because questions themselves feel like betrayal.The second is authoritarian aggression. This is hostility directed at whoever the authority figure identifies as a target. It doesn’t come from personal experience with the target. It comes from the authority’s say-so. If the leader says immigrants are the problem, immigrants become the enemy. If the leader says it’s the media or the schools or the trans community, the aggression shifts instantly. The aggression isn’t principled. It’s outsourced.The third is conventionalism. This is a rigid attachment to traditional social norms and a belief that everyone else should be forced to follow them too. Not a personal preference for tradition. A demand that it be imposed. In parenting, high-RWA individuals value obedience, neatness, and good manners in children above curiosity, independence, or creativity.These three traits don’t just correlate with each other. They predict prejudice, intolerance, and support for anti-democratic policies. Altemeyer spent his career documenting exactly how.The engine underneathIn his later research, Altemeyer identified three personality traits sitting underneath those three attitudinal clusters. They are the engine that makes the whole system run.The first is self-righteousness. High-RWA individuals believe they are morally superior to others. Not in a quiet, internal way. In a way that gives them permission to punish. They see themselves as the last decent people in a world that has gone to rot, and that belief is what licenses the aggression.The second is fear of a dangerous world. This is the one I focused on in the video, because it is the fuel supply. High-RWA scorers genuinely believe the world is a more dangerous place than it actually is. They walk through life with an elevated threat response. New people, new ideas, new norms all feel like incoming danger. Not because they’ve evaluated any of it. Because their baseline fear is already running so high that anything unfamiliar registers as a threat.The third is mean-spiritedness. This one is uncomfortable, but it showed up in the data over and over. People who score high on RWA are more willing to inflict harm on others when they believe authority approves of it. They are less empathetic toward out-group members. They report more willingness to punish people who violate norms, even when the punishment is clearly disproportionate.Self-righteousness gives them permission. Fear gives them a target. Mean-spiritedness gives them enthusiasm.Fear is the strongest predictorAltemeyer was not the only researcher who found the fear connection. In 1998, psychologist Mark Eigenberger studied 522 participants using both the RWA...
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  • MAGA is Obsessed with Other Men

    MAGA is Obsessed with Other Men
    2026/10/29
    This week, Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in North Carolina and told the crowd he’d been studying Jon Husted’s body. He described the senator’s backside as “like a pile of muscle.” He went through his shoulders, his jawline, his legs, his hands. He said tapping Husted’s shoulder actually hurt his hand. A few days before that, at a rally in Kentucky, he told the audience he’d “examined his ass.” At another rally in Georgia, he spent time comparing how attractive one male candidate was compared to another. This has been happening at rally after rally all month. The New York Times called his fixation on male bodies “puzzling.” Anderson Cooper aired a montage of all of it back to back. Seth Meyers looked into the camera and asked him directly, “Why are you so weird?”And not a single Republican said a word about any of it.In 1996, psychologist Henry Adams at the University of Georgia designed one of the most uncomfortable experiments in the history of psychology. He recruited 64 men who all described themselves as exclusively heterosexual, meaning they reported no homosexual arousal and no homosexual experiences. He then divided them into two groups based on their scores on a standardized homophobia scale. One group scored high in homophobia. The other scored low. Then he showed both groups three types of sexually explicit videos: heterosexual, lesbian, and gay male.He measured their physical arousal using a penile plethysmograph, a device that measures changes in penile circumference with clinical precision. There was no ambiguity in the data. There was no room for interpretation. The device measured what the body did regardless of what the mouth said.Both groups responded similarly to the heterosexual and lesbian content. The difference showed up only when the gay male content played. In the non-homophobic group, 66% showed no measurable arousal to the gay male video, and less than 25% showed a significant physical response. In the homophobic group, those numbers flipped. Over 54% of the men who scored highest on the homophobia scale showed a significant physical response to the gay male content. Only 20% of the homophobic men showed no arousal at all.And here’s the part that makes the study devastating: when the men were asked afterward to rate how aroused they felt during each video, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their arousal to the gay male content. Their bodies responded. Their conscious minds denied it. The data didn’t care.Adams published his findings in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, one of the most respected journals in the field, under the title “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” The answer, according to the plethysmograph, was yes.The defense mechanism that explains everythingThe concept that explains Adams’ findings is not new. It was first described by Anna Freud in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. She called it reaction formation, and it works like this: when a person experiences a feeling or impulse that produces intense anxiety or shame, they don’t just suppress it. They attack the opposite. They become the loudest, most aggressive opponent of the very thing they feel inside themselves.Reaction formation is not the same as simple disagreement or discomfort. The hallmark of reaction formation is disproportionate intensity. A person who is simply not attracted to the same sex doesn’t spend their career crusading against it. They don’t draft legislation about it. They don’t bring it up in every speech. They don’t think about it at all, because there is nothing to defend against. Reaction formation reveals itself through obsession. The volume of the outrage is the tell.What makes reaction formation so effective as a disguise is that it looks like conviction. It looks like moral clarity. The person performing it often doesn’t know they’re doing it. The defense mechanism works precisely because it operates below conscious awareness. The man who stands at a podium and delivers a passionate speech about the threat of homosexuality to the American family may genuinely believe every word he’s saying. His body, as Adams demonstrated, may be telling a completely different story.The study that connected it to childhoodAdams’ 1996 study established the physical link between homophobia and homosexual arousal. Sixteen years later, a team of researchers led by Netta Weinstein at the University of Essex and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester went deeper and asked a follow-up question that Adams never addressed: where does this internal conflict come from?In 2012, Weinstein, Ryan, and their colleagues published a series of six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most rigorous journals in the field. They recruited 784 college students across the United States and Germany, measured their explicit sexual orientation by simply asking them, and then...
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