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75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world

Dr. Leslie Poston, Research Psychologist: Applied Psychology, Media Psychology, Organizational Psychology

PsyberSpace® is a weekly psychology podcast for curious people who want to understand why the world feels the way it does, online and offline. The show helps you name what you’re seeing and feeling, understand the science behind it, and figure out what to do next. If you"ve ever wondered what makes "reply guys" tick, why we fall for emotionally manipulative language in politics, why meetings suck, why comfort can keep us stuck, why limerence hits so hard, or how music and media reshape your brain,

science social sciences

All Episodes

22:23

Why You're Stuck: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/08/27

Why Some People Bounce Back: Narrative Identity, Redemption Stories, and Getting UnstuckPARTICIPATE IN MY POST DOC RESEARCH! CLICK HERE.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

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22:50

Specimen in a Petri Dish Part Two: Body Control as...

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/08/21

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

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21:15

Specimen in a Petri Dish: The Psychology of Public...

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/08/14

Why Society Feels Entitled to Comment on Women’s Bodies, and the Harm It CausesJenna 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.PARTICIPATE IN

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15:39

Be Cringe, Be Free: The Psychology of Refusing to...

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2026/08/06

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,

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17:17

Gotcha Culture: Why Catching an AI Cheater Feels So Good

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2026/07/30

The Psychology Behind AI Call-Outs and False CertaintyDr. 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

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20:57

Coded to Exhaustion: The Hidden Cost of Outsmarting...

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2026/07/23

Algospeak and the Cost of Speaking Under Algorithmic SuppressionWhen millions of creators have to say 'unalive' instead of suicide and use a grape emoji instead of talking about rape, something has gone wrong. In this episode, Dr. Leslie Poston discusses her dissertation research on the psychological impact of algospeak, the deliberate language modifications social media creators use to evade algorithmic content moderation, where those strategies actually come from, what happens when they

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17:16

What We Lose When Knowledge Has to Pay Rent

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/07/16

Education’s Value Beyond Jobs: Critical Thinking, Humanities, and the Real Jobs CrisisHost Dr. Leslie Poston argues that education’s value is not defined by whether it leads directly to a job, criticizing the “elite overproduction” framing that treats employment outcomes as the only metric and shift systemic economic failures onto individuals. She emphasizes that a good education builds durable capacities like critical thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, and empathy (traits tied to better

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19:13

Love Languages Were Never Scientific

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/07/10

Why Love Languages Went Viral Without the Science to Support ThemMillions of people can name their love language. Almost none of them know the man who invented the concept wasn't a psychologist, never ran a study, and built the whole thing from his own irritation with how his wife loaded the dishwasher. Host Leslie Poston traces "The Five Love Languages" back to its actual origins, checks Gary Chapman's core claims against three decades of relationship research, and asks a harder question:

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19:26

Why We Keep Falling For Moral Panics

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2026/07/02

Moral Panics as Effort Shields: Why Outrage Replaces ActionWhy do we grab onto moral panics so eagerly, and then quietly drop them the moment they stop being convenient? In this episode, host Leslie Poston, Ph.D., introduces the concept of the 'effort shield' and argues that moral panics serve a psychological function most people never examine. Drawing on Stanley Cohen's foundational work, system justification theory, and the Semmelweis effect, she walks through four case studies spanning

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19:31

Why We Reject New Evidence That Could Directly Help...

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/06/25

The Semmelweis Effect, COVID Cognitive Decline, and Why Evidence Struggles to SpreadHost Leslie Poston explains the Semmelweis effect (reflexively rejecting strong evidence because it threatens identity or established norms) through Ignaz Semmelweis’ 1840s discovery that chlorinated handwashing slashed childbed-fever deaths, despite fierce professional backlash and decades-long delay before adoption. She distinguishes the effect from confirmation bias and links it to cognitive dissonance,

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15:58

The Age of Uncertainty: What Workplace Instablity is...

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2026/06/18

Sustained Uncertainty at Work: Why It Hurts Your Brain and What HelpsHost Leslie Poston discusses sustained workplace uncertainty and its psychological effects, citing an APA Monitor on Psychology article and survey data showing widespread job insecurity, low engagement, and feelings of being replaceable or invisible—especially among workers under 25. She explains research finding peak stress at maximum uncertainty and connects it to ongoing “maybe” conditions created by economic

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15:11

Sounds Deep, Says Nothing: The Science of Bullshit...

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2026/06/11

Bullshit Receptivity: Why We Trust the Wrong WordsHost Leslie Poston discusses “bullshit receptivity,” a peer-reviewed construct describing susceptibility to impressive-sounding but meaningless language. She highlights Cornell cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell’s studies in which over 1,000 office workers rated AI-generated corporate jargon alongside real executive quotes; those most impressed scored lowest on analytic thinking and workplace decision-making, and were more likely to

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18:32

The Credibility Trap: Why We Trust Confident Wrongness

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/06/05

The Credibility Trap: Why Confidence Beats CorrectnessHost Leslie Poston is back after a hiatus to move PsyberSpace to a new weekly Thursday schedule and explains why people often trust confident speakers over accurate ones, calling it the “credibility trap.” She outlines the confidence heuristic (certainty feels like evidence), why it works through verbal cues across all media, and how Dunning-Kruger dynamics and overclaiming research show that learning a little can increase false

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12:55

Propaganda: Nobody's Immune

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2026/05/11

How Propaganda Uses Your Values Against Your Brain: The Passport Revocation ExampleHost Leslie Poston explains that no one is immune to propaganda, using her own initial approval of a proposal to revoke passports for unpaid child support as an example of how emotional framing can short-circuit deeper thinking. She argues effective propaganda relies on a grain of truth and an emotional trigger, using agenda-setting to shape what people think about and how, and distinguishes agitation

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12:01

Moral Licensing: How Doing Good Gives People...

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/05/04

Moral Licensing: Why Doing Good Can Make Us Behave WorseHost Leslie Poston explains the phenomenon of moral licensing: after people do something that affirms their identity as a good person, the brain registers progress toward a moral goal, reducing self-regulatory effort and making later unethical choices more likely, sometimes in unrelated domains. Using a fitness “daily budget” analogy, the episode describes evidence from environmental psychology (green purchases followed by increased

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19:30

The Death of Serendipity: What Algorithmic...

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2026/04/27

The Cost of Losing Serendipity in Algorithmic DiscoveryHost Leslie Poston discusses how algorithmic recommendation systems have replaced everyday accidental discovery, reducing serendipity and narrowing what people encounter. The episode explains psychological and neuroscience research showing novelty’s role in motivation, attention, learning, and memory (including locus coeruleus activation), the inverted-U relationship between complexity and curiosity, and how habituation can flatten

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14:03

From the Rape Academy to Your Living Room

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2026/04/20

Semantic Derailment and the Social Permission That Sustains Organized Sexual ViolenceHost Leslie Poston discusses a CNN investigation into an “online rape academy,” including a Telegram group called ZZZ where nearly 1,000 men allegedly coordinated drugging and sexual assault, shared footage, discussed substances and dosages, and advertised paid live streams; while ZZZ was taken down, the U.S.-hosted site Motherless remains public, drawing about 62 million visits in February and hosting

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18:17

When TV Makes Harm Look Normal: Why We Keep Watching

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/04/13

The Ethics of Reality TV: Deception, Conflict, and What We NormalizeHost Leslie Poston examines the ethical and psychological costs of reality and reality-adjacent TV that relies on deception or engineered conflict, arguing the key issue is whether harm is built into a show’s format rather than whether it is scripted. Using Jury Duty as an example of compromised informed consent and Survivor as an example of formats that reward manipulation, humiliation, and betrayal, she asks what it does

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18:57

The Psychology of AI Slop: How Synthetic Junk Erodes...

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/04/06

AI Slop and Your Brain: Attention, Fatigue, and the Erosion of MeaningHost Leslie Poston explains how “AI slop” is industrial-scale synthetic content optimized for volume and fast reactions rather than accuracy or usefulness, ranging from keyword-stuffed articles and fake reviews to fabricated quotes, fake images, and targeted deepfake audio/video. She argues it exploits cognitive shortcuts like attentional capture and processing fluency, creating decision fatigue, weakening deliberate

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13:03

Meta Lost. Now What?

PsyberSpace® - we help you understand your world ·

2026/03/29

Meta Verdicts, Kids’ Harm, and the Push for Age VerificationHost Leslie Poston reviews two jury verdicts finding Meta liable for harming children: a New Mexico case ordering $375 million in civil penalties for concealing knowledge about child sexual exploitation and mental health impacts, and a Los Angeles negligence case where Meta and YouTube were found liable and Kaylee was awarded $6 million for worsened anxiety and depression from compulsive use starting at ages 6 and 9. Poston cites

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127 results

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