Experience: Analysing Newsmakers

Look, There's a Squirrel | Attentional capture, Trump's cheating and why we stare at fire

The Concept of the Week is attentional capture: why some things grab our attention whether we like it or not. Peter explains why a crying baby is so hard to ignore, why s

Who Runs Towards Danger? | Social comparison, Bryan Johnson and a £1.5m Pokémon attic

The Concept of the Week is social comparison theory: the idea, from Leon Festinger, that we judge much of what matters to us against other people. Peter explains the game

Would You Still Buy It? | Conspicuous consumption, Burnham's headphone crackdown and prepping

The Concept of the Week is conspicuous consumption: buying things to show other people you have the means to buy them. It is an economics idea that has bled into psycholo

The Gorilla in the Room | Attentional blindness, a livestreamed execution and ADHD at work

The Concept of the Week is attentional blindness. In the famous experiment, people counting basketball passes fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit walking through the m

You Are Not the Main Story | The spotlight effect, a plague scare and Japan's older prisoners

The Concept of the Week is the spotlight effect. Do something embarrassing and it feels as if everyone is watching, when most people barely noticed. Peter puts it down to

They Can Do Nothing Wrong | The halo effect, Ed Miliband and Burnham on beer at the football

The Concept of the Week is the halo effect. Once you think well of someone, their mistakes get explained away and their strengths get all the credit. Peter calls it a heu

Make the First Move | The bystander effect, AI-mageddon and Burnham meets Trump

The Concept of the Week is the bystander effect: the more people watching something go wrong, the less likely any one of them is to step in. Peter traces it from the Kitt

I Want To Live In The Real World | Reform's £72m, assisted dying and Miliband's settlement ban

The Concept of the Week is motivated reasoning: judging an argument by whether it gets you the answer you already wanted. Peter's version is unsparing. His well motivated

Repeat A Lie Often Enough | the AfD landslide, violence in A&E, and AI's invented facts

The Concept of the Week is the illusory truth effect. Repeat a lie often enough, Peter says, and it stops being something you have heard and becomes something you know. T

I Just Handed In My Lanyard | Starmer's exit, gravitas, and the war on Black Friday

Peter has retired. Not from being a psychologist, but from the university, and the Concept of the Week is the term for precisely that. Role exit. The original paper says

Treat 'Em Mean, Keep 'Em Scrolling | Meta on trial, named storms and the weekend at 100

Peter opens with the Concept of the Week and it turns out to explain almost everything else in the episode. Variable ratio reinforcement is why the fox keeps coming back

It's More Complicated Than the Headline | public shaming, an eclipse and Count Binface

This week runs from the heavy to the daft. We start with the emergency alert and the wildfire risk behind it, which leads Peter into the Concept of the Week. Then the har

Even James Bond Steps on a Banana Skin | results day, disappointment and Freshers' Week

This week is a practical one: a guide to A-level results day and the leap to university, for anyone with a teenager in the house and for the teenagers themselves. We star

There Is No Right Way to Grieve | death rituals, the Bush case and farewell to Bill Oddie

We start light this week, with identity and where you are from: Peter refereeing whether someone from Wilmslow really counts as a Mancunian (his ruling is that if she thi

The Adult in the Room | Ossoff vs Hegseth, Natalie Fleet and Burnham’s Trump problem

This week is all about names, and how much they give away before you have said a word. Peter takes us through what a name signals about class and background, and why a ge

What Number 10 Does to You | Burnham's first day, Kerr's record and the money myth

We recorded this one at nine o'clock on a Monday morning, a few hours before Andy Burnham walked into Number 10 as the country's fifth Prime Minister in five years. So we

Coming Soon...

A taste of what Experience sounds like: Hilary Jeffs and Peter Kinderman taking a headline and working out what's really driving it. Hilary's from communications, Peter's