The Psychology of Us

Why Self-Awareness Isn't Enough: The Mirror and Map of Self-Knowledge

Why can you understand your own patterns perfectly and still keep repeating them? In this episode of The Psychology of Us, we explore RJ Starr’s essay “Psychology as Mir

The Psychology of What We Talk About

"Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas." The line is almost always used as a ranking of intelligence, a way of sorting who b

The Architecture of Intactness

In "The Architecture of Intactness," the discussion works through RJ Starr's essay "What Conditions Allow a Person to Remain Intact?", published through Depthmark Press w

What We Cannot Fear, We Learn to Despise: The Architecture of Contempt

In "What We Cannot Fear, We Learn to Despise: The Architecture of Contempt," the discussion works through RJ Starr's essay "Fear and Loathing: The Architecture of Defensi

The Witch, the Comet, and the Machine

Why does the accusation "that's AI" arrive so quickly, and why does it so rarely yield to evidence? This episode explores RJ Starr's essay The Costume Changes, the Refle

The Mirror Function: Why Desire Never Sees Its Object

Desire is usually understood as a movement toward something: toward a person, an object, a status, a life. This episode examines a framework that reverses that assumption

Feelings Are Data, Not Directives

There is a phrase that has acquired moral weight in modern culture: be emotionally honest. It is offered as advice, as virtue, as evidence of growth. Say what you feel. N

The Psychology of Hoarding: Why Letting Go Feels Unsafe

Hoarded environments invite immediate judgment. The visible density of accumulated objects suggests a failure of discipline, and the obvious question becomes why the indi

My Truth, Your Truth, and the Cost of Neither Being True

What happens when "my truth" stops being a way of naming pain and starts being a way of ending a conversation. This episode examines a phrase that has become so common i

Workplace Cliques: When Belonging Becomes Exclusion

Workplace cliques are often dismissed as gossip, favoritism, or ordinary personality conflict. But they can also be understood as structural features of organizational li

The Performance of Public Life

What if the public isn't withdrawing from civic reality, but from the mediated performance of it? This episode examines a structural argument by RJ Starr: legacy news me

No Dead Air: When Silence Became a Problem

There is an old rule in broadcast radio: no dead air. Silence between segments was treated as technical failure, a lapse in the chain of transmission that would cost the

When Dysfunction Becomes the Rule

Imagine walking into a Monday meeting where everyone knows the project is failing. The timeline is blown, the budget is gone, morale is underground. Then the VP walks in,

The Psychology of the Critic

The Psychology of the Critic examines a psychological structure so normalized it has become invisible: the evaluative position. When someone occupies the role of critic,

The Architecture of the Mind: A New Framework for Understanding Human Experience

In this episode of The Psychology of Us, we explore a new conceptual framework by Professor RJ Starr called Psychological Architecture—a model that organizes human experi

The Psychology of the Cyberbully

The Psychology of the Cyberbully is an episode of The Psychology of Us, a public psychology series by RJ Starr examining the mechanisms underlying human behavior through

The Architecture of Pride: How Group Identity Forms, Excludes, and Endures

Every pride movement on earth — gay pride, national pride, ethnic pride, religious pride, working-class pride, and yes, supremacist pride — runs the same psychological en

The Tragedy of Almost-Connection

Some relationships fail because the people involved were fundamentally wrong for each other. Their values conflicted. Their emotional temperaments continuously destabiliz

When Interpretation Becomes Defense

Most people believe they are thinking critically when they go online. Professor RJ Starr's essay "The Psychology of Adversarial Interpretation" makes a more unsettling ar

The Architecture of Dreaming: Why the Mind Lets Reality Collapse at Night

Dreams are usually treated as irrational, symbolic, random, or neurologically meaningless. We wake from them confused by their contradictions, impossible transitions, dis