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 Kitty Genovese story through the staged subway experiments to the advice he was given as a new lecturer. If the fire alarm goes off, every student in the room will wait to see what you do, so leave the bloody room. Hilary has a Brighton story about a homeless woman punched in the face and a crowd that did not look. The finding that follows is the useful one: people are waiting for a cue, and if somebody steps forward, the chances are the rest will follow.

Then AI-mageddon. Trump told the UN that artificial intelligence should be called super intelligence and that the United States will not accept a global system to regulate it. Hilary listened to Rory Stewart and Yuval Noah Harari on the Aztecs and found herself psychologically inert. Peter's answer is about regulation, tigers and fences: if you were rich enough to keep a menagerie, you would spend some of the money on the enclosure. He has been reading about Lavender, the Israeli military's AI targeting system, and the operators who described their role as pressing yes. Hilary brings the 2023 mammography study in which radiologists went along with a wrong AI suggestion most of the time, and Peter matches it with a mental health tribunal chair who told him the panel had never once disagreed with the psychiatrist. No AI required.

Peter's way through the doom is Descartes by way of a video game. If it turned out you were a character in somebody else's game, what should you do? Play it to the best of your ability. Terrible situations do not change the job, which is to take what you know and make the best possible decision. He has a plan for Russian paratroopers landing near Manchester Airport, and he would rather people other than Donald Trump decided how AI is regulated.

Andy Burnham met Trump for the first time at the UN General Assembly. Peter's advice for negotiating with him: when he says something outrageous, say yes, then bury it in the long grass, because he will not remember and he is mostly interested in how he looks on television. Hilary rates Mark Carney as the first leader to get the measure of the man, and both admire the American TV pool for pulling coverage after CNN was thrown out. Which prompts the question Peter answers with unusual honesty: do you always stand up to a bully? No. He was once thumped in the street in Leeds, and his rule now is to read the situation and pick, and sometimes that means running away.

Finally, the new right to two weeks' bereavement leave, unpaid, for the loss of a partner, parent, adult child or sibling, and for pregnancy loss before 24 weeks, from April 2027. Hilary is dismayed it needed a law at all. Peter puts it alongside AI and migration: as a species we are plenty rich enough, and the problem is only ever how it is shared out.

The Triple T is make the first move. On the tube, in a bar, in the office: somebody has to go first, and it might as well be you. Peter's dating algorithm, aim high and work down, gets a swift rebuttal from Hilary about who actually punches up.

A note before you listen. Peter briefly describes being physically assaulted. The episode also discusses bereavement, pregnancy loss, and AI used to select military targets.

Mentioned in this episode

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at [email protected].

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 donation is a bid to improve the life of the nation, hers is shameless self promotion. His climate pledge is aspirational, hers is a downright lie. People do it all the time, and the week's three headlines are three chances to catch yourself at it.

Two crypto billionaires have given Reform UK 72 million pounds in two days. Ben Delo gave 36 million on the Friday, and Christopher Harborne matched it to the pound on the Saturday, saying in the Telegraph that Delo had warned him it was coming and his competitive instinct did the rest. Both say they expect nothing back. Peter does not believe them, and Hilary pushes him on whether people can be rehabilitated. He says yes, absolutely, and that giving large sums to a political party is not how it is done.

That turns into the best passage in the episode, on what competitiveness is actually for. Compete with your friends over pot plants and you all end up with better pot plants. Decide that you need to beat them and the whole thing becomes a zero sum game, where your win requires my loss. Peter's argument is that a good deal of right wing politics runs on the second kind, and that people who describe themselves as wealth creators are usually moving money rather than making it.

Then the assisted dying bill, defeated in the Commons on Friday by sixteen votes, 286 to 270. Peter supports the principle and says so plainly, including for himself. He also thinks the Royal College of Psychiatrists has it about right, and that palliative care being less than perfect is a reason to be careful. The part that troubles him most is the one nobody legislates for: elderly people who say they do not want to be a burden to their children, and how much that would weigh on a decision that is supposed to be freely made.

Finally, the settlement measures. Ed Miliband banned imports from illegal West Bank settlements while talking about being a proud Jew, and the Chief Rabbi called it a dark day for British Jews. Peter's point is that the line the government drew is the right one and it should hold it: this is not a boycott of Israel, it is a ban on goods from illegally occupied land. He has a story from outside a Marks and Spencer fifteen years ago about what happens when that line gets blurred.

A note before you listen. The middle of this episode is about assisted dying, terminal illness, palliative care and bereavement. Both hosts speak about people close to them.

Mentioned in this episode

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at [email protected].

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. The news then obliges with three demonstrations.

The AfD has won Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote and 39 of the 83 seats, three short of a majority, on a turnout of 76 per cent. They more than doubled their share in five years and the CDU lost more than half of its own. Hilary and Peter go at what was sold to get there: nostalgia for the East German regime, a manifesto line about how children should be taught, and a traditional family message Peter reads as code for undermining everybody else's. He is blunt about where this has gone before.

Which takes them to Galton, who coined the word eugenics, walked around Britain ticking off women he judged attractive, and invented statistical tools we still use every day. And to the paper in Stephen Jay Gould's book where a man packed shot into the skulls of black people and white people and shook them until the numbers came out the way he wanted.

Then the second headline. 96 per cent of emergency department staff have faced violence or aggression at work and only 4 per cent always feel safe. Hilary reads the timing of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine's report as a deliberate play to set the agenda before a BBC investigation landed. Peter asks who benefits from an underfunded health service and is cynical about the answer. He also takes apart Hilary's use of the word simply, and later pulls her up for saying that gangs are taking over the country, which they are not, and which is about as close as this programme gets to a fight.

Third, John Healey's first big speech as Chancellor, and what a Chancellor can actually change. Peter's answer involves six thousand civil servants and some very good computers.

The Triple T is go and look for the evidence, and Peter arrives with the receipts. ChatGPT told him about a Victorian mercury fountain in St Peter's Square lit by gas lamps. He asked for a source. It said it had made the whole thing up.

Mentioned in this episode

• The AfD won Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September with 44.1 per cent and 39 of 83 seats, three short of the 42 needed. Turnout was 76 per cent, up from 60 in 2021: the full result
• The Royal College of Emergency Medicine surveyed over 2,000 emergency department staff and published on 4 September. 96 per cent had experienced violence or aggression, 75 per cent see it weekly or daily, two thirds said incidents were discriminatory, and only 41 per cent of those who reported one said their trust took meaningful action
• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981. Peter could not remember the title on air. The skull measuring is Samuel George Morton's
• Gould's reading of Morton has itself been challenged, which rather proves the episode's point about evidence: The Mismeasure of Science, PLOS Biology, 2011
• The lab coat study Hilary asks about is Adam and Galinsky, Enclothed Cognition, 2012. Worth knowing that it has repeatedly failed to replicate: the British Psychological Society's write up
• John Healey became Chancellor on 20 July. He read Social and Political Science at Cambridge and was a full time disability rights campaigner from 1984. The judicial review announcement came in his growth speech on 7 September
• The Brexit hit to productivity Peter refers to is the Office for Budget Responsibility's standing assumption of 4 per cent over the long run: their Brexit analysis
• The protests Hilary mentions were at Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend of 5 to 7 September
• Hilary went to the wrong hall for The Rest Is Politics at Goalhanger's festival. The Royal Festival Hall is on the South Bank. The Royal Albert Hall is not
• Clearly not really: Peter calls him Edward Galton. He means Francis Galton. Everything else he says about the man, including the beauty map, is correct

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at [email protected].

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 you should mark the moment with some sort of ceremony. Peter handed in his lanyard and went.

Which turns out to be this week's story twice over. Keir Starmer stood down as an MP on 1 September, an hour before Andy Burnham's first big speech as Prime Minister. Vengeance, or a man who has simply changed his mind? Peter makes the case that a u-turn and an open mind look identical from the outside, and that if you want leaders with no emotions and no second thoughts, you need a different species running the country.

Then Hilary, whose actual job is teaching people how to hold a room, takes apart Burnham against Kemi Badenoch at the despatch box and asks Peter the question he says has been held against him his entire career. What is gravitas, and can you get it if you have not got it?

And France has gone to war on Black Friday. Not the sales, the words. Peter, a behavioural psychologist, points out that banning a word is close to the least effective thing you could possibly do, and that Wales worked out the answer years ago.

The Triple T comes from the new Prime Minister, and it is two words long.

Mentioned in this episode

• Hilary's list of the two letter Scrabble words, which Peter maintains is cheating: the official Collins list, all 127 of them
• The advice Peter is remembering about marking a role exit with a ceremony: Say Goodbye, Create a Ritual by Nancy K Schlossberg, which sets out Ebaugh's four stages
• Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit, 1988, the study that gave us the term
• Keir Starmer stood down as MP for Holborn and St Pancras on 1 September. His majority there in 2024 was 11,572
• Zack Polanski is standing for the Greens in the by-election. Labour are still the bookmakers' favourites
• John Healey was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer on 20 July
• Reinhart and Rogoff, Growth in a Time of Debt, 2010, and the spreadsheet error found by Thomas Herndon in 2013
• The Toubon law of 1994, France's law on the use of the French language
• Vendredi fou, recommended in Quebec since 2014 as the French for Black Friday
• Globish, Jean-Paul Nerriere's 1,500 word subset of English for international business
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974
• The Bayeux Tapestry opens at the British Museum on 10 September

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at [email protected].

Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep7-i-just-handed-in-my-lanyard.html
Concept of the Week explained, Role exit: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/role-exit.html

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 to Peter's garden, why the fruit machine keeps taking your pound, and why you keep scrolling. Reward someone every time and they stop caring. Reward them never and they leave. Reward them roughly one time in three and they cannot put it down. The people building these systems know this.

Then three stories that all turn out to be about the same thing: who gets to decide what holds your attention.

The Met Office is running a competition with Aardman to name a storm after Shaun the Sheep or his cousin Timmy. Peter explains why a silly name is doing serious work, and makes the case for naming heatwaves after the companies that caused them.

The two day weekend turns a hundred. Henry Ford gave it to his workers in 1926, having already doubled their pay, and not entirely out of kindness. Bertrand Russell thought we should have gone much further. Peter, a socialist with a lathe and a beehive, agrees.

And in a courtroom in Oakland, twenty nine US states are taking Meta to trial over exactly the mechanism Peter described in the first five minutes.

Timestamps

• 00:45 Concept of the Week: variable ratio reinforcement, the fox, the fruit machine and the feed
• 05:20 A look at the News: why the Met Office names storms, and why it should name heatwaves too
• 12:15 A look at the News: a hundred years of the weekend, Henry Ford and Bertrand Russell on doing better things than work
• 29:35 A look at the News: twenty nine states versus Meta, and what psychologists are telling the court
• 43:20 The Triple T: set limits, and Peter admits he needs them as much as anyone

Mentioned in this episode

• Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1932
• The Met Office and Aardman storm naming vote, which closed on 21 August. The full 2026/27 list is published on 1 September
• Seville has been naming and ranking heatwaves since 2022
• Arturo Bejar, the former Meta engineer giving evidence in Oakland
• West, Mogilner and DeVoe, Happiness From Treating the Weekend Like a Vacation, 2021

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at [email protected].

Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep6-treat-em-mean-keep-em-scrolling.html
Concept of the Week explained, Variable ratio reinforcement: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/variable-ratio-reinforcement.html

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 hard part: the death of Professor Jason Arday, the Cambridge academic who faced a sustained campaign of online abuse, and what public shaming actually does to a person. We talk proportionality, the presumption of innocence that social media has quietly erased, and why a pile-on so often says more about the people holding the torches than the person they are aimed at. After that we lighten up, with why a partial eclipse left Peter cold while eclipse-chasers cross the planet for the full thing, and Count Binface giving Nigel Farage a run for his money in Clacton.

This episode discusses a recent death, online abuse and mental health. Please take care if that is difficult for you.

CONCEPT OF THE WEEK

INUS, from the philosopher J.L. Mackie, which is a formal way of saying that causes are almost always more tangled than they look. A fire needs a spark, but the spark could have been a match, a lighter or a dropped cigarette, and no single one of them is the whole story. It is a useful lens for everything from why a wildfire took hold to why the far right gains ground: there is rarely one simple cause, however much a headline wants there to be.

THE TRIPLE T

Wait a second before you respond. It sounds almost too obvious to say, but most of the harm we do, and most of the nonsense we spread, comes from reacting to a headline as though we already know the whole story. There is nearly always a backstory, a complication, a perspective you have not heard. So let investigations run their course, let the facts arrive, and above all do not send the tweet. It will almost certainly be wrong.

| IF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed on our podcast, please contact your doctor, local support services, or your emergency services if in crisis. If you are in the UK, this website will signpost you to other mental health services: https://www.meandmymind.nhs.uk/getting-help/mental-health-websites/

| LIKED THIS ONE? Please leave us a review wherever you are listening. It takes a minute and genuinely helps others find the show. Got a question, a comment, or a topic you would like us to put on the couch? Write to us at [email protected]. New episodes land every Tuesday.

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Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep5-its-more-complicated-than-the-headline.html
Concept of the Week explained, INUS conditions: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/inus-conditions.html

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 start with the teenage brain, which is not fully built until around
23, and why that means your teenager genuinely cannot wake early or yet see
things from your side. Then the days before: the conversation to have now (in an
ideal world, what would you love to study?), banking some sleep, and quietly
building a Plan B and C so a disappointing envelope has somewhere to go. On the
day, we get into loving them through it, dropping the I-told-you-so, and treating the
result as information rather than a verdict, because even James Bond steps on a
banana skin. And we range across whether university is still worth it, the trades AI
will not touch, and how to make friends in Freshers’ Week without ending up in an
ambulance.

CONCEPT OF THE WEEK
Attribution theory, the story you tell yourself about why something went well or
badly. We are all prone to a self-serving version: the good result was all me, the
bad one was someone else’s fault. It matters at results time because the
explanation shapes what you do next. Tell yourself you aced it purely because you
are cleverer than everyone, and you may coast and come unstuck later. Peter’s
honest version is that he did well at A-level mostly because he had nothing else to
do but revise, which turns out to be a far more useful thing to believe than being a
genius.

THE TRIPLE T
Do something you love. As Hilary puts it, if you do something you love you never
really work a day, which is exactly the long game to keep in mind when a single set
of grades feels like the whole story. The results are one stepping stone, not the
destination. Keep your eye on what you actually want your life to look like, and
there is almost always more than one route to it.

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Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep4-even-james-bond-steps-on-a-banana-skin.html
Concept of the Week explained, Attribution theory: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/attribution-theory.html

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 thinks she is, she is, and it would be rude to say otherwise), and the surprisingly touchy question of what grandparents want to be called.

Then the French wildfires take us somewhere bigger: why we find it so hard to care about people who are not born yet. Peter reaches for Camus and lands somewhere useful. You cannot really picture those future generations, so do not try. Ask instead what principles you want to live by now, and make each small decision one you can be proud of. Mia Mottley, the Barbadian Prime Minister, gets a well-earned mention as one of the great communicators on climate.

The Robert Bush case, the Hull funeral director jailed for what he did to hundreds of grieving families, leads into why death rituals matter so much, why there is no correct way to grieve, and why remembering that we are mortal can help us live better. Peter tells us about the cemetery chapel project he has just joined.

We finish with a tribute to Bill Oddie, who has died at 85. That takes in his openness about depression, Peter’s long argument with the idea of mental illness as a simple brain disease, and the science of laughter, which turns out to be far more about the people around us than the joke itself.

Our Concept of the Week is confirmation bias, sharpened by algorithms and chatbots that are only too happy to tell you that you were right. The Triple T is a single question: what do I actually want here?

Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados at the Opening of the #COP26 World Leaders Summit

A heads up: this episode covers death, grief and mental illness. Please take care if any of that is difficult for you.

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Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep3-there-is-no-right-way-to-grieve.html
Concept of the Week explained, Confirmation bias: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/confirmation-bias.html

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 gender-neutral one quietly helps women at the CV stage. Then three headlines: Senator Jon Ossoff questioning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a masterclass in staying calm and letting the facts do the damage; Natalie Fleet stepping down as safeguarding minister, and what being "triggered" really means; and Andy Burnham letting Trump use UK bases to strike Iran, which turns into a conversation about standing up to a bully without making everyone else pay for it. New this week: the "clearly, not really" klaxon, for when one of us reaches for a bit too much hyperbole. Thanks to Dylan for spotting the first one.
This episode discusses sexual violence and trauma. Please take care if that is hard for you.

CONCEPT OF THE WEEK
Authenticity, and the trust that grows out of it. There is a line, usually put on Groucho Marx, that if you can fake sincerity you have got it made. It lands because we rely on reading other people honestly. We build trust by working out what someone is really like and then acting on it, whether that is trusting a Prime Minister to negotiate in our interest or trusting a friend to get your daughter home safely from a festival. Being yourself is how other people learn they can count on you, and as Hilary puts it, you are the best possible you and a rubbish version of anyone else.

THE TRIPLE T
When you are stuck or on the spot, ask a question. It is the move underneath the whole Ossoff interview, and it works just as well at a party as it does in a Senate hearing. If the conversation stalls or the nerves kick in, an open question hands the floor back to the other person and takes the pressure off you. And if someone puts you on the spot, you can always ask them why they are asking. One catch: it does not work in a media interview, which is exactly why Hegseth had nowhere to hide.

Please leave us a review wherever you are listening. It takes a minute and genuinely helps others find the show. Got a question, a topic, or a "clearly, not really" moment where we got carried away? Write to us at [email protected].

Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep2-the-adult-in-the-room.html
Concept of the Week explained, Authenticity: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/authenticity.html

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 spent most of it asking what that job actually does to a person: whether you can stay yourself once you are in it, how you build a cabinet that will argue with you rather than nod along, and why so much of the answer sits with the team and the civil service around you. Along the way we get to Josh Kerr's mile world record and whether visualising a result really works, Claudia Winkleman admitting she was too nervous to enjoy her own chat show, FTSE 100 bosses on 130 times the average wage, and the rather uncomfortable evidence about money and happiness. We finish on hope, and why it works better than fear when you are trying to talk to people.

CONCEPT OF THE WEEK

Mirror neurons. Peter is sceptical that there is one dedicated neuron sitting there copying other people, but the brain scan evidence is solid: watch someone do something and your own brain lights up in ways that echo what they are doing. It is a good part of why humans learn so well by watching, and a reminder that we are social animals whether we like it or not.

THE TRIPLE T

The 5-4-3-2-1 technique, for when you are stressed or overwhelmed. Sit still and work through your senses. Five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste. The point is the attention rather than the senses. We have very little conscious control over our heart rate or our breathing, but we can choose where to point our attention, and doing that on purpose settles everything else down. If you lose your place halfway through, start again at five. That is part of the exercise.

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Website: https://www.experiencepodco.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033Qpocb5a1TC3KNyN7Ypt
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/experience/id6791528666

Full show notes and transcript: https://www.experiencepodco.com/episodes/ep1-what-number-10-does-to-you.html
Concept of the Week explained, Mirror neurons: https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/mirror-neurons.html