When I was in high school, my father was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. A tumor was growing in his thymus, which rests directly on top of the heart. In the 90s, removing that gland was delicate and risky. Luckily, a brilliant thoracic surgeon shepherded him back to health.

The doctor was also quite overweight—so much that he needed to make a larger than usual incision to use his hands during surgery. No one would confuse him with the picture of health, and he died at 65.

Twenty-five years later, a major influencer tweeted, “I think it’s fair to ask if the MD or scientist or public health official saying to do X or not do Y looks and sounds healthy and vital. I avoid going to a dentist with bad teeth.”

It’s a reasonable argument; someone who won’t take the medicine they prescribe raises questions. But it slides quickly into something else: the idea that all finance influencers should be rich, fitness influencers ripped, and happiness influencers rosy. There I disagree, in part because of the man who saved my dad’s life. It’s easy to equate the way a person looks or lives with the validity of their claims. When it comes to science, that gets things backwards.

I’ve promoted two books, each time joining lots of people on lots of podcasts. Both circuits were packed with geeky, delightful conversations and curious, capable hosts. They were also different. In 2019, I huddled in sound booths, no camera in sight. In 2024, I sat in minimalist, multicamera studios under impeccable lighting. A lot of the hosts were surprisingly hot. I called into one podcast, haggard from travel in a dim Manhattan hotel room, not realizing that the host was a former male model. The split screen turned out unfavorably for me.

More than that, the conversations changed. In 2019, interviewers treated me like an ambassador for the science in my book. They did that in 2024, too, but were more inclined to (1) ask how I used this research to make my life amazing, (2) mention things they do to ensure their lives are amazing, and (3) ask how listeners could use the science I talked about to make their lives amazing.

I love the third question, because psychology research offers a vast number of ideas for how to live better. But we must remember it is a science of averages. If you are going to live 400 lifetimes, I could confidently tell you several things that would make most of those lives a bit better. Barring reincarnation, I can’t offer any guarantees. You are a sample size of 1, your life a hurricane of circumstances, genes, and factors no scientist could fully understand.

So am I. Based on things I’ve learned from research, I strike up more conversations, run more, and take shorter vacations more often. I also overdose on screentime, get snippy when my kids argue, and eat way too many desserts on the weekend. I don’t think any of that should interest anyone very much. I’m a source of information, not a role model.

In memory research, source confusion means remembering something but not where you learned it. Public science has developed the opposite problem: we think too much about the person sharing information, and too little about what they’re telling us.

Social relationships build trust, but so do parasocial ones. After someone flashes across your scroll or pops into your headphones many times, they become familiar and eventually feel like authorities. There’s nothing wrong with having favorites! I laugh along with podcast hosts like they’re friends just out of frame. And a review of 13 studies found that parasocial relationships with science podcasters track people’s interest and trust in research—a wonderful thing.

The problem is that those studies, and listeners, often blur trust in science with trust in the host themselves. When people anchor on a charismatic figure, they are more likely to accept that person’s ideas uncritically, confusing a source they like with good information. This produces perverse incentives for science communicators. They can grow more and earn more if they present themselves as role models, using their lives as advertisements for the ideas (and, too often, products) they share.

In the Old Testament, people flock to King Solomon for his wise advice, but he appears unable to take it, becoming so obsessed with wealth and power that he left his kingdom on the brink of destruction. Many of us exhibit “Solomon’s paradox,” making better decisions for other people than we do for ourselves. One merciful corollary: just because we wouldn’t emulate someone, it doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them. And the fact that someone is thriving doesn’t mean they have much to teach us.

Richard Branson wakes up every morning at 5am and appears to live fabulously. He also drinks about 20 cups of tea per day. Should you do the same? He doesn’t think so, and recently worried that his routine might be “adding to the noise” around how people must live to be successful. “You need to find a routine that works for you,” he concluded.

That sounds like great advice, but then again, we shouldn’t trust it just because Branson has his own island. And you shouldn’t trust me because I have a PhD. Science can be a wonderful light along our path, but the people who tell us about it shouldn’t matter nearly as much as the data. Plus, most of us don’t make for great content. As my kids will tell you, I’m pretty boring.

Application season is here! Junior researchers around the world are considering mentors, departments, and universities—each one offering a different possible future, and even a different future self. You might be one of these people, and might have questions. Which programs are a good fit for you, and how can you maximize your chances of getting in?

Twenty-two (!) years ago I stumbled through this process. I had very little guidance, wrote an awful research statement, and got rejected from all but one program. Thankfully, all it takes is one. I got lucky.

Pretty much since then, I’ve been working with other people—first in my mentors’ labs and now in my own—to help them do a better job applying than I did. A couple of years ago, I noticed my advice was getting repetitive. Rather than deciding I was getting boring in middle age, I interpreted this as meaning that I’ve developed consistent opinions based on all this experience.

Almost all the people I was talking to about these tips were in elite psychology programs. They had access to the “hidden curriculum” of unwritten rules, norms, and signals that people like me use decide who will succeed in this mysterious world.

It would be great to unhide that curriculum. So, five years ago I teamed up with alumni and members of my lab to assemble some of our tips. Now that I have a Substack, I’m posting an updated version of our guide so that anyone can access the insights we’ve collected over the years… and so I can stop giving the same advice over and over again.

Members of my lab have successfully applied to business schools and clinical programs, but my expertise lies mostly in social psychology. Hence, my advice is most tuned towards those.

More broadly, these tips might only be useful in certain contexts, for certain people, or they might not be useful at all. I don’t know! What follows simply reflects my experience, but I hope it can be useful. Applying to grad school can be scary, but it can also be fun and meaningful, and connect you to a world of thoughtful, generous people.

Most of all, thank you to Dean Baltiansky, Ryan Carlson, Marissa Clark, Wicia Fang, Isabella Kahhale, Eric Neumann, Erik Nook, Marianne Reddan, and Emma Templeton for providing input.

BEFORE YOU APPLY

Psychology PhD programs are hugely competitive. As you begin the application process, be sure to keep that in mind as you set your expectations, and try out some preemptive self-compassion.

If your application doesn’t work out, that does not mean you are not a good scientist, scholar, or thinker. Another year of research experience—for instance, in a post-bac RA position—can help you deepen your skillset, sharpen your interests, and emerge an even stronger candidate in the next cycle. What’s more, data suggest that early set-backs make for stronger scientists in the long run!

Which program / school / advisor is right for me?

Your search should begin by identifying at least 10 mentors whose labs you’d be happy working in. But how? There are countless people doing all sorts of research all around the world. How can you narrow down your search and find people who “fit?”

It’s tempting to start with any number of external parameters—a university’s name brand, a professor’s citation count, a program’s reputation. I suggest starting with yourself instead. Fit ultimately boils down to finding a place that connects with, nurtures, and develops your deepest interests and values.

Try writing a short “pre-statement”—nothing formal, more like a diary entry—that lays out in 2-3 paragraphs what you love about psychology, what has inspired you most, and who you’d like to become as a scientist. This note can become a sort of north star as you look for advisors. Is there someone whose work inspired you, or who embodies an approach to science you want to cultivate in yourself? Put them at the top of your list. Keep coming back to these questions as you broaden your search.

There are lots of ways to broaden. You can browse professional society websites and listservs, such as the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) site, which includes a job board and whose listserv sends frequent updates about new opportunities. Even if these listings aren’t for PhD positions, they’ll give you a sense of which labs are hiring. You can also search Google Scholar, Claude, or ChatGPT for terms related to your interest, restricting results to the last year to see who’s working on what you care about. Finally, you can go through conference programs (here’s one for SANS 2026) to see what people in the field are excited about.

Once you’ve identified Principal Investigators who seem like a potential fit, you should read their recent papers and browse their CV to learn more about their science. But you might also be interested in learning about them as potential advisors, and as people! Check out their online footprint. See if you can see your prospective advisor in action talking about ideas—on LinkedIn, Substack, TED talks, podcast interviews, and so forth.

Every advisor is different, but there are still some dimensions that can sometimes separate them. One of these is seniority. When they start their first jobs, junior faculty members tend to have few lab members and lots of time / energy to invest in each one. They are also eager (or, if you’re me, mega-anxious) to be prolific in the face of the tenure process. This invests them heavily in the productivity of their first students. You’re more likely to get lots of their attention.

Tenured senior faculty members tend to be more spread thin, for instance with committee work, editorial jobs, and society leadership positions. They also tend to have larger labs, meaning that each person might get less attention. That said, they might also have more leeway to choose their own research path. And when it comes time to publish, well-known senior faculty tend to have an easier time landing papers (Note: I am not condoning such bias and think double blind review is great).

As you can see, there are some pros and cons of having an advisor who is either junior or senior. Again, you can return to your pre-statement to think about which type of advisor fits with you as you pursue your training.

How can I learn more about an advisor I’d like to work with?

When you find an advisor you think might be a fit, go to their lab website and read their latest papers; if they have a research page, browse that to learn about their current projects. Take a look at what their students are studying, and whether they have published as well. Increasingly, PIs are also publishing their lab manuals (here’s ours), which can give you a sense of the culture they have built.

You can also reach out to members of a potential advisor’s lab, either at this stage or after you are accepted (see below) to ask what it’s like to work with that person and in their department. Current graduate students are the ones living the life you are contemplating; their present might uncannily resemble your future.

Should I email a potential advisor?

It’s totally fine to email a potential advisor, especially to learn whether they are considering grad students (but check first to see if their website already answers this question!). That said, you should keep a couple of things in mind:

(1) Be brief and specific. Advisors are probably fielding LOTS of inquiry emails. If yours is the length of an autobiography and research statement combined, it might not get read. That said, you should also make clear why you are interested in this advisor. A vague and general inquiry with the advisor’s name copy-pasted in (sometimes in a different font than the rest of the email!) might not work. Here’s a format that splits this difference:

a. Greeting and clear purpose for the email (e.g., inquiring about whether an advisor is taking students)

b. Short paragraph on your interests

c. Short paragraph on why their interests and lab resonate with you

d. Conclusion with possible inquiry

(2) You can request a meeting, but don’t expect one. Many students request meetings with potential advisors prior to applying, and some advisors take those meetings. Others—including me—don’t. This is because of the time it would take to meet with dozens of folks, but also because such meetings introduce inequality to the application process. Oftentimes, the people who know to ask for them skew privileged, and getting face time with a faculty member increases their advantage even further. If an advisor doesn’t want to meet, don’t take it personally—they might be trying to promote equity or avoid burnout. And if you request a meeting, I’d advise not doing so in a pushy or presumptuous way.

(3) Try old fashioned typing. Large language models can be a wonderful tool for brainstorming and editing, and research. That said, I strongly recommend actually typing the first draft of your notes to potential advisors—and, later, your research statement. This is for two reasons. First, writing is a gym for the mind, an opportunity for you to think, ideate, and organize yourself. You could ask a robot to lift weights on your behalf, but that would defeat the purpose. Second, AI flattens writing, including in college entrance exams. At least for now, as a reader it’s easy to tell when someone has used it to generate their ideas, which does not impress.

THE GRADUATE RESEARCH STATEMENT

You’ve found advisors / programs to which you’d like to apply, and now it’s time to write the most important two pages of the year: your graduate research statement. Prepare to spend a significant amount of time on it! If you have PhD student colleagues or friends, consider asking them for their statements as examples (but again, don’t push or presume). As you dive into the process, here are some ideas to consider.

Don’t be afraid to make your statement personal

The statement is most often the first piece of information through which potential advisors will get to know what you’ve done and want to do, how you think, but also what drives you towards a life in this field. This is hopefully top of mind for you as you apply—especially if you’ve written a “pre-statement” as described above—but many applicants think writing about themselves will seem unprofessional.

It can be the opposite! Especially when personal narrative (i) showcases your skill as a writer, and (ii) provides a compelling narrative into the topic of your research. Take this example from Emma Templeton (now a professor at UChicago!), whose brilliant research revolves around social connection and conversation. Emma’s draft began with a personal anecdote connected to her interests. That said, it took a bit of time for that connection to crystalize. Here’s an early draft of her statement (note: this and all excerpts shared with the writers’ permission):

Through feedback, Emma was able to clarify the connection between this anecdote and her research interests. In a later draft, in which an authentic anecdote quickly brings the reader into Emma’s question: why do we underestimate the joy of talking to strangers?

The revised statement immediately gets the reader excited about the work, and it also introduces them to Emma and her curiosity-driven approach to science. It lets her shine through the page. Consider letting yourself shine in your statement, too. Your passion and interest should be the center of your application process, guiding you to potential programs and advisors. It should also be the heart of your introduction to them.

Honor the narrative

Not every statement needs to start with or include personal narratives, but they all need some narrative. Any good piece of science writing needs plot and structure—often, the plot is a mystery we’re trying to solve. It’s important that you honor that narrative. One way of doing so is ensuring that you build it in a linear fashion, through a strong and simple story. Along the way, take the perspective of the reader. Assume that reader is smart and interested but doesn’t know what you do. As you revise, ask yourself: are they with me? What have I not told them that they need to know?

Dean Baltiansky’s important work surrounds inequality. Here’s his first draft:

Although succinct, the opener here might leave the reader with questions—do people really accept inequality? Why would interpersonal tendencies and worldviews matter for this? I asked Dean to slow down and bring the reader along with him more gently. In a later draft, he does:

Notice how he now introduces the scope of the problem and helps the reader understand his central premise more clearly.

Narrative doesn’t matter only at the beginning of your statement. You should be able to see the thread of your story unfold through each part of the document. One exercise to see if you’re doing this: for each paragraph you write, ask yourself: what does this contribute to the central story of the statement? If you can’t answer that, you might consider (i) doing more to make the relationship of that section to the central story crystal clear, or (ii) cutting the paragraph altogether.

Don’t overstuff your statement

Related to the above is THE SINGLE MOST COMMON MISTAKE I SEE IN GRADUATE STATEMENTS… candidates overstuffing them with too much information. This happens at every level. Perhaps most often, applicants will use their statement to describe every project they’ve ever been part of, every skill they’ve ever learned, and every award they’ve ever won.

This is not just unnecessary, it’s counterproductive. Prospective advisors will read your CV and statement, and these two documents should not do the same work! Your CV provides us a list of what you’ve done. The statement should show us how you think.

These are fundamentally different goals, and using the statement for the wrong one can ruin it. Too often, I’ve seen statements that describe seven or eight different research / volunteering / academic experiences, meaning each gets very little space. I learn the applicant has done very impressive things—run hundreds of subjects, or performed an intricate analysis—but I understand very little about why they did it, what they learned, or what it means. The result is prose confetti.

Two pages is not a lot of space, and many candidates are anxious to get as much into it as they can. I urge you to let go of that anxiety and focus instead on creating the best narrative you can. Oftentimes, people in my lab have produced statements that describe two or three research experiences. This choice affords them space to do two things (i) describe the work in a more thoughtful, detailed way, and (ii) make sure they are connecting that work to their overall narrative.

Here’s an example from the wonderful researcher Isabella Kahhale, whose work focuses on at-risk populations. In an early draft of her statement, she described one of our collaborations briefly:

This intrigues the reader, but does not explain Isabella’s role in the project and the impact of that role as much as it could. What is the core result? How did she produce it? How does she interpret it? What implications could it hold for criminal justice?

In a later draft, she gives this work room to breathe by cutting other threads from the statement. Notice that the follow-up study is also cut, but (at least for me) not missed, as the reader now gets a much richer picture of Isabella as a scientist and thinker:

Don’t overstuff your sentences

The rush to say as much as possible as quickly as possible also leads applicants to overstuff prose at a micro-level—often jamming a paragraph’s worth of information into single sentences. This, too, is counterproductive. A sentence full of intricate twists and turns can toss a reader off the side of its road, and leave them with whiplash, too. Practically, this can mean a reader becomes confused, disinterested, or both.

There are two key signs that I use to detect an overstuffed sentence. The first is long subordinate clauses. These often pack in a sentence worth of information before the actual point of the sentence even begins! And can impose working memory load on readers. Here’s an example from Isabella’s draft statement:

The text in purple is a subordinate clause, but really deserves its own sentence. It relates a core finding, and the following clause makes a fundamentally different point about the human side of Isabella’s work and interests. Here’s a revision:

Notice how this pacing allows you as a reader to digest each point, which teach us about Isabella’s important research as well as the values that undergird it.

The other telltale sign you’re overstuffing your sentences is long, baroque noun phrases. In general, noun phrases should be short, punchy, and intuitive, quickly getting us to the action in a sentence. In statements, they often expand, like The Blob, to take over almost all of it. This happens in almost every statement I’ve read—very much including my own. Here’s an example from Dean’s early draft.

The two highlighted pieces of prose are each a noun phrase, but they are long, vague, and hard to parse. They make the reader do a lot of unnecessary work. Dean ended up cutting this section from his statement (wisely un-stuffing his statement!), but imagine an alternative here:

“I studied how people’s motives and thoughts shape what they feel…”

Not only does this save a bunch of space, but it also makes the sentence human. The protagonist becomes the applicant, rather than an abstraction.

Write simply, about people and their experiences.

This brings me to another point on prose. Scientific writing can and should still be good writing! In psychology, we have an unfair advantage. We don’t need to tell gripping stories about mRNA or quarks. Even though people can write very gripping stories about both, we in the behavioral sciences have the unfair advantage of telling people about themselves. Few things are more naturally interesting than insight into human experience and action.

Too often, academics bury those interesting stories in mountains of jargon, passive voice, and run-on sentences. Especially early in one’s career, this sort of “academese” can feel important. You might think jargon-y writing proves you are credentialed and well-read. You probably are! But unnecessarily complex prose, if anything, hides those strong qualities, by frustrating, alienating, and boring readers.

I urge you to write about people and their experiences whenever possible. Use language that is spare, active, and concrete. Write brief sentences. Vary your pace and structure, such that the reader can enjoy the rhythm of what they’re reading along with its content. Always remember the golden rule of editing: Use fewer words.

There are some great principles for avoiding academese. If you want to further audit your writing for clarity, try two things. First, read it out loud to yourself. Does the writing sound like something you would say? If not, you might want to make it more conversational. Second, read it to someone from a different field than yours altogether. Do they understand—at least in the broad strokes—what you’re about as a scientist? If not, ask where they got lost, and consider simplifying or re-pacing those sections.

Outline—both before and after writing

Early in your process—in the “pre-statement,” it’s fine to write from a stream of consciousness. But as you move closer to the real thing, you want to ensure you’re using every paragraph wisely. I encourage you to outline your statement not once, but at least twice. Before you write, map out what you’d like each paragraph to do. This is where you can take a 10,000-foot view of the overall narrative and ensure it coheres.

The part people often neglect, though, is to write a reverse outline after you have a complete draft. This is especially helpful if you’re running into overstuffing issues, as 100% of the draft statements I’ve read do. For each paragraph of what you’ve written, write a “headline,” capturing the thesis of that paragraph. String all of those headlines together. Do they still tell the same story you set out to tell? Do they build cleanly on one another? If not, you might consider trimming some of those paragraphs altogether.

Customize where it makes sense

Advisors understand that most applicants are writing several statements, and don’t expect each one to be fully tailored to them. That said, it’s wise to devote some time towards the end of your statement to describe why you are a strong fit for the department to which you’re applying.

At a broad level, this should flow naturally from the core narrative of your statement, which should tell the story about you as a scientist. After describing who you are and where you’ve been, tell the reader where you want to go, and how that destination is a match with your potential advisor(s).

More specifically, it’s a good idea to call out a potential primary advisor and spend a fair amount of time (2-4 sentences) discussing what you might do with them. Here I suggest a “goldilocks” level of specificity. Show you understand their work, but don’t go as far as to propose a single, highly detailed collaboration, which might not be in line with their current interests. After this, spend a sentence or two describing how you might work with other people in that department, and—if relevant—how pieces of the overall culture (e.g., a focus on open science or inclusion) fit your values.

THE INTERVIEW

Congratulations! You’ve been invited to a campus interview. You are most of the way there. Interviews are exhausting, nerve-wracking, and—in an ideal world—fun as well. Here are a few thoughts on how you might prepare, and the visit itself.

Read beyond your prospective lab

You should certainly read up on the work of your prospective advisor(s) and lab(s), but you’ll be talking with other faculty members around a prospective department as well. You don’t need to know all about everyone’s work, but it’s helpful to know a little. One strategy is to look at the faculty with whom you’re interviewing, and at least skim two of their papers: (i) their most cited, and (ii) the one that’s most interesting to you. This will give you a sense of their scientific contributions, but also give you some material for an engaging and connected conversation with them.

Practice out loud

You are likely to receive a few key questions / prompts multiple times. Details will vary, but common ones include:

· Tell me about a project you worked on, your role, and what you learned.

· Tell me about a research setback you’ve encountered and how you responded to it.

· What projects or ideas are you excited to pursue in graduate school?

· What got you interested in this field in the first place?

If you have succinct, clear, confident answers to all of these, you’ll likely have a more positive experience interviewing. Consider practicing out loud! It can feel strange running repeated “elevator pitches” in your room, but actually having a sense of what you’re going to say, and how it feels to say it, is wise. Far from making you seem rote, it can help you feel more comfortable in the room, and ready to move quickly into a conversation rather than stumbling through a long and winding monologue.

For what it’s worth, I still practice every talk and lecture at full volume. I think this is good for my students, and good for my kids, who get to make fun of me several times a month.

You are interviewing them, too

It’s easy to get caught up in how potential future advisors / colleagues / peers see you, but remember that this is probably the best chance you’ll have to learn about them, and whether this is really where you want to spend the next 5+ years. Keep an open mind and open eyes. Observe how people think, how they interact, and the lab and department’s general feel.

Just as you prepare answers to questions, prepare key questions that you’d like others to answer for you. Is it how often labs collaborate across areas, or departments? How closely an advisor works with lab members? How the department creates an inclusive climate that works for everyone? How they reward and value open and reproducible science? Asking thoughtful questions will not only help you learn, but also signals that you are considering a department seriously, and says a lot about what matters to you.

Be authentic

Your search and your statement have been tuned to show you—what you care about, how you think, and the scientist / academic you want to be. Don’t stop now! Represent yourself honestly and transparently, rather than trying to be who you think others want you to be. People can often see through this. Even if they can’t, you’ll be part of this community for a long time, and should ensure it truly matches you.

Everyone matters

Applicants often focus on their conversations with faculty members, and those matter. But don’t neglect your conversations with students, RAs, and staff either. I for one look for students who my students see as a great colleague and potential collaborator.

They’re not your competition, they’re your network

Interactions with your fellow interviewees can be awkward, especially if you are both interested in the same lab, and especially if that lab can admit fewer students than are being interviewed.

It’s tempting to see these interactions as a zero-sum competition, but I urge you to think differently. You might not all get into the same labs, but oftentimes you will end up at many of the same interviews. You might get into different programs and do complementary work. These are your future colleagues, co-presenters, co-authors (and maybe reviewers). If you support and cheer each other on, they can be your future friends, too. To me, that’s been one of the most valuable parts of entering this field.

Bring snacks

If you’re anything like me, it’s hard to eat when you’re nervous. Bring some snacks (protein bars are a life saver) so you can get sustenance in a pinch.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT DEPARTMENT FOR YOU

You got in… to more than one department. Congratulations again! Take some time to brush off your shoulder.

That said, you now face a monumental choice. For many people in my lab, it’s been an agonizing one. Where will they live? Which culture will they join? Which questions will they ask? Who will they become?

These choices are usually impossible to make in any simple way, but here are a few things to keep in mind.

You can take your advisor for a test drive

Interviews are weird conversations, nothing like the ones advisors and advisees actually have on a regular basis. In an interview, you might talk about yourself and them at the most “big picture” level, but in practice you’ll be brainstorming the details of projects, designs, and analyses. In an interview, you might ask about their advising style, but not see it in action. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, talking about an advising relationship is like dancing about architecture. To understand, you need to experience it.

One way to do this is to ask them for a “test drive” advising meeting. Bring them a project idea, or question about your professional development. Brainstorm, plan, or seek advice. This will give them a chance to show, not tell, how they advise.

Think more about yourself than your advisor

It can be awkward thinking about declining an offer. Will you be judged by that potential advisor? Will you burn a bridge? If possible, try to turn down the volume on these concerns. Advisors have many students over the course of a career, but you will probably only go to grad school once. It’s your life path in question, not theirs. Almost every advisor I’ve ever talked with feels this way—their ultimate goal is not to “get” a student, but to have that student go wherever is right for them. And if an advisor doesn’t feel that way, you almost certainly don’t want to work with them anyways.

Talk with students in your prospective lab

You can talk all you want with a prospective advisor, but you are not considering their job; you’re considering their students’ job. If you haven’t already, this is the time to ask those students about their experience. This is the time to ask for candor—about the advisor, lab and department culture, and so forth.

Focus on culture

Beyond research fit, advisor style, and university prestige, look out for the broader culture of a lab and department. Culture is an emergent and sometimes fuzzy property, but it matters. Look for cues about how collaborative and open (or competitive and closed) labs and individuals are. One clue is the extent to which professors and graduate students co-author papers and grants together, as well as how much time they spend together outside of work.

It’s better to ask than to regret

This is the time in the process when you should ask about anything and everything that matters to you. Grad school is a long journey, with plenty of stress, strain, and setbacks. It’s important you take care of yourself and look out for your interests.

You might think it’s rude to inquire about how much research funding a lab has, or about how a program’s stipend compares to local rent and living expenses. It’s not! These things matter. So do other questions. How does a lab / department foster work-life balance and support trainee mental health? What sorts of childcare support is available? How open are the faculty to trainees who want to explore non-academic careers?

All these questions are above board—and if someone responds badly to you asking, that is also a strong signal, too. I for one am happy when prospective students ask them; it increases the chances that if they join my lab, they will be making an informed decision that ultimately supports their well being.

IN SUM

I hope these thoughts have been helpful to you. Let me reiterate that they represent just one perspective, based on one (very lucky and now privileged) experience in academia. You should learn from as many people as you can during this process.

Applications can be daunting. The bad news is that it’s probably just the first of many daunting steps. Academia is full of evaluation, uncertainty, and failure. The good news is that at its best it’s also full of intellectual freedom, curious exploration, and supportive community. In my experience, one key to persevering through the bad pieces is savoring the good ones—and especially learning from the wonderful people that come to this field to wonder, together, about how human beings work.

Good luck!

The history of technology is, in a way, a story of people making themselves obsolete. “Computer,” and “calculator” were jobs before turning into objects. Obsolescence can be a rocky process. When the Belgian town of Verviers installed electric streetlamps, lamplighters—whose livelihood entailed igniting and snuffing out gas lamps—promptly smashed them. It also works from the outside in. Older inventions, from hammers to wheat threshers, replaced our brawn. Newer ones, like GPS navigation, replace rudimentary parts of our brain, freeing it to do other things.

Now, the world is suffused with a technology that can write (mediocre) novels, hack complex security systems, and solve vexing “Erdos problems” in mathematics. Automation is coming for more of us than ever, which forces a new question: what parts of us do we want automated?

Most of us wouldn’t trade places with a 19^th century lamplighter and don’t crave a return to handwashing underwear. Some of us want to produce art, novels, and mathematical proofs on our own, but many are fine with handing off these forms of intellectual work to machines as well. In fact, the very presence of AI causes people to think less, the same way that the presence of a car causes us to walk less.

Researchers call this “cognitive surrender,” and it has already produced some worrying patterns. A recent study of more than 370,000 college essays found that in the years after AI became widely (let’s call them AGPT), students became more verbose but produced fewer unique ideas than in the years BGPT. People engage less critical thinking and retain less information when working with AI as well.

Whether you are relieved or horrified at the idea of handing over cognition to machines, you should know it’s happening, so you can at least choose whether and how cognitive surrender occurs in your life. But there’s a second form of transfer I think fewer people understand: relational surrender, the abdication of human care, connection, and love to non-human entities.

We are a wordy species; relationships form, build, and break one conversation at a time. We cannot waltz, hike, or touch a language model, but it’s thrilled to talk with us until dawn. By now a phalanx of studies show how good chatbots are at mimicking—or even surpassing—human empathy and understanding. Their inexhaustible, sometimes cloying support is manna for anyone who needs an ear.

That need grows all the time. “Passive sensing” of audio from people’s everyday lives reveals that between 2005-2019, people spoke an average of 338 fewer words to each other per day, or 120,000 words per year. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is about that long. Imagine reading it aloud to a friend, and that’s the amount of conversation you might have given over to silence this century.

Like a comforting gas, AI has expanded into the vacuums of our shrinking social lives. New evidence suggests that—like cognitive surrender—it also makes people less likely to point effort towards other humans. In one study, people who interacted with sycophantic chatbots for three weeks felt supported and understood. They were also less likely to turn to family and friends with their problems, in part because it seemed like person-to-person conversation would be too much work. A major report published last month documents a similar pattern in workplaces. Thirty percent of workers said that since the introduction of AI, they felt more anxious talking with colleagues, and less capable of handling conflict.

If we surrender our social needs to AI, we also give up on people who do the same. In yet another set of studies, people who learned that someone had talked with ChatGPT about their problems were less willing to empathize with that individual themselves. Why jump in the ocean to save a drowning swimmer if the cyborg lifeguard has reached them already?

Ultra-processed foods give our palates exactly what they want, hacking ancient human preferences without nourishing us. Likewise, offloading relationships to AI can be emotionally delicious: all compliments and no judgment. But there’s at least some evidence that these are empty calories. After interacting with chatbots for three weeks, people feel lonelier than if they interacted with a random human stranger.

It will take years to understand the dangers of relational replacement, and I fear that by the time we survey the damage it will be everywhere.

Then again, it also presents an opportunity. An invention this profound forces us to ask a question no dishwasher, vaccine, or jet ever could: what are people for? Given the chance to automate every piece of ourselves but one, what piece would we save?

Work on “values affirmation” provides a clue. People around the world have been asked to rank the values that matter most to them, such as creativity, self-determination, humor. In nearly every case, people prize relationships with friends and family and benevolence towards others at the top of the list.

When scientists ask people what people are for, they answer: we are for each other. If there’s just one thing we keep for ourselves, maybe it should be that.

A few years ago, a micro-genre swept social media. An influencer rises, pre-dawn, to plunge themselves in ice water, journal while wearing an infrared mask, or iron their sheets. By the time us lazy slugs trudge downstairs for our first coffee, they have won the day. Over time, they reach a mountaintop at which we can only squint.

Watch enough of these videos and you might notice something missing: other people.

The modern pursuit of well-being has become lonelier and more crowded at the same time. In 1980, the average American spent about $900 in personal health expenses; in 2024, that figure soared above $13,000, more than triple the cost even when adjusting for inflation. In 2018, 44% of Americans said they avoided medical care when sick or injured for fear of the cost. With the rise of apps such as One Medical, more people experience healthcare as a revolving cast of doctors and nurses instead of a trusted professional who knows their history.

When people feel unprotected, they turn inward. Abandoned by our institutions, Americans left them in return. Trust in hospitals and doctors plummeted from more than 70% in 2020 to 40% in 2025. Millions instead are navigating a forest of influencers, companies, and brands. These voices also distrust experts and exhort us to do our own research. For many, that “research” means scrolling 60-second clips from 3-hour videos in which talking heads offer tidy recipes for better living.

Americans now spend four billion dollars a year on elective laboratory tests and ten times that on supplements. There is nothing wrong with taking health into our own hands. But underneath this DIY explosion lies a philosophy that deserves more attention. I’ll call it wellness libertarianism.

Like the political kind, wellness libertarianism treats the self as sovereign. We are each free to pursue our own idiosyncratic path to health, with little regard to medical standards or public health. Vaccination, for instance, becomes an individual choice, even if that gives measles an unlikely comeback. We are also each responsible for our own well-being. If you are unhappy, sick, or dying, you should have spent more time in the sauna, injected yourself with a different peptide, or avoided seed oils. We are each sole proprietors, given the work of doctor, therapist, and nutritionist. Physician, heal thyself.

None of this is new. In 1980, the political scientist Robert Crawford coined the term “healthism” to describe a growing middle-class obsession with personal well being as the primary marker of worth and character:

Back then, healthism looked like aerobics classes, bran cereal, and transcendental meditation, but it remained a side show. Now, traditional medicine is on the ropes. The US Secretary of Health has claimed Tylenol causes autism and recommended “raw milk shooters” for vitality. The Make America Healthier Again movement casts aside evidence from the NIH and FDA—the government bafflingly rejecting its own knowledge. Wellness libertarianism has taken center stage.

Once more: there is nothing wrong with working on ourselves. If life is the sum of our choices, why not make better ones? But as with any health-related decision, it’s worth paying attention to side effects.

First, wellness libertarianism inspires a remarkably self-centered moral vision. Fitness, health, and personal joy stand in for character, worth, and meaning. Each body is a temple, with a congregation of one. If all that naval gazing isn’t uncomfortable on its own, it also “frees” us, in true libertarian fashion, of responsibility for each other.

This elides the vast, non-personal factors that shape health. The poorest 1% of American men die 14.6 years younger than the richest 1%. Wellness libertarianism asks: why isn’t a poor person doing more to lower their cortisol and strengthen their core? It does not ask: what makes it difficult for poorer people to survive, and how could the rest of us change that?[1] That second, harder question is best answered through health policy, and underneath that a cohesive vision of what we owe each other as citizens. When that vision falls apart, it’s natural to retreat into ourselves instead.

This self-centeredness bleeds into mental health, and even how we measure it. The World Happiness Report[2] ranks countries by life satisfaction each year, triggering regular conniptions about American misery and fascination over Nordic people’s long residency on cloud nine. But look closer. The WHR’s primary measure is the “Cantril Ladder,” in which people compare their lives to the best and worst possible versions they could imagine:

If ladder-climbing strikes you as corporate, you’re in good company. People associate the Cantril scale with wealth, power, and competition. When asked about happiness itself, they talk more about family, friends, harmony, and peace.[3]

Our measures of wellness are shot through with zero sum competition. By trying to optimize them, we invisibly commit ourselves to these values. This reveals the second, bigger side effect of wellness libertarianism: it gets wellness backwards, ironically making it impossible to achieve.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill was so precocious that he suffered a midlife crisis at the age of 20. By then, his godfather, Jeremy Bentham, had steeped Mill in utilitarianism, an old-fashioned sort of optimizing. Bentham believed we could quantify happiness and twiddle life’s dials like engineers to make it rise. Mill agreed until he didn’t. A crushing thought experiment overtook him. “It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized… would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’”

Mill concluded that Bentham’s quest was backwards: “ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” Research reinforces this point. For more than a decade, the psychologist Iris Mauss has studied the “happiness paradox.” People who most crave happiness are less likely to feel it, more likely to suffer from depression and loneliness, and less tolerant of other people’s distress. Induce someone to want joy, Mauss finds, and they will worry they don’t have enough, and end up with less.

The same may go for health. Millions of people track their sleep, but this has led to a wave of “orthosomnia,” an obsession with achieving perfect scores for the night. Patients pour into clinics not because they feel tired, but because their watch tells them they’re not giving sleep their all.

Recently, the podcast host Steven Bartlett recounted a harrowing anecdote in which he drank two glasses of wine and “ruined three days” of his life. Bartlett says he slept, ate, and podcasted worse, failures dutifully tallied by wearable technology. Mill might bask in the contradiction: we have quantified and managed every part of our lives, creating versions of health, happiness, and masculinity that are breathtakingly fragile.

He would also offer an alternative. Mill exited his crisis through an anti-Bentham realization: “Those only are happy… who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness,” such as their duty to others. The same goes for peace, health, and romance. Take too tight a grip, and the thing you seek will quickly escape.

People around the world and throughout history have known this. Meditation, one of humanity’s great sources of wellness, has always been practiced in “Sanghas,” or spiritual communities, committed to improving the lives of others. Aristotle viewed eudaimonia, or flourishing, as part of politics and society. Pursuing either as an asocial practice for feeling better would be unrecognizable to previous generations.

They would be right. Disconnection is a public health disaster, but not merely because people feel lonely. Cynicism—the idea that others cannot be trusted—and anomie—the sense that our social fabric is fraying—track ill-being of all sorts, from lower life satisfaction to greater cellular inflammation and cardiovascular risk. On the other side, one of the fastest things we can do to improve mental health, physical health, and longevity is to serve others: to fix our minds and energy on something other than ourselves.

That’s the paradox Mill unearthed centuries ago. When we give up on other people, we lose ourselves. To truly optimize our well-being, we stop obsessing over it, and recover a sense of duty, camaraderie, and citizenship.

You can do this today. For just a bit, turn off your smart watch, take a break from a mindfulness app, and ignore your macros. Turn your focus towards someone else and ask how you could be a great supporting character in their story.

We can also do this as a community, and even as a nation. Compared to our peer countries, the US spends a shocking amount of money for a shockingly little amount of health. Wellness libertarianism holds that we could do better by each carving our own path to health.

We could instead take more responsibility for each other at scale. Several major analyses find that countries and states with stronger social safety nets also enjoy greater health and longevity. One estimates that if the US adopted the average level of social generosity of other wealthy democracies, Americans would live 3.77 years longer. It’s hard to imagine saunas or cold plunges will ever make that kind of difference.

[1]In a similar way, the phenomenon of “grit” took conversations about schooling in a decidedly libertarian direction—far more than its original authors intended. Telling poor students to learn perseverance is simpler, and less helpful, than examining the systems that hold them back.

[2] My colleague and I contributed to the 2025 WHR, and I think the project is phenomenal. The Cantril Ladder is likely the standard measure of life satisfaction, so my gripe is with the field, not the WHR team.

[3] No wonder collectivistic countries sometimes fall lower in happiness rankings than individualistic ones. Then again, what could be more individualistic than ranking happiness?

I recently taught a graduate seminar on Communicating Psychology to a wonderful group of PhD students in our department. Many rich conversations ensued (you can find the syllabus here for details) and we converged on some key ideas that I hope can be useful to anyone who wants to try their hand at science communication.

But, why? Most scientists don’t spend much time on outreach. Time and energy are precious. The academic community doesn’t incentivize it, and sometimes punishes it, as in “Saganizing:” when researchers who share their work outside their community are viewed less seriously within it. Over the years, two mentors I otherwise trust told me to avoid science communication because it could derail my career.

I didn’t listen, for two reasons. The first is civic. The US has entered a frightening anti-science moment. Research funding has cratered, Americans trust scientists less than just a few years ago, and vaccine denial has brought back measles. Scientists are not to blame for all this, but when taxpayers fund our work, the least we can do is tell them what we find, especially when it might help. The second is creative. Explaining old studies has a strange way of generating new ones. Some of my lab’s biggest projects started as blogposts. Outreach is a service to others and an idea engine for ourselves.

Since that paragraph surely convinced you of science communication’s “why,” let’s turn to the “how.” I’ll offer four principles, and four practical tips, all drawn from our seminar.

Principle 1. Compare yourself to the alternative, not the almighty. We began our class on communication by discussing why we don’t communicate. Students were too busy and struggled with writer’s block, but none of those barriers compared to the fear. Their central concern, by far, was that they were unqualified to educate the public. They would get something—anything—wrong, and the Internet would coil into a snake and swallow them whole.

Many of us compare ourselves to idealized standards. Do that enough and creative paralysis will set in. The class inverted that move. Instead of asking whether they were the most qualified communicator, students explored who is already talking publicly about the ideas that interest them. Influencers, media personalities, and pundits have no qualms about sharing science, often in uninformed, biased, and self-serving ways.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect holds that the least qualified people are also least aware that they are unqualified. The corollary is that doubt might be a sign of wisdom. I tend to trust people more when they worry about getting things right. In teaching the public about science, I’d bet on a smart, curious student with a touch of accuracy anxiety over a blustering talking head who never doubted themselves at all.

Principle 2. Communication is kindness. Writing is a vehicle to express what’s inside you. But science communication is, at its core, a public service, meant to educate, fascinate, and delight. As a writer, you are not the main character. You are a director, orchestrating encounters between readers, researchers, and ideas.

To tap into this, our class did some “design thinking.” This approach focuses makers on their end user. What does that person need—even if they don’t know they need it? What bothers them, and how can you help? Design thinking was originally used to build optimal products, but it turns out to be a great starting point for science communication. It clarifies what writers can offer and focuses them on the audience instead of themselves.

Principle 3. You don’t have to do it to talk about it. One of our seminar guests, the great Laurie Santos, recounted her surprising origin story with science communication. Years ago, she gave a public talk, careful to describe only her own research on monkey economics. The next speaker sauntered up and talked about loads of work other people had done, telling a more sweeping (but still accurate) story.

Laurie thought, “you can just do that? Be a ‘summarizer?’” Indeed, you can! As domain experts, researchers digest and distill research quickly. As teachers, academics are trained to convey information in clear and accessible ways. We prize the creation of knowledge, but sharing it matters, too; “summarizer” is a job description worth honoring. Laurie went on to show why. In 2018, she taught the most popular course in Yale’s three-century history. “The Science of Well-Being” grew into an online course viewed by more than 5 million learners. Laurie was not a well-being researcher, but now might be the most thoughtful, accurate, and helpful well-being Summarizer on the planet.

Principle 4. Science is a story. Psychology is in an introspective era. A decade ago, many of its classic findings proved unreliable. Hair was torn, teeth were gnashed, but there was upside: a generation of young scientists now prioritize “open science:” sharing their predictions publicly before running studies, publishing null findings, and trying very hard to not overclaim.

Doesn’t that collide with public communication, which demands we tell a glittering story and elide findings that don’t fit it? No, because the best science writing looks nothing like that. Early in the seminar, I asked students to bring in pieces that inspired them. The writers they chose, like Stephen Jay Gould, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Maria Konnikova, leaned into nuance, favoring the glittering messiness of the world over pat explanations.

Great communicators invite readers into that process. While writing my first book, I asked a personal hero of mine, Robert Sapolsky, how he squares open science with public communication. It was simple, he said: he allowed himself to become a character, especially when findings from his work upended how he had thought before. To paraphrase Robert, “the scientist who is wrong, and then surprised, and then less wrong, is a good story.”

Readers love stories. By pulling back the curtain, we show them that science is not a set of facts, but a living thing that evolves with our efforts. What could serve open science more than that?

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Principles are one thing. Creating something is an entirely different problem. Here are four tips that helped our class get moving.

Tip 1. Write a shitty first draft. Once students conquered the fear, they were met by the inertia. They stared at a blank page, and the cursor blinked back at them, asking “do you really have something to say?”

To fight back, we turned to the legendary Anne Lamott, and her essay, Shitty First Drafts, maybe the single most important piece of writing about writing I’ve encountered. According to Lamott, the best thing to do if you want to write is… to just write. Rather than mapping out every argument or agonizing over the perfect first sentence, she starts with a “down draft,” as in, “just get it down.”

In our first session, I surprised students with an automatic writing exercise. They were tasked with expressing a scientific idea, for 15 minutes, on paper, without ever stopping or slowing down. The command was: just keep producing words, the shittier the better.

Afterwards, students were surprised to find some very un-shitty passages and ideas amid the chaos. Most of all, the exercise taught them that first drafts are not sculptures; they’re blocks. Getting started on an essay or even a book simply means generating raw materials.

2. Reverse outlines are magic. Lamott’s shitty first drafts rhyme with Allen Ginsburg’s famous mantra: “first thought, best thought.” This may be true of beat poetry, jazz, and improv, but science communication demands not just thinking, but re-thinking. My favorite tool for doing so is the “reverse outline.”

People generally outline a piece before writing: crafting a bulleted blueprint for where the argument will go. Our group did the opposite: writing first drafts freely and allowing ideas to appear and morph on the page. Block in hand, we then got to sculpting. Oftentimes, by the end of a shitty first draft, students had found a succinct, precise point. This would then move to the top of their next draft. Reverse outlines allowed them to combine a creative burst of self-expression with the discipline and rigor it takes to build a strong piece of writing.

3. Psychology is about people; sentences should be, too. As psychologists, we are at an unfair advantage when it comes to sharing our work. Most people don’t know they are interested in top quarks or microbiota. They do know they are interested in people. (One trade off here is that psychological science can collide with their intuitions, but that can make the whole thing more fun.)

This is one reason I am so intolerant of jargon from our field. Yes, scientists must use complex terms to quickly share specialized knowledge among themselves. But turning our GRE word firehose on the public is careless at best, and superior gate keeping at worst. For young scholars skittish about getting anything wrong (see Principle 1), jargon is linguistic armor that protects them from uncertainty. It also protects them from most audiences.

In writing our third drafts, we used a simple fix for this. In a “sentence audit,” we grabbed lines at random from our work to dissect closely. Students discovered two common writing tics that could push readers away: long, abstract noun phrases, and overstuffed subordinate clauses.

Consider this sentence I just made up: “Because the illusion of explanatory depth makes it difficult to perceive ignorance, overconfident disagreements across our society persist.” The first half of the sentence demands enormous work from the reader: they need to learn a mouthful of a concept and remember that it makes something difficult, all before getting to what the sentence is actually trying to tell them. Who could blame them for glazing over and picking up their phone?

Instead, we wrote, whenever possible, about people. Here’s a redo of the above train-wreck. “People are often confident they understand things even when they don’t. Because of this, they can become defensive when others disagree.” Eighteen words have become 22. One sentence has become two. But now people are at the center of the argument, which is hopefully much easier on the reader.

In a past life, I was an utterly failed novelist. One of my earliest writing teachers then, the brilliant Hannah Tinti, told me that stories are like a car ride. You are driving along a cliffside. The reader—or at least their attention span—is your passenger, and they have no door or seatbelt. Your job is to make the ride gentle enough that they don’t fall to their doom. Well-paced, human sentences are a powerful way to keep them with you.

4. Elevators come in different heights. As they worked on their writing, students also considered how to get it read. We were joined by Melissa de Witte, a member of Stanford’s press office, and Cloe Sasha, a curator at TED. Both made it clear that to move ideas from our laptops to the world, we need “elevator pitches:” even shorter arguments that can get editors, journalists, and producers on board.

That said, elevators come in different heights. In a three-story building, you might have 15 seconds to get your point across. In a skyscraper, you might have two minutes. But no matter the format, a pitch needs to convey (1) a thesis, (2) why it’s important, and (3) what makes it timely or useful. Students practiced expressing big ideas in a page, a paragraph, and a sentence. If you want to share your work, I encourage you to try the same.

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Every time I teach this seminar, the landscape of communication has changed. Generative AI has flooded the world with cognitively cheap text. Short form video and Substack have decentered traditional media and flattened the communication landscape.

And still, I think some principles and practices of effective communication remain evergreen. Every writer is different, and what worked in our class might not be for you. But I hope something here might be useful to you. And if you bring science to the world, that will almost certainly be useful to someone else.

Lately, I’ve experienced a weird, fundamentally new type of forehead meter for other people’s writing. When someone sends me an email, essay, or anything in between, my meter reads “R” for robot on one side, and “H” for human on the other.

Unlike Saunders, I can’t push the meter myself, but it’s always whirring in the background. Every “it’s not X, it’s Y,” or “here’s the thing” kicks it into high gear. But over the years, the meter has sharpened. When sentences are frictionless, going down easily but conveying little, the meter kicks to the left. When there’s a bump in the logic, a crooked phrase, or even a typo, it pushes right.

I imagine generative AI has implanted this new meter into millions of us. Frequent ChatGPT users are also uncannily good detectors of robot prose. (Maybe your meter is on now, in which case: alow me to assure you this text is not atomated.)

We are all running Turing tests all the time now, producing a low-grade hum of exhaustion we might call Turing Fatigue. What does all this mental work do to us?

As far as I know, there’s no good answer to this question yet, but some work that surrounds it:

1. When people allow AI to do their writing for them, they “cognitively surrender,” engaging less deeply with ideas and retaining less information. To me, this is one reason writers should remain DIY: as a way of remaining mentally active instead of sedentary. I’ve written about that elsewhere.

2. Receiving AI writing is cognitively expensive. “AI workslop” has flooded organizations. In a major survey published last year, 40% of employees reported receiving work from their colleagues that was clearly AI-generated and said that each instance of slop cost them nearly two hours to deal with. If you’ve received a quarter-baked slide deck or memo peppered with “delves,” you know this pain.

Combine these two, and you notice a frustrating picture. Writers outsource their thinking to AI, which then sends slop to readers, who must puzzle through it. Rather than becoming more efficient, bots hand off cognitive labor from one person to another.

3. AI writing signals a lack of care. Chatbots do a terrific job of performing care. In fact, the text they produce often seems more empathic than human responses. But when readers know that text is AI-generated, they penalize it as less empathic.

My friend Anat Perry recently wrote a fantastic piece about why. According to her, human empathy signals investment. We are fragile, momentary creatures. If we’re lucky, we have a few hours of real attention to give each day. When we choose to spend it on someone, their importance to us is clear.

Slop does the opposite, which might be why AI-generated text erodes readers’ sense that a writer is competent and trustworthy.

What I think has not been studied—and which we should consider more, together—is the extra tax a person must endure when they don’t know if someone’s note, story, or brief is AI-generated or not, and their forehead meter must keep whirring. As I see it, this tax comes in multiple forms.

1. It’s tiring. When I was a kid, my dad had a sports car and a radar detector. He bragged about being able to speed with impunity, but then one day announced (I have no idea if this is true) that state troopers now had “radar detector detectors.” Presumably he might have gotten a radar detector detector detector if someone had been canny enough to market it to him.

My forehead meter as an AI-detector has sharpened over the years, but writers now know how to zhuzh up bot prose, even inserting typos to throw the meter off. This arms race takes loads of cognitive work we could be spending to exchange ideas. I feel it as a reader and professor, but can only imagine how journal editors, literary agents, and professional readers must feel.

2. It’s emotionally taxing. Imagine receiving a Mother’s Day present from your 12-year-old. It’s a birdhouse she made in shop class. Rockwell couldn’t imagine something more wholesome, but it does seem a bit too sturdy. Maybe your kid is a master carpenter in waiting? As you hang it from the Elm in your backyard, a Lowe’s price tag tumbles out of it. When you confront your daughter, she insists on having built it herself.

Turing Fatigue is cognitive, and emotional. Ultimately, as we squint and puzzle over whether text looks organic or synthetic, we are asking the writer: “do you care enough about me to have made this yourself?”

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As readers, I’m not sure there’s much we can do about Turing Fatigue, except to name it and understand when it’s here. As writers, we can do a couple of things.

First, we can have the courage to admit when we are sending people bot text. “I got you this birdhouse from Lowe’s” is not as nice a sentence as “I spent hours sawing and hammering while contemplating your many maternal sacrifices,” but at least it’s honest. Yes, readers will trust our work less and doubt our skill more if we used bots. Maybe that’s a fair tradeoff for spending less time on what we send them.

Second, if you are in fact using your body to write, make that clearer. Lean into your quirks. Weird your words and mess with your sentences: not in ways that make them confusing or opaque, but in ways that are unmistakably your own.

We each have verbal fingerprints. These can make us self-conscious, so we edit them away, smoothing our language to make it more palatable. Now, though, things have changed. Idiosyncrasies are a signature that tells the reader, quietly or not, “I am here, behind these words. I am with you and have made them for you.” An unusual angle or misplaced nail in the birdhouse, or fingerprints themselves, make the gift.

Five years and one day earlier, an influencer named Ashley Ward posted a video to social media. In it, a young woman lies in a beach chair, looking upward through gauzy sunlight. The camera zooms in on her and a voiceover proclaims, “You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because, if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by.” This was catnip to millions who felt quite passed by, locked in their homes during the early pandemic. Hashtags related to “main character energy” amassed billions of views.

Every two minutes, humanity takes more pictures than we produced in the entire 19^th century. Anyone with a phone can direct, produce, and star in their own movie. This decade is packed with solo entrepreneurs, selling aspirational personal brands decorated with products and courses. The attention economy belongs to main characters.

This is all a quiet celebration of “naïve realism:” people’s tendency to confuse their version of the world with the world, ignoring their mind’s limits and biases. Main characters leap into this cognitive trap. The self-care industrial complex encourages us to pursue wellness alone. Therapy speak, like “protecting my peace,” becomes cover for ignoring others’ needs. Chatbots flatter us and confirm our beliefs, a warm psychic bath in which we can drown doubt. We are taught, again and again, that our perspective is all that matters.

Ironically, this brings very little peace. In a sad series of studies, the psychologist Jennifer Crocker and her colleagues asked college freshmen about their social goals. Some cared most about making a good impression: showcasing their strengths and hiding their weaknesses. But the more students focused on themselves, the more lonely, depressed, and anxious they became, and anxiety in turn made students worry even more about their image.

Most of all, main character energy sacrifices one of our greatest opportunities. A century of research finds that situations mold us. Like Schrödinger’s cat, both alive and dead until someone observes it, the multiverse is packed with yous, who grew up in different towns, went to different colleges, and—most of all—spent time with different people. Your grocer, bus driver, and frenemy are your situation, changing you one interaction at a time.

You are also their situation. You don’t just go to college. You are college for someone else. You are the workplace for your colleagues and home for your family. You are surrounded by Schrödinger’s friends, who would be different if you weren’t around. Your spouse chose to be the “them” they are around you, killing off infinite possible selves in the process.

How can we honor their choices? By being supporting characters: imagining someone else as a protagonist and asking how we show up in their story. This can be humbling; you might think you’re the office comedian but show up as a bully to your introverted colleague. But being humbled is part of the point, and a source of power.

For me, this began fourteen years ago. Like many PhD students, my early career life involved lots of solo work, thinking, and ambition. I was the main character in a small, unremarkable scientific story. Then luck called and I became a professor, instantly charged with mentoring half a dozen people despite having no leadership training whatsoever.[1]

At first, I did my damnedest to bring them into my story, encouraging them to work and think like me. When they didn’t, I worried they would make it harder for me to reach tenure: every junior professor’s happy ending.

This was a colossal failure in empathy, ironic if you know what our young lab did all day. Thankfully for me, luck came a second time, in the form of a trainee brave enough to call me on my naïve realism. After much embarrassment and soul searching, it finally dawned on me: I was no longer climbing my own scientific mountain. I was a Sherpa for my students.

Since then, I’ve opened most meetings with “mini interviews” about what’s happening in my students’ lives and minds. Performance reviews start with a questionnaire about their evolving career story and how our lab can serve as a strong chapter in it. The entire group co-wrote a lab manual telling our shared story and values.

My trainees now take the lead, which brings out their best and guides our work in directions I could not have anticipated. During a career check in, a student told me she wanted to study empathy in middle schoolers. We ended up touring 7^th grade classrooms around the Bay Area and building a new intervention that encouraged kindness among students.

Most of all, being a “science Sherpa” fundamentally changed my sense of self. Rather than publishing papers or writing grants, my job is to grow people. For me, at least, this turns out to be a much more rewarding story.

I think supporting character energy should be core to leadership and mentoring, but it can be useful for any of us, in forging and keeping relationships, and in contributing what we want to others. Two exercises can help.

Run a humility check. Do you understand your toilet? Go ahead and try to explain the physics of a simple flush. If you’re like most people, this exercise will reveal startling limits to your knowledge. Most of us are surrounded by things we don’t understand, so humbling ourselves is simply a matter of looking more closely.

This is true of the social world, too. In American Pastoral, Philip Roth wrote “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.”

He’s right, and there’s nothing wrong with being wrong! The problem is when we don’t admit it, and barrel through interactions and relationships taking our assumptions as gospel. Main characters are prone to this, but supporting characters must be curious about others. You can try this through a “curiosity audit.” Before talking to someone you care about, write down all the things you don’t know about what they think, feel, want. List the struggles and triumphs they might have gone through outside of your awareness. This can bring your limits front and center, preparing you to wonder more, ask more, and better handle important interactions.

Rotate the narrative. Picture your last conversation. What does that picture look like? People remember events through different perspectives. In “field memories,” people relive events through their eyes. In “observer memories,” they zoom out, for instance seeing a conversation as a fly on the wall.

For main characters, field memories are a default (witness the deluge of videos labeled “POV” where people immerse you in their perspective). Supporting characters rotate memories and experiences like a snow globe, examining them from different angles. With distance, comes wisdom. Research finds that when people rotate their perspective, they are better able to navigate difficult situations and manage their emotions. In one striking study, couples who spent 21 minutes across a year writing about their fights from an observer perspective experienced no decline in marital satisfaction, while couples who didn’t kept drifting apart.

Supporting characters strive to be better situations for the people they care about. But in the process, they also help themselves—by escaping their self. Decades of science and millennia of wisdom traditions converge on a simple idea: people think they will thrive through selfish pursuits, when the deepest meaning comes from service to others.

Kami Rita’s humility is no accident. He practices Buddhism, a spiritual tradition with little patience for self-obsession, and naturally rotates his perspective to lift others. But just look at the view that’s gotten him.

[1] I remain unaware of any university department that includes leadership training as a matter of course for new professors, which probably contributes to the highly uneven, often toxic culture of academia. If you know any exceptions, please tell me!

This has all made me very old fashioned. Every one of my courses is held tech-free, and since 2024, exams in the Psych One Program I direct have been conducted via blue books. Yes, those same blue books you might recall with mixed emotions if you’re around my age, and which have surged in popularity during the AI explosion.

Why bother to make students write, let alone (gasp) by hand? There are many reasons, but I want to list three, which to me range from not at all convincing to vital.

1. We need to write for other people

In the before times, writing lived in the heart of a college education, in part because it was a vocational skill. The average office worker sends about 40 emails per day. Across almost every major and profession, reports must be written, ideas shared, and typing done. These thousands of words might not have inspired but still needed to be created by hands and minds.

I no longer think this is a compelling reason to make college students write, or encourage anyone else to. If most meetings could have been emails, most emails can be automated. Workers, especially from younger generations, will find little incentive for crafting artisanal, small-batch memos.

2. We need to tend our written environment

You’ve probably seen trends in online writing. Sentence fragments. Bulleted lists. Groups of three. That’s not human; it’s textual pollution.

Textual pollution represents all the way that AI writing hurts the people around us. My colleagues at Stanford find that people often pass off “AI workslop,” unbaked deliverables, gussied up by chatbots to seem sensible. Their colleagues then pay a workslop tax, having to make sense of disordered, messy thinking.

Slop doesn’t end at work. Social media overflows with posts that have the outline of something inspiring, vulnerable, or provocative, but are hollow underneath. Major television shows have been accused of generating trite plot points using AI. Scientific journals are flooded with low quality submissions.

Research finds that AI flattens human writing towards a serviceable but boring average. Those stock phrases—“the real question is,” “here’s the thing no one’s talking about,” “and honestly?” become signals, like smoke in the air, that tell everyone that no one else cares enough to slow down. They create an ambient, intellectual cynicism.

We might write, then, not because others demand it of us, but as a gift to them. People love people, and language is the best vehicle ever created for human communion. An environment that replaces this with slop makes everyone worse off. Writing from the mind is a small act of resistance to that, and an act of service to our shared environment.

I find this reason quite compelling personally, and tell it to my students, but I don’t expect them all to buy it. They might think that only chumps put in effort when others won’t. They might think the “written environment” is a precious term I made up in my nostalgia for typewriters (they would not be wrong). They might find communion outside the written word. And all of that would be absolutely fine.

3. We need to write for ourselves

Last month, two researchers named something you’ve probably seen, and maybe experienced. “Cognitive surrender” describes any time that someone allows AI to do their thinking for them. These researchers found that when given logic problems, most people who were given a chance to use AI did so. And when a bot produced the wrong answer, barely 20% noticed.

Writing is thinking. The blank page is terrifying because to fill it, we must wrangle a hurricane of thought into something ordered enough for someone else to understand. And in doing so, we come to better understand our minds, and to use them more sharply. Research finds that writing deepens critical thinking and improves memory. Writing about emotional events even reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression by helping us gain perspective.

When AI writes for us, we lose all of this. My students—or you—might protest that they still do the thinking, and merely use AI to produce output. But in many cases the struggle to put something into words is where the thinking happens, not before it. Absent the friction of putting thoughts into language, thinking dulls. In one study, students who used AI produced more scientific arguments more quickly—and almost all of them were shallower and lower in quality.

Here in San Francisco, I imagine a few people would answer this with some version of “who cares?” Soon, AI might not just be faster and more knowledgeable than us, but also have deeper scientific insights that produce greater progress than human minds can imagine. To think that the world needs human thinking might seem like vanity, or carbon-based chauvinism.

If that strange future arrives, the nature of writing might change. As workers shifted from manual to white collar labor, more people began exercising recreationally, to keep their bodies healthy despite sedentary work. AI has already allowed us to become cognitively sedentary, and that will only increase over time. But just as we must be responsible for our bodies in an era of office work, we must now keep our minds active. Writing is a gym for human thought we need now more than ever.

That’s what I tell my students, and what I hope we can all remember.

Back then I was just getting started as a musician, but already had earned tenure as a nerd. The middle of that Venn diagram was audio technology, and I would spend hours flipping through catalogs of new sound systems and subwoofers, or even better, gawking at the real thing at good old SM. Well, on my 13th birthday, my dad surprised me with a stereo system of my own.

He didn’t ask me which one I wanted, and wouldn’t have bought that one anyhow. I didn’t care. The Sony system was immediately the coolest, most advanced form of technology in my room. Green Day and Nine Inch Nails filled the air, unburdened by my mother’s complaints.

For my part, I didn’t just listen; I equalized. This system had “mega bass,” which you have to trust me sounded cutting edge at the time. And it had a series of analog switches through which a user could fine-tune treble, mid range, and (mega) bass. It turns out you can listen to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” at least 40 times in a row if you’re interested enough in how it changes as you tweak the frequencies. Sorry, mom.

Most stereos don’t have equalizers anymore (mostly because most stereos aren’t stereos anymore). That’s too bad, because an equalizer is the best metaphor I can come up with for empathy, and barely anyone under 35 ever knows what I’m talking about.

Here’s why. Empathy as scientists understand it isn’t one thing at all. It describes three ways we respond to other people’s experiences, and especially their emotions: (1) emotional empathy, vicariously sharing what others feel, (2) cognitive empathy, or thinking about what others feel and why, and (3) motivational empathy, or a desire to improve others’ well being.

You can think of these as empathy’s three frequencies. They often resonate together. In a 2021 study, Greg Depow and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of people several times a day for a week, asking how they responded to others’ emotions. Emotional, cognitive, and motivational empathy most often occurred together.

But just because two things usually follow one another, that doesn’t mean they must. Empathic frequencies have different biological roots, develop at different times in childhood, and predict different actions.

I think most people have a clumpy view of empathy. They think care means diving into someone’s muddy emotional trenches and flailing around with them. But people often don’t want that. In another 2021 study, Judith Hall and her colleagues asked people what they thought empathy was. People endorsed caring and perceptiveness, but didn’t think “anxious reactivity” (aka emotional empathy) was empathic at all. In research from my lab, college students who were high in cognitive and motivational empathy were nominated as “empathic” by their peers. Students high in emotional empathy were less likely to be seen as empathic.

Our brains naturally resonate, and we instinctively ‘catch’ each other’s feelings. That’s a beautiful legacy of evolution, but not one we need to always follow. Oftentimes, someone who’s struggling wants a beacon, not a mirror.

Second, at any moment, we can choose how we empathize, just like I fiddled with the dials on my vintage Sony. Certain forms of meditation allow people to decouple frequencies, for instance caring without taking on others’ pain. But even if you’re not the cushion sitting / inner peace type, you can still fine-tune your equalizer.

Start by seeing where your empathic frequencies are already set. The next time someone in your life needs support, celebration, or care, do an “internal audit” of your empathy by asking yourself these three questions:

(1) Emotional empathy: How do I feel in response to what they’re going through?

(2) Cognitive empathy: How well do I understand what they’re going through?

(3) Motivational empathy: What do I want for this person?

These questions can reveal a tuning that’s often under the surface. You might realize that when your kid is upset about a bad grade, you feel loads of care and deep understanding, but when your spouse is angry you didn’t put the dishes away, you react strongly without taking their perspective.

You can also use these questions to amplify the frequency you want. To join someone emotionally, focus on how you feel in their presence using question 1. To ramp up your motivation, concentrate on what you’d like for them (question 3) instead of what’s happening with them now.

There’s no single right way to empathize. I simply want you to know that you are the one in charge of your own system, much more sophisticated and powerful than any Sony. How you use your equalizer is up to you.

But you might not want to make that choice alone. Care, after all, lives in the spaces between us, less a personal skill than a collaboration. When you’re upset, you might want advice on how to feel better (question 3). But your friend, colleague, or spouse might prefer you to just understand and validate their experience (question 2).

We stereotype good empathy as a sort of clairvoyance: knowing what someone wants before they tell us. Humility often serves us better. So the next time you want to be there for someone check their equalizer before you tune yours, through a fourth question:

“What do need right now?”

This investment appears well placed. Studies of over 35,000 people find that individuals who agree with statements such as “I am true to myself in most situations,” are happier in life and more engaged at work. Western culture also rewards unvarnished self-expression. Americans rate authentic individuals as admirable; authentic-seeming tweets are reposted more often; Shark Tank pitches full of authentic language are rewarded with larger checks.

At least since Aristotle, truth to the self has been viewed as a bedrock of living well. Pile dozens of positive studies onto millennia of good press, and it seems ridiculous to question authenticity. That’s part of the problem. On social media, being “real” is a vast revenue generator, and influencers, brands, and politicians pay vast amounts of money to curate an image that appears as uncurated as possible. This authenticity-industrial complex cynically leverages people’s hunger for identity.

Even when it’s not being sold to us, authenticity has a dark side. During a visit to Berkeley in 1983, the philosopher Michel Foucault decried the “Californian cult of self.” In ancient times, the ideal of being true to ourselves was intertwined with social duty. Modern authenticity, Foucault explained, had forgotten the second half of this equation, prizing whatever feels right over doing right by others. People often justify callous insults as “just being honest,” and individuals who hold racist beliefs often defend others’ racist actions as genuine.

Most of all, modern authenticity rests on a fundamental confusion about human nature. Many of us assume that though we act differently from day to day, our “true” self remains stable: still waters under a churning surface. Being authentic is a matter of diving deep enough. The truth is more complex. Yes, our temperaments and personalities remain stable over time. The most outgoing 20-year-old you know is unlikely to become the shiest 40-year-old.

But we also vary enormously around those set points. Phoenix is hotter than Seattle, but Phoenix at dawn in February is probably cooler than Seattle at noon in July. Likewise, moment-by-moment diary studies find that when it comes to traits like extroversion and conscientiousness, people differ more from themselves across time than they do from each other. Wobble within us outweighs gaps between us.

Most of us don’t seem to get this. In a study of nearly 20,000 people, most agreed that their personalities and values had shifted over the past decade, but believed they would not change much in the years to come, no matter their age. As the authors write, people “regard the present as a watershed moment in which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” They claimed Joseph Campbell’s prize, unaware that their future self would steal it right back.

Perhaps we disregard change because we fear it. How existentially flimsy must a person be to shift according to circumstance or worse yet, social pressure? A popular authenticity questionnaire dings people as inauthentic when they agree with statements such as “other people influence me greatly.”

But like it or not, people do influence us greatly. We perform different versions of ourselves depending on who’s around. People act less conscientiously and more extrovertedly around close friends than distant acquaintances. Multicultural individuals “code switch,” using language and mannerisms that match the group they’re with.

Newer research shows that social change travels deep under the surface. For instance, my lab asked people to rate how much they’d like to eat dozens of different foods after learning how popular each one was. People conformed, saying they preferred popular to unpopular foods. Sounds inauthentic, right? But using brain scans, we found that popular foods also activated parts of the brain associated with desire. During conversations, people’s brain states align, and the more that happens, the more they agree with each other later. Discussing events with others shapes what we remember and forget.

A century ago, sociologist Charles Cooley described the “looking glass self.” In figuring out who we are, he argued, we consider how others see us. This may sound inauthentic, but that’s because we have obsessed over an unchanging core self that seems harder to locate the more scientists look for it. This offers a profound opportunity to redefine who we are. To be authentic, you don’t need to meditate alone on a mountaintop (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or resist other people’s influence. Authenticity is a collaboration, built across each conversation.

This might sound counterculture in the US but is the norm elsewhere. The Bantu proverb “A person is a person through other people” captures the idea that selves emerge in relation, not isolation. Modern research suggests that social authenticity pays off. When teams tune their beliefs, emotions, and actions to match those around them, they pursue goals more effectively and produce more innovative ideas. Conflicts are healthier and more productive when people try to learn from each other rather than scoring points. John and Julie Gottman, pioneers in the science of marriage, argue that successful couples regularly “accept influence” from one another, rather than rigidly clinging to their views.

Many of us could benefit by accepting more influence. First, because whether we accept it or not, others do radically influence how we feel, what we think, and who we become. Second, because doing so enriches, rather than diminishes, true authenticity. If the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, that gift grows when a community helps us become that person.

To make this palpable for yourself, start with an “authenticity audit.” Write down your core values, but don’t stop there. Next to each, list the people who inspired them and those who continue to shape how you live them out. Then, ask yourself, how can your next conversation—whether a catch-up with old friends or a workplace check-in—help you not just express your authentic self, but refine and expand it? Finally, considering these two questions as often as you need:

(1) When you choose the people in your life, you also pick a future “you.” Who brings out the self to which you aspire?

(2) Your spouse and friends have chosen to be the “thems” they are with you. How will you respond to that honor?