Podcast - N of Us

This is the story of two shopping malls and the men behind them - the men who manipulate our surroundings in such a way that we can't help but impulse buy. One lulls us into submission so we buy on the way out. The other dazzles us so much that we have to buy in order to get out. And this, naturally, leads to theme parks. The mouse-father of them all. The Gimme Episode. Go on, gimme.

Hypnosis is the product of two states: the trance and the suggestion. We can be put deeply, deeply to sleep by a professional, or we can put ourselves into one. The important bit is what happens when we're there. Recorded live in front of audiences in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia for Wired for Wonder in August 2015.

Photo by me. There’s an island in the Pacific Ocean that’s only 25 miles long and 12 miles wide. The people there worship a god called John Frum. And their religion has a surprising origin. The Tannese have something in common with a caged pigeon, Peggy Lee and a baby that won't go to sleep. Find out more about where magical thinking comes from in this episode of N of Us.

Growing up in Southern California, the most famous car salesman on my TV was Cal Worthington. He and his hat and his (never really a canine) "dog" Spot persuaded me, a six year old, that I need to buy a car. From him. How did he do that? In this episode of the N of Us, Cal, homemaker Betty and her Tupperware and Top Gun lead us down the two routes of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion to find out.

Fix the small things and the big ones will follow. That's the basic premise of Broken Windows Theory, which has inspired revolutions in public policy since it first appeared on the pages of The Atlantic in 1982. It may be mired in controversy, but it seems to work. But why? In this episode of N of Us, I propose Broken Windows is the icing on our psychological bun, that there's something deeper in our psyche that turns us off the places where we are.

Barack Obama is arguably the most powerful man in the world. But is his power justified? In this episode of N of Us, we find out by wandering through the Italian Renaissance, taking savasana, grabbing a donut and buying the world a Coke.

Whither love? It's the eternal question posited by everyone from poets to pop stars. And in this episode of N of Us, it's answered with three social psychology studies. Help is on hand from Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, Harry Connick Jr and Donny Osmond, all of whom offer their tuppence on who we fall in love with and how to make it happen.

The very first theory of social psychology is the subject of the very first episode of the new social psychology podcast by broadcaster and doctor of social psychology, Aleks Krotoski. Why do we perform better at simple tasks when other people are in the room, but are better at complex tasks when we're alone? And what do cockroaches have to do with it?