BG Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Podcast

Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Stories, science and secrets from the world’s brightest thought-leaders. Behavioral Grooves is the podcast that satisfies your curiosity of why we do what we do. Explanations of human behavior that will improve your relationships, your wellbeing, and your organization by helping you find your groove.

Website ↗ Last published 2 November 2026 523 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on Behavioral Grooves Podcast

“AI has a motive. And it doesn't trip that alarm that that motive is that it wants you to keep using it.” — Kurt Nelson, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Kurt Nelson · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“That's why I also say with the sycophancy, if NYU changed the default, it affects 20,000 faculty and 50,000 students tomorrow. And that's going to have a big scaling effect more than me.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Jay Van Bavel · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“Let's say that I turn off the sycophancy and now I have a student come to my office and I give them tough feedback on a paper because I think that's my duty as a professor. But they now are growing up in an era where they're just getting the positive glowing feedback every time they feed it into an AI. And now the critical feedback is going to sound really jarring and upsetting to them… If everybody's just giving glowing feedback all the time, I look like the jerk.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Jay Van Bavel · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“Something like 97% of political posts on social media are driven by 10% of users… We have a paper we're about to submit where we find on every single topic we study, the people who post the most are the most extreme. So you're just getting the extremes and they're posting non-stop. And people who have a nuanced view or are mixed feelings or ambivalent or just neutral or unsure don't post. And then it creates a false perception of the social norm.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Jay Van Bavel · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“I worry that there's going to be a generation of people who don't have relationship skills because they're getting advice from someone who's telling them that they're always in the right and they don't owe anything to anybody else. They didn't misstep… You're learning how to compromise. You're learning when you offended somebody and you didn't see it coming. You're learning how to make it up to somebody. And now you just dropped maybe the worst possible technology on their lap for giving them bad advice in relationship contexts.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Jay Van Bavel · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“You run a giant company or a university, you pay for this, and the default setting is set to sycophancy. You just put a yes man in every person's computer, every single employee's computer. And we know the psychology on groupthink… We know from behavioral science, probably the biggest effect of all behavioral science is just default settings. And 99% of people don't go change the default setting.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Jay Van Bavel · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“AI chatbots are on average 50% more sycophantic than if you're interacting with a random stranger. And so what happens is they tell you you're brilliant and wonderful. They don't give you the critical feedback. And people love that, but it makes them overconfident. It makes them more extreme in their beliefs. And also they have a bias blind spot for it. They don't realize that it's fueling them with hot air.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Jay Van Bavel · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“We looked at the other contagious diseases as moral problems before we actually understood them too. So I'm thinking about plague and cholera and typhus and leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis. These were thought to be moral problems. These people were bad people. And for many of these diseases, people were put into dungeons… It's in fact the same for violence, because we are looking at it as a moral problem. And we do put people in dungeons.” — Gary Slutkin, MD, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Gary Slutkin, MD · 12 Oct 2026 Listen →
“There's no one on this planet who goes for a run in the morning and they're like, oh, I'm going to keep my Amex in my pocket today, right? Like the cause effect there doesn't make any sense. But it seems to be a consistent pattern that when you start creating new exercise habits ... it makes other habits more malleable and easier to change.” — Charles Duhigg, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Charles Duhigg · 5 Oct 2026 Listen →
“For guys who like their images that they're such rebels and they do drugs and they can't get along with anyone, the greatest thing that the Rolling Stones have done is they never broke up. ... That's like a billion dollar decision that they made.” — Charles Duhigg, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Charles Duhigg · 5 Oct 2026 Listen →
“This warden was giving explicit orders to the guards. The guards who were a bit too lenient, he would take them apart and tell them, you have to be a mean guard, because if you're too nice, then the experiment will fail. And so we won't be able to go to the press and say that we have to reform prisons, that prisons are bad.” — Thibault Le Texier, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Thibault Le Texier · 28 Sep 2026 Listen →
“Let's talk about heroin and opioids and fentanyl and crystal meth. We're at the gangsters-with-machine-guns stage of prohibition right now. … One of the things I ask in the book is, why is it so easy to buy drugs, but so hard to hire a hitman?” — Alvin Roth, Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Alvin Roth · 21 Sep 2026 Listen →

Hosts

Behavioral Grooves Podcast is hosted by Kurt Nelson , Tim Houlihan , Andy Luttrell and Mary Kaliff .

Recent Episodes

  1. 2 Nov 2026

    How Social Media Manipulates You | Jay van Bavel

    With Jay Van Bavel

  2. 30 Oct 2026

    The #1 Thing That Gets People to Vote

  3. 26 Oct 2026

    Throwback Thursday: The Spooky Science of Superstition

  4. 19 Oct 2026

    Throwback Monday: Why Willpower Fails (and What Actually Work)

    With Monica Reinagel

  5. 12 Oct 2026

    The Science of Violence | Dr. Gary Slutkin

    With Gary Slutkin, MD

  6. 5 Oct 2026

    The Psychology of Habits | Charles Duhigg

    With Charles Duhigg

  7. 28 Sep 2026

    What We Got Wrong About the Stanford Prison Experiment

    With Thibault Le Texier and Gina Perry

  8. 23 Sep 2026

    Behavioral Grooves: Behavioral Science Explained

  9. 21 Sep 2026

    Behavioral Economics: When Markets Clash with Morals | Al Roth

    With Alvin Roth

  10. 18 Sep 2026

    Bridging the Gap Between Behavioral Science & Policy | BSPA

    With Sim Sitkin , Crystal Hall and Craig Fox

  11. 14 Sep 2026

    How to Make Work Fun | Bree Groff

    With Bree Groff

  12. 7 Sep 2026

    The Behavioral Science of Psychological Safety | Jeremy Pollack

    With Jeremy Pollack

Guests

Christian Hunt (7 episodes), Annie Duke (7 episodes), George Loewenstein (5 episodes), Nick Epley (5 episodes), Brad Shuck (4 episodes), John Bargh (4 episodes), Robert Cialdini (4 episodes), A.J. Jacobs (4 episodes), Richard Thaler (4 episodes), Colin Camerer (4 episodes), Eugen Dimant (4 episodes), Linnea Gandhi (3 episodes), and 380 more.