About J. C. Pass

What I write about

Simply Put Psych covers several overlapping areas.

Psych 101 pieces explain core psychological concepts in clear, student-friendly language. These articles are designed to help people understand ideas without needing to excavate meaning from a textbook paragraph that appears to have been written during a committee meeting in a cupboard.

Gaming Psych applies psychology to video games, game design, player behaviour, choice, agency, immersion, morality, identity, horror, reward systems, online behaviour, nostalgia, and why some games feel like art while others feel like unpaid admin with a sword.

Mind Over Media looks at film, television, streaming culture, celebrity, fandom, narrative, attention, emotion, representation, and the psychological machinery behind what we watch and why it gets under our skin.

Global Psych and Monday Musings take a broader view of politics, power, persuasion, social identity, moral panic, authoritarianism, culture, technology, media systems, and the strange ways societies persuade themselves that obviously alarming things are probably fine.

Health and wellbeing pieces focus on practical, human-centred psychology. I am not interested in turning mental health into inspirational wallpaper. I am interested in what people actually experience, what helps, what gets oversold, and what happens when advice forgets the person at the centre of it.

The academic tools and student resources exist for a more practical reason: psychology students often need clear help with methods, statistics, APA style, research design, results sections, ethics, hypotheses, tables, graphs, and all the other things that make academic work feel like trying to assemble furniture from instructions written by a tired ghost. The tools are there to make that process less miserable.

A note on values and actual life

Simply Put Psych is proudly inclusive and LGBTQ+ affirming. That is not because psychology needs another little badge to pin to its jacket, but because any serious attempt to understand people has to begin with dignity, autonomy and the basic recognition that human lives do not exist for other people’s comfort.

I try to write psychology in a way that respects complexity without turning people into specimens, slogans or culture-war props. Good psychology should make us more attentive to context, harm, belonging, identity, power and the social conditions people are trying to survive. It should not be used to tidy people into convenient boxes and then look smug about the labelling system.

Away from the keyboard, I’m a fairly typical non-typical person, by which I mean neurodivergent: mainly ASD, with a sprinkle of psychological issues one can only acquire from living a well-lived but deeply flawed life. I am also a wolfdog dad, which is less an ownership status and more a continuing lesson in boundaries, patience, attachment, emotional regulation and being silently judged by a large intelligent animal. It is probably the most applied psychology in my life, and unlike most academic frameworks, it occasionally steals food.

My AI philosophy

I use AI as part of my writing process, but I do not use it as a substitute for thinking, reading, judgement, or authorship.

My view is fairly simple: AI is useful when it acts like a sparring partner, research assistant, copyeditor, and unusually patient critic. It is much less useful when it starts pretending to be the writer. Psychology writing needs more than fluent sentences. It needs context, caution, interpretation, ethical judgement, cultural awareness, and a human being somewhere in the room noticing when an idea sounds clever but is actually nonsense wearing a nice coat.

A typical Simply Put Psych article starts with my own question or argument. For example, I might begin with a general psychology topic like: “Why do people compare themselves to others online, even when they know it makes them feel worse?” That initial idea, angle, and purpose come from me.

From there, I may use AI to help me stress-test the idea. I might ask what psychological theories could be relevant, whether social comparison theory is enough on its own, whether self-esteem, identity, reward systems, envy, attention, or platform design should be included, and where the argument might become too simplistic. This is the debating stage. AI is useful here because it can generate counterarguments quickly, but I still decide which arguments are worth keeping and which ones belong in the bin, where many confident-sounding ideas quietly deserve to live.

If the piece needs research support, I may ask AI to suggest relevant studies, theories, or authors. Any source suggested by AI has to be checked before I rely on it. AI can invent references, misread findings, overstate conclusions, or make a study sound more relevant than it really is. So the rule is simple: no verified source, no citation. Psychology has enough problems without adding imaginary journal articles to the pile.

Once I have the argument, structure, and evidence in place, I write the article myself. The voice, examples, humour, criticism, psychological interpretation, and final judgement are mine. That is where the real work happens. AI may help sharpen the outline, but it does not write the finished piece for me.

After the draft exists, I may use AI as an editor. At that point, its job is mechanical and critical rather than creative. I might ask it to catch spelling and grammar issues, flag unclear sections, identify weak transitions, point out where the argument needs more evidence, or tell me if a section sounds too neat, too vague, too repetitive, or too pleased with itself.

The workflow looks like this:

1. I choose the topic, angle, argument, and purpose.

2. I use AI to test the argument, raise objections, and suggest possible psychological frameworks.

3. I verify any sources, check claims, and decide what evidence actually belongs in the piece.

4. I write the article in my own voice.

5. I use AI to help catch errors, sharpen clarity, and identify places where the argument could be stronger.

6. I make the final editorial decisions and take responsibility for the finished article.

That final point is the important one. AI can assist the process, but responsibility cannot be outsourced. If an article appears on Simply Put Psych under my name, then the argument, standards, tone, and final judgement are mine.

Used well, AI can make writing sharper, clearer, and more rigorous. Used badly, it can produce very smooth emptiness at impressive speed. My aim is to use it in the first way: as a tool for pressure-testing ideas and improving communication, while keeping the actual psychological judgement human.

Editorial standards

I try to keep Simply Put Psych clear, useful, and honest about what it is.

Articles are written to inform, explain, interpret, and provoke thought. They are not medical advice, therapy, diagnosis, or a replacement for professional support. When a topic involves mental health, risk, or wellbeing, the aim is to write carefully and humanely rather than pretend that a neat paragraph can fix a complicated life.

Where articles make academic claims, I aim to ground them in relevant research, theory, or established psychological ideas. Where the piece is more interpretive, cultural, or opinion-led, I try to make that clear through the writing itself. A psychology essay about a game, film, politician, social trend, or media panic is not the same thing as a lab report, and nobody benefits when those forms are mushed together into a grey paste.

I also try to keep the site readable. If psychology cannot be explained clearly, that does not always mean the idea is deep. Sometimes it means the explanation is bad. Sometimes it means the writer has mistaken fog for sophistication. Psychology has enough fog already.

Why the site exists

I built Simply Put Psych because psychology is one of the most useful subjects a person can study, but it is often taught, packaged, or discussed in ways that make it less alive than it should be.

At its best, psychology helps us notice patterns. It helps us ask better questions. It helps us understand why people do things that seem irrational from the outside but make a grim sort of sense from the inside. It helps us see how behaviour is shaped by attention, memory, identity, emotion, threat, belonging, reward, status, culture, power, and context.

It also helps us become a little less easily impressed by simplistic explanations. People are rarely “just lazy,” “just irrational,” “just evil,” “just attention-seeking,” or “just weak.” Sometimes they are trapped, rewarded, frightened, exhausted, socially trained, protecting themselves, performing for a group, responding to incentives, or trying to survive a situation that looks very different once you are inside it.

That does not mean psychology excuses everything. It means explanation is usually more useful than moral theatre.

Simply Put Psych is my attempt to make that kind of psychology readable: serious but not pompous, evidence-aware but not citation-drunk, sceptical but not joyless, useful but not bland.

About the name

The aim is in the name: Simply Put Psych.

Not “simplistic psych.” Not “everything can be reduced to one dopamine fact from a podcast.” Not “here is a complex human problem flattened into a productivity hack.”

Simply put means taking psychological ideas seriously enough to explain them clearly.

It means removing unnecessary fog without removing nuance. It means respecting the reader’s intelligence and time. It means remembering that clarity is not the enemy of depth. It is usually the thing that lets depth survive contact with another human being.

Contact

For questions, corrections, media enquiries, collaboration ideas, educational use, or anything else that seems relevant, you can get in touch through the contact page.

I am especially interested in psychology education, public psychology, student resources, media psychology, gaming psychology, political psychology, digital culture, and projects that make psychological ideas more accessible without turning them into motivational soup.