About

A short essay channel for people who treat psychology like a contested field, not a self-improvement aisle.

HeadFacts started as a notebook. The kind of notebook where you write down the findings that, once you've heard them, change what you notice the next time you walk into a meeting. Then it became a habit of texting one such finding a week to two friends who couldn't read fast enough. Then they suggested it should be a video.

So here it is, as a video. Once a week. Under a minute. One finding, treated with the seriousness it deserves and not a syllable more.

Who is behind it

One person, with a long-running interest in the mid-shelf of behavioral science — the books that sit between the airport pop-psychology paperbacks and the journal-only literature. The intent is to be a careful reader who's read just enough to know what the careful readers say, and to translate that into something a smart non-specialist can use.

The channel deliberately avoids a "founder face" and a "personality." This isn't an influencer project. The interesting thing is the finding, not the person reading it out.

What we read to make a clip

Each episode starts with a paper, a chapter, or a program of research. We follow citation chains both forward and backward — does the result replicate, was it amplified or contradicted, is there a meta-analysis, what does the most recent registered report say. We write the essay, then we cut roughly half of it. The half that survives is the half that earned its seconds.

We treat replication failures as part of the story, not an embarrassment to hide. If a finding is famous but didn't replicate, the famous-but-didn't-replicate version is the finding. That's the more interesting essay.

What we won't publish

• A clip whose conclusion is "and that's why you should X." HeadFacts is not in the business of telling you what to do.
• A clip about a single dramatic study with no follow-up. We wait for replication or context before writing.
• A clip that turns a contested finding into a confident bullet point. The contest is the essay.
• A clip on a topic where the science is being weaponized in a public debate. We can come back to it after the temperature drops.

How the clips get made

Drafted with help from Claude (Anthropic). Narrated through Inworld TTS — the voice we use is one we picked for warmth and patience, not authority. Captions timed via Whisper. B-roll pulled from Pexels. Every step is reviewed by a human, and every clip carries TikTok's AI-generated-content label per platform policy.

We mention this because we think a channel that talks about how minds work owes its audience a degree of transparency about how the channel itself is built.

Correspondence

If you spot a misread of a paper, write to studio@headfacts.com. We'll either fix the clip (re-cut and re-publish) or pin a correction. Researchers whose work has been cited in an episode are particularly welcome to write — we'd rather be told gently than be wrong publicly.

This is an independent project. No university affiliation. No publisher. No course attached. No funded sponsorship slots.