How Medieval Monks Used the 7 Deadly Sins to Map Human Behavior…and LinkedIn Weaponized them Against Us

About this episode

The episode explores how medieval monks used the Seven Deadly Sins as a framework for understanding human behavior and how this concept has been adapted in modern social media.

When medieval historian Peter Jones found himself spiraling into depression while teaching at a frigid Siberian university with icicles sprouting from his eyelashes, he asked himself what a medieval sufferer would do—and discovered something shocking: the Middle Ages, for all its reputation as a dark and superstitious time, was actually the golden age of self-help. A medieval merchant consulting a priest about melancholia would receive diagnosis, confession, and penance based on the Seven Deadly Sins, a psychological framework that mapped the seven basic patterns of human thought long before modern psychiatry existed. What we dismiss today as a catalog of Thou Shall Nots was actually an intricate system for understanding behavior—so effective that Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, credited it for his social media success by mapping each sin to platforms: Tinder on Lust, Yelp on Gluttony, LinkedIn on Greed, Netflix on Sloth, Twitter on Anger, Facebook on Envy, and Instagram on Pride. Today's guest is Peter Jones, author of Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living . We discuss how fourth-century Egyptian monk Evagrius…

People in this episode

Host: History Unplugged

Guest: Peter Jones

Topics covered

• medieval history
• psychology
• self-help
• Seven Deadly Sins
• human behavior
• social media

Keywords

• medieval monks
• Seven Deadly Sins
• human behavior
• self-help
• psychological framework
• social media
• Reid Hoffman

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: LinkedIn

Books & works: Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living

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