Data is most exciting when it proves you wrong. All of us have intuitions and expectations about how society is structured and how it’s changing. Sometimes, the actual numbers support those perspectives, but occasionally, they upend our world view. Expectations are particularly influential when it comes to public opinion. Our…

Small talk is a great way to express jovial politeness with passing strangers, but it often dominates longer social encounters too. Even when we have time for deeper chat with strangers or acquaintances, we tend to drift toward an abundance of weather-related complaints or “how’s the family?” chat. This isn’t…

Happiness is hard work. You might find it in a satisfying career, keeping your body healthy, or connecting with other people, but all of these things require effort and energy. It’s important to pay attention to how your behavior is impacting your happiness so that you can adjust your efforts…

“What’s the meaning of life?” is a cliche philosophical question, but it touches on something fundamental about how humans relate to the world around them. People want to know that there’s significance to their lives, but not necessarily in any grandiose sense. Most of us just want to feel that…

When given the choice between a difficult task and an easy task, it’s natural to expect that people will choose the easy one. In daily life and in most scientific work, effort is typically conceptualized as a cost. Brain imaging studies, for example, often look at how the brain trades…

We’re never short of national scandals to talk about. Stories of CEOs quietly harming customers for profit, rich people exploiting poor people, and politicians cheating the masses for personal gain seem to be in the news on a regular basis (on that note, here’s a New York Times piece from…

A quick way to make sensible decisions is to copy the people around you. We dress like our social groups when there are no rules dictating that we must, we adopt political beliefs that fit into our political tribes, and we use products and services that our friends use to…

The idea that “happiness is good for you” might sound like a truism, but it raises some complicated questions. It’s not necessarily the case that happiness has to be good for your health; it could simply be a pleasant feeling with no other significant impact. Why should smiling translate into…

Here’s a 20-second video. Watch the video before reading on, since reading on might ruin the video for you! The trick in the video may or may not have worked for you (it worked for me the first time I ever watched it!). If it did work, I can…