How do the groups you identify with shape your sense of self? Do they influence the beer you buy? The way you vote? Psychologist Jay Van Bavel says our group loyalties affect us more than we realize, and can even shape our basic senses of sight, taste and smell.  …

Since the pandemic began, people tell me they’ve been thinking a lot more about kindness. Maybe they’ve noticed the mutual aid groups that have sprung up around the world to help during lockdowns, or perhaps it’s because the cessation of normal everyday life has forced them to reconsider their values and what really matters in

New information about a current study between UCLA and Apple shows that the iPhone maker is using facial recognition, patterns of speech, and an array of other passive behavior tracking to detect depression. The report, from Rolfe Winkler of The Wall Street Journal, raises concerns about the company’s foray into a field of computing called emotion AI,

The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University is now accepting applications for residential fellowships for the 2021–22 academic year. CASBS has hosted generations of scholars and researchers who are in residence for the academic year and welcomes applications from individuals at any career stage. It is particularly eager to

What is found in a good conversation? It is certainly correct to say words—the more engagingly put, the better. But conversation also includes “eyes, smiles, the silences between the words,” as the Swedish author Annika Thor wrote. It is when those elements hum along together that we feel most deeply engaged with, and most connected

It was not so much that My Lovely Wife got what’s called an undercut haircut — a style favored by “the youth” that features a partly shaved cranium — or that she dyed the resultant stubble on the right half of her head purple. It’s that she didn’t tell me about it beforehand, leaving me

So much for the big post-pandemic reopening we expected this fall. Instead, a season of caution and delay is here: Office-return plans have been postponed. Schools are back in session, but with worries of exposure to the more-contagious Delta variant. Meanwhile, divisions over masks and safety protocols are sharpening, and Covid-19 cases keep climbing. It’s a long way from earlier this summer,

My Uncle Sidney, a retired U.S. Navy physician and Vietnam veteran, has a military phrase he uses as advice for what to do when life is lousy: Embrace the Suck. He’s dispensed this colorful guidance to me in several stressful situations—when I’ve been anxious on deadline, dealing with a difficult family member, and, most recently,

Decomposing the Motivation to Exert Mental EffortAmitai Shenhav, Mahalia Prater Fahey, and Ivan Grahek Achieving goals and completing tasks tend to require mental effort, something that people have varying motivation to exert. Shenhav and colleagues describe efforts to understand what determines motivation using the expected-value-of-control (EVC) model. This model simulates the process people use to

Folk Classification and Factor Rotations: Whales, Sharks, and the Problems With the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)Gerald J. Haeffel et al. Haeffel and colleagues evaluated the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), a classification system that clusters symptoms of mental illness into dimensions of psychopathology rather than the classic diagnostic taxonomies used in the Diagnostic and