Why some older adults stop performing cheerfulness for others
Some older adults prefer calmer emotions or smaller social circles, but withdrawal has many possible causes and retained enjoyment does not rule out depression.
Mind
The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work inside the technology economy.
856 articles · Mind
Why some people create more distance from family as they get older
The people who distance themselves from family often endured the longest—but their history of sacrifice vanishes the moment they finally step away.
Why looking away during a skin prick may carry a physical cost — in one…
Three pre-registered experiments ran a standard histamine skin prick test on the forearm at least twice per person and varied the instruction about where to put their attention. Attending to the arm produced smaller reactions in roughly nine out of ten participants. The sample is 57 healthy adults, mostly women, average age mid-twenties, and the authors write that a reduced reaction may not universally reflect beneficial regulation.
People who assume the strangers around them are less empathetic than they really…
Stanford researchers found that students underestimated peers' empathy. Corrective information and social nudges increased risk-taking and shifted reported close-friend networks four months later.
The habit of laughing at the end of a difficult sentence isn’t nervousness
The short laugh people give at the end of a hard sentence is usually read as nerves. In many cases it is doing something else entirely: a small piece of social engineering, offered so the listener knows how to receive what has just been said.
A randomized trial coauthored by a Wharton researcher followed nearly 17,000…
A large randomised trial in Odisha found a modest average grade gain from collecting phones, with a substantially larger estimated benefit for lower-performing students.
The Stanford marshmallow test was once treated as a window into a child’s…
Children waited four times longer after an adult kept two promises, showing that the marshmallow task blends self-regulation with a rational estimate of reliability.
People who prefer standing at parties instead of sitting down aren’t necessarily…
The person standing by the wall at a party is often misread as restless or shy. In our reading, they are usually preserving a small exit — and that preserved option is what allowed them to arrive at all.
Why some people disclose personal things to strangers
In a world of shallow connections, strangers on planes become unlikely therapists—and maybe that's exactly what we need.
Why some people fill spare moments with podcasts, playlists or television
The constant hum of podcasts and playlists may feel like preference, but it might reveal something we're avoiding: the discomfort of our own company.
A 2025 longitudinal study challenges the idea that greater discipline…
Two three-wave samples found that earlier well-being predicted later self-control, while self-control did not reliably forecast later well-being after stable personal differences were separated.
The eyes do leak a little genuine feeling that is hard to fake, from pupil…
We're drawn to read honesty in a person's gaze, but neuroscience shows that confidence in what the eyes reveal is precisely where our intuition most reliably deceives us.