The 5am morning routine gets sold as the habit that separates successful people…
Your chronotype might matter more than your willpower—new genetic research suggests the early-bird advantage is largely inherited, not earned.
Relationships & Society
Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
How becoming everyone’s helper can make it harder to ask for support
The care you give becomes a cage: the more you show up for others, the less they can imagine you falling apart.
In a 2020 analysis of 43 datasets and more than 11,000 couples, individual traits…
The science of predicting relationship success just hit a wall: even with thousands of couples and mountains of data, the strongest predictors barely move the needle.
Why generous people can still end up with a quiet phone
The most giving people often end up isolated not because others are ungrateful, but because their relentless availability teaches everyone around them that help isn't needed.
The most agreeable person in the group can still feel unknown, and the research…
We consistently underestimate how much people like us when we first meet them, a miscalculation that can linger for months and reshape how we relate to one another.
A study asked pairs of strangers to skip small talk and answer deeply personal…
We're terrified of depth with strangers, so we hide behind pleasantries—but new research suggests that fear costs us far more than awkwardness.
A study sent groups of friends and relatives to eat at a café and asked half to…
The mere presence of a phone—even untouched—degrades the quality of human connection in ways we don't consciously register.
Unusual habits are not a reliable test of intelligence
The quirks people roll their eyes at—fidgeting, swearing, endless doodling—might be markers of a sharper mind than conventional wisdom suggests.
In 2022, only 10 percent of American marriages had a wife three or more years…
The viral narrative of older women dating younger men masks a stubborn reality: these marriages remain rare and are actually declining, not surging.
In a 2005 study of 140 eighth graders, self-discipline measured months in advance…
The willpower to delay gratification may matter far more to academic success than raw intelligence—a finding that upends decades of assumptions about what predicts achievement.
One way to interpret the boomer–millennial generation gap is as a difference in…
Boomers and millennials may differ in norms of emotional expression despite overlapping values, but researchers have not established a single generational emotional dialect.
The men who become gentler after sixty aren’t the ones who mellowed, they’re the…
What transforms a man's capacity for gentleness isn't softening—it's abandoning the exhausting performance of dominance.