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September 6, 2010
The fact that our female ancestors dispersed more than our male ancestors can lead to conflicts within the brain that influence our social behaviour, new research reveals. 
August 31, 2010
Over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way their collegues look at animals: they've started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.
August 16, 2010
These words you are reading are really just a collection of arbitrary symbols. Yet, after some decoding by your brain, these symbols convey meaning. That's because humans have evolved a brain with an extraordinary knack for language.
July 30, 2010
Life at the bottom is nasty, brutish and short. But it is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to charity.
July 26, 2010
A new study analysing interactions between players in a virtual universe game has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory.
June 28, 2010
Chimpanzee warfare is of particular interest because of the possibility that both humans and chimps inherited an instinct for aggressive territoriality from their joint ancestor who lived some five million years ago.
June 11, 2010
Researchers have found that in the heat of battle soldiers have the same chemicals running through their bloodstreams as protective mothers, meaning they develop incredibly strong bonds with each other but become extremely aggressive to outsiders.
June 10, 2010
Researchers have shown that the psychological concern for compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while the concern for order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.
June 4, 2010
There is tantalising evidence that a common parasite may affect human behaviour.
May 28, 2010
Children start off like Karl Marx, but they eventually become more like a member of the International Olympic Committee.
May 26, 2010
As horror-flick titles go, Night of the Living Chaos and Rosemary's Nonlinearity aren't the catchiest. But filmmakers know that chaos—the mathematical kind—is scary. Now scientists know it too.
May 24, 2010
How people behave in economic games, where they can choose to be selfish or cooperative, can be explained more easily by 'mistakes' than wanting others to succeed.
May 14, 2010
Studying animal conflicts could help shed light on human wars—that is the hope from a study of the choices that monkeys make when deciding to fight or remain at peace.
May 6, 2010
People are extraordinarily skilled at spotting cheats—much better than they are at detecting rule-breaking that does not involve cheating.
May 5, 2010
Humans are incredibly cooperative, but why do people cooperate and how is cooperation maintained? A new research study suggests cooperation in large groups is maintained by punishment.
May 4, 2010
Fehr's work is overturning 50 years of economic wisdom about motivation, showing that most economists have overlooked one of the most important factors determining economic outcomes: our values about fairness.
April 30, 2010
Communities with active participants demonstrate lower levels of crime and lower death rates.
April 27, 2010
The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one's own race.
April 19, 2010
A state's collective organizational structure, procedures and protocols develop hand-in-hand with "predatory" expansion.
April 13, 2010
Children with the genetic condition known as Williams syndrome have unusually friendly natures because they lack the sense of fear that the rest of us feel in many social situations.
April 12, 2010
Chimps recognise unfairness, even when it involves individuals other than themselves. This sense of unfairness towards others may be a rudimentary form of the social justice that characterises human societies.
March 22, 2010
Just about everybody knows that a smile is just a frown turned upside down, but a moan or a sigh when the bedroom lights are low can be downright confusing to people from different cultures.
March 19, 2010
For the evolutionarily minded, the existence of fairness is a puzzle. What biological advantage accrues to those who behave in a trusting and co-operative way with unrelated individuals?
March 9, 2010
Researchers found that kindness is contagious and that good acts by a handful of individuals really can make a difference.
March 8, 2010
Children, like adults, use three visible cues—race, gender and age—to arrange their social world. New research shows that verbal accents may be equally important in guiding youngsters' social decisions.
February 23, 2010
Momentary touches—whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm—can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
February 8, 2010
There is no doubt that spiritual experiences and religion, which are ubiquitous across cultures and time and associated exclusively with humans, are ultimately based in the brain. However, there are still many unanswered questions.
February 3, 2010
Male homosexuality doesn't make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. Since homosexual men are much less likely to produce offspring, shouldn't the genes for this trait have been extinguished long ago?
January 29, 2010
A study argues that human languages may adapt more like biological organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.
January 25, 2010
Extra-terrestrials likely to possess human foibles such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others' resources, conference to be told.
January 21, 2010
People with power that they think is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.
December 11, 2009
Feeling lonely is more than just unpleasant for those who yearn to be surrounded by warm relationships—it is a health hazard.
December 10, 2009
Participate in an online experiment to study cultural evolution in action.
December 9, 2009
Researchers are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, a growing body of evidence shows we are becoming more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.
December 8, 2009
As Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, has said, "apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior."
December 8, 2009
New scientific evidence refutes the preconception that testosterone causes aggressive, egocentric, and risky behavior.
December 3, 2009
Two new studies found that the musical scales most commonly used are those that mimic the physics of the human voice, and that we understand emotions expressed through music because the music mimics the way emotions are expressed in speech.
December 2, 2009
In the past decade, the neuroscience of social behaviour has blossomed. A major catalyst for this has been the discovery of what seems to be a physiological mechanism for social interaction, located in the brain's "mirror neurons".
December 1, 2009
What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind.
November 30, 2009
Change in language can be compared with evolution in the world of animals and plants.
November 24, 2009
Genetic differences in people's responsiveness to the effects of oxytocin are linked to their ability to read faces, infer the emotions of others, feel distress at others' hardship and even to identify with characters in a novel.
November 19, 2009
If a border is simply a line on the map, why are Israeli rodents more cautious than Jordanian rodents? Why are there more ant lions in Israel than in Jordan? And how come there are more reptile species in Jordan than in Israel?
November 11, 2009
That a sense of unfairness may turn out to be quite ancient in evolutionary terms became clear when it was discovered in monkeys.
October 26, 2009
People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments.
October 23, 2009
A new study of chimpanzees living in the wild adds to evidence that our closest primate relatives have cultural differences, too.
October 14, 2009
If you're looking for help from a chimp, don't forget to say please.
October 1, 2009
New research reveals there is a link between the size of the brain, in particular the neocortex which is responsible for higher-level thinking, and the size and number of grooming clusters that monkeys belong to.
September 21, 2009
Cities are organized like brains, and the evolution of cities mirrors the evolution of human and animal brains, according to a new study.
September 11, 2009
There is growing evidence that being a member of a social group can significantly reduce the risk of conditions like stroke, dementia and even the common cold.
September 8, 2009
Market value of vervet monkey falls if monopoly is broken.
September 7, 2009
Analysis of ancient DNA from skeletons suggests that Europe's first farmers were not the descendants of the people who settled in the area after the retreat of the ice sheets.
September 7, 2009
They have been told as bedtime stories by generations of parents, but fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood may be even older than was previously thought.
August 31, 2009
Medically, crying is known to be a symptom of physical pain or stress. But now an evolutionary biologist looks to empirical evidence showing that tears have emotional benefits and can make interpersonal relationships stronger.
August 19, 2009
Barely four years after the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler was calling for a theory of evolution for machines. Since then, a few hardy souls have attempted to oblige him, but none has quite hit the mark.
August 17, 2009
Imitation, the old saying goes, is the sincerest form of flattery. It also appears to be an ancient interpersonal mechanism that promotes social bonding and, presumably, sets the stage for relative strangers to coalesce into groups of friends.
July 27, 2009
A chimp's attention is captured by faces more effectively than by bananas. A series of experiments suggests that the apes are wired to respond to faces in a similar manner to humans.
July 16, 2009
Social cognition—the ability to think about the minds and mental states of others—is essential for human beings. Regions habe been discovered in the human brain that are specifically used for social cognition.
July 9, 2009
It is not just humans who take turns but a range of other animals too, the study by psychologists found.
July 7, 2009
An observer feels more empathy for someone in pain when that person is in the same social group, according to new research.
June 11, 2009
It is a little-known fact that a life lived without enemies would be an extraordinarily dull affair.
June 5, 2009
Increasing population density, rather than boosts in brain-power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human culture.
June 5, 2009
War, what is it good for? A lot, it could turn out. Lethal warfare drove the evolution of altruistic behaviour among ancient humans, claims a new study based on archaeological records and mathematical simulations.
June 3, 2009
Feeling emotionally close to a friend increases levels of the hormone progesterone, helping to boost well-being and reduce anxiety and stress.
June 2, 2009
As if splitting a pair of pants, telling a transparent lie or mispronouncing the word “epitome” weren’t humiliation enough, nature has provided humans, especially the fair-skinned kind, with a built-in scarlet letter.
May 28, 2009
What is the difference between Jesus Christ and Superman? The content of religions and popular tales is often similar, but only religions have martyrs.
May 18, 2009
Why do we inflict pain for no gain? On the face of it, it is rather a perverse way of going about things. Does spitefulness stem from an affronted sense of fairness? Or something altogether darker?
May 12, 2009
Aggressive behavior of men in some South American groups has been considered the means for obtaining more wives and more children, but anthropologists working in Ecuador show that sometimes the macho guy does not do better.
April 22, 2009
What conga lines at dance parties and chanting soccer fanatics reveal about our deep need to coordinate with others.
March 26, 2009
The guiding motto of "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" brings neither success nor happiness.
March 25, 2009
Seeing the bright side of life may strengthen the psyche, ease pain and tighten social bonds.
March 17, 2009
A new study says that a person can influence a group by making cooperative, collective behaviour seem acceptable and appropriate, and thereby encouraging others to act similarly.
March 3, 2009
A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby.
February 27, 2009
Even online, the neocortex is the limit.
February 26, 2009
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.
February 19, 2009
What people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions.
February 5, 2009
Marching, dancing and chanting together encourages us to follow the crowd, scientists claim in a study which could help explain the rise of movements such as fascism.
January 29, 2009
Armies march in step. Religions incorporate many forms of singing and chanting into their rituals. Citizens sing the National Anthem before sporting events. Why do we participate in these various synchronized activities?
January 15, 2009
Why does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots.
January 13, 2009
By watching Japanese macaques monkeys acquire and maintain behavioral traditions from generation to generation, scientists have gained insight into the cultural evolution of humans.
January 9, 2009
Although humans vary from the compact Inuit of the Arctic to the willowy Masai warriors of Africa, any two people are a lot more alike genetically than any pair of chimpanzees or gorillas. The reason may be our advanced culture.
January 5, 2009
Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts.
December 19, 2008
The old adage that we can only learn how to do something by trying it ourselves may have to be revised in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience.
December 18, 2008
In everyday social exchanges, being mean to people has a lot more impact than being nice.
December 15, 2008
Why do high schools have marching bands? Why do churches have choirs? And perhaps most perplexing of all, why do we have synchronized swimming? What is it about moving and chanting and singing in unison that appears to have universal appeal?
December 11, 2008
Call it the justice instinct. When judging the guilt or innocence of alleged criminals, our brains seem to respond as if we were personally wronged, say researchers.
December 9, 2008
Why people may be evolutionarily inclined to make a mountain out of molehill: aggression, status and sex.
December 8, 2008
Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children and from many other corners of social life as well. But teasing is essential to making us fully human.
December 5, 2008
Happiness spreads through social networks like an emotional contagion, according to a study that looked at nearly 5,000 individuals over a period of 20 years.
November 21, 2008
Public displays of untidiness, such as graffiti, may promote bad behaviour, but when it comes to personal cleanliness the opposite appears to be true.
November 20, 2008
The gossipy nature of female macaques also adds weight to the theory that human language evolved to forge social bonds.
November 18, 2008
The earliest evidence of a nuclear family, dating back to the Stone Age, has been uncovered by an international team of researchers.
November 17, 2008
Famous works of abstract art achieve popularity by using shapes that resonate with the neural mechanisms in the brain linked to visual information.
November 13, 2008
It's a question at the heart of what it is to be human: why do we go to war? A new theory is emerging that challenges the prevailing view that warfare is a product of human culture and thus a relatively recent phenomenon.
November 4, 2008
Why do some of us always do the right thing while others only seem to be out for themselves? Research offers a new explanation as to why such a wide range of personality traits has evolved in humans and other social species.
October 30, 2008
People are programmed to avoid inequality.
October 29, 2008
The old adage 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' has kept humans happy in business for centuries.
October 27, 2008
The ability to make fire millennia ago was likely a key factor in the migration of prehistoric hominids from Africa into Eurasia.
October 24, 2008
It has been shown that individuals who are experiencing rejection are better at picking up subtle social cues and are particularly good at discerning fake smiles from real ones.
October 23, 2008
For our ancestors, misjudging the physical strength of a would-be opponent might have resulted in painful—and potentially deadly—defeat. Now, a study has found the brain can determine the fighting ability of men.
October 10, 2008
How do politicians get away with bending the truth? The answer may lie with a fundamental psychological tool that we use to make sense of the world.
October 7, 2008
The public urge for punishment that helped delay the passage of Washington's economic rescue plan is more than a simple case of Wall Street loathing.
October 6, 2008
Although anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are still debating this question, a new study supports the view that the first egalitarian societies may have appeared tens of thousands of years ago.
October 3, 2008
The way male managers power dress, posture and exercise power is due to humans’ evolutionary biology.
October 3, 2008
Belief in God encourages people to be helpful, honest and generous, but only under certain psychological conditions.
September 23, 2008
Humans, chimps, and some apes live in societies with shifting loyalties and affiliations. But not all primates do this. And the reason isn't just brainpower; rather, it has to do with the flexibility of their behaviors.
September 22, 2008
Is America's red-blue divide based on voters' physiology?
September 18, 2008
Popular tales do far more than entertain. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling.
September 16, 2008
If you see a person walking down a dark street and you think they're a male, you're more likely to think they're coming towards you. And they say if you think the person is a female, you are more likely to think they're walking away.
September 16, 2008
The clearest identifiable effect of religious behavior is the promotion of cooperative family-like social relationships.
September 1, 2008
Layoffs can turn social butterflies into near hermits who shun such outlets as book clubs and even church groups, finds a new study.
September 1, 2008
Bravery and belligerence make for a vaunted warrior, but they also increase the chances of getting killed. Now, researchers have built a mathematical formula that explains how such self-sacrificing traits nevertheless could evolve.
August 28, 2008
The economy is plummeting, the planet could burn to a crisp, and war has just broken out—again. Believe it or not though, people around the globe are happier today on average than they were 25 years ago.
August 26, 2008
Empathy is thought to drive this pleasure that transcends primate species.
August 15, 2008
Touch can inspire munificence towards those you trust.
August 6, 2008
People make split-second judgments on faces on two major measures—whether the person should be approached or avoided and whether the person is weak or strong.
August 5, 2008
Religious diversity may be caused by disease.
July 31, 2008
Lots of gossip is good for society and helps people to trust each other and to be more charitable, according to a study published today.
July 31, 2008
Vengeance: it is as old as humanity, as natural as blinking. It has been examined and pondered by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, poets, playwrights and even primatologists.
July 31, 2008
When we are in a pinch, surprising factors can affect our moral judgments.
July 1, 2008
Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni discusses mirror neurons, autism and the potentially damaging effects of violent movies.
June 30, 2008
Feeling powerless can trigger strong desires to purchase products that convey high status.
June 18, 2008
Laugh and the world laughs with you, but wrinkle your nose and you could find yourself on your own.
June 17, 2008
What do parasites and mountains have in common? They both keep populations apart and drive evolution.
June 10, 2008
Clues to understanding the human social brain come from a study of punishment's role in fairness.
June 6, 2008
Rather than picking our friends based on intentional choice and common values and interests, our friendships may be based on more superficial factors like proximity (think neighbors) or group assignments (your department at work).
May 29, 2008
Reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place.
May 27, 2008
God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved.
May 26, 2008
When you look at apes and children in situations requiring them to put their heads together, a subtle but significant difference emerges.
May 22, 2008
The dire situations in Myanmar and southwestern China and the impulse of many to offer relief have a lot to do with human nature. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely did it, and non-human primates do it.
May 13, 2008
International study of animal behaviour has important implications for human decision-making.
May 9, 2008
Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share?
May 5, 2008
Just as religions dwell upon the eternal battle between good and evil, angels and devils, evolutionary theorists dwell upon the eternal battle between altruistic and selfish behaviors in the Darwinian struggle for existence.
May 2, 2008
It is generally accepted that early man began colonising the planet from Africa, but how were those first settlers replaced: by evolution or invasion?
May 1, 2008
Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.
April 29, 2008
For two-thirds of its history, Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa. Only now are the details of that period becoming clear.
April 28, 2008
How can we tell who’s lying, who’s not? New research determines the face will betray the deceiver’s true emotion, but not in the stereotypical ways we think.
April 24, 2008
Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status.
April 18, 2008
Is fairness simply a ruse, something we adopt only when we secretly see an advantage in it for ourselves? And do we expect no more than self-interest of others? Or is there such a thing as fairness for fairness’ sake?
April 10, 2008
The reason a society falls where it does on the individualism-collectivism spectrum has been pretty much a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation: disease-causing microbes.
April 3, 2008
Unlike most members of their species, the chimps of the Senagelese grasslands spend most of their time on the ground. Their creative survival tactics include hunting with spears and drumming to impress potential mates.
March 26, 2008
Chimpanzees show an ability to recognize certain behavioral traits and make assumptions about the presence or absence of these traits in strangers in similar situations thereafter.
March 20, 2008
Individuals who engage in costly punishment do not benefit from their behavior.
March 20, 2008
Have you ever wondered why you seem to understand some people—even if you know relatively little about them? It turns out there may be a biological reason why it's easier to walk a mile in some people's shoes but not in others'.
March 12, 2008
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's alleged involvement in a prostitution ring has sent some heads spinning. The obvious question on many minds: What was he thinking? The short answer, researchers say: Power and corruption go together.
March 7, 2008
In a new international study of 16 countries, economists studied the extent to which some people will sacrifice personal gain to benefit the wider public, while 'freeloaders' try to take advantage of their generosity.
February 25, 2008
Whence morality? That is a question which has troubled philosophers since their subject was invented. Two and a half millennia of debate have, however, failed to produce a satisfactory answer. So now it is time for someone else to have a go.
February 19, 2008
Scientists have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes.
February 5, 2008
The human capacity for empathy—feeling what others feel—is, in fact, not really designed to share happiness. That would be too easy.
January 31, 2008
Languages show periodic bursts of evolution, in which many new words blossom, according to new research that treats linguistic evolution like its biological counterpart.
January 22, 2008
Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians.
January 15, 2008
Evolution and economics are both examples of a larger mysterious phenomenon.
January 10, 2008
Cooperative behaviour is common in many species, including humans. Given that cooperative individuals can often be exploited, it is not immediately clear why such behaviour has evolved.
January 9, 2008
Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies.
January 3, 2008
Smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can actually identify the type of smile based on sound alone.
December 28, 2007
A question of blame when societies fall.
December 20, 2007
The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand.
December 19, 2007
A new study of twins indicates that the genetic foundation for the brain’s ability to recognize faces and places is much stronger than for other objects, such as words.
December 10, 2007
New research suggests that humans pick up infinitesimal scents that affect whether or not we like somebody.
November 30, 2007
Individuals—both men and women—who exhibit positive traits, such as honesty and helpfulness, are perceived as better looking.
November 27, 2007
A brain scan study has shown that no matter how wealthy you are, money is most rewarding if you have relatively poor friends, peers and colleagues.
November 26, 2007
Even infants can tell the difference between naughty and nice playmates, and know which to choose.
November 21, 2007
Whether we know it or not, we're all street-corner psychics. Without the ability to divine others' thoughts and feelings, we couldn't handle the simplest social situations—or achieve true intimacy with others.
November 20, 2007
The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal. And it is these highly evolved abilities that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.
November 16, 2007
If the figurines found in an ancient European settlement are any guide, women have been dressing to impress for at least 7,500 years.
October 29, 2007
Researchers suggest that the altruistic and warlike aspects of human nature may have a common origin.
October 25, 2007
When it comes to their social behavior, people sometimes act like monkeys, or more specifically, like rhesus macaques, a type of monkey that shares with humans strong tendencies for nepotism and political maneuvering.
October 18, 2007
Bullies are kids, male and female, who intimidate other kids with words or physical harm. And no one likes a bully, not even the bully's sidekick. Why then do some kids become bullies?
October 16, 2007
Languages evolve just as species do, and just as with organisms, the rate of evolution is hardly uniform. Some words evolve rapidly but other words have hardly evolved at all.
October 16, 2007
People are influenced by gossip about others, even when it contradicts what they see with their own eyes.
October 15, 2007
You may not be fully dressed without a smile, but a look of horror will make a faster first impression.
October 3, 2007
Women play a more central role than men in a successful society by focusing more on cooperating than competing.
September 26, 2007
Why are some individuals not prejudiced? That is the question posed by a provocative new study investigating how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one’s own group.
September 20, 2007
Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution. (May require free registration.)
September 14, 2007
In the last century, more than 100 million people have perished in violent conflict, very often because of local clashes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups. A novel study reports on a mathematical model that predicts where ethnic conflict will erupt.
September 10, 2007
When trying to understand someone’s intentions, nonhuman primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment.
September 10, 2007
Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter's example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives.
September 6, 2007
The relationship between faith and science in the United States seems, at least on the surface, to be paradoxical.
August 31, 2007
Ancient cities arose not by decree from a centralized political power, as was previously widely believed, but as the outgrowth of decisions made by smaller groups or individuals.
August 30, 2007
Thoughts related to God cultivate cooperative behaviour and generosity, according to psychology researchers.
August 23, 2007
Chimps struggling to accumulate a large quantity of food deliberately keep themselves busy to avoid the temptation to gorge themselves straight away.
August 19, 2007
There's a troubling psychological phenomenon that just about everyone has experienced but few will admit to; having difficulty distinguishing between people of different racial groups.
August 2, 2007
Reading the face of a person who is trying to conceal fear or other emotions is tricky business.
July 26, 2007
Priming people with religious concepts makes them more generous—regardless of whether they declare themselves to be believers.
July 24, 2007
Guilt plays a vital role in the regulation of social behavior. That worried feeling in our gut often serves as the impetus for our stab at redemption.
July 20, 2007
There was a time when ostracism meant grave danger. Today it probably only means a grave hassle. But we unconsciously conflate the two because we are possessed by a powerful drive to conform at almost any cost.
July 18, 2007
A new study on our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, found the animals might enact revenge under certain circumstances, but never with spite.
July 6, 2007
Freeloaders can live on the fruits of the cooperation of others, but their selfishness can have long-term consequences.
July 5, 2007
Next time you have to negotiate a deal with a male business contact, you might want to check his hormone levels first—men with high levels of testosterone are more likely to turn down low offers, even if they stand to gain money by accepting them.
July 4, 2007
A finding from a theoretical model of cooperative activity reveals that making an enterprise optional also makes it more sustainable.
June 14, 2007
Some snail shells from a Moroccan cave could be humanity's earliest known attempt at art or, possibly, a currency.
May 29, 2007
It’s an enduring mystery that taunts neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists. If the human brain evolved to maximize its owner’s survival, why are we motivated to help others, even when it incurs some personal cost?
May 18, 2007
Perhaps human morality is a cultural construction built on top of—and constrained by—a small set of evolved psychological systems.
May 1, 2007
Bonobos and chimpanzees use manual gestures of their hands, feet and limbs more flexibly than they do facial expressions and vocalizations, further supporting the gestural origin hypothesis of human language.
April 24, 2007
Nepotism is known to be important in chimpanzee society, but male chimps' ability to cooperate extends beyond family connections, new research reveals.
April 12, 2007
According to a new study of behavioral economics, people will spend their own money to make the rich less rich and the poor less poor, acting, it seems, out of a taste for equality and sense of fair play.
April 9, 2007
After studying the behavior of adult twins, researchers found that, while altruistic behavior and religiousness tended to appear together, the correlation was due to both environmental and genetic factors.
March 22, 2007
Emotion plays an important role in scenarios that pose a moral dilemma. If certain emotions are blocked, we make decisions that—right or wrong—seem unnaturally cold.
March 20, 2007
Biologists argue that primate social behaviors are the precursors of human morality.
March 15, 2007
It's an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It's not about getting the joke. It's about getting along.
March 9, 2007
In experiments designed to deepen our understanding of how cooperative behavior evolves, researchers have found that bonobos are more successful than chimpanzees at cooperation, even though chimpanzees exhibit strong cooperative hunting behavior in the wild.
March 7, 2007
Women are much more likely than men to make deep and lasting friendships.
March 5, 2007
Life provides us with endless situations in which honesty is not the only virtue in play. Nor is it clear that most of us can really stand endless doses of honesty—especially when the truth might hurt.
February 28, 2007
Ever found yourself preferring some of your cousins over others? It could be down to how they are related to you.
February 21, 2007
Your parents were right: patience is a virtue.
February 16, 2007
While a person's accidental death reported on the evening news can bring viewers to tears, mass killings reported as statistics fail to tickle human emotions.
January 29, 2007
The human need to form stereotypes is one potential barrier to collaboration and reconciliation in politics and society. It turns out that we begin to put people in categories from infancy.
January 23, 2007
People may not perform selfless acts just for an emotional reward, a new brain study suggests. Instead, they may do good because they're acutely tuned into the needs and actions of others.
January 2, 2007
If you happen across a pond full of croaking green frogs, listen carefully. Some of them may be lying.
December 21, 2006
Is it really more rewarding to give than to receive? Brain imaging research is unwrapping what's behind the joy of giving.
December 15, 2006
Humans first moved out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, but 30,000 years later some of them moved back, according to a new study based on DNA evidence from ancient human remains found in Africa.
December 8, 2006
Humans may have evolved altruistic traits as a result of a cultural "tax" we paid to each other early in our evolution.
December 5, 2006
The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior, or what could be called religion.
December 4, 2006
Diversified social roles for men, women, and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals. (The original paper can be found here.)
November 29, 2006
Why do we unconsciously adopt a Southern twang when visiting a friend in Alabama or make caustic remarks around an especially sarcastic co-worker? Because it makes them like us better.
November 21, 2006
Males prefer older females, at least in the chimp world.
These findings could shed light on how the more chimp-like ancestors of humans might have behaved
November 13, 2006
Female remains in graveyards reflect war in pre-Hispanic New Mexico.
November 7, 2006
Children as young as five to seven years of age prefer lucky individuals over the less fortunate, which could clarify the origins of human attitudes toward differing social groups and help explain the persistence of social inequality.
March 16, 2006
Depending on which journals you've picked up in recent months, early humans were either peace-loving softies or war-mongering buffoons. Which theory is to be believed?
March 12, 2006
Human nature may have evolved as well.
January 26, 2006
Simian society, too, needs the forces of law and order.
January 10, 2006
Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports.
November 2, 2006
Who doesn't know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin. (May require free registration.)
October 20, 2006
Sucking up to win the support of the boss dates back to our furry ancestors. The motivation, for monkeys, is life and death.
September 18, 2006
Ever wondered how some people can “put themselves into another person's shoes” and some people cannot? Our ability to empathise with others seems to depend on the action of "mirror neurons" in the brain
September 11, 2006
Random acts of kindness really do make you feel happier and in control.
September 12, 2006
Having a common enemy brings out the best in men, a new study has shown.
August 9, 2006
According to preliminary results from an ongoing long-term study of landscapes and human interaction, neighbors are more likely to be social when living among lush lawns.
June 28, 2006
Honesty may well be the best policy, but it often deserts us when no one is watching, psychologists report today.
July 13, 2006
A new study finds a partisan's brain responds to the opposition candidate's face by activating cognitive networks designed to regulate emotion.
July 7, 2006
Feelings of empathy lead to actions of helping—but only between members of the same group.
June 21, 2006
Overconfident people are more likely to wage war but fare worse in the ensuing battles, a new study suggests.
July 1, 2006
A recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias.
May 22, 2006
While scientists go back and forth on the feasibility of slowing, halting or even reversing the aging process, ethicists and policymakers have quietly been engaged in a separate debate about whether it is wise to actually do so.
May 18, 2006
Research shows that sharing negative attitudes about others may have positive consequences; it promotes closeness and friendship.
April 4, 2006
Gossip is more than just idle chatter, according to recent research. It helps us navigate our complex social world.
May 11, 2006
Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.
April 11, 2006
Study finds that people are more willing to lie to coworkers than to strangers.
April 6, 2006
A smarter, softer kind of paternalism is coming into style.
April 7, 2006
The idea of a happy, cooperative society in which no one gets punished falls apart as soon as a few freeloaders show up.
March 31, 2006
Praying for a sick heart patient may feel right to people of faith, but it doesn't appear to improve the patient's health, according to a new study that is the largest ever done on the healing powers of prayer.
December 1, 2005
People can communicate without agreeing on the meaning of the terms.
November 23, 2005
In an important new study biologists explore the evolution of two distinct types of laughter—laughter which is stimulus-driven and laughter which is self-generated and strategic.
November 17, 2005
Modern humans migrated out of Africa and into India much earlier than once believed, driving older hominids in present-day India to extinction and creating some of the earliest art and architecture, a new study suggests.
November 15, 2005
European immigrants may have passed on agricultural skills, but not their genes.
November 10, 2005
A recent study argues the underlying cause of many regional wars and the type of peace that follows results from a state-to-nation imbalance.
November 1, 2005
We're all naturally born cheats but some of us will only cheat if we can kid ourselves that we aren't really doing it.
October 27, 2005
You can tell a lot about someone from how they treat their friends. As the results of a study of captive chimpanzees seem to show, our ape cousins are only in it for themselves.
October 19, 2005
In a new study of cichlid fish descended from others caught in East Africa’s Lake Tanganika, scientists have made some surprising observations about how those animals respond to changes in their environments known as "social opportunities."
October 18, 2005
The first report of customary use of tool-sets—two or more different types of tool used in sequence to achieve a single goal—by a community of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in the Congo Basin.
October 13, 2005
We all pretend to have more of it and be better at it than we are ... Friendship that is, not sex.
October 5, 2005
We understand the actions of another person on the basis of our own "action inventory". In other words, our own mind and body give us the foundation to understand what other people are doing, thinking, or feeling.
October 4, 2005
Science only adds to our appreciation for poetic beauty and experiences of emotional depth.
September 29, 2005
The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their structure, not their vocabularies, a new report suggests.
September 26, 2005
Kings of the corporate jungle survive by using conflict and cooperation techniques honed by their primate relatives, a new book asserts.
September 23, 2005
Cursing is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, whether living or dead, spoken by millions or by a single small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech.
September 21, 2005
About five to seven million years ago, when the lineage of humans and chimpanzees split, edible root plants similar to rutabagas and turnips may have been one of the reasons.
September 16, 2005
Men who slide down the social ladder during their lifetime take the blow much harder than women in the same position, a new study shows.
September 7, 2005
The invention of the spear about a million years ago sparked 985,000 years of relative peace between tribes of early humans, according to a recent report.
August 25, 2005
Communication evolved hand-in-hand with social bonding, suggests a new study of non-human primates, which probes the origins of language.
August 23, 2005
A report published Monday suggests the use of projectile weapons marked a major turning point in the evolution of intergroup violence in early humans.
August 22, 2005
Humans are not the only conformists in the animal kingdom. New research shows that chimpanzees also tend to imitate their peers, suggesting that the human penchant for follow-the-leader may be more deeply rooted than thought.
August 16, 2005
Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, blather with no useful function. But some investigators now say that gossip should be central to any study of group interaction. (NY Times--requires free registration.)
August 12, 2005
It's no secret that momentum is a powerful force in the stock market. It can drive real estate prices too, and may even account for all those color-coded rubber wristbands everyone is wearing today. Problem is, momentum is often irrational, and advertisers know it.
August 10, 2005
Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it?
August 3, 2005
Threaten a man's masculinity, and he will assume more macho attitudes.
July 29, 2005
Human beings show greater persistence of learned fear toward members of another race than those of their own race.
July 13, 2005
In today's rat-race climate, what makes some of us look out for each other, while others look out for themselves?
July 6, 2005
Men and women differ in how they decide which strangers they can trust, according to new research.
June 30, 2005
Scientists have begun to look in a different way at how the brain creates the convictions that mould our relationships and inform our behaviour.
June 24, 2005
Monkeys show the same "irrational" aversion to risks as humans.
June 23, 2005
Can you trust first impressions? Initial encounters are emotionally concentrated events that can sometimes overwhelm us—but they often contain important elements of the truth.
June 22, 2005
Health-scare stories often arise because their authors simply don't understand numbers.
June 16, 2005
Friends, not family, are the key to a longer life, a new study suggests.
June 13, 2005
When friends pick a restaurant or movie, group decision making can get tricky. So how do flocks stick together in the animal world?
June 10, 2005
Why are some people shy while others are outgoing? Social behavior may be shaped by differences in the length of seemingly non-functional DNA, sometimes referred to as junk DNA.
June 2, 2005
In a finding that may someday benefit the socially manipulative as well as the socially awkward, Swiss researchers are reporting that doses of a natural hormone significantly increased the level of trust.
May 27, 2005
Evidence that psychopaths are born, not made.
May 26, 2005
By the time children are in second grade, they know to take what people say with a grain of salt, particularly when the statement supports the speaker’s self–interest.
May 25, 2005
The tendency to be prejudiced is a form of common sense, hard-wired into the human brain through evolution as an adaptive response to protect our prehistoric ancestors from danger.
May 24, 2005
Whether it's squirrels looking for nuts or you looking for your keys, animals have evolved a foraging behaviour that comes close what physicists calculate is the fastest way to find hidden objects.
May 23, 2005
The ability to comprehend sarcasm depends upon a carefully orchestrated sequence of complex cognitive skills based in specific parts of the brain.
May 12, 2005
The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
May 9, 2005
Fads, fashions and dramatic shifts in public opinion all appear to follow a physical law: one of the laws of magnetism.
May 6, 2005
If dolphins, hyenas and even goats can do it, why do we find it so hard to settle an argument?
May 2, 2005
Low levels of social connectedness can adversely affect the body—lowering immune response and affecting heart health—highlight two new studies.
April 28, 2005
DNA reveals a lot about human evolution, and some family secrets, too.
April 27, 2005
Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science.
April 15, 2005
Every society has its classes—the rich, the poor, and the middle class in-between. Now it seems that the divisions may be a mathematical consequence of competition between people.
April 12, 2005
Women are not more intuitive than men: they just think they are. A national internet experiment involving more than 15,000 people has confirmed that women are no better than men at spotting which smile is a fake, which sincere.
April 11, 2005
Since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, advocates of free trade and the division of labour have lauded the advantages of those economic principles. Until now, though, no one has suggested that they might be responsible for the very existence of humanity.
April 7, 2005
Ancient hominids from the Caucasus may have fed and cared for their elderly, a new fossil find has indicated.
April 4, 2005
Modern humans may have driven Neanderthals to extinction 30,000 years ago because Homo sapiens unlocked the secrets of free trade.
March 18, 2005
Would you donate more to charity if you were being watched, even by a bug-eyed robot called Kismet?
March 15, 2005
Homo sapiens is the only species in which individuals bestow kindness on strangers. Why on earth do we do that?
March 15, 2005
Laws and public policy will often miss their mark until they incorporate an understanding of why, biologically, humans behave as they do.
March 14, 2005
The hurt we feel when a lover dumps us is a primitive response that has the same roots as physical pain.
February 28, 2005
Parenting. Establishing life partnerships. Getting to know someone else's personality. These experiences feel profoundly human, but they have more in common with the animal world than one might think.
February 24, 2005
Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe?
February 23, 2005
One of our most distinctive human traits is our willingness to cooperate with others. Why we are like that is one of the really big questions confronting evolutionary psychologists.
February 22, 2005
Dogs and their owners really do resemble one another.
February 18, 2005
Documentation of sounds and sound patterns, and their evolution over the past 7000-8000 years, allows linguists to quantify the important role of human perception, articulation and imperfect learning as language is passed from one generation to the next.
February 15, 2005
A propensity to faith in some form appears to be embedded within us as a profound part of human existence, as inextricable and perhaps inexplicable as the way we love and laugh.
February 10, 2005
Predatory killers often do far more than commit murder.
February 4, 2005
For a monkey, not all images are created equal. The results indicate that monkeys, like people, value information based on its social context.
February 3, 2005
We may have more control over our race-based vigilance reaction than previously thought.
February 1, 2005
Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike."
February 1, 2005
Homo sapiens passed much of its early history holed up in caves and it is now returning to its origins. For today's postmodern troglodyte, however, labouring in the knowledge economy, the cave is a lofty glass palace.
January 26, 2005
Apes tolerate injustice if they are close to the beneficiary—the first time such behaviour has been demonstrated outside the human race.
January 26, 2005
The co-operative and the selfish are equally successful at getting what they want.
January 24, 2005
Why are some people more prone to give charity or put themselves in danger in order to help others? Perhaps there is a gene linked to altruistic behavior.
January 20, 2005
Humans are among the few creatures that are able to work well cooperatively. According to an evolutionary psychologist, our success at cooperation results from three distinct personality types.
January 19, 2005
Our ability to put ourselves in another person's shoes and 'read their mind' is what makes us human. But how do we do it?
January 18, 2005
The president of Harvard University has provoked a furore by arguing that men outperform women in maths and sciences because of biological difference, and discrimination is no longer a career barrier for female academics.
January 17, 2005
Objective signs of physical and social disorder in a neighborhood are much less influential in shaping people's perceptions of disorder than are the racial, ethnic, and class composition of that neighborhood.
January 10, 2005
There are a lot of minor moral and legal violations that people engage in—violations such as speeding, cheating on tests, etc. But what factors influence a person's willingness to do so?
January 7, 2005
Twin study suggests that DNA accounts for more than 40% of difference in such behaviors as charitable giving.
January 6, 2005
Knowing where to look is key to recognizing others' emotions.
December 21, 2004
Connections between crime and biological make-up are increasingly becoming a hot topic for discussion. Two personal and opposing accounts argue the case for and against.
December 17, 2004
Coming face-to-face with someone who looks scared triggers an automatic response in the brain that tells you to be afraid too.
December 14, 2004
The brain uses three steps to identify faces.
December 14, 2004
The shift from nomadic life to settled village life can lead to a rapid development of religious and social complexity and hierarchy, according to a detailed chronology of the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico.
December 13, 2004
Why should animals help out stricken humans—does it prove that altruism is a natural instinct?
December 13, 2004
Researchers are exploring how and where in the brain people recognise faces.
December 8, 2004
Psychologists have found that the amygdala is associated with unconscious race bias, but that the conscious brain can compensate for unconscious prejudices.
December 1, 2004
Genes exert a strong influence over how nice—or socially responsible—humans are, but contrary to other studies on personality traits, it suggests upbringing also plays a major role.
November 30, 2004
All humans are capable of committing torture and other "acts of great evil". That is the unhappy conclusion drawn from an analysis of psychological studies.
November 30, 2004
A new study suggests that the modern humans' more sophisticated communication skills may have helped to finish off the Neandertals.
November 29, 2004
If you've ever been tempted to drop a friend who tended to freeload, then you have experienced a key to one of the biggest mysteries facing social scientists.
November 29, 2004
The overwhelming similarity of human DNA to that of the chimpanzee shows not that we are `mostly' chimp but how little we actually understand about DNA after all
November 23, 2004
Surprising new research shows that crowds are often smarter than individuals.
November 18, 2004
A menacing body posture can be as threatening as a frightening facial expression, according to new research.
November 16, 2004
It is amazing what you can find rifling through someone's rubbish. You can even work out that people didn't settle into permanent village life as early as once thought.
November 12, 2004
There may be an extra special someone to thank for the past 30,000 years of cultural advances—grandma.
November 11, 2004
Classic English and French composers influenced by their language.
November 2, 2004
Similarity of construction shows 'convergent evolution' applies to behaviour.
October 26, 2004
Reminders of death increase the need for psychological security and therefore the appeal of leaders who emphasize the greatness of the nation and a heroic victory over evil.
October 25, 2004
Being a sports fanatic may have less to do with winning or losing than with self-esteem.
October 19, 2004
In a 1997 survey in the science journal Nature, 40 percent of U.S. scientists said they believe in God; the same percentage as 80 years earlier.
October 18, 2004
Coincidence is a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective?
October 15, 2004
A select group of people have a unique ability to spot when someone is lying.
October 14, 2004
Brain scan studies of people making difficult moral judgments revealed that the judgments activate brain regions involved in both reason and emotion.
September 29, 2004
New find in Israel shows that cereal production predates agricultural societies by millennia.
September 27, 2004
Nations differ dramatically in levels of happiness. But the hot spots aren't where you might think.
September 23, 2004
A personality trait has been identified that seems to predict whether people will vote or engage in politics.
September 20, 2004
More men than women get squeezed out of the mating game. As a result, twice as many women as men pass their genes to the next generation.
September 17, 2004
Psychologists often conclude from research subjects' behavior in psychological experiments that humans are irrational. New research indicates that humans are in fact quite rational; they just do not trust what people in lab coats tell them.
September 17, 2004
Some parts of language arise from the innate way humans process language, according to a new study of deaf children in Nicaragua.
September 7, 2004
Within just 10 minutes of meeting, people decide what kind of relationship they want with a new acquaintance, a recent study suggests.
September 3, 2004
If evolution could be re-run, how would the story end? In this exclusive extract from his latest book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins goes back in time to find out.
September 2, 2004
Northern European men living during the early Middle Ages were nearly as tall as their modern-day American descendants, a finding that defies conventional wisdom about progress in living standards during the last millennium.
September 1, 2004
A trove of 75 beads from the Blombos Cave near Cape Town, South Africa, shows that the modern human mind may have taken shape at least 30,000 years earlier than generally believed.
August 30, 2004
A new study shows that consumers find it easier to rationalize a bad outcome after paying for an item with their time than with their wallets.
August 19, 2004
"Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations." This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: The Company of Strangers, by Paul Seabright.
August 16, 2004
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mexican workers in the United States do not receive labor market advantages from their ethnic solidarity, but familial and friendship obligations do help Mexican workers find better jobs.
August 13, 2004
Disgust is an adaptation for survival but what is the point of it now?
August 10, 2004
Evolutionary psychologists try to shed the just-so story stigma.
August 5, 2004
A month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 70,000 people gathered in Leipzig, East Germany, to demonstrate against the communist regime. No central authority planned this event; so how did all of these people decide to come together on that particular day?
August 2, 2004
Acts of personal vengeance reflect a biologically rooted sense of justice that functions in the brain something like appetite. (New York Times; requires free registration.)
July 27, 2004
Just like humans, many animals make crucial everyday decisions, such as what to eat and who to breed with, by looking at what their peers are doing.
July 26, 2004
One scientist who studies suicide bombers says they're using a trait found in evolution called kin altruism to ensure success.
July 26, 2004
One of a Neanderthal baby's first words was probably "papa", concludes one of the most comprehensive attempts to date to make out what the first human language was like.
July 13, 2004
Some primatologists have argued that to understand human nature we must understand the behavior of apes. (A link to the orginial article is at the bottom of the news release.)
July 6, 2004
Senior citizens played an important role in the dramatic spread of human civilisation some 30,000 years ago, a study of the human fossil record has shown.
June 30, 2004
This finding backs the "Machiavellian intelligence" theory, which suggests the benefits of complex social skills fuelled the evolution of large primate brains.
June 21, 2004
Madness as creativity and coping has been crucial to the species.
June 7, 2004
When it comes to outdoor recreation, men and women differ not just in the activities they choose, but also in the way they perceive questions about how they spend their free time.
May 27, 2004
People are not drawn to religion just because of a fear of death or any other single reason, according to a new comprehensive, psychological theory of religion.
May 21, 2004
Regret is a complex emotion that helps guide humans in regulating their individual and social behavior. It is also vulnerable to injury to the brain.
May 13, 2004
Levels of testosterone in the womb may have profound effects on a person's social development.
May 11, 2004
Our brains seem to be built with many hurdles to thinking clearly. One illusion that many people subscribe to is known sometimes as the identity fallacy and other times as the fallacy of continuity.
May 5, 2004
Coalition troops have certainly mistreated some captives. Should we be surprised?
April 30, 2004
In situations that require quick decisions, anger can fuel automatic, immediate prejudice against people of a different race, religion, or creed.
April 29, 2004
What others think of us is a matter of life and death.
April 13, 2004
While most cases of cultural transmission in primates involve tool use, there has emerged in a group of olive baboons a unique pacific culture. (A link to the original article is near the bottom of the press release.)
April 6, 2004
Before a single word leaves a person's lips you gain important information about them, including their emotional state, by reading their face.
April 1, 2004
It's April 1, the day some people set out to prove that a large brain is no protection against gullibility. Check out "The Museum of Hoaxes" Top 100 April Fool's Day picks.
March 18, 2004
It's a fact that people tend to be more generous to those more closely related to themselves genealogically. That fact has enormous political implications.
March 17, 2004
Our cultural evolution is driven in large part by a desire to control resources.
March 8, 2004
A recent report suggests that baboons classify individuals based on rank and kinship and use this information to evaluate social interactions. The cognitive skills that allow both humans and baboons to think about social relationships could be useful for survival.
March 3, 2004
Two prominent Stanford scientists offer their views.
February 23, 2004
Somewhere in the brain's temporal lobes there may be neural circuitry for religious experience.
February 23, 2004
The ability to develop a form of communication that becomes an actual language is apparently innate.
February 20, 2004
Knowing our partner is in pain automatically triggers affective pain processing regions of our brains, according to new research.
February 17, 2004
The human brain may have started evolving its unique characteristics much earlier than has previously been supposed, according to new research.
February 11, 2004
When people see others in pain, they show patterns of brain activation similar to patterns observed when they themselves are suffering.
February 11, 2004
Scientists see a biological underpinning for religiosity, and it is related to the neurotransmitter serotonin.
February 10, 2004
You may be more prejudiced than you think, especially if you?re angry and approached by someone of a different race, religion or creed.
February 9, 2004
The police killing of an unarmed 19-year-old on a Brooklyn rooftop last month appears to be a tragedy of nanoseconds and eons, a death delivered by a cop firing not because of a conscious decision but an instantaneous neuronal impulse hardwired from the days of our animal ancestors.
February 3, 2004
Forget investment and savings rates, worker productivity and wage scales to determine which countries will become richer or poorer. What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife—especially hell. (May require free registration.)
January 23, 2004
What motivates our choices? Is it reason? Emotion? Biological instinct? Social norms? Is the moral satisfaction of doing right enough to tempt us away from the material rewards of doing wrong?
January 21, 2004
What accounts for the persistent belief that trade with poor countries will make us worse off? Recently, it occurred to me that evolutionary psychology might provide the answer.
January 19, 2004
Some people say a face is like an open book. For psychologist Paul Ekman, the face is more than that, it's the Rosetta stone of human evolution. (Audio interview requires RealPlayer.)
January 15, 2004
Have you ever given a friend part of your dessert just so they will stop bugging you for some? You're not alone—chimpanzees and monkeys share their food with others to avoid hassle too.
January 13, 2004
There are, in fact, two levels of causality to consider: proximate (immediate historical events) and ultimate (deeper evolutionary motives). Both played a role in the Bounty debacle.
January 8, 2004
Research into the aggressive behaviour of male chimpanzees, our closest biological ally, suggests that the urge to go to war is in our DNA and that only women can stop it, says Sanjida O'Connell.
December 19, 2003
Evolutionary theory says self-interest dictates our behaviour. So why do we show such generosity at Christmas?
December 19, 2003
Natural climate change may have started civilisation. And the spread of farming may have caused as much global warming as industry is causing now.
December 17, 2003
Two of the world's leading experts on creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Epstein, debate the myths that surround this mysterious process. Do we all have the ability or is it reserved for only the few?
December 4, 2003
An unusual experiment with monkeys who were switched between mothers shortly after birth has demonstrated the importance of nature over nurture in behavior.
November 26, 2003
Fossil bones record the history of the human form but they say little about behavior. A richer source on the way human social behavior evolved may come from chimpanzees, with whom people shared a common ancestor as recently as five or six million years ago. (May require free registration.)
November 26, 2003
Feminists might be surprised to hear it, but females are the dominant sex in most primate communities. Far from being passive bystanders in a world governed by machismo, a new study suggests females may determine social evolution in primates.
November 25, 2003
Several million years before Bonnie Fuller ditched Jann Wenner's Us Weekly to remake David Pecker's Star tabloid into a shiny celebrity magazine, life on the African savanna had already sculpted the human psyche into a vessel that would thirst for page after page of articles about the mating rituals, health, and drug problems, fertility problems, wealth and status displays.
November 25, 2003
The hassles and frustration of commuting and road trips may not seem so bad if you drive down scenic, tree-lined streets, a new study suggests.
November 24, 2003
A speech by the philosopher Christopher W. diCarlo and published in The Humanist in Canada.
November 20, 2003
If races are defined as genetically discrete groups, no. But researchers can use some genetic information to group individuals into clusters with medical relevance.
November 17, 2003
A new Dartmouth study reveals that interracial contact has a profound impact on a person's attention and performance. The researchers found new evidence using brain imaging that white individuals attempt to control racial bias when exposed to black individuals, and that this act of suppressing bias exhausts mental resources.
November 14, 2003
Two recent studies of African baboons provide new insights into the complexity of monkey social behavior. This research may in turn reveal the conditions that contributed to the evolution of distinctly human traits, such as language and certain strategies for survival.
October 6, 2003
When a nation's overall levels of religious belief and attendance are high, its citizens voice greater disapproval of divorce, homosexuality, abortion and prostitution—issues involving sexual morality. But religiosity is less likely to spur such disapproval for cheating on taxes or accepting bribes in public office, says two Penn State researchers.
October 2, 2003
Early female-dominated societies lost their power to men as they acquired cattle, a new study demonstrates.
October 2, 2003
A speech at the American Enterprise Institute by Lionel Tiger, Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. His "principal focus is on the set of working principles and facts speaking for themselves, which compose the idea of 'human nature.' "
September 29, 2003
Humans are social animals, but does our social organization result from our genetic makeup or does it come from something much more fundamental? From her work studying social insects, Arizona State University biologist Jennifer Fewell believes that these remarkable animals suggest a an alternate cause behind the development of complex societies.
September 23, 2003
The discovery of just a single bacterium somewhere beyond Earth would force us to revise our understanding of who we are and where we fit into the cosmic scheme of things, throwing us into a deep spiritual identity crisis that would be every bit as dramatic as the one Copernicus brought about in the early 1500s, when he asserted that Earth was not at the center of the universe.
September 18, 2003
Knowing when you have been ripped off is not solely a human skill, biologists have discovered. Monkeys can spot a raw deal when they see one, and if they are not treated fairly they throw a tantrum. The finding confirms the idea that cooperative behaviour, which relies on the participants' having a sense of fair play, appeared early in our evolutionary history.
September 16, 2003
The advent of affluent village life with communities splitting into clans may have heralded the first wars, suggests archeological analysis of ancient Mexico.
September 8, 2003
Languages evolve and compete with each other much like plants and animals, but those driven to extinction are almost always tongues with a low social status, U.S. research shows.
September 5, 2003
Many positive aspects of modern human society are the fruit of millennia of cooperative interactions between members of our species. Yet the evolutionary origins of cooperative behaviour in social animals and insects remains one of the most intriguing puzzles in biology. Now scientists have observed the real-time evolution of novel forms of cooperative behaviour between bacterial cells in the laboratory.
September 5, 2003
For more than 3 billion years, biological evolution has guided the colonization of our planet by living organisms. Evolution's rules are simple: Creatures that adapt to threats and master the evolutionary game thrive; those that don't, become extinct.
September 4, 2003
Intricate ivory carvings said to be the oldest known examples of figurative art have been uncovered in a cave in southwestern Germany. Researchers say that the finding could change our understanding of early man's imaginative endeavours.
September 3, 2003
Ever consulted a pet psychic? Swear you saw a UFO? Do you avoid walking under ladders for fear of inviting bad luck? Why do we believe in strange things? NPR's Ira Flatow leads a discussion about science, pseudoscience and the nature of scientific proof. Are we skeptical enough? (Audio program)
August 29, 2003
Roderick Long on the continuing misrepresentation of one of the important philosophers of freedom and a prominent "Social Darwinist" of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer.
August 25, 2003
The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of moral intuitions developed by the Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard. How do humans, throughout the world, decide what is right and wrong? To answer this question, participants evaluate a series of moral dilemmas designed to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our ethical judgments. The test takes about 10 minutes and participation is completely confidential.
August 22, 2003
Michael Shermer's column in the September issue of Scientific American examines recent evidence that, like bonobos, we may be evolving in a more peaceful direction.
August 13, 2003
The idea that people are connected through just "six degrees of separation," based on Stanley Milgram's "small world study," has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the "small world problem," reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence.
August 8, 2003
An e-mail experiment has confirmed the famous 'six degrees of separation' of human social networks, but revealed that individuals don't necessarily benefit from their connectedness.
August 5, 2003
Much has been written about the glass ceiling, the double standard and other barriers to women in management. A related question that has consumed both academic and popular writers is whether men and women have the same leadership abilities. The answer suggested by a comprehensive meta-analysis published in the current Psychological Bulletin (Vol. 129, No. 3) might surprise you. On average, women in management positions are somewhat better leaders than men in equivalent positions, according to the study.
July 29, 2003
Empathy is what we all claim we want more of—from our spouses, our bosses, our friends and, perhaps especially, our harried doctors. But what is it, exactly? Does it truly aid healing to be understood? Do empathizers run the risk of burning out if they care too much? And how, if empathy is such a good thing, can we get—and give—more of it?
July 25, 2003
Is mankind doomed? Against the background of the war against terror, the march of technology and environmental calamity, this has become the defining question of our age.
July 24, 2003
The important thing about religion, David Sloan Wilson thinks, is that it encourages collective action. The emotions that religions build on, and the conduct they encourage, tend to bind groups and build cooperation. The worship of a common god, he believes, is really the worship of a common good, to whom everyone in the tribe or religion must defer.
July 18, 2003
Researchers have worked out why tit-for-tat jostles so swiftly escalate into fisticuffs: humans routinely underestimate the force they exert when pushing or hitting other people.
July 18, 2003
Feel under seige from a vocal religious culture? Maybe you're a Bright. A Bright is defined as a person whose worldview is naturalistic (free of supernatural and mystical elements). Although they differ in many ways, there are lots and lots of people who have such a worldview. An umbrella group for those with a naturalistic worldview is being formed. Members include Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And perhaps you too?
July 3, 2003
Research by economists at two American universities suggests that, even in the job market, women behave in ways that disadvantage them. At the University of Chicago's business school, Uri Gneezy and a group of colleagues have used novel techniques to show that women and men have different attitudes to competing.
July 2, 2003
Spiked, an independent online publication based in London, sponsored a conference on risk aversion in modern society under the above title. Much the the conference material is now online. The lead article, "Challenging the precautionary principle," can be found by following this link. Other materials from the conference are linked at the bottom of that article.
June 26, 2003
The Public Library of Science is excited to announce its newest, public-oriented initiatives. This campaign aims to increase public awareness of the anachronistic scientific publishing system that denies citizens around the world access to publicly-supported research and to promote an alternative that will provide universal access and greatly accelerate scientific and medical progress.
June 24, 2003
Another Ford runs Ford and another Bush runs America. From politics and business to movies, literature and sports, Bellow argues clannishness increasingly prevails. The United States, he says, is undergoing a vast revival of what he calls "the hereditary principle," or, more bluntly, nepotism.
| Want to be a cyborg? You already are |
June 23, 2003
And as companies race to build better gadgets and gizmos to improve our daily routines, a part-human, part machine organism comes closer to becoming reality. But it seems, at least in some circles, that we became full-fledged cyborgs long ago. Technology is inseparable from who we are and how we think, argues Andy Clark in his new book, Natural-Born Cyborgs.
June 20, 2003
Blue-throated lizards that help each other achieve reproductive success are also helping scientists understand how social cooperation evolved. Most examples of cooperative behavior in animals involve cooperation between genetically related individuals, which is explained by the theory of "kin selection." Now, researchers have described an example of cooperation between genetically similar but unrelated members of a lizard species common in the western United States. Their findings, published in the June 20 issue of the journal Science, shed new light on the evolution of cooperation and social behavior.
June 19, 2003
From the BBC comes three radio programs on the history of human folly. Francis Wheen examines the perennial tendency of politicians, scientists and others in authority to act perversely, and how, when more rational alternatives are clearly present, the best and brightest can blithely and arrogantly march into colossal blunders. You can listen to the broadcasts over the 'Net.
June 16, 2003
There is no earthly reason that readers should care about the drama that has unfolded over the turf war between the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and the smaller Chambers of Commerce in Johnson County. Yet, like many conflicts that seem petty to those who are uninvolved, to those who are involved, the issues trigger rage, suspicion, fear, and other deeply passionate emotions that prove, once again, our human systems are programmed oftentimes to fight, particularly over a perceived threat over turf.
June 10, 2003
We've been obsessed with human nature ever since we knew we had one. And we 've fought fierce intellectual battles and even real wars trying to impose different versions on each other. The irony was that much of what we thought we knew was wrong or at best problematic. But now, uniquely, barriers are coming down and disciplines joining forces for what will be a truly epic journey.
June 10, 2003
Lucky people frequently experience the small-world phenomenon, and that such "lucky" meetings have a dramatic and positive effect on their lives. In contrast, unlucky people rarely report such experiences.
June 9, 2003
Some of the most provocative new findings about the origins and worldwide spread of the human species are coming from studies of the history books packed inside nearly every cell of our bodies. Genes speak volumes about our beginnings in Africa an estimated 130,000 to 200,000 years ago, our divergence into distinct populations of hunter- gatherers and farmers, our migration into Europe and Asia, and finally our settling in the Americas, perhaps 30,000 years ago.
June 6, 2003
Apart from population--larger countries tend to have more terrorists--the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists. Poverty and literacy were unrelated to the number of terrorists from a country.
June 4, 2003
An interview with philosopher Galen Strawson. "Almost all human beings believe that they are free to choose what to do in such a way that they can be truly, genuinely responsible for their actions in the strongest possible sense; responsible period; responsible without any qualification; responsible sans phrase, responsible tout court, absolutely, radically, buck-stoppingly responsible; ultimately responsible, in a word - and so ultimately morally responsible when moral matters are at issue. Free will is the thing you have to have if you're going to be responsible in this all or nothing way. That's what I mean by free will. That's what I think we haven't got and can't have."
June 3, 2003
Flawed brain chemistry, brain damage, genetic defects, an unhealthy psychological environment--take them individually or mix them together and you may have the right ingredients for violent behavior, reports a variety of researchers.
June 2, 2003
Terrorists appear to share several biopsychosocial traits with war heroes--with some important distinctions, Dr. Ansar Haroun said at a special session of the annual meeting of the American College of Forensic Psychiatry. Drawn from interviews with suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, Dr. Haroun's observations were in aid of shaping a framework of understanding about such individuals, and, if possible, shedding light on the murky psychiatric study of terrorism.
May 28, 2003
This question, why societies make disastrous decisions and destroy themselves, is one that not only surprised my UCLA undergraduates, but also astonishes professional historians studying collapses of past societies. ... (The first paragraph is at the top of the page. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "next" link to get the rest of the article.)
March 20, 2003
Studies of tribal warfare seek to answer why humans don't stop at 'an eye for an eye.' Can we learn from our aggressive, punishing past?
March 11, 2003
Are we hard-wired for conflict and war? Is it part of our psychology to commit mass killing? The human story is one filled with war and mass killing.
February 19, 2003
Social exchange is cooperation for mutual benefit. It is an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" principle: X provides a benefit to Y conditional on Y doing something that X wants. This very basic form of cooperation is zoologically rare -- it occurs in only a handful of species. But it is as characteristic of human beings as language and tool use.
August 5, 2002
We’re wired by evolution to want to connected to the group. But to stay connected, our brain must reward us for cooperative behavior. Now researchers at Emory University in Atlanta have used brain imaging to show just how cooperative behavior triggers that subtle ‘high’ we all seek.
August 5, 2002
Scientific evidence is piling up that belief in the supernatural, whether God or any other paranormal phenomena, is a result of brain chemistry.
August 20, 2001
In every political convention, those toiling for the candidates were optimistic that their men will win and wildly optimistic that such an outcome would have a profoundly positive effect on the future. Where does such optimism come from?
August 14, 2001
Gerard Piel, editor of Scientific American, once noted: “The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.” The remarkable discovery is the ‘scientific method.' Until the social sciences adopt this proven method, they will continue to be ruled by witchcraft.
April 3, 2001
The government is waging a propaganda war against financial privacy. Big Brother wants to track your activities by rousing envy in your neighbors. It's time to step up to the barricades.
November 15, 2006
Science's definitive answer: it depends.
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