Science Of Small Talk

What makes someone attractive to you? Specific physical features? A particular personality type? A certain indefinable quality of character or depth of soul? All reasonable answers, sure, but there's an additional response you should at least consider. Another critical influence on who you're attracted to is context. Read More

Why can it be so hard to make the life changes we seek? Because we think about the idea of self-help in all the wrong ways, and it comes back to haunt us when the going gets tough. Read More

Reality's rarely as cut-and-dried as we assume it to be. It's not only beauty that's subject to the eye of the beholder. Just ask Rick Santorum. Read More

As we turn our calendars to 2012 and our attention to New Year's resolutions, it's worth taking a moment to remember a critical, yet too-often overlooked ingredient in the recipe for self-improvement: context. Read More

Attractive people grab our attention. Even babies spend more time gazing at attractive faces, suggesting to some that hardwiring in our brains automatically diverts attention to the good-looking others around us, much in the way moths are helplessly drawn to light... Read More

I've long believed that those of us who make a living studying human nature should be as well-versed in popular culture as we are well-read in the scientific literature. So in that vein, I hereby present to you my Top 7 List of Lessons about Human Nature offered by Seinfeld... Read More

We have unambiguously crossed the starting line of the holiday season, a time of year that predictably brings with it a variety of familiar visitors. But there's one recurring aspect of the holidays that we don't always take note of, namely that they provide the perfect opportunity to stop and appreciate the power of situations. Read More

There's no shortage of disturbing aspects to the Joe Paterno story. Take yesterday's impromptu rally in which Penn State students camped on the coach's lawn, cheering. How on earth, you might ask, could people support a man who, at the very least, failed to do more than pass the buck to university administrators upon learning that his assistant had assaulted a child? Read More

It happens, it would seem, with the regularity of the new moon. Unfortunately, every month or so a news story captures local, national, or even global attention because of the apparent indifference of a crowd of people. This week it's the very sad story of a toddler at a market in China who was gravely injured by a hit-and-run driver... Read More

When we think about extramarital affairs, we think about men. Powerful men. Rich, famous, powerful men. Why would men of status be more likely to step out on a spouse? The answers we give to this question usually have to do with biology or evolution... Read More

Few moments in a courtroom are as persuasive to a jury as seeing a confident witness point at a defendant and say, "that's the man I saw at the crime scene." That's what makes the fallibility of eyewitness memory so surprising to most people when they learn about it... Read More

It pays to be pretty. Or so we've been told by life experience as well as research finding. Better looking people get the benefit of the doubt, get away with bad behavior, and make more money. But sometimes being beautiful can backfire... Read More

There are some human experiences that we fancy as too ethereal to study. Like falling in love. But in the past several decades, behavioral scientists have had a lot to tell us about attraction and love... Read More

We keep falling for it, don't we? As today's disillusioned Facebook and Twitter posts spell out, once again plenty of people have been let down and even shocked by the embarrassing missteps of a public figure they thought they knew. Today it's Anthony Weiner... Read More