Human Behaviour
Human
The universal psychology lane. Stories about how people relate to one another, themselves, and the world — written for readers who are curious about why we behave the way we do. Sister section to Space Psychology.
Human Behaviour
Post-it Notes were invented in 1968 by a chemist named Spencer Silver trying to develop a super-strong aerospace adhesive — and the weak glue he accidentally produced instead sat unused for six years until a colleague named Art Fry needed something to anchor the bookmarks in his church hymnal
Psychology
In 1975, an American developmental psychologist demonstrated that when a parent simply stops emotionally responding to a baby's face for as little as three minutes — making no expression, no eye contact, no sound — the baby first becomes frantic trying to re-engage the parent and then withdraws into a hopeless silence, in one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology
Human Behaviour
Morning light exposure in the first hour after waking shapes cortisol and alertness for the hours that follow — and most people in modern built environments are not getting it
Human Behaviour
On May 11, 1997, the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down in a Manhattan office tower to play the final game of his rematch against an IBM computer called Deep Blue — and resigned in under an hour, in what may be the cleanest moment in modern history when a domain of human cognition quietly crossed over to a machine
Human Behaviour
Most people don't realize that men now entering their 70s are often being asked to discuss feelings they were raised to keep out of view
Human Behaviour
In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a 7,000-page classified Defense Department history that demonstrated four successive American presidents had systematically lied about the Vietnam War — leaked by a former military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, who had spent 18 months secretly photocopying the documents in his office at night
Human Behaviour
The person who stays calm in every crisis often isn't fearless — many of them learned in childhood that someone had to hold it together
Human Behaviour
For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer's defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match
Human Behaviour
People who replay old conversations at night often aren't anxious or insecure — many are processing words they were never allowed to say out loud in the moment
Human Behaviour
The hundreds of human skeletons scattered around Roopkund Lake at 5,029 metres in the Indian Himalayas were long assumed to be the remains of a single 9th-century pilgrimage group killed by a sudden hailstorm, in an explanation that a 2019 peer-reviewed ancient DNA study has substantially overturned, by demonstrating that the skeletons came from at least three different populations and died across more than one thousand years.
Human Behaviour
If a bee searching for nectar might be conscious and ChatGPT almost certainly isn't, what exactly were we measuring when we decided something was aware?
Psychology
In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for
Human Behaviour
People born between 1945 and 1965 were taught that needing help was weakness, and most of them are still living by a rule no one would defend out loud today
Human Behaviour
The quiet competence many women carry into their 60s isn't always confidence; it can be the residue of decades spent making sure nothing fell apart
Human Behaviour