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
People who describe themselves as low-maintenance in relationships often aren't easy to love, they're just quietly convinced that being difficult to love is what got them left before
Human Behaviour
On the Japanese island of Okinawa, a cluster of villages produced so many people who lived past 100 that researchers spent decades studying their diet and eventually traced part of the effect to a purple sweet potato that supplied roughly 60 percent of daily calories through the first half of the twentieth century
Human Behaviour
Some of the loneliest people in their sixties aren't the ones without visitors, they're the ones whose family only asks how they are inside the same three-minute call before hanging up
Human Behaviour
Quote by Viktor Frankl: When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves
Psychology
People who feel uneasy around those who think or live differently aren't simply closed-minded — brain imaging suggests their amygdala is physically larger, and fires harder in response to the unfamiliar
Human Behaviour
HSBC paid nearly $2 billion in 2012 after investigators found that Mexican drug-cartel money had moved through its banking system for years — hidden not in suitcases, but inside hundreds of billions of dollars in wire transfers
Human Behaviour
No male population on Earth grew taller last century than Iranian men, who gained 16.5 centimetres between the 1896 and 1996 birth cohorts, while the same study found places where people ended up shorter than those born decades earlier
Human Behaviour
There's a difference between being liked and being known — one is about smoothing yourself into a shape people can hold, the other is about staying whole enough that some people can't
Human Behaviour
The habit of laughing at your own hard stories before anyone else can react isn't resilience, it's often a decades-old strategy for controlling how much sympathy the room is allowed to offer you
Human Behaviour
Encyclopaedia Britannica recently introduced English speakers to fjaka, the Dalmatian art of doing absolutely nothing, and if the word sounds unfamiliar, the feeling won't, it's the same skill the Dutch spent years building an entire wellness trend around and calling niksen.
Human Behaviour
Despite Costa Rica having wider income inequality than the United States on the standard measure, its least advantaged citizens outlive Americans in the same position — which is the part researchers cannot fully explain
Psychology
A man in a Batman costume stood silently on a Milan train, a few metres from a woman who appeared pregnant, and never once interacted with her or anyone else — yet his presence alone was followed by a jump in the share of passengers who offered her a seat from roughly one in three to two in three
Human Behaviour
Wellness retreats are sold as a break from your life. What a 2025 neuroimaging study found is that after seven days, the brain network responsible for that constant inner narrator went about as quiet as it typically does on psilocybin, and nobody in the study had taken anything
Human Behaviour
In 1966, a 10-year-old girl in Wales woke up and told her mother she had dreamed her school vanished under something black; her mother had no time to listen, and 24 hours later a coal tip collapsed onto the building, killing 116 children in one of the most chilling recorded premonitory dreams in modern history
Human Behaviour