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
For most of history the worry was too many people, yet by 2050 some 155 of the world's 204 countries will not have enough babies to sustain their populations, a Lancet study projects — a quiet reversal of the fear that defined the last century
Human Behaviour
Quote by Maya Angelou: “Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”
Psychology
There is a small window in a boy's life, between the ages of four and six, when he is strikingly emotionally perceptive and openly expressive — and a researcher who followed six boys through those years watched something quietly close inside them, one stage at a time
Human Behaviour
An Aboriginal Australian people of northern Queensland speak a language with no words for left or right — only for north, south, east, and west — so instead of asking you to move your left foot, they will ask you to move your east foot, and can point due north almost without thinking
Human Behaviour
A Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda continued fighting the Second World War in the Philippine jungle until 1974 because no one had reached him with orders to stop — when his former commanding officer finally flew in to relieve him personally, Onoda was 52 years old and had been at war for nearly 30 years
Human Behaviour
In villages in the mountains of Sardinia, men reach 100 nearly as often as women, unlike almost anywhere else in the developed world — and the popular explanation isn't diet or exercise, it's that nobody there retired into irrelevance"
Human Behaviour
The United Arab Emirates was once a small federation of fishermen, pearl divers, and camel herders on the Arabian Peninsula with no formal government and no paved roads — and 60 years later, it hosts the tallest building on earth, one of the world's largest airlines, and a per-capita GDP higher than Japan
Human Behaviour
Norway, a country of 5.5 million people that discovered oil off its coast in 1969, has built the world's largest sovereign wealth fund — worth more than $2 trillion in 2026 and holding stakes in roughly 1.5 percent of all publicly listed shares on the planet — meaning every Norwegian citizen effectively owns nearly $400,000 of the fund on paper
Human Behaviour
Japan has more than 33,000 businesses over 100 years old and roughly 3,000 over 200 years old — the highest concentration of ancient family businesses on earth — including a hotel called Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan that has been run by the same family since the year 705
Psychology
Being highly sensitive to your environment is not a weakness but an evolutionary strategy that has been documented in humans and more than 100 other species, and peer-reviewed twin research has established that in humans, approximately 47 per cent of the variation in this trait is heritable and distinct from anxiety or introversion
Human Behaviour
The Eastern Jin army was outnumbered by more than five to one at the Fei River in 383 AD, yet won in a single afternoon by triggering one moment of panic in the invading force, and the result decided which civilisation would rule China for the next two centuries
Psychology
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find a reason for it — and that a life without meaning is what actually breaks people
Human Behaviour
Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren't imaginary — a brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the light-detecting cells sputter out phantom light
Human Behaviour
A genetic analysis of nearly 700,000 people identified 74 distinct locations in the human genome tied to anxiety, 39 of which had never been linked to the condition before
Human Behaviour