Psychology
Psychology
Psychology stories — what makes people tick, what childhood patterns shape adulthood, how high-functioning minds navigate the world. Part of our Mind & Meaning editorial section.
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
Psychology
Hundreds of people wrote to a Bristol newspaper in the 1970s about a hum they could feel more than hear — a warehouse fan was blamed, the warehouse closed, the reports continued, and fifty years later the same complaint has been filed across continents by people who have never met
Psychology
Studies on chronic nail biters keep pointing to the same unexpected personality trait, and it isn't anxiousness. It's perfectionism, a low tolerance for sitting still with something unfinished or imperfect
Psychology
In the late 1960s, a psychologist put twelve-month-old babies through a simple test — leave the room, come back, watch what happens — and the way each child reacted in those few seconds turned out to predict something about how they'd love people well into adulthood
Psychology
The most extensive review of dementia risk to date found nearly half of all cases trace back to 14 everyday factors, from hearing loss to untreated vision problems, most of which have more to do with your health than your age
Psychology
I used to treat boredom as a problem to be solved and now I treat it as a signal, which sounds like a small reframe until you realise it changes almost every decision you make between 6pm and midnight
Psychology
In a 1962 Southern textile factory, 62 workers, nearly all women, fell ill with nausea and rashes after believing insects from a fabric shipment were biting them — no bug, no toxin, nothing was ever found, and the case became a foundational study in mass psychogenic illness
Psychology
Shown two everyday objects and asked which one they had seen first, 50 adults pointed to the wrong object 78 percent of the time, and the wrong object was always the one they had seen most often
Psychology
Somewhere in America lives a woman who genuinely cannot feel fear — a rare disease quietly dissolved the part of her brain that produces it, so when researchers put a tarantula in front of her she reached for it anyway, and when they led her through a haunted house, she startled the monsters
Psychology
Psychology suggests who you end up close to isn't decided by looks or shared passions — it's proximity, plain nearness, because liking tends to grow for whoever we simply keep seeing, again and again
Psychology
Psychologists once sent students into a room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt and asked how many people had noticed — the students guessed about half, but the real number was closer to a quarter, a clean measure of how badly we overestimate how much anyone is looking at us
Psychology
People who scored higher on intelligence tests as children tend to drink more alcohol as adults in the UK and US — but not in Sweden, where the correlation runs the other way
Psychology
In 1973, eight perfectly sane people had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals to see if the doctors could tell, and what happened next humiliated an entire profession and changed psychiatry forever.
Psychology
Jet pilots had a word for the feeling of coming loose from the earth at high altitude, and when two researchers put the question to 137 of them in the mid-1950s, 35 per cent said they had felt it and two-thirds of that group had never told another pilot
Psychology