Good summary in The Boston Globe. bostonglobe.com/2024/04/27/met…

We think people with different ideologies than us are immoral.

This is especially true when they are powerful, since they can hurt us more.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

“Recent Federal Reserve data show that the average wealth of households under 40 was $259,000 in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2023, marking a 49 percent increase since the fourth quarter of 2019, even after adjusting for inflation.”

americanprogress.org/article/wealth…

This restaurant gives a free bottle of wine — but you have to give up your phone during dinner.

'Ninety percent of customers have opted to leave aside their phones in exchange for wine'
nypost.com/2024/04/16/lif…

An absolutely damning thread of evidence. China's government is 100% censoring and suppressing Americans' videos on TikTok.

The development of human causal learning and reasoning

New Review by Mariel K. Goddu & Alison Gopnik

Web: go.nature.com/3Uy0WhG
PDF: rdcu.be/dFT5p

Amazing things can happen when supply is allowed to respond to demand.

“Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America,” I wrote in *Get Married*.

Derek Thompson isn’t totally convinced.

He offers his own fascinating take on marriage, money & happiness The Atlantic:
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Another one for the negativity files — how many people have heard that opioid overdoses peaked and are now falling?

slowboring.com/p/were-living-…

Research by Shawn Rhoads (he/him) et al examines what traits characterize real-world extraordinary altruists—finding it’s not self-reported empathy, agreeableness, or boldness, nor self-focused motivations, but an unusually high valuation of others’ outcomes:
buff.ly/3JAPPhB

Your regular reminder that student evaluations of college professors may not capture what we want them to (because students tend to like easy graders who hurt their longer-term learning).

journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.10…

Beef emits 31 times more CO₂ per calorie of food than tofu does. By cooking so many cows, humans are cooking themselves, too. Forgoing steaks may be one of the most efficient ways to reduce our carbon footprint econ.st/3xuTLxK 👇

There has never been a better time to be or become a birder trib.al/f0dfttt

Universities are failing. They badly misunderstand crowd psychology.

'By aggressively treating crowds as if they are dangerous monoliths, the police...create identities bound together in opposition to the authorities'

We wrote about this research in Power Of Us

Want a lab measure that predicts actual variation in human altruism? Skip empathy scales and transparent prosociality questionnaires.
Your best bets are:
- Honesty-Humility (HEXACO)
- Social Discounting
- Social Value Orientation (SVO)
Rhoads '23, Thielmann '20, Böckler '16

“What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

There has never been a better time to be (or become) a birder scientificamerican.com/article/we-are… by Kate Wong on Scientific American

Abigail Marsh Nature Communications Does this ever ring true—a lot of people expressing the most empathy on social media are simultaneously trolls half the time.

Once, we ran a study on Prolific and a participant wrote on Reddit that the study “Felt like I was losing the will to live.” I went on the Prolific Subreddit (24k members!) and asked what matters. Here is what they told me. A thread on happier participants and better studies 1/9

Huge change—Airlines operating in the U.S. will soon have to AUTOMATICALLY REFUND you when your flight is cancelled or delayed (3 hours domestic, 6 hours into’l) or bag is lost. Refunds within 7 business days. The new Biden DOT rule starts in 6 months.