Popular Science articles about Psychology & Sociology

'Ugly' finding: Unattractive workers suffer more

A study by Brent Scott, business scholar at Michigan State University, suggests unattractive workers are more likely to be bullied in the workplace.

Study finds the sweet spot -- and the screw-ups -- that make or break environmental collective actions

Sustainability programs are a Goldilocks proposition -- some groups are too big, some are too small, and the environment benefits when the size of a group of people working to...

Automated 'coach' could help with social interactions

Social phobias affect about 15 million adults in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and surveys show that public speaking is high on the list...

Helping pet owners make tough choices

Perhaps the hardest part of owning a pet is making difficult decisions when a beloved companion becomes seriously ill.

Video gamers really do see more

Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player's hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and...

Caregiving dads treated disrespectfully at work, new study finds

If policy-makers want to do something about falling birth rates, they may want to take a look at improving how people are treated at work when they step outside of...

Pendulum swings back on 350-year-old mathematical mystery

A 350-year-old mathematical mystery could lead toward a better understanding of medical conditions like epilepsy or even the behavior of predator-prey systems in the wild, University of Pittsburgh researchers report.

Magpies take decisions faster when humans look at them

Researchers from the Seoul National University found that wild birds appear to "think faster" when humans, and possibly predators in general, are directly looking at them.

Facebook: A confidence boost for first-gen college students

Facebook connections can help first-generation college applicants believe in their abilities to both apply to school and excel once they've enrolled, according to a new study from the University of...

Never forget a face? Researchers find women have better memory recall than men

New research from McMaster University suggests women can remember faces better than men, in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it, and a technique researchers...

Meeting online leads to happier, more enduring marriages

More than a third of marriages between 2005 and 2012 began online, according to new research at the University of Chicago, which also found that online couples have happier, longer...

Voices may not trigger brain's reward centers in children with autism, Stanford/Packard study shows

In autism, brain regions tailored to respond to voices are poorly connected to reward-processing circuits, according to a new study by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

People attribute minds to robots, corpses that are targets of harm

As Descartes famously noted, there's no way to really know that another person has a mind -- every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now,...

Researchers conclude that what causes menopause is -- wait for it -- men

After decades of laboring under other theories that never seemed to add up, a team led by biologist Rama Singh has concluded that what causes menopause in women is men.

Sleep mechanism identified that plays role in emotional memory

Sleep researchers from University of California campuses in Riverside and San Diego have identified the sleep mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate emotional memory and found that a popular...

New tasks become as simple as waving a hand with brain-computer interfaces

Small electrodes placed on or inside the brain allow patients to interact with computers or control robotic limbs simply by thinking about how to execute those actions. This technology could...

You're so vain: U-M study links social media and narcissism

Facebook is a mirror and Twitter is a megaphone, according to a new University of Michigan study exploring how social media reflect and amplify the culture's growing levels of narcissism.

How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect

Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of...

Teacher collaboration, professional communities improve many elementary school students' math scores

Many elementary students' math performance improves when their teachers collaborate, work in professional learning communities or do both, yet most students don't spend all of their elementary school years in...

'Belief in science' increases in stressful situations

A faith in the explanatory and revealing power of science increases in the face of stress or anxiety, a study by Oxford University psychologists suggests.