Social World

Human dynamics in real life: relationships, boundaries, culture, influence, and the forces that shape how we behave with others.

Society’s unrealistic standards, and the quiet cost of measuring yourself against them

  • 4 min read

People who grew up in the 1960s and 70s learned that sorry was said once, quietly, and in person, and the idea of typing it into a phone can feel like performing something private in public

  • 4 min read

How cross-cultural research unsettled what psychology called universal

  • 4 min read

American intelligence designed Tor to hide spies in a crowd, which meant the crowd had to be real — ordinary people, dissidents, journalists, all anonymous together — and that detail is the one almost no one remembers

  • 4 min read

The psychology of persuasion: why the most effective influence rarely feels like a trick

  • 5 min read

You might be a better conversationalist than you think, and the belief you aren’t is doing the damage

  • 4 min read

The 75-year Harvard study on happiness: why relationships mattered more than money or status

  • 4 min read

People conform even when they privately disagree not because they are weak but because the social mind was built to prioritize belonging over accuracy

  • 7 min read

The breakup was your decision and you still find yourself looking, and the reason according to neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow is that your brain reads the silence as uncertainty and uncertainty is the one thing it cannot leave alone

  • 4 min read

Loneliness in old age is not always the silence of being alone — sometimes it is the moment you stop doing the emotional work and find out how little of the friendship was ever mutual

  • 3 min read

We talk about Ozempic as if it only touches appetite, but the impulses it appears to reach extend into addiction and aggression, which raises a question about what appetite ever was

  • 4 min read

The psychology behind why disagreement feels like a personal attack

  • 5 min read
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