Social World

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

In 2010, researchers coined the acronym WEIRD for the narrow slice of humanity most psychology research draws its participants from, a slice that’s 96 percent of the field’s samples but just 12 percent of the world’s population, and I’m part of it

  • 4 min read

George Orwell gets quoted constantly, but he’s applied far less often

  • 4 min read

Narcissistic abuse: how a relationship alters your sense of what’s real

  • 5 min read

The questions that reveal personality, and why the answers matter less than you think

  • 5 min read

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
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