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How Young People Learn to Be Unhappy
Why do so many young people have mental-health problems? The growing focus on students’ anxiety and depression, while well-intentioned, may be making psychological distress seem inevitable. Instead of fostering a supportive community for adolescent and young-adult students with mental-health concerns, we may be reinforcing a false and destructive belief that misery is universal among young people. Students regularly post self-deprecating social-media comments about how stressed they are, detailing their deteriorating mental health and inability to stop doomscrolling. These declarations are more than venting or seeking social support. For some, they’ve become signals of virtue.
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The Great Ghosting Paradox
... Some of this was projection. “We love an avatar more than a specific being,” Pettman writes, “a gestalt abstraction, lifted from all the love stories we’ve imbibed since childhood.” I wanted this guy to be the sort of guy who liked and wanted me. As for my irritation when he reappeared? Research shows that people who acknowledge or apologize for rejection risk activating the rejectee’s ire, rather than alleviating hurt feelings. Gili Freedman, a social psychologist who has studied both ghosting and apologies, told me that although apologies after a ghosting can in some cases provide closure, ghostees can also interpret ghosters’ apologies as insincere or self-serving.
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How to Think, Not What to Think
Across the country, people are questioning the value and role of higher education, and institutions—particularly the elite ones—are experiencing a crisis in public trust. On top of that, tech titans are convinced that AI will break higher education, while many observers lament its corrupting influence and ask whether the “mind-expanding purpose and qualities of a university,” as one historian of education put it recently, are gone forever. The idea that higher education has outlived its usefulness to society, however, requires taking an astonishingly narrow view of the true purpose of the university. Higher education is not merely the transfer of knowledge.
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Are You Dreaming of a ‘Mall World’? You’re Not Alone
... Dylan Selterman, a scientist who works as an associate teaching professor at the Johns Hopkins University department of psychological and brain sciences, and studies dreams, said there was no scientific research that backed any of those Mall World theories. “If people are reporting very similar specific physical features of the mall in their dreams, we don’t have any evidence for the collective subconscious or some kind of telepathy that would explain that,” Dr. Selterman said in an interview. “It could be a coincidence.
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RFK, Jr., Says Tylenol Use for Circumcision Causes Autism. Here’s Why That Claim Is Flawed
Today, in a cabinet meeting, U.S. secretary of health and human services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claimed that there is a link between autism and circumcision. “There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol,” he stated, without citing the studies. Kennedy was probably referring to a 2013 study of eight countries and a 2015 study from Denmark, both of which claimed to show a link between circumcision and autism rates.
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Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are
Seven years ago, I took a bet from one of the most controversial figures in the scientific world. Charles Murray, the political scientist who—along with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein—wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, wagered that one of his core ideas about genetics and intelligence would be proved true by 2025. He emailed me some time after I’d helped stoke an online furor about his insistent defense of The Bell Curve’s main points, which he’d recently reiterated on a popular podcast and which I, along with two other psychologists and intelligence researchers, had denounced in Vox. I took the bet because I was confident I would win.
