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Much of What You Know About Groupthink Is Wrong
Everyone knows the concept of groupthink. A tightly knit and overconfident set of decision makers form an insular echo chamber, fail to see the big picture, and end up making disastrous decisions. By now, most
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People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much
Your social life has a biological limit: 150. That’s the number—Dunbar’s number, proposed by the British psychologist Robin Dunbar three decades ago—of people with whom you can have meaningful relationships. What makes a relationship meaningful? Dunbar
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Natural Disasters Bring Married Couples Closer, at Least for Awhile
That’s according to a first-of-its-kind study that looked at couples in the Houston area before and after Hurricane Harvey. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, has implications for how best to help families as
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What We Do and Don’t Know About Kindness
Since the pandemic began, people tell me they’ve been thinking a lot more about kindness. Maybe they’ve noticed the mutual aid groups that have sprung up around the world to help during lockdowns, or perhaps
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Psychologists Are Learning What Religion Has Known for Years
EVEN THOUGH I was raised Catholic, for most of my adult life, I didn’t pay religion much heed. Like many scientists, I assumed it was built on opinion, conjecture, or even hope, and therefore irrelevant to
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The Point of the Cruelty
When a reporter asked Richard Daley, then the mayor of Chicago, whether his gun-control policies were effective, Daley pointed to a rifle and shouted, “If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective this
