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The Friendship Checkup: How to Reevaluate Relationships and Take Steps to Repair Them
As the pandemic has led us to reassess what’s important in our lives, many people have been reevaluating their friendships, reflecting on who they really value and which relationships are healthy or balanced. While the
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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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How Our Friends Affect Our Food
In 2013, Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show, set aside the program’s usual focus on politics to talk about something more important: pizza, specifically Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. “Deep-dish pizza is not only not better than
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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
