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People who assume the strangers around them are less empathetic than they really are take fewer social risks and become more isolated??? and one large field study found that simply correcting the assumption expanded social networks months later
49+ min ago (1609+ words) Edited by Lachlan Brown A crowded room can become socially empty before anyone has said a word. Not because the people in it are necessarily unfriendly. The problem can begin one step earlier, when each person is privately willing to…...
A bad internet connection can quietly cost someone a job opportunity, a patient???s trust, or even parole??? research found that tiny video-call glitches make faces and voices feel uncanny, and people punish the person on screen for it
3+ hour, 49+ min ago (1623+ words) Edited by Lachlan Brown A video call freezes for less than a second. The candidate’s smile stalls while the voice continues. A doctor’s mouth jumps forward to catch up with the sound. A financial adviser’s face briefly dissolves into blocks....
The habit of laughing at the end of a difficult sentence isn't nervousness
8+ hour, 2+ min ago (894+ words) The short laugh people give at the end of a hard sentence is usually read as nerves. In many cases it is doing something else entirely: a small piece of social engineering, offered so the listener knows how to receive…...
A randomized trial coauthored by a Wharton researcher followed nearly 17,000 students across 10 Indian colleges and found that collecting phones at the beginning of lectures modestly raised grades???with lower-performing students gaining roughly twice as much as the average student.
12+ hour, 34+ min ago (1624+ words) Edited by Lachlan Brown A large randomised trial in Odisha found a modest average grade gain from collecting phones, with a substantially larger estimated benefit for lower-performing students. At the beginning of a lecture, students in one group were required…...
Psychology says people who overshare with strangers??? the barista, the Uber driver, the person beside them on the plane??? aren't odd or inappropriately familiar, they're often starving for a conversation where someone actually listens
1+ day, 5+ hour ago (929+ words) Daniel Moran is a writer at Silicon Canals covering technology, psychology, and culture. In a world of shallow connections, strangers on planes become unlikely therapists—and maybe that's exactly what we need. A woman on a flight out of Bangkok…...
Psychology says people who fill every spare moment with noise??? podcasts, playlists, background television??? aren't distracted or disorganised, they're often quietly managing a loneliness they haven't quite named yet
1+ day, 9+ hour ago (844+ words) Daniel Moran is a writer at Silicon Canals covering technology, psychology, and culture. The constant hum of podcasts and playlists may feel like preference, but it might reveal something we're avoiding: the discomfort of our own company. The year I…...
Research suggests the generation that grew up in the 1960s and 70s wasn't hardened by trauma so much as tempered by ordinary difficulty??? the kind of low-level, unmanaged adversity that modern safety culture has almost completely removed from childhood
2+ day, 9+ hour ago (796+ words) Daniel Moran is a writer at Silicon Canals covering technology, psychology, and culture. My uncle fell out of a mango tree at nine and broke his arm in two places. Nobody sued the tree. There was no incident report, no…...
Across 37,073 European Research Council applications, the same proposal scored higher with reviewers who shared the applicant's citizenship and country of work??? and that match moved the score about seven times as much as a shared gender did
2+ day, 12+ hour ago (520+ words) Edited by Christy Suriadi Two economists contracted by the ERC's own executive agency compared how a single proposal was scored by reviewers who matched the applicant and reviewers who did not. Sharing both citizenship and country of work moved the…...
???I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It???s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.?????? Robin Williams in World???s Greatest Dad
3+ day, 4+ hour ago (848+ words) Daniel Moran is a writer at Silicon Canals covering technology, psychology, and culture. Loneliness in a crowded room cuts deeper than solitude ever could—and our culture of constant connection may be making it worse. There is a line from…...
People who cannot sit through a film without checking their phone aren't distracted, they've spent so many years being reachable that stillness now registers to their nervous system as something going wrong
3+ day, 5+ hour ago (1185+ words) Edited by Justin Brown The reach for the phone mid-film is usually filed under distraction. A closer look suggests the body has learned, over years of being reachable, that stillness itself has become the uncomfortable state. What follows is a…...