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Social Sciences

New Research

The Average Prisoner Only Gets Two Visits While They Are Incarcerated

Prisoners who receive the most visitors, however, tend to do the best after they are released

New Research

Why Networking Can Make You Feel Dirty

Pursuing relationships to forward your career aspirations triggers a sense of moral disgust

Cool Finds

If Certain Couples in Yemen Choose to Divorce, Their Siblings Must Get a Divorce, Too

“Swap” marriages dictate that both marriage vows and divorces must be evenly shared between siblings of two families

New Research

We Choose Friends Who Are Genetically Similar to Us

On average, our friends are like the genetic equivalents of fourth cousins

New Research

Longer Prison Sentences Make Incarceration More “Contagious”

When people receive prison sentences about 17 months or longer, their peers become significantly more likely to be locked up

New Research

For Some American Women, It’s Become the Norm to Have Babies Without Being Married

Women who don’t complete college are much more likely to have a child outside of wedlock than those who hold a bachelor’s degree

An artist's rendering of what HitchBOT's journey might look like

Cool Finds

This July, a Robot Will Hitchhike Across Canada

HitchBOT will attempt to travel from Halifax to British Columbia, relying on the kindness of strangers

New Research

“Trophy Wives” Are Rare in Real Life

Most people marry someone who has a similar degree of attractiveness and success as they do

Cool Finds

This Company Sold More Beer by Helping Waitresses Get Home Late at Night

Anthropology can have relevance for the business world—just ask this beer company

Cool Finds

Can Free Crack Pipe Kits—Like Free Heroin Needles—Reduce Disease Transmission?

A group in San Francisco plans to hand out free crack pipes, but the city is not convinced it’ll help reduce the spread of HIV and Hep C

Superstorm Sandy's aftermath on the Jersey Shore. With climate change, extreme weather events, like Sandy, could become more common.

Why Doesn’t Anyone Know How to Talk About Global Warming?

The gap between science and public understanding prevents action on climate change—but social scientists think they can fix that

The statistics-crunching Facebook Data Science team has mined the site's vast clearinghouse of status updates for nuggets of insights on love.

What Can Facebook Tell Us About Love?

With data-mining being all the rage these days, our online activity may reveal some intriguing insights about romance in the login era

Is this the next big thing in sleep tracking?

Tech Watch

This Mask Can Tell You How You’ve Been Sleeping

Its inventors say that through its sensors, the NeuroOn will also let you know the best times to take naps

What Can Jeopardy Tell Us About Uptalk?

The game show offers clues about how the annoying tic got its start

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Who Needs a Boss When You Have Your Co-Workers?

In a new book, Steven Johnson encourages us to lose top-down hierarchies, typical of companies, and instead organize around peer networks

According to one evolutionary biologist, the modern family might look very different had some scrawny male hominids not found a clever workaround to having to physically compete against strong alpha males for mates.

Nerd Love and Why It’s Better For Everyone

In a new study, evolutionary biologist Sergey Gavrilets makes a fascinating claim for how monogamy took root several million years ago

As a child diagnosed with autism, Temple Grandin assumed that everybody thought in photo-realistic pictures.

Temple Grandin on a New Approach for Thinking About Thinking

The famed author and advocate for people with autism looks at the differences in how the human mind operates

Scientists are finding the mind gets sharper at a number of vitally important abilities as you get older.

What is So Good About Growing Old

Forget about senior moments. The great news is that researchers are discovering some surprising advantages of aging

Cave art evolved in Europe 40,000 years ago. Archaeologists reasoned the art was a sign that humans could use symbols to represent their world and themselves.

When Did the Human Mind Evolve to What It is Today?

Archaeologists are finding signs of surprisingly sophisticated behavior in the ancient fossil record

In an episode of "The Simpsons," Professor Frink, left, demonstrates his latest creation: a sarcasm detector.

The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right

How do humans separate sarcasm from sincerity? Research on the subject is leading to insights about how the mind works. Really

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