News by Subject Social & Behavior

Why do humans cooperate? For six years, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have worked to answer this great puzzle, focusing on the Hadza, a nomadic hunter-gatherer population in Tanzania. New findings suggest that cooperation is flexible, not fixed.

New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business explores the consequences of honesty in everyday life and determines that people can often afford to be more honest than they think.

The happiness derived from a purchase may last longer for those who set broader goals for the experience.

People who feel anxious surrounding mass shootings tend to abandon their political ideology on typically divided issues, according to a study by two University of Kansas professors.

Many people feel threatened when reminded of their unhealthy behavior. However, a group of 220 sedentary adults became more receptive to health advice -- and more active -- after being primed to either think about their most important values or to make well-wishes for others.

People have a tendency to interpret new information in a way that supports their pre-existing beliefs, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology have shown that people will do the same thing even when the decision they've made pertains to a choice that is rather less consequential: which direction a series of dots is moving and whether the average of a series of numbers is greater or less than 50.

With over three-quarters of Americans now owning a smartphone, healthcare researchers have speculated that the number of patients recording visits with their doctor was increasing. A new study by researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice is the first to measure the prevalence of recording of clinical visits in the United States. The study also assesses the attitudes of doctors and the public toward recording, and surveys 49 large health systems.

It's known as the disease that attacks the body but leaves the mind unaffected. But a new study shows that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, does affect the mind, especially later in the disease. The study is published in the Sept. 12, 2018, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Using fMRI scans of a brain region called the anterior insula, University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University researchers discovered that people who donated a kidney to an anonymous recipient were more sensitive to a stranger's fear and pain.