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Christopher Anderson / Magnum What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness
Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more complicated.
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Reuters It’s Ridiculous to Use Virtual Reality to Empathize With Refugees
The technology isn’t the moral game-changer that some make it out to be.
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Alex Wong / Getty The Irrational Idea That Humans Are Mostly Irrational
People are smarter than some psychologists would have us think.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters The Reason Our Minds Wander
Why do people spend so many hours per day worrying, daydreaming, or focusing on anything but the present?
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Against Empathy
From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.
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Brian Snyder / Reuters Psychology's Replication Crisis Has a Silver Lining
It’s an opportunity for the field to lead.
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Steve Lawrence / Corbis Stop Being So Self-Conscious
It may make you happier.
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Darren Hauck / Reuters Scientific Faith Is Different From Religious Faith
Not all beliefs are equal.
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Alexey Losevich / Shutterstock People Don't Actually Want Equality
They want fairness.
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Eliana Aponte / Reuters The Dark Side of Empathy
How caring for one person can foster baseless aggression towards another
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The War on Reason
Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here's why they're wrong.
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First Person Plural
An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self "bind" another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?
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Is God an Accident?
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question ...
