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.
The technology isn’t the moral game-changer that some make it out to be.
People are smarter than some psychologists would have us think.
Why do people spend so many hours per day worrying, daydreaming, or focusing on anything but the present?
From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.
It’s an opportunity for the field to lead.
It may make you happier.
Not all beliefs are equal.
They want fairness.
How caring for one person can foster baseless aggression towards another
Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here's why they're wrong.
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?
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 ...