Category: Business

A new study suggests the person who left your message unanswered tends to feel worse about it than you imagine, and worse still when the silence was accidental — in a scenario version of the situation, a one-line “Sorry, but I can’t talk right now” narrowed the gap without closing it

September 7, 2026

“What do you think of this?” That is the last message in one version of an experiment funded by the University of California, Berkeley. It goes to a friend you don’t know all

Psychology says people who quietly dream of starting over in life aren’t weak or ungrateful — they have often spent years living by other people’s expectations before ever asking what they wanted for themselves

September 6, 2026

A friend told me last month, on a rooftop in Bangkok with the traffic grinding away eight floors below, that she sometimes imagines getting on a plane and simply not coming back. Then

Research suggests people who still look young after 60 aren’t always the ones with the best genes, they may also be the ones who spent decades treating their bodies as something worth caring for rather than something to be punished into shape

September 6, 2026

Somewhere on the internet right now there is a photograph of two 61-year-old women sitting side by side. They are identical twins. One of them looks about a decade older. The caption travelling

In 1998, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek donated 74 Hollywood Hills acres worth $2 million, nearly doubling local parkland and protecting trails and a wildlife corridor for deer and coyotes

September 6, 2026

In January 1998, the host of a syndicated quiz show signed away 74 acres of undeveloped ridge and canyon in the Hollywood Hills, and the transaction registered less as celebrity gesture than as

Teams got the hiring decision right 15 percent of the time when the newcomer held the information the group needed, and 28.7 percent of the time when an original member held it — and the originals had been talking to each other for five minutes

September 6, 2026

The setup How long does a group have to exist before it has an inside? Two people met in a text chatroom and spent five minutes discussing what would make someone a good

The most original thinkers weren’t simply better at dreaming up ideas or controlling them. Across 2,433 people, creativity was linked to how fluidly the brain shifted between spontaneous thought and deliberate evaluation—a rhythm general intelligence did not predict.

September 5, 2026

The romantic version of creativity begins with surrender. Stop controlling the mind, let it wander and wait for the strange idea to arrive. The managerial version begins at the opposite end. Define the

Becoming an early riser is less about one burst of willpower than repeatedly following the same routine. In a landmark habit study, daily behaviours took a median of 66 days to become largely automatic—but individual estimates ranged from 18 to 254 days, and waking early itself wasn’t tested.

September 5, 2026

An alarm can be moved from 7am to 5.30am in a few taps. The body attached to it does not update quite so quickly. That gap is where the familiar early-riser story tends

More than six in ten of the Americans and Chinese in a preregistered survey said people have grown less cooperative across a sixty-year span, a belief the authors set against two cross-temporal meta-analyses reporting rises in cooperation in laboratory social dilemmas over the decades those series cover

September 5, 2026

Sixty-five per cent of the American respondents and 62.1 per cent of the Chinese ones said people have become less considerate, helpful or cooperative over a sixty-year span reaching a few years into

1,339 teachers were each shown a student’s exercise with a wrong mark already on it, and the ones told an algorithm had set the mark finished further from the fair grade than the ones told a colleague had — but only where the mark was too harsh, with no detectable difference where it was too generous

September 5, 2026

A teacher in Greece opens a survey link and finds a student’s exercise on screen. Five parts, each already labelled correct or incorrect. Underneath sits a mark somebody else has given: five out

Psychology suggests people who browse social media but never post or comment aren’t usually passive—they found out early that being seen and being known are not the same thing, and they’ve never confused the two since

September 4, 2026

A man in my building told me last month that he has read everything I’ve published and has never once left a comment. He said it in the lift, somewhere between the ninth