In the past, forced or arranged marriages meant that socially inept, unattractive men did not have to acquire social skills in order to find a long-term love interest. Today, men must be able to turn on the charm if they want to find a partner. Those men who have difficulty flirting, or are unable to …
Students perform less well in end-of-term exams if they are allowed access to an electronic device, such as a phone or tablet, for non-academic purposes in lectures, a new study in Educational Psychology finds. Students who don’t use such devices themselves but attend lectures where their use is permitted also do worse, suggesting that phone/tablet …
A team led by a researcher who customarily studies nonhuman primate behavior has found that humans working in operating rooms (ORs) follow the same general primate patterns of hierarchy and gender. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper titled “Ethological Observations of Social Behavior in the …
An international group of researchers, involving scientists from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna & Medical University of Vienna and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, developed a tool to track and analyse gender inequality through Facebook usage data. Their results, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that …
A greater representation of women in the government is bad news for corruption, according to a new study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization by researchers Chandan Jha of Le Moyne College and Sudipta Sarangi of Virginia Tech. In a cross-country analysis of over 125 countries, this study finds that corruption is …
A team of psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used a new technique to construct what a large sample of 511 American Christians think God looks like. Participants in the study saw hundreds of randomly varying face-pairs and selected which face from each pair appeared more like how they imagined …
When organizations turn a blind eye to sexual harassment in the workplace, how many people need to take a stand before the behavior is no longer seen as normal? According to a new paper published in Science, there is a quantifiable answer: Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change …
Since first being awarded in 1901, most Nobel Prizes for science have gone to the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany and France. An empirical study by Professor Claudius Gros from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt has now shown that the Nobel Prize productivity in these countries is primarily determined …
Inter-ethnic conflicts often escalate surprisingly quickly. In a recent study, researchers have investigated the influence of the environment on peoples’ hostility against minorities with the help of experiments. They found that hostility towards members of other ethnic groups is much more often imitated than hostility towards co-ethnics. Whether in Bosnia, Liberia, or Rwanda, violent conflicts …
Growing ‘dead zone’ confirmed by underwater robots in the Gulf of Oman New research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) has confirmed a dramatic decrease in oxygen in the Gulf of Oman part of the Arabian Sea. But the environmental disaster is worse than expected. The ‘dead zone’ was confirmed by underwater robots called …
