Researchers find betrayal doesn’t necessarily make someone less trustworthy if we benefit. New work is helping to explain why people might nevertheless trust certain cheaters and other betrayers.

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#TrustResearch #Betrayal #HumanBehavior #Psychology #SocialTrust

People with psychopathic traits feel less pain—and assume others do too | In turn, those who were less sensitive to their own pain of this kind tended to underestimate the amount of pain others experience.

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#Psychopathy #PainPerception #EmpathyGap #MentalHealthAwareness #HumanBehavior

Testosterone heightens neural sensitivity to social inclusion and exclusion, study finds. 🧠💔 Healthy men who received testosterone showed amplified brain activity related to empathy for others’ inclusion and exclusion experiences, even though their self-reported feelings of empathy remained unchanged.

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#TestosteroneEffect #NeuralSensitivity #SocialInclusion #EmpathyResearch #HumanBehavior

A study of more than 2000 participants showed that people who view the world as a savage social jungle 🐯🌍 are more likely to admire antagonistic leaders 👑😠 while those who see the social world as cooperative 🤝🌈 might call those leaders clueless 🤷‍♂️.

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#SocialPerception #LeadershipStyles #HumanBehavior #CulturalInfluence #PsychologyInsights

Just 5 days old, human newborns already prefer watching kind 🤗, helpful interactions over unkind ones. This suggests we may be wired for prosociality from the very start. 🌟

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#Newborns #Prosociality #Kindness #HumanBehavior #EarlyDevelopment

Certain scent compounds in female body odor increased during ovulation and can subtly influence how men feel: men rated them as more pleasant 😍 and faces associated with the samples as more attractive 🥰.

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#BodyOdor #Ovulation #Attractiveness #ScentCompounds #HumanBehavior

Individuals perceiving their social status as higher tend to be worse at perceiving emotions of others 🤔💔 | The study also reported evidence that self-assessed increases in social status over one’s lifespan were associated with worse emotion perception as well. 📉👥

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#SocialStatus #EmotionPerception #HumanBehavior #PsychologyResearch #SelfAwareness

People who score higher on certain psychopathic traits may actually have a sharper understanding of other people’s thoughts and intentions 🧠🔍 | The findings suggest that this form of psychopathy might be linked to a clearer but emotionally disengaged view of others’ minds.

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#Psychopathy #EmotionalIntelligence #HumanBehavior #PsychologicalResearch #MindReading

New study finds that "selective prosociality" (i.e., helping some people but not others) is not just about a particular situation. Instead, it is tied to stable personality traits, meaning some people are more selective than others about who they help, regardless of the situation. 🤝✨

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#SelectiveProsociality #PersonalityTraits #HelpingBehavior #SocialPsychology #HumanBehavior

💄 Cosmetics Spending Linked to Father's Role & Economic Gaps
New research published in Evolution and Human Behavior suggests a country's cosmetics industry size is tied to how much fathers are involved in childcare and the level of economic inequality. When men are active parents or the wealth gap is wide, women may enhance their appearance to compete for partners.

💰 Revised Sexual Selection Theory Explains Female Ornamentation
A study by Jun-Hong Kim of Pohang University of Science and Technology tested a revised sexual selection theory. This theory posits that when men contribute significantly to child-rearing, they become valuable resources, leading women to invest more in their appearance to attract these "high-investment males."

📈 Cross-Cultural Data Reveals Key Drivers
Kim analyzed data from up to 55 countries. Increased paternal investment (measured by fathers' share of unpaid domestic and childcare hours) correlated with higher per capita cosmetics spending. For every hour increase in relative paternal investment, spending rose by approximately $2.17.

📊 Economic Inequality Also Fuels Beauty Market
High income inequality and low social mobility scores were also strong predictors of larger cosmetics industries. This indicates that in stratified societies, women may use appearance to secure partners offering financial stability.

#SexualSelection #Economics #HumanBehavior

The small talk you try to avoid because you think it will be boring may actually be more enjoyable than you think, in nine experiments involving 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be

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#SocialScience #SmallTalk #HumanBehavior

🚶 A study at Eindhoven Centraal Railway Station found that people exiting trains tend to follow the walking path of the person directly in front of them, even if it's a stranger and leads to a longer route. This "stranger-following effect" creates "avalanches" of similar choices, influencing crowd movement.

📈 Researchers used advanced 3D stereoscopic imaging to track over 30 million pedestrian trajectories between March 2021 and March 2024, filtering out social groups to focus on independent walkers.

🧠 A theoretical model confirmed that this local imitation behavior, not just herding or randomness, is the main driver of collective route choices in crowded spaces.

#CrowdDynamics #UrbanPlanning #HumanBehavior

🚶‍♂️ New research reveals humans have a natural tendency to turn left and walk in an anticlockwise direction, a bias observed across individuals and crowds in various settings like museums and supermarkets.

🔬 This finding, initially noticed during pandemic-related distancing experiments by researchers including Dr. Iñaki Echeverría Huarte (University of Navarra) and Dr. Claudio Feliciani (University of Tokyo), was confirmed in Japan and in different genders and ages, with children showing a more pronounced effect.

🧠 While the exact cause remains unknown, scientists suspect it stems from subtle individual biases in how our brains process information and coordinate muscles, leading to a slight lean. This insight could improve crowd simulations and space design.

🏃‍♀️ Interestingly, this anticlockwise bias is now standard in athletics since 1913, potentially due to the majority right-leg dominance of athletes, and may influence everyday design such as supermarket layouts.

#HumanBehavior #ScienceDiscovery #CrowdDynamics

People who feel unhappy with their height often change other aspects of their appearance to make up for it, such as trying to lose weight, building muscle, or wearing specific shoes. Individuals actively engage in various behaviors to compensate for unchangeable physical traits.

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#BodyImage #SelfEsteem #HumanBehavior

Humans prefer to walk counter-clockwise, scientists find - but no one knows why

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#HumanBehavior #CounterClockwise #ScienceFacts

Parents invest differently in daughters and sons, study finds. Daughters received more investment in mating and relationship guidance, protection, and material provisioning. Sons received more investment in athletics and physical training, competitive encouragement, and sexual permissiveness.

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#GenderDifferences #ParentingStrategies #HumanBehavior

😀 New research suggests humans' highly expressive faces might be key to building strong social connections.

📊 A study of 1,039 adults analyzed videos of real-life interactions. The findings indicate that more facially expressive people tend to have larger and more diverse social networks.

👩‍🦰 For women specifically, higher facial expressivity was linked to bigger, more varied, and more deeply connected social networks. Women were also generally found to be more expressive than men.

🤝 The study proposes that facial expressivity helps foster intimate social relationships, which were crucial for ancestral survival and still benefit us today with improved health and cognitive function.

#HumanBehavior #SocialNetworks #Psychology

Overconfidence is the peacocks tail for humans - Signalling high ability

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#Overconfidence #HumanBehavior #SocialSignaling

• 🧬 A study of 440,209 people in the UK and Estonia reveals that partners are becoming increasingly genetically similar over the past 60 years.

• 📈 This trend, known as assortative mating, has intensified decade by decade, with educational attainment showing a sharper increase than height.

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 The researchers used a new method to estimate genetic similarity between partners by reconstructing parental genomes from their children's DNA, without needing direct partner genotypes.

• 🌍 The study, published on August 17, 2026, in Nature Human Behaviour, found consistent trends across both countries, suggesting this genetic sorting is not static.

#Genetics #AssortativeMating #HumanBehavior

Hunter-gatherer societies are less unequal than many human societies, but they do show inequality; a review of 100s of different sources covering more than a century of ethnography shows that equality often results from people’s self-interested motives to acquire resources and status

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#EvolutionOfSociety #HumanBehavior #EthnographyInsights