The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14 has compelled the editors of the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine to call on other physicians to become active participants in the discussion about gun violence and gun policy in this country. More than 30,000 people die from gun injuries each year, according ...

Human inclinations are not primarily selfish: kindness and altruism have been evolutionarily valued in mates, and even the youngest children often try to be helpful Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have ...

At the height of campaign season in any presidential election year, voters will be inundated with all kinds of information of dubious accuracy, from misleading claims about candidates’ personal lives to exaggerations about their policy differences. Unfortunately, it’s precisely this type of misinformation — the kind that hews to people’s ...

Why does willpower often seem to fail us, just when we need it most? Some researchers argue that willpower is a limited resource that wears out, like a muscle exhausted by overuse. Other experts say that our will may falter only if we think it’s fallible: if we believe we have ...

Thomas Szasz, the father of the anti-psychiatry movement, has died, but his legacy lives on. Earlier this week, I had dinner with a recently retired lawyer who has spent the past 40-odd years working to protect the rights of people with mental illness. She shared with me an anecdote that, she ...

People's overconfidence can be confused with competence, while their paranoia can elicit the very anger and rejection they're seeking to avoid From Shakespeare to The Secret, the idea that our thoughts and perceptions shape our reality is recognized as a powerful truth. As the Bard wrote, “here is nothing either good ...

Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes, say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease. What we need, they say, is a public health approach to the problem, like ...

Most men tend to do dumb things around women just to get their attention — wearing muscle shirts, flexing in muscle shirts, and lying about their job and marital status while wearing and flexing in muscle shirts, for instance. Add this to the list: spending money on stupid things and ...

To paraphrase the old saw about suckers at a poker table: If you can’t spot the sneaky gossip at the office, it’s probably you. But you probably shouldn’t be looking for him or her at all. That’s the conclusion of an interesting new study in the journal Organizational Behavior and ...

A researcher spent two years crisscrossing the country by bus cataloging all the ways we try to prevent strangers from sitting next to us Remember the last time you got on a train, only to find all the seats occupied by people … and their bags? Boy, bags really do like ...