behavioral-science

Our moral failures rarely stem from corruption—they're engineered by invisible psychological traps that ensnare even our best intentions.

A new study reveals that for Israeli rave-goers using psychedelics, the party is just one phase. Extensive preparations and complex physical, emotional, and social after-effects show the experience extends well beyond the dance floor.

Bumblebees combined separately learned facts to reposition a ball beneath an unreachable reward, including when the goal location was hidden.

A new study reveals a troubling pattern in young relationships: women are more likely to face intimate partner violence during the exact weeks their partners are cheating on them, often leading to a breakup.

The term “porn addiction” is ubiquitous, but clinical realities are far more complex. Current research suggests underlying mental health conditions, emotional dysregulation, and even religious guilt fundamentally shape how individuals perceive their psychological reliance on pornography.

Your partner's defensiveness is not yours to fix, but you can change your response to it.

Change is good, it helps us evolve and be better versions of ourselves. The change model helps us to overcome our own barriers.

I ran out of cognitive RAM three times. Each time, the same crash: I'd commit to a behavior, execute it for a few weeks, then watch it degrade as other priorities consumed my mental budget. The problem wasn't commitment. The problem was that I'd built habits on manual resource management — and manual resource management fails at scale. The Manual Memory Problem In software, manual memory manageme…

Complexity has become an increasingly prominent concept in research on mental disorders and pathological behaviors. This is more than due, as these conditions are not only complicated but genuinely complex. Complexity serves both as an analytic lens and as a force that pushes scientific progress forward. However, complexity science, as it currently stands, seems poised to deliver waves of new fin…

Some people dedicate accounts exclusively to their pets, with some of these animals gaining notoriety and wealth as ‘pet influencers’

arXiv:2509.02910v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act on people's behalf: they write emails, buy groceries, and book restaurants. While the outsourcing of human decision-making to AI can be convenient, it raises a fundamental question: how does delegating identity-defining choices to AI shape who people become? Across a large field study and a con…

john a. powell considers how the othering of one group can serve as a way to solidify membership in another group.

We know playing slot machines can trigger uncontrolled spending and addictive behaviors in some people. But what about paid-for features in ‘free-to-play’ games? Microtransactions like loot boxes or paid progression within a game can add up quickly and easily. In their new article in Frontiers in Public Health, Dr Markus Meschik and his colleagues investigate who spends the most among children pl…