Why did some conversations unfurl and others wilt? One answer, I realized, may be the clash of take-and-take vs. give-and-take. 

That’s why when psychologists want to jump-start friendship in the lab, they have participants answer a series of questions that require steadily escalating amounts of self-disclosure (you may have seen this as “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love”).

You might think that the best conversationalists wait patiently for their partners to finish talking before they start concocting a response in their head. It turns out that we like people the best when they respond to us the fastest––so fast (mere milliseconds!) that they must be formulating their reply long before we finish our turn.

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

"Self-silencing" — people saying what they think others want to hear rather than what they truly feel — is skewing our understanding of how Americans really feel about abortion, COVID-19 precautions, what children are taught in school and other hot-button issues, a new study finds.

One problem researchers found with habit trackers is that it creates a “habit dependency” in users: you are only sticking to the habit because of artificial support such as reminders and streak notifications, which help with the repetition of a desired behaviour, but tie the habit to in-app triggers. No app, and the habit is gone. Your habit is tied to ongoing app use.

In his book The Principles of Psychology, the pioneering philosopher and psychologist William James described living creatures as “bundles of habits”, explaining that developing habits “simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result.”

Some 56% of Black teens and 55% of Hispanic teens say they are online almost constantly, compared with 37% of White teens.

Beyond just online platforms, the new survey finds that the vast majority of teens have access to digital devices, such as smartphones (95%), desktop or laptop computers (90%) and gaming consoles (80%). And the study shows there has been an uptick in daily teen internet users, from 92% in 2014-15 to 97% today. In addition, the share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has roughly doubled since 2014-15 (46% now and 24% then).

When reflecting on the amount of time they spend on social media generally, a majority of U.S. teens (55%) say they spend about the right amount of time on these apps and sites, while about a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Just 8% of teens think they spend too little time on these platforms.

Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens.

Furthermore, the paper reports benefits to losing yourself in thought, finding that this state can “aid problem solving, increase creativity, enhance the imagination and contribute to a sense of self-worth.”

Based on data from Oliver Wyman's fleet forecast and our models for industry growth, we anticipate a shortage of almost 30,000 pilots in North America by 2032 if the industry fails to address its staffing problems.

And these disruptions could persist for a decade.

But if you’re going to tweet that social media continues to lose credibility, I feel like you also need to recognize that social media is still a dominating force of discipleship and culture-making among the masses who don’t consider how the medium may affect the message. Something can “lose credibility” among thought leaders and still be seen as credible by the masses. Because the reality is that, while pastors and authors and academics and others are fleeing social media, dismissing it as a cesspool of negativity (understandably so), the people listening to their sermons, reading their books, and taking their classes are still being shaped by social media more than they are by the thought leaders who have fled the platforms.

But 70- and 80-somethings loving their work so much that they never retire is awfully close to something I’ve called workism—the idea that work has, for many elites, become a kind of personal religion in an era of otherwise declining religiosity.

This has created what the writer Paul Millerd calls a “Boomer blockade” at the top of many organizations, keeping Gen-X and Millennial workers from promotions. As older workers remain in advanced positions in politics and business, younger workers who would have ascended the ranks in previous decades are getting stuck in the purgatory of upper-middle management.

More than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania

15 November 2022 is predicted to be the day that the global population reaches eight billion

Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one. Paying only the first price is about the same as throwing money in the garbage.

A hundred years from now, I hope there are people who do not know my name or remember me, but nevertheless carry about with them seeds of faithful living that were first planted in the soil of this home.

But the pandemic gap year appears to be a myth: The National Student Clearinghouse found that of the 2020 high school graduates who chose not to enroll in college after graduation, only 2% ended up enrolling a year later, in the fall of 2021.

Compared with the fall of 2019, the last fall semester before the coronavirus pandemic, undergraduate enrollment has fallen a total of 6.6%. That represents the largest two-year decrease in more than 50 years, Shapiro says.

A 57 percent majority say they have changed privacy settings on websites, such as not allowing tracking, and half say they altered the privacy settings on their phone or apps. Most say they have deleted their Web history (56 percent), while nearly 4 in 10 say they changed their browser settings (39 percent) or used a private browsing setting such as “incognito mode” (37 percent). About 1 in 4 (26 percent) say they have used a virtual private network — software for creating a more private Internet connection — to protect their privacy.

After years of privacy experts warning that “if it’s free, you’re the product,” perhaps the reality of what that really means has started to be fully absorbed.

Major tech companies including Facebook and Amazon have denied accessing microphones without permission, and experts say it’s likely that they instead have enough personal data to accurately predict what you’re interested in.

She thinks the companies themselves are behind this, trying to manipulate their users into having certain opinions and points of view.

About 7 in 10 Americans think their phone or other devices are listening in on them in ways they did not agree to.

Only 10 percent say Facebook has a positive impact on society, while 56 percent say it has a negative impact and 33 percent say its impact is neither positive nor negative. Even among those who use Facebook daily, more than three times as many say the social network has a negative rather than a positive impact.