Social Psychology Archives

But why are you single?? It’s an annoying question, but recently psychology researchers took it to a new level: they asked that question to 648 people and asked those people to rate 92 possible reasons for being single. In a paper just published in Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers describe the results from their study,…

Part of what defines a friendship is what that friendship is founded on. For people to be friends, something has to connect them, but the nature of that connection is different from one friendship to the next. In many cases, part of the foundation of a friendship is similarities – in terms of personality traits,…

With a constant stream of news about coronavirus, it’s easy to overlook the disconcerting news that continues to come out regularly about another global crisis: climate change. Most recently, a study was released suggesting that the number of extreme heat and humidity events with the capacity to kill human beings has doubled since 1979. For…

The new way of life brought about by the current pandemic has many people rethinking their long-term plans, and that may include reevaluating their desire to have children. According to a new study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology, the effect of COVID-19 on people’s intention of having kids might work in both…

Social media has facilitated both new ways of connecting with others and new ways of tallying how our lives stack up against theirs. In the twenty-first century, keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the hundreds of people on your Facebook feed. Several previous studies have suggested that comparing yourself with others…

From getting married to buying homes, millennials are accused of doing everything later. But that’s not true when it comes to having life crises. As the rise of the term “quarter-life” crisis suggests, having life crises is something millennials seem willing to do early and often. So what do you do when you want to…

Can you measure trust in romantic relationships? A team of researchers in Germany thinks so, and they’ve put forward an activity called the Trust Game for Couples that’s intended to do exactly that. Actually, with a name like that, you could argue that even being willing to play the game in the first place is…

Humor is a funny thing. Different people use it in different ways. I’ve touched on this topic in some previous blog posts. People with high self-esteem, for example, tend to use humor to build relationships with others. Undertakers, on the other hand, tend not to use it much at all. Now, a new study from…

I’m not going to bother telling you not to use your phone before bed. Partly because you’ve probably heard that advice before, and partly because it would be hypocritical of me to do so! But I am going to highlight the results of a study that shows what might happen to people who do and…

From white lies to more malicious fibs, people bend or hide the truth for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons, it turns out, is that sometimes the truth is so fantastical that other people wouldn’t even believe it. If you’ve ever had something so strange happen to you that it doesn’t even seem…