Correcting life satisfaction scores for shifting standards, economists find Americans' well-being between doubled and grew more than 2.5-fold from 1959 to 2008, tracking GDP. The same method reveals hidden drops during COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.

Using Mexican avocado data and a global sample of countries from 1993 to 2018, researchers found that rapid gains in a country's share of agricultural export value are followed by more homicides, but only where organized criminal groups operate.

Using representative German data and the country's division as a natural experiment, economists find former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans, likely due to state surveillance. Self-control rises with age, with no gender gap.

In two studies using about 200 Instagram group photos, people judged how unified a group was after just 150 milliseconds, and those snap judgments, driven by how similar faces' emotions were, closely matched judgments made after 3 seconds.

A game-theory model argues that framing repression as a sacred duty and giving people online tools to coordinate can make citizens attack even targets they know are harmless, a cheaper route to control than police or the military.

After YouTube switched off personalized ads and engagement features for made-for-kids content in January 2020, kids' channels made 18% fewer videos, original content fell 9%, manual captioning dropped 28% and views fell 20%, with small channels hit hardest.

On the release days of the 10 most streamed albums from 2017 to 2022, music streaming jumped 43% and US traffic fatalities rose 15.1%, about 18 extra deaths per release day.