Recent Science News

Corporate fraud fell at companies that could send staff home during COVID
In more than 9,500 firm-years from 2017 to 2024, companies better able to work remotely saw financial misconduct drop after 2020. Going from the first to the third quartile of remote-work feasibility cut the likelihood of misconduct by about 2 percentage points, against a 2.7% average.

Firms that adopted generative AI cut junior jobs by about 9% while seniors held steady
Tracking 65 million workers at over 280,000 US firms, the study found junior employment at generative AI adopters fell about 9% relative to senior employment within six quarters, driven mainly by slower hiring.

Online threads sour as users run out of fresh things to say, 2 billion comments show
An analysis of 2.05 billion Reddit comments found that discussions grow more negative over time, and that the drift disappears once the uniqueness of comments is accounted for. In an experiment with 4,000 people, negativity rose only when participants were rewarded for standing out.

Two weeks of kindness to others eased depression, while treating yourself made it worse
In a randomized study of 781 US adults, doing three kind acts a week for others cut depression, anxiety and loneliness over two weeks. Doing three kind things for yourself raised depression scores by about 11 points and anxiety by about 14, even though people enjoyed it more.

Great apes have stable thinking styles, but their social smarts stand apart
Testing 48 bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans 10 times over 1.5 years, researchers found stable individual differences in cognition; nonsocial tasks correlated strongly with each other, while social cognition tasks did not correlate with anything.

Mental health is becoming a political identity, and it predicts support for more spending
In a 2022 national survey of 860 Americans, 26% said they had had a mental illness. Those with a strong mental health identity had a 94% predicted chance of backing more state healthcare spending, versus 56% for those with a weak one.

Whisky labelled “24 years old” sells for about 9% more than the same age given as a year
Across 50,916 whisky auctions and seven experiments, age stated as a length ("10 years") felt longer than age stated as a year ("since 2015"). Length-framed bottles fetched 8.9% higher prices, while year framing raised what people would pay for used goods by 17%.