Pooling 32 studies with 256 effect sizes, a meta-analysis found vacations have a large effect on employee well-being that fades more slowly than earlier work suggested; switching off from work and staying physically active helped most.
Using Facebook data, researchers found that boys who are relatively old for their school cohort make 11% more friends in high school, are 42% more likely to become class president, and as men have bigger networks and more often go into management and entrepreneurship.
Across four studies of 10,211 people, lower-class workers were less likely to negotiate pay and promotions. A fifth experiment with 1,133 HR professionals found an identical salary request made a lower-class candidate seem less cooperative than a higher-class one, hurting his hiring chances.
When brands adopt the nicknames customers give them, people see them as less powerful and value them less. Participants priced the same BMW $6,556 lower when it was called Beemer, and a Rolex nearly $4,900 lower as a Rollie.
In a field experiment with 10,718 job seekers, adding an autonomy pitch to a startup's recruiting email raised clicks from people without degrees by 69% but cut clicks from graduate degree holders by 25% and their applications by 35%.
579 Americans rated face photos of Hadza and Tsimane foragers. Their ratings of men tracked peer-rated hunting ability (r = 0.25), but their ratings of women ran opposite to peer-rated gathering skill.
In a taste-test experiment with 114 college students, people ate about 164 calories of chips and candy while watching a Netflix episode versus 132 undistracted. Using a smartphone made no significant difference to how much they ate.
Trained on 100 million machine-generated proofs, AlphaGeometry solved 25 of 30 International Mathematical Olympiad geometry problems, near gold-medallist level; the previous best program solved 10 and GPT-4 solved none.
Texas birth records from 2007 to 2014 show physician mothers were 15.8% more likely than lawyer mothers to have a low birthweight baby, with surgeons driving the gap, and a 2011 cap on trainee shifts was linked to better outcomes for young doctors.
A Leeds economist argues that the absence of time travellers need not mean time travel is impossible: the energy cost would be enormous, and the only benefit worth it, lost but critical knowledge, is extremely unlikely to be something our era holds.