Comparing Babylonian court records, the Gortyn Code from Crete, biblical law and ancient oaths, legal historian Orit Malka argues that witnesses in many early societies held the power to decide cases, not merely supply facts.
Across nine experiments, people felt more ownership of rentals from companies than from individuals and were more willing to modify them. In a lab test, 25.8% marked a book rented from a company versus 13.4% from a person.
Using data from about 20,000 people in 66 countries, researchers found that the more individualistic, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic a country, the higher the happiness its people consider ideal. Only around 15% of people in one survey wanted maximum happiness.
Among 448 identical and 196 fraternal twin pairs, how funny people rated themselves was heritable, but their judged skill at writing funny cartoon captions showed no significant genetic effect and was shaped mainly by environment.
As fiber broadband reached US neighbourhoods between 2010 and 2018, depression symptoms among adults aged 50 and over fell by 5.7%, driven mainly by stronger social connections and less isolation, with women and rural residents gaining most.
In a survey of 796 US taxpayers, most said filing has grown more complex and would pay for simplification, $130 a year on average, while the US tax code grew from 3.1 million to 4.3 million words over 30 years.
Economists model an 'empathy channel' in which exposure to infants raises the desire for children. Calibrated, it accounts for 3% to 33% of the fertility decline, 13.4% at baseline, and a textbook baby subsidy would overshoot the optimum by 23% to 32%.
In data on 275,000 Americans and a survey of 3,505 more, people whose politics differ from their area’s average were less likely to donate blood, a drop of about 20% from the baseline odds. Racial diversity showed no such effect.
Across 11 experiments with 12,688 participants, telling people they could join a short streak of donors raised giving more than telling them a high percentage of others had donated, because streaks made people feel their gift would influence the next person.
Tracking Uber’s rollout across 323 US metro areas from 2013 to 2018, an economist found its arrival cut local unemployment by between a fifth and a half of a percentage point, about a 3.2% drop, with a small lift for low-end wages.