In two preregistered surveys of about 400 people each, ChatGPT's answers to real advice-column dilemmas were judged more balanced, complete, empathetic and helpful than the columnists' own, even at equal length, but most participants still preferred a human to answer their own problems.
Nonprofit hospitals that hired management consultants paid $15.7 million on average, $7.8 billion in total from 2009 to 2023, yet 306 of them showed no significant change in revenue, margins, operations or patient outcomes against 513 matched hospitals.
When a person dressed as Batman boarded a Milan metro car, passengers offered their seat to a seemingly pregnant woman 67% of the time, against 38% without him. Of those who helped while Batman was present, 44% said they had not seen him.
Pooling raw data from 68 studies and more than 10,000 people, researchers found the odds of drifting off-task rose about 6% every minute, so that by the 20th minute people were off-task roughly 49% of the time.
A meta-analysis of 106 student samples tested with Wechsler IQ tests since 1939 finds undergraduates' average IQ has fallen by about 0.2 points a year to roughly 102, close to the population average of 100.
Men who sniffed odorless emotional tears from women retaliated 43.7% less in a provocation game than after sniffing saline. Tears activated four human smell receptors and changed activity in brain areas linking smell and aggression.
Among 347 working adults applying for a simulated retail sales job, those best at faking a personality test scored higher on mental ability (r = .25) and lower on psychopathy (r = -.29), competitiveness and immorality.
Across five studies, including 2.3 million Weibo posts and experiments with 1,945 people, feeling that one is witnessing history increased both the sense that life has meaning and the search for it. On the day Queen Elizabeth II died, "witness" users were 73% more likely to post about meaning.
In the Add Health study, adults rated attractive were over 10 percentage points less likely to game than those rated unattractive, and attractive gamers played 2.05 fewer hours a week; they also reported more close friends, and teen gaming did not predict adult looks.
Across nearly 1.4 million images and videos, women appeared younger than men despite no age gap in the US workforce; female celebrities on IMDb were 6.5 years younger, and ChatGPT rated older men's resumes highest.