Stock markets tend to rise in the week after a blockbuster movie opens
Blockbuster movie releases were followed by significantly higher US stock market returns the next week, along with lower expected volatility and risk aversion, and the pattern also appeared in international markets.
Lonely people lean toward conspiracy theories, and that link extended to dodging a real tax
Across three UK studies with about 1,400 participants, loneliness was tied to conspiracy thinking, which in turn predicted support for norm-breaking political action and, in one experiment, actually refusing to pay 5 pence of VAT on a study payment.
Driverless trucks could boost Mississippi’s interstate exports by 40% of its GDP
Simulating a 35% cut in trucking costs from autonomous trucks, economists estimate interstate exports would rise by the equivalent of 40.3% of GDP in Mississippi and 5.9% in Florida, with the biggest dollar gains in California, Texas and Illinois.
Tips peak at mid-sized tables and mid-length meals, 800,000 pizza bills show
In more than 800,000 transactions from 60 Norwegian pizza restaurants, the chance of a tip rose and then fell with party size and with time at the table, and both patterns shifted with the bill, customer ratings and whether alcohol was ordered.
Low-income smokers who kept buying doubled their spending after California’s $2 tax
After California added $2 a pack in 2017, the share of households buying cigarettes fell from 10.6% to 4.2% by 2022, but low-income households that kept buying saw yearly spending climb from $651 to $1,343.
Most people think they are more authentic than others, and expect to get even more so
A Nature Reviews Psychology review finds people rate their own authenticity above others’ and expect it to keep rising. The evidence fits authenticity as self-enhancement and self-ownership far better than accurate self-knowledge.
Asking questions before reading beats listing learning goals, two experiments find
In two preregistered experiments, students given unanswerable questions before reading a textbook excerpt learned more than those who just read or who first saw learning objectives, with small to medium Bayesian effects favoring prequestions.
Only 44 of 2,529 Pennsylvanians accepted a free subscription to their local newspaper
In a field experiment, just 1.7% of people offered a free 13-week online subscription to the Philadelphia Inquirer or Pittsburgh Post-Gazette signed up, mostly older Democrats, and neither the offer nor promoted Facebook stories changed knowledge or attitudes.
Teens sent to China’s countryside grew up more altruistic but less trusting of government
Using the abrupt end of China’s sent-down movement as a natural experiment, a survey of 1,821 urban-born adults finds those sent down are more risk averse, more altruistic and more reciprocal, yet less supportive of redistribution and less trusting of government.