Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

A team of researchers from Sweden and Italy have taken a new angle on understanding the rise of Donald Trump: body odor. Wait, what? There’s a logic here, although it’s not obvious at first whiff. As the researchers point out, how we react to smells has played an important role in how we choose who…

Whether you’re concerned with how your actions affect the environment could be partly a matter of personality. That’s according to a new study from researchers in Brașov, Romania that looked at whether personal characteristics influence how likely people are to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. The researchers found that several personality traits influenced how often people…

Last year saw an election in which the established political order was disrupted and a right-wing populist gained a momentum that few people expected. I’m talking, of course, about the 2016 Austrian presidential election. Traditionally, Austrian politics has been dominated by the center-left Social Democratic Party and the center-right Austrian People’s Party. Last year, though,…

Tattoos are commonplace these days, but society’s attitudes can be slow to change. Two studies published this year suggest that on average, people make more negative judgments about the character of people with tattoos. Most recently, a study had people view images of people with tattoos. Some of the images showed the tattoos while in…

Have you ever wondered how some people can lie so much? If you answered “no,” clearly you don’t follow politics. According to a study published this month, prolific liars may not be born that way. Rather, it appears that lying is a habit that escalates over time. Small lies become slightly larger lies, which eventually…

Over the last couple decades, it has become common knowledge that we’ve got some problems with the environment. “Global warming” has become a household word, and people are starting to realize that some of the ways we do things aren’t sustainable. At the same time, not much has changed in the way we act. Environmental…

Old cliches notwithstanding, people often seek out partners similar to themselves in many ways. Researchers call this phenomenon “assortative mating.” Perhaps mercifully, people are more likely to end up with partners who share similar political and religious views. But like also tends to attract like in several other ways, including some personality traits. Some of…