How do pilgrimages get established? How do people become convinced to try something new? Using a theoretical game model, University of California, Davis, anthropologists suggest that lucky outcomes can sometimes give rise to the perception that a new site cures, blesses, grants miracles or otherwise produces great outcomes in pilgrims’ lives.
Out of all the words you know, which ones don’t have vowels? To document these rare “vowelless” words and show how they might develop in real time, Mohamed Afkir and Georgia Zellou studied Tarifit, a Moroccan Amazigh language.
A genomic analysis of over 1,200 people from across South Africa reveals how colonial-era European, Indigenous Khoe-San peoples, and enslaved people contributed to the modern-day gene pool in South Africa.
The sudden drop in the number of immigrants in the U.S. comes at a time when fertility rates among the native-born population are also falling. Research in economics suggests that these two trends could tip a precarious economy into decline.
UC Davis researchers combined electroencephalogram, or EEG, data with eye tracking and machine learning to study “anticipatory attention,” which is attention that enables a person to prepare to perceive upcoming sensory events. They employed this method to learn how our brain processes incoming information.
The Big Five inventory of personality traits is the only scientifically supported model of human personality endorsed by scientists and scientific societies. Take this test to get your scores on the Big Five and learn what they mean about your personality.
New research in psychology finds that our personalities actually change from moment to moment, and that the people closest to us are more likely than we are to notice. The study combined frequent self-reported Big Five inventories with ratings from participants’ friends and family to build a holistic understanding of people’s personalities in everyday life.
From inflation to your grocery bill, the Federal Reserve’s independence shapes everyday life. UC Davis research explains how political pressure on Fed interest rates could impact the U.S. economy.
A new study in psychology finds that combining words that label objects, such as “bear,” with spatial words such as “here” or “there” captures infants’ attention for longer than using those types of words alone or using other words that are neither labels nor spatial. Adding gestures, such as pointing, holds babies’ attention the longest.
Over 100 years ago, civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois argued for an America in which democracy means equal representation for all. Philosopher Elvira Basevich looks back to Du Bois for how we might solve the problems workers face today.
