Friendship is the single most important factor influencing our health, well-being, and
happiness. Creating and maintaining friendships is, however, extremely costly, in terms of …

The evolution of unusually large brains in some groups of animals, notably primates, has
long been a puzzle. Although early explanations tended to emphasize the brain's role in …

We use data on frequencies of bi-directional posts to define edges (or relationships) in two
Facebook datasets and a Twitter dataset and use these to create ego-centric social …

Language is an essential part of what makes us human. Where did it come from? How did it
develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective …

Successful social interactions require both affect sharing (empathy) and understanding
others' mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM). As these two functions have mostly been …

Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led
various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' …

Scholars from both the social sciences and the humanities have credited fiction reading with
a range of positive real-world social effects. Research in psychology has suggested that …

Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories and how our minds are shaped to understand them.
After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer's Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's …

Conventional wisdom over the past 160 years in the cognitive and neurosciences has
assumed that brains evolved to process factual information about the world. Most attention …

Conversation is a uniquely human phenomenon. Analyses of freely forming conversations
indicate that approximately two thirds of conversation time is devoted to social topics, most of …