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 human social world is orders of magnitude smaller than our highly urbanized world
might lead us to suppose. In addition, human social networks have a very distinct fractal …

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting
classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model …

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and
psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential, autonoetic character …

Opinions are an integral part of how we perceive the world and each other. They shape
collective action, playing a role in democratic processes, the evolution of norms, and cultural …

Extensive empirical evidence suggests that there is a maximal number of people with whom
an individual can maintain stable social relationships (the Dunbar number). We argue that …

In distributing clientelistic payoffs to citizens, the best strategy a party machine can pursue,
we argue, is to target citizens who are opinion-leading epicenters in informal conversation …

The literature on language evolution treats the fact that language allows for lying as a major
obstacle to the emergence and development of language, and thus looks for theoretical …

We use the example of art-derived solace to discuss a broader mechanism by which
negative affect is instrumental in creating positive appreciation of artworks. Based on the …

The development of behavioral ethics has brought forth a detailed understanding of the
processes of moral perception, decision-making and behavior within and beyond …