Society, Law & Ethics

Multiple-choice tests are actually making students worse at knowing what they don't know.

The college degrees that get you the biggest paychecks are, ironically, the same ones AI is most likely to take over.

Even in France—where people are snobs about language—voters actually like politicians more if they have a thick regional accent.

When politicians try to talk like 'regular people' to sound cool, everyone—even their own voters—thinks they look less competent and less trustworthy.

Teachers don't usually pick on struggling students; they actually give them 'mercy grades' to try and even the playing field.

Immigrants actually start blending into their new country’s culture six months before they even get there.

Tell someone a snack is 'plant-based' and they probably won't want it. Tell them after they've eaten it, and they’re 37% more likely to buy it again.

Cutting back on social media during elections stops you from seeing fake news, but it doesn't change your political views at all.

Mass surveillance has made it basically impossible to treat paranoia in a clinical setting.

That famous 'cluster-based' tracing that supposedly saved Japan during the first COVID wave was mostly a myth.

Having a strong economy protects people from climate disasters way more than any specific climate policy ever could.

AI surveillance cameras can actually trigger a psychotic break in people who haven't even used a computer.

Telling voters how much billionaires pollute actually makes them *less* likely to want to fix the climate.

If you put just five more items on a ballot, 1% of people will just stay home instead of voting.

The recent shift of Latino voters toward the GOP was actually driven by those voters becoming more anti-immigration.

Your personality is a better predictor of how much you'll struggle with government red tape than your money or education.

Whether a nine-year-old is better at words or math can predict their interest in politics ten years later.

Pot users who remember seeing mental health warnings are actually more likely to be high-risk daily users.

Immigrants often get more 'pro-native' and want stricter borders when a completely different cultural group arrives.

If it rains on the Sunday before a big election, Republican turnout on Tuesday takes a massive hit.

Human lifespan and female fertility are moving up at the exact same pace, like they’re both set to the same internal clock.

People aren't homeschooling because of the curriculum as much as they are because of the racial makeup of the school's bosses.

For-profit medical schools in the Caribbean are 'shopping' for regulators in places like Kazakhstan just to dodge quality rules.

Waiving academic warnings during the pandemic to 'help' students actually backfired and led to way more people failing later on.

That 'scientific certainty' in big medical studies? Sometimes it’s just because the researchers are buddies, not because the data is actually solid.

Getting rid of haggling can actually scare off customers, even if the new "fixed" price is cheaper than what they were paying before.

Planting native flowers might actually be worse for city birds and bees than those "exotic" gardens people love to hate.

Trade wars aren't actually stopping global trade because individual companies are just ignoring the politics and doing their own thing.