Persuasion

Native English speakers understood active sentences (subject performs action) and passive sentences (something acts on subject) faster than non-native English speakers. However, both groups took longer to understand passive sentences.

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

Self-reported lonely college students enjoyed learning about their favorite celebrities' personal lives and visited their social media pages more than their less lonely classmates.

The Social Science Journal

From 2014 to 2016, songs with atypical lyrics (lyrics that defied genre conventions) were downloaded more on large streaming services than songs with typical lyrics.

Persuasion

From 1986 to 2016, billboard-reaching pop music songs became more "attention-grabbing" with faster tempos, shorter titles, less time before singing began, and less time before the title of the song was mentioned.

Persuasion

Compared to children of non-smokers, high school children who had at least one parent who smoked had more favorable attitudes towards smoking, and were more likely to smoke if they viewed it favorably.

Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy

People associated attractive scientists with more interesting but lower quality work and less attractive scientists with higher quality work. People also perceived older scientists' work as more interesting.

Persuasion

Knowing that a competition about donations was taking place caused people who were not participating in the competition to donate more money, possibly because being aware of the competition increased feelings of rivalry.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Persuasion

Early success in winning research funding encourages scientists to apply more often for funding later. Scientists who won funding early in their career were more likely to apply for and win additional funding over the next eight years than similarly ranked peers who didn't win early funding.

Scientists who posted selfies on Instagram were rated as being warmer, more trustworthy, and no less competent than scientists who posted pictures of scientific objects or equipment.

Cannabis users in the U.S. treat legally-obtained cannabis as superior to dealer-bought cannabis, but if the cost of legal cannabis nears $20 per gram, users may switch from legal vendors to illegal dealers.