8 Things We Learned About Human Nature in 2016
Does telling one lie make you more likely to tell another? During which season are couples most likely to divorce? And what prompts the victims of long-ago sexual assaults to finally speak out? This year, researchers have explored these questions and more, delivering fascinating insights into human nature. Here are eight of the most intriguing stories on human nature from this year.
Scientists discover human sociability genes
In a study that was published in the journal Nature in August, researchers identified some of the genes responsible for social behavior. The study involved people with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes people hypersociable, and that involves the deletion of a set of 25 genes on chromosome 7.
“I was fascinated on how a genetic defect — a tiny deletion in one of our chromosomes — could make us friendlier, more empathetic and more able to embrace our differences,” Alysson Muotri, the study’s co-senior author and an associate professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said when the study was published.
The researchers found that some neurons in the brains of those with Williams syndrome had increased branching, which might explain their gregarious nature. Muotri told Live Science that researchers still don’t know why this enhanced connectivity is related to sociability — and not intelligence or memory.
Forcing a smile may not make you happier after all
Scientists may finally have disproved a landmark 1988 study that indicated that faking a smile could actually make people feel happier (or, at the least, make them rate cartoons as funnier). In the new work, which was published in October in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a 17-lab effort that included 1,894 participants found no evidence for the so-called facial-feedback hypothesis. The facial-feedback hypothesis suggested that the body’s movements could affect mood, and not just the other way around.
However, the original researcher on the 1988 study, psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg in Germany, argued that the replication study changed his original experiment to such an extent that it was no longer a faithful replication. “I’m not sure what we’ve learned other than the effect is not very strong,” Strack told Live Science
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