…a systematic test of the putative creativity-enhancing effect of anger is missing. This article fills this void with three experiments examining creativity as a function of anger (vs. sad or…
When a doctor’s shift ends, or a physician retires, are patients left in the lurch? Bapu Jena looks at the challenge of managing medical transitions….
Also: how does a comedian cope with tragedy? With Eugene Mirman….
How much does school choice matter? Probably less than you think, as Levitt has previously argued. Now, in an analysis of seven years of test-score data from 6,000 Los Angeles…
…How best to get a handle on the evolution of day-to-day racism? For more on this, also see?Julia Baird‘s splendid Newsweek column, which emphasizes the gender dimension of our research.…
…subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003…
…I made reference to the ideas of Anders Ericsson, an old friend whom Dubner and I wrote about in our New York Times column back in 2006, and whose ideas…
…propose a first empirical test on the relationship between time preferences and crime using as a sample the whole set of Italian regions observed over the period 2002-2007. We consider…
…ago. He thinks he has found a very interesting pattern in the responses. He wants to test his hypothesis on Freakonomics blog readers. Here is my request: without researching the…
A new RAND research report prepared for the U.S. Army explores the effect of military enlistment on individual earnings and the labor market. The authors used data from applicants to…
…below is adapted from their new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It. Launching into Unethical Behavior By Ann E….
Also: why do we habituate to life’s greatest pleasures?
…weren’t robbing a jewelery store, your evil twin was) you both get off scot free at trial. It could be the perfect crime, and it just happened, in Germany. [%comments]…
…Now along come Donald Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter from the University of Toronto with an interesting question: do applicants to medical school suffer if they happen to be interviewed…
…by Atul Gawande, who also writes for The New Yorker. I haven’t read Better yet, but I loved his previous book, Complications, as well as some of Gawande’s New Yorker…
Every year, Americans short the I.R.S. nearly half a trillion dollars. Most ideas to increase compliance are more stick than carrot — scary letters, audits, and penalties. But what if…
…incentives for kids to distinguish themselves — and for their parents to spend time helping them do so. One nice test of the theory makes the same comparison — highly…
…hip-hop star bury the CD’s of rival stars? Do people who love American cars go to test-drive German cars just so they can smear something sticky on the leather interior?…
…DUH-da) first names are much more common than iambic (e.g., da-DUH) names. This is bad news for bar-RACK hus-SEIN o-BAM-a, a treble iambic, and it’s good news for HIL-lary CLIN-ton….
Well, it’s actually happening. An idea reported extensively in SuperFreakonomics has come to fruition, and some mad scientists are getting their way (and a little government funding) to build a…
…a container of water undergoing a rapid temperature change. For years, Pyrex measuring cups, manufactured by Corning, were a key component of the underground crack industry. But Corning sold Pyrex…
Host Bapu Jena is an economist and medical doctor whose latest research measures the link between birthdays and Covid. He explains his team’s findings, explores the role that kids’ parties…
A few months ago, after someone claimed I was a celebrity, I offered to test that hypothesis by giving $100 to anyone who identified me spontaneously over the next 30…
…forced to grovel and apologize. Now we learn that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis (here’s a recent posting on the subject), who tested high for testosterone after his miraculous…
…undergrads, using a data-driven approach worthy of the Freakonomics imprimatur, set out to test one of these stereotypes: that the co-eds are not so attractive. A write-up of their approach…
Congress has taken note of the shortage of donated organs, and has proposed an incentive to increase donation: a commemorative medal to honor organ donors. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution…
In many states, it is perfectly legal to not hire someone who smokes. Should employers also be able to weed out junk-food lovers or motorcyclists — or anyone who wants…
…Department of Economics at Appalachian State University and contributor to the blog Environmental Economics; and Ethan Zindler, head of North American research at New Energy Finance, to talk about this…
…on the ground. That is a challenge that faces all who research such grand things. One of the leitmotifs of the recent discussions around the SPICE project technology test cancellation…
Even a brutal natural disaster doesn’t diminish our appetite for procreating. This surely means we’re heading toward massive overpopulation, right? Probably not.
