Jeff Wise

A career as a female TV news anchor isn’t all glamor. Away from the glare of the studio lights, the job is plagued by a little-known but particularly unpleasant occupational hazard: stalkers. In newsrooms across the country, the problem is endemic. “Everyone has a crazy guy,” says broadcaster Amy Jacobson. “It’s expected.”

Though no statistics exist on the scope of the problem, experts who study stalking confirm that female anchors and reporters can expect to be targeted sooner or later. “One in eight American women will get stalked in her lifetime,” says stalking consultant Dr. Park Dietz. “But for a female news readers, it’s virtually a certainty. At any given time, she might be stalked by several at once and not even know about it.” Continue reading The Women Most Likely to Be Stalked

Any time two or more people come together, one of them automatically and subconsciously establishes dominance. That’s the reality of being a mammal. We’re social creatures; a place in the hierarchy is a matter of life and death. We need allies to protect us, to fight with us, to groom us and help us bear and raise children. So our brains contain circuitry that automatically find a place for us in the social structure. Some dominate, others submit.

But how do our brains decide who will come out on top? Continue reading Who’ll Be the Alpha Male? Ask the Hormones

The conundrum that has puzzled the greatest minds from Silverlake to Williamsburg: if even hipsters hate hipsters, how could anyone choose to become one? At last, this remarkable video provides the answer.

As I wrote in a recent blog post, moments of extreme emotional intensity can trigger indelibly vivid memories. I cited the case of a reader, Alice from Jupiter, who wrote that she could clearly recall a number of thoughts racing through her head as a fatal accident unfolded. I took her at her word. But how can we be sure that this kind of intense memories is accurate? As reader Sarah writes on her blog at the Pratt Institute,

Did Alice from Jupiter really ask herself all of those questions before the car hit her, or did her mind plant them there as she relived the moment over and over? I would imagine that most New Yorkers also felt a lesser but still extremely high sense of danger and fear after first hearing about 9/11, but even these memories have proven to be susceptible to distortion over time.

The point is well taken. Though memory feels like a straightforward function — something happens, our mind registers and stores it — in fact it’s a dynamic process. Each time we access a piece of information, we’re likely to change it. A memory that seems crystal clear could very well be wrong. Continue reading Your Most Vivid Memory? Maybe It Never Happened

Behold the hipster, the stylishly disaffected breed of twentysomethings whose fog of twee whimsy envelopes Williamsburg and the East Village. Most who encounter the hipster in its natural habitat respond in one of two ways: derision or ridicule.

But science does not cast judgment. Its goal is to explore and explain dispassionately, whether the object of study be the noble eagle or the lowly nematode. So what does science have to tell us about this fascinatingly misunderstood breed, the indigenous North American hipster?

Surprisingly much. Continue reading The Sad Science of Hipsterism

Why is it so hard to be happy? One reason is that we’re bad at predicting how our actions will make us feel. Doing “whatever we want” often winds up making us less happy than some other course of action that at first blush might seem relatively unappealing.

In my case, I think about all those lazy weekends during which I’ve looked forward to lying around, doing nothing — an state of affairs that seemed very appealing when I got up on Saturday morning, but which by twilight on Sunday left me feeling like a pathetic sad potato.

Fortunately, this puzzling and irksome phenomenon has been addressed by science, as described in a blog post by the consistently thought-provoking and entertaining BPS Research Digest. Christopher K. Hsee at the University of Chicago gave his experimental subjects a choice between taking a completed questionnaire to a location 15 minutes away, or delivering it right outside the door and then sitting and waiting for 15 minutes. At the end of each task, they were rewarded with a tasty chocolate snack bar.

Here’s the punchline: the students who walked for 15 minutes reported feeling happier than those who had stayed put. And it wasn’t just because happier people self-selected to take a walk — even when the test subjects were told to wait or walk with no input into the choice, the walkers reported feeling happier.

Hsee concludes from his experiment is that people have an instinct for idleness. Given the choice between doing something that requires effort, and doing something that simply requires us to sit on our duff, most of us are going to choose the duff. What’s fascinating is that the duff-sitters in his experiment made a conscious choice between two potential courses of action, and they chose the one that made them less happy.

How could that be? Continue reading Aiming for Happiness, and Arriving at Regret

In 1992, hunters traveling through the backcountry near Denali National Park made a gruesome discovery: inside an abandoned schoolbus that had been left in the backcountry as an emergency shelter they found the emaciated corpse of a young man. Further investigation revealed that the body belonged to Christopher McCandless, a 22-year-old wanderer who had styled himself “Alexander Supertramp.” Lost in the wilderness, McCandless had apparently been unable fend for himself and died of starvation.

To Alaskans, the gruesome find was sad but not surprising: another greenhorn had come to the north country without the necessary respect for the dangers of the outdoors and had paid the ultimate price. But Outside magazine writer Jon Krakauer looked into the story and was able to piece together a nobler tale. Delving into McCandless’s history, he found a troubled soul caught up in the romance of the road, a young man too unseasoned to understand his own limitations. He turned his research into a book, Into the Wild. When Sean Penn made a movie of Krakauer’s book, the McCandless story became even more gauzy: here was a man, not fatally compromised by overconfidence, but tragically gifted with an uncompromising commitment to living life in the fullest.

Many Alaskans rankled at what they saw as Krakauer and Penn’s glorifying of recklessness. But what particularly disturbed them was that after the book came out, Into the Wild fans began trekking into the backcountry to find the bus where McCandless died. Their numbers greatly increased after the movie was released in 2007. Far from learning from McCandless’ mistakes, they were re-enacting them. Continue reading Beguiled by Hollywood, Drawn to a Death in the Wilderness