Is It Possible to Be Just Terrified Enough This COVID Halloween?

A Biologist of Animal Behavior Explains Why This Primordial Emotion Can Help Guide Us Through an Especially Spooky Season

It’s Halloween, the season when we go out and try to spook each other—at least in normal years. Indeed, fears of contracting and spreading the novel coronavirus have drastically impacted many of our Halloween plans. Should they? And more importantly, how do our fears impact our behavior to make us safe? I’m a biologist who studies animal behavior—including what scares creatures ranging from giant clams and other immobile marine invertebrates to a variety of birds and mammals, and why. Animals’ responses to frightening things—reactions that have helped species survive over …

How Digital Technology Is Making Us Subservient, Anxious, and Uncertain

The Threat of Constant Surveillance Provokes Fears That We’re Losing Our Liberty and Autonomy

In the anxious years since 9/11, surveillance has become one of the essential infrastructures for 21st-century social life, commerce, and government. With an endless number of drones, sensors, scanners, archives, …

Closed-Circuit TV Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Human Behavior

While Researchers Used to Rely on Interviews and Experiments, Raw Video Reveals Subtle, Previously Hidden Reactions

In a 2012 YouTube video of an attempted robbery in California, a strange scene unfolds.

Two robbers enter the Circle T Market in Riverbank. One carries a large assault rifle, an …

Chimpanzee Behavior Isn’t Just Monkey Business. It’s Culture.

Grooming, Using Tools, and Fishing for Termites Show the Humanity of Our Primate Cousins

In 1961, famed primatologist Jane Goodall discovered that wild chimpanzees were fashioning tools from sticks and using them to fish termites out of their nests—revolutionizing our understanding of culture and …

Is It Too Late To Not Be a Jerk?

A Discussion Of the Teachability Of Kindness

We can all point to some dreadful people who seem to live forever, but in general the numbers favor the good guys. According to researchers, being charitable in behavior—being kind—promotes …