1 . Social media companies are often compared to tobacco companies, for they both market harmful products to children and design their products for maximum customer loyalty (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens can and do choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on non-users, at a much younger age and in a more unnoticed way.

Once a few students in any middle school open accounts at age 11 or 12, the pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who consciously knows that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the picture and excluded. In this way, social media unlocks a remarkable achievement: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study in the University of Chicago illustrated the effects of the social media trap precisely. The researchers asked more than 1,000 college students how much they would need to be paid to deactivate (停用) their accounts on Instagram for four weeks. On average, the students said they would need to be paid roughly $ 50. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to get most of their friends to do the same, and then asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero — most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Most students are on social media only because everyone else is too. This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is discouraged from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media, however, has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem.

Distracted driving is an ongoing problem. A new poll by State Farm,     1     insurance company, proves once again that the roads are full of fools. One in five of the 912 drivers     2     (survey) last November admitted accessing the Internet on their smartphones while driving. Over the past several months, the company     3     (conduct) a deeper study.     4     (teenager) and young adults are more addicted to their phones, and they’re also less experienced drivers, a reason for danger on the roads with a likely     5     (high) percentage of smartphone use while driving.

Despite     6     (acknowledge) the dangers, none of the guilty drivers seems to be ashamed of     7     (them). “I’m not saying it’s the smartest thing in the world,” says Sean Black, a 38-year-old Illinois resident, “but I guess I just do it anyway.”Maybe, to a certain degree, this behavior will never change     8     a near-accident or actual crash doesn’t take place. Even then, the change will only happen     9     the basis of each individual case, and it puts the lives and well-being of innocents at the mercy of those     10     are too lazy to change their habits.

4 . Imagine if you could look into the future and see yourself 50 years from now. You could see the wrinkles on your face, how your hair would gray, and how the very shape of your face would change after decades of life. You would be able to see how you might look to your future grandchildren.

It sounds like something out of a fairytale. But a viral “Aged” filter (滤镜) on TikTok is allowing users to look into the face of their future selves.

The new filter uses AI to estimate what your face will look like as you age, and dermatologists (皮肤学家) on TikTok are calling it “very accurate”. But the response, especially among young people using the filter, shows a deep fear within Gen Z of getting, and more importantly, looking old.

What does the filter do?

The filter, which has over 9 million videos on TikTok, provides a picture of users’ faces with realistic aging, including wrinkles, crow’s feet and often gray hair. The filter looks different for each person and uses AI to enhance existing facial features, like under-eye bags or wrinkles, to estimate how their face will age.

TikTok is not the first app to release an aging filter. Snapchat released a similar filter back in 2019, and users similarly used FaceApp to age themselves.

Even Kylie Jenner immediately joined in the trend saying simply “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

Others disagree about how much the filter ages them, comparing their aged face to other users. Some have used the filter on old photos of their parents or celebrities and compared the filter’s results to how they look today.

Others, however, have taken a more loving approach to their future selves. Many users express shock at how similar they look to relatives and others express excitement for the years ahead.

5 . Ancient humans were hunter-gatherers. They followed herds of animals on the hunt and gathered eatable plants as well. Starting around 10,000 years ago, humans in a handful of regions around the world discovered agriculture. People discovered that certain seeds could be planted and crops could be reliably grown. It is impossible to overstate how important the change was. Some time after that, people in the same regions began to domesticate animals, keeping cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats in controlled conditions, eating them and using their hides.

Even fairly primitive agriculture can produce fifty times more caloric energy than hunting and gathering does. The very basis of human life is how much energy we can gain from food; with agriculture and animal domestication, it was possible for families to grow much larger and overall population levels to rise dramatically.

One of the noteworthy aspects of this change is that hunter-gatherers actually had much more leisure time than farmers did. Archaeologists (考古学家) have determined that hunter-gatherers generally only“worked”for a few hours a day, and spent the rest of their time in leisure activities. Meanwhile, farmers always worked incredibly hard for very long hours. In many places in the ancient world, there were groups of people who remained hunter-gatherers despite knowing about agriculture, and it was quite possible they did that because they saw no particular advantage in adopting agriculture. There were also many areas that practiced both—right up until the modern time, many farmers tried to forage in wild areas near their farms.

Agriculture was developed in a few different places completely independently. According to archaeological evidence, agriculture did not start in one place and then spread; it started in a few distinct areas and then spread from those areas, sometimes meeting in the middle. For example, agriculture developed independently in China by 5000 BCE, and of course agriculture in the Americas (starting in western South America) had nothing to do with its earlier invention in the Fertile Crescent.

7 . The tales and the tone vary, and the story-tellers are “journal influencers”, mostly young women reading their teenage diaries to audiences online. One influencer, Carrie Walker, draws 1. 2 million views for a half hour read online. And sharing secrets presents commercial opportunity: selling notebooks and pens on shopping website. or copies of diaries on auction (拍卖) website.

Sally Bayley of the University of Oxford, author of The Private Life of the Diary, regards sharing diaries on social media as the contrary of diary keeping. saying the journal is an internal territory, inseparable (分不开的) from privacy. Yet diaries have also long been shared. In the 19th century, when keeping a journal rose in popularity, diary-sharing then was “extremely common”. Diaries were read aloud or sent to friends. “That distinction between public and private really doesn’t hold at all, ” says Professor Huff. Some diaries served practical uses, sharing advice on self-improvement, pregnancy or childbirth. British women in a strange land often sent diaries back home. They were creating an extended family through these diaries.

Many journal videos also create a sense of community. They share stories of loneliness of struggles with body image or early romantic trouble. They make fun of the improper expectations of youth and the disappointments of adulthood, with the ear of sympathetic strangers.

The co-existence of secrecy and celebration was perhaps best understood by Anais Nin, a 20th-century French-born American whose diary was an exercise in self-creation. “I’m in my journal, and in my journal only. Nothing shows on the outside. Perhaps I don’t exist except as a fantastic character in this story. ”

And Nin published her journals. Its content won her fame that her fiction had not. Her confessional (忏悔的) texts broke through the thin screen between public and private. The diaries are a masterclass in broadcast secrecy.

“We write to taste life twice.” Nin wrote, “in the moment and in reflection. ” She spent her last years reading her diaries to crowds. Like today's influencers, she knew that reflection tastes much sweeter in company.

8 . For a place with a reputation for bottling up feelings, Britain is remarkably honest about mental health problems. The British are more likely than people in any other rich country to think that mental illness is a disease like any other and that support should be sought. Only the Swedes hold the idea that a history of mental health problems should not disqualify someone from public office.

Much of the rich world has struggled with rising rates of self-reported mental health problems. But the numbers in Britain are frightening. Around 4.5 million Britons were in contact with mental health services in 2021-2022, which was almost 1 million higher than five years ago. A National Health Service (NHS) survey in 2023 found that one in five 8-to 16-year-olds in England had a probable mental disorder, up from one in eight in 2017. In 17-to 19-year-olds the figure had increased from one in ten to one in four.

It is good that people do not feel they must bottle things up. Awareness of mental health has raised public knowledge of mental health disorders and revealed that many Britons’ needs are not met, but it has caused damage, too.

Despite the best intentions, campaigns intended to raise awareness are leading some people to combine normal responses to life’s difficulties with mental health disorders. Special treatment creates motivations for people to seek diagnoses (诊断) and to medicalise problems unnecessarily. The need to treat people with milder conditions competes with care for those who have the most severe ones. Medicalising mild worry may not benefit patients; instead, normal teaching is just as good for mental health. But the great harm from over diagnosis is to those who most need help.

Britons’ approaches to mental health require several changes. More money should go on research so that individuals are treated appropriately. More time and effort should be given to those most in need of help. All suffering should be taken seriously, but a diagnosis is not always in someone’s best interests.

9 . Marketers are often very conscious of the ways that their advertisements can backfire or “go wrong” in the eyes of their audiences. However, this rarely happens and there are virtually no cases where advertising has resulted in a decline in sales.

A psychological reason can account for the cause. It has to do with the mere exposure effect, which basically means that the more we’re exposed to something, the more we like it. The mere exposure effect is commonly attributed to Robert Zajonc for the important research that he conducted in the 1960s. His research, and the research of many others, shows that we tend to develop a liking or positive feeling for symbols or items that we see repeatedly.

When we take the mere exposure effect into account, it becomes clear why advertising rarely has a negative impact. Advertising helps to put brand assets (资产), like your logo and color and product and brand characters, in front of people, and the more these assets get in front of people, the more likely people are to develop positive feelings toward these assets and your brand. In fact, the impact of the mere exposure effect has been shown specifically in studies using advertisements, and they have found that students rated a banner ad more favorably when they had previously appeared as a pop up on their computer.

In order to fully take advantage of the mere exposure effect in marketing, marketers should make sure to use recognizable elements within their advertising. In addition, they should make sure that these elements align with what the customers see when they see the product. This will ensure that your customers will have an easier time noticing the product on the store shelves or on the computer screen and that they will have some familiarity with the brand.

The mere exposure effect is just one of many psychological biases that people use to simplify how they go about the world. Feel free to contact us or sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch with the latest insights in marketing psychology.

10 . Is art boring? It’s not, really. I don’t think so, at least. But there’s a problem with how we look at art, how we approach it.

Museums are formal and strangely dry. There’s no embrace. Barriers prevent us from leaving the path set by the curator (馆长). Glass traps the paintings permanently in their frames – an invisible barrier that prevents us from ever getting close to the art, from touching it, feeling it. Guides and guards are constantly observing us, stopping us from taking photos, or using selfie sticks, or talking too loud. Museums have too many rules. And they’ve made our art boring.

We should be able to see art, to sometimes touch it. How can we feel any connection to the world? Art is a way to connect to the world, and yet so much of our art (and it is our art, not theirs, not yours — but ours) is unreachable.

Why can’t we laugh in museums? Why can’t we take silly selfies in front of art, our tongues sticking out, our hands in the air? Art is not boring and yet, we as a society, have made it so. We’ve trapped incredible artists behind glass boxes, with random rules governing noise levels, lights, flashes, sounds, photos, selfies, pens & pencils.

I love art. I think it has this incredible power to change our world. It can move us — as individuals, or as a collective society. Art is so often a window to something else. And yet we’ve allowed museums and galleries and collectors to prevent us from ever opening those windows.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy art museums. There are many fantastic ones around the world. And without so many wonderful curators and collectors, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy much of the art that is created -the masterpieces and the newer, more contemporary (and sometimes crazy) art. But at the same time, we’ ve allowed museums too much control.

They’ve taken our art. They’ve controlled our world. And our world, our art — it’s not meant to be controlled. It’s meant to be experienced — however that may be. It’s an individual, personal choice. Let’s take back our art, our museums. And take some selfies.