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3 weeks ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Welcome to the April edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest - your monthly dose of science, psychology, and subversion. This time around: why men are more distracted by sexual images (shocking, I know), how Freud is making a comeback in virtual reality, and why your pet might be worth more than your car. Also on the menu: the gender orgasm gap, political tribalism, meditation myths, and the growing rebellion against academic censorship.
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1 month ago | 
toddkashdan.substack.com | Todd Kashdan |Steve Stewart-Williams
Welcome to Provoked - your one-stop source for insights on Purpose, Happiness, Friendship, Romance, Narcissism, Creativity, Curiosity, and Mental Fortitude! Support the mission (here) and get benefits:Provoked is free, but it takes a lot of work. Please consider supporting Provoked by signing up as a free or paid subscriber. Let’s talk about the guy who has it all and feels like shit. You know the one. Big house. Nice car. Executive title. Lived-in leather briefcase.
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1 month ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Psychology has a reputation problem. The replication crisis of the past decade has cast a long shadow of doubt over many once-celebrated findings, from power posing to stereotype threat to growth mindset. In fact, ironically enough, one of the most replicable findings in psychology is that psychology findings often fail to replicate. As word of psychology’s replication crisis has spread, many have written the field off as total bunk. This is a mistake.
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1 month ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams |James L. Nuzzo
Welcome to the March edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest - a selection of links to papers and articles that caught my eye over the last month.
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2 months ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
What makes us who we are? To what extent are the differences between us written in our genes, and how much do we owe to the environment? Philosophers, scientists, and armchair theorists have debated this question for centuries - but a groundbreaking meta-analysis of twin studies offers the clearest answer yet.
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2 months ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Welcome to the February 2025 edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that grabbed my attention over the last month. On the menu today, we’ve got sex differences in physical strength, a failure to replicate a popular explanation for gender gaps in STEM, and fraud in the science of Alzheimer’s disease. Plus we’ll ask: What makes people happy? Could psychotherapy harm people’s mental health? Are stereotypes about the sexes accurate or inaccurate?
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2 months ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Last Saturday, I published an essay titled Personality and Intelligence are More Closely Linked Than We Thought. It explored two meta-analyses examining whether smart people have different personalities than their not-so-smart counterparts. One of the meta-analyses, authored by Jeromy Anglim and colleagues, also investigated whether there are age and sex differences in intelligence and personality.
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2 months ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Do intelligent people have different personalities than their less intelligent peers? If so, why? Does personality shape intelligence, or does intelligence shape personality? Or is it a bit of both? These are some of the questions addressed by two groundbreaking recent papers published in two of the world’s top scientific journals.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
The following is an excerpt from an interview I did a few years ago with the biologist and science writer Mairi Macleod. Mairi was working on an article about dating and love myths. This part of the interview didn’t make the final cut, so I thought I’d share it here.
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Feb 1, 2025 | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
How do our IQs and personality traits shape the jobs we choose - or the jobs that choose us? A fascinating 2023 study by Tobias Wolfram, published in the journal Intelligence, explores the connections between cognitive ability, personality, and occupational sorting. Whereas earlier research relied on small or unrepresentative samples, Wolfram’s work draws on data from a representative U.K. sample of more than 40,000 people.
