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1 week ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
“Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life.”-Joseph Epstein, The Joys of Victimhood (1989)Victimhood has always had a certain moral cachet. In recent years, however, it’s become one of the most powerful currencies in the social marketplace. Whereas people once sought status through highlighting their achievements, today they often do so by broadcasting their wounds.
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3 weeks ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
A new review paper by Jan Luca Pletzer and Loes Abrahams offers a fascinating synthesis of decades of research into how personality shapes our work lives. The paper centers on how three major trait models - the Big Five, the HEXACO, and the Dark Triad - relate to job performance. The graph below summarizes the main findings. On the vertical axis, we have the individual traits from each of the three models.
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4 weeks ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Welcome to the May edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest - a collection of linksto the most interesting, surprising, and provocative articles I’ve come across in the last month.
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1 month ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
Back in April, I published a post titled The Other Half: Six Gender Gaps We Rarely Talk About, which highlighted some underdiscussed disadvantages faced by men. It struck a nerve. Since then, I’ve come across a bunch of new examples - enough to justify a second collection. As with the first, the point isn’t to deny that women face disadvantages; obviously, they do.
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1 month ago | 
stevestewartwilliams.com | Steve Stewart-Williams
It’s widely believed that men get an easier ride than women in the workplace: People automatically defer to their views, evaluate them more highly, and heap praise on even their most pedestrian contributions. Women, in contrast, are supposedly judged by a stricter standard, assumed to be less competent, and more often critiqued and corrected.
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2 months 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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Mar 29, 2025 | 
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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Mar 22, 2025 | 
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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Mar 8, 2025 | 
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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Feb 22, 2025 | 
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?