All posts tagged: societies

Poor and happy: The societies that defy life satisfaction trends

Poor and happy: The societies that defy life satisfaction trends

Published by skeptic

The Melanesian people living in the Roviana and Gizo regions of the Solomon Islands are some of the poorest in the world. They live a subsistence lifestyle, fulfilling their needs by fishing and farming. Occasionally, they sell their goods at the local marketplace to buy processed foods or pay their children’s school tuition fees. The luxuries of modern life — smartphones, the internet, TV, memory-foam mattresses — are hard to find. But despite this materially simple existence, the Melanesians express higher life satisfaction than residents of Finland and Denmark, who regularly make headlines as the happiest in the world. One of the most robust findings in happiness research is the link between income, wealth, and life satisfaction. The more money someone has, the more satisfied they tend to be. The richer a country, the happier its citizens. But as scientists are now learning, some buck this broad trend. People — often indigenous — who live in small, isolated communities tend to be as satisfied with their lives as people living in the wealthiest countries. Finding …

‘People are devastated’: anger and anxiety as Peak District loses its last bank | Banks and building societies

‘People are devastated’: anger and anxiety as Peak District loses its last bank | Banks and building societies

Published by Sam

It’s midday on a Friday and a sizeable queue has formed inside the NatWest branch in Bakewell, the last remaining bank in the whole of the Peak District. The two staff members on duty are dealing with a stream of customers including elderly people with queries, people cashing cheques and business owners collecting change for their shops. But the queues will soon be gone as the branch is scheduled to closeearly in 2024, prompting anger and genuine worry in the town. Darren Marsden, 49, a butcher at Critchlow’s farm shop over the road, was one of those in the queue, leaving a few minutes later with bags of coins to keep the till filled over the weekend. “I’m in here every day. I would say most of our customers definitely favour cash so we have to pay a lot in and out. There’s a lot of elderly people in Bakewell who don’t do online banking and things like that,” he said. “It’s going to be a massive loss for the community – it’s part of …

What We Do With Our Faces

What We Do With Our Faces

Published by skeptic

Why do Americans smile so much? Marco Goran Romano November 11, 2023, 10:02 AM ET This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. In 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote. “Whenever I or my friends were having our photos taken, we were told to say ‘cheese’ and smile. But if my parents also happened to be in the photo, they were stone-faced. So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.” Were her Russian relatives simply less happy than her American friends? Not necessarily, it turns out: Research suggests that some societies view casual smiling as …

‘It happens again and again’: why Americans are obsessed with secret societies | Books

Published by Sam

US congressional hearings can be dry affairs but not of late. First there was Robert Kennedy Jr, purveyor of disinformation about vaccines and much else, testifying about big tech censorship. Then David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, claiming that the government knows more than it admits about UFOs: “Non-human biologics had been recovered at crash sites.” The fact that both captured the public imagination is not so surprising. In a new book, Under the Eye of Power, cultural historian Colin Dickey argues that our hunger for conspiracy theories is less fringe and more mainstream than we like to admit. Fearmongering about secret groups pulling levers of power behind the scenes, “conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law”, is older than America itself. From the 1692 Salem witch trials to the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organised by the French), from the satanic panic to the Illuminati and QAnon, it has been tempting to dismiss conspiracy theories as an aberration, resonating with a small and marginal …

the female led societies of the animal kingdom

the female led societies of the animal kingdom

Published by skeptic

Queen Elizabeth II’s record-breaking long reign was exceptional in many ways – not least because England has been ruled by men for most of the last thousand years. Until recently, the crown was passed to the monarch’s eldest son and daughters were married off to royals in other countries. But in most other social mammals, females commonly remain and breed in their birth groups, inheriting the status and territory of their mothers while sons leave to find unrelated partners elsewhere.Social relationships between resident females vary but are often supportive. For example in African elephants, females assemble in family groups and older females are usually dominant over younger ones. This family of elephants lives in Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa. Jonathan Pledger/Shutterstock Overt competition is rare and relationships between matriarchs and younger females are relaxed and supportive. Elephant matriarchs act as reservoirs of information about where to find food and water and their presence is particularly important in times of famine or drought. Where species live in larger groups that include members of several families, …

What the complicated social lives of wasps can teach us about the evolution of animal societies

What the complicated social lives of wasps can teach us about the evolution of animal societies

Published by skeptic

It’s spring in England. The daffodils are in full bloom. A queen yellowjacket (Vespula) wasp emerges from your loft, dopey with hibernation and hungry for nectar. She starts to build a paper nest in which to raise a family. It will be a large family. But for now, she works alone. Wasps are poorly studied compared with other social insects, like bees and ants. But wasp societies are a fascinating example of a social insect (an insect that lives in a group) because their societies are so varied. Comparing their genetic makeup with other social insects helps bolster our understanding of how animal societies evolved. My team sequenced the genes involved with social behaviour from nine wasp species to explore what makes a queen (or a worker). What we found challenges a popular scientific view about the molecular machinery that makes insect societies tick. The shared division of labour, in the form of queen and worker castes, is the secret to success for all social insects. Castes evolved independently at least eight times in Hymenoptera …