Consider the protagonist Walter White from the series Breaking Bad. Throughout the series, he manufactures methamphetamine, repeatedly puts his family in danger, and commits multiple murders. And yet viewers liked him. In fact, some even defended him. How is this possible?

On initial contact, a sociopath will often test other people's empathy, so questions geared towards discovering if you are highly empathic or not should ring alarm bells.

Humans can detect a person's gender through smell alone, even if they don't know they are doing it, a recent study suggests. The study, published in Current Biology details how people are often intrinsically able to identify the gender they are attracted to through smell alone, regardless of their own sexual orientation.

The Behavioral Change Stairway Model was developed by the FBI's hostage negotiation unit, and it shows the five steps to getting someone else to see your point of view and change what they're doing. It's not something that only works with barricaded criminals wielding assault rifles — it applies to most any form of disagreement.

A new study finds that girls police social hierarchies by slut-shaming one another. Though hashtag campaigns like #YesAllWomen remind us that women are often the victims of men’s misogyny and sexual aggression, men are not the only culprits. A new study finds that young women are guilty of bullying their peers using degrading sexual language.

Could've, should've, would've. Everyone has made the wrong choice at some point in life and suffered regret because of it. Now a new study shows we're not alone in our reaction to incorrect decisions. Rats too can feel regret.

The human tongue may have a sixth sense—and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with seeing ghosts. Researchers have found that in addition to recognizing sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter tastes, our tongues can also pick up on carbohydrates, the nutrients that break down into sugar and form our main source of energy.

My best friend from childhood had two beautiful dogs, a German shepherd named Sari and an Australian shepherd named Chloe. Living on a large pasture in the Midwestern countryside, the dogs were both mellow and incredibly well-behaved... that is, until my friend and I decided to mess with them. No, we didn't engage in dog shaming (see photo above); instead, we did something much more ruthless.

Researchers report encouraging advances toward a blood test that can pick up genetic changes linked to suicide. Behaviors can’t be reduced to your genes – they’re far too complicated for that. But genes can lay the foundation for making people more or less likely to respond and act in certain ways, and suicide may be the latest example of that.

We saw the impala first, a young buck with a proud set of ridged and twisted horns, like helical rebar, bounding across the open plain at full, desperate gallop. But why?

Women college students spend an average of 10 hours a day on their cellphones, with men college students spending nearly eight hours, according to a Baylor University study on cellphone activity published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions.

One Saturday night this summer, a foreigner fainted and fell to the floor of a Shanghai subway car. The passengers around him scattered. Not a single person tried to help. When the train arrived at the next station, hundreds rushed out, nearly trampling each other. The incident was captured on closed-circuit cameras.

It happened last Sunday at football stadiums around the country. Suddenly, 50,000 individuals became a single unit, almost a single mind, focused intently on what was happening on the field—that particular touchdown grab or dive into the end zone. Somehow, virtually simultaneously, each of those 50,000 people tuned into what the other 49,999 were looking at.

For years, anthropologists have watched wild chimpanzees "go ape" and attack each other in coordinated assaults. But until now, scientists were unsure whether interactions with humans had brought on this violent behavior or if it was part of the apes' basic nature.

One neuroscientist is peering into the canine brain, and says he's found evidence that dogs may feel love

Toronto resident Simon Treadwell wheeled a garbage bin onto a snow-bound lot next to his property one evening this past winter. Inside the bin was a smelly mixture of wet and dry cat food, sardines, and fried chicken. Treadwell sprinkled some of the mix on and around the bin, made sure his three motion-activated night vision cameras were on, and went back into his house.

A growing number of avid technology users who are adept at social media, smartphone apps and texting are intentionally limiting their usage, according to guest columnists Ricardo Gomez and Stacey Morrison.

A new Pew study confirms that online harassment is endemic. But human behavior—and the limits placed on it by both law and society—can change.

In a previous post I discussed the fascinating case of Paul Frampton who, as the website News Observer put it, “instantly was transformed from superstar particle phenomenologist with three Oxford University degrees to international tabloid fodder” when he fell for a honey trap drug smuggling scam. In it, I talked about irrationality in Mensa, the “high IQ society”, and the fact that rational behavior is not, as most of us assume, a direct product of intelligence.

Bats are dependent upon echolocation to catch their insect prey. But competition for resources is fierce among bats, so they've evolved the capacity to "jam" the signals of other bats to send them off target.

You don't often think of plants as having behavior, but this video clearly shows a beanstalk "looking" for support.

Bats 'stick inside the pitchers like a cork on a bottle'

It should be common knowledge - dogs are animals, not accessories. The trend of small dogs that can comfortably be carried around in a purse has increased over the years, thanks often in part to ce...

Cockoo catfish tricks mother cichlid into raising baby catfish instead of it's own offspring.

Study is first to experimentally show that environment influences the social transmission of fear

This clip shows the general behaviour of the Pacific leaping blenny as it goes about it's day on the rocky foreshores of Guam.

This unusual fish's bony fins can extend up to 1m to help them stand. Video in snap.

Q&A With Jane [Goodall] on Origins of Life Work

Orthodox economics is broken. Applying what we know about evolution, ecology and collective behaviour might help us avoid another catastrophe. By Kate Douglas

Atlantic bottlenose and spotted dolphins are cooperating in unique mixed-species groups that are mostly platonic, but sometimes cross-species sex is involved. By Colin Barras.

There are many reasons why some people get very grumpy when they haven’t eaten for a while. By Amanda Salis.

Artificial intelligence is reducing toxic behavior in online gaming and could mark the future of influencing human behavior. By Gideon Rosenblatt.

A Department of Justice investigation found that Georgia is giving thousands of kids with behavioral issues a subpar education and putting them in the same run-down buildings that served black children decades ago.

A study finds that wild bonobos use a single high-pitched call in a variety of contexts, showing a linguistic flexibility that was thought to be uniquely human... Researchers say the new findings push back the development of context-free vocal calls to our shared ancestor with bonobos, 6-10 million years ago.

Researchers in Japan find fish can think logically and infer when an opponent is too strong to risk fighting.