Less intelligent people are more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes towards same-sex couples, according to new research from Australia. The finding, which appear in the journal Intelligence, adds to a growing body of literature that indicates less intelligent people tend to express more prejudicial attitudes.

If you want to give a little boost to your life satisfaction a year from now, you may want to try socially-focused strategies over strategies that involve nonsocial pursuits, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

People who live in rural areas are happier than city dwellers, new research has found. The study surveyed 400,000 people across Canada using a widely-recognized happiness scale. Cities have higher salaries, higher education levels and lower unemployment rates. However, that meant nothing in terms of joy: people who lived in the countryside were, on average, eight times happier than people in urban areas, the study found.

Amazon started widely selling its Echo speaker, voiced by the Star Trek-inspired personal assistant Alexa, in 2015. That year, 6,050 baby girls in the United States were named Alexa, or 311 for every 100,000 female babies born. Since then, the name has declined in popularity 33 percent, according to new data from the Social Security Administration crunched by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen. Last year, just 3,883 baby girls were named Alexa.

Even your selfies and brunch photos aren’t safe from the long arm of Facebook, it was revealed overnight, as the tech giant admitted it had taken billions of photos from Instagram accounts around the world to boost its own research. More than 3.5 billion photographs were harvested from the photo-sharing platform without users’ knowledge, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told the audience at the company's annual developers' conference F8, revealing they had been used to enhance the company’s artificial intelligence technology.

A recent study finds that young people who get financial support from their parents have greater professional success, highlighting one way social inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next. “The question underlying this work was whether parental support gives adult children an advantage or hinders their development,” says Anna Manzoni, an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University and author of a paper on the work.

China’s social credit system, reminiscent of a dystopian nightmare, has invaded yet another level of Chinese citizens’ lives: determining where their children can go to school. In 2014, the Chinese regime first rolled out plans to create a social credit system, which ranks each citizen based on their levels of trustworthiness and compliance with the regime’s rules.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, young men today are likely to be selfless, socially engaged and health-conscious, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia and Intensions Consulting, a Vancouver-based market research firm. The researchers surveyed 630 young men ages 15-29 in Western Canada and found that the most strongly endorsed masculine value is selflessness. Ninety-one per cent of the men agreed that a man should help other people, and 80 per cent believed that a man should give back to the community.

Google finally has a plan to fix Android's texting problem. This week, the company confirmed its long-rumored plan to improve messaging on Android and bring its features up to par with other popular messaging apps like Apple's iMessage. Google being Google, though, the plan is much more complicated than simply improving its own Android Messages app (though that's certainly part of it). Instead, Google is beginning what will be a years-long effort to get carriers and phone makers to all agree to work together and commit to using the same standard for messaging, called Rich Communications Services (RCS).

Research has consistently found that religious people are judged as more trustworthy than the nonreligious. A new study published in Psychological Science has found evidence that this is because religious people are viewed as slow life history strategists. According to life history theory, early life experiences can shape an individual’s behavior toward relationships and life in general.

New research by the University of Manchester has found that young people belonging to alternative subcultures, like goths, emos or metal fans, are at a greater risk of self-harm and suicide than those who don't. Dr Peter Taylor, a clinical psychologist from the uni, says health, educational and social services need to be more aware of the risks to these young people.

China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year. People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.

Beautiful people tend to believe that life is fundamentally fair and just, according to new research conducted with college students. The study, published in the journal Psychological Reports, examined the relationship between physical attractiveness and belief in a just world, meaning the belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

“Lower your music, you’re upsetting other passengers.” Without social sanction, society frays at the edges. But what drives someone to intervene against bad behaviour? One cynical view is that it appeals to those who want to feel better about themselves through scolding others. But research putting this to the test in British Journal of Social Psychology has found that interveners are rather different in character.

People see fathers as a more distinct group after reading about so-called Dad Bods, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The study found that learning about changes associated with fatherhood reduced differences in essentialist perceptions of mothers and fathers.

Poor understanding of the physical world is related to religious and paranormal beliefs, according to a recent study published this June in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Many people like to believe in supernatural phenomena, for example, breaking a mirror brings you 7 years of bad luck. In the past, studies have shown that people see natural phenomena as having intentions, and give human characteristics to God and other supernatural agents.

So-called “bad girls” who acknowledge themselves as sexual beings may be more likely to turn down unwanted sex, according to new research on college students. The study in Sexuality & Culture found that women who valued their own sexual pleasure as much as their partner’s pleasure were less likely to have engaged in unwanted sexual acts to please their partners.

People who surf the internet more often are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated, according to new research published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The percentage of Americans who do not identify with a religious group has been growing — and the new research suggests that the internet could be playing a role.

Dating site OKCupid is trading its user pseudonyms for a real-name policy.

A new study on mating performance in humans suggests it is common for people to face difficulties in intimate relationships. “The current literature on the difficulties of human mating is thin, while many psychologist hold false beliefs about what causes people to perform poorly,” said study author Menelaos Apostolou, an associate professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Nicosia.