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There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.

Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely people not only interpret things differently from their non-lonely peers, but they even see them differently from each other.

“Our results suggest that lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness,” the research team, led by psychologist Elisa Baek, said in a study recently published in Psychological Science. 

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Piecing together why so many people are willing to share misinformation online is a major focus among behavioral scientists. It's easy to think partisanship is driving it all—people will simply share things that make their side look good or their opponents look bad. But the reality is a bit more complicated. Studies have indicated that many people don't seem to carefully evaluate links for accuracy, and that partisanship may be secondary to the rush of getting a lot of likes on social media. Given that, it's not clear what induces users to stop sharing things that a small bit of checking would show to be untrue.

So, a team of researchers tried the obvious: We'll give you money if you stop and evaluate a story's accuracy. The work shows that small payments and even minimal rewards boost the accuracy of people's evaluation of stories. Nearly all that effect comes from people recognizing stories that don't favor their political stance as factually accurate. While the cash boosted the accuracy of conservatives more, they were so far behind liberals in judging accuracy that the gap remains substantial.

Money for accuracy

The basic outline of the new experiments is pretty simple: get a bunch of people, ask them about their political leanings, and then show them a bunch of headlines as they would appear on a social media site such as Facebook. The headlines were rated based on their accuracy (i.e., whether they were true or misinformation) and whether they would be more favorable to liberals or conservatives.

Enlarge / Vintage illustration of medieval women wearing kirtles. A kirtle (sometimes called a cotte or cotehardie) is a garment that was worn by men and women in the Middle Ages. It eventually became a one-piece garment worn by women from the late Middle Ages into the Baroque period. (credit: duncan1890)

In the illuminating and entertaining blog Going Medieval, Eleanor Janega, a medievalist at the London School of Economics, upends prevalent misconceptions about medieval Europe. These misunderstandings include that people didn’t bathe (they did) and that these were the Dark Ages*. Her new book, The Once and Future Sex, is subtitled “Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society,” and that's exactly what she does—if by “going medieval” you intend the pop culture meaning of "dismembering in a barbaric manner" which, despite her protestations, you probably do.

Her main thrust, in the blog and in the book, is that it's easy and convenient for us to envision medieval times as being backward in every way because that makes modern times seem all that much more spectacular. But not only is this wrong, it's dangerous. Just because life is definitely better for women now than it was then, that doesn’t mean our current place in society is optimal or somehow destined. It's not.

Progress did not proceed in a straight arrow from bad times then to good times now. Maintaining that things were horrible then deludes us into thinking that they must be at their pinnacle now. Janega lays out this argument in the introduction and then spends the bulk of the text citing evidence to bolster it.

Enlarge / Those lab coats aren't going to protect you from your own biases. (credit: Caiaimage/Robert Daly)

It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide.

And it's not just the general public having issues. We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.

Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgments even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.