A study led by Brigham Young University found that 96 percent of girls and 87 percent of boys had interacted with Disney princesses by age four. Girls who engaged the most with princess culture (via m...
Over the next few years I collected data to suggest that we have seen a broad shift from a culture of humility to the culture of what you might call the Big Me, from a culture that encouraged people t...
Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...
Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...
1 Peter 3:3-4, 2 Samuel 11:, 2 Samuel 12:, 1 Kings 1:, 1 Kings 2:, Proverbs 31:30, 1 Samuel 16:7, Genesis 26:7
Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...
Proverbs 21:13, Matthew 25:40, Luke 4:18, James 1:27
Teenage prostitutes, during interviews in a San Francisco study, were asked: “Is there anything you needed most and couldn’t get?” Their response, invariably preceded by sadness and tears was unanimou...
Fully 93% of 18-29 year old smartphone owners in the experience sampling study used their phone at least once to avoid being bored, with respondents in this age group reporting that they did so in ave...
There’s a cartoon that makes a profound statement about happiness. The first panel shows happy schoolchildren entering a street-level subway station—laughing, playing, tossing their hats in the air. T...
Sharan Merriam and Carolyn Clark, in their fine study Lifelines , effectively show that life is fundamentally about two things—our work and our relationships. And maturity is found in having the c...
In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy if a son or daughter married someone from the other party. In a YouGov survey from 2008 . . . 27 percent of...
We swim in an ocean of feedback. Each year in the United States alone, every schoolchild will be handed back as many as 300 assignments, papers, and tests. Millions of kids will be assessed as they tr...
A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...
Our culture is still stuck on viewing marriage through the lens of happiness first and foremost—defining happiness by romantic intensity and sexual chemistry. Since the 1960s, sociologists have found ...
A quarter of American teenagers are connected to a device within five minutes of waking up. Most teenagers send one hundred texts a day. Eighty percent sleep with their phones. Forty-four percent do n...
Matthew 5:46-47, Romans 15:7, Galatians 3:28, 1 Peter 3:8, Colossians 3:11
Most men and women fall in love with individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational and economic background, those of similar physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, simila...
When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games. The stories parents tell me tend to fall into a few common patterns. One is the “co...
Ideally, when a baby is born into a healthy family, she is received with gladness. Her parents look on her with delight and the baby responds with joy. The baby is wanted—is loved. Her parents will ma...
Genesis 2:18-25, Exodus 16:2-12 , Proverbs 3:11-12, Psalm 1:4, Matthew 18:1-4, Luke 15:11-32, Matthew 18:3
Desire is part of what it means to be a child, as implied in Jesus’ words to his disciples when he tells them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never ente...
Matthew 25:40, Romans 12:21, Luke 4:18-19, James 1:27, Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1:17
In October 2014 Wired magazine reported on the dirty work every social media company must somehow handle: moderating the deluge of exploitative, degrading content posted in unimaginable quantities aro...
Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...
In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...
Romans 12:15, John 16:33, Matthew 5:4, Psalm 34:18, Ecclesiastes 3:4
After surveying an incredibly diverse cross section of college students across America, Donna Freitas found “the most pressing social media issues students face: the importance of appearing happy”—and...
The last 80 years of American politics have unfortunately seen a dramatic increase in political polarization. One reporter likened the relationship between Republicans and Democrats to the famous Shak...
Proverbs 18:21, Numbers 13:31-33, Deuteronomy 1:28, James 3:5-6, Exodus 14:12
Learned Helplessness can be easily seen in a research study when participants are given a math test. In this study, some participants are told, “men don’t tend to do well on this test,” or “Millennia...
In a study conducted by Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, researchers discovered what most of us already know: people do not like to be left alone with their own tho...
Leisure has changed significantly since the dawn of the internet age. A 2008 international survey of 27,500 adults between the ages of 18 and fifty-five found that people spend 30% of their leisure ti...
Matthew 13:13, Colossians 4:6, Proverbs 25:11, Luke 24:45, 1 Corinthians 8:1-2, James 1:19
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twen...
Context matters. According to the Terman Study, which followed one thousand study participants from childhood until their death, the people we surround ourselves with are who we become. We see those a...
A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...
Did you know that we are more or less likely to act with prejudice according to the time of day? Daniel Pink, in his excellent work, “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” draws from recent...