A new study of side-blotched lizards in California has revealed the genetic underpinnings of altruistic behavior in this common lizard species, providing new insights into the long-standing puzzle of ...

There’s a great value in being precise when it comes to communication (if you want your message to be understood as you intended it, anyway; when clarity isn’t the goal, by all means, be imprecise).

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — True altruism is rare behavior in animals, but a new study by Penn State researchers has found that honey bees display this trait. Additionally, they found that an evolutionary ...

Our behavior seems to be built by evolution, and it's sometimes paradoxical. To borrow from the hard sciences, our behavior exhibits complementarity. We are largely felicitous to our family and ...

On the Thursday, November 13, 2025 episode of The Excerpt podcast: In honor of World Kindness Day — we’ve partnered with the Humankind team at USA TODAY for a deeper exploration on the topic of ...

Altruistic behavior is often seen as an exclusively human characteristic. However, behavioral research has uncovered numerous examples of altruistic behavior in the animal kingdom. In a new study, ...

Stephen Post, a former happiness researcher at Case Western Reserve University who is now the director of the Center for Medical Humanities at Stony Brook University in New York, has done a number of ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the psychology of leadership, tech and entrepreneurship. Benevolent acts are often motivated by selfish intentions, ...

Beginning again with the proximate question, breastfeeding certainly seems like an altruistic behavior: the mother’s body pays a metabolic cost to create the calorically-rich milk which is then ...