10,000 Steps, Repressed Memories, and Making Other Animals Smarter
The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Linkfest for June 2025
Welcome to the June edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest: your monthly dose of myth-busting, mind-expanding, and occasionally maddening science. In this month’s offering:
Why the 10,000-step rule is nonsense, and where it really came from
Why some people decide not to have children
How woke academics are warping research in psychology
Surprising new findings on antidepressants, autism, and ADHD
The latest research on the nature, nurture, and development of IQ
On top of all that, we’ll ask: Who’s happier, liberals or conservatives? Are repressed memories real or a just psychological myth? And could we selectively breed other animals to be as smart as us?
Note that the first third of the items are free to read for everyone, but the rest are available to paid subscribers only.
You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here.
10,000 Steps
Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need to walk 10,000 steps a day. As Amanda Mull noted in The Atlantic, the 10,000-steps meme began as a Japanese marketing campaign for pedometers, not as an evidence-based guideline.
I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead author of a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, began looking into the step rule because she was curious about where it came from. “It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy,” she explains. “In 1965, a Japanese company was selling pedometers, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’”
Based on conversations she’s had with Japanese researchers, Lee believes that name was chosen for the product because the character for “10,000” looks sort of like a man walking. As far as she knows, the actual health merits of that number have never been validated by research.
Keeping active is important, of course, and walking is good exercise. But as a blanket recommendation, 10,000 steps a day isn’t great advice. For some people, other forms of exercise would be more suitable; for others, fewer steps would be almost as beneficial but more sustainable; and for others still, 10,000 steps would do more harm than good. [Link.]
Believing What Isn’t So
People who think that facts are politically constructed, and that truth is political, are more likely to hold false beliefs and engage in conspiracist ideation. Link.
People who believe in conspiracies and supernatural phenomena are more likely to think they see patterns in what are actually random events. [Link.]
Researchers looked at a large collection of psychological and demographic variables to see which best predicted belief in astrology. The number one predictor was intelligence. Specifically, lower intelligence predicted stronger belief. [Link.]
You’re Prejudiced; I’m Awesome
People everywhere tend to assume that others are more prejudiced than themselves: more racist, more sexist, more homophobic. In a sense, this is good news, because it suggests that we typically overestimate how prejudiced others are. Interestingly, the self-other difference in perceived prejudice is larger among students than non-students. This could mean that students are less prejudiced than non-students, that they have a lower opinion of other people - the bigoted plebs - or a bit of both. [Preprint. Link.]
What Makes a Face Attractive?
Facial attractiveness isn’t just about facial features. If people are told that an individual has held low-status jobs or struggled with their mental health, they start seeing that person’s face as less attractive. [Link.]
Why Some People Opt Out of Parenthood
People with an avoidant attachment to their parents are more likely to choose not to have kids themselves. [Link.]
Woke Watch
- has an excellent piece in ’s Substack Reality’s Last Stand. It explores how woke academics use dodgy research methods to reach predetermined conclusions. Here’s an excerpt from a viral Tweet by Wright, highlighting some of Nuzzo’s examples. [Link.]
Two recent papers show how far this trend has gone.
First, an NIH-funded paper in Child Development interviewed 69 white teens. The students rejected racism and said they try to treat people as individuals.
Rather than see that as a positive result, the authors labeled it evidence of “white ignorance” and “white supremacy”...
Second, in Men and Masculinities, a study interviewed 14 men in fathers’ rights groups. They described feeling powerless, isolated, and grateful for emotional support.
Instead of taking their views seriously, MacMillan imposed a “feminist epistemology” and framed their pain as a backlash against feminism and a sign of “hegemonic masculinity.”
These men made themselves vulnerable—and were pathologized for it.
This is a serious problem. Woke researchers are:
- Treating disagreement as denial
- Starting with activist conclusions
- Exploiting participants who speak in good faith