In Case You Missed It…
Welcome to the September 2026 edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that grabbed my attention over the last month. In this month’s offering:
The latest findings from some of my favorite areas of psychology, including personality psychology, clinical psychology, behavior genetics, social psychology, and political psychology
Recent research on love, relationships, and the battle of the sexes - including who marries whom, and why men sometimes misread women’s interest
Why conspiracy theorists are so combative online, how genes linked to personality and ADHD also shape other traits, and how mental illness can shave more than a decade off your life
New findings challenging common beliefs such as that good schools improve students’ grades, that men underestimate how much sexual harassment women experience, and that teachers punish Black students more harshly than White ones
We’ll also ask: Does money buy happiness? Is Stockholm syndrome real? Does diversity make scientific teams more productive? And are universities more or less politically biased than people think?
You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here.
People Think They’re Hotter Than They Are
There’s a widespread belief that, because we’re constantly bombarded with superhumanly attractive actors and models in the media, most of us feel bad about our looks. Turns out that’s not the case: Most of us think we’re better looking than we actually are. The evidence? When asked to identify their own face in a lineup, people are more likely to select an attractively enhanced version of themselves than the real deal. [Link.]
Do Schools Make a Difference?
Parents go to extraordinary lengths to get their children into the best schools, surrounded by the brightest classmates. But the research suggests that students who narrowly gain admission to elite schools don’t perform any better than those who narrowly miss out. (See the graph below for a representative finding.) This suggests that elite schools’ impressive results largely reflect the students they admit, rather than the value they add. [Link.]
Birds of a Feather
Romantic partners tend to resemble each other on a surprisingly wide range of traits, a phenomenon known as assortative mating. People match especially strongly on age, political views, religiosity, education, and smoking status. But they also match, to a lesser extent, on IQ, personality, happiness, height, weight, and even age at first sex. [Link.]
That’s the end of the free preview. Still to come for paid subscribers:
How birth certificates can take decades off your life
The personality profiles of AIs
A serious challenge to the validity of psychiatric diagnoses
How political correctness helped make 9/11 possible
The $18 million price tag on discriminating against White men
…and much more. Subscribe to keep reading!