25 interesting facts #30

726. While most social progress has been made in a nonlinear fashion, people believe progress is made in a linear fashion (Hur and Ruttan 2023)

727. The flow of information provided by East German industrial espionage in the West led to a significant narrowing of sectoral gaps between West and East Germany (Glitz and Meyersson 2020)

728. Conscientious people experience greater drops in life satisfaction following unemployment (Boyce et al. 2010)

729. Betting returns on horses with fast-sounding names are lower compared to bets on other horses (Merz et al. 2021)

730. Demographic shocks tied to World War I’s high death toll permanently altered attitudes toward the role of women in the labour force (Gay 2023)

731. People do not inherently dislike uncertain advice (Gaertig and Simmons 2018)

732. In chess games, players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so (Anderson and Green 2018)

733. More than 80% of the charts published in the American Economic Review from 1911 to 2017 were line charts (Schwabish 2022)

734. Learning others’ political views reduces the ability to assess and use their expertise in nonpolitical domains (Marks et al. 2019)

735. The demand for modern art during the 1950s led to a decrease in the age at which American painters produced their most valuable work (Galenson and Weinberg 2020)

736. The governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger of California had no impact on the state’s expenditures or deficits (Congleton and Zhou 2019)

737. Historically, technology transfered more rapidly from East to West than from North to South (Pavlik and Young 2019)

738. Hedge fund managers who do well in poker tournaments have significantly better fund performance (Lu et al. 2022)

739. Lightsabers are not impossible due to limitations of the laws of physics, but implausible due to the high intensities and energy needed for their operation (Fillion-Gourdeau and Gagnon 2019)

740. Elite chess players have a similar survival advantage to elite competitors in physical sports (Tran-Duy et al. 2018)

741. Comments that criticize or correct a published scientific study are 20-40% less likely than regular papers to have a female author (Klinowski 2023)

742. Progressive sea-level rise may have acted in tandem with social and environmental factors to drive Viking abandonment of Greenland (Borreggine et al. 2023)

743. The majority of the top-grossing films from 2008 to 2017 have at least one torture scene (Delehanty and Kearns 2020)

744. Newer food crops are evaluated less favorably (Inbar et al. 2020)

745. The medieval Catholic Church deliberately and effectively splintered political power in Europe by forming temporal alliances, funding proxy wars, launching crusades, and advancing ideology to ensure its autonomy and power (Gryzmala-Busse 2023)

746. There is no convincing evidence that people believe in contradictory conspiracy theories (van Prooijen et al. 2023)

747. Addition-related words have more positive connotations than subtraction-related words (Winter et al. 2023)

748. Duke Ellington heard sounds as colours and saw colours as sounds (James and James 2015)

749. In high-income countries, 97% of all children aged 0–4 years killed by guns are in the United States (Grinshteyn and Hemenway 2019)

750. Unequal countries tend to suffer more flood fatalities (Lindersson et al. 2023)


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