When you sign up to be a subject in an academic study, you never quite know what you're in for. Maybe the researchers will show you lots of delicious candy but not let you eat any. Or perhaps they'll try to frighten you with spiders.

Or maybe they'll make you take the math portion of the SAT. That's what researchers did in a study designed to determine how inaccurate negative and positive feedback affected future performance.

Those who did well on the test were told they had done poorly; those who did poorly were told they had done well. There was also a control group made up of people who were told their actual scores.

After hearing about how they'd performed, everyone had to solve 15 anagrams in 10 minutes.

The high scorers who were told they had done poorly didn't perform as well as the high scorers who were told their actual results. No big surprise; their confidence was probably shaken,...

A new study compared people who had a "soulmate" vision of marriage (focused on emotional and sexual intimacy) with people who had a more institutional view (focused on raising children and financial cooperation) to see who had better relationships. Using data from a survey of 1,414 married men and women in Louisiana, researchers arrived at the following conclusion: It's complicated.

People who took the soulmate route had higher levels of conflict and divorce. So that seems bad. But the evidence suggested that soulmaters were happier, at least until they started yelling at each other and calling lawyers. No matter your view of marriage, it seemed that having friends and family who were supportive of your union was an important factor in its survival. The better your social network, the less likely you are to have problems.

As the authors acknowledge, trying to ferret out a single...

In the hypothetical moral dilemma called "the trolley problem," a runaway trolley is speeding down the tracks. If it continues on its current course, it will run over five people. But if you pull a lever, the trolley will switch to another track and kill only one person. What should you do?

In another version of the problem, the circumstances are the same except that, instead of pulling a lever, you can push a fat man onto the tracks and that will stop the trolley, saving the five people. Unfortunately it will be curtains for the fat man. Experiments show that more people are willing to pull the lever than are willing to shove the obese fellow, even though the results are the same.

A recent paper puts a new twist on this classic conundrum. Undergraduates in Spain were presented with the trolley problem, but were told that the five people on the tracks were fellow Spaniards and that the on...

The Boston Globe broke the story this week that a Harvard University psychology professor, Marc Hauser, was under investigation for possible academic misconduct. Mr. Hauser is a prominent researcher and a popular professor who has written successful mainstream books like Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. He's a big deal.

Since then, rumors have been flying, but Harvard officials have remained mum. The university at first was unwilling to confirm that Hauser was, in fact, being investigated. But Thursday afternoon the university sent this carefully worded statement to a few reporters:

Harvard has always taken seriously its obligation to maintain the integrity of the scientific record.  The University has rigorous systems in place to evaluate concerns about scientific work by Harvard faculty members.  Those procedures were employed in Dr. Hauser’s...

Lack of sleep makes you a lousy driver. It also makes you dumb and moody. In extreme situations, it can make you crazy.

But does lack of sleep also make you less moral?

It appears so, according to a new study that tested 71 Norwegian naval and army officer cadets. Prior to being sleep-deprived, the cadets were asked to take the Defining Issues Test, an examination based on Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development. Those who score well on the test demonstrate the ability to think abstractly about moral decisions, to effectively weigh harm vs. benefit. Those who score poorly tend to give self-serving answers or strictly follow the rules without evaluating the consequences.

When rested (averaging eight hours of sleep a night), a number of the cadets had high scores. But under simulated combat conditions (2.5 hours of sleep a night over five days), the scores for those same cadets ...

Some teachers worry that using red ink to grade a paper seems harsh, that it might hurt a student's feelings.

But the real problem with red pens may be what they do to teachers.

Participants in a new study were asked to grade two paragraphs written—they were told—by a student learning English. The 103 participants were randomly given either a blue pen or a red pen. The result: Those given red pens marked significantly more errors.

In another experiment, students were again randomly assigned blue or red pens and asked to grade a one-page essay on a scale from zero to 100. The median grade assigned by those with blue pens was 80. The median for those with red pens was 76.2.

There's more. In a third experiment, participants were asked to fill in the remaining letters in partial words. The partial words, however, were carefully chosen by experiments so that they could be completed either...

Here are a few statistics from a study of the female characters in James Bond films:

• 88 percent of "major female characters" engaged in some form of sexual activity with James Bond.
• 1 percent attempted to kill Bond before engaging in sexual activity.
• 1 percent attempted to kill Bond during sexual activity.
• 0.5 percent attempted to kill Bond after sexual activity.
• 25 percent were targeted by a weapon.
• 5.6 percent were presumed dead at the end of the film.
• 12.3 percent were definitely dead.
• 55.9 percent were "good" throughout the film.
• 14.4 percent were "bad" throughout the film.
• 8.7 percent were "bad" but turned "good."
• 7 percent were "good" but turned "bad."

So what do all these numbers tell us? Oh, I don't know. Let's hear from the authors:

In the prediction of victimization of Bond women, it seems that they were, by and large, aggressed upon for identifiable and...

So, medically speaking, giving birth at home has some advantages. Women are less likely to get infections when they give birth at home rather than in a hospital. Babies born at home are more likely to be healthy (assuming it's a low-risk pregnancy), and there is less medical intervention. The latter isn't necessarily an upside, but it is what some women want.

However, according to a new study, home births have one very big drawback: Babies born at home are more likely to die. In fact, infant mortality rates for home births are two or even three times as high as those for hospital births. We're still talking about a tiny percentage of babies who die (less that 1 percent in both home and hospital births), but that fact is hardly comforting if the baby is yours.

The medical journal The Lancet jumped on board with an editorial titled "Home birth—proceed with caution" that included this...

Murder is wrong, illegal, and it costs $17.25-million.

Not to commit—that, depending on your method, might be free. But the price paid by the public is extremely high, according to a new paper that calculated the monetary costs of breaking the Sixth Commandment.

Researchers added up what it costs to catch, prosecute, and incarcerate a murderer, along with lost productivity of both the victim and the perpetrator. The $17.25-million figure is the low end; the average is $24-million. The authors estimate that, for instance, the societal cost of a certain criminal who committed nine murders is $155,457,083.

They also came up with figures for other crimes. The cost of rape was estimated to be $448,532. Armed robbery was $335,733. And simple burglary, $41,288.

Obviously, for criminals, knowing that their crimes cost other people (and themselves) a lot of money is unlikely to be a deterrent. No...

Unless all you want is a joy ride, stealing a car is a two-step process. First you have to steal it. Then you have to sell it.

Often car thieves have mentors who guide them during their first thefts. In a new paper, based on interviews with 35 active car thieves in St. Louis, researchers quote a thief known as Killa, who says he serves as a "technical adviser" to up-and-coming criminals:

I'm like switching roles from learning to now teaching. Some look out, some know how to break it down, some know how to just do it all themselves. It's all in how they learn. You gotta learn from someone. Yeah, it's a cycle.

This mentorship process was pretty much the same for both men and women who were learning to steal cars. The women were taught how to quickly bypass keyed ignitions, how to flick wires together to start the engines. They also learned how to take advantage of careless motorists who...