Five thousand years of data. Use it.

Annals of Behavior

Five thousand years of data. Use it.

Articles — Page 2

The First Strike Was in 1170 BC — And Management Stonewalled Then Too
Politics & Power

The First Strike Was in 1170 BC — And Management Stonewalled Then Too

When workers building the royal tombs at Deir el-Medina walked off the job in 1170 BC, they left behind written grievances, organized demands, and a precise calculation of how much risk they could collectively absorb before the system would retaliate. The papyrus documenting that episode is not merely a historical curiosity — it is a detailed map of the same psychological terrain that modern organizational researchers keep rediscovering at considerable expense.

Mar 13, 2026

The Oldest Panic in the World: Why Adults Have Always Believed Young People Are the End of Everything
Social Psychology

The Oldest Panic in the World: Why Adults Have Always Believed Young People Are the End of Everything

A Sumerian clay tablet inscribed roughly four thousand years ago records a teacher's lament that students no longer show proper respect — placing the 'kids these days' complaint at the very dawn of written language. The remarkable thing is not that the anxiety exists, but that it has reproduced itself with near-perfect fidelity across every society and every century since, regardless of what the young people in question were actually doing.

Mar 13, 2026

The March That Management Science Forgot: Xenophon and the Leadership Lessons Fifty Years of Research Keeps Relearning
Politics & Power

The March That Management Science Forgot: Xenophon and the Leadership Lessons Fifty Years of Research Keeps Relearning

In 401 BC, an Athenian writer named Xenophon helped lead ten thousand stranded mercenaries out of the Persian Empire with no supply chain, no institutional authority, and no guarantee of survival. What he learned in the process anticipates, with uncomfortable precision, what organizational psychologists spent the second half of the twentieth century laboriously proving in controlled studies.

Mar 13, 2026

Augustus Caesar's War on Fake News: What Rome's Propaganda Machine Tells Us About Trust
History & Human Behavior

Augustus Caesar's War on Fake News: What Rome's Propaganda Machine Tells Us About Trust

When Augustus Caesar inherited a Rome exhausted by decades of civil war, his most urgent problem wasn't military—it was informational. The psychological tools he deployed to control the narrative are nearly identical to the ones misinformation researchers study in laboratories today, which raises an uncomfortable question: have we actually learned anything?

Mar 13, 2026

The Merchant Who Lived Through the Black Death Described Your 2020 Neighbors Perfectly
History & Human Behavior

The Merchant Who Lived Through the Black Death Described Your 2020 Neighbors Perfectly

A Florentine merchant named Gregorio Dati kept a detailed personal journal during the Black Death, and his observations about denial, reckless social gatherings, conspiracy theories, and caregiver collapse map onto documented American COVID-19 behavior with unsettling precision. The parallel is not poetic — it is scientific. Pandemic psychology appears to be among the most conserved and predictable features of the human mind.

Mar 12, 2026

The Architecture of Anxiety: What Five Millennia of Border Walls Reveal About the Human Mind
Social Psychology

The Architecture of Anxiety: What Five Millennia of Border Walls Reveal About the Human Mind

Humans have been constructing monumental barriers at their borders for at least three thousand years, and the archaeological record is unambiguous: the walls consistently fail to accomplish what their builders claimed they would. If the engineering doesn't work, perhaps we have been misidentifying what problem it was ever meant to solve.

Mar 12, 2026

From Frontpage to Footnote: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg
Technology & Digital Culture

From Frontpage to Footnote: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg

Digg once stood as the undisputed king of social news aggregation, shaping how millions of Americans discovered content on the early internet. Its collapse — and the improbable rise of Reddit in its wake — remains one of the most instructive cautionary tales in the history of digital media. What went wrong, and can Digg's repeated attempts at reinvention ever recapture what was lost?

Mar 12, 2026