Round-up: Can women rate their own attractiveness?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

The dark side of going green: Dark triad traits predict organic consumption through virtue signaling, status signaling, and praise from others. Faruk Konuk and Tobias Otterbring examine whether people who score high on the “dark triad” traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy are more likely to purchase organic foods. Analysing data on Turkish consumers, they find that such people are more likely.

Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all. Researchers at The Economist examine whether the readability of academic writing has decreased over time, using the Flesch reading-ease test. Analysing 347,000 PhD abstracts published between 1812 and 2023, they find that average readability has decreased substantially since the 1940s. The decrease is particularly pronounced for the social sciences and humanities.

Trends in readability scores for three different areas of academia.