Round-up: Why are liberal women less happy?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Visual illusions reveal wide range of cross-cultural differences in visual perception. Ivan Kroupin and colleagues explore cross-cultural differences in visual perception. Presenting rural Namibians and Americans with visual illusions such as the Coffer illusion, they find that such differences are very large. The authors interpret their results as showing that visual perception is influenced by the nature of one’s surroundings.

When ELIZA meets therapists: A Turing test for the heart and mind. Gabe Hatch and colleagues study whether AI can provide better written answers to therapy questions than professional therapists. They find that ordinary Americans are unable to reliably distinguish AI-written answers from ones written by professional therapists, and they rate the AI-written answers higher in terms of empathy and competence.