Can corruption, inequality, and violence shape your personality?

A groundbreaking global study says yes. When societies are marked by injustice and instability, people are more likely to develop dark personality traits—callousness, exploitation, and moral disregard.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from nearly two million people across 183 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

The message is clear: our environments matter. Where corruption thrives, selfishness does too.

In Japan, there’s a word for disappearing without a trace: johatsu (蒸発). It means “to evaporate.”

Not evaporate in the mystical sense—no clouds of incense, no cherry blossoms floating down the Sumida River.

Just a person who walks away from their job, their marriage, their debts, their family—and never comes back.

One day they exist, the next they are gone. To their loved ones, it’s as if they’ve been swept from the face of the earth.

And here’s the unsettling part: in Japan, this isn’t an urban myth. It’s a recognized social phenomenon.

What Is Johatsu?

If self-expansion is about gobbling up more—more novelty, more growth, more shiny experiences—Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) flips that script with quiet precision.

This isn’t pop-psych filler.

SST comes from Laura Carstensen, a Stanford psychologist who has spent decades showing that aging is not decline, but design.

She built the theory, founded the Stanford Center on Longevity, and launched the ambitious New Map of Life—an initiative asking how we might actually live well into our 80s, 90s, and beyond (Carstensen, 1992; Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999).

Carstensen’s point is deceptively simple: older adults don’t just “lose” friends or opportunities; they prune them on purpose.

They trade breadth for depth, noise for meaning, obligation for intimacy.

And that single observation reshapes how we think about aging, relationships, and family life.

Love changes us.

Not in the Hallmark sense, but in the literal sense: who we think we are, the skills we use, even the way we move through the world.

Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron built an entire program of research around this idea, calling it the Self-Expansion Model.

The claim is simple but startling: romantic relationships thrive when they allow us to expand our sense of self by including our partner’s traits, perspectives, and resources (Aron & Aron, 1986).

In other words, we don’t just fall in love with another person—we also become enthralled with the notion of becomng a vaster version of ourselves.

Physics has the Big Bang, quantum entanglement, and black holes that swallow time itself.

Psychology? We get “smile more, it helps.”

It’s not a fair fight.

And yet, every now and then, psychology coughs up an idea that feels suspiciously like a natural law—a principle that explains why marriages survive, families adapt, and love doesn’t just collapse under the weight of modern life.

One of the main culprits here is Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist who took the audacious step of studying happiness in a field obsessed with misery.

She gave us three ideas—Broaden and Build, Upward Spirals, and The Undoing Hypothesis—each sounding like the title of a self-help workshop but backed by actual data.

Taken together, they form what I like to call the secret physics of love.

Let’s walk through them.

Psychology in the late 20th century was a gloomy business.

Entire careers were built on studying fear, depression, and rats in mazes.

Joy? Curiosity? Amusement? Those were treated as fluff, maybe suitable for weekend hobbies but hardly worthy of serious science.

Enter Barbara Fredrickson. In 1998, she had the audacity to ask: What good are positive emotions? (Fredrickson, 1998).

Her answer became the Broaden-and-Build Theory, a framework that suggested positive emotions aren’t trivial decorations on the evolutionary tree.

They are functional.

Joy, interest, love, amusement—all of them expand our mental horizons (“broaden”) and help us accumulate durable psychological and social resources (“build”).

I

n other words, feeling good helps you see more, connect more, and prepare better for the not-so-good times ahead.

A team of scientists recently strapped heart monitors onto 148 long-married couples, set up cameras, and told them to argue.

Not surprisingly, what emerged was not the spectacle of marital apocalypse—but proof that love hides in the tiniest flickers of connection.

The couples who still laughed together, mirrored each other’s smiles, or matched their tones—even in conflict—were the same couples who scored higher on enduring love.

Thirty years into marriage, the data suggested, romance survives not because of grand gestures, but because of micro-moments of emotional synchrony.

If this sounds familiar, it echoes what I’ve written about in quiet quitting marriage—that relationships don’t collapse in fireworks, but in the erosion of everyday attention.

In the U.S., nearly one in five adults will experience an anxiety disorder this year (National Institute of Mental Health, 2024).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 30% of adults have felt anxious or depressed most or all of the time in the past two weeks.

That’s not an individual malfunction—it’s a national work order stamped “URGENT.”

We have meditation apps, employee wellness webinars, and self-help podcasts in every flavor—and still, anxiety rates climb.

Why? Because America has perfected the art of converting structural problems into personal defects, then monetizing the cure.

In the spring of 1961, a Buick the size of a small tugboat clipped me in a crosswalk.

No screech of brakes, no horn — just an impossible collision of my knee and chrome.

The impact felt like being kicked by something that didn’t care whether I lived. The sound was worse than the pain: a deep, wet crack that made bystanders look away.

They set the knee twice before they could cut. The plaster cast ran from ankle to hip, itchy and heavy enough to serve as a boat anchor. The hospital air smelled of antiseptic and cigarette smoke — nurses lit up at their desks, then came to check your vitals.

For a month I watched the hallway parade: head bandages, traction rigs, kids staring at ceiling tiles like they’d memorized every crack.

The Buick was gone in seconds, but the fear stayed. It took up residence in the muscles, in the scanning of intersections, in the twitch before stepping off a curb. Fear doesn’t leave when the cast comes off. It left a large moon-shaped scar on my right knee.

Fear is the first emotion to evolve and the last one to leave.

Before there was love, before there was guilt, before there was the very human urge to buy throw pillows you don’t need, there was fear. It’s not a glitch in the system — it is the system.

Here’s the scene: You’re in the middle of a conversation with your spouse.

Maybe the topic is small (“Did you pay the water bill?”) or monumental (“Are we happy?”). And then—without warning—your autistic partner’s voice disappears.

No yelling, no slammed doors. Just… gone. You’re left holding the conversational steering wheel while they’ve quietly climbed into the trunk.

If you’ve never lived with autism, this can look like stonewalling or contempt. It isn’t. It’s neurology pulling the emergency brake.

Office romance is back. The slow migration back to cubicles, open-plan spaces, and conference rooms has revived an ancient workplace tradition: people falling for each other between the coffee machine and the quarterly budget review.

In 2025, nearly half of workers aged 18–44 say they’ve started dating a coworker since returning to in-person work, with Gen Z and millennials leading the way (Business Insider).

They’re less likely than older generations to hide these relationships, less fearful of stigma, and more likely to see work as a legitimate place to meet a long-term partner.

For HR leaders, this means one thing: it’s time to stop pretending workplace romance doesn’t exist, and start managing it more intelligently.

Somewhere in America, a man in rural Missouri is mailing heirloom tomato seeds to a woman in Brooklyn. On paper, they should hate each other.

His yard has a flagpole; hers has a climate march poster. Their political bumper stickers, if parked side by side, could ignite a small brush fire.

And yet, they’ve been swapping seeds for three years.

Every spring, she sends him a sourdough starter; he sends her rare zinnia seeds in return. Neither has mentioned politics once. That’s probably why they still like each other.

This is a quiet revolution — the growth of rural conservatives and urban progressives finding each other in unlikely online spaces, building small, durable friendships around passions that have nothing to do with ballots, yard signs, or cable news.