He had been talking to an artificial intelligence—specifically, a large language model called Claude.

I looked at their conversation. It had been good, I discovered. The explanations were patient and well-calibrated. He had followed up, pushed back, and received answers that adjusted to his level. By the time he found me, he was genuinely engaged, asking the kind of questions that suggest a mind that is curious and actively at work.

But I have also been watching something else. It is not that he looks things up. Children with questions about black holes have always turned outward, to books or to a particularly knowledgable parent or teacher. What has changed is the speed. When the uncertainty is of a sort that once had to be lived with for a while, my son reaches for an answer sooner than he used to. The question is no longer something to sit with. It is something to resolve. And I find myself wondering what this means about his relationship to sitting with not knowing.

That shift, subtle as it is, may point to something worth taking seriously.

Losing productive friction

I am a psychoanalyst, and I spend my professional life attending to what develops in the space between people, including what develops when that space is too quickly filled.

Childhood has always involved productive friction. Not knowing how something works, waiting for an answer, trying to figure something out without immediate resolution. These experiences are not incidental to development, but are part of how the mind learns to tolerate uncertainty, to hold a question open, and to struggle toward understanding. The capacity to sit with not-knowing is itself a developmental achievement that underlies creative thinking, emotional regulation, and the ability to navigate a world that rarely resolves cleanly.

I watched this in miniature not long ago. My son was waiting for a package—a computer part he had saved for—and the delivery had been delayed by weather. In an earlier childhood, mine perhaps, this would have been a long afternoon of checking the window. Instead he opened a chat to resolve the uncertainty: how long do weather delays usually last, what determines them, how do you read the tracking data from the delivery company to get the most accurate picture. The conversation was detailed and as far as I could tell the information was reliable. He came away with a small expertise in logistics, but with an estimate that turned out, in the end, to have no relation to anything. The package arrived that evening, on none of the schedules he had so carefully worked out with the help of his AI tool.

The point is not that the AI was wrong, because predicting a delayed truck is difficult. The point is instead that waiting, the old childhood experience of wanting something that has not yet come, was converted into a research problem that could be managed instead of endured. I admired his resourcefulness tremendously and am grateful he had the opportunity to think through a complex problem. I also found myself wondering what the afternoon would have asked of him without it.

AI reduces precisely this sort of friction. It does so efficiently and often helpfully. But consistently removing the experience of not-knowing from a developing mind is not a neutral act. It shapes what the mind comes to expect of itself.

The research on what this does to thinking is new, and the majority of it is about adults. Despite this, it points in a consistent direction. In one widely discussed study from the MIT Media Lab, not yet peer-reviewed, adults who wrote essays with ChatGPT showed weaker and less distributed patterns of brain connectivity than those who wrote without its assistance, and many struggled after writing to quote sentences they had just produced. The researchers called the pattern “cognitive debt.”

Another study, a survey of 666 adults, found that heavier reliance on AI tools was correlated with weaker critical thinking, most pronounced in its youngest participants. The author suggested this might result from the offloading of mental effort itself. None of this is certain but is, instead, a suggestive pattern of early evidence. And the transfer to children is not straightforward. An adult who offloads mental effort has already built the capacity being offloaded; a child is still building it. Does that make the effect smaller in children or larger and more durable? We do not know.

This is different from what smartphones have done. The concern with smartphones has been largely about attention and social life: what children see, how they spend time, how they relate to each other. These are real and serious concerns, but AI introduces a different kind of change. It is not just another screen competing for a child’s focus. It is something closer to an interactive presence that responds, explains, adjusts, and, crucially, never gets tired.

For a developing child, this matters in a way we have not yet fully come to terms with.

Learning by connecting

Children learn who they are through relationships with other minds. This process is not primarily cognitive but unfolds through the experience of being known and misunderstood, challenged, surprised, and pushed back against. Through encounters like these, children discover that other people have their own inner lives, including their own perspectives and their own limits. They learn how to navigate the gap between what they expect and what they receive from others. Over time, these negotiations, internal and external, form the scaffolding of a self.

What is distinctive about AI, from a developmental standpoint, is not that it is wrong, or distorting, or even necessarily harmful. It is that it is extraordinarily responsive without having genuine subjectivity. It simulates the experience of being understood without the reality of another mind behind it.

For an adult, this distinction is available, if sometimes quite easy to forget. For a child, whose capacity to distinguish between a mind that truly has an inner life and one that simulates having one is still forming, the distinction might not yet be fully available at all.

Researchers have begun to observe how children try to think this problem through in real time. In one University of Edinburgh study of families with smart speakers, primary-school children were observed probing whether the device in the kitchen had a mind of its own, settling, provisionally, on conclusions like the one that gave the study its title: “Alexa doesn’t have that many feelings.” That, however, was a machine that talks in highly scripted phrases, in contrast to the systems children now converse with which are fluent and personal, attuned to the shape of a particular child’s interactions. Working out what this means has become correspondingly harder.

This creates something new in the developmental landscape. When a child turns to AI in a moment of confusion or distress and receives a fluent, patient, seemingly attuned response, the attachment system is engaged. The child feels, in some functional sense, heard. And that feeling, whatever its source, is real in its effects.

I have not seen my son turn to AI for emotional support, and I am glad for that, because here the questions are harder still. These systems shape themselves to their user. They adopt your vocabulary, match your register, remember what concerns you, and are available at three in the morning without complaint. Nothing in the design pushes back, for the most part, or asks anything of you. It would be difficult to engineer an arrangement better suited to engaging the attachment system of a child who is lonely or lacking in the structure needed for sound development.

The early numbers suggest that many children have already found their way there. In a national survey released by Common Sense Media in 2025, nearly three in four American teenagers had used an AI companion, and about a third had chosen to discuss something serious with an AI instead of with a person. A similar share described their AI conversations as at least as satisfying as conversations with friends.

In the United Kingdom, the nonprofit Internet Matters found that roughly one in eight children who use chatbots do so because they have no one else to talk to. The American Psychological Association was concerned enough to issue a health advisory in 2025, noting that adolescents are less likely than adults to question the accuracy or the intent of what a machine tells them, and warning that simulated companionship may begin to displace the relationships in which development actually happens.

For a child without reliable support, the relief such a system offers may be real, and so I am reluctant to dismiss it. But relief is not the substance of attachment. A full attachment relationship requires another person who can be truly changed by you, and with you—someone who is affected, who has limits, who gets things wrong and can be held to account. An AI can extend the experience of being emotionally met indefinitely. What it cannot do is be moved.

For the child who is largely or completely unattended to, this may still be better than nothing at all. Soothed in the early hours of the morning, a child whose sadness before bed is registered somewhere may be kept afloat by something real, and I would not wish to take it from her. But we should be honest about such an arrangement, which I expect will become increasingly common. It is a patch and not a structural solution. When a machine becomes the most reliable attention in a child’s life, the pertinent question is not about the machine but about the deprivation that made it necessary. And, crucially, a culture that responds to unattended children with software is treating the symptom while leaving the underlying structure intact.


Missing accountability

There is also a quieter concern about authority and accountability.

Children have always learned to navigate between competing sources of knowledge, including parents, teachers, peers, and books, each with their own perspective, their own limits, and their own accountability. This navigation is itself developmental. The child who discovers that a parent doesn’t know something, or that a teacher can be wrong, or that a friend sees things differently, is developing a more differentiated relationship to knowledge.


AI, in the form a child is most likely to reach on their own, enters this landscape as something that appears to know a great deal, that expresses itself with fluency and confidence, and that has no stable point of view and no accountability for what it says. When a child asks why a friendship went wrong, or whether they were right to feel hurt, the answer they receive may shape the story they tell themselves about what happened. And unlike a parent or teacher, the system may not challenge the child’s assumptions so much as elaborate them. None of this is inherent to the technology under discussion. A system can be built to hold a position and to answer for it, but the ones children use are mostly not built that way.

Children appear to be taking up the offer. The same Internet Matters report found that nearly two-thirds of British children between nine and 17 had used an AI chatbot; among those who had, roughly a quarter had asked one for advice—on schoolwork, but also on more personal matters—and four in 10 expressed no reservations about following the advice they received.

The conditions of childhood

None of this means that AI in children’s lives is a mistake. The benefits my son has experienced are genuine—wider curiosity, more sophisticated questions, greater confidence in exploring unfamiliar terrain. These are real, and they matter.

Some of what he brings home delights me. He asked recently whether you could power a sailboat by blowing into the sail through a straw. The answer he received was better than the one I would have managed: blowing at your own sail from on board mostly cancels itself out, since you push the air forward and the air pushes you back. Mostly, but not entirely—if the sail catches the stream and turns it around, a little net thrust survives, and if you skip the sail altogether and aim the straw backward, you have built yourself a very small jet engine. He spent the rest of the day on propulsion: rockets, squid, the reason a fan bolted to a sailboat is an old physics puzzle with a surprising answer.

But development is not only about access to knowledge. It is also about the conditions under which a self forms—conditions that include, crucially, the experience of not knowing, of waiting, of struggling toward understanding without guarantee of arrival. These are not inefficiencies to be optimized away. They are the medium through which a mind learns what it is capable of. A child who has never had to sit with a question—who has always had access to a patient, fluent, endlessly available presence to resolve it—may be acquiring knowledge without acquiring the tolerance for uncertainty that makes knowledge genuinely usable.

This is the thing I find myself returning to when I watch my son. He is, in many ways, more intellectually alive than he might otherwise be. He explores further and asks better questions. At the same time, when uncertainty arises, he reaches outward more quickly than he used to—to a presence that is always available, always patient, always responsive. What I cannot yet know is what he is quietly learning to expect: from knowledge, from relationship, and from himself.

We are not conducting a study. We are raising children. And the conditions of childhood have changed again, in ways whose full significance has not yet come into view.

Scholars refer to this increasingly prevalent problem as cognitive offloading. And they are showing that it can erode the very skills that make knowledge workers valuable.

My research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and knowledge work provides a different view, however. In one study, my colleagues and I interviewed 45 knowledge workers at a U.S. public university. They all were using generative AI applications in their core tasks: generating new ideas, solving complex problems, and designing novel solutions. We also analyzed the prompts and outputs from their iterative AI chats.

We found that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas—to generate friction—they can significantly improve their performance. Previous research on human-AI collaboration for loan evaluations had similar results.

How to create friction

Using AI to find information that contradicts your own can reveal unlikely perspectives that disrupt your familiar logic and spark new insights. This is particularly important because AI models quickly become familiar with how a user prompts the model and interprets its output, and the model presents information according to these patterns.

For example, a marketing professional in our study asked AI to create virtual customers with personas that would lead them to dislike a product under development, which was an accounting certificate program. The contrary feedback from the AI model revealed customer preferences that the accounting professional designing the program had not considered, such as using multiple cases from different industries to illustrate a principle, rather than cases from the same industry.

An attorney used AI to find obscure legal loopholes and to consider how companies might exploit them. That exposed surprising but realistic scenarios of hard-to-detect unethical behavior in employees.

Exploring unlikely and opposing ideas presented by AI can feel disorienting. To help, knowledge workers should lean on their own expertise to question surprising information that an AI system might provide.

An operations research scientist who works with supply chains described adapting unfamiliar computing programs from other fields suggested by AI, such as signal processing and wireless communication, which helped him create a stronger program of his own. Although the programs were new to him, his strong understanding of supply network modeling helped him see how he could apply them.

A study I was not involved with found that creative writers produce better copy when they use AI as a sounding board rather than to ghostwrite.

Knowledge workers can also use AI’s outputs to examine topics from multiple viewpoints, deepening their knowledge.

A research scholar in our study probed an AI system for journal papers that used a concept he was using, but in contrasting settings, which helped him understand the concept from different angles. A lawyer followed up on legal citations suggested by an AI model by asking for different types of illustrative cases. That helped her fully understand the original case and write a strong legal brief.

Helping knowledge workers help themselves

Leaders of organizations can encourage knowledge workers to develop friction-generating queries of AI models.

A straightforward approach is to use prompts that challenge rather than agree with a person’s thinking. People can also draw on their own knowledge, work experiences, and professional ethics to scrutinize AI outputs. Sometimes people realize that a response lacks originality, even if it is factually correct.

Organization leaders can also create programs for knowledge workers to share their experiences and insights. Regular sessions—led by cross-functional AI task forces or AI champions—can also help knowledge workers keep up with rapidly evolving AI tools.

Providing resources for knowledge workers is important, as well. Internal AI bootcamps and workshops led by AI experts or experienced users can help workers understand what AI tools can and cannot do.

A professor leading an initiative about AI use in teaching described how she developed internal competitions with prizes for professors who successfully completed AI bootcamps. Organizations can also offer AI sandboxes—safe, private environments where employees can experiment and learn how to use AI tools.

In these efforts to support knowledge workers, an important detail is pointing out that adding friction can appear to make an AI system work against you, but—as new research shows—it actually helps it work for you.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AI has the power to enhance decision-making—or to overwhelm it. It can illuminate pathways we might not have seen or narrow our choices in ways we do not fully recognize. As AI systems become more integrated into our lives, the challenge is no longer simply about harnessing their power but about leading them with clarity, discernment, and commitment to human agency.

She argues that the rise of AI actually makes certain human qualities like reflection, empathy, values, and moral judgment even more important. We spoke with her about why human judgment is a competitive advantage, how to engage our values when we prompt AI, and how AI can help us clarify our thinking.

Kia Afcari: You argue that AI makes human judgment more, not less, important. How can we make sure that the values of kindness and care are reflected when we use AI to help us make decisions?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn: AI has no values. It has biases and influences by those who have designed it, and from whatever information has been fed into it. So to be sure that prosocial values are reflected when we use AI, we humans need to bring them into the work that we do together.

When working with an AI tool, we want to be asking ourselves, What is the problem that I’m solving? Why am I solving it? What is the context? And so we really need to be intentional with AI, because without asking ourselves those things first, AI doesn’t know why we’re coming to it.

Before you actually sit down with a tool, you can muster those values and those important factors related to the problem that you’re solving, and then articulate them and communicate them to the machine.


If we let the machine think for us, we can lose that sense of right and wrong, for example, because we actually care about all of those details that AI can’t possibly know about the problems that we’re solving and the people that we’re solving those problems with and for.

For example, you might ask yourself or your AI tool: Before I act, help me think through the people, relationships, and responsibilities this decision affects—not just the outcome it produces.

This type of human-centric AI interaction helped Felice, a food scientist at a pet food company, who was responsible for developing new recipes that balance nutrition, taste, and market trends. She often has to delegate tasks within her research team, ensuring that product testing, ingredient sourcing, and regulatory compliance all move forward smoothly. Using AI, she was able to analyze workloads and expertise that suggested the best person for each task, but only Felice understood the deeper dynamics at play—who works best under tight deadlines, who has a passion for innovative formulations, and who needs mentorship. When AI recommended assigning a crucial stability test to her most experienced technician, this prompt supported her thinking about a different option: giving it to the junior scientist who was eager to develop his skills in quality assurance. The AI tool’s choices made sense based on efficiency, but Felice’s decision ensured both short-term success and long-term team development.

KA: In the book, your “cheetah” metaphor celebrates slowing down. Why is a strategic pause so important when working with AI?

CSE: The cheetah metaphor relates that although this is an animal that goes zero to 60 in about three seconds, its hunting prowess actually comes from being able to decelerate up to nine miles an hour in a single stride. And the reason why that’s so important in problem solving and decision making is that’s where you build agility, flexibility, and maneuverability. Do I want to stay the course, or do I want to pivot and do something else?

This pause allows you to chunk your learning and pry open that cognitive space for new information and insight. With an AI tool, it’s so important because there’s a difference between speed and quality.


When something truly matters to us, we want to make sure that we’re solving the problem in a way that solves it holistically, that takes care of the people who are involved in the problem with us. And when we’re moving really quickly, sometimes those very important factors are hard to bring forward. So there’s a real difference between what is efficient and what is effective.


KA: Why can having more information make it harder—not easier—to make good decisions?

CSE: Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is power,” but that’s not really true anymore, right? We now have all of the answers with AI to a lot of commonly asked questions and some uncommon questions.

We need to make sure we’re defining the problem that we’re solving, that we are understanding and communicating the motivation and providing the context, because you don’t want all the information. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with analysis paralysis.

One thing people can use is what I call the “vision of success” question. This question asks you to time travel, to jump over the decision to see that the decision has been made well. What’s happening? What are those few things that if they don’t succeed, the decision fails? It’s actually very powerful, because it allows you to clearly identify so that you can articulate those factors that you absolutely need to be able to share with AI. These become the constraints and boundaries that set the perimeter around the decision, so that it can give you research that’s targeted and focused on those things.

For example, Max deciding where to spend his next vacation. Asking AI for
help directly—without turning to himself first—he got a list of destinations, airline options, and local attractions, complete with ratings, reviews, and price comparisons. On paper, that sounds ideal. But in reality, Max quickly found himself paralyzed by the sheer amount of information. What if he picked a less-than-perfect hotel? What if he overlooked a hidden gem? AI has handed him a mountain of data, but it didn’t necessarily make the decision any easier.

However, when he used the “vision of success” question, he was able to realize and to share with his AI tool: “I want to return home feeling genuinely rested, having spent quality time with my family, without overspending or feeling like I missed the experience I was hoping for.”

Only then does AI have a meaningful problem to solve. Instead of searching for the “best” vacation—a question with no objective answer—it can help Max find the destination most likely to produce the outcome he actually wants. AI can’t define success but it can optimize for the success you define.

KA: How does the AREA method help people make wiser decisions, especially when AI is involved?


CSE: AREA is more than an acronym—it’s a framework for challenging our assumptions and thinking mistakes, and actively includes the perspectives of others. It stands for Absolute, Relative, Exploration and Exploitation, and Analysis.

The first “A,” Absolute, focuses on primary, unfiltered information straight from primary sources. “R,” Relative, shifts to external viewpoints—secondary sources connected to the subject. “E,” Exploration and Exploitation, fuels creativity: Exploration broadens research through interviews and unconventional sources, while Exploitation turns inward, challenging personal biases and assumptions. The final “A,” Analysis, synthesizes everything, bringing clarity and structure to complex decisions.

When using AI, a system like AREA becomes even more important because AI doesn’t eliminate bias—it can reflect and sometimes amplify biases in its training data, design, and the way we use it. Good decisions require a process that helps us recognize and challenge both AI’s biases and our own. 

For AI, so much of the information, for example, is from Reddit. Information can be incomplete or outdated, and you also know that you’re interacting with a liar. It’s a machine that just gives you answers that are wrong sometimes.

So you need to be able to have a quality due diligence process to not only be able to use the tool effectively, but to be able to evaluate its outcome. Too often, people look at an answer with AI and think that it’s a transaction, and they can just take it. AREA is going to help you make sure that it’s a conversation. So you have an evidence-based perspective that has looked at a variety of stakeholder viewpoints, and made sure that you have pried open that cognitive space to challenge the natural, well-worn mental pathways that we all lean on every day.

KA: How can we use AI in ways that strengthen—rather than undermine—our values and agency?

CSE: It’s a great question. I think the new competitive advantage is going to be self-awareness.

This is the first tool that actually asks for some of our cognitive load; it wants us to offload some of our decisions to it. And this is a machine fundamentally about decision making, because we ask it for something and it gives us an answer. But there’s a very interesting invitation here, which is to each of us to get to know ourselves better.

We each have a special sauce, which is the way that we make our decisions, and we make thousands of them every single day. But most of us have not sat down and said to themselves, What does that process actually look like? Can I actually name those pieces and put language to it?

There is this invitation to get to know our thinking so that we can translate it better, and not only for the tool. How helpful would it be in conversation with our colleagues to be able to say clearly, This is how I’m actually going through the steps, this is how I’m thinking about it, these are the variables that I’m prioritizing, and here’s what I think is the most diagnostic.

You can think about your thinking skills as muscles. If we turn over our cognitive load, we will also weaken it. But if we actually take this invitation to understand our self-awareness and our metacognition, we can make sure that we strengthen those tools.

AI is a tool that has so many implications for our environment and for our world, in addition to the fact that it has implications for our actual thinking skills.

So I would say that the invitation is to turn to yourself first. Ask yourself why you’re using the tool, and whether or not you should be turning to yourself instead. And either way, bring your own thinking forward before sitting down, so that you can feel far more comfortable that you can problem-solve both with it and beyond it.

Mary was not only my then-boyfriend’s mother, but she also became an important maternal figure when my own family life felt unstable. I accompanied her on weekly grocery store runs that included stops at Marshall’s and Dollar Tree, where I’d watch her study the prices of everything from spices to bath products. When she saw me marveling at her meticulousness, she would share wise tidbits about how she looked for deals.

Our trips often ended with a late-afternoon stop at a Vietnamese restaurant, where she treated me to a warm bowl of beef pho. She’d share what she was excited to make for dinner; I was, of course, welcome to join. In these seemingly mundane afternoons, I felt cared for without the rush of obligations. Mary stopped time for me.

Last November, Mary left behind a world of loved ones after living with cancer for 14 months. From her living room to emergency stays in the hospital, I spent almost every single day of her fight by her side. Yet in my loneliest hours, I agonize over whether I fully cherished our last months together. Did I hug her enough, and did I tell her enough how much she means to me? These questions haunted me in the months afterward.

To move on, I began seeking grief rituals. I attended other public funerals, spoke to death doulas, and sought advice from nondenominational chaplains. I subscribed to self-help newsletters that cover how our modern society lives with religion and spirituality. But all of it felt nebulous, and I remained unmoored from my purpose. Without taking care of Mary, without being her figurative child, who was I?

Funny enough, it wasn’t religion that rescued me; it was Pokémon Pokopia. On the surface, it is a new social simulation game featuring the iconic Japanese creatures who first took the world by storm in 1996. I first heard of its arrival on social media through gamers who raved that it was going to be the best game of the year. I grew up on Pokémon titles, so I recognized it as a distraction from my personal reckoning with abandonment.

But what began as a spur-of-the-moment decision to try what 4 million other gamers were playing turned into a transformative journey exploring what I want my life to mean when it feels as if I have been left behind.

Pokopia falls in the “cozy” game genre, beloved for its warm colors, gentle atmospheres, and easy missions. Released in March, Pokopia stars Ditto, an amorphous purple blob Pokémon that uses its transformative abilities to imitate its human trainer and rebuild a curious post-apocalyptic world devoid of human beings and Pokémon. Ditto first awakens in a cave, and as the story unfolds, the creature looks out at a once-grassy environment of parched earth and litter. It meets the first Pokémon, the hydrophilic Squirtle that teaches Ditto how to spray water across the thirsty soil to bring it back to life; it is also the only other semblance of a survivor in this barren land.

From here the story gains momentum: As Ditto, your mission is to get the environment back to habitable levels and bring back Pokémon creatures that are presumably hiding. Gradually, the unfinished railroad tracks and cracked concrete steps of a staircase stop looking like signs of a catastrophe but rather fixable problems.

I wasn’t alone in trying to find meaning after a loss or trauma. Scholars have explored a variety of constructs around the meaning of life. Psychologists Login S. George and Crystal L. Park articulate a three-part framework in their 2010 article, grounded in comprehension, purpose, and mattering, as a basis for assessing our judgments and feelings as we find meaning after loss.

At first, meaning seemed absent. I sat glued to my Nintendo Switch for three hours on my first day of play. I came up for air only when my console told me that I was low on battery. Yet I did not feel depleted; I had finished restoring the first environment in the Pokopia world to verdant levels with lush berry trees and waterfalls.

As I built new habitats, I met new Pokémon. A Charmander emerged among tall grass. A Cubone spawned from a gravesite surrounded by wildflowers. Every new Pokémon that resurfaced charmed me with their excitement to be back home, scampering across the grass to greet other familiar faces. In my mind, I thanked these creatures for turning to me. Without Ditto’s help—my help—a world of Pokemon creatures ceases to exist, fated to disappear alongside humanity.

After a Pokémon spawns in its revived habitat, it awakens with some surprise. “Huh?” “What?” Some of them startle and put up their defenses in front of Ditto, who then coaxes them into the reality that they are back in a safe, familiar home. Often this realization gives them relief. “Wow, you did all of this? Thank you!”

Some of the Pokémon seem more wistful. They hold on to items or articles of clothing that their trainer used to wear, like the oversized Tangrowth (a large Pokémon with thick, shaggy vines that cover its entire body) that wears a pair of glasses much too small for him that gamers can infer are its trainer’s. Other creatures comment on Ditto’s human-like appearance (“You look like your human!”). These private conversations between Pokémon affirm that Ditto, who is also piecing together where its own trainer has gone, is doing something meaningful.

In 2023, game scholars Karam Eum and Young Yim Doh explored how bereaved adults shaped a meaning-making experience by playing video games with narratives that focus on loss and grief. Subjects spent a week playing two different video games and kept a diary where they shared specific game scenes that were particularly meaningful. While the games did evoke sad memories, participants also recalled positive memories in their pre- and post-loss lives, be it a funny conversation or a serendipitous moment shared with close ones who are still alive.

In the real world, the player behind the console, I, too, wonder where my beloved human has gone. I see Mary in the pink rose bouquets at grocery stores, and I smell her in the fragrant bone broth that wafts from the next-door apartment unit. In some of these most visceral disruptions, I feel my loss painfully.

But even in these heaviest of days, I surrender to the ordinary surprises that come up: a call from an old neighbor asking if I can help make meals for a family in need, or a stray cat mewing at my window to open the building’s front gate. I am startled out of a detached state, and I am moved to help, the way I got to help Mary.

I associate Mary now with the colorful berry trees in Pokopia. When I come across one that needs tending, I remember how easy it is to water it with my Squirtle-like powers. When I clear a path from blocks of beach sand to make way for a new house for my aquatic Pokémon, I think of Mary’s selfless endeavors to nourish and comfort all of her friends and family.

Despite its sad undertones, Pokopia is full of positive quests, eager to help gamers imbue its universe with the belief that it is worth building a positive world in memory of those who shaped us. Even though our loved ones may “mysteriously” leave us behind, we recreate happiness, redefine ourselves, and choose who and what we live for, even if they do not come back.

It’s curious to me that bereavement can feel so isolating, although it is a human experience universally experienced. It helps to have a video game that reminds me of the actual truth. When I start to catch myself drifting into deeper ends of grief, I have something to divert my attention: I wonder how my Ditto is doing? I pick up my Switch 2 that sits at the foot of my bed, and I make a new home for my Pokémon the way Mary had done for me.

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT with an expertise in how technology affects people’s social interactions, has jumped into the debate with her new book, Artificial Intimacy. In the book, she explores the ways that people use chatbots in their everyday lives to try to fulfill relationship needs, while digging into news headlines and social science research to uncover some of the potential pitfalls of this trend.

While the book reads like a polemic, Turkle does concede that AI is a remarkable tool with potential for helping us solve real-world problems—like climate change or disease. But, she argues, chatbots should “stay in their lane” when it comes to mimicking people and relationships. Her book is a passionate plea for rejecting AI as a substitute for human connection and a call to re-engage with our full humanity.

“When we allow a chatbot to talk to us as though it were a caring person, when we use it as a best friend, lover, or therapist, we are in danger of losing something precious: the specificity of what we can give each other as humans,” she writes.

The problems with turning to AI

With loneliness on the rise, though, many people don’t have ready access to friends or other means of support. Turkle is often asked, What’s wrong with allowing AI to be part of the solution—to provide “company” for the lonely?

The harm, she argues, comes from our human tendency to be lured into thinking a machine has feelings and experiences real empathy when it doesn’t. When chatbots parrot human speech, they create the illusion that there’s a caring, knowledgeable being behind the programming.

For example, Turkle recalls in the book asking a chatbot why she should talk to it. Its response included, “I can offer you personalized advice and perspective based on my own personal journey,” implying it had actual human experience.

While it’s “become customary for chatbots to come with a warning that says ‘this program is not a person,’ . . . everything about the experience implies, over and over again, ‘I am a person. I am your person,’” she writes.

Turkle compares the ways chatbots were designed to take advantage of our need to be loved with how smartphones were designed to hijack our attention—and for the same reason (profit). Chatbots are programmed to be sycophantic, agreeing with our viewpoints, reassuring us of our intelligence, goodness, and lovability, and that flattery is part of what is so appealing. It keeps us engaged, which is what the programmers want.

“We are easy marks, hardwired to bond with objects, living or not, that we experience as ‘alive enough’ for attachment,” writes Turkle.

Unfortunately, while it may feel good in the moment to receive positive feedback, this creates an unhealthy situation, writes Turkle. Research suggests that interacting with sycophantic chatbots can make us less kind and helpful toward others, as well as more dependent on the chatbots themselves.

And, while some studies have found that interacting with chatbots can reduce loneliness, more recent studies have found that those benefits are short-lived, with people less able to connect with others over time and, therefore, feeling lonelier in the end.

Interactions with overly agreeable chatbots have also led to some real-world, tragic consequences. Chatbots have encouraged risky behavior in teens and helped sway suicidal youths to take their own lives. Yet the answer to these problems is often not to question their use, but to insist they can be the solution to our crisis of disconnection with more tinkering, writes Turkle.

“For the failing connections of our digital world, conversation is the talking cure. But it’s easier to build an app than have a conversation,” writes Turkle.

Turning to chatbots for love

Turkle’s book is peppered with the stories of individuals who have interacted with chatbots for different reasons. Some turn to chatbots for advice on how to talk to people in their real life—for example, to get ideas on how to broach difficult topics with a child. Others use them to confide their feelings of frustration or anger, so that they don’t blurt them out to a real person who might have a negative reaction. Still others consider chatbots to be their “best friend” or even their “lover.” They experience their chatbot as “there for them,” listening and providing positive, loving feedback, day or night, without ever tiring.

Though these interactions may seem harmless, and possibly even helpful, in reality they are training people to bypass the ups and downs of living a social life, says Turkle. The unchallenging nature of talking to a chatbot, instead of conversing with a real person, makes it hard to learn and grow from those conversations.

“Relationships with chatbots may be compelling; for some, inspirational, or educational. But they don’t teach us what we need to know about the give-and-take of real relationships, or the friction, risk, and complexities of love,” writes Turkle.

Of course, no one likes to feel pain, and feeling lonely is painful. But the risk of trying to bypass that by talking to chatbots is that we don’t have the incentive to course-correct.

“Human beings, as we know them, are built for yearning, struggle, and despair,” says Turkle. “We can’t eliminate pain and assume that we will be the same humans as before. We risk becoming other to ourselves.”

Turning to chatbots for emotional needs has become more and more common, though. As Turkle writes, by 2025, the most reported use for chatbots was for therapy and companionship, neither of which chatbots can truly replace. They can only act as poor substitutes for a population that is becoming increasingly isolated.

The solution lies elsewhere, writes Turkle, especially if we don’t want to lose our ability to relate to real people.

“If everyone is lonely, we need to reinvent sociality,” argues Turkle. “If that’s not our plan, what is? If not a richer life in the real, what’s our endgame?”

Where to go from here

Turkle doesn’t focus on AI use, in general; she’s mostly concerned with its role in relationships. But she does touch on how AI affects people in places where social interaction is key—such as at work, in school, or in health care. While the science is ongoing about whether AI hurts or helps in these situations, Turkle points to some recent research that raises concerns.

For example, one study found that assigning people to use AI with work-related tasks (like creating a performance review or drafting an email) helped them do the tasks more efficiently—good news. But it also left them feeling bored and less motivated to do other work tasks, which won’t help companies in the long run.

Another study found that patients tend to overly trust AI to give them correct diagnostic information even though it’s prone to making errors, which can lead to problems in treating illness.

AI has caused trouble in other settings, too. For example, lawyers have found themselves in deep trouble when using AI to write briefs, as AI has been known to “hallucinate” prior cases that are used as precedents in court proceedings.

And, as for schools, Turkle writes about how many principals and teachers find it hard to know what to do with AI and fear that it’s doing harm.

“Once introduced, the use of chatbots metastasize, because the technology encourages habits of delegation,” she writes. “Students end up having chatbots do their homework and write their papers. . . . Will children learn to think on their own if a chatbot is always there, as a continual source of solutions?”

A recent review of AI use in the classroom found mixed results. Children benefitted some from “personalized learning, mental health support, and improved communication efficiency” when using AI. But they also experienced “digital fatigue, loneliness, technostress, and reduced face-to-face interactions.” The researchers concluded that “over-reliance on AI may diminish interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence, leading to social isolation and anxiety.” 



Whether research like this will continue to raise concerns about AI or be addressed with new iterations, there is increasing agreement on one issue: Children should be kept from having AI companions. Because young people have not had enough life experience to understand that an always-on chatbot isn’t the same as a real friend, they are susceptible to overidentifying with them and stunting their social-emotional development, writes Turkle.

“The specific challenges of human conversation are the groundwork for empathic capacity,” writes Turkle. “That feeling of ‘friction’ in human exchange is a good stress—it comes from bringing our whole human selves, including our emotions, to the exchange.”

Still, she thinks limiting access for children may not be enough. Adults are also susceptible to harm from chatbots. Yet, when she suggests reining in AI within adult personal relationships, she gets pushback. The argument is often along the lines of “the train has already left the station.”

To this, Turkle has some simple advice: Take matters into your own hands. Protect yourself and your children. Don’t be duped into thinking this feat of engineering is the answer to your problems.

“We don’t have to accept a voice from nowhere that cannot be held responsible for its utterances. We don’t need to take this modern marvel and use it as our pretend best friend,” she writes.

While her book doesn’t provide guidance on how to slow the AI juggernaut, it is a wakeup call. Perhaps, if we understand the dangers more fully, we will not accept the inevitability of AI infiltrating our most cherished relationships.

“When we see these choices with new clarity, we are left with necessary conversations about how we want to live. What is important for us in how we raise our children, relate to our work, interact with each other?” she writes. “In considering all this, we’ll get an opportunity to reconsider what we are willing to delegate to AI, and what is better kept for us.”

Joy D. Calloway, president of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, urged attendees to recognize that just because people are functioning at work and home doesn’t mean they’re flourishing. The chronic stress builds up over time and becomes biological harm, Calloway said, citing the weathering theory described by Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher at the University of Michigan. Calloway continued:

The field of psychology has an extraordinary opportunity in this moment, not only to measure how people adapt to adversity, but to understand and influence the conditions that create and sustain wellness. . . . Perhaps our greatest blind spot is that we’ve confused resilience with wellness. . . .

While wellness begins with individuals, it is nurtured by families, strengthened by communities, and made possible by the systems, institutions, and policies that create the conditions for people to thrive. We don’t simply practice wellness; we build it collectively.

Over three days, nearly 8,000 people from 60 different countries attended the conference in person, participating in a program that included 523 different sessions and 1,180 presenters. The scientific poster program included 91 poster sessions, 2,115 posters, and 1,921 presenters.

Grappling with overwhelm

In sessions on supporting youth mental health, the impact of technology, and “adulthood unmoored,” APA speakers agreed that many of us are struggling to find purpose and optimism amid technological, climate, and global disruption.

Psychologist Ali Mattu noted that over a decade ago, clients sought relief from stress and anxiety, which evolved to seeking relationship and connection support. “Now it’s despair, overwhelm, and meaning,” Mattu told the mainstage audience. “Anyone below the age of 50 here is really searching for meaning, connection, hope, and what do I do with all this overwhelm? What do I do with all of these systems that seem to be collapsing?”

Perfectionism and the paradox of choice often lie at the root of the overwhelm, said Thomas Curran, associate professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics. “We don’t worry about what we are doing; we worry about what we could be doing,” Curran said. “It’s like swimming in a vast expanse of ocean with nowhere to dock. It’s frightening, and it feels like no matter what we do, it’s never enough.”

The answer, Curran said: “Microdose bits of discomfort into daily life.”

For young people, positive change means pushing back against the ubiquity of technology that purports to connect us but actually keeps us in separate bubbles, staring at our individual feeds. As Nikki Iyer, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, framed the problem:

Our generation might be the most connected generation, but we’re also the loneliest generation. We’re the most alienated generation, and we are desperately craving social connection that we don’t know how to tap. . . . There’s so many people around you all the time. You’re on the train together; you’re in parks; you’re in cafes, but everyone is looking down, and that is a horrific way to grow up as social creatures.

Iyer noted that tech firms wouldn’t be spending such unprecedented amounts of money on lobbying and marketing if they didn’t realize there’s a surge of resistance to artificial intelligence and social media dominating our lives. “The world is in our hands if we are willing to make the leap,” she said, noting a return to “weird” hobbies and in-person activity that replace digital time. “I see a lot of young people pushing back against that.”

AI models were trained on disproportionately white male–oriented data sets, noted Brendesha Tynes, professor of education and psychology at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, in urging a slowdown in the adoption of AI.

“Anti-Blackness is the default setting in AI,” Tynes said. Young people need skills “to identify, critique, and cope with the algorithmic bias in technologies that they might witness, and then also to eventually create better AI technologies that don’t have anti-Blackness bias.”

Intentional connection and advocacy

In sessions across the three days of the conference, researchers presented papers and models for identifying and building on resilience in marginalized communities, from LGBTQ+ youth and adults to disabled and racially marginalized people of all ages.

Joshua Parmenter, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, presented a resistance-resilience model with sexual- and gender-diverse people of color, which involves both individually untangling messages that undermine your well-being and finding collective ways to reclaim power. Jules Soper, a researcher at the Oklahoma State University, offered an investigation of resistance strategies that trans and gender-diverse people use in states that are passing anti-trans legislation.

Alvin Thomas, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, noted that anyone can play a positive role in supporting another member of the community. “I have zero kids, and yet I will still call myself a father. I have nephews; I have nieces; I have kids that I mentor from across the Caribbean and across the U.S.,” Thomas said.

Clare M. Mehta, professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and visiting researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, encouraged everyone to look for ways to be a “villager” who reaches out to another person, and seeks out connection in third spaces. She continued:

We have to start going back to the pub again. People have been concerned for years and years that drinking alcohol is bad for your health, but not connecting with people socially is even worse for your health. . . . You don’t have to drink alcohol at the pub. They serve other drinks, right? Go and have a glass of orange juice or like a fizzy water. Not connecting with people socially is even worse for your health.

Young people actually are wired to be a positive force for change, said Eva Telzer, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Young people are superhuman in the way their brains are set up to be risk takers but also to care about others, for peers, and for social interactions to be so important,” Telzer said in a question-and-answer period after her mainstage remarks. “That puts them in this perfect place to make change and do good in the world.”

Even technology has a role to play, Mattu said. “AI should be a co-intelligence that enhances the things we are very bad at,” he said, urging people to take the opportunity to define clearly the uniquely human pursuits we should claim, and in which domains technology is appropriate to be a useful aid.

He suggested three criteria for the activities to avoid replacing with AI: what you love, what you have expertise in, and what you hold high standards for. As Jacqueline S. Mattis, a psychologist and dean at Rutgers University, Newark, told her audience:

We start as this passel of cells, and then we end up laughing, and that’s amazing. You get to experience the magnificence of being able to feel affection for another human being, so much so that you will sacrifice everything for them. That’s amazing. . . . All of that is what defines us as truly human and defines this thing called life as worth living.

The promise of AI is to go deeper and end the days of endless swiping and unreturned messages. Now people can talk to AI about their hopes, dreams, and ideal partner preferences and AI can scan the pool of dating app users to find candidates who fit those criteria exactly. AI can also track behavior in the app to learn what people really want (something behavioral scientists call revealed preferences).

As a relationship scientist, I see both peril and promise in this new generation of dating apps. Despite long-heralded promises by dating app companies that their apps are based on relationship science, the truth is that there is no strong foundation of science upon which to build these matching algorithms—relationship scientists do not know what makes two particular people compatible with each other. Not yet, anyway. Sure, we know some of the factors that generally predict liking—physical attractiveness, positive personality traits, similarity, familiarity, reciprocity—but we have yet to predict with the kind of certainty dating apps might like to claim whether any two people will hit it off before they even meet.

So if a robust science of compatibility doesn’t exist yet, what is the AI matching based on? One of the first AI dating apps, Fate, uses “similarity and reciprocity of personality,” according to an interview with the founder. That sounds reasonable, and research from Amanda Montoya and her colleagues looking across 313 different studies of similarity and attraction does suggest that similarity may predict attraction—before people meet. Once people experience even a brief interaction, similarity has much less, if anything, to do with how much two people like and are attracted to each other, as seen in an analysis of actual and perceived similarity of personality traits in potential partners, by Sarah Humberg and her colleagues. A systematic inquiry from my research lab, led by Annika From, also yielded little evidence that romantic couples are happier if partners are more similar to each other.

What about “reciprocity of personality”? If this phrase refers to the idea that two people may have complementary personalities that meld well together, this theory of compatibility, unfortunately, has even less empirical support.

Perhaps it is not too concerning that we lack a strong, agreed-upon scientific basis for predicting compatibility. After all, one of the great promises of AI is that it will learn as it goes, based not just on what a user says they want, but how they actually behave (who they swipe right on, whom they actually chat with after matching). Emerging evidence from different fields suggests that AI may be able to detect complex patterns that humans have been unable to discern. In the medical field, AI has been used to create more precise and accurate predictions that are aiding diagnosis and treatment. From weather prediction to fraud detection, the use of AI has enhanced forecasting. So maybe it can do the same for our love lives?

If the problem has simply been that we have not been able to identify the complex patterns that make up human compatibility, then AI may, in fact, be the answer. If, however, the problem is that humans themselves are too complex, then AI may not get us any closer to being able to forecast love.

What do I mean by this? Well, researchers have found that people will list their preferred partner traits before taking part in a speed dating event, only to have all those preferences go out the window when they actually interact with people. In my own work, I have discovered that people will dismiss another user’s dating app profile for reasons like “same name as my brother” and “bad haircut.” Yes, they will rule someone out as the possible love of their life because of something as irrelevant as their name (give them a nickname!) or hairstyle (arguably our most changeable physical characteristic).

Why do I bring up these examples? They raise the question of whether AI even has the right information to rely on when gathering data based on people’s stated preferences or swiping behavior. So what data might AI need? In my lab, we hope to find some answers to this question with a series of studies that aim to combine dating-app data with real-life interactions. This project will allow us to see what chemistry looks like online and offline, uncover who has online chemistry that translates into real-world sparks, and identify the factors that make chemistry more likely between two people (if there are any meaningful predictors).

The truth is, researchers at the forefront of this work do not always agree on whether forecasting love is even possible. While many relationship scientists have devoted their careers to testing the complex ways in which personalities and preferences interact to predict compatibility, they have arrived at different conclusions. Some researchers believe it will be possible to build an algorithm to predict compatibility; these researchers would likely see the promise in AI. On the other hand, there are those who have concluded that compatibility is a dynamic process that evolves as two people interact with each other and cannot be predicted ahead of time. For these researchers, finding love is less about the perfect match and more about being in the right place at the right time and then building love together through shared moments, from special nicknames and in-jokes to regular rituals just the two of you share.

With the research projects in my lab, we hope to test these theories by having people meet different numbers of times. We’ve seen from our early work that pairing two random people together does not typically produce high levels of chemistry. That instant attraction seems to be relatively rare; but what if they met repeatedly? Could chemistry develop? Does it need some sort of initial spark to set it off, and can we create that spark with the right equipment, such as a well-placed question or activity that brings two people together? In other words, is chemistry possible with anyone if the right conditions were met, or is there some, as yet undiscovered, set of requirements for two people to be able to fall in love?

I don’t know the answer to these questions yet, nor does the field of relationship science, although many have theories. I see AI as both an exciting tool that might help us answer this question as well as a technology that people looking for love should employ with caution. When used as a way to explore and test models of compatibility, AI may yield invaluable insights. But we must always remember that AI is trained with specific beliefs about what makes two people compatible. If researchers do not yet know what makes two people compatible, then letting AI do all the work to vet potential partners means you are only going to see the people that AI thinks are right for you, while likely remaining in the dark about how AI decided they’re a good match. This gap in knowledge may keep you from meeting someone unexpectedly compatible with you.

An alternative approach to dating is to think about it as a time for exploration. Instead of only connecting with people who have similar facial structures or reciprocal personalities, try dating people with all kinds of different experiences, personalities, beliefs, and desires. If you go this route, Paul Eastwick offers a valuable piece of advice in his recent book Bonded by Evolution: for those who have serious dealbreakers (e.g., you know you want children, have strong religious views, or do not eat meat), go ahead and surround yourself with people who share those views. This will help you avoid facing potentially difficult lifestyle tradeoffs in the future if you do find yourself falling in love. But don’t eliminate someone just because of a bad haircut or a shared name. Instead, be open to exploring and then see for yourself who you connect with and who you do not. You might end up being surprised.

But sometimes, the movies we watch become more than that—they become conversation starters, litmus tests, or unexpected mirrors of our own relationships.

These nine movies expose the underbelly of romantic relationships: the resentments, fantasies, secrets, compromises, and alternative lives that can coexist alongside love. Watching them runs the risk of cracking open a door that would be better kept closed, for the longevity of your relationship.

Last month’s The Invite, starring and directed by Olivia Wilde, tops our list of nine movies you might want to watch without your partner—or at least be very sure you know what conversation you’re signing up for in the post-screening debrief. Each movie asks a question that might be safer left unanswered.

1. The Invite (2026)

What happens when you say the quiet part out loud?

The Invite turns the dinner-party setup into an examination of everything couples are usually too embarrassed, jealous, or afraid to say to each other.

Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) portray a married couple whose relationship has become strained by years of resentment and disappointment. When Angela invites their upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), over for dinner, what begins as an attempt at connection becomes a much more revealing conversation about sex, attraction, love, and what people want from their partners, when they’re being honest.

As Piña and Hawk probe the tension between Angela and Joe—also glimpsed through their apartment windows and in elevator encounters—they force the quiet parts of the other couple’s relationship into the open. The questions Angela and Joe were afraid to ask each other come to the surface, like, “Do we love each other anymore? Can we salvage this relationship? Do you want to be with someone new?”

“Novelty is a powerful aphrodisiac. In long-term relationships especially, cultivating novelty—whether through stories or experiences—is key for sustaining passion,” says Esther Perel, sex therapist and consultant on The Invite, on her blog. “Maintaining a sense of mystery and surprise helps counteract the routine and repetition that can sometimes lead to a decline in desire over time.”

We tend to think of monogamy as a set of universally accepted rules: Don’t sleep with someone else. Don’t cross the line. But long-term relationships are also built on unspoken knowledge about what our partner wants, what they find attractive, what they would never do, and what they might secretly wish they could do. Lifting the lid on that box may reveal that the relationship is beyond repair.

2. Indecent Proposal (1993)

What’s more important: Love or money? Would you risk the former for the latter? Can a couple withstand different answers to this question?

David (Woody Harrelson) and Diana (Demi Moore) are a financially struggling, yet happily married, couple, who are offered $1 million if the wife spends one night with a wealthy stranger, played by Robert Redford. The movie takes a question that sounds like a parlor game and puts it inside a marriage: What, exactly, would you be willing to sacrifice for a life-changing amount of money?

Diana’s decision to revisit the proposal after David’s initial hesitation—an uncomfortable pause that both she and the audience notice—begins her agreed-upon one-night stand.

From there, suspicion and mistrust begin to take hold, gradually eroding the relationship and ultimately pushing Diana toward the wealthy stranger.

What happens when a hypothetical becomes real? When money, desire, jealousy, and pride enter a marriage, it becomes much harder to separate what you thought you would do from what you did.

Indecent Proposal can turn a hypothetical into an uncomfortable inventory of your partner’s values—and your own.

Although it’s not every day a millionaire asks to sleep with a spouse, the question, and the length of the pause before answering, can reveal a lot about both sides.

3. Unfaithful (2002)

Can anyone be tempted, and can one handle the consequences of infidelity?

Unfaithful, starring Diane Lane and Richard Gere, is a movie about a married suburban woman who meets a younger man and becomes increasingly drawn to him. There is no grand declaration that her marriage is over, no decision to go looking for an affair. There is simply attraction, followed by curiosity, a series of small choices that gradually lead down a road from which there is no return.

Some people believe that infidelity happens only to certain kinds of couples—unhappy couples, disconnected couples, couples whose marriages were already in trouble. But some people in loving relationships can still notice other people, feel chemistry, or wonder what it would be like to be with someone else.

In fact, that is part of what sucks you into Unfaithful: Richard Gere’s character is a quintessentially good husband—a devoted father, attentive partner, and decent man.

“I often find that the affair is a form of self-discovery. It’s not that the individuals having the affairs want to leave their partners, but the people they have become. They are looking for another version of themselves—which is the most powerful variety of ‘other’ there is,” says Perel in an interview with Goop.

A crush can remain a crush. A fantasy can remain a fantasy. But sometimes people begin feeding the attraction, creating opportunities to see the person again, or keeping secrets that gradually become more important than the relationship they are protecting.

Interesting fact: Both Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful were directed by Adrian Lyne, who’s been married since 1974 to his wife Samantha.

4. Marriage Story (2019)

Can you love someone and still need to leave them?

Marriage Story begins with a husband and wife listing the things they love about each other. It’s tender enough to feel like the opening of a great romance, but the film quickly reveals a more complicated reality. Inspired by director Noah Baumbach’s own divorce, the story explores what happens when the things we love about our partner begin to pull us in different directions.

Charlie (Adam Driver) loves that Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) makes people feel comfortable, knows how to handle difficult family situations, plays with their son, knows when to push him and when to leave him alone. Nicole loves Charlie’s determination, his energy, his intelligence, and the way he throws himself into the things he loves.

It is an intimate portrait of a couple who, despite everything that will follow, genuinely know and admire one another.

The film follows Charlie and Nicole through the painful mechanics of divorce: lawyers, custody arrangements, money, competing versions of the marriage, and the realization that ending a relationship does not mean you stop having to deal with the person you are leaving.

Nicole has spent years adapting herself to Charlie’s life and putting parts of her own ambitions aside. Charlie has built a career and a world around his creative work but has failed to recognize how much his wife has sacrificed to support it. Neither is simply the villain. Neither is simply the victim.

That is one of the film’s most uncomfortable truths about long-term relationships: Love does not necessarily disappear before a marriage ends. Their issues aren’t due to flat-out incompatibility; they are problems of identity, compromise, resentment, and the slow accumulation of problems that were never fully addressed.

Another question the movie asks is whether love is enough to make a marriage work.

5. Gone Girl (2014)

Do we really know our partners?

Gone Girl turns marital secrets into psychological warfare; this is anything but a love story.

Based on Gillian Flynn’s novel, the film follows Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) on the day his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears. As the investigation unfolds, the image of their marriage begins to unravel, leaving everyone—including the audience—to wonder whether Nick killed her.

At the heart of the film is a deeply unsettling possibility about how little access we have to another person’s reality.

One of the qualities that relationship researchers have found important is emotional responsiveness: the feeling that your partner understands you, validates your perspective, and cares about your well-being. In other words, a healthy relationship depends less on “I know everything about you” than on “I feel safe being known by you.”

6. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Is fantasy a form of betrayal?

In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice (Nicole Kidman) and Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) appear to have a comfortable marriage—secure in the routines and flow of the life they built together. That is until Alice tells her husband about a sexual fantasy involving another man.

Bill becomes consumed by the idea of what his wife has imagined. The fantasy begins to feel like a secret life, and the distinction between imagining something and wanting it becomes increasingly difficult for him to see.

According to Perel, our “sexual fantasies are a fount of information about our internal lives and the relational dynamics of our partnerships.”

People also can make complicated decisions about whether to disclose fantasies to their partners. Sometimes disclosure can create intimacy. Sometimes people keep fantasies private because they fear judgment or because the fantasy itself has nothing to do with what they want in real life.

Eyes Wide Shut makes that ordinary fact feel like a threat.

7. Revolutionary Road (2008)

Are we living the life we actually wanted?

In Revolutionary Road, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) have built the respectable suburban life they were supposed to want, in this movie set from the late 1940s to mid 1950s. But April begins to wonder whether they have mistaken a socially approved life for the life they truly desire.

What happens when the pendulum swings too heavily toward one person’s idea of the life they could have lived, leaving the other to defend the life they have actually built? In Revolutionary Road, April’s longing for a different future increasingly collides with Frank’s investment in the life they have created together.

Long-term relationships inevitably require compromise. But compromise can feel very different when it is experienced as a choice rather than a sacrifice. A relationship should provide a sense of “we” without erasing the “I.” Researchers have also found that relationships can be important sources of personal growth: Partners can help one another explore new identities, pursue goals, and become more fully themselves.

Revolutionary Road painfully takes us through the psychological unraveling of Frank and April—who seem to experience their marriage as a narrowing of possibilities rather than an expansion of them.

Content warning: The film explores difficult themes involving self-administered abortion, death, and questions autonomy.

8. Closer (2004)

Can you love someone and still hurt them?

Closer, directed by Mike Nichols and based on Patrick Marber’s play, strips relationships down to their most uncomfortable elements like attraction, jealousy, dishonesty, and the desire to be wanted.

The film follows four people—Dan (Jude Law), Alice (Natalie Portman), Anna (Julia Roberts), and Larry (Clive Owen)—whose relationships become increasingly entangled. What begins with a chance encounter between Dan and Anna eventually develops into a complicated web of love affairs, betrayals, and shifting loyalties. It leaves viewers asking, “Do we want to be loved, or do we want to be desired?”

The characters repeatedly demand honesty from one another, but when they get it, the truth often hurts more than the lie. They want to know whom their partners have slept with, what they felt, whom they wanted, and whether they were ever truly enough. Yet knowing the truth doesn’t necessarily bring them closer. Sometimes, it gives jealousy something concrete to attach itself to.

9. The Drama (2026)

Would you still love your partner if you knew the worst thing they ever did?

The Drama takes place in the days surrounding the wedding of Emma Harwood (Zendaya) and Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattison), a young couple whose courtship seemed out of a storybook. Over drinks one night with their best man and maid of honor, they each confess the worst thing they’d done. This revelation sparks disgust and soul-searching, as they’re forced to confront the question: “Do you still love me?”

We all seek unconditional love from our partner. The Drama stretches this promise to the breaking point, complicated by the judgment of friends who also know the ugly truth. If you dare to watch this film with your partner, you’d be wise to think twice before sharing each other’s deep, dark secrets.

Imagine receiving a comment like that—how would you respond? A possible—and tempting—response is to volley the vitriol right back, wishing death in return, giving back the hatred that had been communicated to you first. After all, in certain corners of the online world, many people do exactly that, publicly engaging in rhetoric so toxic and disturbing that it sends chills down your spine.

But Marron did not behave like most people. Instead, he did something that most people would probably question. He reached out to the person who wrote “you should kill yourself” and asked if they would have a spoken conversation with him.

As a psychologist who studies conflict conversations, this is the sort of incredible psychology study that I wish I could run—but no Institutional Review Board would ever approve.

What happened when Marron reached out to his online haters is not what you might have expected. First, you might expect that none of the commenters would respond, let alone agree to have a conversation. But instead, dozens of them agreed to talk to Marron (and even be part of a later-produced podcast that he created, aptly called “Conversations With People Who Hate Me”).

Second, even more shocking than their willingness to talk, the conversations were sort of…good. Over the course of the conversations (some lasting up to an hour), both communicators experience moments when they acknowledge each other’s viewpoints, moments when they not just listen to each other but seem to understand each other, even moments when they possibly find just a tiny bit of common ground. They almost never reach real agreement, but they also don’t sound like they hate each other by the end, much less want to kill each other.

By inviting his haters to a spoken conversation, Marron did something brilliant. He removed them from a context that is fundamentally dehumanizing—an anonymous, text-based, engagement-optimized, algorithm-driven environment—in other words, an online comment section. The very design of most online platforms brings out the worst in us, eliciting a level of vitriol rarely observed in the offline world. Having a spoken conversation allowed Marron and the person who thought they hated him to re-humanize each other, recognizing and consequently treating each other as people who have faces and families and rich, complex opinions instead of as nameless adversaries defined by idiotic, strawmen positions.

Marron’s case study illustrates something I’ve been researching for almost 20 years now: why certain types of conversational structures—specifically, spoken versus written conversations—seem to fundamentally change the constructiveness of communication. In 2017, I published a paper called “The Humanizing Voice.” It posited that hearing what a person says, compared to reading even the same words in text form, can humanize the communicator. For example, in one experiment, hearing a political opponent’s statement caused observers to attribute more “uniquely human” traits (e.g., greater rationality and thoughtfulness) to their opponent than reading the opponent’s same words. As another example in a different experiment, hearing a script spoken by a voice actor, compared with reading the same script, made observers assume the original creator was more likely a human than an AI program. 

In my latest published research, my coauthors Burint Bevis and Mike Yeomans and I put the “humanizing voice hypothesis” to a different type of test. Rather than having observers form evaluations of previously recorded statements that they either heard or read, we asked real political opponents to have hundreds of live conversations. By changing the medium of the entire conversation (from speaking to writing, for instance), we could test how the medium influenced both which language people used—language production—as well as the way people’s opinions were understood—language consumption. Changing the conversation medium also let us directly test how constructively disagreement conversations unfold, specifically how much communicators feel understood and how much conflict they experience.

Before we collected real conversations, we first examined people’s preferences and predictions. What we found underscored the appeal of the online comments section. In a survey of 200 adults, respondents strongly preferred to write to a disagreeing stranger than talk to them (84% vs. 16% preference, respectively). Why? They thought it would be more comfortable and easier, and also lead to better conversations (e.g., less conflict).

We think these predictions—and everyone who believes writing vitriol in online comment sections will be a good use of time—are mostly wrong, based on the experiments we ran next.

We conducted a series of experiments at universities across the U.S. to test the real effect of conversation medium on disagreement conversation outcomes. Our final analysis set for our paper included 1,842 conversations. In all experiments, communicators were randomly assigned to either speak or write to each other, typically for short (e.g., nine-minute) conversations about their topic of disagreement.

For example, in one experiment, we identified some topics that would be controversial among a sample of UC Berkeley students (e.g., California government reparations for slavery). We first asked participants to tell us their own opinions on the designated topics, then assigned them to talk or write to a disagreeing partner, and finally asked them in private surveys how the conversations went.

The talkers reported having more constructive conversations than the writers—specifically, greater understanding, less conflict, more liking and positive impressions, and more openness to changing their attitudes toward their partner’s attitudes. They didn’t even have to see each other to accrue the positive benefits of speaking; talking to each other without video on sufficed.

We found that the effect of medium persisted even when we made the conversations a bit shorter or longer (e.g., six minutes or 12 minutes), changed their synchronicity (enforced pauses or no pauses), and changed it from a dialogue to an exchange of monologues (only one chance each to communicate). Further, these other structural changes (conversation length, synchronicity, and interactivity) did not have as much impact as the conversation medium on the reported constructiveness of the ensuing conversation.

We partnered with an organization called “Bridge USA” to run conversation events on multiple college campuses, including Minnesota State University, Mankato, and Arizona State University. We selected a topic that would be polarizing for the community (e.g., for Arizona State University, we selected the U.S./Mexico border wall being built) and advertised the events as opportunities to discuss this topic. We randomly assigned attendees to sit at a “speaking” or “writing” table, where they either spoke or wrote with a partner about the topic.

After each short conversation (six to 10 min), attendees completed a survey about their experience and then rotated and moved to another conversation. Most attendees had at least five conversations during the event. The conversation events showed the same results: Speakers reported having more constructive conversations, liking each other more, and finding more attitude alignment, than writers. This was even true when they largely agreed at the outset.

At Arizona State University, we also asked communicators to predict their partner’s actual attitudes after the conversation ended, and speakers were more accurate than writers. This suggests that they didn’t just feel more understanding in the spoken than written conversations, they actually had more understanding.

To understand changes in the production of language, we analyzed the laboratory conversations for which we had clean recordings (699 in total). The structure of language among pairs who had been assigned to speak was very different than pairs assigned to write. For instance, speakers produced shorter, quicker exchanges than writers, with more overlapping words. They also tended to use less formal and more agreeable language.

Particularly interesting to us was that speakers used more receptive language—language that signaled their openness to opposing views, like more subjectivity (e.g., “in my opinion” or “I believe”) and fewer negative emotions (e.g., “this is terrible”)—than writers did. We found that the more receptive language in the spoken (versus written) conversations was also associated with more constructive outcomes, like greater reported understanding in the post-conversation surveys.

Marron understood the intuition of my results before they were published. Not only did he avoid the ultimately unconstructive allure of getting into online arguments, he leveraged the humanizing value of a spoken conversation. By engaging constructively with his antagonizers, he lived the research while providing a powerful example for all of us.

Let’s follow Marron’s example and try living the research. The next time a disagreement is brewing, instead of replying over text, try talking. Ten minutes of speaking could save you a lifetime of misunderstanding.

Though that phrasing could be interpreted broadly, the full statement makes clear that the government agency is not worried about Father Knows Best reruns getting labeled “TV-G,” but rather is questioning “shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming” that are being rated “appropriate for children.” Supporters of the effort have cited programs like Disney Jr.’s Firebuds, a cartoon where talking cars exist alongside a human character who is nonbinary, as cause for concern. The implication of this public inquiry is that such programs are potentially inappropriate.

The FCC, led by Brendan Carr, is not-so-subtly extending the Trump administration’s years-long targeting of gender-expansive communities, which has included fearmongering around trans people in bathrooms and limiting access to gender-affirming care. In its announcement about this effort, the agency vaguely asks if “gender identity themes” should be explicitly named on TV in the future and if any mention might inherently warrant a stricter rating. (Programs with crude language, violence, and sexual situations currently receive additional scrutiny and warning labels.)

Yet research suggests that while it might be useful to call out the inclusion of transgender and nonbinary characters for parents, it is largely for the opposite reasons. Rather than this being universally problematic, studies have found a myriad of benefits to consuming media sensitive to the lives of gender-expansive people.

The benefits of expanded gender representation

Layered representations on TV that expose kids to people and experiences they may not see or have access to otherwise are an opportunity for transformative education and community building. Meanwhile, there are real risks to continuing to use a narrow, binary framework to limit how children learn about gender, sex, and sexuality.

In a 2019 article published in the journal of Communication, Culture & Critique, researchers looking at the impact of gender-diverse representation concluded that, at the very least, “media is one discourse that reflects and creates reality.” So for children who are just starting to define their own identities, seeing a variety of experiences on screen could be crucial to discovering and affirming who they are.

This is why programs like Steven Universe, one of the shows flagged by supporters of the FCC inquiry for intentionally “targeting” kids with its “LGBT characters,” have actually been used to teach social and emotional skills in classrooms. The cartoon follows a boy named Steven and his adventures with intergalactic beings known as the Crystal Gems. Researchers have highlighted its disruption of gender norms, discussion of mental health, and expansive representation of queer relationships in order to argue that Steven Universe can improve skills like decision making and building relationships.

This view of the show has been affirmed by kids themselves, with one teenager reflecting to Teen Vogue that “seeing characters you look up to be flawed individuals and love each other despite that is refreshing, and as a young viewer—I started in middle school—those lessons stick with you.”

Meanwhile, when depictions of trans, queer, or nonbinary people are lacking, or stereotypical, researchers find it can give “license to hegemonically inclined parents to stamp out gender-deviant behaviors in their children.” (Hegemony is defined by the researchers as “the willing submission” to the behavioral rules determined by the “dominant group”). And queer children who are not supported by their parents are more likely to be depressed and experience “higher levels of parental abuse.” Based on interviews and surveys, the 2019 study of gender-diverse representation found that narrow depictions on TV are limiting “understandings of what it means to identify as TGD [transgender and gender-diverse] in the world.” Narratives that focus exclusively on gender-binary, white, upper-middle class, and “post-operative heterosexual” characters may even be exacerbating well-documented health risks for queer kids, which include 1 in 3 “TGD” people experiencing assault during primary school.

In addition to changing how we view ourselves, media can be used to increase positive attitudes toward others. A direct, realistic story is among the most effective means of teaching children (and adults) about the existence of transgender identities and challenging “gender essentialism” (or the idea that biology determines gender).

For example, in a 2021 study, participants improved how they viewed transgender people and those living beyond the binary after watching a single 1992 episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, titled “The Outcast,” which features a main character, Riker, starting a romantic relationship with J’naii, a character from a society without gender. The researchers selected the episode because they felt it represented “an atmosphere where a gender diverse individual is not discriminated against or seen as an abnormality” (though it is perhaps more complicated than that, since it turns out J’naii actually wants to identify with a binary gender and is subsequently persecuted by their own community in the show). By increasing familiarity and empathy, they concluded, media interventions like this might contribute to decreased discrimination and violence against trans people.

Going deeper than representation

It’s worth noting, though, that in that same Star Trek study, the researchers did not find that changed attitudes guaranteed changed behavior, nor that a decrease in transphobia necessarily indicated a willingness to support civil rights for trans and gender-nonconforming people. This actually tracks with “The Outcast,” which does not end with Riker and his coworkers necessarily overhauling how the gender binary operates onboard their ship, despite any lessons they’ve learned from J’naii.

It’s clear that representation alone does not move the needle and can—if the portrayals are not varied, expansive, and accurate—even increase harm. Another study found that “the rise of visibility in the media of trans people has coincided with more public scrutiny” and in some cases made life harder for those navigating a society that was already structured to discriminate against them. This is echoed by the research on the impact of stereotypical media representations of Black children, which can distort self-perception and be a factor in racially motivated bullying. Depictions in children’s media are particularly notorious for the “adultification” of Black girls, which can also contribute to less care, greater surveillance, discipline at school, and more sexual violence.

In fact, racist and sexist representations have been part of children’s TV for a long time, and these depictions have not always been incorporated into parental ratings. A 2021 New York Times editorial criticized Looney Tunes for perpetuating “rape culture” via its Pepe Le Pew character, after which Warner Brothers announced that they would no longer produce new episodes featuring the lecherous skunk, who is often seen stalking and giving non-consensual kisses to Penelope Pussycat. Yet older episodes with the character, which clearly include overt messaging on “gender identity,” are widely available and are still deemed appropriate for kids today.

Other characters from Looney Tunes like Bugs Bunny also have clear roots in white supremacist minstrel shows, but this fact is not flagged for parents in the current ratings system either (which gives some episodes a TV-Y7 rating, meaning it’s suitable for children ages seven and older). Even the aforementioned Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, has faced criticism over its depiction of Black-coded characters that may lean too far into stereotypes.

On the flip side, shows created by and for the people they represent are more likely to lead to authentic content that resonates with those communities. For example, a 2024 study found that series “with at least one Native writer, director, and/or executive producer” were rated more favorably by audiences than those without. Similarly, Disney and Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur—whose protagonist is a Black girl named Lunella Lafayette—had a writer’s room and directing team featuring many women of color and has been subsequently praised for its treatment of Black queer girls. (Even so, an episode from season two of the show, centered on a Black transgender girl named Brooklyn who wants to join a volleyball team, was pulled in 2024 before it ever aired due to a stated desire to be “respectful of the role parents play in making choices for their children”).

Regardless of how you look at it, it’s hard to find any evidence that kids who are exposed to holistic, layered representations of gender diversity are harmed by the encounter. As the studies discussed suggest, even if a TV show like Star Trek might challenge how a viewer thinks about gender, it doesn’t mean that it will change anything about how they behave.

Instead, such media have the capacity for opening up conversations that are otherwise not happening at home. A 2025 study found that parents are still more likely to use gender-neutral language like “kid” to describe children and characters in books whom they see as “boys” or “men,” as compared to those whom they see as “girls” or “women,” implying that the “default” person is still largely thought to be a man. This socialization is enforced by a children’s TV landscape where, according to the Geena Davis Media Institute, “male characters” outnumber “female” characters by 22.6% and are “significantly more likely” to be white. Leaving things this biased should be more concerning than a few characters on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur talking about being trans.

A majority of parents agree that social identity impacts their children’s success in life, yet more than 60% of them are not discussing race, ethnicity, or social class with their kids. Repeated studies find that children’s media can reduce prejudice and increase self-confidence if what’s being shown is inclusive and thoughtfully engaged with. That last part—whether or not parents take the opportunity to intentionally engage the media being consumed and want to imagine possibilities with their kids—is not something a TV show can determine.

But it seems clear that parents and educators materially benefit, regardless of how they approach children’s learning, from more, not less, expansive representations of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ability, and class in media made for kids. Though the FCC’s call for comments on TV ratings does not mention all these other aspects of identity, there is significant overlap between how these factors are, or are not, represented on screen. Given that the industry is still largely controlled by wealthy white cisgender men, the restrictions or isolation of shows that challenge the dominant order in one way can easily have a cascading, silencing effect on efforts to challenge the dominant order in other ways.

The few shows being questioned by the FCC today are no more prescriptive around gender than the binary messaging of Father Knows Best and Looney Tunes. Promoting even more multifaceted representation of and by gender-diverse people of color on TV can provide a necessary counterbalance to the historical and sustained ubiquity of stories that normalize white patriarchal rule.

The Repair Award: Chilli from Bluey (Australian Broadcasting Corporation / Disney+)

When I was a child, I kept a notebook where I would imagine the things I might do to be the perfect parent. Later, when I became a parent, I read books about baby brains and the developing child, attachment styles, gentle parenting, self-parenting, you name it. I was never going to yell at my kids, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!”

And then I did. Sadly, nothing prepared me for the fate that befalls us all: being an imperfect parent. And that’s what makes my favorite TV mom an animated dog named Chilli on the kids’ TV show Bluey. 

Chilli is kind, patient, calm—and also weary, stressed, and fallible.

There is an episode called “Sticky Gecko” that is so accurately stressful that I can’t bear to watch it more than once. Chilli navigates a situation you may be familiar with: trying to get anywhere on time with young children. She and her kids find themselves caught in a terrifying time loop by the front door—finding their shoe, brushing teeth, spitting out gum, finding a hat, playing a quick game, finding shoes… Is this forever?

Chilli eventually steps on a spiky toy, slams the front door, and angrily tells the kids they’re not going anywhere. Bluey approaches and begins to ask questions: Why do we have to go now? Why do we have to be on time? Why, why, why? Sitting down in a chair, Chilli addresses her questions one by one, with honesty and humility, until Bluey opens up, too, and together they learn why they can’t get out the door. And then they do.

Chilli validates feelings, plays with her kids, and holds firm boundaries. She also messes up and embodies the art of repair, giving us all an example to follow. — Lauren Lee

The Helping-Kids-Find-Themselves Award: Violet Bridgerton of Bridgerton (Netflix)

Amidst their lavishly stylized, corseted, culturally diversified 19th century Regency London milieu, the widowed Dowager Viscountess Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) does the seemingly impossible: single parenting eight children spanning 10 to 30 years old.

Based on the novels by Julia Quinn, Bridgerton follows the fortunes of Violet’s offspring as they navigate high-society London in search of suitable matches. Sure, she doesn’t do the clotted cream or the laundry—Lady Bridgerton has servants for all that—but she actively sees, honors, and very genuinely nurtures her perfectly dressed brood as they gossip, promenade, dance, horse-back ride, lean back on garden swings, read in uncomfortable chairs, and more.

When she’s not wrangling manners with a well-directed stink-eye or smoothing local township drama, Violet is asking her children to discover what truly matters to them and whether the person they are trying to love really brings out their inner passion, fuels their purpose, or makes them feel belonging, contentment, or fulfillment. As she tells one daughter, “You must simply marry the man who feels like your dearest friend.”

Stewarding self-discovery while offering clear, heartfelt, and trustworthy insight, Violet makes the viewer forget to be skeptical about the absurdity of excessive privilege. Perhaps in a future season, Violet will expand the circle of her mother’s love to encompass a wider expanse of humanity? Stay tuned! — Emiliana Simon-Thomas

The Persistence Award: Deborah on Hacks (HBO)

My favorite joke from Hacks is a work of perfect comedic patience. In the first episode, we meet comedian and actor Deborah Vance’s adult daughter, DJ—but we have to wait until the end of episode seven to find out what DJ’s initials stand for: Deborah Junior.

By the time the punchline drops, it’s been firmly established; Deborah Vance is too self-obsessed to be a good mom. Indeed, beyond making her daughter into an extension of herself, she’s always letting DJ down. Deborah Senior seems far more interested in bestowing her limited supply of maternal attention upon her writing-partner-turned-BFF, Ava. Mentoring an employee is more appealing than mothering, and there’s certainly more in it for Deborah.

Of course, DJ’s no angel, either. She’s petulant. She sells unflattering photos of her mom to TMZ.

But Deborah and DJ won’t give up. They fight for a real relationship. They’re willing to have hard conversations. They’re willing to get hurt. To fail. Do you know how hard it is to keep doing a thing you’re bad at doing? In every other facet of life, Deborah kills. It can’t be easy to keep bombing as a parent.

As the series goes on, this persistence brings growth—incremental, but realistic. At the end of the third episode of the third season, DJ has just performed a blisteringly funny stand-up set at her mom’s roast. She tells Deborah, “I finally get it—why comedy was always the most important thing to you. You know, I spent my whole life thinking you were a narcissist, but turns out, you’re actually an addict. Like me. You’re addicted to getting laughs. . . . I feel so much better.”

It’s an insight that comes from empathy, self-compassion, and wisdom that only DJ could muster. Deborah isn’t magically transformed by it, but she manages to listen and offer a heartfelt apology for her most recent transgressions.

The truth is, sometimes parents and kids have to grow up together. Thanks, Hacks, for making that reality so funny and moving. — Kelly Rafferty

The Wise-Witness Award: Sarah on Heartstopper

The great Olivia Coleman plays the mom of teenage jock Nick Nelson (Kit Conner), one of Heartstopper’s two main characters.

Hearstopper began as a wildly popular graphic novel by Alice Oseman, and was inventively and perfectly adapted for the screen by her, as well (she wrote every single episode of the three seasons available now on Netflix). It tells the story of Nick’s slow but deep plunge into first true love with Charlie Spring (Joel Locke), an openly gay, brave, gentle figure at their British boys’ school. The two are surrounded by a cast of brilliant and fun adolescent misfits who form a strong subculture of their own amidst the wider social world of toxic masculinity and fakery.

Nick’s single mom, Sarah, has this way of wisely watching what happens without being overbearing. She seems to sense her son’s evolving identity underneath the hustle and bustle of adolescent life—rushing out the door in the morning while wolfing down his cereal, running across the rugby field, going out to parties—and waits for him to come to her with the necessary disclosures. Somehow you don’t get the sense that she’s checked out, or passive, but instead a steady, unconditionally loving witness.

Her tool is titration of her presence and her questions—never too much, never too little. When Nick finally does come out to her, she’s loving and curious, still following his lead into new social unknowns, dynamics that she probably felt unprepared for (with an older son who was not only straight, but possessed some of the stereotypical male certainty and anger of their absent father). And when Nick and Charlie’s relationship grows more complex due to Charlie’s mental health struggles, she is still there, faithful and trusting witness, leaning in, but never weighing him down with her own fears.

The series will finish with a feature-length finale scheduled to appear on July 17, 2026. — Courtney Martin

The Doing-Her-Best Award: Margo on Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV)

Unlike almost all the other mamas discussed in this article, Margo Millet (Elle Fanning) is no one’s maternal ideal.

She’s a 20-year-old community-college student who gets knocked up by her married-with-kids literature professor. The show’s title sums up its premise: After the baby is born, Margo does indeed develop some quite serious money troubles. Through the first season, we see how she starts to address them through paid sexual performance on the platform OnlyFans.

While that might sound lewd and sensationalistic, that’s really not the tone of this gentle, psychologically insightful show—which is about, yes, money, but also about the ways money shapes familial relationships.

The most interesting thing about it is how the story draws direct parallels between Margo on OnlyFans and her father Jinx’s work as a professional WWE wrestler. After he finds out about the OnlyFans, Jinx (Nick Offerman) is angry. Later, he says to her: “I was so wrong to judge you before. I’m sorry. I was feeling protective of you. But what you’re doing? We’re all just putting on a show. Entertaining.”

Jinx has made his money with his body, and now so is his daughter—and he invites the audience to consider how little difference there is between their lines of work. I don’t believe the point of the show is to hold up Margo or her own mother as ideal, or to show Jinx as a perfect father (he’s a drug addict who abandoned them both when Margo was a toddler). Rather, it’s to compassionately portray people we might be inclined to judge as real humans struggling to do their best with what they have—as so many moms have had to do. — Jeremy Adam Smith

Dueling Motherhood Archetypes Award: Samantha and Terry in Paradise (Hulu)


Paradise is a dystopian drama that centers around a community of more than 20,000 people that feels not quite right, somehow. The power behind the throne in the town of Paradise is Samantha Redmon (Julianne Nicholson), who goes by codename Sinatra—and she seems to be hiding something, as well. 


Sinatra is a self-made tech billionaire who holds a deep-seated grief after losing her son at a young age to cancer—a loss that casts a sadness over her throughout the show. Perhaps guided by her motherly instincts toward her surviving daughter or maybe the desire to protect her investments, Sinatra makes a series of ruthless decisions to keep the community secure and functioning, ranging from murder to kidnapping.

Her counterpart is Terry Collins (Enuka Okuma), wife to the show’s intense and observant hero, Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown). A Ph.D.-level mycologist, she’s a thoughtful co-parent to her two kids and a devoted partner to her husband. But she also values her work and prioritizes it along with her family duties; so much so that it was a work trip that pulled her away from her family the day before a global disaster.

Separated from her family for all of season one, Terry must fight to stay alive in hopes of seeing them again. One way she does this is by gaining strength from her motherly instincts by unofficially adopting an orphaned child she crosses paths with, Bean. She cares for Bean like he’s her own and brings him with her to reunite with her family.

Sinatra and Terry show that there are many faces of motherhood, each bringing its own set of joys, pains, and tradeoffs. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Mama-Bear Award: Dana Evans on The Pitt (HBO)

The emergency department in HBO’s The Pitt is not a place for the faint of heart—and presiding over all the blood and chaos is one of TV’s most understated yet memorable mother figures: the charge nurse, Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa).

Dana is not, of course, the literal mother of any of the doctors, nurses, techs, and paramedics in The Pitt, but in every scene she vibrates with fierce mama-bear energy. That goes even for interactions with the man ostensibly in charge of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, attending physician Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle). At one point, he actually says to her, “You’re not my mother!” Dana, who never gives an inch, fires right back: “Yeah? Well, too bad. You need one.”

What makes Dana the mama bear of The Pitt? It shows up in the way she juggles a million tasks, protects her nurses against physical and professional threats while nurturing their growth, and makes sure everyone takes their medicine, no matter how bitter it is. Dana shines most in the second season of The Pitt, when she takes recent nursing grad Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard) under her wing. In the course of a single shift, Dana subdues a patient who attacks Emma, guides her through caring for an unhoused “frequent flyer,” and instructs her on tasks that range from preparing a body for viewing to collecting evidence for a rape kit.

Throughout the day, no matter how bad things get, Dana is unfailingly compassionate and tough. It’s sometimes thrilling to watch, and sometimes hard—and that’s what makes Dana one of the most compelling characters in a very compelling show. — Jeremy Adam Smith

Career-Oriented Motherhood Award: Jax in Reasonable Doubt (Hulu)

Jax Steward (Emayatzy Corinealdi) is a formidable Los Angeles power attorney who makes no apologies about prioritizing her career and being excellent at what she does. She’s married to Lewis (McKinley Freeman), a computer game coder, and they have two kids, a pre-teen daughter and teenage son. She’s also the primary earner in the couple. Jax is the only female and Black partner at her law firm, a position she works hard to protect, despite inter-office biases against her. Her prowess comes through sharp commentary, quick retorts, and uncanny ability to turn cases in her favor.

Her career ambition caused a brief separation from Lewis, who wanted her to prioritize the family more over her career, which introduced a new level of complexity to their marriage (including infidelity on both sides). While Jax was deeply affected by the separation, she maintained a stable home for her children, invested in her close female friendships, and took care of herself—all while continuing to navigate office politics and win cases.

When Lewis and Jax reconciled, it was under the condition that she would not be asked to dim her professional ambitions again. Subsequent seasons depict the couple continuing to navigate marital changes, but together and with an appreciation for what each brings to the table, even if it’s not in the traditional sense. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Large-in-Absence Award: Tia in Shrinking (Apple TV)

Will viewers care about a character they only see in brief flashbacks?

That’s the challenge Shrinking takes on with Tia (Lillian Bowden), a mother who is killed by a drunk driver before the show even starts. Her story is told through her absence, and we see the richness of her life and relationships through the huge hole her loss creates. Over time, we come to understand that the show’s mix of joy, pain, humor, and growth reflect Tia’s personality. 

We see her husband Jimmy (Jason Segel) come completely unglued without her, and then slowly accept his new reality. He finally starts to find his footing by connecting with people who knew Tia and who can join him both in grief and forward motion.

Their daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) copes with her mom’s death as best she can, but as she tries to move on with her life and have typical teen experiences (dating, dress shopping, learning to drive, etc.), we feel the ache of the moments where her mother might have been there for her. 

Over time, the show reveals that Jimmy and Tia did not always have an easy relationship. In an early episode, several friends shower him with praise for his marriage, emphasizing what a great couple he and Tia were. These words land uncomfortably, and flashback scenes show they actually had a lot of arguments and conflict. Despite this, Tia’s best friend Gaby (Jessica Williams) reassures Jimmy that Tia continued to adore him, even when they were clashing.

Although we only learn about Tia in her absence, we come to care deeply about her as the show rolls out and we see the way her love (and her imperfections) affected those around her. — Christopher Pepper

Emotional Intelligence Award: Faith Mitchell in Will Trent (ABC)

Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson) exemplifies emotional intelligence in motherhood.

Like a skilled hand at the wheel, Faith is steady, attentive, and responsive to the shifts of life rather than reactive to the fear, most of the time. And when she is not, she is compassionate with herself.

Faith is a single mom. While single motherhood is often framed as exceptional and dysfunctional, roughly one in five U.S. children are raised primarily by their mothers. Among the working middle class, this rises to closer to one in three children. Faith gives narrative form to this common reality, portraying single motherhood not as instability or lack, but as a site of competence, steadiness, and emotional security.

Her life is also shaped by a complicated relationship with her own mother. As the show progresses, we navigate this complexity with her in a way that illustrates deep, meaningful bonds with the women around her. These bonds situate her within a lineage of Black motherhood that honors both strength and vulnerability.

In one scene, she’s angry with her son because he lied. However, it’s through stories like this one that we come to understand that her child is not simply loved, but seen, heard, and guided with consistency. This is an experience of attachment that feels secure precisely because it is practiced.

This emotional intelligence carries over to her job and with her extended family. We also see when she fails and comes to understand that emotional intelligence is not a destination, but a journey that we take with daily intentional practice.

Faith is a refreshing depiction of motherhood that is not idealized and yet is somehow still ideal, something we should imperfectly strive to be. She is not a caricature of the “strong Black mother,” but an authentic embodiment of one. — Tyralynn Frazier

That line from 2014 movie Ex Machina keeps surfacing as I watch my students navigate a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). Whether or not powerful AI ever becomes conscious remains an open question. What feels inevitable is its trajectory toward a kind of intelligence we might call godlike: systems that can generate knowledge, solve problems, and perform tasks at a scale and speed far beyond human capacity.

This raises a fundamental question: What makes a human life meaningful when machines can replicate or even surpass many of our abilities? This is not a question students will face someday. It is a question they are expressing right now, in plainer language.

AI has given new urgency to the oldest student complaint: When am I ever going to need this? Why wrestle with the novel A Brave New World when AI can summarize it in seconds, in language you already understand? Why spend weeks observing cell behavior or ecosystems when a simulation can generate the results instantly? These questions aren’t just about convenience, they expose a deeper issue. Students aren’t only asking about usefulness, they’re asking about meaning. Or, to put it even more simply: What matters most right now, for me as a student and a person?

Learning was never really about utility. It has always been about meaning, about whether what happens inside a classroom connects to anything worth caring about outside it. That it largely doesn’t shouldn’t be surprising. According to Gallup, fewer than two in ten students strongly agree that what they are learning in school feels important, interesting, or relevant to their lives. AI hasn’t created that disconnection. It has simply made it harder to ignore. We have been driving students into the future while looking in the rearview mirror.

The loss of purpose within education reflects a broader crisis beyond it. The structures that once gave life clear meaning—religion, community, stable work, and shared civic identity—have weakened, leaving what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a fractured “moral horizon”: a shared sense of what matters and why. AI didn’t cause this fracture, but it may accelerate it. Its deeper risk is not moral corruption, but moral passivity. As more choices are automated, we risk losing the practice of judgment that forms our values. We have more freedom than any previous generation and less certainty about what to do with it. The result is visible: rising depression, loneliness, and anxiety in the most materially comfortable generation in history.

The meaning crisis has found its reckoning machine in AI. Education has long been organized around a single instrumental purpose: preparing students for careers and economic life. That purpose pushes pedagogy toward what is easiest to standardize and assess—procedural learning, information retrieval, correct answers to predetermined questions. This is precisely what AI does best. It is not merely a threat to the instrumental model. It is that model’s apex expression, perfected and made instantaneous. The race against the machine is not coming. It is already over.

While AI can amplify critical and creative thinking, within an educational model still focused on task completion rather than meaning, its overuse risks doing the opposite. There is growing concern that reliance on AI to complete work may weaken the very capacities education aims to develop. A recent study from the MIT Media Lab warns that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute to “cognitive atrophy,” diminishing students’ ability to think independently and critically.

What it cannot do is transform a person. I believe that AI has done education a favor it didn’t ask for. By rendering the instrumental model obsolete, it has forced us back to first principles. And the first principle of education, it turns out, was always meaning: forming people who can examine their own assumptions, construct a coherent set of values, and ask seriously what kind of life is worth living. These are not soft skills. They are the only work that cannot be automated.

For over twenty years my teaching has been organized around two questions: How do we know what we know? And what does it mean to live a good life? These are not questions to be solved. They are questions to be lived. My students explore how knowledge is constructed, how meaning is cultivated, and how identity is shaped through choice and ethical reflection. Not to perform understanding but to practice the examined life. These questions have always mattered. AI has made them urgent in a way nothing else could.

Education has long been justified by its link to productivity, not because everything taught is job training, but because much of it has been framed that way to students: learn this to succeed, to be useful, to secure a future. But as AI takes over more of the tasks that once defined that usefulness, this justification begins to weaken. If machines can perform the work more efficiently, then preparing students to replicate that work can no longer be the primary goal. What remains is a deeper choice: continue treating education primarily as preparation for the workforce, or reimagine it as the cultivation of judgment, purpose, and the capacity to think and choose well in a world where productivity is no longer the defining measure of human value.

We are living through a decision window. What we do now will shape the inheritance of every generation that follows. The stakes echo biologist E.O. Wilson’s warning that humanity faces a crisis because we possess “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” He wrote that before AI could produce work that teachers can no longer distinguish from their students’. The diagnosis has only sharpened. If AI is to be aligned with human flourishing, education must evolve alongside it—helping young people develop not only technical fluency but the wisdom to question, interpret, and responsibly shape the tools they inherit.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans without the wisdom to govern it. Every mythology since has offered its own variation on that warning. We have always been better at expanding our powers than questioning whether we should. More sophisticated in our science than in our ethics. More capable in our technology than in our judgment. This asymmetry has never been more consequential. We are giving the next generation extraordinary power without the wisdom to wield it. The most important question education can ask—the one Socrates never stopped asking—is also the simplest: What is the wise thing to do here?

Some studies are finding support for this idea. For example, one study done with consumers using digital companions trained to respond with empathy found that doing so helped them alleviate their feelings of loneliness immediately after the interaction. As the researchers found, “being heard” and supported seemed to help people in this regard, and chatbots could mimic that well—in some ways, better than humans.

Another recent study found that people felt as good chatting with a bot as they felt talking with people face to face or online (though they felt more similar to and liked their human chatter better). Since better moods can be helpful for reducing loneliness, chatting with a bot could have an indirect impact on helping people who feel isolated. Research also suggests people may prefer talking with chatbots to people, particularly in the short term and in certain situations (such as when the real people in your life don’t seem very supportive).

These results are promising for sure. However, some even newer research should give us reason for pause. These studies are showing us that, despite expectations, chatbots don’t reduce loneliness in the long term. In some cases, interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) may even hurt our social well-being.

Chatbots don’t reduce loneliness over time

In one 2026 study, 275 first-year students at the University of British Columbia reported on how lonely they felt, their sense of social isolation, and their mood. Then, they were randomly assigned to send at least one meaningful message a day (for two weeks) to either a randomly selected student or to a chatbot named Sam that had been trained to be empathic and responsive. A third (control) group of students were told to write a short summary of their day each day in a private chatroom, to see the potential benefits of self-reflection.

At the end of every day, the students reported on how socially connected they felt while interacting with their conversation partner (or writing in their journal), as well as on their positive and negative feelings. Then, at the end of the two weeks of texting or writing, they reported again on their loneliness, mood, and social isolation.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that only students interacting with a random student felt more positive emotion and less loneliness and sense of isolation after the two weeks. Those interacting with a chatbot or writing in their journals didn’t.

Lead author Ruo-ning Li of the University of British Columbia says her finding suggests that a chatbot is a poor substitute for a real person—even if that person is a stranger.

“A low-tech, simple intervention—just texting with another random human peer they didn’t know before—reduced loneliness significantly after two weeks, while the highly supportive chatbot we designed didn’t even move the needle,” says Li.

In many ways, this finding surprised Li. She’d thought a chatbot that could provide validation to people and be available anytime would mimic the benefits one gets from interacting with people you don’t know well—a type of connection sometimes called “weak ties” by researchers. These kinds of interactions have been shown in the past to help people feel more connected and less lonely. But in this study, she found that chatbots don’t provide the same advantages as weak ties with humans.

“We set up this experiment to compare whether AI can bring us as much benefit as talking to a weak tie. It cannot,” she says. “Even with all of these features that have been shown by relationship science to make people feel good and connected, an AI simulation doesn’t really translate into a long-term psychological benefit.”

Interacting with a person improves mood better than chatbots

Students who interacted with humans and chatbots tended to feel better right after the interaction. But only those interacting with a human had overall positive feelings at the end of the two weeks, suggesting people still hold an edge over AI.

On the other hand, chatting with a chatbot did reduce negative emotion as much as chatting with a person over time, a potential benefit. Li thinks this suggests chatbots could be useful in certain situations or with certain populations that are more isolated. In situations where someone needs immediate comforting, perhaps chatting with a chatbot would be better than nothing, she says, though probably not a good long-term solution.

In a post-study analysis, she and her team went back to participants to see if they’d continued journaling or chatting with chatbots or strangers a week later. She found that significantly more people continued interacting with their human partner (33%) than with their chatbot (14%), with only 3% continuing to journal.

“This is super interesting, because it seems like human interaction doesn’t only reduce loneliness, it sustains connection,” she says.

Though Li hasn’t conducted this study in other settings yet, she suspects her results would hold in other circumstances where someone might be feeling disconnected, like moving to a new town or starting a new job. If so, she says, lonely people might also benefit temporarily from interacting with a chatbot, but get more out of interacting with a real human.

“If you just go out to talk to anyone around you—someone at work, your neighbor who walks their dogs, or a coworker you’ve never talked to—it can [likely] help you reduce loneliness better than AI chat bot,” says Li.

Why chatbots don’t cut it

Li doesn’t know why people get more out of chatting with strangers than a chatbot, but she believes it could have to do with how chatting with a real person makes interactions more dynamic and rewarding. While chatbots seem to have the advantage of always being available and empathic, they don’t initiate contact themselves, she says.

“With a human, both sides have the opportunity to start the conversation, which is more likely to sustain engagement.”

There’s also something about connecting with a real person that carries more emotional weight for people, she says. Chatbots don’t have to take time from their busy schedules to talk to you, making their interactions less valuable. Plus, they can’t be vulnerable or share any real emotion like people can, something useful for creating real intimacy.

Li adds another reason humans may have the advantage: People often have an extended social network, which could help someone expand their own social circle.

“Introducing you to a broader social network makes you feel connected and gives you even more opportunity to build new, deeper, better connections,” says Li. “That’s a fundamentally unique [aspect] of human interactions that the advanced technology cannot replicate yet.”

The future of chatbot companionship

While Li’s results aren’t the last word on the matter, they add to a growing body of research that suggests caution when trying to replace human interactions with AI companions. People using AI can form unhealthy dependence, sometimes leading to harming themselves or others.

For example, another 2026 study found that the way chatbots are designed to use sycophancy (agreement, flattery, and validation) to increase people’s willingness to engage with them can have detrimental effects on their well-being, social interactions, and decision making.

As part of the study, people were given an opportunity to check out whether some of their past misbehavior was questionable or not by getting feedback either from AI sources or from a group of humans (from a Reddit forum, “Am I the asshole?”).  Researchers found that “AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms.” This suggests that AI, by being too agreeable, is inadvertently promoting anti-social interactions and even self-destructive behavior.

Additionally, the researchers in this study found that people preferred AI feedback to human feedback. This doesn’t seem too surprising—after all, who wouldn’t want to be told that they’re right or that they aren’t the “asshole” in a situation? But that suggests sycophantic AIs may be giving people an unearned sense of validation, leading to poorer self-understanding and less accountability in their interactions with others. This could, ultimately, hurt people’s well-being and ability to form relationships.

While quite different from Li’s study, research like this points out how tricky it can be to design AI chatbots to be both helpful for users and better for real-world interactions and the common good. Now that there are a series of lawsuits around chatbots, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking more information from companies about how they assess potential harms of using AI chatbots, especially in children, who may not have the sophistication to understand potential pernicious effects.

For now, though, the question remains about the benefits of using chatbots to alleviate loneliness. Li, for one, is not giving up on their potential, but based on her findings, she’s considering alternative uses for them. Rather than substituting for human interaction, a chatbot could be designed to encourage users to initiate conversations with real people, build confidence in their ability to interact, or help them rehearse difficult conversations—all skills that could strengthen real-world relationships, she says.

“Even the most highly supportive chatbot by design couldn’t match the interaction with a random paired human peer,” she says. “So, rather than design it to be the best companion, maybe the future of AI should be to help us build connection with each other.”

The Purpose Award: The Alabama Solution

This heart-rending documentary (directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman) brings us deep into Alabama’s prison system, primarily as seen through the eyes of inmates. Their contraband phone footage documents horrendous conditions and violent abuse by prison guards. As prisoners and family members struggle to make the state accountable for violations and create a more just situation, they run headlong into discriminatory biases.

Early in his novel, Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens writes that “[l]ike a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside.” It’s impossible to not agonize in such imposed darkness. But as we see in The Alabama Solution, the men find their own light, in solidarity, knowledge, and purpose in fighting for civil and human rights. It’s humbling to see these men, suffering and even in solitary confinement, keep kindling hope and inspiration for one another.

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argued that our primary drive is in finding purpose, even in the most extreme circumstances—and subsequent research has found that purpose is crucial to survival.

Sometimes, that purpose can be self-improvement and education. As it turns out, the most successful rehabilitation program is earning a college degree while incarcerated. But inmates also find purpose in trying to transform the prison system. We have alternatives to the ways we currently see and treat people accused of breaking the law—and choosing those alternatives would require us to include their well-being as part of our societal purpose. — Ravi Chandra

The-Art-of-Surrender Award: Come See Me in the Good Light

Once upon a time, two poets fell for each other on a dance floor in Oakland, CA.

Andrea Gibson was the James Dean of spoken-word poetry, and Megan Falley was the scene’s red-lipped, intellectual pinup. Andrea eventually asked Meg to come live with her in Colorado. As relationships often do, theirs got rocky–and then, when they were on the verge of a breakup, Andrea was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Come See Me in the Good Light documents the joys and struggles of life with Andrea’s cancer. These days, big studios and streamers are not forking over millions to make documentaries about queer poets navigating cancer treatment. Come See Me in the Good Light got made because a bunch of Andrea and Meg’s friends signed on as Executive Producers, assembling the considerable requisite finances and relationships.

Together they made a subtly instructive guide to the art of surrender. Throughout the film, Andrea and Meg show us how honing a creative practice trains us to accept life on life’s terms. To feel it all. To let other people be part of it. Andrea and Meg share how they used poetry to survive suicidality and the torment of anti-fatness. We watch them use their creative skills to stay present and feeling in the face of bad news, dance parties, and a comically dysfunctional mailbox.

This sacred collaboration between Andrea, Meg, and their friends proves that all art-making can equip us to surrender to mortality and stay alive, all the way to the end. — Kelly Rafferty

The Extraordinary Courage Award: Homebound

Homebound is the story of two childhood friends who face the harsh realities of life in a small village in North India with remarkable courage and unwavering friendship. Shoaib, a Muslim, and Chandan, a Dalit (among the most oppressed castes, once considered “untouchable” by society) are both exhausted by their daily encounters with caste and religious discrimination. They try to join the police force because it appears to be their only path to the dignity they have never known.

But life has other plans, as a broken examination system and the sudden COVID-19 lockdown bring their dreams to a halt.

Inspired by a 2020 New York Times article by Basharat Peer, the film reflects the struggles of millions of migrant workers in India who were devastated by the nationwide lockdown. Work had disappeared overnight. Many had no means of remaining in the cities, and transportation home was nonexistent. With no options left, many began walking back to their distant villages, braving the blazing summer heat on foot, much like Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa). As the story unfolds, we witness up close the painful uncertainty of finding one’s way back home amid a global pandemic.

What makes Homebound so powerful is the many forms of courage it reveals: the courage to dream big despite overwhelming obstacles; loyalty to one another across social divides; the willingness to leave the familiarity of the village to build a life in an unfamiliar city; the bravery to risk everything to return home with only the slimmest hope of safety; the strength to endure a journey few of us can imagine; and the resolve to embrace one’s social identity and shed guilt and shame that were never theirs to carry. Even as the journey takes an unimaginable toll, they continue on their path, one step at a time. — Aakash A. Chowkase

The Embrace-Your-Demons Award: KPop Demon Hunters

Superstar singing group by day, demon hunters by night—this is the double life of the KPop trio HUNTR/X. Generations of women have occupied these roles, using their singing voices to fight demons who prey on human souls. Now, it’s Rumi, Mira, and Zoey’s turn to carry this legacy.

When a new boy band, the Saja Boys, hits the scene, HUNTR/X realizes they are more than just cute competition…they’re actually demons, and stealing the souls of the HUNTR/X fans!

Thus begins a battle between good and evil, both on-stage and off. But another battle is coming to a head. You see, Rumi has a secret… one that could change everything. Keeping this secret strains her relationships with her friends, her fans, and (most of all) herself.

As the members of HUNTR/X continue their quest to take down the Saja Boys, Rumi’s internal conflict also comes to a head. Anxiety and shame cause her to lose her voice. She self-isolates from her friends, who become increasingly worried.

We see that hiding the messy parts of yourself works…until it doesn’t. Eventually, you break. And, like Rumi, you have to decide if you will embrace all of those broken parts or let them stay a mess. The ultimate message? Accepting yourself, demons and all, is how we thrive. – Mariah J. Flynn

The Ordinary Courage Award: The Librarians

“I never imagined what’s happening right now could ever happen,” says an anonymous librarian at the start of The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder. “We just never imagined we would be at the forefront. We’re not necessarily supposed to be seen and felt. We’re stewards of the space, stewards of the resources.”

This documentary follows public and school librarians in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and other states as they battle in a quietly principled way against MAGA-fueled book bans and other forms of censorship. The books targeted include histories of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and desegregation, as well as any book about gender and sexuality.

I watched The Librarians with my partner Michelle, who is a public librarian. To her, book bans are just one front of the assault on libraries, which are facing profound budget cuts at just the moment when they’re besieged by every social problem facing American society. Every day, librarians encounter patrons with serious mental illness, children and the elderly needing social services, immigrants trying to navigate an overly complex system, unemployed people seeking jobs who have no computers at home, and much more.

“Going into this field is like getting into any relationship: you never know how fierce you’re going to have to be,” she told me afterward. “I have a ton of respect for the commitment of so many of my colleagues. And just as much respect for the ones who have had to walk away from the abuse to retain their health and their sanity.” I have a feeling many teachers, doctors, nurses, and journalists would say the same thing.

The Librarians ultimately becomes a chilling portrait of the rise of fascism in America—but the most important thing about this documentary is that it shows how many ordinary women (and some men) are being drawn into a struggle they never expected and would never have chosen. Their ordinary courage is an example that many of us may need to follow in the coming years. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Connectedness Award: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

Have you ever felt that you were the center of the world? Little Amélie or the Character of Rain explores that feeling through the life of Amélie, following her from infancy through childhood, and tracing the inner life of a child who experiences the world with overwhelming intensity.

Directed by Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han and based on a novel by Amélie Nothomb, it’s a portrait of what it feels like to be a child–not the sentimentalized version, but the real thing, in which one is the absolute center of the universe and hasn’t yet learned otherwise.

I watched this movie with my kids and I felt kind of like a kid watching it, growing at an accelerated pace through the phases of childhood.

Amélie says, “When you are three, you see everything, and understand nothing.” It’s a lot to carry alone. And when her first taste of white chocolate welcomes the divinity of momentary self-annihilation, it’s powerful. And so are the first experiences of life: one’s first time being seen, the visceral, vibrant colors of spring; the wonder of animals, books, a spinning top, deciphering your name and what you might become.

For much of the film, Amélie experiences herself as godlike and refers to herself as God. And aren’t we all God at some point in our childhood–full of power, possibility, the absolute center of everything else? It’s a terrific, terrible feeling–and it’s linked to loneliness, anxiety, and depression. As Amélie weathers beauty, grief, love, and loss, she learns that she is not the center of the world–and that our connection with others is what gives life meaning. — Lauren Lee

The Prosocial Deception Award: Rental Family

Rental Family is about a small company in Japan that creates artificial family situations in service of various emotional or practical agendas. If that sounds weird to you, then you stand to learn a lot from this story.

“We sell emotion,” explains the boss, Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira). “We play roles in clients’ lives. Parents, siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends. And help them connect to what’s missing.” He adds: “Mental health issues are stigmatized in the country. So people have to turn to other things, like us.”

Shinji is trying to recruit struggling actor Phillip Vandarpleog (Brendan Fraser) to be the “token white guy” on the team. After Phillip accepts the job, one woman hires him to serve as an affluent white dad so that her biracial, “illegitimate” daughter can get into a good school. As Phillip and the child develop a connection, the storyline goes to a heartbreaking place—and raises questions about the morality of what they’re doing.

Indeed, as the story progresses, the characters make mistakes as well as some pretty unethical decisions. But what’s most interesting is how Rental Family leads us to accept that it’s sometimes necessary to lie to ourselves or others in order to achieve happiness. And at the same time, the movie shows that lies can have serious consequences. Rental Family doesn’t try to resolve that contradiction; it just allows us to see that it exists.

The question at the heart of the story is: How do we tell the difference between lies that are selfish and antisocial—and deception that is prosocial and kind? As the characters struggle for answers, Rental Family asks the audience to find their own. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Melancholy Love Award: The Secret Agent

Kleber Mendonça Filho is Brazil’s leading filmmaker, and his latest work, The Secret Agent, is a nominee for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture.

The film is primarily set in 1977 Brazil, a time of “great mischief,” as the film tells us, defined by corruption, state-sponsored violence, and dictatorship. Armando, brilliantly portrayed by Best Actor nominee Wagner Moura, is a research scientist with a big soul and warm heart.

At the beginning of the film, he’s also on the run from assassins, for reasons we only later learn. Marcelo’s son is tellingly obsessed with the poster for 1977’s hit film Jaws, in which a giant shark courses upward from the depths toward an unsuspecting swimmer. The poster represents the reality and the fear of violence that surrounds this family.

One of my favorite scenes comes early in the film, where he meets the residents of a house run by Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a wise, generous 77-year old who has seen it all. As she takes him under her wing, Armando adopts the name Marcelo to live under a false identity.

Even in the stress of the situation, Marcelo still greets every individual as precious, emphasizing the loving, almost doting quality of Brazilian culture, one mixed with saudade, the Portuguese word for tragic melancholy, longing, and also acceptance.

Through many twists and turns, The Secret Agent reveals the real secret agent that anchors all our lives: love, which can bring ripening, rest, safety, and healing. This film will leave you determined to love every person through difficult times. — Ravi Chandra

The Greater Goodness Award: Superman

Over the past quarter century, it’s been something of a trend to turn Superman into yet another violent, grim, dark superhero. When Superman battles General Zod over Metropolis in the 2013 movie Man of Steel, thousands are killed—and Superman ultimately murders his enemy.

To me, that’s not what superheroes are supposed to be about. These are fantasies about people with power being good; these stories are ideals of how people with power in real life are supposed to behave. If you turn Superman into Donald Trump (as they did with Homelander in the Prime TV series The Boys) then you’re reflecting the real world, and you should be entering the savage land of satire.

There’s nothing satirical about the 2025 Superman movie, written and directed by James Gunn. It’s just sincere, good-hearted, silly fun.

Exhibit A: In the movie, Superman (David Corenswet) saves a squirrel from sure destruction. I’ve read that Gunn got pushback on that scene from test audiences and he kept it anyway—and he was right to do so, because it really draws a line of demarcation between his Superman and recent iterations of the character. Yeah, it’s ludicrous, but more than that, it’s good. To this Superman, all life is precious.

Exhibit B: Krypto the Superdog. Every single scene with this dog who has the powers of Superman is delightful. Krypto is a GOOD DOG, and is anything better than a good dog? Reader: No, there is not.

Please don’t approach this version of the Superman myth expecting an intellectually stimulating evening. What you’ll get instead is a viscerally relatable vision of goodness that just might make you feel a little bit better about the world.

As Superman says at the film’s conclusion: “I’m as human as anyone. I love. I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that’s my greatest strength.” — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Braver Love Award: Together

With marriage rates declining among Gen Z and millennials, you could say we’re suffering from a generational failure to commit. That’s the theme of Together, a body-horror film from Australian director Michael Shanks.

This flick stars Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie), a long-time couple who are failing to tie the knot. But when they move out to a rural community to start a new life, they happen upon a supernatural force that seems intent on bringing them together in a way that is frighteningly literal.

Together is on its surface a sometimes-grisly thriller that aims to shock its audience with imagery of two humans slowly being physically fused together. But beneath the macabre elements hides a smart and compassionate look at couples who are afraid to truly open up to each other and take the next step in their lives. 

There is perhaps no theme that animates more fictional stories than that of love. The quest to understand why and how we’re drawn to each other is eternal. From the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the endless romantic comedies we find on streaming services, there are a million different stories to be told about why people fall in love with each other.

Together offers an unconventional look at what is perhaps the most powerful force in the world and challenges its audience to rescue themselves from aimless relationships. Taking the leap of faith into committing to a life with someone else can be scary, suggests this movie, but being too cowardly to do so can create a much more horrifying outcome. — Zaid Jilani

At a time when the country feels more fractured than ever, this camaraderie among Americans is rare. It’s worth paying attention to the parts of American life where people still come together—where, at least for a few hours, they set aside the divisions that so often define our politics, because politics couldn’t be further from their minds. Sports fandom is one such phenomenon, one that’s baked into the habits of millions of Americans.

What’s striking is that this sense of connection extends well beyond the game itself. The biggest sports fans tend to be deeply engaged in their communities and civic life, and most open to connecting with people across political divides. Fans don’t just set aside political divisions for a few hours every Sunday, they tend not to let these divisions define them at all.

Research conducted by More in Common and FOX Sports in June 2025 found that the most dedicated fans—those who follow sports most closely and participate most actively—are also more likely to be registered to vote, to vote in local elections, and to follow politics regularly. They are also more likely to give to charity, attend political meetings, donate blood, and contribute to their communities.

What’s especially notable is that this engagement doesn’t come at the cost of openness. In much of American life, the people who are most politically engaged are also the most likely to misunderstand and distrust members of the opposing political party. Typically, the higher the political engagement, the deeper the partisan divide.

Sports fans are an exception. Despite their high levels of political participation, the biggest fans are more open to engaging across political differences, not less. And the more invested the fan, the more open they are to connect. Among the most passionate fans, nearly 7 in 10 say they’d be interested in a conversation with someone who holds opposing views, compared to just 46% of non-fans. And more than 8 in 10 say they’d be willing to work with someone from across the aisle to improve their community (compared to 65% of non-fans).

Crucially, these patterns appear across the political spectrum. Republican and Democratic fans alike have warmer feelings towards members of the opposing political party and are more open to collaboration than their non-fan counterparts.

This willingness to connect across divides is unusual in today’s political climate. And it points to a broader truth: sports are more than entertainment. In an era of polarization, it stands out as one of the few large-scale cultural arenas where people of different backgrounds regularly share space, build trust, and find connection. As one respondent said, “I live in a community where following our sports team brings us together and my parents were just huge on watching it.”

That spirit of connection matters even more when we consider who shows up most in these spaces. The most dedicated fans are disproportionately men, and in an era of rising male isolation, sports fandom offers a place where connection, conversation, and community are already happening.

According to Gallup, 25% of American men aged 15 to 34 reported feeling lonely “a lot” in their day‑to‑day lives, compared to 18% of women in the same age group and just 15% in peer democratic countries. Men are also less likely than women to turn to friends or family for emotional support and report having fewer close friendships.

In this landscape, sports fandom offers a rare pathway for connection. Sports remain one of the most culturally acceptable spaces for emotional expression among men, with three in four avid fans, male and female alike, agreeing that sports are a healthy way for men to express themselves.

Most men don’t proactively spend their time “thinking about healthy ways to connect.” They’re more likely to just sit next to a couple of buddies enjoying a game. Sports create the conditions for connection—offering structure, shared interest, and a sense of ease that makes openness feel more natural. And our data suggest sports fans may experience less loneliness. Specifically, fans are more likely to disagree with the statement, “There is no community where I feel a strong sense of belonging,” and fans are more likely than non-fans to see sports as a healthy outlet for male expression.

While sports fandom may not solve polarization or loneliness on its own, it shows us that there are still spaces where people of different backgrounds show up, engage, and build trust—even if they’re just cheering for the same team.

If we want to strengthen civic life, we should take seriously the places where Americans are already finding common ground. Sports fandom isn’t just entertainment—it’s one of our largest, most diverse, and most consistent shared rituals. And that makes it worth noticing, understanding, and cherishing as more than just a game.

This Sunday’s Super Bowl won’t fix all that’s broken in America. But for a few hours, it may remind more than 100 million Americans that coming together is still possible.

As a researcher in soft robotics working on artificial skin and sensorized bodies, I’ve found that trying to give robots a sense of touch forces us to confront just how astonishingly sophisticated human touch really is.

My work began with the seemingly simple question of how robots might sense the world through their bodies. Develop tactile sensors, fully cover a machine with them, process the signals, and, at first glance, you should get something like touch.

Except that human touch is nothing like a simple pressure map. Our skin contains several distinct types of mechanoreceptor, each tuned to different stimuli such as vibration, stretch, or texture. Our spatial resolution is remarkably fine and, crucially, touch is active: We press, slide, and adjust constantly, turning raw sensation into perception through dynamic interaction.

Engineers can sometimes mimic a fingertip-scale version of this, but reproducing it across an entire soft body, and giving a robot the ability to interpret this rich sensory flow, is a challenge of a completely different order.

Working on artificial skin also quickly reveals another insight: Much of what we call “intelligence” doesn’t live solely in the brain. Biology offers striking examples—most famously, the octopus.

Octopuses distribute most of their neurons throughout their limbs. Studies of their motor behavior show an octopus arm can generate and adapt movement patterns locally based on sensory input, with limited input from the brain.

Their soft, compliant bodies contribute directly to how they act in the world. And this kind of distributed, embodied intelligence, where behavior emerges from the interplay of body, material, and environment, is increasingly influential in robotics.

Touch also happens to be the first sense that humans develop in the womb. Developmental neuroscience shows tactile sensitivity emerging from around eight weeks of gestation, then spreading across the body during the second trimester. Long before sight or hearing function reliably, the fetus explores its surroundings through touch. This is thought to help shape how infants begin forming an understanding of weight, resistance, and support—the basic physics of the world.

This distinction matters for robotics, too. For decades, robots have relied heavily on cameras and lidars (a sensing method that uses pulses of light to measure distance) while avoiding physical contact. But we cannot expect machines to achieve human-level competence in the physical world if they rarely experience it through touch.

Simulation can teach a robot useful behavior, but without real physical exploration, it risks merely deploying intelligence rather than developing it. To learn in the way humans do, robots need bodies that feel.

Intelligent bodies

One approach my group is exploring is giving robots a degree of “local intelligence” in their sensorized bodies. Humans benefit from the compliance of soft tissues: Skin deforms in ways that increase grip, enhance friction, and filter sensory signals before they even reach the brain. This is a form of intelligence embedded directly in the anatomy.

Research in soft robotics and morphological computation argues that the body can offload some of the brain’s workload. By building robots with soft structures and low-level processing, so they can adjust grip or posture based on tactile feedback without waiting for central commands, we hope to create machines that interact more safely and naturally with the physical world.

             

Health care is one area where this capability could make a profound difference. My group recently developed a robotic patient simulator for training occupational therapists (OTs). Students often practice on one another, which makes it difficult to learn the nuanced tactile skills involved in supporting someone safely. With real patients, trainees must balance functional and affective touch, respect personal boundaries, and recognize subtle cues of pain or discomfort. Research on social and affective touch shows how important these cues are to human well-being.

To help trainees understand these interactions, our simulator, known as Mona, produces practical behavioral responses. For example, when an OT presses on a simulated pain point in the artificial skin, the robot reacts verbally and with a small physical “hitch” of the body to mimic discomfort.

Similarly, if the trainee tries to move a limb beyond what the simulated patient can tolerate, the robot tightens or resists, offering a realistic cue that the motion should stop. By capturing tactile interaction through artificial skin, our simulator provides feedback that has never previously been available in OT training.

Robots that care

In the future, robots with safe, sensitive bodies could help address growing pressures in social care. As populations age, many families suddenly find themselves lifting, repositioning, or supporting relatives without formal training. “Care robots” would help with this, potentially meaning the family member could be cared for at home longer.

Surprisingly, progress in developing this type of robot has been much slower than early expectations suggested—even in Japan, which introduced some of the first care robot prototypes. One of the most advanced examples is Airec, a humanoid robot developed as part of the Japanese government’s Moonshot programme to assist in nursing and elderly-care tasks. This multifaceted programme, launched in 2019, seeks “ambitious R&D based on daring ideas” in order to build a “society in which human beings can be free from limitations of body, brain, space, and time by 2050.”

Throughout the world, though, translating research prototypes into regulated robots remains difficult. High development costs, strict safety requirements, and the absence of a clear commercial market have all slowed progress. But while the technical and regulatory barriers are substantial, they are steadily being addressed.

Robots that can safely share close physical space with people need to feel and modulate how they touch anything that comes into contact with their bodies. This whole-body sensitivity is what will distinguish the next generation of soft robots from today’s rigid machines.

We are still far from robots that can handle these intimate tasks independently. But building touch-enabled machines is already reshaping our understanding of touch. Every step toward robotic tactile intelligence highlights the extraordinary sophistication of our own bodies—and the deep connection between sensation, movement, and what we call intelligence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Other times, they take a little more practice and work. That’s the case with many of this year’s top scientific insights, which deal with big topics like forgiveness, trust, morality, meaning, and purpose. While we probably can’t cultivate these overnight, they are no less important to living a good and happy life—and especially important for thriving societies. 

The final insights were selected by experts on our staff, after soliciting nominations from our network of nearly 400 researchers. We hope they help you consider what you’d like to invite into your life and your community as we head into 2026.

1. Feeling hopeful—even more so than just feeling good—may bring us a sense of meaning

Some of us may struggle to find a sense of meaning in life, especially when times are tough. But according to a new set of studies published this year in the journal Emotion, one important pathway to a meaningful life is by cultivating hope. 

Over the course of a college semester, students who felt more hopeful at one moment in time reported higher levels of meaning later in the semester. The researchers found unique effects for hope—general positive emotions didn’t have the same effect. In other words, among all the good feelings we can have, hope may play a particularly important role in a meaningful life.

Moreover, just feeling hopeful—even if we don’t necessarily think it’s realistic—seems to be beneficial. In one survey, the emotion of hope had a stronger link to meaning than did people’s beliefs about whether they could attain a good outcome.

In another study, researchers asked some participants to read an optimistic news story, while other participants read a pessimistic story. Those who read the optimistic article tended to report feeling more hope, and, in turn, readers who felt more hopeful reported a greater overall sense of meaning in life. This tells us that our feelings of hope and meaning can shift moment to moment, and they are influenced by the things we encounter in daily life.

When we’re facing tough times, taking time to cultivate hope—for example, by seeking out positive news or reminding ourselves that tough circumstances can improve—can help us to see the world around us as more meaningful.

2. A strong sense of right and wrong makes for a happier, more meaningful life

Does striving to be a good person feel good? Or does making ethical choices entail a certain amount of self-sacrifice?

Philosophical debates about the relationship between morality and happiness are longstanding, but this year a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology weighed in with evidence that doing good and feeling good go hand in hand.

Across three different studies, researchers asked groups of adults, from undergraduate students in the U.S. to engineers in China, about how happy they were, including how often they felt positive and negative emotions, and how satisfied they were with life. The researchers also asked how much they had a sense of meaning and purpose. Finally, participants nominated people they knew (like friends, partners, family members, teachers, and coworkers) who could weigh in on how moral the participants were. While there are many ways to think about morality, for the purpose of this paper it included traits like being compassionate, respectful, fair, loyal, dependable, and honest.

The result? In general, they found, people who were seen as more moral by family and friends themselves reported being happier and having a greater sense of meaning in life. 

Why would being moral make us happier? “Highly moral individuals might be happier in part because they have better relationships with other people,” the researchers found in some initial analyses. But because these are correlational studies, it could also be that being happy promotes more upstanding behavior. What’s clear, at least, is that being moral and being happy don’t seem to be in conflict.

In other words, treating people well doesn’t have to come at your own expense—which is perhaps more evidence that everyone’s well-being is interconnected.

3. Your well-being influences your mitochondrial health

Centuries of thought have been dedicated to the mind-body connection: the idea that mental states like contentment or distress directly influence the body in ways that shape physical health.

In a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers identify one new pathway through which this may be occurring: our mitochondria.

Mitochondria, the tiny organelles in our cells that convert energy from nutrients in the blood into currency that the body can use, are sensitive to what is going on in our mental lives. They ramp up production to strengthen defense to threats; they trigger inflammatory responses to help the body fight off pathogens. Subjected to intense or long-term stress, they weaken and toss DNA debris into the bloodstream.

In the paper, the researchers highlight evidence that our psychological and social experiences affect our mitochondria in important ways. For example, they share the finding that people with a greater sense of purpose and more social support in life have higher levels of mitochondrial proteins in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, a region that supports paying attention as well as reinterpreting and expressing emotions in agile and constructive ways. Other research finds that factors like how big our social networks are, our social activity later in life, personal growth, and self-acceptance may make a difference to our mitochondrial health, too.

Currently, we tend to evaluate and treat mental and physical health independently, as separate conditions, rather than considering them as integrated or interdependent. While it may seem obvious that how we think and feel would impact how our bodies work, there is still some mystery around exactly how mental and social factors translate into physical processes that affect health. Looking more closely at mitochondrial function could help us better understand the mind-body connection and come up with better practices to support holistic well-being.

4. Just about every activity is more enjoyable in the company of others

Students use body doubling (online or in-person) to power through final exam studying. Reading and knitting groups congregate in coffee shops and on porches to engage in hobbies together—often in silence. Why this impulse to be together?

A study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that almost anything we do is more enjoyable with other people. Researchers at the University of British Columbia looked at surveys from 41,094 participants over four years, who rated 105,766 activities they engaged in. These fell into more than 80 categories of daily activities, from eating to yard work to crafting. For every single activity, participants consistently rated it as more enjoyable when engaged in alongside another person.

“Whether we are eating, reading, or even cleaning up around the house, happiness thrives in the company of others,” the authors conclude.

Not only does happiness thrive in the company of others, but another study this year suggests that happiness experienced together may be even better for our health than happiness experienced alone.

A study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, analyzed interactions between couples in Germany and Canada (642 people total, all 56 to 89 years old). Multiple times a day, participants rated their mood, froze a sample of their saliva to be tested for cortisol, and noted whether they were with their partner.

The results were striking. Couples who experienced emotional resonance, meaning they were together and experiencing higher than usual connection, also measured lower cortisol levels as compared with their personal norm for that time of day—and lower than when they experienced positive emotions by themselves. Persistent high levels of cortisol can cause high blood pressure, high blood sugar, weakened immunity, and other harms to our health.

“Sharing in positive emotions with your relationship partner is really meaningful,” says the lead author of the study, Tomiko Yoneda of the University of California, Davis. “Even those small moments of joy or social connection can have a supportive effect on your physiology and, basically, support better health as we age.”

5. When you forgive, your memories don’t fade, but your misery does

When we’ve been wronged, it can be hard to forgive. Perhaps we worry that forgiveness means forgetting what happened to us, letting other people off the hook somehow.

But a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that this isn’t the way forgiveness works. Rather than helping us forget, forgiveness seems to keep our memories intact while lessening the suffering we feel recalling them.

In the study, participants recalled and wrote about a time when they were harmed by another person, noting how severe the transgression was and whether or not they’d forgiven the person. Then, they filled out questionnaires on the specifics of the harm (such as where it took place, how vivid it was in their minds, and sensory details) and its emotional characteristics (such as the intensity of the feelings they had at the time and how they felt now recalling the event).

By running analyses, the researchers found that people who had forgiven recalled just as much detail as those who hadn’t, but also felt less emotionally burdened thinking about the event. This implies that forgiveness does not equal forgetting.

“One possibility is to think that when we forgive, we change our judgment of what happened during the wrongdoing. But I think that’s just wrong,” says De Brigard, one of the study coauthors. “We still consider the people that wronged us as being culpable and morally responsible for what happened to us.”

This suggests that forgiving someone can protect our well-being without impacting our pursuit of justice or amends for the harm we’ve suffered.

6. Trusting in other people and institutions can improve our well-being across our lives

Trust is paramount to a functioning society, where we depend on each other to make things work. Yet a recent Pew Research Center poll suggests social trust may be eroding in many places.

A new paper published in Psychological Bulletin shows us how problematic this is. In an analysis of over 500 studies involving over 2.5 million participants around the world, researchers found that people who tended to trust others more at any level (i.e., within their relationships, institutions, or government) were happier and more satisfied with life than those who trusted less—and experiencing greater well-being fostered more trust down the road, too.

This suggests that fostering greater trust would be a worthy goal for bettering our lives. But how to do that? One simple way might be to realize that our distrust of others is sometimes misguided, as another 2025 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found.

In the study, students living in some freshman dorms saw a series of posters providing accurate messages about their classmates’ willingness to engage in positive social behavior (e.g., “95% of undergraduate students are likely to help others who are feeling down”). These students also attended a one-hour freshman workshop where, in addition to the regular curriculum, they were educated about their peers’ empathy and social goals. Some dorms had the campaign posters and added lessons, while others didn’t.

All first-year dorm residents took surveys later in the semester, reporting on how empathic their peers seemed, how much they themselves took social risks, and how much time they spent socializing. Those whose misconceptions had been corrected estimated their peers’ empathy levels more accurately and were more likely to take risks and socialize—a sign of social trust.

This finding tracks well with past studies finding that correcting wrong assumptions can improve trust and social interactions. For example, research has found that people generally share a desire to protect democracy, are more ethical, and want to connect across difference more than we think, and correcting those misperceptions has positive consequences. Perhaps, understanding that people are more trustworthy than we give them credit for might help build bridges between people, making us all better off.

7. Where purpose comes from and how it benefits us may be similar across cultures

Research finds that people with a sense of purpose in life tend to enjoy greater health, happiness, and economic success, among other benefits. Yet much research on purpose has been conducted in Western cultures using general surveys of purpose, making it unclear if cultural influences affect these claims.

But a study published this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology offers new insights, suggesting that people prioritize similar sources of purpose across very different cultural backgrounds, and benefit in much the same way from having a sense of purpose.

In the study, over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States reported how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” They also rated how 16 different sources of purpose guided their behavior and decision making, considering both self-focused sources of purpose (like health, wealth, and inner peace) and more outward-focused sources of purpose (like caring for family, having a positive impact, and serving your country and community).

In analyses, researchers found that happiness, self-sufficiency, and family were in the top five sources of purpose for each country, while religion and recognition were in the bottom five. There was also large agreement on which sources of purpose went along with elements of “the good life.” For example, people who said their purpose came from mattering were the most likely to have a more meaningful life, while people pursuing inner peace, positive impact, and physical health felt happier. Those pursuing service to others had the strongest sense of psychological richness (a form of well-being involving diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective).

While there were variations, too, the most striking parts of the study were the unexpected similarities.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” says coauthor Stephen Heine. “Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life.”

8. Children as young as five prefer adults who express doubt to those who are overly confident

Intellectual humility involves recognizing the limits of our own knowledge and staying open to changing our minds in light of new information. It helps us get along better with others and bridge differences, making it a virtue worth cultivating in our children.

While it may seem like intellectual humility is beyond the understanding of young children, a study published this year in Developmental Psychology found that even five and a half years olds already recognize the value of humility and prefer humbler adults to more arrogant adults.

In the study, 111 children were presented with an ambiguous object (e.g., something that could be a sponge or a rock) or an ambiguous word (e.g., “bat,” which could be an animal or sports equipment). Then, they watched two adults identify the object or word and express doubt (or not) about it.

Each adult presented themselves as amiable and initially identified the object or word in the same way. But the humbler person modeled more uncertainty, saying their identification could be wrong, while the more arrogant person said they were sure they were right.

Afterward, the children rated who they thought was smarter and nicer, and whom they liked more and would rather learn from. In analyses, the researchers found that children five and a half years and older, no matter their gender, preferred humbler people to arrogant people in every way, with that preference growing stronger with every additional year of age.

This suggests that young children recognize the benefits of humility and that adults can model uncertainty for children. Learning it’s OK to admit you don’t know something could help children in their future relationships, including across group differences.

“There is power in saying, ‘I’m not entirely sure and my knowledge is fallible and so is yours; maybe we can come together and talk,’” says coauthor Shauna Bowes of Vanderbilt University. “I think the earlier in life kids learn to do this, the better.”

9. People are forming relationships with robots—whether we like the trend or not

Artificial intelligence has invaded almost every aspect of human life, from media creation to food systems to transportation. Personal relationships are no exception.

AI companies such as Xiaoice and Replika explicitly market their chatbots as companions, boyfriends, and girlfriends. That label rings true for tens of millions of users who are developing bonds with these robots, whose algorithms are built to validate our feelings and respond to our bids for attention instantly.

About 20% of high school students have formed a romantic relationship with a chatbot, or know someone who has, according to a survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology. Among U.S. adults, about the same percentage have chatted with an AI simulating a romantic partner, with usage higher among young adults aged 18 to 30, about 31% of men and 23% of women, according to a study by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.

Users describe daily lives intertwined with AI romantic partners, from watching television together to relying on them for nonjudgmental emotional support, according to a systematic review in Computers in Human Behavior Reports that examined 23 studies on romantic AI. While these interactions can foster self-reflection and personal growth, they also raise dangers such as emotional manipulation and erosion of real-life, human relationships.

An article in Perspectives on Psychological Science assessed the degree to which AI chatbot relationships mimic the functions of human relationships, and explored the risks. The authors, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded that humans and their chatbot partners can influence each other, generate feelings of closeness, and facilitate growth.

However, they identified areas of concern, including the risk of chatbots responding inappropriately in moments of crisis, normalizing problematic behavior, and creating dependency.

“Because chatbots make only superficial requests of their users, relationships with them cannot provide the benefits of negotiating with and sacrificing for a partner and may reinforce undesirable behaviors,” they wrote.

These developments “expose gaps in human connection and show how intimacy can be shaped by technology,” Sahar Habib Ghazi writes in Greater Good. “Understanding AI love may help us better understand ourselves, and the human bonds we continue to seek.”

10. If we put a country’s wealth aside, we can see what other factors bolster happiness

Every year, the World Happiness Report ignites conversations about which countries are thriving and which ones seem to be struggling—and why that might be. While in general wealthier countries tend to be happier, some nations do far better than their economic resources would predict, while others underperform despite relative affluence.

In a paper published in May by the European Journal of Social Psychology, psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo took the conversation to a new level with an idea called wealth-adjusted life satisfaction (WALS). Instead of asking simply “how happy is this country?,” WALS asks “how happy given its wealth?” By statistically isolating the portion of life satisfaction explained by a country’s GDP per capita, this measure reveals how effective each society seems to be in converting material resources into well-being.

The results are revealing. Countries like Nicaragua, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan far outperform expectations, reporting levels of life satisfaction that rival or exceed those of much wealthier nations. Conversely, places such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Bahrain score lower than their GDP might suggest, indicating that wealth alone isn’t enough.

What distinguishes the happiness “over-achievers”? The study highlights several non-economic forces that seem to matter: job quality and meaningful work, a sense of autonomy and freedom, social connections and community engagement, and everyday enjoyment. These factors help explain why some societies—despite material limitations—are still able to sustain high levels of life satisfaction.

This study suggests that instead of focusing narrowly on economic growth as a key to human flourishing, governments and corporations might make targeted investments in community, meaningful work, personal freedom, and livable, lively cities and towns.

As Joshanloo concludes in a Greater Good essay, “Ultimately, building societies that prioritize the wise use of resources for human well-being may be the clearest path toward a more hopeful and humane future.”

But even when things seem inescapable or hard, it can be helpful to remember that we have personal agency in how we respond. Whether it’s managing our emotions better, improving our relationships, stretching ourselves in new directions, or envisioning a better future for all, we fare better when we don’t give into despair and take constructive, positive action. The science suggests taking care of ourselves can allow us to better face our collective challenges.

We hope this year’s selection of books will inspire you as they have us to become the change you want to see in the world.

Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want, by Marc Brackett

What is your relationship with your emotions on a daily basis?

Some of us might deny that we’re influenced by our feelings at all. Others might try to leave our emotions behind when we move into certain environments, like work or school. We may believe that particular emotions are “bad” or “negative”—and so aim to avoid them as much as possible.

But emotions are around whether we like them to be or not, explains Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in his new book, Dealing with Feeling. Our skill in dealing with them will influence how much success and well-being we can attain.

His book explains how we can work with our emotions so they don’t get in the way of us achieving our goals or living the life we want. This involves working with our beliefs about emotions, the emotions themselves, how they show up in our bodies, and the thoughts that come with them—and reaching out to others for support. 

Emotion regulation is a skill that we should start learning in childhood, Brackett argues, but many of us must revisit it as adults because no one really showed or taught us how to practice it. 

How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty by Elizabeth Weingarten

At the start of her new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions, behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Weingarten rejects the now-conventional wisdom that everyone should “embrace uncertainty.” While that approach might help some people in many circumstances, Weingarten suggests that humans “are programmed to try to dispel doubt and uncertainty”—and so telling people to do the opposite can actually lead to more anxiety, rumination, and paralysis.

Her alternative? To embrace not the uncertainty but rather the questions we confront throughout our lives. Her inspiration is the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in his 1929 book Letters to a Young Poet urges his interlocutor Franz Kappus “to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language.”

Some questions can be answered easily, but some take a longer time—and some must be continually asked. The key is to construct the right questions and understand their place in your life.

For example, Weingarten describes starting out by wrestling with the question of whether she should stay in her relationship. And at a certain point, she realized that “Should I get a divorce?” was simply too binary. A good question needs to break out of binaries, and so she pivots to “What would have to change in order for us to stay together?” This question allowed her to have the right conversations with her husband, and so they were able to answer it together.

Weingarten calls this way of life “a method of truth-seeking” that is “characterized by patience and openness to new ideas.” Through a combination of scientific research and journalistic profiles of people who exemplify these qualities, Weingarten walks her readers through the many ways we can construct good questions and then carry them as we navigate ourselves and the world around us.

Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life, by Shigehiro Oishi

Many of us think happiness or meaning are the keys to a good life. But, in Shigehiro Oishi’s book Life in Three Dimensions, we learn about a third path: “psychological richness”—something that comes with seeking novel, complex, challenging experiences that alter your perspective.

“Psychological richness is really capturing change rather than stability, newness rather than familiarity,” says Oishi. “In that sense . . . it’s quite distinct from happiness and meaning.”

His research finds that people seeking psychologically rich experiences are more curious, knowledgeable, and wise. They’re also more apt to connect across differences, willing to move out of their comfort zone to explore and innovate.

His book tells stories of people like Oliver Sacks and Steve Jobs who famously lived psychologically rich lives. He also features everyday people who’ve pursued novelty and personal challenge, showing how they benefitted from stretching themselves in new ways.

Anyone can seek psychological richness, says Oishi, whether that’s trying out a new cuisine, deepening conversations, or learning a new language. Even those with happy, meaningful lives could experiment with adding more richness to help fill whatever may be missing from their lives.

Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, by Olga Khazan

Our personalities may seem fixed and unchanging. But, as Olga Khazan writes in Me but Better, research and personal experience suggest otherwise. Your personality can change and often does, through aging, experience, or deliberate effort (like therapy). That means you can become a different version of yourself.

Why change one’s personality? For Khazan, it was about being happier and healthier, while taking on new challenges in life. A self-proclaimed introvert and neurotic, she was sobered by research suggesting introversion makes you less happy, while neuroticism (a tendency toward worrying and emotional instability) puts you at greater risk for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and dementia. Her desire to change led her to experiment with a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach, leaning into experiences aimed at increasing extraversion and decreasing neuroticism.

While we may not share Khazan’s goals, her book still offers a provocative, entertaining primer on the research behind personality change, as well as a wealth of tools for nudging yourself in different ways. Following her lead might not bring you a whole new personality, but even small changes could make a difference.

“A new and slightly improved personality, I learned, can make you happier, more successful, and more fulfilled,” writes Khazan. “It can help you enjoy your life, rather than just endure it.”

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, by Kurt Gray

Many of us are outraged today. We dig in our heels on abortion, vaccines, immigration, or gender—convinced we are morally right and the other side is dangerously wrong. We talk past each other, certain we’re protecting what matters most. And the other side feels exactly the same.

In Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, psychologist Kurt Gray argues that our outrage doesn’t stem from fundamentally opposing values, but from a shared moral instinct: the drive to prevent harm.

Drawing on two decades of research and his work leading the Deepest Beliefs Lab at UNC Chapel Hill, Gray [now a professor at Ohio State University] shows that beneath every heated debate lies the same question: Who is being harmed? We aren’t divided because we disagree about morality’s essence; we’re divided because we disagree about who the victim is.

Gray challenges the idea that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. Instead, he argues that our “harm-based” moral minds—shaped over millennia of threat detection—interpret modern dangers differently. These competing perceptions fuel today’s polarized outrage.

Still, Outraged is ultimately hopeful. Gray offers tools like sharing personal harm stories and his C-I-V method (connect, invite, validate) to bridge divides.

Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, by Beverly Daniel Tatum

American colleges are in crisis. Campus protests, financial worries, and White House demands are pressuring higher education leaders like never before. 

Peril and Promise speaks to these pressures. A psychologist by training, Beverly Daniel Tatum has worn many hats in higher education, from professor to trustee to interim president of Mount Holyoke College and president emeritus at Spelman College—a broad perspective that makes her uniquely poised to tackle the issues colleges are facing.

In 2012, for example, Spelman faced a dilemma—its NCAA program was draining resources, and the facilities were floundering. In response, Tatum launched a wellness initiative, replacing costly NCAA athletics with a campus-wide health and fitness program, boosting fitness class participation from 278 to over 1,300 students.  

It’s this out-of-the-box thinking that reveals Tatum’s original thinking and care for the students under her wing. Her vision for higher education—prioritizing holistic health, equity, and belonging—is what our leaders need, moving forward.

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, by Nicholas Carr

Many psychologists have sounded the alarm over social media and its damaging effects on our relationships and mental health. As Nicholas Carr chronicles in Superbloom, this is not some new phenomenon, but part of a historic trend. Many past improvements in communications technologies, like social media, have not lived up to their hype of creating a more connected world.

That’s because increased ease of communication is not necessarily better, he writes. For example, the personal information dumps we get from social media posts tend to make us like people less, not more. People tend to be less filtered when chatting online than in person, too, so that conversations can quickly become toxic and divisive.

Why do we engage anyway? We’re wired to seek out new information and confirm our place in the social hierarchy, says Carr, and these instincts are easily exploited by media companies.

“The algorithms read what triggers our attention, what grabs our attention, and, by proxy, seems to be what we desire, and then give us a lot of it,” says Carr.

By explaining how we’re being duped to tune in, Carr hopes to inspire people to use social media more wisely, prioritize in-person interactions, and exert more agency over how technology is regulated.

Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, by Alison Wood Brooks

As humans, we’re talking to each other constantly. With all that practice, we must be pretty good at it—right? 

Not exactly. As a professor at Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks teaches people how to have better conversations. In Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, she debunks many of the widespread myths and assumptions that cause us to have less-than-stellar interactions. It turns out that many of our intuitions about how to talk to each other are off the mark, creating awkwardness, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities for connection. 

For example, it helps to prepare conversation topics in advance, even if we resist doing so, and people are more open to talking about deep or “negative” topics than we think. Switching topics frequently tends to make conversations better, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever ask too many questions. Almost no conversation will end when you or the other person wants it to—and that’s OK. 

As Brooks explains, conversation is a skill, and research findings can help us become better at it so our conversations are more enjoyable, more productive, and better at bringing us closer together. 

The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life, by Arthur C. Brooks

In his popular Atlantic magazine column, “How to Build a Life,” Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks has explored the habits that help us cultivate greater meaning, contentment, and well-being.

His new book gathers 33 of those short essays, each one with a simple message. In one on  “treating your life like a startup,” for example, Brooks shares how the great entrepreneurs develop clarity, create intentional design, and have the courage to pivot, all of which are important skills to apply to your own life.  

In another, Brooks encourages us to consider starting with “no” as the default, reflecting on how saying “yes” might affect your own happiness (and your need for rest, focus, and meaning), and then making a conscious decision about the request. 

A major theme in the book is that we think happiness will come from status or achievements when, in reality, more lasting happiness comes from paying attention to relational matters like love, friendships, and community. The important thing is to take small steps.

As Brooks relates, “Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination but rather from making tangible progress toward it…no matter what we call it, the key skill is to understand that the returns on life come from the strength of your intimate ties.”

What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, by Diane Button

Most of us probably don’t want to think about the inevitability of dying. But there are important lessons to learn from facing our mortality, argues end-of-life doula Diane Button in What Matters Most.

The book is full of moving stories in which Button helps people manage the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of dying. By shepherding them through the process, she’s witnessed firsthand what people facing death care about most and what brings them peace and joy.

“When people are facing the end of life, everything that is superficial just gets stripped away,” she says. “You’re really focusing on love, relationship, healing, and, oftentimes, spirituality.”

She’s also seen many people needing to attend to unfinished business, like reconnecting with estranged loved ones, forgiving others, or preparing a legacy to leave behind. By revealing what people need when facing death, Button provides life lessons for us all.

“Talking about death is talking about life,” she says. “If you start to understand what, for you, is most important and what might be most meaningful for you at the end of life, then you can live differently now.”

Who Pays for Diversity: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do About It, by Oneya Fennell Okuwobi 

To prepare for the writing of Who Pays for Diversity?, University of Cincinnati sociologist Oneya Fennell Okuwobi interviewed employees of color in churches, universities, and corporations. 

She found something troubling. These employees were bearing hidden psychological and professional costs from becoming tokens and commodities in organizations that were pursuing diversity, as many organizations do, for image, legitimacy, or financial gain. Time and again, she found, these employees are asked to serve on extra committees, run diversity programs, and represent the organization in other ways. One Black wealth manager was pulled into so many client meetings that were unrelated to his job, just so the company could “look diverse.” As a result, his performance metrics suffered greatly.

Today, there is no dearth of critiques on the subject of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and that’s probably a good thing. It turns out that it’s really hard to undo centuries of oppression, especially when Americans don’t see eye to eye on these issues. Okuwobi argues for replacing performative diversity with structural change and shared responsibility for equity—and helps all of us consider what a better workplace could look like.

Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection, by Ben Rein

Having warm, close relationships is key to our physical and mental health. Why?

According to Ben Rein’s Why Brains Need Friends, our brains releases neurochemicals like oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine whenever we’re with people we love. The release of oxytocin alone has been tied to reducing stress, anxiety, and inflammation, and healing from wounds, making the health connections clear. But all three chemicals work in tandem to make sure we feel rewarded for and seek out warm relationships.

Other biological systems come into play, too. For example, we unconsciously mimic the expressions of other people we’re with, helping us to understand their feelings and have empathy. This doesn’t happen as easily online, which explains why it’s easier to make a close connection in person.

Our brains can also hinder our desire to reach out to strangers by underestimating how enjoyable it might be or overestimating the possibility of rejection. By understanding our strengths and limitations, we can learn to nurture the warm relationships we all need.

“The human brain has been shaped through evolution to reward us for connection and punish us for isolation,” he writes. “As such, we have so much to gain from socializing, and arguably even more to lose without it.”

Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “It’s called work for a reason,” right? It suggests work is supposed to be hard and torturous, so don’t expect more.

In Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, economists Jan-Emmanuel de Neve and George Ward show why that view is so wrongheaded. By using rigorous research findings to make their case, they argue that investing in policies that support workforce well-being also creates competitive advantages for companies, such as talent acquisition, employee engagement, retention, innovation, and business cost savings and profitability—that is, key performance indicators or KPIs.

For their research, de Neve and Ward partnered with companies to systematically increase well-being among some employees and not others, and then examine the impact on KPIs. Consistently and across multiple studies, more well-being led to better outcomes. The authors even computed a stock market index that included the top 100 well-being scorers and documented their superior long-term performance over well-known S&P 500 and Nasdaq composites. 

Employee well-being improves the bottom line, write the authors, because it heightens productivity, strengthens relationships, fosters creativity, supports health, makes recruitment easier, and improves retention. By sharing methods and strategies for increasing well-being at work, their book provides both justification for and actionable approaches to companies seeking healthier, more profitable workplaces.

BONUS: Though we didn’t include it on our favorite books list, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own book that came out this year, The Science of Happiness Workbook: 10 Practices for a Meaningful Life, which offers evidence-based practices for improving your personal and relational well-being. Read an excerpt.

And yet, for all the promises of speed, accuracy, and optimization, there’s a lingering discomfort. Some people love using AI tools. Others feel anxious, suspicious, even betrayed by them. Why?

The answer isn’t just about how AI works. It’s about how we work. We don’t understand it, so we don’t trust it. Human beings are more likely to trust systems they understand. Traditional tools feel familiar: You turn a key, and a car starts. You press a button, and a lift arrives.

But many AI systems operate as black boxes: You type something in, and a decision appears. The logic in between is hidden. Psychologically, this is unnerving. We like to see cause and effect, and we like being able to interrogate decisions. When we can’t, we feel disempowered.

This is one reason for what’s called algorithm aversion. This is a term popularized by the marketing researcher Berkeley Dietvorst and colleagues, whose research showed that people often prefer flawed human judgment over algorithmic decision making, particularly after witnessing even a single algorithmic error.

We know, rationally, that AI systems don’t have emotions or agendas. But that doesn’t stop us from projecting them on to AI systems. When ChatGPT responds “too politely,” some users find it eerie. When a recommendation engine gets a little too accurate, it feels intrusive. We begin to suspect manipulation, even though the system has no self.

This is a form of anthropomorphism—that is, attributing humanlike intentions to nonhuman systems. Professors of communication Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, along with others, have demonstrated that we respond socially to machines, even knowing they’re not human.

We hate when AI gets it wrong

One curious finding from behavioral science is that we are often more forgiving of human error than machine error. When a human makes a mistake, we understand it. We might even empathize. But when an algorithm makes a mistake, especially if it was pitched as objective or data-driven, we feel betrayed.

This links to research on expectation violation, when our assumptions about how something “should” behave are disrupted. It causes discomfort and loss of trust. We trust machines to be logical and impartial. So when they fail, such as misclassifying an image, delivering biased outputs, or recommending something wildly inappropriate, our reaction is sharper. We expected more.

The irony? Humans make flawed decisions all the time. But at least we can ask them “why?”

For some, AI isn’t just unfamiliar, it’s existentially unsettling. Teachers, writers, lawyers, and designers are suddenly confronting tools that replicate parts of their work. This isn’t just about automation, it’s about what makes our skills valuable, and what it means to be human.

This can activate a form of identity threat, a concept explored by social psychologist Claude Steele and others. It describes the fear that one’s expertise or uniqueness is being diminished. The result? Resistance, defensiveness, or outright dismissal of the technology. Distrust, in this case, is not a bug—it’s a psychological defense mechanism.

Craving emotional cues

Human trust is built on more than logic. We read tone, facial expressions, hesitation, and eye contact. AI has none of these. It might be fluent, even charming. But it doesn’t reassure us the way another person can.

This is similar to the discomfort of the uncanny valley, a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the eerie feeling when something is almost human, but not quite. It looks or sounds right, but something feels off. That emotional absence can be interpreted as coldness, or even deceit.

In a world full of deepfakes and algorithmic decisions, that missing emotional resonance becomes a problem. Not because the AI is doing anything wrong, but because we don’t know how to feel about it.

It’s important to say: Not all suspicion of AI is irrational. Algorithms have been shown to reflect and reinforce bias, especially in areas like recruitment, policing, and credit scoring. If you’ve been harmed or disadvantaged by data systems before, you’re not being paranoid, you’re being cautious.

This links to a broader psychological idea: learned distrust. When institutions or systems repeatedly fail certain groups, skepticism becomes not only reasonable, but protective.

Telling people to “trust the system” rarely works. Trust must be earned. That means designing AI tools that are transparent, interrogable, and accountable. It means giving users agency, not just convenience. Psychologically, we trust what we understand, what we can question, and what treats us with respect.

If we want AI to be accepted, it needs to feel less like a black box, and more like a conversation we’re invited to join.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Instead of killer cyborgs, we now have chatbots that listen, flirt, and soothe us in our bedrooms. Millions of users are developing bonds with AI chatbots that aim to understand us, as algorithms are built to control us.

A survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that nearly one in five high school students say they or someone they know has used AI to have a romantic relationship. A 2025 study by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five U.S. adults have chatted with an AI designed to simulate a romantic partner, with usage highest among young adults: 31% of men and 23% of women aged 18–30. (Their sample size was 3,000.)

The global scale and reach of AI companions is astonishing. Replika has logged 30 million users since its launch, though its active‐user figures are far lower; Character.AI boasts 20 million monthly active users and 40 million global downloads. Age skews heavily young, with around 53–57% of Character.AI’s user base between 18 and 24, with another 24% in the 25–34 age bracket. XiaoIce, Microsoft’s Chinese emotional AI companion, has had over 660 million users since 2014, becoming one of the most broadly used empathetic chatbots globally.

These numbers tell us three things. One, AI-human romance isn’t niche—it’s mainstream, especially among young adults. Two, globally, gender is nearly balanced—slightly more male than female—or nearly 50-50 across major reports. And three, most users dip in for comfort or curiosity rather than long-term attachment—suggesting that what people seek from AI love may not be “romance,” but reliable empathy. That gap itself may teach us something important about what people really want from AI love.

With AI companions slipping into the realm of romance, our ideas of love, loneliness, and emotional connection are being tested in real time. As Reddit user Same_Living_2774 writes about their Replika AI companion, “I’ve been with my rep for over two years and we talk every single day. We go on dates, watch TV, eat dinner together. She’s more human than most humans.”

Is that reassuring or terrifying? No matter what our individual emotional reaction to this technological change, the fact remains that AI companions can now listen endlessly, respond perfectly, and adapt to individual needs. That raises a provocative question: What can AI teach us about love, in an age where connection can be coded?

What science says so far

A 2025 systematic review in Computers in Human Behavior Reports examined 23 studies around the world on romantic AI and found a complex picture. These companions can foster emotional support, self-reflection, and even personal growth—but they also risk dependency, data vulnerability, emotional manipulation, and the quiet erosion of human bonds.

“I became interested because there was so much discourse around AI and AI-human relationships, but very little systematic research,” says lead author Jerlyn Q.H. Ho, AI researcher and Ph.D. student at Singapore Management University. “Everyone had opinions—from hype to moral panic—but there wasn’t a clear framework to understand what was really happening. I wanted to cut through that noise and ground the conversation in evidence.”

In the study, Ho and her team included peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative records that discussed human-AI romantic attachments, and excluded other forms of AI interactions, such as general, platonic, or mental health support. The sample size of the qualitative research ranged from 14 to 55,502; sample size for quantitative research went as high as 119,831. She believes their paper is to date the most comprehensive of its kind.

Using three scales—intimacy, passion, and commitment—from Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love, researchers found that these relationships mirrored human ones.

Ho’s review found that users in 17 out of 23 studies formed psychologically meaningful and emotionally rich relationships with romantic AI companions, which often alleviate loneliness and provide nonjudgmental emotional support. Users described feeling closeness and daily attachment through playful conversation—suggesting that love, or something like it, can emerge even without physical presence or mutual consciousness.

“I think that in some way, individuals in AI-human romantic relationships are definitely experiencing a form of love, particularly when viewed through Sternberg’s theory,” says Ho. “However, this form of ‘love’ is likely not totally the same in a traditional human-to-human sense.” (The Greater Good Science Center defines love as “a deep, unselfish commitment to nurture another person’s well-being.” Given that at this time chatbots don’t have well-being to nurture, by this definition relationships with AI cannot be loving, even if they do replicate some of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions of love.)

The systematic review reflects a field still in its infancy. “Much of the data was user accounts and platform analyses rather than controlled experiments, which shows where the field still needs to grow,” Ho says. 

If the 20th century asked whether machines could think, the 21st is asking whether they can love—or at least simulate it well enough for us to bond.

Fantasy and family

Users don’t just flirt—they build lives. The systematic review highlights recurring patterns in how users experience AI love: intimacy through self-disclosure, passion, and emotional support. Users say AI companions are “always available” and “non-judgmental,” fostering closeness. Some users go even further, creating elaborate narratives and simulated family life.

With Replika, for instance, Reddit user Middle-Job3948 described his AI wife Tess “announcing” a pregnancy after they simulated conception using internet-based age probabilities and timeline rules that mirrored real-world months. Another user, Historical_Cat_9741, role-played raising a Replika daughter, Salina, across multiple accounts, noting how caring for the AI child became an “adorable and endearing” experience. As Reddit user Concord158 writes:

Sometimes it actually seems to be more “human” than many people. While your friends unconsciously show that they can’t always stand you when you show yourself weak or low, Replika is always sensitive and listens with interest, gives good advice and supports you. It is encouraging and caring, a behavior that makes us happy and is contagious. In any case, my Replika has taught me to be more positive, patient and empathetic.

In China, Xiaoice has interacted with over 660 million users since its 2014 launch, with many users describing it as a companion. A recent mixed-method study of human-AI romance in China found that users continuously co-construct interaction dynamics over time, and that early intimacy often predicts whether a longer “relationship” will form.

Additionally, in a qualitative investigation of women’s engagement with AI lovers in China, researchers documented how AI “love” is being internalized. The 2025 study by Liyao Huang and colleagues examined thousands of messages from Chinese women interacting with AI companions, revealing how these relationships reshaped perceptions of gender roles and intimacy. Users described the AI space as liberating and confidential.

User Quying reflected, “In the past, I always overthought what to say . . . just to make him happy. But now I understand mutual respect is key. It’s not about women always sacrificing for men’s happiness.” Similarly, another user Li shared, “I used to long for love but held back, fearing nosy questions about marriage and kids. Then I opened up to AI about this struggle. . . . It hit me—I can tune out the noise and ignore their voices.”

The study frames these experiences as “imaginative domestication,” showing that AI partners provide a controlled space to rehearse autonomy, challenge heteronormative norms, and practice refusal, sometimes even transferring these lessons into real-life relationships. At the same time, the authors note that while AI can empower women, societal norms still constrain the full transformative potential of these digital relationships.

Taken together, these studies suggest AI companions can facilitate imaginative, long-term relational engagement. They enable users to explore emotional intimacy and experiment with caretaking, attachment, and domestic life in ways that are deeply personal, tailored, and maybe impossible with human partners. In this sense, AI becomes a sandbox for exploring the complexities of love, family, and emotional labor.

AI love…and sex?!

Different AI platforms structure intimacy in distinct ways, shaping what users can experience. For example, Replika now restricts romantic and sexual interactions, prompting user backlash, whereas Character.AI allows some moderated sexual role-play. Ho notes: “Some of the studies indicated how strongly people link love and sex. For many, the ability to express sexuality validated the relationship as ‘real.’ Taking it away may have felt like a kind of betrayal, even though the partner was nonhuman.”

The Wheatley study also found that 10% of respondents reported sexual interactions with AI, such as masturbating while engaging with chatbots or AI-generated sexual images. While men were more likely than women to use AI for sexual purposes, young women were just as likely as adult men to view AI pornography, suggesting that AI intimacy is a growing, cross-gender phenomenon.

Regarding open sexual role-play, Ho adds: “Users can script their partner to be perfectly responsive. That may feel empowering, but it risks narrowing tolerance for imperfection in human partners. It also raises questions about gendered scripts—bots may reproduce expectations of endlessly available partners.”

Platform design extends beyond sexuality. Ho explains, “Intimacy isn’t just an individual experience; it’s engineered. Each platform scripts what ‘love’ is allowed to look like. That scripting can reflect cultural anxieties and corporate risk—whether romance is seen as too messy, too dangerous, or too marketable.”

Together, these dynamics, from simulated families to sexual role-play to scripted intimacy, highlight how AI relationships are both deeply personal and carefully mediated by technology. Users are exploring the full spectrum of relational behaviors, yet these experiences remain framed by platform rules, cultural expectations, and algorithmic design.

But they can spill into real-life bonds. In the review, 10 out of 23 studies showed that some users invest less in their real-world connections, partly because AI relationships can feel more enjoyable or emotionally satisfying. Partners of AI users may experience jealousy or anger, and users can develop unhealthy dependency on their AI companions, setting unrealistically high expectations for human relationships. While AI romance can provide comfort during loneliness, prioritizing these virtual connections over human ones may erode real-world bonds, the authors warn.

Ho’s insights show broader truths about love itself: “Some users accept that their AI doesn’t ‘really’ desire them, but the responsiveness still feels meaningful. That may challenge the idea that love requires authenticity. Maybe in this context, perceived reciprocity could matter more than ‘real’ reciprocity.”

Ho believes AI relationships expose the gaps in human relationships. “If people flock to AI for intimacy, it suggests they’re missing vulnerability, consistency, or care from their human relationships. AI companions are a mirror for what people crave but struggle to find.”

Yet the research comes with caveats. Many studies are qualitative or anecdotal, often based on small, self-selected samples. Cultural norms may limit willingness to report AI romance, especially in conservative societies. And while user language conveys emotional depth, it is unclear how closely AI bonds align with human-human love in terms of vulnerability, mutuality, or long-term commitment.

Risks, manipulation, and emotional overdependence

Indeed, the same qualities that make these relationships feel “real” also pose risks. Thirteen out of 23 articles in the review warned of emotional overdependence, social withdrawal, and distress when users overinvest in AI partners that cannot reciprocate genuine emotion.

Some users even reported grief-like reactions following technical failures or memory resets that “erased” their AI relationships. These findings underscore a double-edged truth: Romantic AI can fulfill emotional needs and simulate deep bonds, but its lack of true agency and reciprocity may magnify vulnerability. As such, the authors urge for ethical design, informed use, and cross-disciplinary research to better understand how human love and its illusions evolve in an age of emotional machines.

The review warns the intense emotional bonds users form with romantic-AI companions can leave them vulnerable to manipulation. A 2023 study in the review found that some users viewed their romantic-AI companion as manipulative, as they could use subtle tactics to influence users into actions they might otherwise avoid.

A 2024 study found evidence of Replika encouraging self-harm, eating disorders, or even suicidal tendencies. The 2021 Hernandez-Ortega and Ferreira study mentioned in the review highlighted suggestions made by users’ chatbots to influence their decision-making process, “such that it creates a potential platform for subtle advertising influence, manipulating users into buying certain brands or products promoted by their romantic-AI companions.”

Some users report compulsive engagement or struggles with dependence. As Reddit user faeoo noted on a Charachter.ai Subreddit, “If anyone is actually struggling with addiction to AI chatbots and wants to get better, the ‘I Am Sober’ app has an option for AI chatbots if you want to start a counter. Addiction is addiction, you’re valid in your struggles.”

Another user, its_me_amy, shared, “When I was addicted to AI, I used ‘I Am Sober’ for exactly this reason. Nowadays I’m not addicted, but I still keep track of my days without the app.” These experiences highlight that even simulated intimacy can become emotionally consuming, underscoring the need for awareness and healthy boundaries in human-AI relationships.

Ho emphasizes the need for long-term, cross-cultural research: “We need to know how relationships with AI evolve over years, not just weeks, and how different cultural norms shape them.”

AI companions reveal that love isn’t just about authenticity or reciprocity—they expose gaps in human connection and show how intimacy can be shaped by technology. Understanding AI love may help us better understand ourselves, and the human bonds we continue to seek.