2024 in Review: Our most popular columns of the year

Issue 149: Revisiting our most read newsletters from 2024

Thanks for an Incredible 2024!

When we created this newsletter a little under four years ago to soft-launch our book, The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony, we couldn’t have imagined the growth we’d experience. This year, we doubled our subscriber base and now connect with 6,700+ subscribers and nearly 10,000 followers. Our newsletters received over 250,000 views this year!

With so many new readers, we’re revisiting some of our most popular posts from the past year, along with a few hidden gems from our earlier days. Whether you’re a longtime subscriber catching up or a newcomer looking for a place to start, these highlights will offer useful insights and spark curiosity.

Here are our greatest hits from 2024!

#5: The Power of Us Course

Since publishing The Power of Us, we’ve had many educators request to use our teaching materials in their classrooms. We created a free syllabus, with along test questions, presentation slides, interactive activities, chapter summaries, and video content to assist educators in teaching about social identity. If you plan to use our book with your students and want access to all these free materials, just fill out this short form.

#4: The Four Dark Laws

Jay’s wrote a summary of his research on the four dark characteristics of online content that drive online engagement. Learn what types of negative content are most likely to go viral on the internet. Although this stuff works, we made a conscious decision when we launched this newsletter not to traffic in outrage, conflict, and misleading content. We decided to take the long view and try to create a healthier information diet for our subscribers. Thanks for sticking with us—despite the lack of regular outrage!

#3: The Bystander Effect

In the first of four columns debunking some of the biggest myths in social psychology, we clear up some misconceptions about the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 and the bystander effect—a phenomenon taught to millions of students that is even more interesting when you dig into the reality. We plan to debunk more big myths in the 2025, so please subscribe to read them all!

#2: How to talk about climate change

What ways of communicating about climate change are most likely to spur desire to take action for the climate? We recently conducted a massive study around the world that compared eleven interventions and report the biggest result here (spoiler alert—doomerism messages can backfire!). In addition, Yvonne interviewed Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman for insights.

#1: Why we fall for faux psychology tests

In our most popular newsletter of all time, we explain why the popular Myers-Briggs and other psychology test are wildly popular despite being mostly bullshit. We hate to be haters, but we hate bullshit even more. There is an entire industry dedicated to fooling people into taking this test, so we needed to debunk the myth and explain why it persists.

More Like Us

We checked our audience overlap statistics for this year and Substack helped identify the top five newsletters we most overlap with, with the highest overlap at 13%! We’re betting that if you like our newsletter, you’ll enjoy these ones as well…