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.
The POWER OF US Course: A syllabus for teaching about social identity
With the new school year on the horizon, we decided to share a syllabus for anyone interested in teaching about “The Power of Shared Identity” based on our book. This is a chance for people to learn directly from our book, but also go beyond it and dig into the underlying research, fresh studies, and educational materials we created. We suggest readings from some of the most relevant articles for each chapter and added new research published since we wrote the book.
#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!
The four dark laws of online engagement and the science of group psychology
Each day, we scroll through roughly 300 feet of social media content—that is equivalent to the height of the Statue of Liberty! This constant engagement is not just habitual; it fundamentally alters our identities and realities. Social media holds a fun-house mirror up to society, distorting our perceptions of reality, and the incentives and engagement structures of social media put us in constant conflict with one another.
#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!
Debunking Popular Psychology Myths #1: The Bystander Effect
The night of March 13, 1964, marked one of the darkest moments in the history of New York and the beginning of a myth that shaped how people saw the city—as well as human psychology—for decades.
#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.
How to talk about climate change and the problem with doomerism
It often feels as if the world is falling apart. In the past few years, we have faced a global pandemic, record high global temperatures, serious threats to democracy, and the rise of frightening technology — including social media and artificial intelligence. It is not surprising that people are burned out from existential panic.
#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.
Why are we suckers for Astrology, the Myers-Briggs, and other shaky psychology tests?
Scientists love to hate on the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator Test, easily the most popular and well-known measure of personality. The test puts people into 16 categories based on four personality dimensions:
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…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Power of Us to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.