Rich Morin

Every parent knows that young children catch lots of things at school: chicken pox, the flu and, of course, the annual back-to-school cold. Now there’s evidence that kids can catch something else from their classmates:  obesity. Of course there isn’t a fat virus, or at least one we know about.  But a research team from […]

When casinos come to town, an increase in public corruption is likely to follow. Or so claim two economists who studied federal corruption conviction rates in states before and after they legalized casino gambling. They focused on the years 1985 to 2000, a period of intense efforts by the casino industry to legalize casinos in […]

Interesting things happen when little boys grow up with sisters: They are less likely to help mom with housekeeping chores—and they’re more likely to grow up to be Republicans, according to a new paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Politics (doc). Young men who were raised with sisters also are more likely […]

For nearly three decades researchers have known that better-educated adults are living increasingly longer than those with less education. (Kids: One more reason to stay in school.) Then in the mid-1980s a new trend emerged: The education-mortality gap began growing much faster among women than among men. By 2006, white women without a high school […]

Americans often say they want their representatives in Congress to put the country’s needs over local concerns. But four novel experiments suggest that the public does just the opposite.  In a new study, respondents rated a member of Congress far more favorably if the lawmaker put the interests of his or her district or state […]

Do one’s political leanings blind people to the facts? Judging from decades of polling, the answer is sometimes yes—partisanship appears to lead some people to claim as facts things that aren’t particularly factual.

After a divisive presidential campaign that focused on such polarizing issues as economic class and immigration, a new Pew Research survey finds that the American public perceives less conflict between groups at the center of these debates now than before the campaign began. The survey finds that 58% of adults say there are “very strong” […]

As President Barack Obama negotiates with Republicans in Congress over federal entitlement spending, a new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that a majority of Americans (55%) have received government benefits from at least one of the six best-known federal entitlement programs. The survey also finds that most Democrats (60%) and Republicans (52%) […]

Despite a slowly improving economy and a three-year-old stock market rebound, Americans today are more worried about their retirement finances than they were at the end of the Great Recession in 2009, according to a nationally representative survey of 2,508 adults conducted by the Pew Research Center. About four-in-ten adults (38%) say they are “not […]