In this column, we provoke fresh thinking and round up some of the weird, wonderful, quirky, surprising – and shocking – stories out there

  Avoid loss not make gains Do people choose to exert more effort to avoid losses than to make equivalent gains? Ana Farinha and Tiago Maia at the University of Lisbon, used an experimental set-up that focused not on task performance – as is generally the case in this field of research – but rather on how much effort participants opted to make to avoid losses or...