Social psychologists Ethan Ludwin-Peery and Adam Mastroianni were in a diner one day, eating omelets, when they thought of a question neither of them could definitively answer: What makes some things good and some things bad? More concretely, why do a lot of people think of the government as bad and their phones as good?

Ethan and Adam hypothesized that humans think of something as bad when it is easy to imagine how that thing could be better. But when they dove into the scientific literature to see if research supported their hypothesis, the two realized that there is little research about how people make these judgement calls.

So they got to work.

The pair of researchers conducted studies ... lots of them. After surveying hundreds of people, Ethan and Adam realized they may have been wrong.

When asked how things could be different, people tend to always answer with how they could be bettereven if life is already pretty good. This holds true regardless of language or word choice.

Read their paper, "Things Could Be Better".

Curious about other laws of human behavior? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Margaret Cirino and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Anil Oza checked the facts. The audio engineer was Alex Drewenskus.

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Never happy? Humans tend to imagine how life could be better : Short Wave - NPR