A key House lawmaker says he’s optimistic that a recent court ruling widely seen as limiting the US

Dozens of patients are moved to safety as wildfires burn out of control near Alexandroupolis.

Past high-profile trials suggest additional scrutiny and stress for the four judges overseeing the indictments against former President Donald Trump

'Love is Blind' Season 5 star Izzy Zapata hopes to find someone who is 'open-minded and also a good communicator' and can love him unconditionally

A massive wildfire is burning unabated in northeastern Greece for the 11th day despite the efforts of hundreds of firefighters and a fleet of water-dropping aircraft

Nick Cannon announced in April that Abby De La Rosa would be joining him on 'The Daily Cannon' radio show

A famous Dutch tattoo artist is inking sketches by Rembrandt van Rijn onto the skin of visitors to the building the Golden Age master once called home

It looked as if the Atlanta Falcons' chance to secure a win literally slipped away from Desmond Ridder’s fingers in the fourth quarter

With the increasing number of self-service checkout machines popping up in stores for convenience, there is one simple feature that is used to put off potential shoplifters - mirrors. There's a good chance that you've looked at your reflection in the screens fitted to these machines, and the purpose of it is for potential shoplifters to catch themselves in the mirror in the hopes of making them feel guilty. This pang of a guilty conscience is hoped to prevent them from committing any crime (it's not just there for vanity purposes like most of us use it for). Research also backs up the theory that people who see themselves in a mirror are less likely to do something bad. A 1976 study from Letters of Evolutionary Behavioural Science found that when people are around mirrors, they "behave in accordance with social desirability". "Mirrors influence impulsivity, a feature that is closely related to decision-making in both social and non-social situations." When participants in the experiment were looking at mirrors, their "private self-awareness was activated" by them and as a result influenced "decision-making as a non-social cues". Similarly, Psychology Today notes how a mirror allows "people to literally watch over themselves" and this "dramatically boosts our self-awareness". Meanwhile, the issue of self-service checkouts and shoplifting was highlighted in a report by Mashed last year which it appeared to confirm that Walmart's attempt at combatting this problem was a psychological method with the addition of mirrors (though Walmart, alongside other supermarkets, has never confirmed the purpose of their mirrors at their self-service checkout services). Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The turnover bug that bit the Minnesota Vikings hard at the beginning of the season apparently wasn’t fully exterminated

A key selling point of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential run was that he was a...

Gavin Rossdale reveals why he and ex Gwen Stefani don't co-parent their 3 kids