The Trump adviser’s assertions about the “real world” reflect a deep misunderstanding of Thomas Hobbes’s dog-eat-dog worldview.
Author: Gal Beckerman | Source: The Atlantic (January 10, 2026) | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Author: Yuval Noah Harari | Source: Big Think (August 11, 2025) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Information, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
The upside to mechanical values is that they’re easy to apply. It’s very hard to agree with other people about what counts as a full life, as great art, or as a soul-nourishing vocation. But it’s easy to agree about what leads to statistically longer lifespans, more page views and engagement hours, or more money. When we turn our values mechanical, we make it easy … [ Read more ]
Author: Christopher Thi Nguyen | Source: Vox (January 13, 2026) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
And that’s okay.
Author: Julie Beck | Source: The Atlantic (June 2, 2025) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, used to say that most of us have a personality that looks very much like an onion: In the center you have the Id, a very simple component that all it wants is immediate gratification and self-Pleasure thus following the … Pleasure Principle. Built around the Id, there is a second entity called the Ego, which basically is a … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Thought Starters
What would you do if your son wanted to be a girl? Some doctors have a new and troubling answer.
Author: Hanna Rosin | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Individuality, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind” another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy … [ Read more ]
Author: Paul Bloom | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior
Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can’t cure.
Author: Virginia Postrel | Source: The Atlantic (December2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire.
Author: Caitlin Flanagan | Source: The Atlantic (December2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Literature | Arts, Psychology | Behavior
A self-schema is the information and beliefs you hold about yourself. This cognitive framework influences how you feel, how you react, your actual behavior, and your perception of your place in the world.
How your self-schema influences your actions can be nuanced: For example, you may have internalized that you’re not athletic during childhood — and then, later in life, limit yourself when you want to … [ Read more ]
Author: Sarah Sloat | Source: Inverse (April 22, 2025) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James
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“Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that … [ Read more ]
Authors: Andy Clark, Maria Popova, William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Insight, Psychology | Behavior, Senses, Thought | Inquiry
Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.
The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.
The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a … [ Read more ]
Author: James Steiner-Dillon | Source: The Conversation (March 2, 2023) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Since the 1950s, political scientists have theorized that political polarization—increased numbers of “political partisans” who view the world with an ideological bias—is associated with an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world.
But little is known about the biological mechanisms through which such biased perceptions arise.
To investigate that question, scientists measured and compared the brain activity of committed partisans … [ Read more ]
Authors: Corrie Pikul-Brown, David J. Halpern, Jeroen van Baar, Oriel FeldmanHall | Source: Futurity (May 14, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Since 1992, people have been talking about “Dunbar’s number,” the supposed upper limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, its value, rounded from 148 to 150, has permeated both professional and popular culture. […] It’s also probably wrong. Despite its fame, Dunbar’s number has always been controversial. A new study … [ Read more ]
Authors: Robin Dunbar, Scotty Hendricks | Source: Big Think (May2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Human beings are creatures of mimicry. We are evolutionarily supercharged to do one thing better than anyone else: learn by watching and copying others. And the most important thing we learn is how to want.
As we grow up and live our lives, we watch others and learn what it is we ought to want. Aside from the basics, like food, water, shelter and sex, our … [ Read more ]
Author: Alex Danco | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more … [ Read more ]
Author: Thomas B. Edsall | Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Motivation, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The savanna theory of happiness is the idea that life satisfaction is not only determined by what’s happening in the present but also influenced by the ways our ancestors may have reacted to the event. Evolutionary psychology argues that, just like any other organ, the human brain has been designed for and adapted to the conditions of an ancestral environment. Therefore, the researchers argue, our … [ Read more ]
Author: Sarah Sloat | Source: Inverse (December 6, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper … [ Read more ]
Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Three primary reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories:
Author: Joe Forrest | Source: Instrument of Mercy (May 7, 2020) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry