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Human behavior in a post-rational world
Feeling threatened changes people's perceptions of other people. Before World War II, for example, American university students described the Japanese as artistic and progressive, while the Chinese were supposedly treacherous and deceitful. By 1943, those stereotypes were reversed—just as American ...
Once upon a time, we were taught that people are basically rational—at least when they have to be, at the stock market, the voting booth, the courtroom, the hospital, the school, the employment office and other important places. Economists, in particular, depended on their version (rationality ...
Struggling with a foreign language is practically the definition of mental strain: what is the word for "screwdriver" again? did I produce that "ĥ" sound correctly? are they laughing with me or at me? And mental strain, according to post-rational theories of the mind, has consequences for how we ...
Responding to my post the other day (about the claim that entitlement programs discourage people from having kids) Ramesh Ponnuru replies here with the fair point that cultural differences among nations mean that you can't expect a perfect correlation between generosity of social program and ...
Mayor Bloomberg's latest anti-obesity proposal—ban sales of giant flagons of sugary drinks by next spring—has been criticized as bad politics in support of good policy. In fact, it is the opposite: Such a ban will do almost nothing to lower obesity, but it is an example of democracy working the way ...
Why do we still watch plays by Euripides, born some 2,500 years ago, or Shakespeare, who is nearly 450 years old? Writer orthodoxy says it's because the fundamental rules for drama have never changed, as they are rooted in human nature. Those rules make the characters in a play or film or ...
In some ways the United States and France are unusually similar nations—still enchanted with their 18th century revolutions, eager to export their ideals (via pamphlets, speeches, language schools, paratroopers, whatever it takes) so that others may live as they do. Maybe this similarity is why ...
A few days ago, Ramesh Ponnuru made an interesting case for a massive U.S. tax break for childrearing—not a piddly deduction, but a honking big $5,000-per-kid credit. His reasoning (to which I was led by Ross Douthat): While you childless people are raking in that disposable income, we parents are ...
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, "that other people are as real as you are." But other people's opinions are so wrong! Surely they're deluded, deceived, bought off, stupid ...
In his interesting review of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind last month, the philosopher John Gray makes an important point about evolution-based attempts to account for human morality. To explain ethical behavior in evolutionary terms, we have to accept that morality is "groupish"—that curbing ...
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" asks the gospel of Mark. Verily, I know not. But in contemplating the sale of his soul for gain, saith this study, such a man doth activate his temporoparietal junction, and also, lo, his ventrolateral ...
Psychology is rich in findings that emerge from complex statistics done on the behavior of college students behaving for money or course credit. It's fair to wonder, then, how well those findings relate to the real world: Maybe a result is peculiar to undergrads, or maybe it's a subtle effect that ...
Take some standard tools for graphing data. Add the power of three-dimensional printing. Result: Data rendered not as a graph or chart, but as an object. A new frontier in the art of representing information, where it's turned into something not only comprehensible and beautiful, but touchable—an ...
Strictly speaking, a "psychopundit" is William Saletan's term for a scholar who uses psychology to explain what's wrong with people who don't vote for Democrats or recycle or otherwise agree with the pundit's left-wing views. But why limit the coinage to liberal malcontents? "Psychopundit" could ...
Phoney-baloney outrage. Black-hat, white-hat exaggeration. Every day, I get emails some activist organization or other, suggesting that the nation hangs by a thread, about to drop into a bottomless pit of slimy hells unless I sign a petition or contribute at least $25 to someone's campaign for a ...