David Berreby
Author, Us and Them: The Science of Identity
David Berreby is the author of "Us and Them: The Science of Identity." He has written about human behavior and other science topics for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Smithsonian, The New Republic, Nature, Discover, Vogue and many other publications. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Paris, a Science Writing Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a resident at Yaddo, and in 2006 was awarded the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the first edition of "Us and Them." David can be found on Twitter at @davidberreby and reached by email at david [at] davidberreby [dot] com.
For the past few days I’ve been thinking out loud about the importance of narrative form to the mind—that way we have of being much more impressed by information in […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it is a very popular idea in psychology, philosophy and various social sciences that people experience their lives as a story or collection of […]
Literary types used to run the world. To understand life and society, people counted on great orators and poets and interpreters of sacred texts. Political, moral and literary power were […]
Deriding the Democratic Party’s “Julia” propaganda yesterday, Ross Douthat recycled a conservative truism. Unlike those admirable (because safely extinct) old-timeliberals, he wrote, today’s Democrats want the government to do what families should: “The liberalism […]
A lot of ink has been spilled over the inconsistent and illogical ways that human beings make choices. Not as much attention has been paid to the decision to make […]
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, from which many of us get the notion that when a ship goes down, it’s […]
If I were trapped in a burning building, here’s who I would want to see coming up the smoke-filled stairwell: A trained professional firefighter in full gear. Not Mayor Bloomberg. […]
We may think we’re free to choose what to eat and how to eat it, but food companies maximize their profits by restricting our choices
For a certain kind of economic conservative, the cardinal sin of modern governments is printing money whenever they please. Currency’s value should be tied to something real, they say, as […]
Human irrationality is an important and fascinating subject, especially when it’s pitted against the assumption that people are rational, which still dominates modern life. Sometimes though evidence of human irrationality […]
Happy International Day of You, women of the world. Unfortunately it remains internationally respectable to argue that science has shown that men are inherently better at math and scientific pursuits […]
For some time now, cognitive scientists have been sure that the mind is not made for logical reasoning. That ability is just a lucky side effect of the work brains […]
Here at Mind Matters, we aren’t big fans of militant atheism, or any other doctrine that prefers to explain away other views, rather than engaging them. I’m convinced that rhetorical […]
Everyone in politics pays lip service to data. “Our opponents say X but the facts are plainly Y, which they would admit if they were not (pick one) deceived or […]
Why can’t the Greeks be more like the Germans? Could it be because they speak Greek? There’s no doubt some nations save more money than others, and plan better for […]
Orthodox globalization declares that any hindrance to rational market efficiency is a Bad Thing. So there’s no sensible counter to that unnamed Apple executive in the New York Times‘ series […]
The ideal American store, Adam Gopnik once suggested, would have no employees. Consumers’ desires would be met flawlessly by unerring, tireless machines. On the other hand, the ideal French store […]
Twenty years from now, could veterans of Afghanistan be trading war stories over friendly dinners with ex-Taliban fighters? It sound inconceivable, but then, it always is—when the war is still […]
Anything “organic” or “low-fat” must be good for you, right? Ask people how fattening those organic chocolate-covered peanuts are, and they’ll guess a lower number than they did for the […]
Ah, New Year’s Eve: It feels so important to find something significant, meaningful, memorable to do. And then two weeks later you can’t recall what it was, because it was […]
If you want to understand Occupy Wall Street and the frustration, rage and sadness that drive it, you could do worse than to watch White Christmas. That’s the 1954 confection […]
A frequently cited objection to widespread use of the Gardasil vaccine against Human Papillomavirus is that it will give children the message that it’s normal, expected and inevitable that they […]
Newt Gingrich was almost right about the Palestinians when he said they were an “invented people” (though the difference between right and almost right, to paraphrase Twain, is the difference […]
In the annals of human hatred, there’s a special place for those who play the same game we do—the ones who are on to our tricks and whose mirror tactics […]
“A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ assessment of Franklin Roosevelt, reflecting an old and widespread notion that the smartest and most ingenious person in the […]
As a general rule, I’m a fan of changing human behavior by changing the rules we live by. Given how inconsistent people are, it seems to me foolish to rely […]
Have you ever poked around in the “People You May Know” box in Facebook? For the first few score people, it’s a pleasure. Click: A person I forgot I knew. […]
“As a man is,” wrote William Blake, “so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.” No doubt my tumultuous childhood is a part of the reason […]
Whatever the facts of the crimes in this week’s pair of institutional scandals (and it bears saying that trials in the Afghanistan “kill team” case are ongoing, while Jerry Sandusky […]
This paper, published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, introduces a new term to neuroscience: The FBN, or “Facebook number.” Your Facebook number is, of course, […]