This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth re... See more

■ The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us. ■ We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe. ■ We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those w

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This, I think, is how our “moral matrices,” as Haidt calls them, are formed: we respond to the irresistible draw of belonging to a group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a

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