The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

For example, people cheat more on a test when the lights are dimmed.27 They cheat less when there is a cartoonlike image of an eye nearby,28 or when the concept of God is activated in memory merely by asking people to unscramble sentences that include words related to God.

Margolis proposed that there are two very different kinds of cognitive processes at work when we make judgments and solve problems: “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” “Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. Even the simplest animals are wired to respond to certain patterns of input (such

I showed how this moral matrix leads liberals to make two points that are (in my opinion) profoundly important for the health of a society: (1) governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms, and (2) some big problems really can be solved by regulation. I explained how libertarians (who sacralize liberty) and social conservatives (who

Darwin proposed a series of “probable steps” by which humans evolved to the point where there could be groups of team players in the first place.

The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tool and we

Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars.12 When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religion that’s very different from the view of the New Atheists. I’ll call this competing model the Durkheimian model, because it says th

Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nes

For example, there is an open market for LASIK surgery (a kind of laser eye surgery that removes the need to wear contact lenses). Doctors compete with one another to attract customers, and because the procedure is rarely covered by insurance, patients take price into account. Competition and innovation have driven down the price of the surgery by

The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant.