Sublime

this thought experiment suggests that we don’t cheat and steal as much as we would if we were perfectly rational and acted only in our own self-interest.

When evaluating a transaction, traditional economic models simply compare the value to the price. Real, human people, however, compare value to price plus other elements, like fairness.

It might seem obvious to say this, but we all like consuming things and we all dislike paying for them. But, as Drazen and George found, the timing of the payment matters a great deal, and we feel better consuming anything that we have already paid for.5

Cheating is an isolated action that gets evaluated with the logic of consequence: Can I get away with it? Being a cheater evokes a sense of self, triggering the logic of appropriateness: What kind of person am I, and who do I want to be?

The way price discrimination usually works is that in order to get the lower price, the consumer has to do something,

1 In other words, our brains don’t like unfairness and this dislike makes us take action to express our displeasure.

George Loewenstein, the neuroeconomist, thinks that understanding the errors of the emotional brain will help policymakers develop plans that encourage people to make better decisions: "Our emotions are like software programs that evolved to solve important and recurring problems in our distant past," he says. "They are not always we

It seemed that merely trying to recall moral standards was enough to improve moral behavior.

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we sho