Sublime

I highly recommend Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman.

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

Humans tend to be tribal and have a huge propensity for kindness – but within their identified community

This builds on a growing body of work that our ‘‘mind perception’’ (which manifests as inferences of intentions, beliefs, and values) meaningfully varies across individuals and shapes our moral judgments

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious

Of the many emerging descriptions of our social brain, for me the simplest and most elegant is the highly regarded Social Baseline Theory of Lane Beckes and James A. Coan, two researchers at the University of Virginia.