Sublime

social interdependence breeds emotional interdependence, leading people to strongly identify with their in-groups and to make sharp in- group vs. out-group distinctions based on social interconnections.

Sam Barondes’ book Making Sense of People

given a long list of things you might share with someone – beliefs, attitudes, hobbies, interests – and asked which they shared with specific people in their social circles (a named family member and a friend of each sex in each layer of the social network), and, as a measure of altruism, how likely they were to lend this person a sum of money or d

amygdala

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

But sometimes you can also make an instant judgment about a stranger. Probably not for the loan of your life savings or the pin-number to your bank account, but certainly for a drink at the bar or a bit of help at the roadside. So how do we make that judgment?

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too f

the child seems to go through a major transition known as theory of mind. At four, it cannot distinguish between its own knowledge of the world and someone else’s.