Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

The only people who are immune to this mistake are neurologically impaired patients who can't feel any emotion at all. In most situations, these people have very damaged decision-making abilities. And yet, because they don't feel the extra sting of loss, they are able to avoid the costly emotional errors brought on by loss aversion. Consider this e

mental accounting,

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely right. Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultiv

During the peak of the housing boom, 55 percent of all 2/28 mortgages were sold to homeowners who could have gotten prime mortgages.

David Hume,

Now comes the interesting part: the scientists noticed that there was a lot of individual variation during the experiment. Some people had very active sympathetic brains, while others seemed rather uninterested in thinking about the feelings of someone else. The scientists then conducted a survey of altruistic behavior, asking people how likely the

This developmental process holds the key to understanding the behavior of adolescents, who are much more likely than adults to engage in risky, impulsive behavior. More than 50 percent of U.S. high school students have experimented with illicit drugs. Half of all reported cases of sexually transmitted diseases occur in teenagers. Car accidents are

When the scenario was described in terms of deaths instead of survivors,…

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