If they view their political opponents as incompetent, irrational, or immoral, then they won’t be motivated to compromise.

When stress hormones stop insulin from storing glucose for extended periods of time, we are at greater risk for diabetes and obesity. When they make the heart pump harder and the blood vessels constrict for months on end, we become prone to cardiovascular disease. And when inflammation goes unchecked, the immune system can become overactive—so eage

the disruptive effect of inequality on team coordination can outweigh the motivating effect on particular individuals.

The first and most obvious is that conservatives generally want to preserve tradition and the status quo, while liberals want to see changes in society.

unreflective assumptions that the world is always a fair place where good outcomes await the virtuous and bad outcomes signal vice.

the truth is that, politically speaking, we all contain multitudes.

writing about cherished values also made people less impulsive and more likely to delay immediate gratification for longer-term benefits. These studies suggest that the live fast, die young mind-set cued by inequality can be mitigated by recentering attention on what one really cares about.

Randomness and chaos feel threatening, but orderly patterns are reassuring, helping us feel that the world is predictable, trustworthy, and controllable. When people detect patterns in noise, they are extracting meaning from a world that has too few bright lines and too many gray areas.

John Rawls, however, was deeply suspicious of that idea. If a man is brilliant, he argued, why should he be praised for being so? He was merely fortunate for being born intelligent. If he has a strong work ethic, he just happened to win the lottery for hardworking traits. And if one boy was strong enough to survive a terrible disease and a weaker b