In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”).

The second principle of moral psychology is: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

In what might be the pithiest and most prescient statement in the history of moral psychology, Darwin summarized the evolutionary origin of morality in this way: Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-

Another helpful cultural innovation, according to Atran and Henrich, are gods who administer collective punishment. When people believe that the gods might bring drought or pestilence on the whole village for the adultery of two people, you can bet that the villagers will be much more vigilant for—and gossipy about—any hint of an extramarital liais

Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not j

The horror of 9/11 motivated several of these scientists to write books, and between 2004 and 2007, so many such books were published that a movement was born: the New Atheism. The titles were combative. The first one out was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, followed by Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, D

Like the New Atheists, their story has two steps, and the first step is the same: a diverse set of cognitive modules and abilities (including the hypersensitive agency detector) evolved as adaptations to solve a variety of problems, but they often misfired, producing beliefs (such as in supernatural agents) that then contributed (as by-products) to

First, this is a functionalist definition. I define morality by what it does, rather than by specifying what content counts as moral.

Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support