Sublime

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primat

Some economists are already working on that. They are using this brain-imaging data to support a new political philosophy known as asymmetric paternalism. That's a fancy name for a simple idea: creating policies and incentives that help people triumph over their irrational impulses and make better, more prudent decisions. Shlomo Benartzi and Richar

Based on these particular effects in the brain, glucocorticoids have predictable effects on behavior during stress. Your judgments become more impulsive. If you’re reactively aggressive, you become more so, if anxious, more so, if depressive, ditto. You become less empathic, more egoistic, more selfish in moral decision-making.[20]

Because people don’t follow simple mechanical rules, modeling human decision-making is an even bigger challenge. Understanding how people make decisions, both as individuals and in groups, is an important goal of the disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science.

fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry 1 are not based on well-tested research but on science that is itself a bit mad: misconceived, flawed, erroneous, misinterpreted, and often misreported.

When they were in a group, they took their cues from others, no matter how nonsensical. This experiment was a variant of the conformity tests developed by the psychologist Solomon Asch, which have been replicated over and over in ever-more-ridiculous ways. As Asch discovered, the pressure to conform is so strong that people will ignore the evidence

Ever the curious scientist, Pavlov spent months studying how the flood changed his dogs’ behavior. Many were never the same—they had completely different personalities after the flood, and learned behavior that was previously ingrained vanished. He summed up what happened, and how it applies to humans:

Behavioral Scientist’s Ethics Checklist by Jon Jachimowicz