Sublime

The hero instinct, a suite of status-related motivations and learning heuristics, brought a new dimension to our forebears’ tribal living. Instead of just social learning from peers, there was social learning from heroes (attention to and emulation of high-status members). Instead of just motivation to act normally, there was motivation to act

Hence, we are more likely to accept a dangerous idea if it aligns with our own experiences and is supported by the people we value.

In fact, by age one, infants use their own early cultural knowledge to figure out who tends to know things, and then use this performance information to focus their learning, attention, and memory. Infants are well known to engage in what developmental psychologists call “social referencing.” When an infant, or young child, encounters something

Conventional economics asks how agents’ behaviors (actions, strategies, forecasts) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate patterns these cause. It asks, in other words, what patterns would call for no changes in microbehavior, and would therefore be in stasis or equilibrium.

The same three essential elements characterize the agents and their strategies in the financial system. There is descent because investors develop their strategies by inheriting knowledge from their mentors, as well as learning from their own prior experience. There is variation because investors tinker with their strategies to improve them. There

However, it may well be that New York slum-dwellers and Kalahari hunter-gatherers experience mental states which we will never discover by forcing Harvard psychology students to answer long questionnaires