Sublime

Automatically and unconsciously, people also use cues of self-similarity, like sex and ethnicity, to further hone and personalize their cultural learning. Self-similarity cues help learners acquire the skills, practices, beliefs, and motivations that are, or were in our evolutionary past, most likely to be suitable to them, their talents, or their

In Hansonian terms: Your instinctive willingness to believe something will change along with your willingness to affiliate with people who are known for believing it—quite apart from whether the belief is actually true. Some people may be reluctant to believe that God does not exist, not because there is evidence that God does exist, but rather bec

Its scholars study many different kinds of cultural groups—from hunter-gatherer clans to corporations to nations—investigating cognitive structures, social structures, biases, and behaviors.

Mathematically, there is an optimal way to play such games, but it assumes that players are strangers who will never meet again (i.e. you and that secondhand car salesman). Dutifully, the students produced the optimal solution. But most of the players in the ethnographic societies did not. They either accepted offers that were far too low or insist

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.

the real solution to anthropological enigmas that the so-called science of anthropology has never been able to solve.

Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.