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Yale sociologist Philip Gorski recently wrote of the “failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life . . . that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating.” He notes that there are two main theories put forward by social scientists to explain morality without recourse to religion. First there are

Timothy Keller • Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

Your Primitive Mind disagrees. For your genes, what’s important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior—whether or not those beliefs are actually true.1 The Primitive Mind’s beliefs are usually installed early on in life, often based on the prevailing beliefs of your family, peer group, or broader community. The Primiti

Tim Urban • What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

The first is that customs, traditions, and the like are subject to Darwinian selection. Henrich is not always clear on exactly what is being selected for—is it individuals who follow a tradition, groups whose members all follow the tradition, or the tradition itself?—but the general gist is that traditions stick around longest when they are a... See more

Tanner Greer • Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

These patterns of evolved solutions included psychological principles like scarcity (making the offer feel limited or scarce) and social proof (illustrating existing consumption to reinforce trust in the product’s quality).

Sam Tatam • Evolutionary Ideas

In an effective mass movement, the true believer’s yearning for identity finds a place. A sense of belonging is fulfilled, and individual responsibility is then taken out of one’s hands. The movement, and its leader, decide what’s right and wrong. All one needs to do is stay with the movement and the whole gnawing existential issue of what is the p... See more

Antonia Malchik • True believers and mass movements

Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of ...

Hugo Mercier sciencedirect.com

Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.

Luke Burgis • Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

For the first time in evolutionary history, one individual could give any of a variety of resources without actually giving them away. The result was the lowering of the natural inhibitions against transactions that must be begun by one person’s providing personal resources to another. Sophisticated and coordinated systems of aid, gift giving, defe

Robert B. Cialdini • Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion

Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknow