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Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm.42
The social intuitionist model.
Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable45 and altruism seem embarrassing,
2001
“The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.”
But intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cognition. They’re just not a kind of reasoning.
moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog.
Dale Carnegie
get the other person’s point of view
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
hypnotized people to feel a flash of disgust whenever they saw a certain word
I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.
BRAINS EVALUATE INSTANTLY AND CONSTANTLY
Wilhelm Wundt,
“affective primacy.”
Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to app...
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too fleeting to be called emotions
Robert Zajonc
dual-process model in which affect or “feeling” is the first process.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL JUDGMENTS ARE PARTICULARLY INTUITIVE
“affective priming”
the first word triggers a flash of affect that primes the mind to go one way or the other.
It’s like getting the elephant to lean slightly to the ...
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Implicit Association Test
Alex Todorov,
the candidate that people judged more competent was the one who actually won the race about two-thirds of the time.
human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions.
OUR BODIES GUIDE OUR JUDGMENTS
Alex Jordan,
people made harsher judgments when they were breathing in foul air.
PSYCHOPATHS REASON BUT DON’T FEEL
BABIES FEEL BUT DON’T REASON
Yale psychologists
Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom put on puppet
Joshua Greene,
personal harm,
regions of the brain related to emotional processing.
ELEPHANTS ARE SOMETIMES OPEN TO REASON
more like a lawyer serving a client than a slave serving a master.
We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor,
Necker cube
chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources.
Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe?
That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.
Glaucon
ring of Gyges,
faith in the perfectibility of reason.
Reason is our original nature,
Passions often corrup...
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for Plato, the assumed psychology is just plain wrong.
