More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.
The fusiform isn’t fooled—“That’s not an Other; it’s just a ‘normal’ Photoshopped face.”
As a repeating theme, pain does not cause aggression; it amplifies preexisting tendencies toward aggression. In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.27
Confident and optimistic. Well, endless self-help books urge us to be precisely that.
It’s a crucial unifying concept that testosterone’s effects are hugely context dependent.
Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most
acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.
alcohol only evokes aggression only in (a) individuals prone to aggression
When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It’s a parochial one.
Humans understand logical operations between individuals earlier than between objects.
There are also hints of a sense of justice. Preschoolers tend to be egalitarians (e.g., it’s better that the friend gets a cookie when she does). But before we get carried away with the generosity of youth, there is already in-group bias; if the other child is a stranger, there is less egalitarianism.
Soon after kids start responding negatively to someone else being treated unjustly, they begin attempting to rectify previous inequalities (“He should get more now because he got less before”).16 By preadolescence, egalitarianism gives way to acceptance of inequality because of merit or effort or for a greater good (“She should play more than him; she’s better/worked harder/is more important to the team”).
being good and being law-abiding aren’t synonymous. As Woody Guthrie wrote in “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “I love a good man outside the law, just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.”*
moral heroism rarely arises from super-duper frontal cortical willpower. Instead, it happens when the right thing isn’t the harder thing.
“I love my kids, but I smack them around when they need it. My father did that to me, so he could have loved me too.” But once again something biologically deeper also occurs—infant monkeys abused by their mothers are more likely to become abusive mothers.30
This suspicion of gene/behavior links exists because of the pseudoscientific genetics used to justify various “isms,” prejudice, and discrimination. Such pseudoscience has fostered racism and sexism, birthed eugenics and forced sterilizations, allowed scientifically meaningless versions of words like “innate” to justify the neglect of have-nots. And monstrous distortions of genetics have fueled those who lynch, ethnically cleanse, or march children into gas chambers.*1
