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January 5 - January 11, 2022
effect,” a phenomenon where people who pay more for something experience the thing differently than if they pay less.
“It was heartbreaking from the perspective of my identity,” he says. “In that instant, I lost a part of myself.” “I literally remember the day that I went and got all of my LiveStrong and Lance Armstrong gear and I put it in a bag and I set it outside,” he says, describing how he dragged it all to the trash. “It was almost like a funeral. It was almost as if I was grieving because this iconic, aspirational self turned out to be a shallow and hollow fraud. And I felt like I was a fool in that relationship with his brand because I was trying to reinforce and express all of these values that
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work. Evolution has given us minds that are alert to stories and suggestion, to imagination and self-deception, because, through many hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, minds that can attend to stories have been more successful at passing on their owners’ genes.
Logos roughly referred to the world of the logical, the empirical, the scientific. Mythos referred to the world of dreams, storytelling and symbols. Like many rationalists today, some philosophers of Greece prized logos and looked down at mythos. Logic and reason, they concluded, make us modern; storytelling and mythmaking are primitive. But lots of scholars then and now—including many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers today—see a more complicated picture, where mythos and logos are intertwined and interdependent.
The Copernican Revolution involved more than just scientific calculation; it involved a new story about the place of Earth in the universe. Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed how we think of ourselves; it rewrote the story of the role of human beings in creation.
We know this is the case because neurological disorders cause some people to have no interest, and sometimes no capacity, to feel love. Why would natural selection design our brains to experience an emotion that regularly short-circuits reason and logic?
Naive realism is a powerful force in daily life, one that prompts us to question the actions of other people.
the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the tendency for people who are really bad at something to think they are good at it.)
group. Fear can produce similar distortions: People asked to judge the proximity of a tarantula saw it as closer if they were afraid of spiders. Those who were the most afraid saw the tarantula as closest of all.
Cognitive dissonance helps explain a lot about the world—from voters who refuse to acknowledge they made a mistake in electing a demagogue to organizations that fail to back away from misguided policies, even in the face of mounting evidence.
self-deceptions lasted. I once asked a linguist what the difference was between a dialect and a language. “Languages,” he quipped, “are dialects that have armies.” Myths
Sacred causes—and the myths and stories that underpin them—give us something to value beyond our own lives. They can be the fuel that prompts soldiers to fight to the death on the battlefields of Normandy, or induces suicide bombers to blow themselves up in Kabul.
what the theorists call mortality salience, the psychological term for a person’s conscious awareness of death at any given time. The death of a loved one, for instance, can have a long-lasting impact on mortality salience. Watching a television show in which someone is killed could also impact your mortality salience, but for a shorter duration and to a smaller degree.
death. Divers took longer and more dangerous dives when asked to think beforehand about their own mortality. Sunbathers exposed themselves longer to the sun when informed about the risks of cancer. What was going on? In each case, groups hewed more strongly to things they identified with—the Israeli drivers to their driving, the divers to their dives, the sunbathers to getting a tan—when reminded of their own fragility.
“immortality narratives.” The first of these might be described as the longevity story: the belief that through potions or herbs, fountains of youth, magic elixirs or hidden knowledge, we can extend our lives, perhaps indefinitely.
The second immortality narrative that Cave has identified is the one emphasized by the Abrahamic religions: Resurrection.
we have an essence that lives on forever—a soul. Buddhist and Hindu traditions take this a step further and suggest that, after death, our souls transmigrate into new bodies—we are reincarnated.
The fourth immortality narrative involves coming up with ways to live on forever—not in one’s own body, not in one’s own body that has been resurrected, and not through one’s soul—but in a figurative sense, as a memory in the hearts and minds of other people.
How exactly did societies create angry gods and religions? It’s not enough to say that such gods produce functional benefits. How did they come about in the first place? As we have seen elsewhere, the cost-benefit language of rational persuasion isn’t likely to have produced the evocative myths and stories that lie at the heart of religions.
The “dictator”—the volunteer initially given the money—shared more than twice as much with their partner after being primed to complete word scrambles that featured the words Spirit, Divine, God, Sacred and Prophet. This was true regardless of whether the subjects described themselves as atheists or religious believers.
conflict. Scandinavians have lots of trust in their governments, excellent social services and high-functioning states. They also have some of the lowest levels of religious belief in the world.
She used something called peer effects: Religious teens are more likely to have friends who are religious, and depressed teens tend to have friends who are depressed.
Multiple analyses of obituaries in major cities across the United States have found that people who are members of religious groups live on average five years longer than those who are not religious, even when controlling for other factors that influence life span, such as gender and marital status.
works. If believing in the Sun God or Shiva or the Abrahamic prophets can get people to stop destroying the only planet we have, I say we go for it. (For the 100th episode of Hidden Brain, I interviewed the Nobel Prize–winning economist Danny Kahneman. He told me, “For me, it would be a milestone if you manage to take influential evangelists, preachers, to adopt the idea of global warming and to preach it. That would change things. It’s not going to happen by presenting more evidence. That, I think, is clear.”)
