The Future of Mankind
I wrote a post on the psychological limits of human beings in which I referred to another website’s article on ten famous experiments in psychology. Another website has put a different spin on several of them, suggesting five experiments that show that mankind is doomed.
The Psychological Limits of Human Beings
PsyBlog has a post that ties together ten famous experiments in psychology, each with it’s own unique lesson to be learned. I find the one on cognitive dissonance the most interesting.
The Extent to which People Lie
I read an interesting interview with David Livingstone Smith about the extent to which people lie and why they do it. I found it via Loren Rosson’s blog, in a post that included comments on Jesus’ historical identity.
The Five Primary Colours of Morality
Steven Pinker has written an article that was published in the New York Times on the science and philosophy of morality. I have created a diagram below that I hope accurately summarises the key points of the article.
The steps involved in forming a moral reaction to a given scenario.
- Some scenario occurs and is observed or some scenario is imagined.
- The brain reacts to the scenario.
- The brain examines the scenario from five perspectives, with some more relevant to different scenarios than others.
- Each perspective is given weight and priority. They are then balanced against one another.
- The moralisation ‘switch’ is either turned on or remains off. If it is switched on, rationalisation follows. If it remains off, any non-moral thoughts will win out.
Confirmation Bias
The research described in this article, if sound, provides an example of how our cognitive biases can have demonstrable health consequences. In this case, the bias appears to be confirmation bias. Clinical depression and a range of anxiety disorders also often result from cognitive biases.
