Willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games.
Stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus—essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy—while strengthening frontal connections with more...
Someone’s hand being poked with a needle, and subjects have an isomorphic sensorimotor response—hands tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands; the...
Math performance in Asian American women, built around the stereotypes of Asians being good at math, and women not. Half the subjects were primed to think of themselves as Asian before a math test; th...
Glucocorticoids in
Genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludg...
Evolution is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes.
Call the game the Wall Street Game, and people become less cooperative. Calling it the Community Game does the opposite. Similarly,
Acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorpo...
Words pack power and these definitions are laden with values, often wildly idiosyncratic ones. Here’s an example, namely the ways I think about the word competition: (a) competition—your lab team race...
Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent
When testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn't prompt aggression. Instead it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status. This changes things tremendously... Engineer social circu...
What is that 95 percent? Some is junk—remnants of pseudogenes inactivated by evolution.fn4,3 But buried in that are the keys to the kingdom, the instruction manual for when to transcribe particular ge...
What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies.
What happens when children observe domestic violence, warfare, a gang murder, a school massacre? For weeks afterward there is impaired concentration and impulse control. Witnessing gun violence double...
US/THEM-ING TYPICALLY involves inflating the merits of Us concerning core values—we are more correct, wise, moral, and worthy when it comes to knowing what the gods want/running the economy/raising ki...
This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on a...
This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for deali...
This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.
The health risk of poverty turns out to be a huge effect, the biggest risk factor there is in all of behavioral medicine—in other words, if you have a bunch of people of the same gender, age, and ethn...