The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.
The picture is complicated further—AIS individuals raised female have higher-than-expected rates of being gay, and of having an other-than-female or neither-female-nor-male-sex/gender self-identificat...
The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone’s pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.
The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once defined free will as internal forces I do not understand.26 People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human...
Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety.5 This explains the winner effect in lab animals, where winning a fight increases an animal’s willingness to part...
Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.
Stick recording electrodes into numerous species’ amygdalaefn9 and see when neurons there have action potentials; this turns out to be when the animal is being aggressive.fn10 In a related approach, d...
Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.
So testosterone does subtle things to behavior. Nonetheless, this doesn’t tell us much because everything can be interpreted every which way. Testosterone increases anxiety—you feel threatened and bec...
So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.
Roughly half a million people died in the Roman Colosseum to supply audiences of tens of thousands the pleasure of watching captives raped, dismembered, tortured, eaten by animals.
Perhaps the best moral is that when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be the...
Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive...
Our prototypical behavior has occurred. How was it influenced by events when the egg and sperm that formed that person joined, creating their genome—the chromosomes, the sequences of DNA—destined to b...
Other work has shown that when people are hungry, they become less generous with money and show more future discounting (i.e., are more likely to want reward X now, rather than wait for reward 2X).
It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.
In the 1970s Allan Wilson and Mary-Claire King at Berkeley correctly theorized that the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how...
In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.27
In contrast, conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Obviously, this is a big difference. Is it okay to criticize your group to outsiders? Rightists: no, that’s disloyal. Leftist...
If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so fru...