Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First th...
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism?21 The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it’...
While average finger number is an inherited trait, the heritability of finger number is low—genes don’t explain individual differences much.
What’s a heritability score? What does a gene do? is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that tra...
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 Wilkinson and others have shown is that poverty is not only a predictor of poor health but, independent of absolute income, so is poverty amid plenty—the more income inequality there is in a soci...
We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function—working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and tas...
Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressiv...
University of Cambridge.68 When compared with non-CAH girls, CAH girls do more rough-and-tumble play, fighting, and physical aggression. Moreover, they prefer masculine toys over dolls. As adults they...
Two complications illustrate some endocrine principles.fn16 Estrogen contributes to maternal aggression. But estrogen can also reduce aggression and enhance empathy and emotional recognition. It turns...
Thus, oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate bonding between parent and child and between couples.fn10 Now for something truly charming that evolution has cooked up recently. Sometime in the last fifty t...
Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other fac...
This level is egoistic in that rules and their application come from within and reflect conscience, where a transgression exacts the ultimate cost—having to live with yourself afterward. It recognizes...
This explains context-dependent craving in addiction.93 Suppose an alcoholic has been clean and sober for years. Return him to where the alcohol consumption used to occur (e.g., that rundown street co...
This addition produces a two-by-two matrix: parenting is authoritative (high demand, high responsiveness), authoritarian (high demand, low responsiveness), permissive (low demand, high responsiveness)...
There’s support for the idea—three of my favorites are that (a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more dominant posture makes them feel more...
There’s an additional depressing reason why stress fosters aggression—because it reduces stress. Shock a rat and its glucocorticoid levels and blood pressure rise; with enough shocks, it’s at risk for...
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed fight or flight stress response. To use the feeble joke told to first-year...
The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing your foot on a carpet). Over a series of these, the rat de...
The subject is also fascinating because of the nature of the revisionism—neuroplasticity radiates optimism. Books on the topic are entitled The Brain That Changes Itself, Train Your Mind, Change Your...