5 posts
Someone joins a bhajan group with no particular faith and years later finds themselves genuinely devout. The usual explanation reaches for magic or manipulation. The actual mechanism is simpler, well-studied, and has nothing to do with the specific god being sung to.
Most of what people do carries far less deliberation than observers assume. Research shows intentional explanation is the automatic default — under time pressure people judge even accidental acts as deliberate — and that reading calculated motive into ordinary behaviour is the effortless option, not the accurate one.
Why do we spend money on impractical luxury items, even when we know it's irrational? Explore the 'Peacock Paradox' and discover how costly signaling, rooted in evolutionary biology, hardwires our desire for status over utility.
The claim that neuroscience disproved free will rests on a reading of the readiness potential that its own field has largely retired. The follow-up claim — that telling people this makes them behave worse — was tested across 145 experiments and found nothing.
We treat empathy as the foundation of ethics — the more you feel someone's pain, the better you'll act. In the lab, inducing empathy makes people violate their own stated principles of fairness. The problem isn't that empathy is bad. It's that it was never a moral faculty.
