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e6148f6
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Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence in each of belief in the existence of a heaven and hell. The greater the skew toward belief in hell, rather than heaven, the lower the national crime rate. When it comes to Eternity, sticks apparently work better than carrots.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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78970b6
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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 develops a prolonged stress-response: its heart rate and glucocorticoid secretion rate go up, for example. For convenience, we can express the long-term consequences by how likely the rat is to get an ulcer, and in this situation, the probability..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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4af829f
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Prior to the monotheistic Yahweh, the gods made sense, in that they had familiar, if supra-human appetites--they didn't just want a lamb shank, they wanted the best lamb shank, wanted to seduce all the wood nymphs, and so on. But the early Jews invented a god with none of those desires, who was so utterly unfathomable, unknowable, as to be pants-wettingly terrifying. So even if His actions are mysterious, when He intervenes you at least get..
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god
jewish
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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d1df5ac
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call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite. Similarly,"
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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b2cb4f2
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Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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7a102ab
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Archaeologists do something impressive, reflecting disciplinary humility. When archaeologists excavate a site, they recognize that future archaeologists will be horrified at their primitive techniques, at the destructiveness of their excavating. Thus they often leave most of a site untouched to await their more skillful disciplinary descendants. For example, astonishingly, more than forty years after excavations began, less than 1 percent o..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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2d5a7eb
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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.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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92c5841
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Obviously, oxytocin and vasopressin are the grooviest hormones in the universe. Pour them into the water supply, and people will be more charitable, trusting, and empathic. We'd be better parents and would make love, not war (mostly platonic love, though, since people in relationships would give wide berths to everyone else). Best of all, we'd buy all sorts of useless crap, trusting the promotional banners in stores once oxytocin starts spr..
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neurobiology
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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18b309b
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Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, th..
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hunter-gatherers
inequality
war
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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941dee2
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Part of the reason for the evolutionary success of primates, human or otherwise, is that we are a pretty smart collection of animals. What's more, our thumbs work in particularly fancy and advantageous ways, and we're more flexible about food than most. But our primate essence is more than just abstract reasoning, dexterous thumbs, and omnivorous diets. Another key to our success must have something to do with this voluntary transfer proces..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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ba663f2
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In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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9796f4e
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Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.13 Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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2102a2f
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Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number in the hippocampus; sustained stress or glucocor-ticoid exposure does the opposite.7 Moreover, major depression or anxiety--two disorders associated with elevated glucocorticoid levels--can reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number. This arises from decreased levels of th..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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cf59c8a
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testosterone's actions are contingent and amplifying, exacerbating preexisting tendencies toward aggression rather than creating aggression out of thin air.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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347f14f
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If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression--the insular cortex processes gustatory disgust. Ditto for disgusting smells.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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17f999d
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A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys. Why the difference? There have always bee..
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gender
genetics
mathematics
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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892f69e
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The dissociation between fear and aggression is evident in violent psychopaths, who are the antithesis of fearful--both physiologically and subjectively they are less reactive to pain; their amygdalae are relatively unresponsive to typical fear-evoking stimuli and are smaller than normal.34 This fits with the picture of psychopathic violence; it is not done in aroused reaction to provocation. Instead, it is purely instrumental, using others..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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2fe3042
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Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don't predict who will be aggressive. Moreover, the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for further aggression. When testosterone does play a role, it's facilitatory--testosterone does not 'invent' aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression. Also, ris..
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gender
hormones
men
testosterone
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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286427c
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Males who do extreme amounts of exercise, such as professional soccer players and runners who cover more than 40 or 50 miles a week, have less LHRH, LH, and testosterone in their circulation, smaller testes, less functional sperm. They also have higher levels of glucocorticoids in their bloodstreams, even in the absence of stress. (A similar decline in reproductive function is found in men who are addicted to opiate drugs.)
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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9c14984
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Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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016b173
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when it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. This has been explored at length in a series of studies by Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people's emotions and in experimental settings are greed..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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54b04ea
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In another study subjects waited an unknown length of time to receive a shock.12 This lack of predictability and control was so aversive that many chose to receive a stronger shock immediately. And
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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3f9126f
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There's also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We're more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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3b78fd7
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Cognitive therapists, like Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, even consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought, rather than emotion, in that sufferers tend to see the world in a distorted, negative way.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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bf4cbb7
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The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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8e317ed
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In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuit..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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bfd14c0
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Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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463c359
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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 need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces. And even the neuroscientist on the witness stand can't accurately predict which individual with extensive frontal damage will become the serial mu..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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4df3230
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Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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9e3c0a9
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Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child's socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regu..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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b7034d5
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Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren't under control, they can't drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures "deserves" to be banned from driving. Crowds of goitrous yahoos don't excitedly mass to watch the epileptic's driver's license be..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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f1b277b
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I didn't feel obliged to first disclose my feelings about the gland. But the equivalent feels appropriate here. Thus: I was raised highly observant and Orthodox, felt intensely religious. But then, around age thirteen, the whole edifice collapsed; ever since, I've been incapable of any religiosity or spirituality and more readily focus on religion's destructive than its beneficial aspects. But I like being around religious people and am mov..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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22a68e7
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In a study of employees throughout the world working for the same multinational bank, what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously helped them; for Chinese it was that the person was higher ranking; in Spain, that they were a friend or acquaintance.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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37c0af3
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Now we have hundreds of carefully engineered, designed, and marketed commercial foods filled with rapidly absorbed processed sugars that cause a burst of sensation that can't be matched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation and negatives, also offered a huge array of subtle and often hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine a thousand-fold higher than any..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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8bd4659
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The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery. Yet when offered the command of the Union Army by Lincoln, Lee wrote, "I wish to live under no other government and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor." When Virginia chose secession, he regretfully ful..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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084d56d
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This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy--responsibility without control.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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90a558e
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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.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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d166913
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How's this for fascinating: Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high-socioeconomic status (SES) families but is only around 10 percent in low-SES kids. Thus, higher SES allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas lower-SES settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you're grow..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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7b0cb7c
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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 that being good and being law-abiding aren't synonymous.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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41fd3e7
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Similar intermixing of the real and the metaphorical occurs with temperature sensation. In another study from Bargh's group, the researcher, hands full with something, would ask a subject to briefly hold a cup of coffee for them. Half the subjects held warm coffee, half iced coffee. Subjects then read about some individual and answered questions about them. Subjects who held the warm cup rated the individual as having a warmer personality (..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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b2e5e38
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In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the "warrior" variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a 'normal' or subclinical range. However, these same characteristics in an abusive childhood environment--one typified by persistent uncertainty, unpredictable threat, poor behavioral modeling and social referencing, and inconsistent reinforce..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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f2cabd1
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Moderate, transient stress (i.e., the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD--one reason why cognition tanks at such times. This is the inverted-U concept of stress writ synaptic.4
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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9799269
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In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward.91 Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It's "I know how things work; this is going to be great." In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the ..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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4316877
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Lots of work has examined the genes involved, most broadly showing that variants that produce lowered dopamine signaling (less dopamine in the synapse, fewer dopamine receptors, or lower responsiveness of these receptors) are associated with sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, and extroversion. Such individuals have to seek experiences of greater intensity to compensate for the blunted dopamine signaling.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |