What We Believe About People

Mean World Syndrome

Why relentless exposure to exceptional disasters can make the world seem more dangerous than broader evidence suggests.

How Power Corrupts

Doug asks why shameless, opportunistic people so often rise to power even if humans are fundamentally social and cooperative.

The Psychology of Power

How settled societies changed the balance of power, making rulers harder to remove and hierarchies more durable.

Mosts Revolutions Fail

Why revolutions so often replace one elite with another, viewed through the iron law of oligarchy and the limits of representative democracy.

How to Make Friends with Your Inner Critic

Practical strategies for changing one’s relationship with the inner critic rather than trying to silence it.

Death is not Well Understood

A reflection on death as a process rather than a fixed instant, moving from resuscitation research to compassionate bedside behavior.

Amazing Crows

Crows recognize faces, make tools, teach their young whom to trust, and remember human behavior for years.

Love Shows Its Resilience

Survey evidence from spring 2020 suggested that many romantic relationships remained stable or even improved under pandemic pressure.

Wisdom and Aging

Examples from Gandhi, Benjamin Franklin, and Grandma Moses show how creativity, purpose, and contribution can continue in later life.

The Neuroscience of Wisdom

A look at the brain networks associated with prosocial behavior, emotional regulation, reflection, uncertainty, and other components of wisdom.

Wiser

Intelligence is not the same as wisdom; this piece introduces wisdom as a biological capacity that can be studied, measured, and strengthened.

Defining Wisdom

Doug reviews five features researchers associate with wisdom and the idea that wisdom can be learned rather than produced by medication.

The Real Lord of the Flies

The true story of six Tongan boys stranded for fifteen months offers a striking counterexample to the grim social collapse imagined in Lord of the Flies.

The Blitz

Evidence from the Blitz challenged predictions that bombing cities would destroy civilian morale and trigger mass panic.

Is Our State of Civilization Only Skin Deep?

A challenge to the idea that civilization is only a thin veneer, drawing on evidence of resilience under catastrophic bombing.

Bomb Mongers

A critical look at area bombing, civilian destruction, and the assumptions that drove wartime decisions about strategic power.

A Radical Idea

Why people often expect panic in disasters even though real emergencies repeatedly show cooperation, order, and mutual aid.

What is Truth?

How beliefs and expectations can help produce the reality they predict, from bank runs and placebos to mass illness scares.

How Empathy Binds

Research on soldiers suggests that loyalty to comrades and close social bonds can matter more in combat than abstract ideology.

Terrorists Are Like Us

A look at the social ties, friendships, and sense of belonging that can help draw ordinary people into extremist groups.

Do Infants Possess an Innate Sense of Morality?

Infant experiments suggest an early preference for helpers, but also reveal how quickly similarity and group preference can complicate moral choices.

An Aversion to the Unfamiliar

How an early preference for the familiar can become suspicion when ancient social instincts meet anonymous modern life and alarming news.

Helpful Toddlers?

Helpful toddlers and Jane Elliott’s classroom experiment show both the strength of spontaneous cooperation and the speed with which hierarchy can divide a group.

The Ability to Feel Empathy

Doug considers the limits of empathy as a spotlight that favors individuals while defending its importance in human relationships.

Are Humans Innately Selfish?

A surviving fragment of Doug’s discussion of veneer theory and the long Western tradition of viewing human beings as innately selfish.

Why Do Good People Turn Bad?

From George Orwell to battlefield history, Doug examines the difficulty ordinary people often have in treating another human being as a faceless enemy.

How Are Most Wars Won?

How physical distance, dehumanization, stimulants, and military conditioning can make killing easier while increasing its psychological cost.

The Golem Effect

How low expectations can quietly shape behavior and outcomes, creating a downward spiral known as the Golem Effect.

Mirroring

How people mirror one another’s emotions and behavior, strengthening connection but also spreading harmful ideas and reactions.

The Dangers of Pluralistic Ignorance

How people can become trapped by mistaken beliefs about what others think—and how one person resisting the group can interrupt the cycle.

Economic Bubbles

What financial bubbles and silent classrooms reveal about pluralistic ignorance and the tendency to follow what we think others believe.

William James

From William James’s philosophy of belief to Robert Rosenthal’s rat-maze experiment, a look at how expectations may shape outcomes.

Skepticism

How power, force, and shared belief can sustain myths and authority long after skepticism might otherwise take hold.

Living Together in Larger Groups

How shared myths and belief in watchful gods may have helped strangers cooperate as human communities grew larger.

Living Together in Larger Groups (Cont.)

Evidence that large-scale cooperation and shared social networks existed among mobile prehistoric peoples before settled civilization.

Why Do We Believe the Stories Our Leaders Tell Us?

How shared stories allow large groups of strangers to imagine common membership in nations, religions, and institutions.

Justifying Privilege

How societies justify unequal power, status, and wealth through stories of divine right, merit, and social contribution.

Are Humans Like Bonobos?

A comparison of human social behavior with bonobos and chimpanzees, emphasizing cooperation, equality, and resistance to domination.

More on Chimpanzees

How chimpanzee and bonobo societies offer contrasting models of hierarchy, aggression, coalition-building, and social power.

The Psychology of Power

An examination of Dacher Keltner’s power paradox: communities may elevate modest people only to see authority change them.

If Powerful People Feel Less Connected

How unequal power may shape empathy, cynicism, self-doubt, and people’s sense of connection to others.

Humankind

The opening of Doug’s Humankind sequence, beginning with the Blitz and evidence that crisis did not produce the mass panic leaders expected.

Is Play Pointless?

Why unstructured play is not a break from learning but one of the ways children develop practical knowledge, cooperation, and adult skills.

Human Capacity for Empathy and Altruism

A look at humanity’s capacity for empathy and altruism—and whether institutions built on assumptions of selfishness can make those assumptions come true.

A Cynical View of Humankind

How Frederick Taylor’s cynical view of workers helped shape management systems built around measurement, surveillance, and external incentives.

The Effects of Economic Incentives

How bonuses and targets can crowd out judgment, intrinsic motivation, and creativity—especially when complex work is reduced to simple measures.

Workers Have Ideas

Jos de Blok argues that the people doing the work are often the people with the best ideas—and that management can sometimes get in their way.

Jos de Blok

A profile of Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok, whose anti-managerial approach emphasizes trust, autonomy, and intrinsic motivation.

The Flip Side of the Pygmalion Effect

The darker side of expectation effects, including the Golem Effect and the lasting ethical questions raised by the 1939 Monster Study.

Further Research on the Pygmalion Effect

A review of later research on the Pygmalion Effect and how expectations can influence performance in schools, workplaces, armies, and hospitals.

The Test of Inflected Acquisition

How randomly assigned expectations about children’s potential helped shape performance in the experiment that became central to the Pygmalion Effect.

The Pygmalion Effect

How expectations can influence treatment and performance, from laboratory rats to students labeled as having unusually high potential.

Inspired (Pt. 5)

How creativity can be deliberately pursued through the mating, combination, and recombination of ideas.

Inspired (Pt.4)

A comparison between biological evolution and the trial-and-error process behind creative breakthroughs in science and art.

The Agoura Way

A look at schools built around freedom, play, and intrinsic motivation—and the question of whether adults can trust children with greater independence.

What Is the Purpose of Education?

A challenge to achievement-focused education, asking what success means when highly credentialed workers doubt their work has social value.

Visiting Agoura

Doug reflects on a visit to Agora, where mixed ages, self-directed learning, and play challenge familiar assumptions about schooling.

Bullying

How rigid total institutions can foster bullying—and why open, mixed-age environments like Agora may reduce it.

Angelique & Rafael

How two Agora students illustrate curiosity, self-directed learning, and the power of intrinsic motivation.

Schools with No Classes or Classrooms

Inside a school without conventional classes, grades, or rigid hierarchies, students pursue individual learning paths in a deliberately unconventional environment.

Play

A defense of unstructured play, boredom, and the curiosity and imagination that can emerge when children make their own rules.

Is Education Endured?

A critique of achievement-driven schooling and the risk that résumés, paychecks, and the knowledge economy crowd out play and exploration.

Wrong Assumptions About Others

Why people may underestimate others’ prosocial values—and how mistaken expectations can help create the behavior they predict.

Short-Lived Golden Days

How the rise of achievement culture and busier childhoods helped squeeze out unstructured play.

The Dawn of Civilization

How civilization, schooling, and industrialization reshaped childhood—and how unstructured play later briefly re-emerged.

Thinking with Movement

How movement can sharpen perception and support thinking—and when physical effort begins to compete with thought.

Thinking with Gesture

How gesture carries ideas, supports memory, and helps make abstract or uncertain possibilities feel tangible.

Thinking with Built Spaces

How architecture and built environments can shape attention, reflection, and the conditions for creative thought.

Thinking with Natural Spaces

Why natural environments can restore depleted attention and why preserving access to nature matters for the mind.

Thinking with Experts

How cognitive apprenticeship can make expert thinking visible and help learners build difficult skills step by step.

Thinking with Peers

Why thinking with peers can deepen learning, strengthen memory, and make intellectual development a social process.

Investors’ Interoceptive Awareness

A debate over bodily intuition in fast decisions—and Doug’s warning not to substitute it for deliberate System 2 thinking.

Birthing Consciousness

An exploration of childbirth as an adaptive altered state of consciousness associated with pain relief and reduced prefrontal activity.

Losing Sleep

How sleep deprivation can weaken the ability to suppress intrusive memories and intensify a cycle of distress and poor sleep.

Teaching the Truth About Aging

A challenge to common stereotypes about aging, with evidence on emotion, cognition, priorities, and meaningful experience.

Inspired (Pt. 6)

Why creativity does not require genius, and how openness, curiosity, and developing ideas may matter as much as raw talent.

Two Wolves

A parable about the inner forces we strengthen through attention, identity, and choice.

Ships at Sea: Exploring the Mysteries of Self and Consciousness

An exploration of the changing self, from cellular renewal and Buddhist non-self to experiences of ego dissolution.

Controlling Consciousness

What mindfulness may change in attention, emotion, and bodily awareness—and why the benefits take sustained practice.

The Seven Sins of Memory

How memory shapes, distorts, and sometimes deceives us—and what that means for a more thoughtful life.