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Damned Spot: Guilt, Scrubbing, and More Guilt
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters, and by far the bard’s most obsessive. Immorally ambitious, she prods her husband to murder Scotland’s king, and then deludes herself into believing that “a little
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What a Mess: Chaos and Creativity
One of the most influential ideas about crime prevention to come out in recent years is something called the “broken windows theory.” According to this theory, small acts of deviance—littering, graffiti, broken windows—will, if ignored
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Is Religion Just An Assortment of Gut Feelings?
The vast majority of the planet’s 7 billion people ascribe to some kind of religious belief—that is, a faith in things that cannot be proven. This makes no sense from a scientific and psychological point
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Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Jonathan Haidt is occupying Wall Street. Sort of. It’s a damp and bone-chilling January night in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The 48-year-old psychologist, tall and youthful-looking despite his silvered hair
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Washing the Body ‘Cleanses’ the Mind
U.S. News & World Report: There may be some truth to the expression “cleanliness is next to godliness” after all, finds a new review of previously published studies. University of Michigan researchers found that showering
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A Moral Gene?
Scientific American: Morality is often considered to be the domain of philosophers, not biologists. But scientists have often wondered what role our genomes play in directing our moral compass. Today, a paper was published in