The New York Times: Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an More
The vast majority of the world’s 7 billion people practice some kind of religion, ranging from massive worldwide churches to obscure spiritual traditions and local sects. Nobody really knows how many religions there are on the planet, but whatever the number, there are at least that many theories about why More
The New York Times: Why envy? It seems to be the most useless of the deadly sins: excruciating to experience, shameful to admit, bereft of immediate pleasure or long-term benefits. To an evolutionary psychologist, there’s a certain logic to seducing thy neighbor’s wife or stealing his goods, but what’s the More
The New York Times: Psychologists sometimes have a way of proving what you always suspected was true. A recent study of popular song lyrics done at the State University of New York in Albany shows not only that messages about sexual relationships dominate the songs at the top of the charts More
A few years ago a group of Swiss researchers scanned the brains of people who had been wronged during an economic exchange game. These people had trusted their partners to split a pot of money with them, only to find that the partners had chosen to keep the loot for More
Wendy Wood, of University of Southern California, and Alice Eagly, of Northwestern University, chairs of the symposium on the cultural and biological evolution of gender, have been turning heads for the last couple years by casting doubt on the dominant discourse in evolutionary psychology of gender. By examining the ways More
