Morality and Ethics

Insubordination gets a bad reputation – perhaps deservedly so.  However, there are times when insubordination is what we want.  The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively is designed for those times.  We want people to be insubordinate when...

What makes a man a man? What drives our behavior? What makes us us? These are the questions that Steven Pinker tries to answer in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature . The answers are surprisingly entangled in religion and our belief ...

In part 1  of this book review of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature , I focused on the basics of the argument. We learned about the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine. In this part, I focus on what the implications ar...

It all started the night of April 4th , 1968.  Jane Elliott was preparing for her next day’s lessons when she heard of Dr. King’s assassination.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been fatally shot by James Earl Ray on a balcony in Memphis, TN.  It sho...

Sometimes while reading a book, you can be in such agreement with the concept and so frustrated by the experience of reading.  It’s hard reading.  The research support is sometimes weak, but it’s so important, it’s worth looking past these limitations.  Compassi...

It’s an important question.  Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others answers it.  Even the Dali Lama and Paul Ekman couldn’t come to a conclusion in Emotional Awareness .  Richard Dawkins argues that there is no “true” altruism i...

Just how does cooperation evolve? If you followed Darwin’s survival of the fittest, cooperation doesn’t make sense. How do you benefit from sacrificing for someone else? That’s the problem that game theory sets out to solve. Along the way, they found...

If you start a list of the people who are the most concerned with the welfare of everyone on our planet, names like Mother Theresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama are certain to make the list. In A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision fo...

Had you asked me a few months ago what it meant to make an ethical decision, I would have been inclined to tell you something along the lines of “doing what’s right.” It’s a fine response but one that overlooks a problem. How do you decide when you’re ...

If you’ve been reading my blog – or even just the book reviews for a while you may have realized that I’m on a voyage of self-discovery – and it’s a voyage that isn’t even close to its end. I’m constantly trying to improve my understanding of psychology...

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil  left me with a terrifying thought. What if we are all evil? What if we don’t turn people evil? What if, instead, we’re all evil and only briefly rise to be good? This is the third and fina...

It seems as if the construction of prisons is all about the bricks, mortar, and iron bars. On the surface, constructing a prison is about preventing break outs. However, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil  explains that the r...

Young children can say things that adults could never get away with. Ask a child why they did something wrong, and one answer you may get is, “The devil made me do it.” The personification of evil, they proclaim, can override their free will and cause the...

Mindreading  – it’s the stuff of comic books and science fiction. At the same time, Dr. Paul Ekman struggles with the implications of his discovery of micro-expressions and the emotions they reveal (see Nonverbal Messages  and Telling Lies ). All ...

In part 1 of this review, we talked about the mechanisms which allow good people to execute Moral Disengagement . In this part of the review, we’ll talk about the second half of the book, which discusses moral disengagement in a variety of topics. Th...

If you want to talk about moral behavior, at some point Albert Bandura’s name is going to come up. He’s done a great deal of work trying to understand people. His research in 1961 showed that children imitate the aggressive behavior they see adults doi...

Most of the time, my reviews are roughly linear to my reading. However, this review of Nonverbal Messages: Cracking the Code: My Life’s Pursuit  is different. It’s different because it’s an autobiography written by Dr. Paul Ekman, and in it he refers ...

It all started with memes.  I wanted to know the origin.  I wanted to understand how they start, how they function, and how to generate them.  I discovered that the root was The Selfish Gene – and memes were conceived as the ideological counterpart to g...

It’s time to draw the line between the dots.  SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed is the final missing piece that connects the dots between Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene , The Evolution of Cooperation ,...

Life is chaos. It’s the million-billion random connections that make life interesting. All art and all science seek to understand us. We try to understand the connections in our own minds that make us, well, us . By understanding ourselves, we will ha...

I’ve been a fan of Paul Ekman’s work for some time now. Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage  isn’t the first book of Dr. Ekman’s that I’ve read. I got exposed to his work through Destructive Emotions  and Emotio...

It’s a fair question to ask why I’d read Wonder Drug: 7 Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself given the mixed review of the authors’ prior work, Compassionomics .  The short answer is that someone in a posi...