The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Ayn Rand Is the Most Influential 20th-Century Philosopher
“One of my favorite champions of this is Ayn Rand, who Probably the most influential philosopher of the 20th century. You know, everybody's Atlas Shrugged, and so forth.”
Half of Emotional Expressions Are Universal; 25% Are Culturally Specific
“Across these five different cultures, China, India, Japan, Korea, the U S really different cultural systems. About 50% of any expression that an individual would admit is this universal expression, you know, where if you get embarrassed, you turn your head awa…”
Acquiring Power Biologically Impairs Empathy and Degrades Foundational Social Skills
“Once you feel powerful... You lose all the social skills that got you power in the first place, you know, and, you know, we show when I feel powerful, I read people's emotions less effectively, I interrupt them more, And then all hell breaks loose, and you kno…”
Wealthy Individuals Are More Likely to Cheat and Drive Aggressively
“Our studies show fitting this power abuse hypothesis that if I'm from the well-to-do and, you know, or feeling I'm from the upper class I'm less likely to attend to people carefully when they're speaking. I in an experiment, I'm more likely to lie and say I go…”
Parents Must Expose Children to Suffering to Raise Altruistic Adults
“I think it's important for parents to let kids Experience suffering and to see suffering, right? To recognize that there's pain that this is part of the human condition, because that's really what activates a lot of the pro-social stuff is suffering. And, you …”
Maternal Caregiving Biology Explains Why Women Collaborate More Than Men
“And these interesting sex differences but they are there and I think have interesting things to say about why women are more collaborative and live longer and handle stress in different ways. I think a lot begins with just that basic source of caregiving they …”
The Reproducibility Crisis in Social Psychology Is Somewhat Overblown
“So when I looked at some of the tables of, like, here's what's being attempted to be replicated, it's a very narrow swath of social psychology. You know, no one's attempting to replicate a long-term study of merit. Right. Or cause it's just, it takes a long ti…”
Shifting Historical Contexts Cause Valid Psychological Replication Failures
“By definition, we believe that phenomena change as a function of the social context. That's the heart of social psychology. If I'm in one situation, I behave differently than in another situation or one context. And I think that what we should start to make su…”
Machiavellian Tactics Succeed in One-Shot Deals but Fail Long-Term
“There are measures of Machiavellianism, and you, if you're a Machiavellian, you know, and you lie and manipulate and don't mind really harming people to rise in power, you'll do well in one-shot negotiations, but for the most part, you don't do too well in ris…”
Acquiring Power Amplifies Preexisting Character Traits Rather Than Corrupting Uniformly
“If I'm really competitive and self-serving and I get power, I'm even more competitive and self-serving and corrupts. But, critically, if I'm kind and Dalai Lama-like and I get power, I'm even more sacrifice-oriented and other-focused, right? Power reveals.”
Emotions Evolved Primarily to Build Essential Human Relationships
“What they were arguing for, if you read them carefully, is that our emotions and how we express them in our facial expressions and our voice and what happens in our body Are really about building the strong relationships that define the human species, the atta…”
Human Fathers Uniquely Recognize Offspring to Actively Provide Care
“We're an unusual primate in that, you know, like chimpanzees, males don't even know who really know who their offspring are given their reproductive patterns. And I write about this in born to be good. You know, the female goes into estrus mates with every mal…”
Historical Average for Human Maternal Breastfeeding Is Four Years
“Through breastfeeding, which, you know, the human average across history is four years of skin to skin contact and the provision of nourishment and the oxytocin that's released and the prolactin that is this oceanic feeling of connection that's foundational.”
Darwin Believed Sympathetic Communities Flourish Better Than Ruthless Individuals
“We have this notion of Darwin as being founded on survival of the fittest. And it's the strong and the nasty and the manipulative and the Machiavellian who thrived in evolution. And Darwin didn't believe that at all. And in fact, he anticipated a shift in evol…”
UC Berkeley Lab Links Extreme Compassion to Vulnerability to Mania
“We've done work in my lab on people who show a lot of hyper connectivity and compassion to others. And you know, they tend to fit a profile of being vulnerable to mania”
Expanding Compassion to Out-Groups Relies on Culture Over Biology
“I do think that that is the, that is where we encounter the limits of evolutionary biology, and we have to get to cultural practices, like extending compassionate people who are not like us.”
Social Darwinists Distorted Darwin to Justify Victorian Racial Superiority
“What happened is how the social Darwinists after Darwin, used his thinking, and what they did, as is characterized in this really important book on social Darwinism by Degler, is they said, hey, there's this English scientist who says, you know, we can explain…”
Early Hunter-Gatherer Societies Maintained Collaborative, Horizontal Power Structures
“The best, most reliable data on hunter-gatherer societies, small groups, 75 people, we evolved in these groups for 200,000 years, was that power was collaborative, it was distributed across people, and it was kind of horizontal. It was hard to, there weren't r…”
Brain Scans Reveal Privilege Actively Dampens Empathetic Neural Activation
“Keeley found that if I come from a place of power and privilege, and I listen to my friend, those regions of the brain aren't activated, right?”
Parents Foster Empathy by Asking Reflective Questions Rather Than Preaching
“How you get them to empathize is by asking questions and then being quiet and letting the kids reason. So, you know, if a conflict's happening, the parent who leads the kids towards empathy is saying things like, God, you know, why is your little sister crying…”
Charitable Donations Activate Brain Reward Circuits Similarly to Receiving Gifts
“Investigators at the University of Oregon led by Harbaugh and colleagues showing that if I give money to charity, it activates the reward circuits of the brain, much as if I receive that gift.”
Half of Scientists Were Creationists When Darwin Published Evolution Theory
“At the time that Darwin published his theory of evolution, 50% of scientists were creationists.”
Research Shows Average Young Siblings Squabble Six Times an Hour
“Judy Dunn found, for example, the average siblings, two little beautiful, you know, laughing two and four year old siblings are fighting with each other six times an hour, right? So every 10 minutes they get into a squabble, or they're wrestling, or pulling ea…”