Thoughts on Psychology

  1. Free Will

    Far from being essential to our humanity, the belief in free will holds us back from being more humane and pragmatic.

  2. Deep Work

    The ability to sustain deep focus on our most important work is growing rarer at the same time it’s becoming more essential.

  3. Man’s Search for Meaning

    Meaning is found not in what we expect from the world, but what the world expects from us.

  4. The Moral Foundations of Violence

    Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.

  5. The Righteous Mind

    Morality is more than just right and wrong: its the evolutionary result of a range of competing moral intuitions. The failure to appreciate this is a major cause of political partisanship and deadlock.

  6. The Drunkard’s Walk

    We’re naturally poor judges of probability. Correcting our flawed intuitions about chance would leave us feeling less guilty, more grateful, and generally happier.

  7. Stalker

    We might so want to live in a just world, a world in which bad things never happen to good people, that we try to blame those good people (even when it's ourselves) for the bad things that happen to them.

  8. Bad Thoughts for a Better Life

    Three techniques for harnessing bad thoughts into the service of better emotional hygiene

  9. When Nietzsche Wept

    Obsession is never about the thing you're obsessed with.

  10. The Persistence of Poverty

    Traditional thinking about what motivates the poor is precisely backwards.

  11. How We Decide

    The brain is an argument.

« All Topics