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Does Believing in Evil Make Us More Violent and Less Tolerant?
New York Magazine: Two weeks ago, many people will tell you, we saw the face of evil. Well, not its face, exactly, since James Foley’s killer wore a black mask as he horrifically beheaded the
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Study discovers the ordinary psycho
New Zealand Herald: There’s more to psychopaths than being murderous. They aren’t all as smart as Hannibal Lecter, or evil, and they can change, say researchers. Victoria University Associate Professor Devon Polaschek, one of four
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Mind Reading: Steven Pinker’s Case for Why the World Is Heading Toward Peace
TIME: Amidst the headlines tallying the damage wrought by persistent economic decline, cataclysmic climate change and unbending political stalemate — among other things — Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker brings good news. In his new
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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
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What the Stanford prison experiment taught us — and didn’t teach us — about evil
Boston Globe: Via Longreads, Stanford Magazine has a fascinating piece on the infamous Stanford prison experiment. For those who never took a psychology class, in August of 1971 a psychologist named Phil Zimbardo and his
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‘Evil Scientist’ Wants To Teach People To Do Good
NPR: In 1971, at Stanford University, a young psychology professor created a simulated prison. Some of the young men playing the guards became sadistic, even violent, and the experiment had to be stopped. The results
