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Human Nature’s Pathologist
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
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Why Do We Have Religion Anyway?
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
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Envy May Bear Fruit, but It Also Has an Aftertaste
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
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This Just In: Study Shows Songs About Sex Are Hot Sellers
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
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The Complicated Psychology of Revenge
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
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Gender: A Product of Cultural and Biological Evolution
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
