There's a science to what sort of people we're attracted to, and it has to do with everything from how similar they are to us, to what sort of pheromones we imprinted on when we were little, and what variants of genes we have related to the neurochemical oxytocin.
— Robert Sapolsky
I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.
As for testosterone, it's gotten a bum rap. Yes, it has tons to do with aggression but it doesn't cause aggression as much as sensitizes you to the environmental triggers of aggression.
I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.
We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.
Well, much of my research over the years has been on stress, and the adverse effects of stress on the health of the central nervous system. All things considered, I've been astonishingly unhelped by my own research.
When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.
My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead, there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the American way of life.
Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.
The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.
The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth.
Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.
That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.
Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.
My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.
From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.
I'm sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.
There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.
Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
When the Nazis urged on their populace toward the final solution, their propaganda was of Jews as rats, the Holocaust as extermination of the disgusting vermin in Germany's basement. For contemporary European white supremacists, it's the image of Islam as a malignancy. For Southern slavers, it was Africans as subhumans.
Ninety percent of what I'm listening to overall is like the same tape of Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. Like, how did I become one of those people on late night TV where they sell anthologies to you and you buy them?
The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.
Juvenile justice is probably the area that's most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there's no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
At its worst, there's just virtually no organ system in your body that's not thrown out of kilter in some way by chronic psychological stress.
What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you're 25.
Authoritarians have always been here. But the features of a given moment make that way of thinking more or less appealing. Germany in the 1920s, when people are starving, suddenly makes 'populist' answers and scapegoating different groups as the source of the problem much more appealing.
If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.
For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.
My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.
Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.
For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.
Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.
I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.
In terms of the most unique thing we do socially, my vote goes to something we invented alongside cities - we have lots of anonymous interactions and interactions with strangers. That has shaped us enormously.
I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.
Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.
When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.
Individuating and taking someone else's perspective can be very powerful.
Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress - just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.
My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop.
Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the 'them,' to treat that group horribly is made much easier.
I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.
The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.
I was not especially a writer back in college.
I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.
As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.
Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.
You know, I'm an egg-heady scientist with a large beard and like Birkenstocks.
