http://bit.ly/g4zBIF Tragedy tends to bring out the best in people, according to new research into cooperative behavior. The more people are affected by tragedy, the more they cooperate and engage in “prosocial” behavior.
In a study of 2,447 residents in five provinces at the epicenter of a 2008 earthquake in China, researchers found that residents who [...]

http://bit.ly/aibJLe
A new interview explores what happens to people when they are deprived of their hidden brains.
Much of The Hidden Brain is about the problems that unconscious factors create in our lives — from the vagaries in our moral judgment to the ways in which suicide bombers are indoctrinated. A natural conclusion from these examples is that [...]

http://bit.ly/8xAasp
One of the things I always find striking after a major natural disaster such as the recent earthquake in Haiti is how religious believers and non-believers quickly reach diametrically opposing conclusions about the implications of the disaster. For non-believers, natural disasters are evidence that God does not exist — for what kind of benevolent, just [...]

Tiger Woods. Michael Jackson. Brittany Murphy. Why do we care so much when celebrities die, or cheat on their spouses? Why do we read magazine cover story after cover story about people in rigor mortis or in flagrante delicto with whom we share no personal connection? (I love this collage of New York Post cover [...]

I gave a couple of talks and Q&As last week at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. One of the questions that came up was whether we need to increase the store of human compassion in order to better deal with the problem of apathy in the face of genocide. Why has the world sat on [...]