Kelly Goldsmith and Caroline Roux (Northwestern) and Ravi Dhar (Yale): When Altruism Trumps Self-Interest: The Effect of Donation Incentives on Motivation. Kevin Patrick Tobia reviews Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them by Joshua Greene. Charles Montgomery on why we're sometimes kind without reason: Our brains are constantly, subtly being primed in fascinating ways by our physical surroundings. What makes humans capable of horrific violence? Tom Bartlett on a small group of psychologists say they are moving toward answers. From Public Seminar, Emanuele Castano on the attack on empathy; who’s afraid of Sigmund Freud? Jeremy Safran on the rise, fall, and possible resurrection of psychoanalysis in the United States; and what’s left after penis envy? Chiara Bottici wonders. How does lust affect the way we think about people? Paul Bloom investigates. When people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory — those who can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago — are tested for accuracy, researchers find what goes into false memories. Nick Brown smelled bull: A plucky amateur dared to question a celebrated psychological finding — he wound up blowing the whole theory wide open. Nadja Dwenger, Dorothea Kubler, and Georg Weizsacker investigate the possibility that a decision-maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. Jeffrey Marlow on why you aren’t as creative as you’d like to think.
