So, as I’ve mentioned previously here probably, I’m working on a rather largish project that I guess you could describe as a popularization of a lot of current strains of moral psychology. And the way I’m setting it up, while there will be a series of different narratives and illustrations woven throughout, tying together different […]

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I’ll confess some mild disappointment with Amartya Sen’s recent book Identity and Violence. It is, as Philostrate might’ve put it, some 200 pages long, which is as brief as I have known a book, but by 200 pages it is too long. The core idea—that we need to see people as “diversely diverse” rather than […]

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A theme that keeps coming up in my research into toxic obedience and bad group behavior, albeit under different names and in different variants, is what Robert Jay Lifton, in his study of Nazi doctors calls “doubling,” a kind of psychic compartmentalization that allows people to commit brutal acts under the aegis of one role […]

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Tyler Cowen’s post on countersignalling, which I discussed in a post below, came back to me as I read Christopher Bohem’s account of the behavior of egalitarian forager bands in Hierarchy in the Forest. Turns out it’s pretty widespread among groups where members are hypervigilant against dominant hunters or temporary, limited-function leaders becoming dominant over […]

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