Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

We scientists have way too much a tendency to simplify problems. I guess it actually comes to us naturally. Take the simplest unit, separate out all the confusing, external factors. Study it. Make sure you understand it. And in psychology that means the person studying the individual. But if you want to study our social nature, if you want to study processes that will lead to war and peace, you don't learn all that much by looking at the single individual. A lot of the important things are emergent facts about us, things that you can only see when you get a lot of us interacting.

It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.