1. Robert K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science,” Science 159(38) (1968): 56–63.
2. For example, a relatively unknown sociologist named Marcello Truzzi wrote in an obscure academic journal article about the paranormal that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” When Carl Sagan repeated the line in his documentary series Cosmos, it was thereafter credited to him, and one routinely hears and sees the quote prefaced with “As Carl Sagan said, . . .”
3. As an example of the bestseller effect in publishing, I organize and sponsor a well-attended public science lecture series at Caltech in Pasadena, where we routinely host the biggest names in science, usually when they are in the Los Angeles area on a book tour. We usually order and sell their books for them, but occasionally publishers will request that we arrange to have a bookstore that reports sales to the New York Times Book Review sell the books.
5. Matthew Salganik, Peter S. Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market,” Science 311 (2006): 854–56. See also Duncan J. Watts, “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” The New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007, 22–25.
6. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Friendship and the Banker’s Paradox: Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism,” Proceedings of the British Academy 88 (1996): 119–43.
7. Ibid., 134–35.
8. Ibid., 133–34.
9. Letter dated September 18, 1861, in Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), vol. 2, 121.
10. Michael Shermer, “Colorful Pebbles and Darwin’s Dictum,” Scientific American (April 2001): 38. A parallel to Darwin’s Dictum is what I call “Wallace’s Wisdom,” named after Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of natural selection and Darwin’s younger contemporary who lived in the penumbra of the Darwinian eclipse. Wallace wrote, “The human mind cannot go on for ever accumulating facts which remain unconnected and without any mutual bearing and bound together by no law.” Quoted in John Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace, Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Arno Press, 1916), 63. In my biography of Wallace I employ this principle to emphasize the supreme role of theory in the history of science. Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.
11. Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (New York: Times Books, 2006).
12. http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/booklists.html. After the Bible and Atlas Shrugged were The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, The Book of Mormon, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, Passages by Gail Sheehy, and When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner.
13. In my 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, I devoted a chapter to the cultlike following that developed around Rand and her philosophy (“The Unlikeliest Cult in History,” I called it), in an attempt to show that extremism of any kind, even the sort that eschews cultish behavior, can become irrational. I cited the description of Rand’s inner circle by Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s chosen intellectual heir, where he listed the central tenets to which followers were to adhere, including “Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth. No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns. No one can be a fully consistent individualist who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue.” Nathaniel Branden, Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 255–56. Many of the characteristics of a cult, in fact, seemed to fit what the followers of Objectivism believed, most notably veneration of the leader, belief in the infallibility and omniscience of the leader, and commitment to the absolute truth and absolute morality as defined by the belief system.
14. My religious conversion and deconversion are recounted in my book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (New York: Times Books, 2000).
15. Michael Shermer, “Choice in Rats as a Function of Reinforcer Intensity and Quality: A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Fullerton, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Psychology,” August 8, 1978.
16. Galambos defined freedom as “the societal condition that exists when every individual has full (i.e., 100%) control over his own property,” and a free society as one where “anyone may do anything that he pleases—with no exceptions—so long as his actions affect only his own property; he may do nothing which affects the property of another without obtaining consent of its owner.” Galambos never published his long-promised book in his lifetime, so my summary of his theory comes from my own extensive notes from the V-50 class, and a series of three-by-five leaflets he printed called “Thrust for Freedom,” numbered sequentially and presenting the definitions quoted here. In 1999, Galambos’s estate issued volume 1 of Sic Itur Ad Astra (The Way to the Stars), a 942-page tome published by The Universal Scientific Publications Company, Inc. Galambos’s dream was to be a space entrepreneur and fly customers to the moon. In his logic, in order to realize this dream he believed that space exploration had to be privatized, which meant that society itself, in its entirety, would have to be privatized. Too bad Galambos did not live long enough to witness the space entrepreneur and libertarian Burt Rutan succeed in being the first to build a private rocket that reached space—it is a lesson libertarians should take to heart.
17. I recount my cycling experiences and the founding of the Ultra-Marathon Cycling Association and the Race Across America in my books Sport Cycling (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1985), and Race Across America: The Agonies and Glories of the World’s Longest and Cruelest Bicycle Race (Waco, TX: WRS Publishing, 1989).
18. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1966), orig. pub. 1949.
19. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, edited with an introduction by R. H. M. Elwes, translated by A. H. Gosset (London: G. Bell & Son, 1883), orig. pub. 1667. Emphasis added.
20. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997); Shermer, How We Believe (New York: Owl Books, 2002); Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2004).
1. The 100,000-year figure is a low estimate of the range given by paleoanthropologists for when anatomically modern humans migrated out of Africa and began to colonize Europe and the rest of the world, usually given as a range between 100,000 and 160,000 years ago. See Timothy D. White, B. Asfaw, D. Degusta, H. Gilbert, G. D. Richards, G. Suwas, and F. Clark Howell, “Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia,” Nature 423 (2003): 742–47. Many hominid species lived in small bands for many millions of years in Africa, but for our purposes the 100,000-year figure will suffice to make the point. For an overview see Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
2. Through my friendship with Napoleon Chagnon, the anthropologist whose ethnology Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992) put them on the world map, I have long been interested in the Yanomamö and have written about their religion in How We Believe (New York: Owl Books, 2002), their moral and ethical systems in The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2004), and the controversy over Chagnon’s ethnography and whether or not they are really the “fierce people” in Science Friction (New York: Times Books, 2005). The direct comparison with New Yorkers was made by Eric Beinhocker in The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). Beinhocker computes a figure of $93 annual income per person for hunter-gatherers from data collected on GDP by Bradford DeLong, available at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/. Since the figure is in 1990 dollars, and is an estimate in any case, I rounded up to an even $100 for easy comparison. The estimates for New Yorkers’ average income is from the state’s government statistics—Beinhocker quotes a mean of $36,000 and a median of $43,160, so I split the difference and rounded off to an even $40,000, again for simple comparison. Beinhocker estimates the Yanomamö SKU figure from Chagnon’s ethnography, and the Manhattan SKU figure from the universal product code (UPC) system whose 10-digit (one billion) accounting is now full and the system is switching to a 13-digit (one trillion) code. I’m not sure why he uses a 10-billion figure instead of one billion, but whether the SKU difference between hunter-gatherers and consumer-traders is seven or eight orders of magnitude does not really matter—the point is made regardless of the precise accuracy of the figures.
3. Once again, these are back-of-the-envelope calculations for comparison purposes only. The average male walks at about 3.5 miles per hour, or 5.67 kilometers per hour, so it would take 261 hours to walk 1,480 kilometers, which is just under eleven days, assuming you didn’t stop to eat, rest, or take care of other necessities. The distance between Earth and Jupiter varies considerably depending on where in our respective orbits we are when the measurement is taken. The speed of the Voyager I spacecraft has also varied, most notably in its acceleration through the “slingshot” effect of receiving a “gravity boost” from planets it approached. My figure of about 51,000 kilometers per hour comes from the fact that it took Voyager I a year and a half to reach Jupiter (it was launched on September 5, 1977, and arrived at Jupiter on March 5, 1979). It is now traveling at about 63,000 kilometers per hour, and on August 12, 2006, it reached the heliosheath, the termination shock region between our solar system and interstellar space; that is, the zone where our sun’s influence gives way to interstellar space and the influence of interstellar gas and other stars. Voyager I is now traveling at about 538,552,332 kilometers per year and is now about 15 billion kilometers from Earth. Even at this almost incomprehensible speed, it would take 74,912 years to get to the Alpha Centauri star system, the closest stars to our sun, if it were heading in that direction, which it is not.
4. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
5. Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). We know that the mind is a product of the brain, but how? We know that conscious thought is produced by neurons firing, but how? No one fully understands what is called the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, but much progress has been made in recent years by modeling neural networks, or the actions of networks of neurons out of which emerges a more complex phenomenon we call mind or consciousness. See Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Denver, CO.: Roberts & Co., 2004).
6. Personal correspondence between myself, Dawkins, and Hardison. See also vol. 9, no. 4 of Skeptic, that presents the details of these computer experiments and what they mean for how evolution works, as well as the original works in which they were published: Richard Hardison, Upon the Shoulders of Giants (Baltimore: University Press of America, 1985); and Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). Hardison’s response to Dawkins’s revelation was equally insightful on the power of this model:
Incidentally, I never felt that the TOBEORNOTTOBE example was entirely original with me. Bob Newhart, the comic, did a very nice skit in which he proposed an infinite number of monkeys working with an infinite number of typewriters, and then he realized that he would also need an infinite number of “inspectors” looking over the shoulders of the monkeys to see if anything meaningful occurred. Newhart then put himself into the role of one of these inspectors, spending another boring day and finding nothing. “Dum de dum de dum . . .Boring…Oh…Hey, Charlie, I think I have one. Let’s see, yeah. ‘To Be Or Not To Be, that is the acxrotphoeic.’” I simply realized that Bob’s humor might be a useful way of helping students to comprehend the selective nature of the “struggle for survival.” So you see that my contribution was minimal.
7. I am grateful to David B. Schlosser for some of these examples as well as his insights into the evolutionary basis of economics from his very real-world experiences as a businessman and a congressional candidate.
8. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981). See also Murray Rothbard, The Essential Ludwig von Mises (Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute of Auburn University, 1980).
9. R. Preston McAfee, “The Price Is Right Mysterious,” Engineering and Science 3 (2005): 32–42; Michael Doane, Kenneth Hendricks, and R. Preston McAfee, “Evolution of the Market for Air-Travel Information,” http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/AirTravel.pdf, 2003; Joseph Turow, Lauren Feldman, and Kimberly Meltzer, “Open to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline,” policy statement, Annenberg Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
10. Ultimatum game research and applications are reviewed in Colin Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
11. Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
12. Frans B. M. de Waal, “Food-Transfers Through Mesh in Brown Capuchins,” Journal of Comparative Psychology, 111 (1997): 370–78; and “Food Sharing and Reciprocal Obligations Among Chimpanzees,” Journal of Human Evolution (1989): 433–59.
13. James Madison, “The Federalist No. 51: The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments,” Independent Journal (Wednesday, February 6, 1788).
1. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 367–68.
2. K. Hawkes, “Showing Off: Tests of an Hypothesis about Men’s Foraging Goals,” Ethnology and Evolutionary Biology 12 (1990): 29–54; Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill, “Food Sharing Among Ache Foragers: Tests of Explanatory Hypotheses,” Current Anthropology 26 (1985): 223–46.
3. P. Freuchen, Book of the Eskimos (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961).
4. For a brilliant and highly readable history of the transition from the zero-sum interactions of our ancestors to the nonzero world of today, see Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon, 2000).
5. Quoted in Mark Skousen, The Making of Modern Economics (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 20.
6. Daniel B. Klein, “The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (As Much As They Do),” The Independent Review X(1) (Summer 2005): 5–37.
7. Personal correspondence, March 9, 2007.
8. I provide numerous examples of this bias in the next chapter. Please note that I am using the terms “conservative” and “liberal” in their modern usages, and recognize that the eighteenth-century term “classical liberal” refers to those who tend to favor free markets.
9. Stephen Jay Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” Natural History (July 1998): 12–21.
10. Peter A. Corning, “Evolutionary Ethics: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? An Overview and an Affirmation,” Politics and the Life Sciences 22(1) (2003): 50–77.
11. Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902).
12. Daniel P. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1859–1917,” Isis 78(294) (1987): 537–51.
1. Janet Browne, Voyaging: Charles Darwin—A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2000), 36, 366.
2. Toni Vogel Carey, “The Invisible Hand of Natural Selection, and Vice Versa,” Biology & Philosophy 13(3) (July 1998): 427–42; Michael T. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin’s Middle Road,” in The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980), 59–68; Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand,” in Eight Little Piggies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 138–52; Elias L. Khalil, “Evolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Economics,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 8(4) (1997): 221–44; Silvan S. Schweber, “Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of Character,” Journal of the History of Biology 13 (1980): 195–289; Syed Ahmad, “Adam Smith’s Four Invisible Hands,” History of Political Economy 22(1) (Spring 1990): 137–44; Donald Walsh, “Darwin Fallen Among Political Economists,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145(4) (2001): 415–37.
3. William Paley, Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (Hallowell, ME: Glazier & Co., 1826), 169–71 (orig. pub. 1802). Emphasis added.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759), part 1, sec. 1, chap. 1.
5. Ibid., part 1, sec. 1, chap. 40.
6. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, gen. eds., W. B. Todd, text ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 549 (orig. pub. 1776).
7. Ibid., 131.
8. Ibid., 625.
9. Ibid., 424.
10. Ibid., 625.
11. http://www.taxfoundation.org/.
12. Frédéric Bastiat, “The Petition of the Candlemakers” and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” in Selected Essays on Political Economy, George B. de Huszar, ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1995) (orig. pub. 1845 and 1848).
13. Bastiat, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” chap. 1.
14. Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) (orig. pub. 1845).
15. Richard D. Stone, The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Railroad Industry: A History of Regulatory Policy (New York: Praeger, 1991).
16. The complete text of the Sherman Antitrust Act is available at the following government Web page: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/foia/divisionmanual/ch2.htm#a1. See also Dominick Armentano, Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure (New York: Wiley, 1982); and Yale Brozen, Concentration, Mergers, and Public Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1982).
17. I am grateful to Jay Stuart Snelson and his seminar on free market economics taught through his Institute for Human Progress for making the distinction between consumer and producer driven economics in Adam Smith’s theory, and for the example of Alcoa as a violation of consumer driven economics, to which I added my own spin of distinguishing between bottom-up and top-down economics.
18. U.S. v. Aluminum Co. of America, 148 F.2d 416, 431 (2d Cir. 1945).
19. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, penned a succinct history and summation of the effects of antitrust legislation in his 1966 essay “Antitrust,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand, ed. (New York: Signet, 1966). There is no question that government subsidies of the railroads opened them up to subsequent strings tied to those subsidies in the form of legislation regulating that (and subsequent) industries.
20. U.S. v. Microsoft, No. 98–1232 (TPJ) (D.D.C. November 5, 1999) (Court’s Findings of Fact), paragraph 408. The entire document is available on the U.S. government Web page http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm.
21. Ibid., paragraph 409.
22. Ibid., paragraph 375.
23. AP wire story, “Motorcycle Imports Cited,” New York Times, January 20, 1983.
24. United States International Trade Commission, Heavyweight Motorcycles, and Power Train Subassemblies Therefor: Report to the President on Investigation No. TA-201-4F under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, February 1983, 19. After the first year rate of 49.4 percent, the tariff was lowered to 39.4 percent in the second year, 24.4 percent in the third year, 19.4 percent in the fourth year, and 14.4 percent in the fifth year. After that the tariff would return to its original 4.4 percent.
25. George Will, “Liberalism as Condescension,” Washington Post, September 14, 2006. Available at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/liberalism_as_condescension.html.
26. Edward C. Prescott, “Competitive Cooperation,” Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Feb. 15, 2007, A19.
27. Ibid.
28. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, “One Year After CAFTA,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2007, A18.
29. Prescott, “Competitive Cooperation.”
30. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 145.
31. Ibid., 418.
32. Ibid., 14.
33. Ibid., 423. Emphasis added. For a lengthy discussion of the origins of the invisible hand metaphor, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Emma Rothschild notes that Smith used the invisible hand metaphor in an early work on the history of astronomy, in a discussion of how polytheistic societies lead people to attribute “the irregular events of nature” to “intelligent, though invisible beings—to gods, demons, witches, genii, fairies.” They do not ascribe divine support to “the ordinary course of things”: “Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters.” Rothschild also suggests that Smith may originally have picked up the metaphor from Shakespeare, in Macbeth: Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale. There is, however, no direct proof of a connection between Smith and Shakespeare.
34. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: Charles Murray, 1859), 133.
35. Darwin most likely made the connection between the two economies early in the development of his theory—around 1838—when he read Dugald Stewart’s On the Life and Writing of Adam Smith, in such passages as this: “The most effective plan for advancing a people . . . is by allowing every man, as long as he observes the rules of justice, to pursue his own interest in his own way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into the freest competition with those of his fellow citizens. Every system of policy which endeavors . . . to draw towards a particular species of industry a greater share of the capital of the society than would naturally go to it . . . is, in reality, subversive of the great purpose which it means to promote.” Read “animal” for “man” and “population” for “people,” and we have a perfect description of natural selection in nature. See Silvan S. Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 229–316. Schweber argues that Darwin put the pieces of his theory together only after extensive reading of works outside of natural history, such as the Scottish economist Adam Smith: “The Scottish analysis of society contends that the combined effect of individual actions results in the institutions upon which society is based, and that such a society is a stable and evolving one and functions without a designing and directing mind.”
36. Listen to Darwin’s description of the evolution of the social instincts and our natural inclination to feel sympathy for others and how this led to the development of a moral system, from his 1871 The Descent of Man, and you will hear the echo of Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” And: “The social instincts, which no doubt were acquired by man as by the lower animals for the good of the community, will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows, some feeling of sympathy, and have compelled him to regard their approbation and disapprobation. Such impulses will have served him at a very early period as a rude rule of right and wrong.” Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1, 71–72.
1. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 283.
2. Edward Lorenz, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Address at the AAAS annual meeting, Washington, D.C., December 29, 1979.
3. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Panda’s Peculiar Thumb,” Natural History 9 (1978): 20–30.
4. Paul A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review 75 (1985): 332–37; see also his “Understanding the Economics of QWERTY: The Necessity of History,” in Economic History and the Modern Economist, W. N. Parker, ed. (London: Blackwell, 1985); and “Path Dependence in Economic Processes: Implications for Policy Analysis in Dynamical System Contexts,” in The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics, Kurt Dopfer, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151–94.
5. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.”
6. John Nash, “Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36(1) (1950): 48–49; and “Non-Cooperative Games,” The Annals of Mathematics 54(2) (1951): 286–95. See also Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947).
7. For a general discussion of the most recent research on game theory in light of such concepts as Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimization, see Colin F. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
8. John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Maynard Smith and Eros Szathmary, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1998).
9. For the history of the QWERTY keyboard, see Paul David, “Understanding the Economics of QWERTY: The Necessity of History”; and Stephen Jay Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb of Technology,” Natural History (January 1984): 14–23. For a general history of the typewriter see F. T. Masi, ed., The Typewriter Legend (Secaucus, NJ: Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, 1985); F. J. Romano, Machine Writing and Typesetting (Salem, MA: GAM Communications, 1986); and D. R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Hoke notes the paucity of historical records for reconstructing the history of the typewriter and was forced to rely on company histories, advertisements from magazines, photographs and illustrations of typewriters, surviving typewriters, and biographical material on the inventors, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs in the industry.
10. Stanley J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys,” Journal of Law and Economics 33 (April 1990); Liebowitz and Margolis, The Economics of Qwerty, papers by Stanley Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis; Peter Lewin, ed. (MacMillan/NYU Press, 2002); Margolis with Liebowitz, “Path Dependence, Lock-in and History,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization (Summer 1995): 205–26; and Liebowitz and Margolis, “Typing Errors,” Reason (June 1996).
11. Liebowitz and Margolis, “Typing Errors.”
12. Ibid.
13. W. Brian Arthur, “Positive Feedbacks in the Economy,” Scientific American 262 (1990): 92–99.
14. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY” (see note 4 above).
15. Paul Krugman, “QWERTY, Lock-In, and Path Dependence,” 2001. Accessed at http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/qwerty.html.
16. Douglas J. Puffert, “Path Dependence in Spatial Networks: The Standardization of Railway Track Gauge,” Explorations in Economic History 39(3) (July 2002): 282–314.
17. George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
18. Quoted in Basalla, Evolution, 53.
19. Ibid., 30.
20. Ibid., 123.
21. Ibid., 128.
22. Charles Darwin, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (London: John Murray, 1862), 348.
23. Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba, “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology 8 (1982): 4–15.
24. R. O. Prum and A. H. Brush, “Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird: A Long-Cherished View of How and Why Feathers Evolved Has Now Been Overturned,” Scientific American (March 2003): 84–93.
25. Kevin Padian and L. M. Chiappe, “The Origin of Birds and Their Flight,” Scientific American (February 1998): 38–47. In the Galápagos islands, for example, I have photographed flightless cormorants returning to shore after diving for food in the sea, upon which they stretch out their stubby little wings with desultory feathers to dry them out and collect heat from the sun. In this case, the exaptation was from flight to thermoregulation. The Galápagos are also home to a species of penguin whose wings have been exapted for propulsion and steering in the water.
26. K. P. Dial, “Wing-Assisted Incline Running and the Evolution of Flight,” Science 299 (2003): 402–4; P. Burgers and L. M. Chiappe, “The Wing of Archaeopteryx as a Primary Thrust Generator,” Nature 399 (1999): 60–62; P. Burgers and Kevin Padian, “Why Thrust and Ground Effect Are More Important Than Lift in the Evolution of Sustained Flight,” in New Perspectives on the Origin and Evolution of Birds: Proceedings of the International Symposium in Honor of John H. Ostrom, J. Gauthier and L. F. Gall, eds. (New Haven, CT: Peabody Museum of Natural History, 2001), 351–61.
27. Alan Gishlick, “Evolutionary Paths to Irreducible Systems: The Avian Flight Apparatus,” in Why Intelligent Design Fails, Matt Young and Taner Edis, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 58–71.
28. Stephen Jay Gould, “Tires to Sandals,” Natural History (April 1989): 8–15.
29. As a final example of exaptation on a grand scale, bicycle technology has been utilized in, and even spawned, new technologies and industries. Consider this short list compiled by David Gordon Wilson: mass production and use of ball bearings, production and use of steel tubes, use of metal stamping in production, differential gearing, tangent-spoked wheels (later used in cars, motorcycles, and airplanes), bushed power transmission chain, mass production and use of pneumatic tires, good-roads movement, Harley and Davidson, bicycle racers, Wright brothers, bicycle manufacturers, the underpinnings of the automobile age. David Gordon Wilson, Bicycling Science, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 32.
Trevor Pinch and W. E. Bijker make a similar point: “It may be useful to state explicitly that we consider bicycles to be as fully fledged a technology as, for example, automobiles or aircraft. It may be helpful for readers from outside notorious cycle countries such as the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain to point out that both the automobile and the airplane industries are, in a way, descendants from the bicycle industry. Many names occur in the histories of both the bicycle and the autocar: Triumph, Rover, Humber, and Raleigh, to mention but a few. The Wright brothers both sold and manufactured bicycles before they started to build their flying machines—mostly made out of bicycle parts.” T. J. Pinch and W. E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. P. Pinch, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 50.
1. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study (New York: HarperCollins, 1964), 3.
2. Ibid., 194.
3. By January 9, 1955, Mrs. Keech’s group had completely disbanded, and, fittingly, she moved from the Chicago area to Arizona, where she joined another UFO cult—Scientology.
4. For a popular treatment of the subject see Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1996). For a scholarly treatment of the subject, see Diana Tumminia, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
5. Dan Eggen and Paul Kane, “Gonzales: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” Washington Post, March 14, 2007, A01.
6. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) (New York: Harcourt, 2007). The quotes from Kissinger, Egan, and the McDonald’s spokesperson are cited on page 1.
7. Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
8. Geoffrey Cohen, “Party over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 808–82.
9. John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady, “Antecedents and Consequences of System-Justifying Ideologies,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 14 (2005): 260–65; Aaron C. Kay and John T. Jost, “Complementary Justice: Effects of ‘Poor But Happy’ and ‘Poor But Honest’ Stereotype Exemplars on System Justification and Implicit Activation of the Justice Motive,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 823–37; see also Stephanie Wildman, ed., Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
10. Tavris and Aronson, 130–32. See also http://www.innocenceproject.org/.
11. Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).
12. Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28 (1999): 1059–74. You can watch the video clip at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/.
13. Simons told me that he has had the same experience: “We actually rewound the videotape to make sure subjects knew we were showing them the same clip.” Personal interview, January 8, 2004.
14. Personal interview, January 8, 2004. Simons added, “The mistaken belief that important events will automatically draw attention is exactly why these findings are surprising; it is also what gives them some practical implications. By taking for granted that unexpected events will be seen, people often are not as vigilant as they could be in actively anticipating such events.”
15. Emily Pronin, D. Y. Lin, and L. Ross, “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002): 369–81.
16. Emily Pronin, Thomas Gilovich, and L. Ross, “Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder: Divergent Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others,” Psychological Review 111 (2004): 781–99.
17. Personal correspondence, January 7, 2004.
18. S. N. Brenner and E. A. Molander, “Is the Ethics of Business Changing?” Harvard Business Review (January/February 1977): 57–71.
19. P. A. M. Van Lange, T. W. Taris, and R. Vonk, “Dilemmas of Academic Practice: Perceptions of Superiority Among Social Psychologists,” European Journal of Social Psychology 27 (1997): 675–85.
20. J. Kruger, “Personal Beliefs and Cultural Stereotypes About Racial Characteristics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1996): 536–48.
21. “Oprah: A Heavenly Body? Survey Finds Talk-Show Host a Celestial Shoo-in,” U.S. News & World Report, March 31, 1997, 18.
22. M. Ross and F. Sicoly, “Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 322–36; R. M. Arkin, H. Cooper, and T. Kolditz, “A Statistical Review of the Literature Concerning the Self-serving Bias in Interpersonal Influence Situations,” Journal of Personality 48 (1980): 435-48; and M. H. Davis and W. G. Stephan, “Attributions for Exam Performance,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 10 (1980): 235–48. For a general summary of the attribution bias, see Carol Tavris and Carole Wade, Psychology in Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman / Addison Wesley, 1997).
23. R. E. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980).
24. Preliminary results of our study were originally published in my book How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000).
25. The full data set and analysis will be published in Michael Shermer and Frank J. Sulloway, “Religion and Belief in God: An Empirical Study.” In preparation.
26. Daniel Kahneman, “Autobiography,” Nobel Prize.org: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-autobio.html (2002).
27. Thomas Gilovich, Richard Vallone, and Amos Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” Cognitive Psychology 17 (1985): 295–314.
28. Quoted in obit released by Stanford University and available at http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/96/960605tversky.html.
29. For a literature review on this and dozens of other problems studied in this area, see Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and, more recently, Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
30. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “On the Psychology of Prediction,” Psychological Review 80 (1973): 237–51.
31. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” in Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty, 163.
32. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Extension Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review 90 (1983): 293–315.
33. J. S. Carroll, “The Effect of Imagining an Event on Expectations for the Event: An Interpretation in Terms of the Availability Heuristic,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 14 (1978): 88–96.
34. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973): 207–32.
35. B. Combs and P. Slovic, “Newspaper Coverage of Causes of Death,” Journalism Quarterly 56 (1979): 837–43.
36. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
37. Baruch Fischhoff, “For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Heuristics and Biases in Hindsight,” in Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty, 335–351.
38. John C. Zimmerman, “Pearl Harbor Revisionism,” Intelligence and National Security 17(2) (2002): 127–46.
39. Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin, eds., Advances in Behavioral Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11.
40. Marilyn vos Savant was bombarded with angry letters when she revealed the correct solution in her column: “Ask Marilyn,” Parade, Sept. 9, 1990; Feb. 17, 1991; July 7, 1991. You can actually play the three-door game at http://utstat.toronto.edu/david/MH.html#1. And on other Web sites you can find computer programs that have run hundreds of thousands of simulations of the game, proving that in the long run it is better to switch doors. See also L. Gillman, “The Car and the Goats,” American Mathematical Monthly (January 1992): 3–7.
41. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211 (1981): 453–58; and “Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions,” Journal of Business 59(4) (1986): 2; Benededetto De Martino et al., “Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain,” Science 313 (2006): 684–87.
42. Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, “Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit-Card Effect on Willingness to Pay,” Marketing Letters 12(1) (2001): 5–12.
43. W. Samuelson and R. J. Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1 (1988): 7–59; Daniel Kahneman, J. L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler, “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(1) (1991): 193–206; and E. J. Johnson, J. Hershey, J. Meszaros, and H. Kunreuther, “Framing, Probability Distortions, and Insurance Decisions,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 7 (1993): 35–51.
44. Samuelson and Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making.”
45. Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, and Jack Knetsch, “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem,” Journal of Political Economy (December 1990).
46. Costs, deaths, and casualties of the Iraq war: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/. Bush quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/07/20060704.html. Clinton quote: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/09/not_quite_ready.html.
47. Raymond Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2(2) (1998): 175–220.
48. Mark Snyder, “Seek and Ye Shall Find: Testing Hypotheses About Other People,” in E. T. Higgins, C. P. Heiman, and M. P. Zanna, eds., Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1981), 277–303.
49. John M. Darley and Paul H. Gross, “A Hypothesis-Confirming Bias in Labelling Effects,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (1983): 20–33.
50. Bonnie Sherman and Ziva Kunda, “Motivated Evaluation of Scientific Evidence,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society, Arlington, VA, 1989.
51. Deanna Kuhn, “Children and Adults as Intuitive Scientists,” Psychological Review 96 (1989): 674–89.
52. Deanna Kuhn, M. Weinstock, and R. Flaton, “How Well Do Jurors Reason? Competence Dimensions of Individual Variation in a Juror Reasoning Task,” Psychological Science 5 (1994): 289–96.
53. D. Westen, C. Kilts, P. Blagov, K. Harenski, and S. Hamann, “The Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Political Judgment During the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (2006): 1947–58.
54. Thomas Gilovich and Gary Belsky, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics (New York: Fireside, 2000).
55. My preferred strategy, which I have yet to find a casino to accept, would be to give the dealer $500 and ask if I can just play for an hour—they’re going to get my money anyway, and I am primarily just a recreational gambler.
1. Michael Shermer, “Choice in Rats as a Function of Reinforcer Intensity and Quality: A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Fullerton, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Psychology,” Douglas J. Navarick, committee chair; Margaret H. White and Michael J. Scavio, members, August 8, 1978.
2. Richard J. Herrnstein, “Relative and Absolute Strength of Response as a Function of Frequency of Reinforcement,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 4 (1961): 267–72.
3. Peter A. De Villiers and Richard Herrnstein, “Toward a Law of Response Strength,” Psychological Bulletin 83 (1976): 1131–53.
4. Thomas Gilovich and Gary Belsky, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics (New York: Fireside, 2000).
5. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica 47(2) (1979): 263–91. Reprinted in Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Choices, Values, and Frames (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17–43. What Kahneman and Tversky did for economics was to integrate the research findings and methodologies from their own field of psychology into the study of how people behave in markets. They embodied what an earlier integrationist, the Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek, recommended for students of the profession: “An economist who is only an economist cannot be a good economist,” a position quoted and endorsed by another Nobel economist, Vernon Smith, in his prize acceptance speech. Such transdisciplinary links between economics and psychology have proven to be some of the most fruitful in the history of both fields.
6. John Nash, “Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36(1) (1950): 48–49; and “Non-Cooperative Games,” The Annals of Mathematics 54(2) (1951): 286–95; Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947).
7. For a general discussion on the most recent research on game theory in light of such concepts as Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimization, see Colin F. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
8. Colin Camerer et al., “Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers: One Day at a Time,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2) (May 1997): 407–41. Camerer’s career has been dedicated to this methodological triad ever since he came to Caltech in 1994 and opened his laboratory in behavioral economics, where his star is well ensconced among the galaxy of talent clustered on this small Pasadena campus. Ambition runs high here. Behavioral economists want to use their science to inform policy with an end goal of determining how we can improve people’s and society’s welfare so that everyone is better off and no one is worse off. Ambitious indeed.
9. Keith Chen, Venkat Lakshminarayanan, and Laurie Santos, “How Basic are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin-Monkey Trading Behavior,” Journal of Political Economy, June 2006.
10. Richard H. Thaler, “Some Empirical Evidence on Dynamic Inconsistency,” Economic Letters 8 (1981): 201–7.
11. H. Rachlin, Judgment, Decision and Choice: A Cognitive/Behavioral Synthesis (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989), chap. 7; J. H. Kagel, R. C. Battalio, and L. Green, Economic Choice Theory: An Experimental Analysis of Animal Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
12. R. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994); Joseph E. Ledoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
13. Samuel M. McClure, David I. Laibson, George Loewenstein, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards,” Science 306 (2004): 503–7. Note: this interpretation of the limbic system has come into some disrepute among some neuroscientists, who argue that it is not clear that the different regions noted as part of this system are really functionally coherent. Also, recent work by Joe Kable and Paul Glimcher challenges the McClure interpretation, showing that activity in the limbic system regions decrease exactly as predicted by the subject’s behavioral discounting function, and that their data are fit better by a single discounting function than by the beta/delta model suggested by McClure.
14. The amount of data generated in a single experiment is mind-boggling: a brain snapshot every two seconds for 30 minutes results in 900 photographs per subject at a total size of about 250 megabytes, in an experiment in which there could be as many as 16 or 20 subjects.
15. Sabrina Tom, Craig R. Fox, Christopher Trepel, and Russell A. Poldrack, “The Neural Basis of Loss Aversion in Decision-Making Under Risk,” Science 315 (January 26, 2007): 515–18.
16. Interview with Russell Poldrack and Craig Fox conducted on March 12, 2007.
17. Daniel Kahneman, B. L. Fredrickson, C. A. Schreiber, and D. A. Redelmeier, “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science 4 (1993): 401–5.
18. Michael L. Platt and Paul W. Glimcher, “Neural Correlates of Decision Variables in Parietal Cortex,” Nature 400 (July 15, 1999): 234. See also Paul W. Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
19. B. Knutson, S. Rick, G. E. Wimmer, D. Prelec, and G. Loewenstein, “Neural Predictors of Purchases,” Neuron 53 (2007): 147–57.
20. Quoted in “This Is Your Brain on Shopping,” Scientific American, January 5, 2007, www.sciamdigital.com.
21. James Olds and Peter Milner, “Positive Reinforcement Produced by Electrical Stimulation of Septal Area and Other Regions of Rat Brain,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 47 (1954): 419–27.
22. M. E. Olds and J. L. Fobes, “The Central Basis of Motivation: Intracranial Self-Stimulation Studies,” Annual Review of Psychology 32 (1981): 523–74; M. P. Bishop, S. T. Elder, and R. G. Heath, “Intracranial Self-Stimulation in Man,” Science 140 (1963): 394–96.
23. C. M. Kuhnen and B. Knutson, “The Neural Basis of Financial Risk-Taking,” Neuron 47 (2005): 768.
1. The trolley car thought experiment was first proposed by the philosopher Phillipa Foot in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Oxford Review 5 (1967): 5–15. The extensive research utilizing the trolley car scenario has been summarized in many works, most recently in Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 33–34, 113–20. Hauser, who has conducted his own research on the trolley car dilemma (http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu), argues that the experimental results reveal that we have an evolved “moral grammar,” not unlike our evolved language grammar. Just as we are born with a capacity to learn a language complete with rules of grammar that are fined-tuned by the culture in which we are raised, so too are we born with a capacity to be moral, the specific moral grammar rules of which are determined by the specific culture in which we are raised. See also L. Petrinovich, P. O’Neill, and M. J. Jorgensen, “An Empirical Study of Moral Intuitions: Towards an Evolutionary Ethics,” Ethology and Sociobiology 64 (1993): 467–78.
2. A much longer essay on my experiences with my mom’s cancer, entitled “Shadowlands,” is reprinted in my book Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (New York: Times Books, 2005).
3. Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2004). The case for a universal moral sense continues to grow as new research is conducted on nonhuman primates and a variety of social mammals, from which it is clear that social relations and conflict resolution between individuals is at least as important as other traits in determining survival.
4. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 2003); D. Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female Attractiveness: Role of Waist-to-Hip Ratio,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 293–307; Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).
5. Extensive references for this research are provided in Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, most notably chapters 2, 7, and 8. On one level, The Mind of the Market is a continuation of where I left off in chapter 8, the final chapter of that book.
6. B. J. Ellis, “The Evolution of Sexual Attraction: Evaluative Mechanisms in Women,” in J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1992), 267–88; Buss, Evolution of Desire; T. Bereczkei and A. Csanaky, “Mate Choice, Marital Success, and Reproduction in a Modern Society,” Ethology & Sociobiology 17(1) (1996): 17–35; Randy Thornhill and S. W. Gaugestad, “Fluctuating Asymmetry and Human Sexual Behavior,” Psychological Science 5 (1994): 297–302.
7. Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 142.
8. Arthur Gandolfi, Anna Sachko Gandolfi, and David Barash, Economics as an Evolutionary Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 139–40.
9. Study cited and discussed in David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: The Free Press, 2000). The expression “zipless fuck” comes from Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying: “The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the woman is not ‘giving.’ No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.”
10. Gandolfi et al., Economics as an Evolutionary Science, 139–89. I added the modifier “relatively” since, as we all know, plenty of men are faithful to their wives, and plenty of women have affairs. Reliable data to define “plenty” is hard to come by, and published figures range widely, but surveys typically find that between 25 and 50 percent of U.S. men and around 30 percent of women report having had at least one episode of extramarital sex. See David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001).
11. S. W. Gangestad and J. A. Simpson, “The Evolution of Human Mating: TradeOffs and Strategic Pluralism,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23(4) (2000): 1–33.
12. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, “Child Abuse and Other Risks of Not Living with Both Parents,” Ethology & Sociobiology 6 (1985): 197–210; Daly and Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldene de Gruyter, 1988); Daly and Wilson, “Stepparenthood and the Evolved Psychology of Discriminative Parental Solicitude,” in S. Parmigiani and F. S. Von Saal, eds., Infanticide and Parental Care (London: Harwood Press, 1994), 121–34.
13. L. K. White and A. Booth, “The Quality and Stability of Remarriage: The Role of Step-Children,” American Sociological Review 50 (1985): 346–58; M. V. Flinn, “Stepand Genetic Parent/Offspring Relationships in a Caribbean Village,” Ethology & Sociobiology 9 (1988): 335–69.
14. D. A. Dawson, “Family Structure and Children’s Health and Well-being: Data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey on Child Health,” Journal of Marriage and Family 53 (1991): 573–84; K. E. Kierman, “The Impact of Family Disruption in Childhood on Transitions Made in Young Adult Life,” Population Studies 46 (1992): 213–34.
15. M. Gordon, “The Family Environment of Sexual Abuse: A Comparison of Natal and Step-Father Abuse,” Child Abuse and Neglect 13 (1989): 121–30; D. E. H. Russel, “The Prevalence and Seriousness of Incestuous Abuse: Stepfathers vs Biological Fathers,” Child Abuse and Neglect 8 (1984): 15–22; M. Young, The Sexual Victimization of Children (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 1982).
16. M. K. Bacon, I. L. Child, and H. Bary, “A Cross-Cultural Study of Correlates of Crime,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 66 (1963): 291–300.
17. Daly and Wilson, Homicide.
18. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, “Competitiveness, Risk Taking and Violence: The Young Male Syndrome,” Ethology and Sociobiology 6 (1985): 59–73.
19. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
20. Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Laura Betzig, Despotism and Human Reproduction: A Darwinian Viewpoint (New York: Aldine, 1986).
21. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel,” in Jerome Barko, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 289–322.
22. Daly and Wilson, Homicide; Daly and Wilson, “Violence Against Stepchildren,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 5 (1996): 77–81.
23. Daly and Wilson, “Whom Are Newborn Babies Said to Resemble?” Ethology and Sociobiology 3 (1982): 69–78.
24. Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 76.
25. Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, chap. 4, “Master of My Fate,” 105–38.
26. Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); and The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1987); Frank Miele, “The (Im)moral Animal: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Evolutionary Psychology and the Nature of Human Nature,” Skeptic 4(1) (1996): 42–49.
27. Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
28. Chris Boehm, “Egalitarian Society and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,” Current Anthropology 34 (1993): 227–54; and Hierarchy in the Forest: Egalitarianism and the Evolution of Human Altruism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
29. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
30. Signe Howell, Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), 184.
31. Amotz Zahavi and Avishag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
32. R. Adolphs, “Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behavior,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (March 2003): 165–70; R. J. Dolan, “Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior,” Science 298 (November 8, 2002): 1191–94.
33. K. McCabe, D. Houser, L. Ryan, V. Smith, and T. Trouard, “A Functional Imaging Study of Cooperation in Two-Person Reciprocal Exchange,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 98(20) (2001): 11832–35.
34. K. Semendeferi, E. Armstrong, A. Schleicher, K. Zilles, and G. W. van Hoesen, “Prefrontal Cortex in Humans and Apes: A Comparative Study of Area 10,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114 (2001): 224–41.
35. J. Moll, R. de Oliveira-Souza, P. J. Eslinger, I. E. Bramati, J. Mourai-Miranda, P. A. Andreiuolo, and L. Pessoa, “The Neural Correlates of Moral Sensitivity: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Basic and Moral Emotions,” The Journal of Neuroscience 22(7) (April 1, 2002): 2730–36.
36. Jorge Moll, Frank Krueger, Roland Zahn, Matteo Pardini, Ricardo de OliveiraSouza, and Jordan Grafman, “Human Fronto-Mesolimbic Networks Guide Decisions About Charitable Donation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 103(42) (2006): 15623–28.
37. U. Frith and C. Frith, “The Biological Basis of Social Interaction,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 10(5) (2001): 151–55.
38. Helen Phillips, “The Cell That Makes Us Human,” New Scientist, June 2004, 33–35; J. M. Allman, K. K. Watson, N. A. Tetreault, and A. Y. Hakeem, “Intuition and Autism: A Possible Role for Von Economo Neurons,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(8) (2005): 367–73; K. K. Watson, T. K. Jones, and J. M. Allman, “Dendritic Architecture of the Von Economo Neurons,” Neuroscience 141 (2006): 1107–12.
39. Giacomo Rizzolatti et al., “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research 3 (1996): 131–41.
40. L. Fogassi, P. F. Ferrari, B. Gesierich, S. Rozzi, F. Chersi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding,” Science 308 (2005): 662–67; V. Gallese, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119 (1996), 593–609.
41. M. Iacoboni, R. P. Woods, M. Brass, H. Bekkering, J. C. Mazziotta, and G. Rizzolatti, “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation,” Science 286 (1999): 2526–28; G. Rizzolatti and L. Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–92. It should be noted that the activity imaged in such fMRI studies is not the same as the recording of individual neurons in monkeys’ brains. As the University of Gröningen psychologist Christian Keysers explained, “When we record signals from neurons in monkeys, we can really know that a single neuron is involved in both doing the task and seeing someone else do the task. With imaging, you know that within a little box about three millimeters by three millimeters by three millimeters, you have activation from both doing and seeing. But this little box contains millions of neurons, so you cannot know for sure that they are the same neurons—perhaps they’re just neighbors.” See Lea Winerman, “The Mind’s Mirror,” Monitor on Psychology 36(9) (October 2005): 48.
42. G. Buccino, S. Vogt, A. Ritzl, G. R. Fink, K. Zilles, H. J. Freund, and G. Rizzolatti, “Neural Circuits Underlying Imitation of Hand Actions: An Event Related fMRI Study,” Neuron 42 (2004): 323–34.
43. Helen L. Gallagher and Christopher D. Frith, “Functional Imaging of ‘Theory of Mind,’” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(2) (February 2003): 77.
44. V. Gallese and A. Goldman, “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (1998): 493–501.
45. L. Fogassi, P. F. Ferrari, B. Gesierich, S. Rozzi, F. Chersi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding,” Science 308 (2005): 662–67.
46. B. Wicker, C. Keysers, J. Plailly, J. P. Royet, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust,” Neuron 40 (2003): 655–64.
47. L. Carr, M. Iacoboni, M. C. Dubeau, J. C. Mazziotta, and G. L. Lenzi, “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans: A Relay from Neural Systems for Imitation to Limbic Areas,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 100 (2003): 5497–5502.
48. M. Iacoboni, I. Molnar-Szakacs, V. Gallese, G. Buccino, J. C. Mazziotta, et al., “Grasping the Intentions of Others with One’s Own Mirror Neuron System,” PLoS Biology 3(3) (2005): e79 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030079.
49. Y. W. Cheng, O. J. L. Tzeng, J. Decety, T. Imada, and J. C. Hsieh, “Gender Differences in the Human Mirror System: A Magnetoencephalography Study,” Neuroreport 17(11) (2006): 1115–19; Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
50. M. V. Saarela, Y. Hlushchuk, A. C. Williams, M. Schurmann, E. Kalso, and R. Hari, “The Compassionate Brain: Humans Detect Intensity of Pain from Another’s Face,” Cerebral Cortex (2006); T. Singer, “The Neuronal Basis and Ontogeny of Empathy and Mind Reading: Review of Literature and Implications for Future Research,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 6 (2006): 855–63.
51. V. S. Ramachandran and L. M. Oberman, “Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism,” Scientific American, May 2006, 62–69. For the connection between mirror neurons and the evolution of language, see M. A. Arbib, “From Monkey-Like Action Recognition to Human Language: An Evolutionary Framework for Neurolinguistics,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (2005): 105–24.
52. V. S. Ramachandran, “Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind ‘The Great Leap Forward’ in Human Evolution,” Edge (2000), available at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_index.html.
53. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759), part 1, sec. 1, chap. 1. The last two decades have witnessed the development of a number of theories on the evolutionary origins of the moral emotions. See, for example, William D. Casebeer, “Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents,” Nature Neuroscience 4 (2003): 841–46; William D. Casebeer and Patricia S. Churchland, “The Neural Mechanisms of Moral Cognition: A Multiple-Aspect Approach to Moral Judgment and Decision-Making,” Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003): 169–94; Jorge Moll, Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman, “The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition,” Nature Neuroscience 6 (2005): 799–809; Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Robert Hinde, Why Good Is Good: The Sources of Morality (New York: Routledge, 2003); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Robert Buckman, Can We Be Good Without God? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 2000).
54. The final scene from About Schmidt is available on YouTube by searching “Ndugu’s Letter.” Have some tissues handy.
55. I thank my friend Robbin Gehrke, who works for the public relations firm that represents World Vision, for telling me about this sponsorship program and its ability to deliver support reliably and efficiently where most needed.
1. Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Macmillan, 1948) (orig. pub. 1789).
2. From Penn World Tables. Real GDP per capita (Laspeyres) (RGDPL) is obtained by adding up consumption, investment, government spending, and exports, and subtracting imports in any given year. The given year components are obtained by extrapolating the 1996 values in international dollars from the Geary aggregation using national growth rates. It is a fixed base index where the reference year is 1996, hence the designation “L” for Laspeyres. Computed by Levan Efremidze.
3. These economic measures are summarized thoroughly and in great detail by Easterbrook (see following note) and briefly in Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005).
4. David G. Myers, The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Robert E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003); Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2004).
5. W. Pavot and E. Diener, “Review of the Satisfaction with Life Scale,” Psychological Assessment 5 (1993): 164–72.
6. E. Diener and E. Suh, “National Differences in Subjective Well-Being,” in Daniel Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, eds., Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
7. Joel M. Hektner, Jennifer A. Schmidt, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006). The Experience Sampling Method involves giving subjects beepers and a survey instrument measuring subjective well-being, and then beeping them randomly throughout the week, at which point they complete the survey questions. This avoids the problem of self-report happiness data being time- and context-dependent.
8. Study conducted by the Princeton Research Associates, July 12–15, cited in American Enterprise, November/December 1994, 99.
9. Rafael di Tella, Robert J. MacCulloch, and Andrew J. Oswald, “The Macroeconomics of Happiness,” Warwick Economic Research Papers no. 615, 2001.
10. World Values Survey, http://www.worldvaluessurvey.com/.
11. R. Inglehart and H.-D. Klingemann, “Genes, Culture, Democracy and Happiness,” in E. Diener and E. M. Suh, eds., Culture and Subjective Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
12. N. G. Martin, L. J. Eaves, A. C. Heath, R. Jardine, L. M. Feingold, and H. J. Eysenck, “Transmission of Social Attitudes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 83 (1986): 4364–68; L. J. Eaves, H. J. Eysenck, and N. G. Martin, Genes, Culture and Personality: An Empirical Approach (London and San Diego: Academic Press, 1989).
13. N. G. Waller, B. Kojetin, T. Bouchard, D. Lykken, and A. Tellegen, “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Attitudes and Values: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together,” Psychological Science 1(2) (1990): 138–42.
14. David T. Lykken, Happiness: The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000).
15. Sara Solnick and David Hemenway, “Is More Always Better? A Survey on Positional Concerns,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 37 (1998): 373–83.
16. Fredrik Carlsson, Olof Johansson-Stenman, and Peter Martinsson, “Do You Enjoy Having More than Others? Survey Evidence of Positional Goods,” Economica (Online Early Articles), 2007, http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.2006.00571.x.
17. B. Van Praag and P. Frijters, “The Measurement of Welfare and Well-Being: The Leyden Approach,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, Well-Being. An earlier economist to notice this effect was Tibor Scitovsky, in his The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
18. Richard Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1980, reprinted in Breit and Hochman, eds., Readings in Microeconomics, 3rd ed., 1985; and in Howard Kunreuther, ed., Risk: A Seminar Series, IIASA, 1981.
19. Gregory Berns, Satisfaction (New York: Owl Books, 2005).
20. Daniel T. Gilbert, Elizabeth Pinel, Timothy Wilson, Stephen Blumberg, and Thalia Wheatley, “Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 633.
21. Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2005).
22. E. O. Laumann, J. H. Gagnon, R. T. Michael, and S. Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
23. Jennifer Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why Smarter, Healthier, and Faster Doesn’t Work (San Francisco: Harper, 2007), 223–25.
24. David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness: Who Is Happy and Why (New York: William Morrow, 1992); Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness (New York: Free Press, 2002).
25. D. A Schade, and Daniel Kahneman, “Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction,” Psychological Science 9(5) (1998): 329–40.
26. Elizabeth W. Dunn, T. D. Wilson, and Daniel T. Gilbert, “Location, Location, Location: The Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29(11) (2003): 1421–32.
27. Richard Davidson, “Emotion and Affective Style: Hemispheric Substrates,” Psychological Science 3 (1992): 39–43.
28. N. Fox and Richard Davidson, “Taste-Elicited Changes in Facial Signs of Emotion and the Asymmetry of Brain Electrical Activity in Human Newborns,” Neuropsychologia 24 (1986): 417–22.
29. S. Lisanby, “Focal Brain Stimulation with Repetitive Transcranial Magnet Stimulation (rTMS): Implications for the Neural Circuitry of Depression,” Psychological Medicine 33 (2003): 7–13.
30. A. Quaranta, M. Siniscalchi, and G. Vallortigara, “Asymmetric Tail-Wagging Responses by Dogs to Different Emotive Stimuli,” Current Biology 17 (2007): R199–R201.
31. Reported in Layard, Happiness, 19.
32. Lykken, Happiness.
33. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994); Ellen Peters and Paul Slovic, “The Springs of Action: Affective and Analytical Information Processing in Choice,” Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin 26(12) (2000): 1465–75; Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Roy F. Baumeister, Todd F. Heatherton, and Dianne M. Tice, Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994); George Loewenstein, “Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65 (1996): 272–92; George F. Loewenstein and Jennifer Lerner, “The Role of Affect in Decision Making,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, and H. H. Goldsmith, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 619–42.
34. Björn Grinde, Darwinian Happiness: Evolution as a Guide for Living and Understanding Human Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2002), 49. See also his article “Happiness in the Perspective of Evolutionary Psychology,” Journal of Happiness Studies 3 (2002): 331–54.
35. Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham, The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self (New York: Harmony Books, 2003).
36. Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner, “Fear, Anger, and Risk,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(2001): 146–59.
37. Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 34(1) (2005): 9–65. See also Andrew Oswald, “Happiness and Economic Performance,” Economic Journal 107 (1997): 1815–31; and Wolfram Schulz and A. Dickinson, “Neuronal Coding of Prediction Errors,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000): 473–500.
38. T. D. Wilson, D. J. Lisle, J. W. Schooler, S. D. Hodges, K. J. Klaaren, and S. J. LaFleur, “Introspecting About Reasons Can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 (1993): 331–39; Timothy D. Wilson and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60(2) (1991): 181–92.
39. K. C. Berridge, “Food Reward: Brain Substrates of Wanting and Liking,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 20 (1996): 1–25.
40. Personal correspondence, April 10, 2007.
41. Barbara L. Fredrickson, “The Value of Positive Emotions,” American Scientist 91, (July/August 2003): 330–35.
42. Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 113–17.
43. Daniel Kahneman, A. Krueger, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz, and A. Stone, “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experiences: The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM),” Science 306 (2004): 1776–80.
44. David G. Myers and Ed Diener, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Scientific American, May 1996, 70–72.
45. Ibid., 72. See also David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness: Who Is Happy and Why (New York: William Morrow, 1992).
46. Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (New York: Times Books, 1999).
47. D. B. Barrett, G. T. Kurian, and T. M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Christians dominate at just a shade under 2 billion adherents (Catholics count for half of those), with Muslims at 1.1 billion, Hindus at 811 million, Buddhists at 359 million, and ethnoreligionists (animists and others in Asia and Africa primarily) accounting for most of the remaining 265 million.
48. Interview of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted by the author on April 17, 2007. See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1998).
49. Helen Keller, “The Simplest Way to Be Happy,” Home Magazine, February 1993, available at the Web site of the American Foundation for the Blind: http://www.afb.org/section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID?193&SubTopicID=12&DocumentID=1211.
1. The story appears in Patrick Grim’s teaching company course, Questions of Value, Lecture 23, “Moralities in Conflict and Change.” Although I am using the story to make a different point than Grim does, the deeper meaning of it is the same.
2. Interview conducted in November 2000. I thank my friends Donna and Michael Coles for making this visit to De Waal’s lab possible. The full interview was originally published in Skeptic, vol. 8, no. 2.
3. I also asked De Waal about the policy implications of research on the evolutionary basis of moral behavior. For example, as we saw in chapter 7, most crimes are committed by young men in their twenties, in part because of high levels of testosterone coupled with the fact that as social hierarchical primates, young men go through initiation rites, compete for females, struggle for power with other males, etc., all of which can lead to antisocial behavior. How can evolutionary theory inform our political debates about moral issues? Here De Waal once again employs his skepticism about pushing evolutionary models too far. Evolutionary theory, he thinks, “can help us understand why we have moral systems and how they operate. But I would never say ‘that’s how chimps do it so we should too.’ First of all, even though we are so closely related to chimps, we have rather different kinds of societies. Even within human groups, societies vary considerably, along with their moral systems.” How, then, should we determine how to act morally? “The decision on how we should act is a consensual decision we make as a society. Now, in that decision enters human nature—we have tendencies of sympathy, reciprocity, parent-child relationships, aggression, or whatever. For example, if you set up a society that is in direct conflict with one of these basic human needs you are setting yourself up for failure.” Here I think of the Israeli kibbutz where children were separated from their parents and raised by the group, but it was a failed social experiment because mothers still wanted to be with their own children.
4. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Sex and Power Among the Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 203, 207.
5. Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
6. Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 175.
7. Ibid., 187–88.
8. Frans B. M. de Waal, “Food-transfers Through Mesh in Brown Capuchins,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 111 (1997): 370–78; and “Food Sharing and Reciprocal Obligations Among Chimpanzees,” Journal of Human Evolution (1989): 433–59.
9. Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” Nature 425 (September 18, 2003): 297–99.
10. M. Cords and S. Thurnheer, “Reconciling with Valuable Partners by Long-Tailed Macaques,” Behaviour 93 (1993): 315–25.
11. Sarah F. Brosnan, “Fairness and Other-Regarding Preferences in Nonhuman Primates,” in Paul Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
12. Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
13. N. F. Koyama and E. Palagi, “Managing Conflict: Evidence from Wild and Captive Primates,” International Journal of Primatology 27(5) (2007): 1235–40; N. F. Koyama, C. Caws, and F. Aureli, “Interchange of Grooming and Agonistic Support in Chimpanzees,” International Journal of Primatology 27(5) (2007): 1293–1309.
14. Daniel Dennett, “True Believers” in D. Dennett, ed., The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2005).
15. Frans de Waal, “How Selfish an Animal? The Case of Primate Cooperation,” in Zak, ed., Moral Markets.
16. Interviews conducted over a series of visits in February and March 2007.
17. Paul J. Zak, “Trust,” Capco Institute Journal of Financial Transformation 7 (2003): 13–21.
18. Paul J. Zak and Stephen Knack, “Trust and Growth,” The Economic Journal 111 (2001): 295–321.
19. Zak, “Trust.”
20. V. C. L. Hutson and G. T. Vickers, “The Spatial Struggle of Tit-for-Tat and Defect,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 348 (1995): 393–404; K. Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 1: Playing Fair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
21. There is a sizable body of literature on game theory and cooperation. See, for example, John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [orig. pub. 1944]); Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–57; Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 211 (1981): 1390–96; Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Douglas R. Hofstadter, “Metamagical Themas: Computer Tournaments of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Suggest How Cooperation Evolves,” Scientific American 248(5) (1983): 16–26; Robert Frank, Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996); J. K. Murnighan, Bargaining Games (New York: William Morrow, 1992); M. Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and on the Internet, a Google search on “prisoner’s dilemma” will lead to thousands of sites, computer simulations, chat rooms, discussions, bibliographies, etc., such as http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html.
22. B. Bower, “Getting Out from Number One: Selfishness May Not Dominate Human Behavior,” Science News 137(17) (1990): 266–67.
23. R. M. Dawes, A. van de Kragt, and J. M. Orbell, “Cooperation for the Benefit of Us—Not Me, or My Conscience,” in J. Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 97–110.
24. James Rilling, D. A. Gutman, T. R. Zeh, G. Pagnoni, G. S. Berns, and C. D. Kilts, “A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation,” Neuron 35 (July 18, 2002): 395–404.
25. R. Forsythe, J. L. Horowitz, N. E. Savin, and M. Sefton, “Fairness in Simple Bargaining Experiments,” Games and Economic Behavior 6 (1994): 347–69.
26. Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).
27. Steven R. Quartz and Terry J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are (New York: William Morrow, 2002).
28. M. Kosfeld, M. Heinrichs, P. J. Zak, U. Fischbacher, and E. Fehr, “Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans,” Nature 435 (2005): 673–76.
29. Paul J. Zak, “Trust: A Temporary Human Attachment Facilitated by Oxytocin,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(3) (2005): 368–69; Vera B. Morhenn, Jang Woo Park, Elisabeth Piper, and Paul J. Zak, “Monetary Sacrifice Among Strangers Is Mediated by Endogenous Oxytocin Release After Physical Contact,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (in press).
30. Linda Mealy, “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 523–99; D. T. Lyyken, The Antisocial Personalities (Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995).
31. Ralph Adolphs, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio, “The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment,” Nature 393 (1998): 470–74; Ralph Adolphs, D. Tranel, H. Damasio, and A. Damasio, “Impaired Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions Following Bilateral Damage to the Human Amygdala,” Nature 372 (1994): 669–72.
32. Paul J. Zak, “Values and Value: Moral Economics,” in Paul Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
33. Dan Chiappe, Adam Brown, Brian Dow, Jennifer Koontz, Marisela Rodriguez, and Kelly McCulloch, “Cheaters Are Looked At Longer and Remembered Better Than Cooperators in Social Exchange Situations,” Evolutionary Psychology 2 (2004): 108–20.
34. Kevin McCabe, Daniel Houser, Lee Ryan, Vernon Smith, and Theodore Trouard, “A Functional Imaging Study of Cooperation in Two-Person Reciprocal Exchange,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (98) (2001): 11832–35.
35. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Sam Bowles, Colin Camerer, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, and Ernst Fehr, “In Search of Homo Economicus: Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” American Economic Review 91(2) (2001): 73–79.
36. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Sam Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, Foundations of Human Sociality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8.
37. Ibid., 49–50.
38. Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
1. First: Lon Haldeman: 9 days, 20 hours, 2 minutes. Second: John Howard: 10 days, 10 hours, 59 minutes. Third: Michael Shermer: 10 days, 19 hours, 54 minutes. Fourth: John Marino: 12 days, 7 hours, 37 minutes. The first three broke the previous transcontinental record of 10 days, 23 hours, 27 minutes held by Haldeman.
2. One more example reinforces the point. Since decorum soon breaks down along with the body and mind from extreme fatigue and sleep deprivation, cyclists tend to relieve themselves on the side of the road, sometimes even on the bike itself (for the guys, anyway). This led to an entire section in the rulebook on the matter of personal discretion, because some cyclists are more discreet than others. One year, for example, someone let it all hang out in front of a tinted restaurant window that obscured a clan of shocked diners (he thought the restaurant was closed). So we added a rule that if you cannot find a public restroom and your motorhome is not around, you can go on the side of the road only if your support crew surrounds you with an opaque sheet or blanket. This issue also led one of the top women competitors, who routinely led the entire race for the first thousand miles and typically finished in the top five overall, to calculate how much time she was losing to the men because they could pee off the bike whereas she had to stop and dismount. (She figured it was several minutes each stop, several stops a day, which in the course of ten days really does add up.) This led to the passing of a nondiscriminatory pee rule (later revoked after further consideration).
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, C. B. Macpherson, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1968), 76 (orig. pub. 1651).
4. David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
5. Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981); and Understanding the Process of Institutional Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
6. North’s lecture is available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html. The economist Ronald Coase made the connection between institutions, transaction costs, and neoclassical theory. North writes: “The neoclassical result of efficient markets only obtains when it is costless to transact. Only under the conditions of costless bargaining will the actors reach the solution that maximizes aggregate income regardless of the institutional arrangements. When it is costly to transact, then institutions matter. And it is costly to transact. Wallis and North (1986) demonstrated in an empirical study that 45 percent of U.S. GNP was devoted to the transaction sector in 1970.” See Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics 3(1) (1960): 1–44; and John J. Wallis and Douglass C. North, “Measuring the Transaction Sector in the American Economy,” in S. L. Engerman and R. E. Gallman, eds., Long Term Factors in American Economic Growth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
7. Erin O’Hara, “Trustworthiness and Contract,” in Paul Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). The link between contract law and markets has its early roots in medieval Europe. According to Indiana University political scientists David Schwab and Elinor Ostrom, the medieval Law Merchant was “a set of legal codes governing commercial transactions and administered by private judges drawn from the commercial ranks. The purpose of these codes was to enforce contracts between merchants from different localities. A merchant who felt that he or she had been cheated by another merchant could file a grievance with the local private judge, who would then conduct a trial and, if the grievance was justified, enter a judgment on behalf of the aggrieved merchant.” Much of the modern world is structured to deal with the very problems addressed by the medieval Law Merchant and to insure reliable transactions in the marketplace. See David Schwab and Elinor Ostrom, “The Vital Role of Norms and Rules in Maintaining Open Public and Private Economics,” in Paul Zak, ed., Moral Markets.
8. Oliver E. Williamson, “The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead,” Journal of Economic Literature 38 (2000): 595–613.
9. T. Anderson and P. J. Hill, “The Evolution of Property Rights: A Study of the American West,” Journal of Law and Economics 18 (1975): 163–79; John Umbeck, “The California Gold Rush: A Study of Emerging Property Rights,” Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977): 197–226.
10. Robert C. Ellikson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4.
11. Ronald Coase, “The Lighthouse in Economics,” Journal of Law and Economics 17 (1974): 357–76. For a more general discussion of this and many other related problems, see Vernon Smith, “Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics,” available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/smith-lecture.html.
12. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 286.
13. Ibid., 287.
14. Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1989); bartleby.com, 2001 (www.bartleby.com/124/).
1. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007).
2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973–78).
3. Charles W. Perdue, John F. Dovidio, Michael B. Gurtman, and Richard B. Tyler, “Us and Them: Social Categorization and the Process of Intergroup Bias,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 475–86.
4. Philip Zimbardo, “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” in W. J. Arnold and D. Levine, eds., Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1969 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). See also Zimbardo’s The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). For a dissenting view of the connection between the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib, see William Saletan, “Situationist Ethics: The Stanford Prison Experiment Doesn’t Explain Abu Ghraib,” Salon.com, May 12, 2004.
5. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper, 1969).
6. Solomon E. Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs 70, no. 416 (1951). See also his “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Scientific American, November 1955, 31–35.
7. Gregory Berns et al., “Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation,” Biological Psychiatry 58 (August 1, 2005): 245–53.
8. Ibid.
9. Edmund Burke, The Portable Edmund Burke, Isaac Kramnick, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1999).
10. Interview with Phil Zimbardo conducted by Michael Shermer on March 26, 2007.
11. Joel Bakan, Mark Achbar, and Jennifer Abbott, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, documentary film, 2003. See also the book by the same title.
12. Michael James, “Is Greed Ever Good?” ABC News.com, August 22, 2002, available at http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=85971.
13. Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools (New York: Broadway Books, 2005); Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room (New York: Penguin, 2004). See also the documentary film based on the book under the title Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. For a skeptical perspective on the received view of Enron’s demise, see Malcolm Gladwell, “Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information,” The New Yorker, January 8, 2007.
14. Clinton Wallace Free and Norman B. Macintosh, “Management Control Practice and Culture at Enron: The Untold Story,” August 8, 2006, CAAA Annual Conference Paper, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=873636.
15. Quoted in Free and Macintosh, “Management Control Practice and Culture at Enron.”
16. R. Bryce, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 112.
17. Quoted in B. Gruley and R. Smith, “Anatomy of a Fall: Keys to Success Left Kenneth Lay Open to Disaster,” The Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2002, A1, A5.
18. Robert Simons, Levers of Control: How Managers Use Innovative Control Systems to Drive Strategic Renewal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1995).
19. Alex Gibney, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, documentary film, 2005, Independent Lens.
20. Ibid.
21. Quoted in L. Fox, Enron: The Rise and Fall (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).
22. Quoted in P. Fusaro and R. Miller, What Went Wrong at Enron: Everyone’s Guide to the Largest Bankruptcy in U.S. History (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).
23. Quoted in L. Fox, Enron: The Rise and Fall.
24. T. Fowler, “The Pride and the Fall of Enron,” The Houston Chronicle, October 20, 2002, 14.
25. No cats, please. “We have nothing against cats, per se, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our campus would be fairly stressed out.”
26. Robert Cialdini, Influence: The New Psychology of Persuasion (New York: William Morrow, 2006).
27. http://www.google.com/corporate/culture.html.
28. http://investor.google.com/conduct.html.
29. Although one corporate wag said evil is whatever Brin says it is.
30. Last updated January 30, 2007, http://investor.google.com/conduct.html#8.
1. Read Montague, Why Choose This Book? (New York: Dutton, 2006). The title echoes Abbie Hoffman’s classic 1960s social commentary Steal This Book.
2. Ibid., 2–3.
3. Ibid., 24.
4. Ibid., 16.
5. P. Read Montague and Gregory S. Berns, “Neural Economics and the Biological Substrates of Valuation,” Neuron 36 (2002): 265–84.
6. Montague, Why Choose This Book? 99.
7. Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 68.
8. Samuel M. McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim S. Cypert, Latané M. Montague, and P. Read Montague, “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks,” Neuron 44 (2004): 379–87.
9. Robert Lee Hotz, “Searching for the Why of Buy,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2005.
10. An excellent discussion of the discovery of the D4DR gene and its implications for risk-taking behavior can be found in Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
11. Benjamin Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action,” Behavior and Brain Sciences 8 (1985): 529–66.
12. Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2004), chap. 4.
13. Richard Layard, Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2005).
14. Ibid., 223–36.
15. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1966) (orig. pub. 1949), 860.
16. Interview of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted by the author on April 17, 2007.
17. Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) (orig. pub. 1845).
18. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgebern128084.html.
19. http://quotations.about.com/od/moretypes/a/taxquotes1.htm.
20. Quoted in David Boas, Libertarianism: A Primer (New York: Free Press, 1998).
21. Albert Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
22. Ruut Veenhoven, “Quality-of-Life in Individualistic Society,” Social Indicators Research 48 (1999): 157–86. See also his article “The Four Qualities of Life,” Journal of Happiness Studies 1 (2000): 1–39.
23. Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, “Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron,” University of Chicago Law Review 70(4) (2003): 1159–1202; Thaler and Sunstein, “Libertarian Paternalism,” American Economic Review 93(2) (2003): 175–79.
24. Sunstein and Thaler, “Oxymoron,” 1159.
25. Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin, eds., Advances in Behavioral Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
26. http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/fridays/27066/.
27. Sunstein and Thaler, “Oxymoron,” 1191.
28. Barry Schwartz makes this point, as well as others, such as making MRI mammograms the default option that women must opt out of as the standard diagnostic tool. See Barry Schwartz, “Unnatural Selections,” New York Times, April 12, 2007, A21.
2. By employing the hindsight bias, of course, it is easy after the fact to back into the historical record and find someone whose prescience seemed to presage the Soviet collapse or the rise of the World Wide Web, but for our purposes here, suffice it to say that both events took nearly everyone by surprise, and that’s my point. For an apparent exception see John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
3. Robert Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169(2947) (1970): 733–38.
4. Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Blackwell Publishers, 2004), and Mark Nathan Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). The Neolithic revolution may have also led to a shift in parental preference for offspring quality over quantity, especially for those capable of mastering technologies that lead to an increase in survival. See O. Galor and O. Moav, “Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 67(4) (2002): 1133–91.
5. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). See also N. Roberts, The Holocene (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
6. Robert Carneiro, “On The Relationship Between Size of Population and Complexity of Social Organization,” in Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 23 (1967): 234–43.
7. Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) (orig. pub. 1845).
8. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992).
9. Ronald M. Berndt, “The Walmadjeri and Gugadja,” in Hunters and Gatherers Today, M. G. Bicchieri, ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988).
10. Jared Diamond, “The Religious Story: A Review of Darwin’s Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson,” The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.
11. In subsequent ethnographic studies, other anthropologists found that these indigenous peoples also experienced a significant increase in Subjective Well-Being. In other words, they were happier because the physical and psychological burden of the constant endemic wars were lifted. See R. B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992); and M. P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence (Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1999).
12. Robert L. Bettinger, Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory New York: Plenum Press, 1991). For a literature review on intergroup violence and aggression, see Anne Campbell, “Aggression,” and Roberg Kurzban and Steven Neuberg, “Managing Ingroup and Outgroup Relationships,” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, David Buss, ed. (New York: Wiley, 2005); and Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
13. Rudolf J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997). See also http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/pk.chapi.htm. For additional discussions on the relationship of democracy and war, see N. Beck and R. Tucker, “Democracy and Peace: General Law or Limited Phenomenon?” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association; Steve Chan, “In Search of Democratic Peace: Problems and Promise,” Mershon International Studies Review (47) (1997); Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong II, “Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996,” American Journal of Political Science 48(3) (2004); Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Christopher F. Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, “Winners or Losers? Democracies in International Crisis, 1918–94,” American Political Science Review 95(3) (2001): 633–47; Hyung Min Kim and David L. Rousseau, “The Classical Liberals Were Half Right (or Half Wrong): New Tests of the ‘Liberal Peace,’ 1960–88,” Journal of Peace Research 42(5) (2005): 523–43; David Leblang and Steve Chan, “Explaining Wars Fought by Established Democracies: Do Institutional Constraints Matter?” Political Research Quarterly 56 (2003): 385–400; Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); John M. Owen, “Give Democratic Peace a Chance? How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace,” International Security 19(2) (Autumn 1994): 87–125; and James Lee Ray, “Does Democracy Cause Peace?” Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998): 27–46.
14. A good place to start is Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War (New York: Viking Press, 1979).
15. Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2003).
16. C. Gamble, Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization (London: Alan Sutton, 1993), and T. D. Price and J. A. Brown, eds. Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985).
17. Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 152.
18. J. Rilling, D. A. Gutman, T. R. Zeh, G. Pagnoni, G. S. Berns, and C. D. Kilts, “A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation,” Neuron 35 (July 18, 2002): 395–404.
19. This research was pioneered by Paul Zak at the Center for Neuroeconomics at Claremont Graduate University. See his Web page at http://www.llu.edu/llumc/neurosciences/. For the research on national trust, see P. J. Zak, “Trust,” Journal of Financial Transformation (CAPCO Institute) 7 (2002): 18–24.
20. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000); and The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
21. Michael Shermer, “Starbucks in the Forbidden City,” Scientific American, July 2000, 34–35.
22. Robert Wright has a good discussion of this in his influential work on nonzero cooperative relationships in both history and life, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Vintage, 2002), 215–16.
23. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Penguin/Portfolio, 2006).
24. A good summary of the growing globalization movement that was published as I finished this epilogue is Nayan Chanda’s Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
25. Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006) (org. pub. 1956). Also available at http://www.mises.org/etexts/mises/anticap/section5.asp.
26. The quote has also been attributed to Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and others, including the Irish orator John Philpot Curran, who is quoted as saying, in 1790, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”
27. The phrase served as the motto of the Institute for Human Progress, and I am grateful to Jay Stuart Snelson for bringing it to my attention.