Notes

Introduction

1. This was Stewart’s original title. He later merged it with comedian Stephen Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive,” to make the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” which strikes me as a less effective title.

2. “Stephen Colbert,” interview, A.V. Club (January 25, 2006), http://www.avclub.com/articles/stephen-colbert, 13970/ (accessed May 9, 2013).

3. Glenn Kessler, “Euthanasia in the Netherlands: Rick Santorum’s Bogus Statistics,” The Fact Checker, Washington Post (February 22, 2012), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/euthanasia-in-the-netherlands-rick-santorums-bogus-statistics/2012/02/21/gIQAJaRbSR_blog.html (accessed May 9, 2013).

4. The confusion here is between involuntary and nonvoluntary, where nonvoluntary refers to cases in which an explicit statement, either for or against, is lacking. For a survey of the facts regarding euthanasia policy in the Netherlands, see L. W. Sumner, Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 187–89.

5. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 1.

6. Laura Penny, Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005).

7. When pressed to justify the strategy, the Conservatives defended their claim on the grounds that their cap-and-trade plan was revenue neutral while the NDP proposal was supposed to bring in revenue and could therefore be labeled a “tax.” Following this logic, the Liberal carbon tax proposal, put forward during the 2008 election campaign, was not actually a carbon tax, since it was intended to be revenue neutral (the tax on carbon was to be offset by cuts in income tax).

8. Tim Harper, “Conservatives Sentence Tom Mulcair to Death by Talking Point,” Toronto Star (September 18, 2012).

9. John Bryden, “Speaker Urged to Stem Tide of Partisan Vitriol in House of Commons,” Winnipeg Free Press (October 22, 2012).

10. Frank Luntz, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear (New York: Hyperion, 2007), p. 211.

11. David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), p. xiv.

12. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), p. 156.

13. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p. 114.

14. Apart from their deep involvement in racial animus, concepts of purity are often very closely tied to social status hierarchies. See Elliot Turiel, The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 173–74.

15. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p. 1.

16. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p. 88.

17. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p. 224.

18. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, translated by Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. xv–xvi.

19. This is according to an estimate by the Center for Public Integrity (Caitlin Ginley, “On Financial Reform Bill, 52 Percent of Lobbyists Worked in Government,” Center for Public Integrity [June 10, 2010], http://www.publicintegrity.org/2010/06/10/2656/financial-reform-bill-52-percent-lobbyists-worked-government/ [accessed June 18, 2013]).

20. As Thomas Frank observed, “under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate” (“To the Precinct Station,” The Baffler, 21 [2012]).

21. Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (New York: Picador, 2012), p. 186.

22. In 2004, George W. Bush’s campaign undertook an extensive polling exercise in order to determine which issues made voters most angry. See Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 140.

23. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988).

24. For a selection, see Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (New York: Harper, 2010); Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005); Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (New York: Pantheon, 2012); and Matthew Hutson, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane (New York: Penguin, 2012). Following the conventions of modern publishing, it is the subtitles that tell the tale.

25. For a discussion of this, see Joseph Heath, Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 44–48.

26. Ole Rogeberg, “Taking Absurd Theories Seriously: Economics and the Case of Rational Addiction Theories,” Philosophy of Science, 71 (2004): 263–85.

27. One can find a typical expression of this in Margaret Wente’s column in the Globe and Mail, where she often makes an invalid inference from the fact that people get emotional when talking about politics to the conclusion that people’s political views are determined by their emotions. For example, “When it comes to politics, most of us react with our paleomammalian brain. We only think we’re basing our preferences on reason. The neuroscientific evidence is overwhelming that we form our opinions first, then find the facts to back them up” (“The Amygdala Election,” Globe and Mail [March 29, 2011]).

Chapter 1

1. Keith Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 106–7. The original formulation of the problem is in Hector J. Levesque, “Making Believers out of Computers,” Artificial Intelligence, 30 (1986): 85.

2. Called “serial associative cognition” or “impulsively associative thinking” by Stanovich (What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p. 181).

3. David Hume, The Philosophical Works, Vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1854), p. 220.

4. This formulation is from Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Comment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

5. Gladwell, Blink, pp. 5–6.

6. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (London: Polity, 1984), p. 33.

7. Keith Stanovich, Who Is Rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999), pp. 32–33.

8. Monica Bucciarelli, Sangeet Khemlani, and P. N. Johnson-Laird, “The Psychology of Moral Reasoning,” Judgment and Decision Making, 3 (2008): 121–39.

9. Stanovich, Who Is Rational?, pp. 165–79.

10. For an overview, see Nelson Cowan, Working Memory Capacity (New York: Psychology Press, 2005).

11. For general discussion, see Alan D. Baddeley, Working Memory, Thought, and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

12. Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, Hypothetical Thinking: Dual Processes in Reasoning and Judgement (New York: Psychology Press, 2007), p. 174.

13. Mariano Sigman and Stanislas Dehaene, “Brain Mechanisms of Serial and Parallel Processing during Dual-Task Performance,” Journal of Neuroscience, 28 (2008): 7585—98. See also James T. Townsend, “Serial vs. Parallel Processing: Sometimes They Look Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee but They Can (And Should) be Distinguished,” Psychological Science, 1 (1990): 46–54.

14. See Kenneth J. Gilhooly, “Working Memory and Reasoning,” in Jacqueline P. Leighton and Robert J. Sternberg, eds., The Nature of Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 54–56.

15. Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, “In Two Minds: Dual-Process Accounts of Reasoning,” Trends in Cognitive Science, 7 (2003): 454–59. I use the term dual process rather than dual system in reflection of the fact that things are actually a lot more complicated than the term dual system suggests. For example, see Keith Stanovich, “Distinguishing the Reflective, Algorithmic, and Autonomous Minds: Is It Time for a Tri-Process Theory?” in Jonathan St. B. T. Evans and Keith Frankish, eds., In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

16. Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, “The Heuristic-Analytic Theory of Reasoning: Extension and Evaluation,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 13 (2006): 382.

17. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 227.

18. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), p. 215.

19. This is not a joke. Pocket Fritz, which runs on a mobile phone, has won several tournaments and has achieved a grandmaster rating of 2898.

20. Ulrich Schwalbe and Paul Walker, “Zermelo and the Early History of Game Theory,” Games and Economic Behavior, 34 (2001): 123–37.

21. Adrianus Dingeman de Groot, Thought and Choice in Chess (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), pp. 335–36; de Groot, “Intuition in Chess,” International Computer Chess Association Journal, 9 (1986): 67–75. On compression in the visual representations using in heuristic search, see Christopher F. Chabris and Eliot S. Hearst, “Visualization, Pattern Recognition, and Forward Search: Effects of Playing Speed and Sight of the Position on Grandmaster Chess Errors,” Cognitive Science, 27 (2003): 645. I am bowdlerizing somewhat—this was actually known before the advent of chess-playing computers.

22. This is how the designers of the system put it. See Chrilly Donninger and Ulf Lorenz, “The Chess Monster Hydra,” Field Programmable Logic and Application, 3204 (2004): 927.

23. Jonathan Evans writes, “What typically happens is that an expert recognizes a situation as of a kind encountered previously and rapidly retrieves a scheme that provides a solution … The application will involve some explicit reasoning (sometimes mental simulations to check feasibility of solutions) but the key to intelligent action is the automatic retrieval process” (“Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology, 59 [2008]: 267). Also see Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 15, where he calls this “recognition-primed” decision making.

24. Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, “How Many Dual-Process Theories Do We Need? One, Two, or Many?” in Evans and Frankish, eds., In Two Minds, p. 35.

25. Compare to Richard Dawkins’s evolution of “biomorphs” (The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design [New York: W. W. Norton, 1996], pp. 57–59).

26. Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 192. The discussion of the hiccup that follows is from Shubin.

27. William Hirstein, Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 31.

28. Hirstein, Brain Fiction, p. 32.

29. Albert Yonas, A. Gordon Bechtold, Daniel Frankel, F. Robert Gordon, Gerald McRoberts, Anthony Norcia, and Susan Sternfels, “Development of Sensitivity to Information for Impending Collision,” Perception and Psychophysics, 21 (1977): 97–104.

30. Michael McCloskey, Allyson Washburn, and Linda Felch, “Intuitive Physics: The Straight-Down Belief and Its Origin,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9 (1983): 636–49.

31. A phrase borrowed from Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Everyday Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Note that I am rejecting their view, as well as that advanced by Keith Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 63–68.

32. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two of the most influential proponents of “evolutionary psychology,” describe the human mind as “an intricate network of functionally dedicated computers, each activated by different classes of content or problem, with some more general-purpose computers embedded in the architecture as well” (“The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind, p. 94). One can see the problem in the final clause. Why would a few “general-purpose computers” be added to the mix? Why is there no sign of evolution having produced a “general-purpose computer” anywhere else in nature?

33. See Derek Bickerton, “Resolving Discontinuity: A Minimalist Distinction between Human and Non-human Minds,” American Zoologist, 40 (2000): 862–73.

34. Mark Hauser and Elizabeth Spelke, “Evolutionary and Developmental Foundations of Human Knowledge: A Case Study of Mathematics,” in Michael S. Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

35. Tooby and Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” pp. 108–12.

36. And by “designed” I mean “adapted.”

37. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 210.

38. For the former, see Allan Pavio, Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 53–83; on the latter see Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

39. See Mark Richard, Propositional Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) for discussion.

40. Elizabeth S. Spelke and Sanna Tsivkin, “Language and Number: A Bilingual Training Study,” Cognition, 78 (2001): 45–88.

41. This has to do with the importance of recursion for grammar. See Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science, 298 (2002): 1569–79.

42. As Margarita Azmitia puts it, “There is wide agreement that self-regulation emerges from other-regulation” (“Expertise, Private Speech, and the Development of Self-Regulation,” in Rafael M. Diaz and Laura E. Berk, eds., Private Speech: From Social Integration to Self-Regulation [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992], p. 101). See also Janet Wilde Astington, “The Developmental Interdependence of Theory of Mind and Language,” in N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson, eds., Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction (Oxford: Berg, 2006), pp. 179–206.

43. Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 24. See also David Bakhurst, The Formation of Reason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 153–54.

44. For a more nuanced account, see Laura E. Berk, “Children’s Private Speech: An Overview of Theory and the Status of Research,” in Diaz and Berk, eds., Private Speech.

45. Alexander Luria, as reported in Karl Levitin, One Is Not Born a Personality: Profiles of Soviet Education Psychologists, translated by Yevgeni Filippov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), p. 118.

46. Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?” Annual Review of Psychology, 62 (2001): 341–42. For a developmental perspective, see Philip David Zelazo and Douglas Frye, “Cognitive Complexity and Control: II. The Development of Executive Function in Childhood,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7 (1998): 121–26.

47. As Katherine Nelson puts it, “Language (and logic) are public constructions with private ramifications. Among the ramifications is the possibility of using language as a cognitive representational level with greater analytic power than any prior nonsymbolic representation system” (Language in Cognitive Development [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], p. 15).

48. See Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, “The Faculty of Language.” There is still a “chicken and egg” question of whether recursion came first, enabling natural language, or vice versa. My preference is, obviously, for the latter order of explanation. The connection between language, recursion, and mathematics is more obvious to those familiar with the so-called Peano axiomatization of arithmetic, particularly the definition of number in terms of the “successor” function.

49. As Andy Clark writes, “This power of computational transformation constitutes a neglected virtue of linguistic practice. It reveals language as the ultimate upgrade: so ubiquitous it is almost invisible; so intimate, it is not clear whether it is a kind of tool or an added dimension of the user. But whatever the boundaries, we confront a complex coalition in which the basic biological brain is fantastically empowered by some of its strangest and most recent creations: words in the air, symbols on the printed page” (“Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/magicwords.html [accessed May 9, 2013]).

50. Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 117.

51. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, pp. 116–17.

52. See Janet Shibley Hyde, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist, 60 (2005): 581–92.

53. These two lists are from Evans, Hypothetical Thinking, pp. 14–15, slightly modified.

54. Evans, Hypothetical Thinking, p. 110.

Chapter 2

1. “The Temple of Reason,” in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 168–71.

2. Leo Gershoy, The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1957), p. 160.

3. Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology, 8 (1982): 4–15.

4. Like many stories coming out of Nigeria, this may be a hoax, but see Addy Dugdale, “Nigerian Man Builds Working Helicopters from Junk,” Gizmodo (October 22, 2007), http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2007/10/nigerian_man_builds_working_he/ (accessed May 9, 2013). True or not, it nevertheless provides an excellent illustration of a kluge.

5. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 210.

6. Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).

7. Marcus, Kluge, p. 21.

8. Marcus, Kluge, p. 45.

9. For discussion of these and other weaknesses of memory, see Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Broadway, 2009), pp. 61–79.

10. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits, and Ancestors (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 223.

11. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 259.

12. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 220.

13. The term scaffolding in psychology is more commonly associated with the work of Jerome Bruner. See, for example, David Wood, Jerome S. Bruner, and Gail Ross, “The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving,” Journal of Psychology and Psychiatry, 17 (1976): 89–100. Clark uses the term in a slightly different sense, to refer to ways in which “we solve problems by ‘piggy-backing’ on reliable environmental properties” (Being There, p. 45). The central difference from Bruner is that there is no sense in Clark’s use of the term that the scaffolding will some day be taken down.

14. Again, see Cowan, Working Memory Capacity and Baddeley, Working Memory, Thought, and Action. It is interesting to compare the discussion of working memory in psychology with the discussion in computer science of the Von Neumann bottleneck in the architecture of standard computer systems.

15. Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (2009): 15583–87.

16. “The main conclusion from the studies of multitasking is that virtually nobody does it well: As a rule, it is more efficient to do tasks one at a time rather than simultaneously” (Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, p. 32).

17. Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 24.

18. See Henry K. Beecher, Measurement of Subjective Responses: Quantitative Effects of Drugs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959) and George Ainslie, Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 103.

19. Daniel Simon and Christopher Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception, 28 (1999): 1059–74. The video is available online, but once you’ve been told about the gorilla, it’s impossible not to notice it. See also Simon and Chabris, The Invisible Gorilla.

20. See Stanovich on the importance to rationality of “cognitive decoupling,” separating our hypothetical representations from our primary representation of the world (Rationality and the Reflective Mind, pp. 48–52).

21. Clark, Being There, p. 191.

22. Does that make us ectologs?

23. Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 11.

24. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 282. See also James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 227.

Chapter 3

1. For discussion of this analogy, see George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

2. Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); also Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, p. 3.

3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 170.

4. For an overview, see Frank Cunningham, Theories of Democracy: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Routledge, 2002) and Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

5. Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789, in Thoughts on War and Revolution: Annotated Correspondence, edited by Brett F. Woods (New York: Algora, 2009), p. 93.

6. See Jürgen Habermas, “‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 132. Note that conservatism is a child of the Enlightenment, as is romanticism.

7. It is worth noting that our intuitions are often even worse in these situations. Dietrich Dörner, in The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations (New York: Basic Books, 1996), presents a nice experiment showing how the introduction of a five-minute delay between cause and effect in a simple task can make it impossible for most people to figure out the relationship (p. 130).

8. Laura E. Berk, “Why Children Talk to Themselves,” Scientific American (November 1994): 78–83.

9. Reported in Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 244.

10. Deacon, The Symbolic Species. It has been suggested that laughter in humans is a vestigial trace of these primate vocalizations, since it is contagious across individuals in much the same way that ape vocalizations are, and is also very difficult to suppress.

11. Clark, Being There, p. 191.

12. Baumeister, Masicampo, and Vohs, “Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?” p. 351.

13. It also appears to be subject to depletion. See Roy E. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice, “Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (1998): 1252–65.

14. Lynn T. Kozlowski, “Pack Size, Reported Cigarette Smoking Rates, and Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health, 76 (1986): 1337–38.

15. For more extensive discussion, see Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, “Procrastination and the Extended Will,” in Mark White and Chrisoula Andreou, eds., The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

16. For more extensive discussion of these and other collective action problems, see Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is as Close to Utopia as It Gets (Toronto: Penguin, 2001), p. 69.

17. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

18. Plato, The Republic, Book 2, in Complete Works, Vol. 2, translated by B. Jowett (New York: Tudor Books, 1937), p. 46. It is worth noting that this is not the theory that Plato accepts, because it does not show the intrinsic worth of just acts.

19. Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency,” American Sociological Review, 22 (1957): 664–70.

20. Donald R. Cressey, Other People’s Money: A Study in the Social Psychology of Embezzlement (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953).

21. David Sally, “Conversation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: A Meta-analysis of Experiments from 1958 to 1992,” Rationality and Society, 5 (1995): 58–92.

22. This term is from Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, p. 214, but I am using it in a different sense than they do.

23. This is the biggest problem with Frans de Waal’s widely celebrated work (e.g., Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006]). De Waal catalogues a series of pro-social behaviors among chimpanzees and suggests that the underlying mechanism might account for cooperation among humans as well. He glosses over the fact that chimpanzees are incapable of large-scale cooperation (that is, they are unable to support tribal groups larger than about one hundred). Thus whatever pro-social tendencies we share with them, they must not provide an adequate account of human sociality; otherwise, we would see large-scale chimpanzee societies as well. See Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, “The Evolution of Reciprocity in Sizable Groups,” Theoretical Biology, 132 (1988): 337–56.

24. Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, p. 230. See also Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, and Joseph Henrich, “Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation,” in Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 265.

25. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 62–63.

26. Edward Shils, “The Study of the Primary Group,” in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Laswell, eds., The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 64. See also David Wong, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 142.

27. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

28. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

29. Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, pp. 231–35.

30. Karl P. Schuessler and Donald R. Cressey, “Personality Characteristics of Criminals,” American Journal of Sociology, 55 (1950): 476–84; Gordon P. Waldo and Simon Dinitz, “Personality Attributes of the Criminal: An Analysis of Research Studies, 1950–65,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 4 (1967): 185–202; David J. Tennenbaum, “Personality and Criminality: A Summary and Implications of the Literature,” Journal of Criminal Justice, 5 (1977): 225–35.

31. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

32. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

33. Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1 (1973): 69–97.

34. Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Treviño, and Kenneth D. Butterfield, “Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research,” Ethics and Behavior, 11 (2001): 219–32.

35. McCabe, Treviño, and Butterfield, “Cheating in Academic Institutions,” p. 222.

36. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette, 2007), pp. 15–36.

37. This is what undoubtedly explains the phenomenon, described most influentially by Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin, 1994), that people who suffer brain damage that results in emotional deficits also lose certain capacities for rational decision making and control. Many people have taken this to show that reason is a sham and that our emotions are doing all the work. This is too hasty. What it shows is that reason does not have its own dedicated systems, but rather uses various parts of the brain, including parts that belong to older, nonrational systems, in order to get its work done. In other words, Damasio’s work suggests that reason is an exaptation.

38. Jonathan Baron, Rationality and Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 168.

39. This formulation is from Jonathan Wolff, Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 79.

Chapter 4

1. Gladwell, Blink, p. 48.

2. Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64 (1993): 431–41.

3. Jerome S. Bruner and Mary C. Potter, “Interference in Visual Recognition,” Science, 144 (1964): 424–25. For general discussion of the phenomenon, see Baron, Rationality and Intelligence, pp. 163–66.

4. As Christophe Chabris and Daniel Simons point out, even Gladwell’s famous example of the art experts detecting the forged statue has obvious problems. There are many, many examples of forgeries that fooled all the experts until they were discovered by scientific analysis, such as radiocarbon dating or X-ray imaging. See Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, pp. 232–34.

5. We appear to rely upon the sensation of “cognitive fluency” or ease in order to determine whether we need to engage System 2 reasoning. For an overview, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 59–70. Even being in a good mood tends to make people “less vigilant and more prone to logical errors” (p. 69).

6. Aphorism slightly modified from Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality (London: Constable, 1992), p. 270.

7. Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, p. 83.

8. Clark, “Magic Words.”

9. Brooks, The Social Animal, p. 219.

10. Brooks, The Social Animal, p. 219.

11. Brooks, The Social Animal, p. 244.

12. Brooks, The Social Animal, p. 246.

13. Brooks, The Social Animal, p. xvii.

14. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 11–35. Also Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). The phrase “wife capture” is from Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich, “Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation,” p. 367.

15. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, p. 11.

16. Dacher Keltner, Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are (New York: Vintage, 1995); Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

17. Evans, Hypothetical Thinking, p. 19.

18. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, p. 31.

19. This observation of baby jackdaws is attributed to Konrad Lorenz by Ken Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 16. Binmore does not provide a reference, and I have been unable to locate any. The story is not implausible, though; one can find accounts of similar observations of “misfires,” including one by Lorenz involving jackdaws, in Niko Tinbergen, The Animal in Its World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 98–99.

20. Amos Tvesky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology, 4 (1973): 207–32.

21. Dan Gardner, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), pp. 66–68.

22. Robyn M. Dawes, Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), p. 207.

23. A classic discussion is Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein, “Facts versus Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk,” in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

24. Kathryn A. Braun-LaTour, Michael S. LaTour, Jacqueline E. Pickrell, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “How and When Advertising Can Influence Memory for Consumer Experience,” Journal of Advertising, 33 (2004): 7–25.

25. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, p. 134. See also Cosmides and Tooby, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” p. 73, and Roger Shepard, “The Perceptual Organization of Colors: An Adaptation to Regularities of the Terrestrial World?” in Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind.

26. Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter A. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

27. Stanovich, Who Is Rational? p. 190.

28. Stanovich, Who Is Rational? p. 193. It is worth noting that this is a complete repudiation of John Dewey’s very influential educational philosophy.

29. Timothy D. Wilson and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decision,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60 (1991): 181–92.

30. United States Department of Agriculture, “Profiling Food Consumption in America,” Agriculture Fact Book, 2001–2002, http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.htm (accessed June 23, 2013).

31. Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future Affective States,” in Joseph P. Forgas, ed., Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 178–97.

32. Itamar Simonson, “The Effect of Purchase Quantity and Timing on Variety-Seeking Behavior,” Journal of Marketing Research, 27 (1990): 150–62.

33. Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, “Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 (2005): 131–34.

34. Robert Frank, Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 79–83.

35. George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Howard Rachlin, The Science of Self-Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Chapter 5

1. William Dowell, “Interview with Li Hongzhi,” Time (May 10, 1999).

2. Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 71–75.

3. The additional claims, that the woman became young and beautiful and that Master Li is superior to Jesus Christ, both strike me as gratuitous embellishments. After all, we have it on good authority that Jesus Christ brought a man back from the dead. Can Master Li do that?

4. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 173.

5. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press 1991).

6. Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross, “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self versus Others,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28 (2002): 369–81.

7. Peter C. Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12 (1960): 129–40. I have since had the opportunity to try the test out on the author of a widely used textbook on critical reasoning. (Philosophers tend not to read psychology, so he was unfamiliar with the test.) He failed, although not quite as egregiously as I had. It occurred to him that they might also be odd numbers, but he didn’t manage to escape the assumption that they were ascending in increments of two.

8. There is a debate about whether this should be called “confirmation bias,” because in principle, any of the questions being asked could be attempts at disconfirmation. What is striking about the task is that people fail to generate and test what they take to be false hypotheses. For the broad reading of confirmation bias, see Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology, 2 (1998): 175–220. For critique and a discussion of the controversy over the correct interpretation of this task, see Evans, Hypothetical Thinking, pp. 34–35.

9. Klein, Sources of Power.

10. With respect to vision, psychologists refer to the phenomenon as pareidolia, defined as “the human mind’s tendency to promiscuously perceive meaningful visual patterns in randomness” (Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, p. 155). This is why the faces of Jesus or the Virgin Mary show up so often on people’s toast or in misshapen potatoes or what have you. As in so many cases, what distinguishes the pathological from the normal is not that the underlying tendency is different, but that the pathological individual is unable to inhibit it.

11. Stephen Levy, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 190–96.

12. Jonathan Evans writes, “It is clear from psychological research that we have very poor intuitions about random events, but it could be argued that true randomness is rarely manifest in the natural word and that we were designed by evolution to detect patterns in noisy environments” (Hypothetical Thinking, p. 152).

13. This is an idea known as error management theory; see Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss, “Error Management Theory and the Evolution of Misbeliefs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32 (2009): 522–23. The idea is that if errors can occur in several different dimensions and the fitness consequences of error are different in these different dimensions, then evolution may not favor a system that minimizes errors overall; it may instead produce a system that produces many errors but skews them into a dimension in which the cost is lower. My favorite example of this is the bias in male perception of female attractiveness. Given a very brief glimpse or indistinct image of a woman, men almost always err on the side of overestimating her attractiveness (relative to their own assessment after more careful inspection). One can think of some plausible evolutionary reasons why this might be so. (Music videos, incidentally, are relentless in their exploitation of this bias.)

14. As Stanovich writes, “We found that across a wide range of cognitive biases, the tendency to magnify the biases of others and minimize our own was not attenuated by high intelligence … If anything, the tendency was increased by high intelligence, not because the more intelligent subjects were in fact less biased but instead because they tended to assume that they would be less biased” (Rationality and the Reflective Mind, p. 135–36).

15. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, p. 163.

16. There is also the problem of compartmentalization. As Jonathan Baron has observed, “The public pronouncements of Nobel Prize winners on matters outside their fields seem to vary enormously in the extent to which rational thinking was involved” (Rationality and Intelligence, p. 191).

17. Michael Kranish, “Yale Grades Portray Kerry as a Lackluster Student,” Boston.com, June 7, 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student (accessed June 23, 2013). The typical liberal assumptions are well articulated by Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Vintage, 2009), who starts by comparing John Kerry to John Kennedy, “both scions of wealth and privilege, both recipients of the best possible American and international education, both epitomizing cosmopolitanism,” then laments the fact that Kerry “spent much of his campaign in a doomed effort to make himself look and sound more like an average Joe” (p. 283). She goes on to suggest that with George W. Bush, “there cannot be anyone in the country who believes that Bush’s brain would have gotten him anywhere near Yale … without his family name and connections” (p. 284). But this is just to say that Bush, like Kerry, was a “scion of wealth and privilege.”

18. David Frum, “Bush Is Incurious and Dogmatic but He Is Still the Right Leader,” Financial Times (September 27, 2005) (accessed June 23, 2013).

19. For some reason, being an engineer seems to make people particularly vulnerable to dysrationalia. This may explain why engineering schools—not madrasas—seem to be the largest breeding grounds for future terrorists.

20. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Bruce McEwen (1779; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1907), p. 79.

21. There is a classic psychology experiment that shows how important this task is. Subjects were asked to draw balls from an opaque urn containing some mixture of red and blue balls and to guess whether the majority were red or blue. The tendency was for subjects to settle on an initial hypothesis rather quickly, after which all subsequent draws simply reinforced belief the hypothesis, regardless of what color the balls were. If they started out thinking “blue,” then they would mentally note each new instance of blue as confirmation, while each instance of red would be discounted. They would do the exact opposite if the initial guess was “red.” Thus mixed evidence tends simply to reinforce previous belief, whatever that belief may be. See Gordon F. Pitz, “An Inertia Effect (Resistance to Change) in the Revision of Opinion,” Canadian Journal of Psychology, 23 (1969): 24–33. One can see the obvious relevance of this in many areas, such as the history of medicine.

22. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, edited by Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 8.

23. Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, p. 112.

24. Results on group deliberation are mixed. For an overview, see Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 57–64.

25. Restaurant failure rates are often overstated. There have been some attempts recently to correct that. See H. G. Parsa, John T. Self, David Njite, and Tiffany King, “Why Restaurants Fail,” Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 46 (2005): p. 310.

26. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 124.

27. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, 185 (1974): 1124–31.

28. For discussion, see Keith Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 108.

29. See Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities (London: Granta, 2005).

30. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89.

31. See Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest; see also Benoît Dubreuil, Human Evolution and the Origin of Hierarchies: The State of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

32. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89.

33. Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature, 415 (January 2002): 137–40.

34. Because of this, “the capacity for reciprocity to maintain cooperation decreases geometrically as the group size increases” (Nathalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich, Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], p. 51).

35. Some people may have wanted me to say “the market” here rather than “the state.” I assign priority to the state not to downplay the significance of the market, but merely as a reflection of the fact that the state always comes first. There has never been, nor could there ever be, an instance of the spontaneous emergence of a market economy—it must always be institutionalized through law. That having been said, the market is clearly the second-most important kluge ever developed when it comes to extending the scope of human cooperation. On this, see Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

36. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 214–16; John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited by C. B. Macpherson (1690; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 47 (§88), p. 67 (§130).

37. This is something of a simplification. For more general discussion, see Kenneth W. Simons, “The Crime/Tort Distinction: Legal Doctrine and Normative Perspectives,” Widener Law Journal, 17 (2008): 719–32.

38. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.

39. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

40. Steven M. Teles, “Klugeocracy: The American Way of Policy,” New America Foundation, (December 12, 2012), http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/kludgeocracy_the_american_way_of_policy (accessed June 18, 2013).

41. Peter Baker, “Hip, Hip—If Not Hooray—for a Standstill Nation,” New York Times (June 18, 2011).

Chapter 6

1. Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason.

2. The frequency of extreme weather events in recent years has since driven the rate up to over 50 percent.

3. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Poll: 83% Say God Answers Prayers, 57% Favor National Prayer Day,” USA Today (May 4, 2010).

4. See Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality, pp. 95–124; also Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, p. 155. The article that served as the focus of much discussion was L. Jonathan Cohen, “Can Human Irrationality Be Experimentally Demonstrated?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 4 (1981): 317–70

5. Strictly speaking, that maximizes the ascription of true beliefs. See Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (1973–1974): 5–20.

6. Joseph Heath, “Problems in the Theory of Ideology,” in William Rehg and James Bohman, eds., Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory; Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

7. E.g., Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings.

8. Clark, Being There, p. 191.

9. This is the NISMART-2 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice: David Finkelhor, Heather Hammer, and Andrea J. Sedlak, “Nonfamily Abducted Children: National Estimates and Characteristics,” NISMART: National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, October 2002), http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/nismart2_nonfamily.pdf (accessed May 11, 2013).

10. This example is taken from a brilliant discussion by Frances Woolley, “Over-selling Soap,” Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (December 2, 2010), http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/12/the-news-item-dominated-the-new-york-times-most-popular-list-for-weeks-for-your-dishwashers-sake-go-easy-on-the-detergent.html (accessed May 11, 2013).

11. See the discussion of anchoring effects in chapter 5.

12. Original observation by Jean Piaget, Six Psychological Studies (New York: Random House, 1967).

13. Woolley, “Over-selling Soap.”

14. Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, p. 21.

15. N. B. Davies, Cuckoos, Cowbirds and Other Cheats (London: T. & A. D. Poyser, 2000), pp. 104–5.

16. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think (New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. 119–21.

17. Mary F. Wilson and Anna Traveset, “The Ecology of Seed Dispersal,” in Michael Fenner, ed., Seeds, 2nd edn. (New York: CABI, 2000).

18. This is why there is something suspicious about people who claim not to like fast food. Of course, there is no question that some are able to cultivate a distaste for it—often by channeling the disgust they feel for the social class of the average fast-food customer. But to deny that hamburgers, pizza, or burritos speak to you at some level seems to me little more than an attempt to deny one’s essential humanity. Seeing them as the outcome of an incredibly competitive evolutionary process is central to understanding their appeal.

19. This is one of the theses central to Jared Diamond’s highly influential book about European contact with the Americas, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Diamond argues that Europe and Asia had essentially been swapping diseases for centuries, resulting in both populations sharing an incredibly large pool of viruses and having high levels of acquired immunity. The Americas, in part because of their north—south geography, didn’t have the same exchange of diseases, and so had a relatively small stock of viruses and very little immunity. Europeans had centuries to adapt to the viruses they carried with them. When this entire batch of highly contagious viruses was introduced all at once into the Americas, the result was the complete extinction of the indigenous population in certain areas.

20. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).

21. Don Ross and Harold Kincaid, “Introduction,” in Don Ross, Harold Kincaid, David Spurrett, and Peter Collins, eds., What Is Addiction? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. ix.

22. Wolff, Ethics and Public Policy, pp. 52–53.

23. See Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

24. For general discussion, see Ron Larson, “Core Principles for Supermarket Aisle Management,” Journal of Food Distribution Research, 37 (2006): 107–11.

Chapter 7

1. Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

2. On November 11, 1995, the Globe and Mail newspaper printed the email and recipe, treating it as fact.

3. Boyer, Religion Explained, p. 69. Also Wendy James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

4. Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 79–82. The experiments were conducted in collaboration with Justin Barrett.

5. Alison R. Fragale and Chip Heath, “Evolving Informational Credentials: The (Mis) Attribution of Believable Facts to Credible Sources,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30 (2004): 227. See also Hal R. Arkes, Catherine Hackett, and Larry Boehm, “The Generality of the Relation between Familiarity and Judged Validity,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2 (1989): 81–94; see also Scott A. Hawkins, Stephen J. Hoch, and Joan Meyers-Levy, “Low-Involvement Learning: Repetition and Coherence in Familiarity and Belief,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 11 (2001): 1–11.

6. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, edited by Louis P. Lochner (London, 1948), entry for January 29, 1942, p. 22, cited in David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 26.

7. Intelligent, well-educated people, it should be noted, are perfectly capable of succumbing to belief contagion. There are academic versions of urban myths—ideas that get published in refereed papers but for which each paper cites some other paper that repeats the claim, which cites some other paper, and for which no one ever seems to have an original source. The most famous of these is the “Eskimo words for snow” myth, according to which the Inuit have a huge number of different words for snow. It turns out they don’t, but this didn’t stop some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century from claiming that they do. See Laura Martin, “‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example,” American Anthropologist, 88 (1986): 418–23.

8. “New Age,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age, accessed May 7, 2012. Unsurprisingly, the entry is not very stable, and has since been modified several times.

9. Matt Loney, “Study: Unpatched PCs Compromised in 20 Minutes,” CNET News (August 17, 2004), http://news.cnet.com/2100-7349_3-5313402.html (accessed May 11, 2013).

10. For an overview, see Menachem E. Yaari, “On the Role of ‘Dutch Books’ in the Theory of Choice under Risk,” in D. P. Jacobs, E. Kalai, M. I. Kamien, N. L. Schwartz, P. Hammond, and A. Holly, eds., Frontiers of Economic Theory: The Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lectures, 1983–1997 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

11. Most notably, Bayes’ rule, which seems to say something quite substantive and controversial about how we are committed to evaluating new evidence but which is actually just an elementary consequence of the definition of conditional probability. See Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality, pp. 53–55.

12. Frank P. Ramsey, “Truth and Probability,” in The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931), pp. 156–98.

13. Donald Davidson, John McKinsey, and Patrick Suppes, “Outlines of a Formal Theory of Value,” Philosophy of Science, 22 (1955): 140–60.

14. Which is not to say that the irrational have no response. They may have the advantage of being able to make more credible threats, because, being crazy, they might carry out the threat even after it has failed to achieve its desired effect. The rational are usually bluffing—once the threat has failed, they see no reason to carry it out, and so no one believes them in the first place. So if the irrational are exploitable by the rational, we might say that the rational are extortable by the irrational.

15. Fredrick Schick, “Dutch Bookies and Money Pumps,” Journal of Philosophy, 83 (1986): 112–19.

16. For more extensive discussion, see Heath, Filthy Lucre, p. 260.

17. Cariboo Sentinel (Aug. 27, 1866), p. 1, http://historicalnewspapers.library.ubc.ca/view/collection/cariboosent/date/1866-08-27#1 (accessed July 5, 2013).

18. Advertisement for Sanka Coffee, Good Housekeeping (June 1932), p. 128, http://retroads.net/v/1930s/Food/1932_SankaCoffee.jpg.html (accessed May 11, 2013).

19. Advertisement by Pan-American Coffee Bureau, reproduced in Jim Heimann, ed., All-American Ads: 50s (Köln: Taschen, 2001), p. 627.

20. For more extensive discussion, see Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 206.

21. Heath and Potter, The Rebel Sell, pp. 208–9.

22. There was a time when consumer opposition to advertising might have stemmed the tide. Inger L. Stole, Advertising at War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), argues that it was the success of domestic propaganda during the Second World War that really broke the back of popular resistance. But since, the die has been cast.

23. For example, see James Twitchell, Lead Us into Temptation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 23.

24. James R. Flynn and Lawrence G. Weiss, “American IQ Gains from 1932 to 2002: The WISC Subtests and Educational Progress,” International Journal of Testing, 7 (2007): 209–24. See also James Flynn, Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

25. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), p. 277.

Chapter 8

1. Luntz, Words That Work, p. 279.

2. The video can be found in a variety of places, including Palin’s PAC: http://www.sarahpac.com/videos (accessed July 5, 2013)

3. Ayn Rand, “Sanction of the Victims,” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 156.

4. For interesting discussion of the American trends, see Gordon Gauchat, “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010,” American Sociological Review, 77 (2012): 167–87, showing that “conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest” (p. 167).

5. This is a style that subsequently became known as “high modernism.” See Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 88–90.

6. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1958), p. 179.

7. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916; Moscow: International Publishers, 1970).

8. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

9. Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969).

10. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 24.

11. See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011), pp. 191–92.

12. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 239.

13. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, rev. edn. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

14. Michael Joseph Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), pp. 3-13.

15. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindications: The Rights of Men and the Rights of Women, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Sherf (1790, 1792; Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997), p. 117.

16. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 39.

17. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, 2nd edn. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 23.

18. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. xi.

19. At the time of writing, Google Scholar showed that Gyn/Ecology had over 2,300 academic citations. That is a lot.

20. Eleanor Emmons Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 98–110; Alan Feingold, “Sex Differences in Variability in Intellectual Abilities: A New Look at an Old Controversy,” Review of Educational Research, 62 (1992): 61–84.

21. Fiona Godlee, Jane Smith, and Harvey Marcovitch, “Wakefield’s Article Linking Vaccination and Autism Was Fraudulent,” British Medical Journal, 342 (2011): 64–66.

22. Weston Kosova and Patrice Wingert, “Live Your Best Life Ever!” Newsweek (May 29, 2009).

23. See “Mothers Battle Autism,” Oprah, http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Mothers-Battle-Autism/ (accessed May 13, 2013).

24. Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, pp. 103–15.

25. Jenny McCarthy, Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism against All Odds (New York: Penguin, 2008).

26. David Olson, Psychological Theory and Educational Reform: How School Remakes Mind and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 16–19.

27. Stanovich, Who Is Rational? p. 193.

28. Valerie A. Thompson, Jamie A. Prowse Turner, and Gordon Pennycook, “Intuition, Reason, and Metacognition,” Cognitive Psychology, 63 (2011): 107–40.

29. Adam L. Alter, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Nicholas Epley, and Rebecca N. Eyre, “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytical Thought,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136 (2007): 569–76.

30. For an excellent discussion, see Olson, Psychological Theory and Educational Reform.

31. David Brooks, “Amy Chua Is a Wimp,” New York Times (January 17, 2011).

32. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes, rev. edn. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

33. Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 1.

Chapter 9

1. Hirstein, Brain Fiction, p. 19.

2. Mark Green, To Err Is Reagan: Lies and Deceptions from the President (San Francisco: Foundation for National Progress, 1987).

3. Michael Barone and Jodie T. Allen, “The ‘Great Communicator’ or the ‘Great Prevaricator,’” Washington Post (October 10, 1982).

4. Luntz, Words That Work, p. 13. He goes on to say, “His message never wavered, and that was the major reason he sustained personal credibility even though a majority of Americans opposed many of his policies during his administration” (p. 13).

5. Fay S. Joyce, “2 Approaches to a Candidate’s Image: Showing the Message or Speaking It,” New York Times (November 1, 1984).

6. George Monbiot, “Advertising Is a Poison That Demeans Even Love—and We’re Hooked on It,” The Guardian (October 24, 2011).

7. Eric Boehlert, “Fox News’ ACORN Fanatics Still Won’t Address GOP’s Widening ‘Voter Fraud’ Scandal,” Huffington Post (February 10, 2012), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/fox-news-acorn-fanatics-s_b_1932745.html (accessed December 19, 2012).

8. “National Opinion on Libya, the Norquist Plan and Obama’s Reelection,” Public Policy Polling (December 4, 2012), http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_National_1204.pdf (accessed December 19, 2012).

9. Frank Luntz quotes this a lot (e.g., Words That Work, p. 18), crediting it to Warren Beatty.

10. Luntz, Words That Work, p. 11.

11. “Staying on Message with the Media,” Moveon.org, http://www.moveon.org/team/training/Staying_on_Message_with_the_Media.doc (accessed May 30, 2012).

12. Classically described in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963).

13. As Thomas Frank has observed, this way of thinking divides the world into two classes, ordinary people and “intellectuals”: “Either you’re a productive citizen, or you’re some kind of snob, a university professor, or an EPA bureaucrat. Compared to the vivid line separating intellectuals and productive members of society, all other distinctions fade to nothingness” (Pity the Billionaire, p. 92).

14. John Geddes, “Ian Brodie Offers a Candid Case Study in Politics and Policy,” Maclean’s (March 27, 2009).

15. Allan Gregg, “1984 in 2012: The Assault on Reason,” speech to the Faculty of Public Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa, September 8, 2012, http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/09/08/1984-in-2012-the-assault-on-reason-speech/ (accessed May 14, 2013).

16. Gregg, “1984 in 2012.”

17. Roy Walmsley, World Prison Population List, 9th edn. (London: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2011).

18. William J. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 48.

19. See Paul H. Robinson and John M. Darley, “Does Criminal Law Deter? A Behavioral Science Investigation,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 24 (2004): 173–205.

20. The Monks of New Skete, The Art of Raising a Puppy (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1991).

21. Norman Miller, Donald C. Butler, and James A. McMartin, “The Ineffectiveness of Punishment Power in Group Interaction,” Sociometry 32 (1969): 24–42.

22. Thomas W. Phelan, 1-2-3 Magic, 3rd edn. (Glen Ellyn, IL: Parentmagic, 2003).

23. Daniel Kahneman, “Biographical,” Nobelprize.org (2002), http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-autobio.html (accessed May 15, 2013).

24. Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, “Third-Party Punishment and Social Norms,” Evolution and Human Behavior, 25 (2004): 63–87; Katrin Riedl, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “No Third-Party Punishment in Chimpanzees,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (2013): 14824–29.

25. “Crime Agenda Fuels High Costs,” The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon, January 17, 2013).

26. Canadian Press, “Crime Rate Debate Won’t Stop Tory Push: Toews,” CTV News (February 22, 2011), http://www.ctvnews.ca/crime-rate-debate-won-t-stop-tory-push-toews-1.610672#ixzz20nWdyFvH (accessed May 15, 2013).

27. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, remarks at the 6th Annual Gala and Fundraiser for the Canadian Crime Victims Foundation, Vaughan, Ontario, June 6, 2008, http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=2&id=2145 (accessed May 15, 2013).

28. Geddes, “Ian Brodie Offers a Candid Case Study in Politics and Policy.”

29. Evan McMorris-Santoro, “Christine O’Donnell: Where in the Constitution Is the Separation of Church and State?” Talking Points Memo (October 19, 2010), http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/christine-odonnell-where-in-the-constitution-is-the-separation-of-church-and-state.php (accessed May 15, 2013).

30. Alexander Burns, “The GOP Polling Debacle,” Politico (November 11, 2012), http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83672.html (accessed June 18, 2013); Noam Scheiber, “The Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He’d Win,” New Republic (November 30, 2012), http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/110597/exclusive-the-polls-made-mitt-romney-think-hed-win# (accessed June 18, 2013).

Chapter 10

1. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1977), p. 156.

2. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, p. 191.

3. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, p. 195.

4. James D. Fearon, “Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country,” Journal of Economic Growth, 8 (2003): 195–222.

5. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, p. 193.

6. John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau: 1968–2000 (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 199.

7. Sarah Palin, “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate,” Facebook (August 7, 2009), http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434 (accessed June 15, 2012).

8. Frank, Pity the Billionaire, p. 97. His remark is actually made in the context of Republican claims about small business and job creation, but the point is a general one.

9. George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004).

10. George Lakoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 236–38.

11. Mark Steyn, “John Kerry Is All Tied Up in Nuances,” Telegraph (March 2, 2004). “Nancy boy” is an older term for a homosexual, something that would have been well known to Steyn’s British readers.

12. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

13. There is a good discussion of this in Luntz, Words That Work, p. 87.

14. This is an extreme difficult point to grasp. One cannot overstate the importance of Boyd and Richerson, “The Evolution of Reciprocity in Sizable Groups,” in clarifying this point.

15. Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 47.

16. On this, see the interesting discussion by Craig Calhoun in “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order,” Canadian Review of Sociology, 41 (2008): 373–95.

17. Ted Nugent, “Trample the Weak, Hurtle the Dead,” Washington Times (June 24, 2010), cited in Frank, Pity the Billionaire, p. 188.

18. Halford Ross Ryan, “The 1988 Bush-Dukakis Presidential Debates,” in Robert V. Friedenberg, ed., Rhetorical Studies of National Political Debates: 1960–1992, 2nd edn. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), p. 160.

19. Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997), pp. 46–47.

20. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 305–9.

21. Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 119.

22. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn. (1739–40; Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 477.

23. As Friedrich Hayek put it, “the manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people” (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976], p. 64).

24. For my own attempt, see Heath, Filthy Lucre, pp. 103–5.

25. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Chapter 11

1. Simon Rogers, “Healthcare Spending around the World, Country by Country,” Guardian (June 30, 2012), http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthcare-spending-world-country (accessed December 20, 2012).

2. Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 56.

3. Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 68.

4. Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 67.

5. Specifically, the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals are nonprofits.

6. There is only one significant example of government-provided care, which is the NHS in the U.K. But this is not a particularly attractive model, precisely because it gets the government too much involved in the provision of care.

7. Gardner, Risk.

8. Gardner, Risk, p. 296.

9. Eric J. Johnson, John Hershey, Jacqueline Meszaros, and Howard Kunreuther, “Framing, Probability Distortions, and Insurance Decisions,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 7 (1993): 35–51.

10. Gardner, Risk, p. 342.

11. Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, p. 241.

12. Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam, 2006), p. 69.

13. Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, p. 242.

14. Roy F. Baumeister, Todd F. Heatherton, and Dianne M. Tice, Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1994).

15. Matt Yglesias, “Bachmann Introducing Bill to Ban Use of Made-Up Global Currency,” ThinkProgress (March 29, 2009), http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2009/03/26/192285/bachmann_introducing_bill_to_ban_use_of_made_up_global_currency/ (accessed May 16, 2013).

Chapter 12

1. The argument developed here owes an enormous debt to Andy Clark’s brilliant paper “Economic Reason: The Interplay of Individual Learning and External Structure,” in John N. Drobak and John V. C. Nye, eds., The Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1996).

2. Clark, “Economic Reason,” p. 271.

3. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 85–86.

4. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 284.

5. Paul Krugman, “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea,” http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm (accessed May 16, 2013).

6. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 38.

7. The irony here, as Dawkins points out, is that we have intuitions governing a relatively short time frame precisely because our brains are the product of evolution.

8. The exceptions are two pieces on the subject of Charles Darwin’s life and work.

9. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Adult Obesity Facts” (August 13, 2012), http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html (accessed May 16, 2013).

10. The average person, at an average activity level, should be consuming somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 calories total per day.

11. Wansink, Mindless Eating.

12. This has been known for a long time. See Paul S. Siegel, “The Completion Compulsion in Human Eating,” Psychological Reports, 3 (1957): 15–16; Andrew B. Geier, Paul Rozin, and Gheorghe Doros, “Unit Bias: A New Heuristic That Helps Explain the Effect of Portion Size on Food Intake,” Psychological Science, 17 (2006): 521–25.

13. Wansink, Mindless Eating, p. 203.

14. “New York’s Calorie Counting,” Economist (July 28, 2011). See also Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorenson, “Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants,” NBER Working Paper No, 15648, National Bureau of Economic Research (January 2010), http://www.nber.org/papers/wl5648 (accessed June 18, 2013).

15. Douglas E. Levy, Jason Riis, Lillian M. Sonnenberg, Susan J. Barraclough, and Anne N. Thornsdike, “Food Choices of Minority and Low-Income Employees,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, 43 (2012): 240–48.

16. See Heath and Anderson, “Procrastination and the Extended Will.”

17. Wansink, Mindless Eating, p. 204.

18. Wansink, Mindless Eating, p. 68.

19. Committee on Sleep Medicine and Research, Board on Health Sciences Policy, Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2006), p. 58.

20. For a general discussion of the food industry, see Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (New York: Random House, 2013).

21. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill (1869; New York: Random House, 1992), p. 79.

22. Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2008).

23. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge, p. 3.

24. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge, p. 6.

Chapter 13

1. Allen, Getting Things Done, p. 86.

2. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, new edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 136.

3. This is the core phenomenon in the famous Stroop effect. See Colin M. MacLeod, “Half a Century of Research on the Stroop Effect: An Integrative Review,” Psychological Bulletin, 109 (1991): 163–203. For applications of similar techniques to the study of racial attitudes, see Jennifer A. Richeson and J. Nicole Shelton, “When Prejudice Does Not Pay: Effects of Interracial Contact on Executive Function,” Psychological Science, 14 (2003): 287–90.

4. Marilynn Brewer, “In-Group Bias in the Minimal Intergroup Situation: A Cognitive-Motivational Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin, 86 (1979): 317.

5. Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, “Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (2001): 15387–92.

6. The episode is “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (1969). It is sometimes compared, unfairly, to Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches (New York: Random House, 1964).

7. Gat, War in Human Civilization, p. 135.

8. Roy Baumeister writes, “In the history of the world, increased recognition of differences between groups has led more often to conflict and violence than to peaceful cooperation and sharing. America is now making a dangerous gamble on the opposite result” (Evil, p. 79).

9. Zhang Weiwei, “Why China Prefers Its Own Political Model,” Europe’s World (Spring 2013), http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/ArticleView/ArticleID/22086/language/en-US/Default.aspx (accessed May 14, 2013).

10. Cass Sunstein, “Cognition and Cost-Benefit Analysis,” Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 1059–1103.

11. C. E. S. Franks, The Parliament of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 156.

12. Franks, The Parliament of Canada, p. 156.

13. This is from the FCC’s 1974 formulation. See John Corry, “Why the Fairness Doctrine Is Still Important,” New York Times (September 15, 1985).

14. Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, Resolution 1003 on the Ethics of Journalism (1993), http://assembly.coe.int/documents/adoptedtext/ta93/eres1003.htm (accessed December 21, 2012).

15. Amy Sullivan, “Truth in Advertising? Not for Political Ads,” Time (September 23, 2008).

16. A similar suggestion has been made by Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 151. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the legal implications of such a restriction in the American context—specifically, whether it would be unconstitutional.

17. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

18. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p. 90.

19. “O’Reilly Debates Christopher Hitchens about Coerced Interrogation, Water-Boarding,” The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News (January 12, 2009), http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479839,00.html (accessed May 16, 2013).

20. Hat tip to Folco Portinari, author of the Slow Food Manifesto (December 10, 1989): http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/manifesto.lasso (accessed May 16, 2013).

Epilogue

1. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 272.

2. Heath, Filthy Lucre, pp. 158–63.

3. Gat, War in Human Civilization, p. 4.

4. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985).