Dans son livre, Sunstein explique que le Sludge donne aux gens le sentiment qu’ils ne comptent pas, que leur vie ne compte pas. Pour la sociologue Pamela Herd et le politologue Donald Moynihan, coauteurs de Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (Russel Sage Foundation, 2019), le fardeau administratif comme la paperasserie complexe, les procédures confuses entravent activement l’accès aux services gouvernementaux. Plutôt que de simples inefficacités, affirment les auteurs, nombre de ces obstacles sont des outils politiques délibérés qui découragent la participation à des programmes comme Medicaid, empêchent les gens de voter et limitent l’accès à l’aide sociale. Et bien sûr, cette désorganisation volontaire touche de manière disproportionnée les gens les plus marginalisés.

Self-experimentation is exactly how smart people get pulled into homeopathy or naturopathy, for example. It’s what makes them often more likely to fall for superstitions and odd ideas. The smart person’s self-identity means they can’t believe their own psychological biases are fooling them.

Don’t self-experiment with psychological hazards! I can’t stress this enough!

There are many classes of problems that simply cannot be effectively investigated through self-experimentation and doing so exposes you to inflicting Cialdini-style persuasion and manipulation on yourself.

Fascist movements, formal or otherwise, operate much like cults. When one joins them, they are at first overwhelmed with the appearance of validation and support. This is called "love bombing" and it's meant to endear you to them, to become dependent on them to meet your emotional needs. Then that validation and support is gradually withheld in order to pressure the target into severing ties with the "normie" world. They drive away anyone outside of their hateful little bubble. So their entire network of social support depends on how useful they can be to the cause. It's the only way they can feel part of something anymore because nobody else wants anything to do with them at this point.

When we are able to admit that the capacity to harm lies within ourselves — within us all — we become capable of radically transforming the conversation around abuse and rape culture. We can go from simply reacting to abuse and punishing “abusers” to preventing abuse and healing our communities. Because the revolution starts at home, as they say. The revolution starts in your house, in your own relationships, in your bedroom. The revolution starts in your heart.

But moral outrage must be closely managed, or it can do more harm than good. Ganz, who eventually became a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has spent years teaching people how to use their anger to effect change. Stoking the emotion is easy. Learning how to channel it to useful ends, he told me, is harder. For anger to be productive, at some point, it must stop. Victory often demands compromise. “You have to know how to arouse passions to fuel the fight, and then how to cool everyone down so they’ll accept the deal on the table,” Ganz said.

Théorie fascinante qui propose un modèle pour expliquer l'émergence de la conscience dans le vivant.

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

Feminism boosts sexual satisfaction for both men and women, a new study suggests.