A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society - and especially parents - to transf...
Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin? Why does recalling the 10 Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save 25 cents on a can of soup? Why do we go back for second helpings at the unl...
丹·艾瑞里又出新书了，这本《不诚实的诚实真相》中文版还是由中信引进。心理学和行为经济学相关领域，近几年热度不减，正如90年代末开始经济学成为显学一样，心理学和行为经济学与工农商学一一沾边，炙手可热势绝伦，成为显学中的显学。 显学说的不好听一点，就是泡沫，一般泡沫升起的时候会把经典也给淹没了，在一片噪音中你很难分清楚什么才是值得听的声音。所以心理学和行为经济学图书领域也一样随大流，泛起了泡沫。...
理查德·道金森想必大家已经熟知，他那部经典的《自私的基因》近期又突然火了起来。看完了他的书对人生一半感觉悲观，另一半有种要“绝处逢生”的感觉。怪不得有人说出“人活着就是生命最大的意义”这样的鸡汤来。看了他的书，除了对其中复杂的演变和过程描述印象深刻之外，还有对于世界观的改变。 理查德·道金森的书对站长来说比较颠覆三观，对思维框架的形成也有重要影响。
Can you imagine the world—or your life—without writing? From emails to street signs and newspapers to novels, the written word is so ever-present that we rarely stop to consider how it came to be. Yet at just over 5,000 years old, writing is actually a relatively recent invention. It has become so central to the way we communicate and live, howe...
Sixteen centuries ago a wave of settlers from northern Europe came to the British Isles speaking a mix of Germanic dialects thick with consonants and complex grammatical forms. Today we call that dialect Old English, the ancestor of the language nearly one in five people in the world speaks every day. How did this ancient tongue evolve into the ...
Is English broken? Do bad grammar, slang, and illogical constructions signal a decline in standards of usage? Do e-mail and text messages corrupt the art of writing? In short, is our language going to the dogs? It’s easy to think so, just as it’s easy to listen to people speaking a foreign language and think that they’re doing something more com...
Language basics. In Lecture 1, you start by comparing human language to animal communication and ask, how valid are claims that animals such as chimpanzees have rudimentary language skills? Then you look at intriguing evidence that links a specific gene to the ability to use language. The first appearance of this gene in humans has been calculated ...
With more than 6,000 languages spoken around the world, it’s no wonder that linguistics, the study of language, has a reputation for being complex and inaccessible. But here’s a secret: There’s a lot that’s quirky and intriguing about how human language works—and much of it is downright fun to learn about. Every day, linguists ponder and try to ...
Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as “The Harper’s Essay”, Franzen’s controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the Amer...