Helping Good People do Good

I just finished The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. It’s a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it. The first half of the book describes Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which young male college students participated in a psychology study on the effects of prison life [...]

What it will take to change the world

Many years ago, when I was stuck in traffic, a cyclist zoomed by me. I’d just added a new bumper sticker to my car that read, “Earth’s best friend is vegetarian.” I thought it was rather witty with its graphic of the Earth in the shape of an apple, and I personally considered [...]

Choosing MOGO

In response to my last post, “Dracunculus” discussed the process of decision-making between the chess master and the computer program and asked, “We are always making choices which, like the chess master, involve a conscious decision and also some sort of unconscious pre-selection. Clearly we are unable to use the chess program method of brute [...]