By Carl Zimmer, New York Times Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you...

The Vexing Mental Tug-of-War Called Morality By Kristin Ohlson, Discover magazine Would you kill a crying baby to save yourself and others from hostile soldiers outside? Neuroscience offers new ways to approach such moral questions, allowing logic to triumph over deep-rooted instinct. You arrive at the...

By David Brooks, The New York Times The story of evolution, we have been told, is the story of the survival of the fittest. The strong eat the weak. The creatures that adapt to the environment pass on their selfish genes. Those that do not become extinct. In this telling, we humans are like all other...

Portraying emotions at their unfolding: A multilayered approach for probing dynamics of neural networks By Gal Raza,Yonatan Winetrauba, Yael Jacoba, Sivan Kinreicha, Adi Maron-Katza, Galit Shahamf, Ilana Podlipskya, Gadi Gilama, Eyal Soreqa, and Talma Hendler Abstract: Dynamic functional integration...

By Eugene Caruso & Francesca Gino Abstract: Four experiments demonstrate that closing one's eyes affects ethical judgment and behavior because it induces people to mentally simulate events more extensively. People who considered situations with their eyes closed rather than open judged immoral...

Corrado Sinigaglia , Laura Sparaci The paper aims at highlighting how our primary understanding of others' actions is rooted in the mirror mechanism. To this end, the anatomical architecture of the mirror neuron system for action will be outlined as well as its role in grasping goals and intentions...

Wouter van den Bos, Eric van Dijk, Michiel Westenberg, Serge A.R.B. Rombouts, Eveline A. Cron Reciprocity of trust is important for social interaction and depends on individual differences in social value orientation (SVO). Here, we examined the neural correlates of reciprocity by manipulating two factors...