Evolutionary Psychology

A reader’s thoughtful comment on artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence / Evolutionary Psychology

A reader’s thoughtful comment on artificial intelligence

A reader wrote a long response to my recent posts on AI. They said they couldn't get the comments section to work, so emailed it to me. After removing identifying parts, I'm sharing the whole thing since it shows some difference in this community, as well as being connected to decision-makers at an AI firm. The part in bold was by me, calling out a governing principle I find people otherwise miss about technology. It's less that it changes culture so much as accelerates it, though does change it somewhat to benefit those with status. Despite using AI, this reader mostly avoids it. I'll add a couple more comments after. Commenting on the AI question [relating to] someone who works somewhat high up at [major…

September 17, 2026

Are humans more rationalizing than rational?

Evolutionary Psychology

Are humans more rationalizing than rational?

I came across the idea that humans are more rationalizing than rational in a book on racism, where plenty of rationalizing happens that those rationalizing probably think is rational. I put it as a question in the title since I don't know how we can quantify them for comparison, but I find the idea compelling that we rationalize more than reason. I hope you don't mind the short post, but I think the title says it all. It's something to think about. I'll probably develop the idea in my philosophy and use it in conversation.

April 25, 2025

We all descend from indigenous people and we’ve all been assimilated

Evolutionary Psychology / Relationships

We all descend from indigenous people and we’ve all been assimilated

In Sustainability Simplified, I clarify that a culture being indigenous doesn't mean it's sustainable. An indigenous Indian group that puts up a casino is pushing addiction. An African politician who finds oil and gets cozy with the global oil industry is too. Any culture that doesn't live sustainably will find itself running out of something, leading it to conflict with others or collapse. But indigenous cultures that endure tend to be sustainable. People praise indigenous cultures with land acknowledgments and such. Well, we all descend from indigenous cultures. Yes, even former colonists and slaveholders can trace their roots to someone indigenous. For that matter, we can probably all trace our roots to someone enslaved. Likewise, everyone who isn't living sustainably has been assimilated, so even…

January 21, 2025

Likely Myth: Food Was Scarce for Our Ancestors Before Agriculture

Early humans preparing food -- depicted in an engraving from "Grands Hommes et Grands Faits de l'Industrie" circa 1880.

Evolutionary Psychology / Fitness / Nature

Likely Myth: Food Was Scarce for Our Ancestors Before Agriculture

Everyone talks about our ancestors like they struggled for food. Many people believe we store fat well because our ancestors didn't know when they'd next eat. Maybe they look at surviving hunting and gathering cultures and see less food than in their local supermarket. Look at nature, though. Animals and plants aren't starving all the time. On the contrary, places that aren't frozen, desert, or that we've paved over abound with life. Why would we think our ancestors would struggle when animals today don't? Animals don't reach old age more because predators eat them, but we're apex predators. Wouldn't it make more evolutionary sense for our ancestors to evolve where food was abundant than scarce? Our ancestors found so much food that they expanded to…

May 15, 2024

Sustainability and mating

Evolutionary Psychology / Fitness / Nature

Sustainability and mating

A friend told me he thought of me and my sustainability leadership work with concern while reading the book The Mating Mind. He described it as describing the implications and effects of sexual selection in evolution. He started with the example of peacocks having elaborate tails. Sexual selection suggests that the tails that make them easy targets for predators indicate all its other genes are fit, so a potential mate attracted to big tails will more likely give birth to healthy children more likely to have more grandchildren. The upshot: animals evolve sexual attraction to some properties that seem maladaptive. There's a lot more detail than I'll go into here. My friend told me one property of traits like peacock's tails across the animal kingdom…

October 12, 2022

How we’re like gorillas with kids

Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

How we’re like gorillas with kids

You know how male gorillas kill babies from other fathers? As written here, "silverbacks have been observed to deliberately kill babies---especially in mountain gorillas. Usually this is the case after a female transferred to another male together with her baby or if a new leading male takes over. This behaviour, called infanticide, is interpreted as a means to shorten the time until the baby's mother becomes fertile again and the new male can sire his own offspring with her."? The behavior made sense in the species' evolutionary past. When they're close to extinction, if a gorilla wants to maximize its chances of its genes surviving, the extra baby from another gorilla may help more, even if he has to wait longer for his chance to…

December 9, 2021

Superman and picking up garbage

Art / Creativity / Events / Evolutionary Psychology

Superman and picking up garbage

As you probably know, I pick up at least a piece of litter every day from the ground and put it in a trash can. I'm not reducing the amount of trash, but at least saving some from reaching the ocean. More importantly, I'm developing skills, experiences, and beliefs about changing culture around trash. Since restaurants and bars started serving outdoors on mostly single-use plastic, the amount of litter has skyrocketed. Every trash can in my neighborhood is filled to overflowing by around noon, spilling into the gutters soon after. People's slightest whim for, say, water instead of waiting an hour, leads to trash that will last centuries. I end up picking up ten or more pieces a day, just pieces in my path that…

July 30, 2020

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Exercises

A catalog of inner monologue thoughts

If you pay attention to your inner monologue, as the exercise I call The Most Effective Self-Awareness Exercise I Know leads you to, you'll notice patterns. Songs get stuck in your head. You judge people. You judge yourself. You try to figure out the best order to do things in. You play out arguments you might have with others. Sound familiar? Years ago I had the idea to catalog the types of thoughts you repeat. Before doing the exercise, I thought we could think about anything. After doing the exercise enough times and hearing how much others' thoughts resembled mine, I concluded we think in patterns, and not as many as we'd think. I suspect the types of patterns emerged through evolution, so most patterns…

May 3, 2017

Education / Entrepreneurship / Evolutionary Psychology / Stories

Cockroaches and equality

A couple weeks ago I was in NYU's "eLab," a space that promotes entrepreneurship. Besides a few administrators who work there, it's mostly students there, mainly connected with tech startups. That morning there weren't many people there. I sat on a couch near the entrance and the staircase downstairs. Twenty or thirty feet away, across the open meeting area to my left, a few students worked on their laptops in the booths. The place was pretty quiet. Morning light poured in the big windows. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement on the floor. A large cockroach creeped slowly across the meeting area---large like a few inches long, between the size of a thumb and the size of a palm. I don't…

September 30, 2015

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Leadership / Models / Nature

Language, communication, evolutionary psychology, and leadership

A client who knows I've applied a lot from evolutionary psychology to leadership and self-awareness wrote: What's your opinion of the theory that language serves primarily as persuasion? In its raw form, I'm currently telling you that you are an authority by asking a question. And that sentence might seem like it's an authoritative statement, but instead it is clarifying my question, which in its clarification is a neediness to be understood on my part, and distancing us even further. Does that make sense? I read the Red Queen and I don't know what to think anymore. Noting that [an entrepreneurial friend of his who is very successful] mentions the book often, I can guess that at some of the theories in the Red Queen…

August 1, 2015

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature / Nonjudgment / Perception

Calling emotions negative is like calling fire or pain negative

People describe anger, depression, and many other emotions as negative or bad, as if they don't want them in their lives. They're useful! They motivate you to change what causes them, generally things in your environments and beliefs. What causes them is conflict between yourself and others, internal conflict, and wanting the world to change, mainly. As long as conflict exists, which is forever since no one shares your interests exactly, you're going to feel those emotions. If you think of them as negative or bad, you're making an inevitable part of life worse for yourself. It's like you're kicking yourself when you're down. People seem to get that pain, although they don't enjoy feeling it, helps their lives. They find the source of the…

March 19, 2015

Evolutionary Psychology / Models / Nature / Perception

Insightful BBC video on mental models, beliefs, and how your mind perceives

If you like my perspective on being human and our place in the world, I recommend watching the videos of James Burke from BBC. They're mostly available on YouTube. I first saw his series Connections and The Day The Universe Changed in the 80s on PBS. I watch them again periodically. His work is some of the few I find I like watching repeats as much as the original. I just found his show from 1980, The Real Thing, which I'd never heard of before. I loved it. It gave an entertaining, scientific, illustrative background to my Model. The video quality is terrible, which I view as a testament to the quality of his work since you still get the full meaning. It's six half-hour…

March 14, 2015

Evolutionary Psychology / Models / Nature / Perception

How different beliefs lead people with identical motivational systems to behave differently

We all have similar emotional systems, so why do we behave so differently? I illustrated below how people who have identical drives and emotional systems with only different beliefs can end up behaving differently yet feeling internally the same. I plan to represent it more graphically and pretty, but this is where I am so far. It shows that internally, we all think and react similarly. Only a slight difference in beliefs can lead to, say fighting in the case of patriotism, even though internally, people feel the same and are following the same emotional system. If you have questions or comments about the table, please let me know. They will help me improve the model, which is only half-baked now. Â Example (internal) Same/different…

February 26, 2015

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature / Nonjudgment

I like judging people

I write a lot about judgment and non-judgmental behavior. I won't lie. I like to judge people. I decide whom I consider valuable or not, whom I think looks good or not, or has taste or social skills and so on. People seem mortified after doing the exercise in "The most effective self-awareness exercise I know of." Seeing their thoughts written out on paper and realize how much they judge themselves and other people fills them with shame, dread, embarrassment, and other feelings they don't like. Telling them that every person who does the exercise finds out the same thing about themselves helps relieve those feelings. Seeing everyone, without fail, find the same result has completely relieved me of those feelings I don't like. It's…

December 12, 2014

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

Why do you freak out when you’re late?

You're stuck in traffic, late for an important meeting. There's nothing you can do. Each tick of the clock reminds you of how bad this will make you look. If the meeting is important enough your palms sweat and your breathing becomes affected. Your mind keeps going around in circles about how to explain your lateness and making up excuses. Have you ever wondered why you react this way? You can't do anything about it, so why the intensity of emotions? You aren't feeling fight-flight-or-freeze. That reaction makes sense in the face of an aggressor, even if in today's world you have to hold yourself back from acting on them. In your ancestors' environments before about ten thousand years ago, without law and police to…

October 9, 2014

What makes an emotion a passion?

Evolutionary Psychology / Models / Nature / Visualization

What makes an emotion a passion?

What's the difference between emotions and passions? In a leadership context I look at emotions functionally, as motivations. In an art or music context, I think more about how emotions feel and how to express them. To distinguish them, I think the functional view helps more. A passion is something that motivates you strongly with strong feelings. In other words, a passion is a strong or intense emotion. A lot of people seem to think of emotions as ethereal or mysterious, which makes them hard to understand. Many also see passions as something they wish they had so they could achieve more, like others do. They feel like the passions they could have unluckily elude them. I think of emotions and passions lying along a…

September 20, 2014

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology

What you’re thinking

This post follows up "The most effective self-awareness exercise I know of" and the exercise in it, so I recommend reading it and doing it first. Besides making these posts personal, the exercise increases your self-awareness. When I talk to a client after doing that exercise, we cover six main points, which I'll cover in detail below. The details of their results---that is, the content of their inner monologue and trends in it Their reaction to becoming aware of those thoughts The liberation of realizing they aren't the only one who thinks that way Clarifying how this part of their mind works How to use what they've learned The incredible value of knowing how this part of the mind works I'll cover them in reverse…

July 14, 2014

How to increase empathy, part 2: a model and strategy

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Leadership / Tips

How to increase empathy, part 2: a model and strategy

Yesterday's post discussed how the world complicates understanding empathy with vague definitions and associating it with neediness and unwanted emotions. Today I'll describe a simple model to understand empathy simply. A simple model for empathy The model you have for something determines how you understand it and how you use it. I'll talk about emotions in general and then empathy in particular A simple model for emotions in general Many people contrast emotions with reason and conclude that emotions are irrational or random. I also used to think so, and that mental model undermined my ability to understand others' emotions and motivations, as well as my own. I've found another model more useful. My series on The Model, explains my model for emotions more deeply,…

July 8, 2014

How to increase empathy, part 1: why it seems so hard to

If you can tell Michael Phelps and his teammate feel happy and triumphant, you have empathy, probably more than you suspect.

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Leadership / Tips / Visualization

How to increase empathy, part 1: why it seems so hard to

You want to improve your empathy because you've heard it's fundamental to leadership, influence, and motivation, but find it hard to define, measure, or see in use, making it hard to improve or learn from others. In other words, empathy is important for working with people, but hard to learn, all the more so for those who lack it most. While I don't pretend to be the most empathetic person, having started with little, I've improved a lot. I can teach you to improve yours. Today let's see how others make it hard. The world makes learning empathy hard when it's not. For example, searching on "What is empathy" returns pages and pages of links but searching on "how to increase empathy" returns fewer than…

July 7, 2014

Evolutionary Psychology / Leadership / Tips

How not to lose your composure: Rational Emotion

Context: Losing your composure hurts you When you lose your composure you don't get promoted. People don't follow you if you lose your composure. You lose your ability to motivate or influence them. If you debate or argue with someone and you lose your composure and they don't---that is, if your emotions become more intense than theirs---you generally lose the argument. People feel emotional reward when someone else's emotions get intense. When you get the other person to lose their composure, you feel a certain reward. If you show intense emotions, you motivate the other person to do again what led your emotions to get intense. Any parent knows this because kids are great at it. It helps to understand why emotions get intense, which…

July 3, 2014

Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

Calling any emotions negative shows you don’t understand emotions

Look at your body in the mirror. Is the human body not a wonder of evolution? Do you see anything extraneous? I don't. It seems efficient. What our species didn't need evolved away. What's left is essential. Take anything away from the human body and our ancestors might not have survived and you might not have been born. Our ancestors had competition from similar species for the same resources, so our particular anatomy is likely best suited to its purpose than anything close. Would you call any part of your body negative or bad? If someone suggested that your hand, because you can clench it into a fist and hit someone with it, was a negative body part you'd probably consider that stupid. The hand…

June 10, 2014

Evolutionary Psychology / Tips

Judging is inevitable. You choose if you communicate it.

Nobody likes feeling judged when they didn't ask for it. We like people to support us. We know others don't like feeling judged either. Yet we all feel like we judge others. When someone walks into a room we judge what they wear, whom they're with, how they act, and so on. When we walk into a room we decide who we consider worth talking to and who doesn't. When we watch presentations we evaluate the person, their ideas, and how they present them. (Sometimes we ask for judgment, but I suggest you'll achieve whatever your goal in asking for judgment better by asking for advice, a la Feedforward.) How do we get around that we don't like feeling judged but we can't help judging?…

May 19, 2014

Evolutionary Psychology / Leadership / Tips

How to Choose

Most of your identity is the culmination of the choices you've made. You choose all day every day. Many people have trouble making big choices, for some choosing is even debilitating. If you do, you're holding yourself back from living your life more fully. I used to dwell on decisions too. In my second year of business school I saw many of my classmates dwelling on choices between different job offers, unable to choose between Goldman and McKinsey. While most of the world would imagine it simple to choose among six-figure offers from prestigious firms, people choose for their reasons, not anyone else's. Still, I saw their self-fabricated conundrums as pathetic and pitiful. They seemed like an emotional version of physical compulsive hoarders---people who save…

March 20, 2014

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Leadership / Nature

The connection between physics and self-awareness and emotions

People often ask me if I use my physics education today. As I see it, whereas physical sciences aim to make the world a materially better place, by studying and sharing what I learn about self-awareness and emotions I aim to make the world an emotionally better place. To me, physics is the study of the most fundamental parts of nature---time, distance, gravity, charge, mass, and so on. It also includes the human side of observing, honestly sharing results, and accepting improvements to past work, which I consider essential parts of science. People study nature for different reasons, some personal, some social. I expect many share my most personal reason---to find more and deeper beauty in nature. That is, something about learning about nature creates…

February 24, 2014

Awareness / Evolutionary Psychology / Nature

Things you never get bored of

Today's post is on awareness--to note something about yourself you may not have noticed. You know how if you listen to a song too much you get bored of it, no matter how much you loved it at first? Or if you spend too much time with someone you need time away from them? I noticed a few things I never get bored of. It's not the biggest insight into humanity ever, but I think it helps you understand yourself better, especially my priorities, which helps me simplify my life and so no to good things to make way for great things. I noticed though I eat nearly the same breakfast every day--oatmeal with fresh fruit and nuts, usually with chia seeds sprinkled in--I never…

February 3, 2014

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