How to Hack Your Brain. Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things. /Illustrations by Adam Cole/NPR Editor's note on Feb. 14, 2018: Please scroll to the end of this story to see a corrections note. Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the subprime mortgage crisis. Over the past decade or so, news stories about unethical behavior have been a regular feature on TV, a long, discouraging parade of misdeeds marching across our screens.
And in the face of these scandals, psychologists and economists have been slowly reworking how they think about the cause of unethical behavior. In general, when we think about bad behavior, we think about it being tied to character: Bad people do bad things. But that model, researchers say, is profoundly inadequate. Which brings us to the story of Toby Groves.
Chapter 1: The Promise Groves grew up on a farm in Ohio. "I can picture this," he recalls. Toby says his father simply thrust a newspaper at him. Toby's brother was almost 20 years older than Toby and worked at a local bank. Now for Toby, this was an easy promise to make. Why? What is the Monkeysphere? "There's that word again... " The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150. Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away. And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern.
It's the way our brains are built. Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? I mean, they're not people. "So? Oh, not much. They're all humans and they are all equally dead. "Why should I feel bad for them? Exactly. They'd think you'd gone insane. Sort of. 47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself. I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People.
As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 things is going to be pretty random. So the fact that this first one is first doesn’t mean that’s it’s the most important.. just that it came to mind first. Dr. Susan Weinschenk is the author of Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? And 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. Binaural audio and brainwave entrainment for the psychedelic mind.