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This chapter reviews the literature on genocide to define it, asks what scholars already know about it, and provides a context within which the stories that constitute the heart of the data section of this volume can be analyzed. While the Holocaust and World War II is often considered as so horrific that they become unique, the chapter argues that is not the case. Moreover, it remains conscious of the extent to which understanding the human psychology surrounding the Holocaust can lend insight into a far wider range of related, important, and ongoing political behaviors that emanate in forces deep-seated within the human psyche: prejudice; discrimination; ethnic, sectarian, religious hatred and violence.

Social institutions are the laws, informal rules, and conventions that give durable structure to social interactions within a population. Such institutions are typically not designed consciously, are heritable at the population level, are frequently but not always group beneficial, and are often symbolically marked. Conceptualizing social institutions as one of multiple possible stable cultural equilibrium allows a straightforward explanation of their properties. The evolution of institutions is partly driven by both the deliberate and intuitive decisions of individuals and collectivities. The innate components of human psychology coevolved in response to a culturally evolved, institutional environment and reflect a prosocial tendency of choices we make about institutional forms.

The specific circumstances in which an individual encounters their mate options may influence how she chooses and, ultimately, whom she chooses. In particular, the choice environment may affect the cues we pay attention to, how we combine them and, ultimately (and significantly), our reproductive fate. This chapter consolidates the current state of knowledge regarding choice environment effects on mating behavior. This chapter's thesis is that human mate choice is adapted to the choice environment in which it is made: We are sensitive to changes in the environment and adapt our judgments and choice strategies accordingly, thereby exhibiting ecological and social rationality—the topic of this volume. This chapter promotes the view that mating-related judgment and choice depend very much on the environmental conditions facing the chooser, while also being shaped by the past recurring conditions in which these behaviors evolved. To substantiate this perspective, the chapter describes anthropological, sociological, and psychological research showing that human mating-related judgments and choice are context-sensitive in meaningful ways. In particular, the chapter shows how the cues and strategies used in mate choice are influenced by environmental structure, considered first at the population level and second at the level of individual choosers. The chapter concludes by focusing in on one important aspect of the mate choice environment in specific modern settings and its impact on heuristic and cue use: the number of potential mates available.

The concluding chapter of A New Narrative for Psychology, reflects on the place of the narrative perspective in the discipline as a whole. It argues that although the methods of narrative psychology may not be wholly distinct from qualitative or mixed methods, the narrative perspective does present an integrated, theoretical, and methodological approach to the study of human meaning making and is specially suited, distinctly credible, to this pursuit. The chapter addresses the growing debate on unity in psychology in which some scholars have proposed unifying psychology through overarching theoretical structures or by imposing methodological discipline. By virtue of the way that narrative can deal with complexity, it can be a productive force for a more synthetic view of human psychology. In this regard, a narrative perspective can provide insight into human experience in a way that no other perspective can.

This chapter analyzes human self-conscious psychology from the perspective of development. Human psychology is ontologically self-conscious, with an exacerbated care for reputation at its core. This psychology defines us as a species and becomes explicit by the end of the second year, with the expression of self-conscious emotions such as shame or pride. From this point on, children not only demonstrate evidence of recognizing themselves in a mirror, but they also show apparent emotional weariness and self-consciousness. As a human trademark, mirror self-experience changes status, becoming construed in reference to the evaluative gaze of others. Human self-conscious psychology cannot be thought of independently of the particular evolution of childhood, an evolution that led toward a prolonged immaturity and the incomparably protracted social dependence of the human young. As a by-product of this evolution, the gaze of others gained unique power as a social signal: the power to assess and reflect self-worth. This evolution also led us to become the shameful and guilt-prone species we are, always under the spell of the evaluative gaze of others.

This chapter examines the role of history and the family in debates over human sociability and the foundations of politics, drawing attention to how David Hume was able to revolutionize the use of state-of-nature conjectures in order to elucidate the emergence of institutional structures and related moral values. According to Thomas Hobbes, human psychology was fundamentally characterized by the balancing of appetites and aversions: all motivation could be explained in terms of the seeking of private pleasure and the avoidance of private pain. Bernard Mandeville essentially followed Hobbes, refusing to give any role to fellow feeling in explaining human sociability. The chapter first considers Hume's rejection of Hobbes's and Mandeville's reductive accounts of human psychology before discussing Hobbes's views on the question of the family and his notion of the state of nature. It also analyzes the debate involving Hobbes's British successors, namely: Mandeville, Anthony Ashley Cooper, and Francis Hutcheson.

This chapter explores how morality can be rational if moral intuitions are resistant to rational reflection. There are two parts to this question. The normative problem is whether there is a model of moral justification which can show that morality is a rational enterprise given the facts of moral dumbfounding. Appealing to the model of reflective equilibrium for the rational justification of moral intuitions solves this problem. Reflective equilibrium views the rational justification of morality as a back-and-forth balancing between moral theory and moral intuition, and therefore does not require that individual moral intuitions be directly responsive to rational reflection. The psychological problem is whether human psychology actually implements the processes required for reflective equilibrium. The psychological problem is far more difficult, and requires appealing to a dual-process view of moral judgement that regards moral intuitions and moral theories as belonging to different mental systems.

This chapter assesses how the comprehensiveness of the halakhic process is further evident in the numerous instances in which laws are formulated on the basis of human psychology — of how human beings normally respond, rationally and emotionally, in given circumstances. There is an abundance of material on this topic, especially in the Babylonian Talmud. It must be appreciated, however, that a good deal of the Talmud is purely theoretical. In the majority of instances, the psychological motivation suggested in the Talmud is not the starting-point of the legal formulation, rather, it is an explanation by the amoraim of a law that has long been established. However, as this type of explanation becomes part of the halakhic process, one can still see it as evidence of halakhic comprehensiveness. There are so many instances of this phenomenon in the Talmud that a separate volume would be required to treat them all adequately. The chapter therefore presents just some of these instances, taken more or less at random. These instances include the disqualification of certain types of witness; the validity of a betrothal; and the doctrine of diminished responsibility.

This chapter argues for making representational commitments in metareasoning systems in a principled manner, that is, through the development of anthropomorphic self-models. Integrated, broad-coverage, reusable self-models for metareasoning can be developed by formalizing the commonsense theories that people have about their own human psychology.

This chapter presents the author's view of psychology in Homer. It begins by suggesting that the Odyssey is particularly interested in a central psychological issue — agency — and that it demands that its audience consider issues of agency and responsibility throughout its plot. The chapter then distinguishes the author's view of Homeric psychology from prior treatments among Homerists by introducing concepts from Jerome Bruner and Mark Turner (among others), who have written about connections between narrative and literature, on the one hand, and human psychology, on the other. These two authors conceptualize some generalizable concepts — Bruner's “folk psychology” and Turner's “everyday mind” — which provide frameworks for thinking of the Odyssey as therapeutic on a social level, especially in the context of repeated performances. In pursuing this last framework, the chapter starts by teasing out some common threads that help to support the Odyssey as an investigation of human minds before addressing the issue of the engagement between the epic and collective mentalities.

This chapter summarizes the main results of the study. It highlights some key factors that explain the success of attachment theory in the face of substantial criticism, and reflects on what the present historical analysis says about its value. Since attachment theorists have often used historical reconstruction to legitimize their science, a reinterpretation of that history must bear on the status of the theory. It is argued that over the course of a few decades, attachment theorists failed to address some of the basic challenges their critics raised. It cites the need to clarify the relations among behaviors, emotions, and instincts and the questionable uses of animal models in human psychology.

This chapter discusses how the Holocaust is a prime example of dehumanization. Indeed, the dehumanization of Jews was a central component of the Nazi program. And to date it represents the most explicit and thoroughly documented example of the dehumanization of a whole people. Much of what we can learn from the Holocaust can be applied to other cases of dehumanization too, because dehumanization always conforms to more or less the same pattern. Of course, there are individual variations, as each incident of dehumanization must be understood against the background of different historical and cultural contexts, and in response to different political forces. But these differences make their striking similarities all the more significant, suggesting that dehumanizing states of mind are grounded in some very general features of human psychology. The chapter shows how easy it is to slip into thinking of others as less than human in part because of how the human mind is configured.

Paul Tillich’s death In 1965 marks a turning point in May’s life, one in which he mourned his mentor but also declared his freedom from Tillich’s watchful influence. As the war in Vietnam heats up, May becomes active in various professional groups seeking an end to the war. He also found himself drawing closer to colleagues in California. A key moment in his public visibility came with being featured as a prophet in the newly created monthly, Psychology Today.

This chapter describes how Welty’s career was based on the dark recesses of human psychology, evidenced by a steady stream of fictional works that made this its main subject. A student of the perverse, the cruel, and the brutal, and a champion of the heroic, the beautiful, and the elegiac, Welty had mounted an assault on the systematic cultivation of women’s ignorance about the world, desire, men, and themselves. Andre Breton saw this assault as part of the revolution of consciousness when he first leveled the institutions of bourgeois life in the “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Like the fantasist in “A Memory,” Welty used her fiction to enter a “dual life, as observer and dreamer,” and her conviction insisting on the permeability of consciousness produced a body of work that shows a profoundly surrealist sensibility at work.