Stuck In a Rut? Here's How to Get Out of It
They got fed up with each other and divorced, confident that they would each find better partners. They found new partners but in the end, no real improvement.She was raised devout Catholic and broke...
View ArticleAmerica is Suffering an Epidemic of 'Dishonest Fake Belief' - Promoted by the...
“The True Believers” is a psychology classic, a study undertaken by Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman moonlighting as a psycho-philosopher shortly after WWII. It profiles the characteristics of an...
View ArticleAmerica’s Patriotic Fervor is an Epidemic Problem -- Supported by the GOP
“The True Believers” is a psychology classic, a study undertaken by Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman moonlighting as a psycho-philosopher shortly after WWII. It profiles the characteristics of an...
View ArticleJerks Can Be Found Wherever There Is Intelligent Life - And We Need to Stop...
Astrobiology, the study of extra-terrestrial life seeks to discover the essential features common to life anywhere in the universe, and especially “intelligent life,” organisms anywhere that can...
View ArticleHow the Right Wing Uses This Psychological Trick to Galvanize Its Base
True righteousness, like true bravery or true love, will cost you. You have to put risky, expensive effort into it or else it’s just lip service. We each have limited effort to expend. How we expend...
View ArticleA Psychologist Explains How to Battle America's Online Epidemic of Right-Wing...
There are lots of things to try in our pressing mission to tool up quickly to disappoint trolls.Overwhelm and overload: Trolls often treat their game as a war of attrition, wearing you down with...
View ArticleDon't Be Afraid to Go Low - And 12 Other New Strategies for Dealing with...
The US is rapidly becoming just another Hypocracy, a state ruled by absolute hypocrites – no self-aggrandizing hypocrisy they won’t perpetuate. Hypocrisy tends to corrupt; absolute hypocrisy corrupts...
View ArticleHas the Republican Party Become a Trump Cult?
Experimental psychologist, John Gottman's Love Lab research demonstrates that in order to sustain a romantic partnership you need five good interactions to offset every bad one. Apparently, we're so...
View ArticleHere Are 16 New Tips for Shaming and Harassing Trump's Goon Squad –...
To state the obvious, this is just another run-of-the-mill, catastrophic trump-card cult, people playing god for self-love and/or money. There’s no GOP anymore. Let's stop calling it that. It's the...
View ArticleThis Isn't a Culture War - But a Patriotic Defense Against All Cults
If you still think this is just a fight between left and right, you’re not keeping up. It hasn’t been for a long time if it ever was. It’s patriotic Americans defending the country against a cult that...
View ArticleRepublicans Can't Tell the Difference Between Honesty and Truth - And They're...
Honesty: Expressing your feelings and opinions accurately.Truth: Accurate representation of reality.How could we have ended up with most Republicans celebrating a president who “speaks his mind and...
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Here's How the Hallucinogen Ayahuasca Taught Me a Valuable, Old-School...
Ayahuasca, a Peruvian hallucinogen, is on people’s minds these days, in part with Michael Pollan’s best-selling book How to Change Your Mind.1 I’d been meaning to try it and my opportunity came up...
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Troll Model: Trump Takeaways For the Hard Art of Naming and Taming Total Jerks
Watch him go, this psychopathic, gaslighting, brat, preening, pious-posing, egomaniac idiot of a president. Some of us watch in awe, plenty of us in disgust.He can’t be cornered. Never backing down;...
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Here's why Trump is a great gift to America
Assuming he goes down in flames before he causes us to; assuming that what’s left of our democracy ends him before he ends what’s left of our democracy, Trump will have been the best thing that ever...
View ArticleHere's how some people become just awful
It starts simply enough, people doing what any and all of us do. We’re cruising along and something gets in our way. So we sidestep it. If we can’t, we brush it aside. If we can’t, we shove it aside...
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Here is the psychological condition that best explains Trump's twisted worldview
Trump’s ghostwriter put these words in the president’s mouth: "Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game."I believe it about the...
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Here's how to feel better about the mess you’re in
You wake up most mornings wondering whether you took a wrong turn somewhere back. You expected a smoother path than this.You get up and on with your day, the difficult people you ended up stuck with,...
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Frustrated by politics? Try your hand at psycho-proctology
Everyone has a project. For about 20 years, mine has been mission to find an objective definition of total jerks. See, I believe that in a free society you don’t get to tell people how to live but you...
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The biggest blind spot in Psychology we all ignore
Every engineering advance of the past 400 years is the product of a brilliant breakthrough modeling method. Not the scientific method’s guess and test process—no, something more practical. Call it...
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Why Trump uses this psychological trick to appeal to his followers — and the...
We spent the Obama administration’s first months monitoring attempts to cap the source of BP’s toxic oil spill. We have spent all of Trump’s administration trying to cap the source of his toxic spill....
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Conspicuous presumption: Blatant hypocrisy isn’t just a moral outrage — it’s...
The king has everything; the peasants have nothing. He eats 15 course meals while the peasants starve. Rebels yell and the king laughs, ignoring or suppressing them effortlessly.Mitch McConnell...
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How to take down a cult leader
Do you focus on shaming them for the damage they’re doing? Do you try to expose their lies and hypocrisies? Do you remind them of our common values? Do you try to prevail with your values? Do you try...
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History shows Trump’s house of cards will eventually fall — and reality...
Trump has overlearned one life lesson: Impulse trumps deliberation. There have been gaps in its success but overall, it has worked beautifully. His impulsivity now reliably outwits any wit.He just...
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How to beat a trumpbot
Throughout history people have fallen for an easy way out of life’s complications by just pretending that they can do no wrong. Moment to moment, challenge to challenge they find trumped-up...
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The re-emergence of totalitarianism -- and why some extremists prevail
“News” means two things, what’s happening and what’s surprising. In information theory, it means surprise. It’s not news that you still have air to breathe or that millions live in poverty. More of...
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The rhetorical trick most likely to cause our species’ extinction
For all the invective we throw and recycle at the MAGA cult, we have yet to put a finger on, let alone driven a stake through that cult’s mindless, heartlessness. Our invective is at most therapeutic...
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If Trump wins, all of our past war victories are reversed
The Right has mastered preemptive wolf-crying. Calling Obama Hitler got us up in arms about hyperbole, which opened the way for right to shift us toward Nazism with us reluctant to call it by its...
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The founders tried to guard against con artist tyrants — but our democratic...
Our founding fathers were of an era when slavery and colonization were a direct extension of the "t'was ever thus" of history. To fault them for their failures to live by our current standards (by...
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The GOP's sociopaths are still winning — but we can outsmart them
The culture war is not fundamentally between left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and intolerant.Fundamentally it has nothing to do with ideals, values or...
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One privileged white dude's awakening to fascism's racist and misogynist subtext
It's the patriarchy, stupid.I'm not a fan of kitchen sink political strategy. Just throwing every issue out unprioritized dilutes us. It feeds the right’s caricature of us as chicken littles running...
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