Empa­thy, com­pas­sion and grat­i­tude — these traits don’t usu­al­ly spring to mind when you think about Dar­win­ism and nat­ur­al selec­tion. No, your mind more imme­di­ate­ly drifts toward anti-social char­ac­ter­is­tics like com­pe­ti­tion, sur­vival of the fittest, and self­ish­ness (as in the “self­ish gene”). But above, on the first day of 2015, UC Berke­ley psy­chol­o­gist Dacher Kelt­ner reminds us that evo­lu­tion can bring out the best in us, and Dar­win rec­og­nized that. As Dar­win wrote in The Descent of Man, the strength­en­ing of our capac­i­ty for “sym­pa­thy” played a cen­tral role in human evo­lu­tion:

With mankind, self­ish­ness, expe­ri­ence, and imi­ta­tion, prob­a­bly add .… to the pow­er of sym­pa­thy; for we are led by the hope of receiv­ing good in return to per­form acts of sym­pa­thet­ic kind­ness to oth­ers; and sym­pa­thy is much strength­ened by habit. In how­ev­er com­plex a man­ner this feel­ing may have orig­i­nat­ed, as it is one of high impor­tance to all those ani­mals which aid and defend one anoth­er, it will have been increased through nat­ur­al selec­tion; for those com­mu­ni­ties, which includ­ed the great­est num­ber of the most sym­pa­thet­ic mem­bers, would flour­ish best, and rear the great­est num­ber of off­spring.

That’s not to say that we don’t have a dual nature — a capac­i­ty for being unsym­pa­thet­ic, self­ish, pow­er hun­gry. That’s some­thing Kelt­ner stud­ies too, and, indeed a while back, we told you about his stud­ies show­ing that the wealthy tend to be less sym­pa­thet­ic and giv­ing than the poor. You can find cours­es taught by Kelt­ner on Human Emo­tion and Human Hap­pi­ness in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Devour

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I often say that, if you want to vast­ly over­es­ti­mate your own capa­bil­i­ties, you need only do one of two things: (a) get coked out of your mind, or (b) get behind the wheel of a car. But what if the prob­lem runs deep­er in human­i­ty than that? Indeed, what if our inabil­i­ty to per­ceive our own incom­pe­tence exact­ly match­es the degree of the incom­pe­tence itself? Now, none of us can do every­thing well, but we’ve all met peo­ple who, even well out­side of the con­texts of drugs or dri­ving, sim­ply can­not grasp the full extent of how much they can’t do well. “The prob­lem with peo­ple like this is that they are so stu­pid,” explains Mon­ty Python’s John Cleese in the clip above, “they have no idea how stu­pid they are.”

“In order to know how good you are at some­thing requires exact­ly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place,” Cleese elab­o­rates, “which means — and this is ter­ri­bly fun­ny — that if you are absolute­ly no good at some­thing at all, then you lack exact­ly the skills you need to know that you are absolute­ly no good at it.” With that, he gives us an extreme­ly brief intro­duc­tion to the Dunning–Kruger effect, “a cog­ni­tive bias where­in unskilled indi­vid­u­als suf­fer from illu­so­ry supe­ri­or­i­ty, mis­tak­en­ly rat­ing their abil­i­ty much high­er than is accu­rate” owing to “a metacog­ni­tive inabil­i­ty of the unskilled to rec­og­nize their inep­ti­tude” (and, by the same token, of “high­ly skilled indi­vid­u­als to under­es­ti­mate their rel­a­tive com­pe­tence, erro­neous­ly assum­ing that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for oth­ers”).

The effect takes its name from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty researchers Justin Kruger and David Dun­ning, the lat­ter of whom Cleese, who has spent time at Cor­nell as a long-term vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor (where he has, among oth­er projects, tak­en part in a talk about cre­ativ­i­ty, group dynam­ics and celebri­ty), counts as a friend. He orig­i­nal­ly invoked Dun­ning and Kruger’s “won­der­ful bit of research” in the video “John Cleese Con­sid­ers Your Futile Com­ments,” where he talks back to YouTube com­menters on Mon­ty Python videos — in this case, those who men­tioned the names of cer­tain polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors beneath the 1970 sketch “Upper­class Twit of the Year.” “This explains not just Hol­ly­wood,” Cleese con­cludes, “but almost the entire­ty of Fox News.”

Those of you inter­est­ed in both cog­ni­tive phe­nom­e­na and con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures will sure­ly have seen Gates of Heav­en and A Brief His­to­ry of Time doc­u­men­tar­i­an Errol Mor­ris’ most recent film The Unknown Known, a long-form con­ver­sa­tion with for­mer U.S. Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld. In the years before its release, Mor­ris wrote a five-part series for the New York Times called “The Anosog­nosic’s Dilem­ma,” fueled not just by his fas­ci­na­tion with Rums­feld but with his near-obses­sion over the Dun­ning-Kruger effect. In it, he actu­al­ly inter­views Dun­ning him­self, who sum­ma­rizes the issue thus: “We’re not very good at know­ing what we don’t know.”

Dun­ning even brings up the sub­ject of Rums­feld first, specif­i­cal­ly about his speech on “unknown unknowns” that gave Mor­ris’ movie its title. It goes some­thing like this: ‘There are things we know we know about ter­ror­ism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.’ He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, ‘That’s the smartest and most mod­est thing I’ve heard in a year.’ ” When Mor­ris fol­lowed up, Dun­ning added that “the notion of unknown unknowns real­ly does res­onate with me, and per­haps the idea would res­onate with oth­er peo­ple if they knew that it orig­i­nal­ly came from the world of design and engi­neer­ing rather than Rums­feld.” Or maybe they could asso­ciate it with the Min­istry of Sil­ly Walks instead.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese Explains the Brain — and the Plea­sures of DirecTV

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

Jorge Luis Borges: “Soc­cer is Pop­u­lar Because Stu­pid­i­ty is Pop­u­lar”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

We’ve all heard the old philo­soph­i­cal sce­nario known as the trol­ley prob­lem: as the run­away vehi­cle of the name careens out of con­trol toward the edge of a cliff, you must choose whether to pull the lever to switch it to anoth­er track. The catch: while the trol­ley would then no longer plunge off that cliff, bring­ing about the cer­tain deaths of the five peo­ple aboard, it would instead kill some­one stand­ing on the oth­er track, who will sur­vive if you don’t pull the lever. In a more fraught ver­sion of the prob­lem, you must choose not whether to pull a lever, but whether to shove a per­son of con­sid­er­able bulk onto the (sin­gle) track, stop­ping the trol­ley but killing the bulky indi­vid­ual.

In the Big Think video above, Oxford psy­chol­o­gist Kevin Dut­ton, author of The Wis­dom of Psy­chopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Ser­i­al Killers Can Teach Us About Suc­cess, uses the trol­ley prob­lem to illu­mi­nate the con­di­tion of psy­chopa­thy. While non-psy­chopaths may dither about the first ver­sion of the sce­nario, they even­tu­al­ly come to the con­clu­sion that they pre­fer one death to five. They have much more of a strug­gle with the sec­ond ver­sion, which requires them to actu­al­ly push the lone stranger to head off those five deaths. Psy­chopaths, by con­trast, expe­ri­ence no such dif­fi­cul­ty: the trol­ley prob­lem, for them, hard­ly amounts to a prob­lem at all, and Dut­ton explains, neu­ro­sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, why: “Imag­ine that I were to hook you up to a brain scan­ner and present you with those two dilem­mas. I would see the emo­tion cen­ter of your brain, your amyg­dala and relat­ed brain cir­cuits, the medi­al orbital frontal cor­tex for exam­ple, light up like a pin­ball machine.”

And if he’d scanned a psy­chopath? “Pre­cise­ly noth­ing.” All this assumes, of course, that you do not your­self suf­fer from psy­chopa­thy. If you don’t know whether you do, Dut­ton offers a handy mul­ti­ple-choice “psy­chopath chal­lenge” on his site that can give you an idea of the direc­tion your brain may lean. If you’ve got a touch of the old psy­chopa­thy, don’t lock your­self away; as Dut­ton explains in this Time inter­view, “you don’t need to be vio­lent,” and you can even attain greater suc­cess in cer­tain fields than non-psy­cho­pathics — espe­cial­ly if you con­sid­er vig­i­lant­ly and unhesi­tat­ing­ly min­i­miz­ing the death tolls at divert­ed cliff­side trol­ley tracks a field.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This is Your Brain on Sex and Reli­gion: Exper­i­ments in Neu­ro­science

What Hap­pens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitch­cock: The Neu­ro­science of Film

The Dalai Lama on the Neu­ro­science of Com­pas­sion

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Nov­el­ist, edu­ca­tor, and vlog­ger John Green has drawn a lot of press late­ly, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to a New York­er pro­file by Mar­garet Tal­bot, in the wake of the film ver­sion of his pop­u­lar young-adult nov­el The Fault in Our Stars. But we here at Open Cul­ture can say we fea­tured him before that mag­a­zine of cul­tur­al record did: in 2012 we post­ed his Crash Course in World His­to­ry, and last Octo­ber, his Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture. If you keep up with this site, you prob­a­bly know Green less as a com­ing-of-age-tragedy-writ­ing “teen whis­per­er” (in the words of the New York­er) than as the mile-a-minute, con­stant­ly wise­crack­ing, but nev­er­the­less whole­some teacher you nev­er had. You may not know that he has an equal­ly edu­ca­tion­al broth­er named Hank, who first came to inter­net promi­nence in a back-and-forth video series of John’s devis­ing called Vlog­broth­ers, which Tal­bot describes as “less a con­ver­sa­tion than an extend­ed form of par­al­lel play.”

Now you can find Hank, pos­sessed of a sim­i­lar­ly fast and fun­ny deliv­ery style, pre­pared to inform you on a whole range of oth­er sub­jects, teach­ing crash cours­es just like John does. At the top of the post, we have his 30-part Crash Course in Psy­chol­o­gy, in which he cov­ers every­thing about the study of the human mind from sen­sa­tion and per­cep­tion to the the­o­ry of the homuncu­lus to remem­ber­ing and for­get­ting to lan­guage to depres­sion. (You can watch the series from start to fin­ish above.) Psy­chol­o­gy has long ranked among the most pop­u­lar under­grad­u­ate majors in Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties, and giv­en human­i­ty’s ever-increas­ing curios­i­ty (and grad­u­al­ly accu­mu­lat­ing knowl­edge) about the work­ings of its brains, that should­n’t come as a sur­prise. But those of us who felt com­pelled to pick a more “prac­ti­cal” course of study back in col­lege, can now turn to Hank Green, who offers us a sur­pris­ing­ly thor­ough psy­cho­log­i­cal ground­ing with only about five hours of “lec­tur­ing” — much less than the major would have tak­en us, and with many more corny jokes. Per­haps the course will help you under­stand why we laugh at them any­way.

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture: Watch John Green’s Fun Intro­duc­tions to Gats­by, Catch­er in the Rye & Oth­er Clas­sics

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.