Quotes from Paul Bloom

It turns out that for experienced happiness, money matters only up to an annual income of about $75,000. (This study was done in 2010, so we might adjust that to $89,000 for inflation.) Apparently, the day-to-day experiences of a well-off person and a very rich person aren't that different,

This point is worth emphasizing, since there seems to be an urban legend that money, at least past a certain point, doesn't make much of a difference in the quality of your life or even makes you miserable. This just isn't so.

In a similar study, people were asked to write about a past event that made them feel "most guilty," and then were asked to manipulate a shock machine to either increase or decrease a set amount of shock they were receiving. Again the guilty group gave themselves more shock than a control group, and the stronger the shock they gave, the more their guilt went away.

Dimitris Xygalatas finds that those who engage in high-pain rituals become more loving to their group and more generous as a result. And the more pain they experience, the more group-oriented they get. Importantly, this growing attachment to the group holds true not only for the participants themselves but also for those who watch their performance, who watch them on the long trek up the hill. These observers report feeling vicarious pain, and this brings them closer to their community.

Closer to the Pallotta case, they also found that subjects judged someone more harshly for running a charity for profit than for running a corporation for profit.

Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that when we think about our overall lives, we tend to compare ourselves with others—and when it comes to social comparison, the sky is the limit.

We scream when we are in pain. But, weirdly, we also scream for the opposite of pain—intense pleasure, joyous surprise, great excitement. Have you seen the videos of fangirls in the sixties in the presence of the Beatles? They positively shriek. Crying is also triggered by opposites. You might cry on the worst day of your life and on the best. Weddings and funerals; the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

In experimental work, people tend to contribute more to a charity when they expect to endure pain and suffering for that cause—the so-called martyrdom effect.

It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain.

benign masochism refers to the choice to pursue activities that are normally painful or unpleasant but not harmful.

Steven Pinker has argued that just as a high level of self-control benefits individuals, cultural values that prize self-control are good for a society. Europe, he writes, witnessed a thirtyfold drop in its homicide rate between the medieval and modern periods, and this, he argues, had much to do with the change from a culture of honor to a culture of dignity, which prizes restraint.

If you ask one group of people whether they will participate in a charity that involves a five-mile run (grueling) and a second group whether they will participate if the event involves a picnic (pleasant), the people in the first group are more likely to agree.

Once again, none of this is to deny the importance of traits such as compassion and kindness. We want to nurture these traits in our children and work to establish a culture that prizes and rewards them. But they are not enough. To make the world a better place, we would also want to bless people with more smarts and more self-control. These are central to leading a successful and happy life—and a good and moral one.

Seeing the world through the eyes of others is essential to many acts of kindness. For me to respond to your worries and alleviate your fears, I need to understand your thoughts, even if I don't share them. (I might soothe a child who is terrified of a small dog, even if I'm not frightened in the slightest.)

Our altruism and kindness are grounded in the capacity to imagine the world as others see it. But so is our cruelty and manipulation. Another name for this capacity to suss out the minds of others is "Machiavellian intelligence," and the name captures the dark side of this power.

Winston Churchill: "Si no eres un liberal a los veinte, es que no tienes corazón; si no eres conservador a los cuarenta, no tienes cerebro".

But I also think that, as David Hume put it, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And this is truly an extraordinary claim.

How we respond to boredom matters: blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals. Empty maladaptive responses, such as self-inflicted electric shocks in the lab, compulsive social media use, or full-scale gambling and drug use, may work to temporarily alleviate boredom, but at what cost?

trials they were asked, "How happy are you right now?" The main predictor of reported short-term happiness wasn't how much the subjects were making; it was how much they were making relative to their expectations. Momentary pleasure and pain are, at least in part, relative experiences.

Smith organizes her own book, The Power of Meaning, around four themes that show up in this summary: Belonging: connecting to and bonding with other people Purpose: finding something worthwhile Storytelling: narratives that bring order to life Transcendence: mystical experiences of self-loss

Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for.

life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens... Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, 'Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.' This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Or consider why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science." It's a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the "gay science" of music and poetry: "Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.