Quotes from Robert M. Sapolsky

But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

If you care about your longevity and health, be a socially affiliated baboon who is better than high-ranking ones at walking away from provocations.

It's probably even the case that if you stoked up some Buddhist monks with tons of testosterone, they'd become wildly competitive as to who can do the most acts of random kindness.

Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.

We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.

This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding—social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.

In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.

Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence in each of belief in the existence of a heaven and hell. The greater the skew toward belief in hell, rather than heaven, the lower the national crime rate. When it comes to Eternity, sticks apparently work better than carrots.

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That's not generic prosociality. That's ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.

Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.

It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.

In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.

Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill. And unconscious priming with words influences pro- and antisocial behaviors.

Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45

Irrational optimism can be great; it's why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.

Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.

The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

As adults, these kids are mostly what you'd expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis.

testosterone's actions are contingent and amplifying, exacerbating preexisting tendencies toward aggression rather than creating aggression out of thin air.

If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression—the insular cortex processes gustatory disgust. Ditto for disgusting smells.

Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.

There's also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We're more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.

call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite. Similarly