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What Use Far Truth?

Consider two facts: People with religious beliefs, and associated behavior, consistently tend to have better lives. It seems that religious folks tend to be happier, live longer, smoke less, exercise...

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Far Truth Is For Extremes

To answer the question posed in my last post, here are some situations where it makes sense to forgo the large benefits of things like religion, to care about far truth: You are stuck in your ways,...

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Eventual Futures

I’ve noticed that recommendations for action based on a vision of the future are based on an idea that something must “eventually” occur. For example, eventually: We will run out of coal, so we’d...

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Responsibility and Clicking

Sometimes when people hear obvious arguments regarding emotive topics, they just tentatively accept the conclusion instead of defending against it until they find some half satisfactory reason to...

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Robot ethics returns

People are often interested in robot ethics. I have argued before that this is strange. I offered two potential explanations: Ethics seems deep and human, so it’s engagingly eerie to combine it with...

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Far Mode Overly Praised

Roughly speaking, in near mode we focus practically on acting in our local situation, while in far mode we talk about how people in general should act in more ideal socially approved ways. So while we...

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We Add Near, Average Far

Quick, what is the best gift you ever got from a woman? From your parents? From a left-handed person? From a teacher? These aren’t easy questions to answer. But they seem easier than these questions:...

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Paternalism can be kind, just not to present-you

You may want to file this under ‘incredibly obvious’, but I haven’t seen it noted elsewhere. Liberals and libertarians have an instinctive aversion to paternalism. Their key objection is: how can...

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Silly Mayans

In my morning paper, today’s possible apocalypse was mentioned in five comics, but no where else. I’ve heard many mention the issue of the last few weeks, but mostly mocking it; none seem remotely...

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Death Is Very Sad

Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a simple but heart-breaking story of a dying man. In this passage, Ivan finds it very hard to translate his far outside view about his death to a near inside view:...

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Middle-Age Is Near

Tali Sharot says we are optimistic because we under-respond to bad news, an effect weakest for the middle-aged, explaining why they are more pessimistic: People of all age groups changed their beliefs...

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Social Norms Are Far

We see social norms as more relevant when predicting the average behavior of a group, relative to predicting an individual’s behavior: In judgments of morally relevant behaviors, forecasters estimated...

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Beware Far Values

In the last four years I’ve posted often on construal level theory. First discovered in the context of how differently people think about the distant future, construal level theory says that people...

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What About The Future Matters?

The future of 2050 might be different in many ways if, for example, climate change were mitigated, abortion laws relaxed, marijuana legalized, or the power of different religious groups changed. Which...

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Rich Is Far

[We hypothesized that] reminders of (a great deal of) money facilitate global, abstract mental construals … [while] reminders of expenditure or a little money should trigger more concrete mental...

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The Poor Wore Color

A year ago I posted on how ancient buildings are usually depicted as colorless, even though they were brightly colored, and suggested this is because we think about the distant past in far mode. I’ve...

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Individualism Is Far

Four studies show that an independent self-view is associated with abstract representations of future events and with perceiving these events as happening in the more distant future, whereas an...

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Whistleblowers Think Far

Rita Handrich: The “highly conscientious” … are more likely to work hard to achieve their goals [both personally and on behalf of their organization] and often have organizational abilities that help...

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Adam Ford Interview

Late on a freezing grey afternoon last December, Adam Ford filmed me outside in front of Oxford’s Christ’s Church, me all bundled up a coat, scarf, and cap. Youtube says Ford has 506 videos (and more...

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Boss Hypocrisy

In our culture, we are supposed to resent and dislike bosses. Bosses get paid too much, are mad with power, seek profits over people, etc. In fiction, we are mainly willing to see bosses as good when...

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