Insight by Psychology

Increasing physical or psychological distance—via artillery, remote weapons, or dehumanizing rhetoric—makes mass violence easier because it removes direct confrontation and the moral resistance that face-to-face contact normally triggers.

Explainable AI often needs explanations that convince people because humans build trust via plausible, comprehensible narratives, so a convincing story can be more effective than a perfectly literal account of internal processes.

Social fitness is a practice because relationships weaken without ongoing attention, so regular routines (calls, shared activities, check‑ins) are needed to preserve bonds that regulate stress and well‑being.

Researchers systematically overestimate between‑subject manipulation strength because they mentally simulate both conditions (a within‑subject perspective), which makes effects feel larger than they appear to participants who experience only one condition.

Your capacity for wholeheartedness is limited by how much heartbreak you're willing to endure, because wholehearted engagement requires vulnerability that exposes you to loss and pain.

Country of birth explains large global income differences because national institutions, economic conditions, and resource distribution shape the opportunities available from childhood, materially raising expected lifetime earnings for those born in wealthier countries.

Dehumanization plus unchecked power enables extreme cruelty because turning people into 'non‑people' collapses emotional barriers to harm, and concentrated power with social conformity removes accountability for atrocities.

We downplay luck's role in our success because fortunate events are external and unearned, so they don't register as things we did and therefore get omitted from our explanations for outcomes.