Explore "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity. That, at least, is the view long held by many social scientists who accepted the idea that Homo sapiens is really Homo economicus.1 “Economic man” is a simple creature who makes all of life’s choices like a shopper in a supermarket with plenty of time to compare jars of applesauce. If that’s your view of human nature, then it’s easy to create mathematical models of behavior because there’s really just one principle at work: self-interest. People do whatever gets them the most benefit for the lowest cost.
1 E.g., Luce and Raiffa 1957.