Child Marriage Should Be Legal - 989 Words

For many of these girls in India, being married before the age of eighteen has become and reality for these girls. Marriage should be an happy, joyful, and an enjoyable celebration of love for two people who are in love, but for most girls in India and other country this has become and nightmare that they can t wake up from. For these young girls they are forced into getting married before they even hit puberty. A child should be able to finish school and become and independent person, but in India that is not the lives that of some of these young girls live. When a child learns how to be independent that helps them go further in life instead of depend on a man and anyone they encounter in their life. Child marriage have cause segregation from family and friends, limiting the child s interactions with the community and peers, and lack of opportunities for education. Child Marriage have been declining in India, but it is still an huge problem that many of these young girls are fac ing, and according to UNICEF,â€Å"child marriage is a violation of child rights, and has a negative impact on physical growth, health, mental and emotional development, and education opportunities...It also affects society as a whole since child marriage reinforces a cycle of poverty and perpetuates gender discrimination, illiteracy and malnutrition as well as high infant and maternal mortality rates.† there is some much complication that child marriage have on these young girls live and theirShow MoreRelatedChild Marriage Should Be Legal952 Words   |  4 PagesChildren should be able to experience their childhood and be able to enjoy those worriless year not worry about anything. Living life is not all about growing up, it about living and enjoys it to help making yourself happy about what have accomplished and experience. A child should not have to choose between their childhood and their parent or a religion. Both girls and boys are affected by child marriage, but girls are affected in much larger numbers and with greater intensity. Child marriage is seenRead MoreSame Sex Marriage Should Be Legal1288 Words   |  6 Pages Marriage is not precisely the same as it used to be interpreted. For example, women used to be their husband’s property. Sometimes the women were forced to marry whoever their parents wanted them to marry and most of the time they couldn’t leave the marriage. Nowadays women have more freedom. They can vote, they can run their own business, and they can marry whichever man they want to. The laws change as the people’s mind change. As they get more comfortable with the idea, they become more openRead MoreShould Same Sex Marriage Be Made Legal? Australia?1035 Words   |  5 PagesShould same-sex marriage be made legal in Australia? Should same-sex marriage be made legal in Australia? This is something you and I have heard in recent years come up time and again in the media and private conversations. But why is this an issue? We need to understand why this is even an issue. Let’s talk about what is a marriage. Society’s perspective of marriage is that it is a permanent, social, legal contract between two people who have mutual rights between the two people that are agreedRead MoreThe Is Rooted Behind The Beginning Legal Conclusion Of Marriage1166 Words   |  5 PagesThe term stepparent is rooted behind the beginning legal conclusion of marriage. Since this term has been coined there have been many stipulations of the legal rights and financial responsibilities that the stepparents should posses. Due to the increase divorce in the U.S., the amount of remarriages is increasing. The conversation of stepparent’s rights is very common. The national Step Family Resource Center notes that if the tendency of increasing number of people becoming step parents continuesRead MoreShould Marriage for Same Sex Couples be Legal in United States?1220 Words   |  5 PagesMarriage as generally define is the union between one man and one woman. However a recent debate over same-sex marriage has stirred a nationwide debate reverberating in the halls of Congress, at the White House, in dozens of state courtrooms and legislatures, and is also becoming a speech-making topic for election campaigns at both the national and state levels. As the debate for this controversial topic rages on, the American religious community view on the topic remains deeply divided over theRead MoreShould Gay Marriage Be Legal?778 Words   |  3 PagesShould Gay Marriage Be Legal? â€Å"†¦I now pronounce you husband and wife†¦Ã¢â‚¬  One would normally hear this when attending a wedding. In tradition marriage has been between one male and one female who love each other. But how would one feel if they heard â€Å"I now pronounce you groom and groom† or how about â€Å"†¦bride and bride...†? In the last 50 years the number of same-sex couples has increased. The on-going argument between the government and the people is â€Å"Should gay marriage be legal?† Although some sayRead MoreShould Same Sex Marriage Be Allowed?1620 Words   |  7 Pages The Right To Marriage Same sex marriage is a topic today that brings strong moral objections from both sides. Should same sex marriage be allowed? Should these people be given the same rights in their relationship as heterosexual couples? Why restrict these citizens from their rights just because of their love for another? Should we deny foreign customs to foreigners just because they aren’t customs we perform? The United States is a land of the free, not the restricted. We are not robots setRead MoreGay Marriage Should Be Banned874 Words   |  4 Pagesrights or same sex marriage should be banned or that it’s wrong under their religions. With that there are many factors that contradict against gay rights, such as religion, child adoption, and divorce just to name a few. Roger Severino, a graduate from Harvard Law School, and has a master in public policy claims the negative collusions that are against gay rights (924). Severino tells us that gay marriage conflicts with religious beliefs be cause it ruins the traditional marriage between a man andRead MoreShould Same-Sex Couples Be Allowed to Adopt? Essays838 Words   |  4 Pages Well, same-sex adoption is not legal in most places which makes this dream for some impossible. This caused controversy between same-sex couples and the general public who believes that same-sex adoption should remain illegal. Ultimately, same-sex adoption should be legal. The same-sex controversy is one of the many results from the slow process of gay marriage becoming legalized in various states across the United States of America. The fight for gay marriage is predated way back to the StonewallRead MoreSame Sex Marriage And Parenting999 Words   |  4 PagesSame-Sex Marriage and Parenting Same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting are comparatively new controversial topics in today’s world and its â€Å"mainstream† morality. I was not exposed to any homosexual â€Å"lifestyle† while growing up. While I know that I am firmly traditional in my theological views, nevertheless, I firmly believe that traditional marriage and traditional parenting are devotional commitments between a man and a woman. Therefore, same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting are to me, issues

Intellectual Property Is Intangible Property - 963 Words

Intellectual property is intangible property that can be owned by law. The Law protects the four following areas. 1) Copyright- grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution. 2) Trademark- a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company or product. 3) Patent- is the protections of an individual’s invention and the way its use. 4) Trade Secrets- A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, commercial method, or compilation of information not generally known or reasonably ascertainable by others by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors or customers. Broadly speaking, any confidential business information which provides an enterprise a competitive edge may be considered a trade secret. The Crime Intellectual property theft involves taking a person’s idea, invention or their creative expression and claiming it to be your own. This can include software, movies, trade secrets, and more. Stealing intellectual property can be done with little to no effort for relatively no cost. By just copying the other persons ideas or their product. From the other persons idea the thief gets a large profit. By doing that the person commits Intellectual Property Theft and can cost the owner of that property jobs, tainted reputation, government tax revenue, and incite the continuation of gangs and organized activities. Destroying people along the wayShow MoreRelatedEthics And Intellectual Property : Personal Property984 Words   |  4 PagesETHICS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Introduction In this week’s assignment, we will look at the subject of ethics and intellectual property. First, start off by looking at the basics of what intellectual property, and take a closer look at case that has involved these issues. Then we will discuss why it is important to protect intellectual property. Next we will look at how can intellectual property be protected? Then we will discuss if intellectual protections ever go â€Å"too far†? Finally what isRead MoreWhat Is Intellectual Property?1338 Words   |  5 PagesWhat is Intellectual Property? â€Å"Intellectual Property (IP) is a term that describes the application of the mind to develop something new or original. It can exist in various forms such as a new invention, brand, design or artistic creation†. (Ipaustralia, 2014) Therefore, as expressed in the week three lecture, IP signifies the ownership of ones intangible and non-physical goods. This could include ideas, names, designs, symbols, artwork, writings, and other creations. It also refers to digital mediaRead MoreIntellectual Property Protection and Enforcement Essay1365 Words   |  6 PagesIntellectual property (IP) is defined as property that is developed through an intellectual and creative processes. Intellectual property falls under the category of property known as intangible rights, which includes patents (inventions of processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter), copyrights (original artistic and literary works of), trademarks (commercial symbols), and trade secrets ((product fo rmulas, patterns, designs). Intellectual property rights has a significant valueRead MoreJean Reinhard Essay1668 Words   |  7 Pagescorporation by transferring the Tricometer intellectual property and more than $10,000 of cash so that corporation can acquire the patent, trade name and trademark? 2-. What are the tax consequences if Jean Joseph jointly acquire the patent, trade name and trademark; create the corporation with more than $10,000 cash; and license the patent, trade name and trademark to the corporation in return for royalties? 3-. Add another step to#2, i.e. giving the intangibles to children under 16 or over 15? FactsRead More Copyrights: Intellectual Property and Technology Essay1535 Words   |  7 PagesCopyrights: Intellectual Property and Technology The Government and many other agencies around the world are continuously at work to improve protections for intellectual property rights and the enforcement of intellectual property laws. In today’s age of digital madness, passing legislation and actually enforcing of those laws becomes a very daunting task. However, the protection of intellectual property has both individual and social benefits. It protects the right of the creator of something ofRead MoreIntellectual Capital Comparison Paper1077 Words   |  5 PagesIntellectual Capital Comparison Paper Intellectual capital is the combined knowledge of employees within an organization (Intellectual, 2013). This knowledge is to add value to the organization in ways such as increase profits, provide products or services to customers, gain competitive advantage, improve processes, or other types of capital. This paper will show five different types of intellectual capital that adds value to an organization. It will provide examples of each intellectual capitalRead MoreIntellectual Capital Essay859 Words   |  4 PagesIntellectual Capital The term intellectual capital (IC) is synonymous with Intangible capital. IC collectively refers to all the resources and assets that defy conventional accounting measures, but which still determine the value and the competitiveness of an enterprise. IC is commonly divided into the areas of Human Capital, Structural Capital, Relationship/Relational Capital, and the Business Model. In our modern Information and Knowledge Economy, intangibles have progressively become the drivingRead MoreCompanies : Profit And Nonprofit Organizations1088 Words   |  5 PagesAssets are classified in one of three different categories; tangible assets, intangible assets, and intellectual property. Tangible assets refers to buildings, vehicles and office equipment that is not consumed during the length of doing business (Francis, n.d.). Tangible assets are used in the process of doing business and can depreciate over time (Francis, n.d.). On the balance sheet, tangible assets reside under Plant, Property and Equipment. Tangible assets can also be referred to as high liquidityRead MoreLegal And Ethical Aspects Of Intellectual Property1238 Words   |  5 PagesEthical Aspects of Intellectual Property According to Cross and Miller (2012), â€Å"Intellectual Property is any property that results from intellectual, creative processes that are products of an Individual’s mind† (p. 320). There are several rights that are used to help protect ownership of creative processes. Despite only benefiting the greater good in the long term, the utilitarian approach is the best option when it comes to ethical decision making and protecting intellectual property, because the longRead MoreThe Idea Of Intellectual Property864 Words   |  4 PagesThe idea of intellectual property has many correlations with the concept of the marketplace of idea. According to a common argument, intellectual property rights spark innovation, creating positive economic growth and benefits for all. Because the marketplace comparison is an economic one, there is a tendency to tie intellectual property with the marketplace of ideas. The key argument arises whether ideas- intangible resources, can be pr otected as property using the same concepts and social processes

English Research Paper free essay sample

There are many different selections to choose from such as; beaver, chinchilla, fox, mink, seal etc. However, there are many activist groups such as PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which feel the complete opposite. Many of these people think that it is a form of murder and a completely disgusting way to wear fashion. There are many advertising campaigns that display the hatred towards this trend. It is crucial both to the environment and society to use faux fur in both fashion and within lifestyles. The education of fur can be done by learning about endangered species, the fur industry and animal cruelty. Before the reasons behind why we should switch to faux fur and boycott real fur is revealed there is a brief background that needs to be stated. Fur was one of the earliest materials that were used to make clothes. By wearing fur it showed that one was wealthy and had a high stature in society. During the 1800’s France became friendly with Russia. The Tsar of Russia came to Paris to visit his friends and while he was there the people of France took great interest in his stylish furs. Soon after, all of Europe became obsessed with fur and many of these coats were made out of Russian sable. The seal coat was the first coat to ever display its fur on the outside of the jacket. This trend started spreading to the Western countries and becoming more popular. Many animals could be sewn together in order to make a wrap or shawl for a woman. In the late 1800s Madame Isidore Paquin started designing lines of fur that were even more comfortable than before. This statement is how fur became to be what it is today. However, many would never guess what it would do to our animals. There are over 5,000 different animals that are endangered on our planet. One of the most deadly reasons we hunt for animals is for their fur. More than one in three species assessed by the World Conservation Union is threatening extinction to many different animals. Overhunting and fishing since the early days of Europeans and Americans have threatened animal species. In the United States the grizzly bear, timber wolf and bald eagle have been continuously overhunted and have gone into extinction. Supporters of the fur trade and industry much often claim that killing animals is a way to conserve and manage the wildlife. â€Å"This is untrue. Many species of wild cats such as ocelots, margays, lynx and Geoffrey’s cat are being driven to the verge of extinction by hunting and trapping. There are only 4,000-7000 snow leopards left in the world. Sea otters were driven to the very edge of extinction and, despite protection their numbers remain very low† (animalaid. org). The fur trade has gone on for years now and there is no chance in this trade stopping or animals being saved. An example of this is the Northern Fur Seal. Northern fur seals have had a dramatic population decline in recent years. â€Å"70% of the world’s 1. million northern fur seals breed and pup only on the Pribilof Islands. Due to dramatic declines in recent decades, northern fur seals are listed as depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act† (Schafer). Due to this astounding fact and many other cases similar to this one the fashion industry has continued to change its ways from real fur to faux fur. The fashion industry has started to become more pro faux fur and less about the usage of real animal fur. Creative director for Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, has even changed his mind about the usage of faux fur. In an interview once before Lagerfeld made a remark many found ignorant and controversial. â€Å" Beasts would kill us if we didn’t kill them. † (Adams) Since then he has changed his whole outlook on fur and become such an avid user that he designed his new collection with only faux fur. During his winter 2010 fashion show Lagerfeld was describing how we as people need to worry more about global warming than the usage of real fur. â€Å" It’s the triumph of fake fur†¦because fur changed so much and become so great now that you can hardly see a difference. And in reality there actually is no difference at all. It has become common today to dismiss that real fur is warmer and better than faux fur. Many people assume that and they are wrong. The personnel that work in the Arctic do not wear real fur they were synthetics. Animals have fur because they are born with it on their backs and because they are alive and their blood provides the warmth that the jacket entails. Good quality fake fur is almost impossible to even tell apart from real fur. A real fur coat would probably last around 20 years or longer but it would have to be properly cared for. Being â€Å"properly cared for† means that when one puts their coat into storage it should be refrigerated for all of spring and summer and stay until fall. When it is taken out of refrigeration it needs to be cleaned and put into a washing machine full of oils and sawdust so it can have it softness back. As you can see this is quite a process and most people do not take the time to care for it, which is why faux fur is a much better option in the long run. Faux fur is an easy alternative because it is less expensive and looks and feels just the same without the maintenance, which is why activists’ continuously protest for the use of it. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is an activist group against anything to do with torturing animals; which includes meat eating and wearing fur. This activist group is about keeping animal rights all over the world. They focus on factory farms, clothing trade, laboratories and numerous celebrities. PETA tries to educate the public about the acts of violence towards animals and the meat industry. They throw special events, fundraising, advertising campaigns; countless protests and even celebrity appearances, which make it, seem to the average person more alluring to become a member of this organization. PETA has been a part of almost every controversial ad campaign in the world. They have celebrities pose naked in order to portray their point across so people will not wear fur, eat meat or even buy a pet. Among their famous campaigns is the â€Å"I’d rather go naked than wear fur campaign. † Some of the celebrities that have been featured in these ads include Pamela Anderson, Jenna Dewan Tatum, Chad Ochocinco, Bethenny Frankel, Brody Jenner and many others. PETA has been at countless fashion shows and designer appearances protesting the usage of animal furs. However, even though PETA wants to show their caring attitude towards animals and the right of their fur they have proven to sometimes take it too far on some occasions. Some of the most controversial and memorable protests were the â€Å"We’d rather go naked than wear fur† campaign. This is when PETA volunteers stood outside a Burberry store in Washington where they were naked covered in a banner that said, â€Å"We’d rather go naked than wear fur. † As this may sound like a good use of dedication it caused much chaos and uproar in the community. Another instance was the famous Protest against Canada’s annual seal hunt. There were PETA volunteers that were dressed up as bloody seals in the middle of a road blocking traffic in front of the Canadian embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue in order to stop the hunting of seals for their fur. Another famous instance of PETA protests was during the 2004 fashion week in New York. PETA members were outside of the fashion tents in Bryant Park scaring many of the onlookers and fashionista’s by carrying bloody skinned animals with their bodies drenched with blood and fur. These protests were just a few of the instances where PETA takes their campaigns and messages a bit too far by disturbing people instead of educating them. Celebrities, PETA activists and others have seemed to jump on the bandwagon of the no fur campaigns all around the world. However, many of these people do not even stick to their morals. Being faux fur seems to be the trend for the time until celebrities magically start to rethink their decisions. â€Å"Fur is just so passe. And, in any case, Campbell (Naomi Campbell model) proved just how fickle the modern celebrity can be by soon deciding that actually, come to think of it, she would much rather wear fur than go nude, and did so on catwalk in Milan. Jay Rayner from â€Å"The Observer† describes of PETA’s â€Å"Id rather go naked than wear fur campaign and Naomi Campbell’s hypocrisy. It is just a matter of time until celebrities and activists become obsessed and â€Å"concerned† with another issue that fur will be forever forgotten (Vilensky). Many PETA activists however think differently about fur wearers. An example of many of their hate campaigns aim ed at specific people and designers is an advertisement about designer, Donna Karen, that has a bunny in the center with â€Å" bunny butcher† written under her name (PETA). They are trying to prove a point by saying she says she is against using fur in her collections but yet she still uses it. They have also been known to make unreasonable and hasty statements in the past about meat and fur lovers. â€Å" If ten people in America died of mad cow disease, in the long run it would save probably millions of lives. Because people would stop eating meat. That’s not a catty thing to say, to say- in the long run this is what I hope. † This was a quote by Bill Maher, an endorser of PETA, upon accepting his award at the Animal Rights convention in 2003. Even though some designers do not choose to follow the new â€Å"faux fur† trend there are still dozens of others that do. Some of which include Stella McCartney and Betsey Johnson. Betsey Johnson has recently come out with numerous pieces in her new line with faux fur trims, hoodies, coats and gloves. She will not allow anyone to have touched or even be seen wear a piece of article of clothing that is real. (Adams) World-renowned stylist, Rachel Zoe, has also found the beauty of wearing faux fur instead of the real thing. She is so passionate about it that she decided to design a special line for QVC. Many stores like Target, Forever 21, Walmart, Hamp;M and so have also increased the need to replace real fur with faux fur as well as faux leather. This trend has been continuously showcased in many of their lines and promoted in their advertisements because of the reality check that many of the designers have seen. One of the main reasons that this issue of faux fur versus real fur is presented is because of the underlying issue of animal cruelty. One may not realize how serious these cases really are. Animal cruelty can vary from state to state or country to country but overall it is a horrible sin that consumers have committed. Some of the unnoticed cases are within factory farming, fur farming and animal testing. These corporations neglect animals and leave them to die by starving them and putting these animals in cruel conditions. Animals on these fur farms spend most of their entire lives enduring the pain that they are put through for our own selfish wants and needs. Every fur jacket or lining of your boots come from fur farms. These animals live in tremendous conditions where they are confined to a cage full of wire and no space to spread out (Martin). Most of the fur farmers use cheap mechanisms to destroy the animals and make them into fur. A few of their tactics include suffocation, where they hang the animals from their neck until they are dead and unable to breathe, electrocution, where they stick metal rods up the animals anuses and shock them into death, and gas or poison, this is when they put them in a chamber and basically gas their life away. The animals are fed meat products that are not even good enough for humans to eat because they are full of pesticides, mold and other diseases. Moreover there is even more shocking news about the fur industry. Most of the fur that we import comes from China and half of the time even though we think we are getting some exotic furs they really turn out to be dogs and cats. There are millions of dogs and cats that are killed each year that replace the fur we wear because it is a cheaper and less expensive way to go. These precious pets are hanged, skinned alive, sometimes bled to death so they can use their fur and keep it in perfect tactful condition. The Chinese tend to mislabel their fur so there is absolutely no way to find out what kind of animal we have on our back. Among the few ways named to kill the animals there is also another mechanism, fur traps. This is when animal like coyotes, bobcats, raccoons and beavers are caught in their natural habitat and used for fur. There are a few different kinds of traps that these trappers use including Conibear traps, underwater traps, snares, but among all of these the steel-jaw is the most commonly used. This trap is so destructible it is banished in numerous amounts of states and the European Union (Martin). The process of killing these animals with the trap is vigorous and dehumanizing. When the animal is in its environment they walk into a trap and it slams down on their limb and most of the time the animal is in horrible pain that they even try to chew or gnaw their legs out of the pain. â€Å"About 1 out of 4 trapped animals escapes by chewing off his or her own leg or paw†(PETA). Often times their legs are mutilated and they bleed to death. This process of escaping the trap may last for hours and eventually they lose so much blood they go into shock, get frostbite or die. If these animals do not die from the trap than often times the hunters will kill them by strangling, stomping or beating them to death in order to not cause any harm to their fur. However, some of the time these animals do have damage to their fur so the hunters call them â€Å" trash kills† or â€Å"garbage† because they have no value anymore to them. â€Å"Up to 50% of trapped animals are discarded as â€Å"trash animals† and are not even used. † (PETA) These animals are left weeks upon weeks left alone in these traps even though state regulations require the hunters to check every 24 hours if there is an animal trapped. For all these reasons this is why people need to switch to faux fur instead of wearing the real thing. Consequently it is one of the most unnecessary acts that human beings can commit. When one wears real fur it endangers the eco system and animals as whole. Many animals become more endangered every year because of the hunting and killing of animals for fur. Before we know it we will not have any animals left to show our children, it will be a once told tale of a lion or a tiger. Fashion has even decided to work against this even though it is a huge trend to wear fur. They have come up with alternative ways to wear fur and leather that look and feel exactly the same. And finally the most crucial and important reason why we should stop wearing fur is the slaughtering and cruelty to animals. These animals are innocent creatures of our world that cause no harm to us but yet we take their lives away because we want a certain jacket or hat. How can we call ourselves citizens of the world when we commit acts of crimes towards these animals that people of society would never think about using on each other.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment Essay Example For Students

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment Essay The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger Selections from three of Charlie Mungers talks, combined into one talk never made, after revisions by Charlie in 2005 that included considerable new material. The three talks were: (1) The Bray Lecture at the Caltech Faculty Club, February 2, 1992; (2) Talk under the Sponsorship of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies at the Harvard Faculty Club, October 6, 1994; and the extensive revision by Charlie in 2005, made from memory unassisted by any research, occurred because Charlie thought he could do better at age eighty-one than he did more than ten years earlier when he (1) knew less and was more harried by a crowded life and (2) was speaking from rough notes instead of revising transcripts. 3) Talk under the Sponsorship of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies at the Boston Harbor Hotel, April 24, 1995. PREFACE When I read transcripts of my psychology talks given about fifteen years ago, I realized that I could now create a more logical but much longer talk, including most of what I had earlier said. But I immediately saw four big disadvantages. First, the longer talk, because it was written out with more logical completeness, would be more boring and confusing to many people than any earlier talk. This would happen because I would use idiosyncratic definitions of psychological tendencies in a manner reminiscent of both psychology textbooks and Euclid. And who reads textbooks for fun or revisits Euclid? Second, because my formal psychological knowledge came only from skimming three psychology textbooks about fifteen years ago, I know virtually nothing about any academic psychology later developed. Yet, in a longer talk containing guesses, I would be criticizing much academic psychology. This sort of intrusion into a professional territory by an amateur would be sure to be resented by professors who would rejoice in finding my errors and might be prompted to respond to my published criticism by providing theirs. Why should I care about new criticism? Well, who likes new hostility from articulate critics with an information advantage? Third, a longer version of my ideas would surely draw some disapproval from people formerly disposed to like me. Not only would there be stylistic and substantive objections, but also there would be perceptions of arrogance in an old man who displayed much disregard for conventional wisdom while popping-off on a subject in which he had never taken a course. My old Harvard Law classmate, Ed Rothschild, always called such a popping-off the shoe button complex, named for the condition of a family- friend who spoke in oracular style on all subjects after becoming dominant in the shoe button business. Fourth, I might make a fool of myself. Despite these four very considerable objections, I decided to publish the much-expanded version. Thus, after many decades in which I have succeeded mostly by restricting action to jobs and methods in which I was unlikely to fail, I have now chosen a course of action in which (1) I have no significant personal benefit to gain, (2) I will surely give some pain to family members and friends, and (3) I may make myself ridiculous. Why am I doing this? One reason may be that my nature makes me incline toward diagnosing and talking about errors in conventional wisdom. And despite years of being smoothed out by the hard knocks that were inevitable for one with my attitude, I dont believe life ever knocked all the boys brashness out of the man. A second reason for my decision is my approval of the attitude of Diogenes when he asked: Of what use is a philosopher who never offends anybody? My third and final reason is the strongest. I have fallen in love with my way of living out psychology because it has been so useful for me. And so, before I die, I want to imitate to some extent the bequest practices of three characters: the protagonist in John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, Benjamin Franklin, and my first employer, Ernest Buffett. Bunyans character, the knight wonderfully named Old Valiant for Truth, makes the only practical bequest available to him when he says at the end of his life: My sword I leave to him who can wear it. And like this man, I dont mind if I have misappraised my sword, provided I have tried to see it correctly, or that many will not wish to try it, or that some who try to wield it may find it serves them not. Ben Franklin, to my great benefit, left behind his autobiography, his Almanacks, and much else. And Ernest Buffett did the best he could in the same mode when he left behind How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Have Learned about Fishing. Whether or not this last contribution to the genre was the best, I will not say. But I will report that I have now known four generations of Ernest Buffetts descendants and that the results have encouraged my imitation of the founder. I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However, I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating sychology to an understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and published mostly for themselves, with much natural detriment from isolation and groupthink. And so, right after my time at Caltech and Harvard Law School, I possessed a vast ignorance of psychology. Those institutions failed to require knowledge of the subject. And, of course, they couldnt integrate psychology with their other subject matter when they didnt know psychology. Also, like the Nietzsche character who was proud of his lame leg, the institutions were proud of their willful avoidance of fuzzy psychology and fuzzy psychology professors. I shared this ignorant mindset for a considerable time. And so did a lot of other people. What are we to think, for instance, of the Caltech course catalogue that for years listed just one psychology professor, self-described as a Professor of Psychoanalytical Studies, who taught both Abnormal Psychology and Psychoanalysis in Literature? Soon after leaving Harvard, I began a long struggle to get rid of the most dysfunctional part of my psychological ignorance. Today, I will describe my long struggle for elementary wisdom and a brief summary of my ending notions. After that, I will give examples, many quite vivid and interesting to me, of both psychology at work and antidotes to psychology-based dysfunction. Then, I will end by asking and answering some general questions raised by what I have said. This will be a long talk. When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution and appreciation of mans many evolution-based resemblances to less cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a social animal, greatly and automatically influenced by behavior he observed in men around him. I also knew that man lived, like barnyard animals and monkeys, in limited size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying considerable distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy. But this generalized, evolution-based theory structure was inadequate to enable me to cope properly with the cognition I encountered. I was soon surrounded by much extreme irrationality, displayed in patterns and subpatterns. So surrounded, I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with life unless I could acquire a better theory-structure on which to hang my observations and experiences. By then, my craving for more theory had a long history. Partly, I had always loved theory as an aid in puzzle solving and as a means of satisfying my monkey-like curiosity. And, partly. I had found that theory-structure was a superpower in helping one get what one wanted. As I had early discovered in school wherein I had excelled without labor, guided by theory, while many others, without mastery of theory, failed despite monstrous effort. Better theory, I thought. had always worked for me and, if now available, could make me acquire capital and independence faster and better assist everything I loved. And so I slowly developed my own system of psychology. more or less in the self-help style of Ben Franklin and with the determination displayed in the refrain of the nursery story: `Then Ill do it myself, said the little red hen. I was greatly helped in my quest by two turns of mind. First, I had long looked for insight by inversion in the intense manner counseled by the great algebraist, Jacobi: Invert, always invert. I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes. Second, I became so avid a collector of instances of bad judgment that I paid no attention to boundaries between professio nal territories. After all, why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard-to-find new stupidity in my own field when some large, important, asy-to find stupidity was just over the fence in the other fellows professional territory? Besides, I could already see that real-world problems didnt neatly lie within territorial boundaries. They jumped right across. And I was as dubious of any approach that, when two things were inextricably intertwined and interconnected, would try and think about one thing but not the other. I was afraid, if I tried any such restricted approach, that I would end up, in the immortal words of John L. Lewis, with no brain at all, just a neck that had haired over. Pure curiosity, somewhat later, made me wonder how and why destructive cults were often able, over a single long weekend, to turn many tolerably normal people into brainwashed zombies and thereafter keep them in that state indefinitely. I resolved that I would eventually find a good answer to t his cult question if I could do so by general reading and much musing. I also got curious about social insects. It fascinated me that both the fertile female honeybee and the fertile female harvester ant could multiply their quite different normal life expectancies by exactly twenty by engaging in one gangbang in the sky. The extreme success of the ants also fascinated me-how a few behavioral algorithms caused such extreme evolutionary success grounded in extremes of cooperation within the breeding colony and, almost always, extremes of lethal hostility toward ants outside the breeding colony; even ants of the same species. Motivated as I was, by midlife I should probably have turned to psychology textbooks, but I didnt, displaying my share of the outcome predicted by the German folk saving: We are too soon old and too late smart. However, as I later found out, I may have been lucky to avoid for so long the academic psychology that was then laid out in most textbooks. These would not then have guided me well with respect to cults and were often written as if the authors were collecting psychology experiments as a boy collects butterflies-with a passion for more butterflies and more contact with fellow collectors and little craving for synthesis in what is already possessed. When I finally got to the psychology texts, I was reminded of the observation of Jacob Viner, the great economist, that many an academic is like the truffle hound, an animal so trained and bred for one narrow purpose that it is no good at anything else. I was also appalled by hundreds of pages of extremely nonscientific musing about comparative weights of nature and nurture in human outcomes. And I found that introductory psychology texts, by and large, didnt deal appropriately with a fundamental issue: Psychological tendencies tend to be both numerous and inseparably intertwined, now and forever, as they interplay in life. Yet the complex parsing out of effects from intertwined tendencies was usually avoided by the writers of the elementary texts. Possibly the authors did not wish, through complexity, to repel entry of new devotees to their discipline. And, possibly, the cause of their inadequacy was the one given by Samuel Johnson in response to a woman who inquired as to what accounted for his dictionarys misdefinition of the word pastern. Pure ignorance, Johnson replied. And, finally, the text writers showed little interest in describing standard antidotes to standard psychology-driven folly, and they thus voided most discussion of exactly what most interested me. But academic psychology has some very important merits alongside its defects. I learned this eventually, in the course of general reading, from a book, Influence, aimed at a popular audience, by a distinguished psychology professor, Robert Cialdini, at Arizona State, a very big university. Cialdini had made himself into a super-tenured Re gents Professor at a very young age by devising, describing, and explaining a vast group of clever experiments in which man manipulated man to his detriment, With all of this made possible by mans intrinsic thinking flaws. I immediately sent copies of Cialdinis book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock to thank him for what he had done for me and the public. Incidentally, the sale by Cialdini of hundreds of thousands of copies of a book about social psychology was a huge feat, considering that Cialdini didnt claim that he was going to improve your sex life or make you any money. Part of Cialdinis large book-buying audience came because, like me, it wanted to learn how to become less often tricked by salesmen and circumstances. However, as an outcome not sought by Cialdini. who is a profoundly ethical man, a huge number of his books were bought by salesmen who wanted to learn how to become more effective in misleading customers. Please remember this perverse outcome when my discussion comes to incentive-caused bias as a consequence of the superpower of incentives. With the push given by Cialdinis book, I soon skimmed through three much used textbooks covering introductory psychology. I also pondered considerably while craving synthesis and taking into account all my previous raining and experience. The result was Mungers partial summary of the non-patient-treating, non-nature vs. nurture weighing parts of nondevelopmental psychology. This material was stolen from its various discoverers (most of whose names I did not even try to learn), often with new descriptions and titles selected to fit Mungers notion of what makes recall easy for Munger, then revised to make Mungers use easy as he seeks to avoid errors . I will start my summary with a general observation that helps explain what follows. This observation is grounded in what we know about social insects. The limitations inherent in evolutions development of the nervoussystem cells that control behavior are beautifully demonstrated by these insects, which often have a mere 100,000 or so cells in their entire nervous systems, compared to mans multiple billions of cells in his brain alone. Each ant, like each human, is composed of a living physical structure plus behavioral algorithms in its nerve cells. In the ants case, the behavioral algorithms are few in number and almost entirely genetic in origin. The ant learns a little behavior from experiences, but mostly it merely responds to ten or so stimuli with a few simple responses programmed into its nervous system by its genes, sometimes walk round and round until they perish. It seems obvious, to me at least, that the human brain must often operate counterproductively just like the ants, from unavoidable oversimplicity in its mental process, albeit usually in trying to solve problems more difficult than those faced by ants that dont have to design airplanes. Naturally, the simple ant behavior system has extreme limitations because of its limited nerve system repertoire. For instance, one type of ant, when it smells a pheromone given off by a dead ants body in the hive, immediately responds by cooperating with other ants in carrying the dead body out of the hive. And Harvards great E. O. Wilson performed one of the best psychology experiments ever done when he painted dead-ant pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally; the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the hive even though it kicked and otherwise protested throughout the entire process. Such is the brain of the ant. It has a simple program of responses that generally work out all right, but which are imprudently used by rote in many cases. Another type of ant demonstrates that the limited brain of ants can be misled by circumstances as well as by clever manipulation from other creatures. The brain of this ant contains a simple behavioral program that directs the ant, when walking, to follow the ant ahead, and when these ants stumble into walking in a big circle. The perception system of man clearly demonstrates just such an unfortunate outcome. Man is easily fooled, either by the cleverly thought out manipulation of man, by circumstances occurring by accident, or by very effective manipulation practices that man has stumbled into during practice evolution and kept in place because they work so well. One such outcome is caused by a quantum effect in human perception. If stimulus is kept below a certain level, it does not get through. And, for this reason, a magician was able to make the Statue of Liberty disappear after a certain amount of magician lingo expressed in the dark. The audience was not aware that it was sitting on a platform that was rotating so slowly, below mans sensory threshold, that no one could feel the acceleration implicit in the considerable rotation. When a surrounding curtain was then opened in the place on the platform where the Statue had earlier appeared, it seemed to have disappeared. And even when perception does get through to mans brain, it is often isweighted, because what is registered in perception is in shockingness of apparent contrast, not the standard scientific units that make possible science and good engineering against often-wrong effects from generally useful tendencies in his perception and cognition. A magician demonstrates this sort of contrast based error in your nervous system when he removes your wristwatch without your feeling it. As he does this, he applies pressu re of touch on your wrist that you would sense if it was the only pressure of touch you were experiencing. But he has concurrently applied other intense pressure of touch on your body, but not on your wrist, swamping the wrist pressure by creating a high-contrast touch pressure elsewhere. This high contrast takes the wrist pressure below perception. Some psychology professors like to demonstrate the inadequacy of contrast-based perception by having students put one hand in a bucket of hot water and one hand in a bucket of cold water. They are then suddenly asked to remove both hands and place them in a single bucket of room temperature water. Now, with both hands in the same water, one hand feels as if it has just been put in cold water and the other hand feels as if it has just been placed in hot water. When one thus sees perception so easily fooled by mere contrast, where a simple temperature gauge would make no error, and realizes that cognition mimics perception in being misled by mere contrast, he is well on the way toward understanding, not only how magicians fool one, but also how life will fool one. This can occur, through deliberate human manipulation or otherwise, if one doesnt take certain precautions. Mans-often wrong but generally useful psychological tendencies are quite numerous and quite different. The natural consequence of this profusion of tendencies is the grand general principle of social psychology: cognition is ordinarily situation-dependent so that different situations often cause different conclusions, even when the same person is thinking in the same general subject area. With this introductory instruction from ants, magicians, and the grand general principle of social psychology; I will next simply number and list psychology-based tendencies that, while generally useful, often mislead. Discussion of errors from each tendency will come later, together with description of some antidotes to errors, followed by some general discussion. Here are the tendencies: One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency Two: Liking/Loving Tendency Three: Disliking/Hating Tendency Four: Doubt-Avoidance Tendency Five: Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency Six: Curiosity Tendency Seven: Kantian Fairness Tendency Eight: Envy/Jealousy Tendency Nine: Reciprocation Tendency Ten: Influence-from-Mere Association Tendency Eleven: Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial Twelve: Excessive Self-Regard Tendency Thirteen: Overoptimism Tendency Fourteen: Deprival-Superreaction Tendency Fifteen: Social-Proof Tendency Sixteen: Contrast-Misreaction Tendency Seventeen: Stress-Influence Tendency Eighteen: Availability-Misweighing Tendency Nineteen: Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency Twenty: Drug-Misinfluence Tendency Twenty-One: Tendency Senescence-Misinfluence Twenty-Two: Authority-Misinfluence Tendency Twenty-Three: Twaddle Tendency Twenty-Four: Twenty-Five: Reason-Respecting Tendency Lollapalooza Tendency-The Tendency to Get Extreme Confluences of Psychological Tendencies Acting in Favor of a Particular Outcome One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think Ive been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and vet Ive always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. Thomas Harris EssayBut, if the mother goose is not present right after the hatching, and a man is there instead, the gosling will love and follow the man, who becomes a sort of substitute mother. Somewhat similarly, a newly arrived human is born to like and love under the normal and abnormal triggering outcomes for its kind. Perhaps the strongest inborn tendency to love-ready to be triggered-is that of the human mother for its child. On the other hand, the similar child-loving behavior of a mouse can be eliminated by the deletion of a single gene, which suggests there is some sort of triggering gene in a mother mouse as well as in a gosling. Each child, like a gosling, will almost surely come to like and love, not only as driven by its sexual nature, but also in social groups not limited to its genetic or adoptive family. Current extremes of romantic love almost surely did not occur in mans remote past. Our early human ancestors were surely more like apes triggered into mating in a pretty mundane fashion. And what will a man naturally come to like and love, apart from his parent, spouse and child? Well. he will like and love being liked and loved. And so many a courtship competition will be won by a person displaying exceptional devotion, and man will generally strive, lifelong, for the affection and approval of many people not related to him. One very practical consequence of Liking/Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency, and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love. There are large social policy implications in the amazingly good consequences that ordinarily come from people likely to trigger extremes of love and admiration boosting each other in a feedback mode. For instance, it is obviously desirable to attract a lot of lovable, admirable people into the teaching profession. The phenomenon of liking and loving causing admiration also works in reverse. Admiration also causes or intensifies liking or love. With this feedback mode in place, the consequences are often extreme, sometimes even causing deliberate self-destruction to help what is loved. Disliking/Hating Tendency In a pattern obverse to Liking/Loving Tendency, the newly arrived human is also born to dislike and hate as triggered by normal and abnormal triggering forces in its life. It is the same with most apes and monkeys. Liking or loving, intertwined with admiration in a feedback mode, often has vast practical consequences in areas far removed from sexual attachments. For instance, a man who is so constructed that he loves admirable persons and ideas with a special intensity has a huge advantage in life. This blessing came to both Buffett and myself in large measure, sometimes from the same persons and de as. One common, beneficial example for us both was Warrens uncle, Fred Buffett, who cheerfully did the endless grocery-store work that Warren and I ended up admiring from a safe distance. Even now, after I have known so many other people, I doubt if it is possible to be a nicer man than Fred Buffett was, and he changed me for the better. As a result, the long history of man contains almost continuous war. For instance, most American Indian tribes warred incessantly, and some tribes would occasionally bring captives home to women so that all could join in the fun of torturing captives to death. Even with the spread of religion, and the advent of advanced civilization, much modern war remains pretty savage. But we also get what we observe in present-day Switzerland and the United States, wherein the clever political arrangements of man channel the hatreds and dislikings of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns including elections. But the dislikings and hatreds never go away completely. Born into an, these driving tendencies remain strong. Thus, we get maxims like the one from England: Politics is the art of marshalling hatreds. And we also get the extreme popularity of very negative political advertising in the United States. At the family level, we often see one sibling hate his other siblings and litigate with them endlessly if he can afford it. Indeed, a wag named Buffett has repeatedly explained to me that a major difference between rich and poor people is that the rich people can spend their lives suing their relatives. My fathers law practice in Omaha was full of such intrafamily hatreds. And when I got to the Harvard Law School and its professors taught me property lay with no mention of sibling rivalry in the family business, I appraised the School as a pretty unrealistic place that wore blinders like the milk-wagon horses of yore. My current guess is that sibling rivalry has not yet made it into property law as taught at Harvard. Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred. Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscognition is shockingly large. When the world Trade Center was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in hatred either difficult or impossible. Mediations between Israelis and Palestinians are difficult because facts in one sides, history overlap very little with facts from the other sides. Doubt-Avoidance Tendency The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision. It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do. And so mans Doubt Avoidance Tendency is quite consistent with the history of his ancient, nonhuman ancestors. So pronounced is the tendency in man to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision that behavior to counter the tendency is required from judges and jurors. Here, delay before decision making is forced. And one is required to so comport himself, prior to conclusion time, so that he is wearing a mask of objectivity. And the mask works to help real objectivity along, as we shall see when we next consider mans Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Of course, once one has recognized that man has a strong DoubtAvoidance Tendency, it is logical to believe that at least some leaps of religious faith are greatly boosted by this tendency. Even if one is satisfied that his own faith comes from revelation, one still must account for the inconsistent faiths of others. And mans Doubt-Avoidance Tendency is almost surely a big part of the answer. What triggers Doubt-Avoidance Tendency? Well, an unthreatened man, thinking of nothing in particular, is not being prompted to remove doubt through rushing to some decision. As we shall see later when we get to Social-Proof Tendency and Stress-Influence Tendency, what usually triggers Doubt-Avoidance Tendency is some combination of (1) puzzlement and (2) stress. And both of these factors naturally occur in facing religious issues. Thus, the natural state of most men is in some form of religion. And this is what we observe. Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency The brain of man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change, which is a form of inconsistency avoidance. We see this in all human habits, constructive and destructive. Few people can list a lot of bad habits that they have eliminated, and some people cannot identify even one of these. Instead, practically every one has a great many bad habits he has long maintained despite their being known as bad. Given this situation, it is not too much in many cases to appraise early-formed habits as destiny. When Marleys miserable ghost says, I wear the chains I forged in life, he is talking about chains of habit that were too light to be felt before they became too strong to be broken. The rare life that is wisely lived has in it many good habits maintained and many bad habits avoided or cured. And the great rule that helps here is again from Franklins Poor Richards Almanack: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to change it. Also tending to be maintained in place by the anti-change tendency of the brain are ones previous conclusions, human loyalties, reputational identity, commitments, accepted role in a civilization, etc. It is not entirely clear why evolution would program into mans brain an anti-change mode alongside his tendency to quickly remove doubt. My guess is the anti-change mode was significantly caused by a combination of the following factors: (1) It facilitated faster decisions when speed of decision was an important contribution to the survival of nonhuman ancestors that were prey. 2) It facilitated the survival advantage that our ancestors gained by cooperating in groups, which would have been more difficult to do if everyone was always changing responses. (3) It was the best form of solution that evolution could get to in the limited number of generations between the start of literacy and todays complex modern life. It is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by DoubtA voidance Tendency, when combined with a tendency to resist any change in that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern man. And so it observably works out. We all deal much with others whom we correctly diagnose as imprisoned in poor conclusions that are maintained by mental habits they formed early and will carry to their graves. So great is the bad-decision problem caused by Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency that our courts have adopted important strategies against it. For instance, before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not naturally favor, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable bad thinking from first conclusion bias. Similarly, other modern decision makers will often force groups to consider skillful counterarguments before making decisions. And proper education is one long exercise in augmentation of high cognition so that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking, maintained by resistance to change. As Lord Keynes pointed out about his exalted intellectual group at one of the greatest universities in the world, it was not the intrinsic difficulty of new ideas that prevented their acceptance. Instead, the new ideas were not accepted because they were inconsistent with old ideas in place. What Keynes was reporting is that the human mind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, theres an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result. And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong. Moreover, this doesnt just happen in social science departments, like the one that once thought Freud should serve as the only choice as a psychology teacher for Caltech. Holding to old errors even happens, although with less frequency and severity, in hard science departments. We have no less an authority for this than Max Planck, Nobel laureate, finder of Plancks constant. Planck is famous not only for his science but also for saying that even in physics the radically new ideas are seldom really accepted by the old guard. Instead, said Planck, the progress is made by a ew generation that comes along, less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. Indeed, precisely this sort of brain-blocking happened to a degree in Einstein. At his peak, Einstein was a great destroyer of his own ideas, but an older Einstein never accepted the full implications of quantum mechanics. One of the most successful users of an antidote to first conclusion bias was Charles Darwin. He trained himself, ear ly, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one. The opposite of what Darwin did is now called confirmation bias, a term of opprobrium. Darwins practice came from his acute recognition of mans natural cognitive faults arising from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. He provides a great example of psychological insight correctly used to advance some of the finest mental work ever done. Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency has many good effects in civilization. For instance, rather than act inconsistently with public commitments, new or old public identities, etc. most people are more loyal in their roles in life as priests, physicians, citizens, soldiers, spouses, teachers, employees, etc. One corollary of Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency is that a person making big sacrifices in the course of assuming a new identity will intensify his devotion to the new identity. After all, it would be quite inconsistent behavior to make a large sacrifice for something that was no good. And thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiation ceremonies, often public in nature, that intensify new commitments made. Tough initiation ceremonies can intensify bad contact as well as good. The loyalty of the new, made-man mafia member, or of the military officer making the required blood oath of loyalty to Hitler, was boosted through the triggering of Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Moreover, the tendency will often make man a patsy of manipulative compliance-practitioners, who gain advantage from triggering his subconscious Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Few people demonstrated this process better than Ben Franklin. As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor, like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter, the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a nonadmired and nontrusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book. During the Korean War, this technique of Franklins was the most important feature of the Chinese brainwashing system that was used on enemy prisoners. Small step by small step, the technique often worked better than torture in altering prisoner cognition in favor of Chinese captors. The practice of Franklin, whereunder he got approval from someone by maneuvering him into treating Franklin favorably, works viciously well in reverse. When one is maneuvered into deliberately hurting some other person, one will tend to disapprove or even hate that person. This effect, from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency, accounts for the insight implicit in the saying: A man never forgets where he has buried the hatchet. The effect accounts for much prisoner abuse by guards, increasing their dislike and hatred for prisoners that exists as a consequence of the guards reciprocation of hostility from prisoners who are treated like animals. Given the psychology-based hostility natural in prisons between guards and prisoners, an intense, continuous effort should be made (1) to prevent prisoner abuse from starting and (2) to stop it instantly when it start s because it will grow by feeding on itself, like a cluster of infectious disease. More psychological acuity on this subject, aided by more insightful teaching, would probably improve the overall effectiveness of the U. S. Army. So strong is Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency that it will often prevail after one has merely pretended to have some identity, habit, or conclusion. Thus, for a while, many an actor sort of believes he is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. And many a hypocrite is improved by his pretensions of virtue. And many a judge and juror, while pretending objectivity, is gaining objectivity. And many a trial lawyer or other advocate comes to believe what he formerly only pretended to believe. While Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency, with its status quo bias, immensely harms sound education, it also causes much benefit. For instance, a near-ultimate inconsistency would be to teach something to others that one did not believe true. And so, in clinical medical education, the learner is forced to see one, do one, and then teach one, with the teaching pounding the learning into the teacher. Of course, the power of teaching to influence the cognition of the teacher is not always a benefit to society. When such power flows into political and cult evangelism, there are often bad consequences. For instance, modern education often does much damage when young students are taught dubious political notions and then enthusiastically push these notions on the rest of us. The pushing seldom convinces others. But as students pound into their mental habits what they are pushing out, the students are often permanently damaged. Educational institutions that create a climate where much of this goes on are, I think, irresponsible. It is important not to thus put ones brain in chains before one has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person. Curiosity Tendency There is a lot of innate curiosity in mammals, but its nonhuman version is highest among apes and monkeys. Mans curiosity, in turn, is much stronger than that of his simian relatives. In advanced human civilization, culture greatly increases the effectiveness of curiosity in advancing knowledge. For instance, Athens (including its colony, Alexandria) developed much math and science out of pure curiosity while the Romans made almost no contribution to either math or science. They instead concentrated their attention on the practical engineering of mines, roads, aqueducts, etc. Curiosity, enhanced by the best of modern education (which is by definition a minority part in many places), much helps man to prevent or reduce bad consequences arising from other psychological tendencies. The curious are also provided with much fun and wisdom long after formal education has ended. Kantian Fairness Tendency Kant was famous for his categorical imperative, a sort of a golden rule that required humans to follow those behavior patterns that, if followed by all others, would make the surrounding human system work best for everybody. And it is not too much to say that modern acculturated man isplays, and expects from others, a lot of fairness as thus defined by Kant. In a small community having a one-way bridge or tunnel for autos, it is the norm in the United States to see a lot of reciprocal courtesy, despite the absence of signs or signals. And many freeway drivers, including myself, will often let other drivers come in front of them, in lane changes or the like, becau se that is the courtesy they desire when roles are reversed. Moreover, there is, in modern human culture, a lot of courteous lining up by strangers so that all are served on a first-come-first-served basis. Also, strangers often voluntarily share equally in unexpected, unearned good and bad fortune. And, as an obverse consequence of such fairsharing conduct, much reactive hostility occurs when fairsharing is expected yet not provided. It is interesting how the worlds slavery was pretty well abolished during the last three centuries after being tolerated for a great many previous centuries during which it coexisted with the worlds major religions. My guess is that Kantian Fairness Tendency was a major contributor to this result. Envy/Jealousy Tendency A member of a species designed through evolutionary process to want oftenscarce food is going to be driven strongly toward getting food when it first sees food. And this is going to occur often and tend to create some conflict when the food is seen in the possession of another member of the same species. This is probably the evolutionary origin of the envy/jealousy Tendency that lies so deep in human nature. Sibling jealousy is clearly very strong and usually greater in children than adults. It is often stronger than jealousy directed at strangers. Kantian Fairness Tendency probably contributes to this result. Envy/jealousy is extreme in myth, religion, and literature wherein, in account after account, it triggers hatred and injury. It was regarded as so pernicious by the Jews of the civilization that preceded Christ that it was forbidden, by phrase after phrase, in the laws of Moses. You were even warned by the Prophet not to covet your neighbors donkey. And envy/jealousy is also extreme in modern life. For instance, university communities often go bananas when some universit