Many of the communities in which anthropologists work are hierarchically organized, and the people who live in them often describe this arrangement in positive terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists rarely paint hierarchy in a favorable light.

we explore those aspects of Western thought that make it difficult for anthropologists to take hierarchy seriously. In addition, we develop an interpretive approach that treats hierarchy both as a relational form and as a theoretical model

Imagination itself is a socially creative process

Across two studies, we find that co-imagining a shared future with a novel partner cultivates feelings of social connection, to a greater degree than individually imagining a shared future or engaging in a collaborative or shared experience in general.

When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are often related to each other but can also be dissociated. The present work used three approaches (correlational, experimental, and archival) to conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs. […] Overall, these studies provide convergent evidence for tight connections between implicit attitudes and beliefs, suggesting that the dissociations observed using explicit measures may arise uniquely from deliberate judgment processes.

Even though conscious reflection can disentangle stereotypes from judgements, stereotypes still carry positive or negative valences which affect subconscious attitudes about the target groups.

Being intentional with your interpersonal contact and maintaining a variety of conversation partners are crucial to supporting a healthy social life.

A total of 536 Hong Kong university students completed questionnaires measuring their experiences of compassion from others, self-compassion, resilience, psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life. Serial mediation analyses showed that compassion from others was associated positively with self-compassion, which was, in turn, linked to greater resilience and consequently lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of flourishing and meaning in life.

I bring together such a large congregation by using the four ways of being inclusive

he was still petting the puppy’s wet head,
and I cried like I’d never known …

they were in the middle of a lake in the middle of a desert in the middle of a war zone…

How fourteen ships of different nationalities trapped in the Suez Canal quickly formed a community.

I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.

Along with a word on the importance of surprise in writing.

exposure to a stereotype, regardless of whether one agrees with it, can shape how one experiences and learns from interactions with members of the stereotyped group, such that it induces individual-level prejudice

Computational modeling revealed that this preference was due to stereotype effects on priors regarding group members’ behavior as well as the learning rates through which reward associations were updated in response to player feedback. We then show that these stereotype-induced preferences, once formed, spread unwittingly to others who observe these interactions, illustrating a pathway through which stereotypes may be transmitted and propagated between society and individuals.

He’d accidentally gone into climate-rant mode instead of speaking as a dad.

The apocalyptic stakes of climate change cause one Seattle father to go over the edge along with the story of a technique Santa Fe uses to put its glooms to rest.

While we do find that reputation inspires punish-ment that is sometimes unreflective, we also find that people correctly believe that engaging with opposing perspectives will be perceived positively by others. Thus, by giving people opportunities to broadcast their engagement with other viewpoints, it may actually be possible to leverage reputation to motivate more careful deliberation.

It’s the kind of story that displaces other stories, easily sweeps them aside, which is what happened with Dan…

Three stories about how people fill in what they don’t know about strangers.

A gray hoodie will not protect my son…

Among the general public and behavioral scientists alike, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the best known and most widely used tool for demonstrating implicit bias: the unintentional impact of social group information on behavior.

The idea that racial bias exists in places more so than in people can be a disorienting idea for many of us born and raised within cultures that predominantly treat places as neutral and passive while prioritizing the importance of individual actors and their internal states and motivations. In general, when most of us think about a concept like sexism, we think about people (like misogynists). We are unlikely to think about spaces causing people to be sexist.

We found that participants tended to have more similar self-views post-conversation than pre-conversation, an effect we term “inter-self alignment.” Further, the more two partners’ self-views aligned, the more they enjoyed their conversation and were inclined to interact again. This effect depended on both conversation partners becoming aligned. These findings suggest that the way we see ourselves is coauthored in the act of dialogue

Preregistered analyses reveal a notable increase in biological stress levels among both LGBTIQ+ individuals as well as those close to them during the campaign.

These effects were, however, moderated by exposure to the campaign for marriage equality (i.e., yes-campaign), indicating the powerful buffering effects of the yes-campaign on the impact of discrimination on individuals’ health.

Monks, a friend endowed with seven qualities is worth associating with.

With illustrations from the contemporary Thai religious landscape, we can observe how various forms of relational karma intuitively account for spirits and material objects as an agency of relations.

Across the Buddhist world, we find not only that our relationships are constituted by karmic affinities, but also that in many contexts those relationships are seen as the media through which karma unfolds.

These understandings not only provide frameworks for interpreting relationships but underwrite ritual technologies through which people can form, maintain, or disperse these affinities.

Justin Ritzinger shares what he learned about the nature of karma after attending the “Lived Karma” conference at Dartmouth in 2022. To read more papers from the conference, see the Journal of Global Buddhism Vol. 24 No. 2.

This is a preliminary research note on the cluster concepts of collective karma in Chinese Canonical sources.

In a daily study of 80 couples across 14 days ( N = 1,798 observations), people experienced lower life satisfaction, greater negative emotions, and fewer positive emotions on days when they reported lower than their average relationship satisfaction, but this association was attenuated for people high in mindfulness.

We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language.

Why social media is particularly divisive as a medium.

Eissler may have been attracted to Jeff in somewhat the way Freud was attracted to Fliess. Fliess was a very charming and vivacious man, and Freud had a need and a terrible weakness for that kind of glamorous person. When Jung came along, he became that person again for Freud. Both Fliess and Jung were charlatans in some ways, but very bright, very beguiling ones. There must have been something of that sort going on between Eissler and Jeff.

A “charming charlatan” weasels his way into the Sigmund Freud Archives and discovers shocking letters the family had been hiding for decades.

Tell me how does it feel

How changes in technology precipitated a change in music.

Transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery.

[Psychoanalysis] rearranges things inside the mind the way surgery rearranges things inside the body. It’s that impersonal and that radical. [Yet] the changes achieved are very small.

An excellent—thoughtful, funny—introduction to the world of Freudian psychoanalysis centered around the “case study” of one (pseudonymous) New York analyst, placing his work in the context of the field, its histories and its controversies.

The well-behaved have many friends,
because of their self-restraint.
But one lacking ethics, of bad conduct,
drives away their friends.

Ethical conduct is the starting point and foundation;
the mother at the head
of all good things:
that’s why you should purify your ethics.

Results reveal a compassionate culture towards this marginalised group, for which Buddhist lesbians, gays and bisexuals (LGBs) cultivate self-acceptance through Buddhist teachings, such as the clarification of nature and manifestation, Buddhist equality, and proper interpretation of precepts. These teachings also encourage inclusiveness.

Consistent with predictions, Monitor+Accept training reduced daily-life loneliness by 22% and increased social contact by two more interactions and one more person each day, compared with both Monitor Only and control trainings.

Both present moment awareness AND acceptance are critical for effective mindfulness.

Our findings indicate that dehumanization enables violence that perpetrators see as instrumentally beneficial. In contrast, dehumanization does not contribute to moral violence because morally motivated perpetrators wish to harm complete human beings who are capable of deserving blame, experiencing suffering, and understanding its meaning.

Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology.

We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame’s match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

See also this group’s similar article on pride.

Bhikkhus, it is good for a bhikkhu from time to time to review his own failings. It is good for him from time to time to review the failings of others. It is good for him from time to time to review his own achievements. It is good for him from time to time to review the achievements of others.

Devadatta’s downfall was from not overcoming the eight worldly winds.

The hard part of having a secret doesn’t seem [to be] those moments when we’re in conversation. That turns out to be the easy part. It’s having to live with the secret alone, and being unsure whether you’re doing the right thing.

Even when the conversation doesn’t “matter” in a traditional sense, perhaps that’s part of the joy: a small escape from the serious, a reprieve from the heavier matters …

A defense of polite “nothings.”

Surely, venerable sir, we are living in concord, with mutual appreciation, without disputing, blending like milk and water, viewing each other with kindly eyes.

The Buddha comes across three mendicants practicing diligently and harmoniously, and asks them how they do it. They explain how they skillfully deal with the practical affairs of living together. Only when pressed by the Buddha do they reveal their attainments.

We asked a total of 1,368 people from five [European] countries to reveal, using an Internet-based topographical self-reporting tool, those parts of their body that they would allow relatives, friends, and strangers to touch.

While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys in the parking lot…

Following is a summation of the extraordinary story, as explicated in the Aitken letters, of a Zen master teaching in America for some 35 years, who has been accused of sexual misconduct numerous times and yet was never called to task nor properly investigated.

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Comparative analysis shows that the extent of segregation for different religions is much higher than that for different races and slightly higher than that for different political parties. Furthermore, we study the few cross-religion links and find 46.7% of them are probably related to charitable issues.

… the appearance of three people is rare in the world…

I do not perceive another single factor so helpful as good friendship…

Friendship with admirable people is the prime external factor to help those in training.

There is a person who is not to be associated with…

You should associate with people who are equal or better than you.

… these four people similar to vipers are found in the world

… four things are born of love and hate

And how to not be burned by them.

Their design ideas were radically different but the reaction was the same: people hated it.

On the importance of autonomy and power in interior design.

Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch

and then there are times
that both sides seek to disown
to cut my cords
let me fall…

Targeted groups came to be attributed a biological or timeless essence, not because this was inevitable, we argue, but because of these failures to historicize inequality.

A community is defined by four criteria: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

… these six are conditions that are conducive to amiability, that engender feelings of endearment and respect

Six warm-hearted qualities practiced among the mendicants.

I found him on the porch that morning…

The whole idea that all of this can be locked up in a little box and say ‘Oh, nothing much happened before the invention of farming,’ is just beginning to look kind of silly.

An archeologist responds to Sapiens and points out that history is always more variegated and contingent than our neat stories let us believe.

Phil kept all this to himself, though there was another person who noticed there was something different about the new guy…

An hour of stories of people failing to see what is right in front of their faces.

Onions are fallible, only
pretending to be infinite…

Today, thanks to a Canadian passport, I’m entering my father’s homeland for the first time.

A documentary about Tibetans and the struggle to preserve their culture under Chinese occupation.

The point of Metta is not what we feel about a person, at least not in the beginning, but rather what we aspire to

A thorough account of love and relationships from a Buddhist perspective.

A mysterious letter shocked Britain in 2014, alleging an Islamist plot to take over one city’s general schools. But who wrote it?

An eight-part miniseries in which two journalists attempt to expose an eight-year-old conspiracy in Birmingham’s public schools. The Trojan Horse Affair shows how minor racial biases and stereotypes, multiplied across society, ignited into a full-blown, moral panic and, along the way, they uncover state secrets, an ominous cucumber, and serious questions about the role of journalism in a biased world.

In the morning when the Sun returns, it’s possible for us to hope.

We have been through such hardship and danger together. Now we must love one another.

I found the world so new

Sometimes I get a little bit Genghis Khan

Thailand has long been known to be friendly to the queer community. However this is not always the case for gay monks

With its tropical climate, lower costs and culture of respect for the elderly, Thailand is attracting families dealing with dementia and Alzheimer’s from as far away as Europe.

Mahānāma, why do you say that they will make it as Vajjis?

How to cimb the social ladder the Buddhist way.

A spiritual community is nothing if it cannot take care of its most vulnerable.

A spirited defense of the anitiya rules of the Bhikkhu Pātimokkha which require monks to take allegations of sexual impropriety seriously: a responsibility many Buddhist monks and leaders today have failed to live up to.

In recent years the community of Tibetan Buddhists has been agitated by an intense dispute concerning the practice of a controversial deity, Gyel-chen Dor-je Shuk-den. Several Tibetan monks have been brutally murdered, and the Tibetan community in general and the Geluk tradition in particular have become profoundly polarized. […] Why is Shugden so controversial?

An excellent explainer of the Dalai Lama’s antipathy towards this peculiar Gelug protector.

How does one say “what if” without reproach?

A kaleidoscopic meditation on race, identity, culture, and deep listening.

You don’t care for someone because you love them, you love them because you care

A far-reaching conversation about childhood.

… madness itself is not a role that can be played any old how. In every generation are quite firm rules about how you should behave when you are crazy.

A meditation on the impact of biotechnology on society.

This decision is about business. Just not exactly in the way he meant.

On why there are so few actors with disabilities.

Like power, gender is everywhere, running through our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the earth, and the relations between nations, classes, and cultures. And like power, it is not a problem in itself but instead a question of how we do it.