Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
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episode 83: Ego Trip
David and Tamler continue their series of breaking down a classic essay/article in their fields. For this installment, David assigns Tamler Anthony Greenwald's fascinating 1980 review article "The Totalitarian Ego." What do totalitarian regimes, scientific theories, and your own cognitive biases have in common? As it turns out, quite a bit. Why do egos rewrite our memories, preserve our beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, and make us think we're way more important than we are? And how does Thomas Kuhn fit into all this? Plus, we read a few of our favorite iTunes reviews.
Links- Audience video of Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2016 Session on Moral Purity with Kurt Gray, Jon Haidt, David Pizarro (courtesy of Kate Johnson) [youtube.com]
- Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American psychologist, 35, 603. [verybadwizards.com]
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