Feeling outraged feels more powerful than feeling afraid. Provocateurs have always been able to capture attention and whip up emotional reactions. We are emotional creatures, governed by our base instinctive survival reactions. Hyper-alertness for any potential danger is hardwired into us at the genetic level. We don’t even have to…

Physical attractiveness is powerful but it is not the only influential type of attraction. Research has proven again and again that we are predisposed to view and treat people we perceive as attractive more favorably. Definitions of what is considered attractive can vary wildly from culture to culture or over…

When provocation and attention are the only true goal, no actual results are necessary. The ‘information economy’ has morphed into the ‘attention economy’. Attention has come to matter more than verifiable accuracy or results, it is the only currency. Our accusations do not to be based in any verifiable evidence…

# 3 — Loud matters more than any other factor. We would all rather have the world around us confirm and reinforce our current perspectives, interpretations, and opinions than challenge or contradict them. We would rather be right than wrong. …

We all agree with the concept of fairness, in the abstract. Applying it however… We all recognize the notion of fairness as a universal and fundamental good. Of course things being fair for all people is a good thing, an ideal. Things get sticky when we start striving to achieve…

No longer a hobby or a career, it has become an all-encompassing lifestyle. Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. Mark Twain Anger is a natural emotional reaction. We feel it in…

Whether it actually is a choice or not. In a strange irony we feel safer when there is a villain. Bad guys are dangerous, a malevolent presence threatening our lives with a promise of potential doom. But if at all possible we would vastly prefer a black-hat wearing villain to…

And must take the form of declaring a side. We are in the midst of a highly conflicted time in the history of public discourse. Never before has every individual had access to so much information, spanning every continent and topic, and yet the dominant form of engagement between people…

Plugging our ears and trying to shout it down only exhausts us and makes us look silly. Change is a daunting and uncomfortable thing, even a change for the better we fully want and have worked for. Change means replacing something known with something new, unfamiliar, and it is a…