Ingroup Favoritism

When we decide to lie, we privilege some other value over honesty. The value is often compassion, as people lie more about their feelings than about anything else. 

Those who tell prosocial lies are often viewed as more trustworthy and more moral than are people who tell harsh truths...

Delayed gratification works because the benefits compound. We go through the pain of doing something with the understanding that over the long run, they will produce far more value than we put into them. 

So why is delayed gratification so hard to practice? Because it's hard to do. We need ...

We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth; we mostly focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another and estimate value accordingly.

For example, we don't know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we c...