So Why Is There So Much Hate Around?

There might not be a satisfying answer but it doesn't really matter because of the impact it has on us.

We are in the Age of Authenticity, where ‘be yourself’ is the defining advice in life, love and career.”

John Locke, the English philosopher, thought that the most important compone...

It could be because it's beneficial for well-being and cooperation, but it could just be how we think about everything. We have a tendency to reflect on a thing's positive traits; this is called

A belief in the morally good self can give a person hope to keep trying in poor circumstances.

Alternatively, it could be fuel for a kind of existential crisis if your life doesn’t match up to your “true self.” 

More pressure to "be yourself" or "find yourself" can add to that stress—...

If having a morally good true self is core to our identity, then acting immorally isn’t just doing the wrong thing—it threatens our sense of identity and causes a lot of distress. 

In response, some people might respond to the distress by denying that they're acting immorally and getting de...

A study found that when subjects were asked to think about criminal offenders, people were more willing to say that a person’s true self is morally bad. 

The more people think that a person’s true self is morally bad, the more they support retributive punishment. The idea that the true self...

We can start with the idea that people “have some essential drive to be morally good, while emphasizing that work needs to be done to realize that with some reliability in practice.”

Acknowledging our belief in a good true self can be a way to appreciate our capacity for goodness. Then, we ...

People attribute positive traits to the true self, and negative traits to something else. And while we usually think about ourselves differently than others, we think that other people’s true selves are morally good too.