Top Highlights

• You can’t separate “culture” from “psychology” or “psychology” from “biology,” because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think.
• Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.
• Individualism is best thought of as a psychological cluster that allows people to better navigate WEIRD social worlds by calibrating their perceptions, attention, judgments, and emotions.
• The feeling of guilt emerges when one measures their own actions and feelings against a purely personal standard. I can feel guilty for eating a giant pizza alone in my house or for not having given my change to the homeless guy that I encountered early Sunday morning on an empty Manhattan street. I feel this because I’ve fallen below my own person...
• Overall, the greater the number of domains such as food sharing and defense that are governed by cooperative norms, the greater the degree of fitness interdependence among group members.