Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile. The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile, which in turn passes the smile into someone else's brain.”

“In humans the mirror neuron system is found in brain regions that correspond directly to those studied in macaques. But in humans the mirror neurons have a much stronger connection to emotion-related areas of the brain—first to the insular cortex, and from there to the amygdala and other limbic areas. People feel each other's pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates.”

“Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more. It makes them parochial altruists. The authors conclude that their findings "provide evidence for the idea that neurobiological mechanisms in general, and oxyto-cinergic systems in particular, evolved to sustain and facilitate within-group coordination and cooperation."”

“Durkheimian higher-level sentiments is "collective effervescence," which describes the passion and ecstasy that group rituals can generate. As Durkheim put it: "The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation." ”

“Durkheim frequently criticized his contemporaries, such as Freud, who tried to explain morality and religion using only the psychology of individuals and their pairwise relationships. (God is just a father figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society."

“Ehrenreich was surprised to discover how little help she could get from psychology in her quest to understand collective joy. Psychology has a rich language for describing relationships among pairs of people, from fleeting attractions to ego-dissolving love to pathological obsession. But what about the love that can exist among dozens of people?”

“Ehrenreich argues, collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal "biotechnology" for binding groups together. She agrees with McNeill that it is a form of muscular bonding. It fosters love, trust, and equality. It was common in ancient Greece (think of Dionysus and his cult) and in early Christianity (which she says was a "danced" religion until dancing in church was suppressed in the Middle Ages).”

“If the hive hypothesis is true, then it has enormous implications for how we should design organizations, study religion, and search for meaning and joy in our lives. Is it true? Is there really a hive switch?”

“My hypothesis in this chapter is that human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than our-selves. That ability is what I'm calling the hive switch.”

“Darwin believed that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection operating at the individual level and at the group level. Tribes with more virtuous members replaced tribes with more selfish members.”