WARNING: There is something wrong with this video.  Does the same thing no matter how you access it.  Starts at 18 minutes.  Please start at the beginning once it loads.

What’s not to love about this video.  Right off Dan Ariely trashes game theory for exactly the right reason, because it only predicts strictly logical, long game, behavior.  Not the game of emotional context aka: emotional means, and nonlinear thinking aka:imagination the empaths play.

He goes on to demonstrate how most people cheat a little most of the time.  And guess what his shredder experiment catches?  There is a small group of outliars that cheat perfectly.  They simply can’t resist the golden opportunity of free money.  But that distribution of likely psychopaths (or possibly starving desperate empaths?) is not the REALLY interesting part.  Because they finish impossibly fast the other participants see they have obviously cheated.   Then their mean level of cheating goes up more.  The normally light cheaters, cheat more.  You can see society disintegrating before your eyes.

He goes on about religion and the catholic church a bit and makes a subtle but important point.  He talks about how both recalling the 10 commandments (regardless of the participants current faith structure) or confession makes people temporally more honest.  He doesn’t elaborate on why but it seems obvious to me.  The metamind’s context has changed.  Accessing the new memories has changed the lens (context), and the new emotional state forces a change in perspective.  The conscience is just the mean of our emotions and the religious context is not one where the ego plays a big role.  No ego, no action, no cheating.

Thanks for the vid, keep em coming!