Sure I remember your theory, Tom. It's valid as far as it goes, but doesn't go nearly far enough.

You're taking the old-fashioned mechanistic view that the human mind and the human brain are the same thing, and that human thought is limited to, and generated by, only the capabilities hardwired into the brain. In that view the human mind would exhibit a "chunkiness" that exactly maps to the "chunkiness" of the kludgy brain. Yet our minds are often more flexible and more integrated than the chunky-brain theory would predict.

Remember my theory that the human mind is immersed in the human social environment, which both builds the mind out of the brain, and sustains the mind throughout life? The mind can tap into the greater "mentality" of that society, to acquire knowledge as well as ways of thinking that aren't built in to the brain. The brain has no region labelled "The Scientific Method", yet minds can incorporate it from the general intellectual environment. Conversely, while the brain contains ancient primitive regions such as "Berserker rage" and "kill the stranger", our minds are capable of taming those beasts with the support of the social environment. Clearly the mind is not just the result of the brain.

Or to use a more trivial (on many levels) example, you and I right now are engaged in "co-thinking", as we externalize and share our thoughts--my mind is borrowing a bit of your mind, and vice-versa. In less partisan situations people collaborate by joining their minds to produce mental constructs that one of the minds alone could not have produced. The brain doesn't provide that capability, it's provided by the external environment.

I related the view in "The First Idea" that emotion, far from being the enemy of reason, is in fact what creates the human intellect, and remains an integral part of it. There is a "human reason" that's a superset of the dry intellectual reason that you seem to think is superior to that human reason. It's clear that you think that the study of "loss aversion" reveals a flaw in the human mind, perhaps one that ought to be either corrected or ignored as irrelevant to reason. I see it differently: This is the way that the human mind works, in all its emotional glory, and that decisions about human affairs must take the reality of the human mind into account in order to build societies that real humans find satisfying to live in.

You can point to the arithmetic of cheap consumer goods as demonstrating the superiority of American society all you want, but that argument does nothing to address the feeling that Americans have been reporting for years, that they're feeling vaguely unfulfilled and unsatisfied with all that material abundance, and that "surely there's more to life than this?". That's the intrinsic emotional substrate of the human mind that you, and all Conservatives, alternately ignore or deplore.

I suspect you might not have read to the end of the article:

Consider one more experimental example to prove the point: the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer -- the very embodiment of Homo economicus -- he isn't going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Why? Because they aren't fair. Says who? Says the moral emotion of "reciprocal altruism," which evolved over the Paleolithic eons to demand fairness on the part of our potential exchange partners. "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" only works if I know you will respond with something approaching parity. The moral sense of fairness is hard-wired into our brains and is an emotion shared by most people and primates tested for it, including people from non-Western cultures and those living close to how our Paleolithic ancestors lived.

When it comes to money, as in most other aspects of life, reason and rationality are trumped by emotions and feelings.

"Because they aren't fair"...fairness is something most people judge with their guts. As the study shows, fairness isn't a matter of arithmetic. Nor, for that matter, is morality. Conservatives have a history of coming to disaster by ignoring or resisting emotional moral judgments, and seem constantly blindsided when their seemingly rational plans are laid low by emotion. It wouldn't happen if you'd acknowledge the legitimacy of human emotion. All the evidence seems to suggest that the fault lies not in the human mind, but in the flawed Conservative view of the human mind.