Insight by Psychology

Believing you fully control outcomes raises your chances of success because perceiving control increases effort and persistence, whereas seeing results as mostly chance reduces motivation and thus actual performance.

Explainable AI often needs explanations that convince people because humans build trust via plausible, comprehensible narratives, so a convincing story can be more effective than a perfectly literal account of internal processes.

World-record performances often need favorable external conditions because transient boosts like tailwinds add performance margin that, combined with top-level ability, enable records that ability alone might not reach.

Dehumanization plus unchecked power enables extreme cruelty because turning people into 'non‑people' collapses emotional barriers to harm, and concentrated power with social conformity removes accountability for atrocities.

Successful people often believe the world is meritocratic because survivor bias leads them to observe only those who worked hard and succeeded, causing them to generalize that effort reliably produces success while ignoring failed but hardworking peers.

Increasing physical or psychological distance—via artillery, remote weapons, or dehumanizing rhetoric—makes mass violence easier because it removes direct confrontation and the moral resistance that face-to-face contact normally triggers.

Basic ingroup–outgroup loyalties create social distance from outsiders, which reduces empathy and makes harmful treatment of outgroups psychologically permissible.

Social fitness is a practice because relationships weaken without ongoing attention, so regular routines (calls, shared activities, check‑ins) are needed to preserve bonds that regulate stress and well‑being.