Note that cognitive dissonance theory diverges at times from behaviorism. Behaviorism predicts that if you reward someone for certain behavior, they will repeat it, punish them, and they will avoid it. Release dog food when the dog presses a lever, and it will press the lever again; shock it when it presses the lever, and it will avoid pressing it again. But dissonance theory, like Russell in the letter to Donnelly, predicts that in certain cases, if people experience some discomfort to achieve something, they will value it more highly, to justify the effort, than if they had gotten it without a struggle. Fraternity hazing rituals and army boot camp are based on this fact.

nother group, with the dominant group creating what we have called a ‘ruling class fiction’ to avoid the discomfort that recognizing its own injustice would cause it.

Unsurprisingly, then, he frequently asserts that conventional morality is often just a cover-up and justification for bad human impulses and behavior, as in his 1925 essay ‘What I Believe’, where he writes: “In the ordinary man and woman there is a certain amount of active malevolence, both special ill will directed to particular enemies and general impersonal pleasure in the misfortune of others. It is customary to cover this over with fine phrases; almost half of conventional morality is a cloak for it.” Russell continues with examples of the malevolence we use morality to justify. They include “the

To do so, we must overcome radically different visions of how industrial policy should be structured. The business community’s vision is one of U.S.-owned firms around the world that are subsidized and deregulated to make them more competitive with foreign counterparts. That stands in stark contrast to labor’s vision of an industrial policy that will result in high-paying jobs in the United States.

Political and ideological timidity has restrained the administration from adequately funding these programs. And now there is no funding. Even worse, the administration seems to have given up on jobs altogether and has embraced austerity even though unemployment languishes near double digits.

In its purest sense, game theory is the study of models of conflict or co-operation between intelligent decision-makers. Everything from the functioning of ant colonies to which products consumers might buy has been explained with this mathematical framework.

The Nash equilibrium for this problem is therefore that both suspects give evidence against the other. But this is not the optimal solution – they get eight years jail each as opposed to a potential two each –