Two Minds Blog

My main purpose in writing this blog has always been to continue exploring the reasons behind health behavior. I often say in talks about my theory that the question "why don't people take their medication?" led me naturally to the question "why do people do anything ?" In pursuit of that question, I had several blog posts this year on health behavior theory: a post on Lazarus and Folkman's theory of stress and coping ; a post on self-determination theory , which has become entwined in the literature with motivational interviewing techniques; a post on Leventhal's dual-process model of cognition and emotion, which was a source for Two Minds Theory; and a look at new developments in a popular health-behavior theory that I had previously critiqued, the theory of planned behavior . I was also pleased to share a guest post by my colleague Dr. Britt Ritchie, who shared an example of Two Minds Theory in her evolving understanding of her own public-speaking a...

One of this year's most shocking developments has been a political fight over empathy -- yes, that  empathy -- with serious people disagreeing on whether empathy is a positive or negative force in the course of human affairs. Early in 2025, Vice President Vance invoked a Catholic doctrine called the ordo amoris  ("order of love") to argue that our moral duty extends more directly to our immediate friends and family than to people who are more distant in terms of race, religion, geography, or nationality. This drew a direct rebuke from then- Pope Francis I , who argued that the Vice President had misunderstood St. Augustine's writings on the topic. The Pope wrote a defense of unlimited empathy based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, discovered "by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." The Pope's message specifically took issue with new U.S. policies using increased force to target immigrants as criminals an...

The pace of technological change continues unabated, and many conversations turn to concerns about how our use of technology might be changing us humans in return. I wrote earlier this year about Jonathan Haidt's analysis of the ways in which two specific technologies -- smartphone and social media apps -- can have negative school or mental health consequences for adolescents. At a recent meeting of scholars on a journal's editorial board, my colleagues and I debated what uses of AI might be allowable versus not during the writing of a scientific article. And I wrote about risks that can occur when people use AI models as a companion or a counselor, tasks that it isn't always good at. In a recent book titled Jung vs. Borg (in which "Jung" is Carl the analytical psychiatrist, and "Borg" is the resistance-is-futile cyborg collective from  Star Trek ), Glen Slater argues that technology can have negative effects on us in four areas:  Loss of connection to ...