David DeSteno

speaker

570 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 27 Apr

David DeSteno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Good Life Project · The Science Behind Why Religion Actually Works | David DeSteno · 27 Apr 2026 podcast

It is, what do we owe to each other?

And I think that's what oftentimes gets lost in some of the ways we're interpreting some of these old spiritual techniques and trying to make them fit the modern world.

We are human.

We didn't evolve to be good or to be bad.

We evolved to be adaptive.

And since we're a social species, we depend on each other.

There are times we have to care about each other.

We have to support each other.

We have to be fair.

Because if we were always just self-interested, no one would want to work with us, cooperate with us, marry us, etc.

But...

when the mind perceives a way to have your cake and eat it too, when it perceives a way to be selfish without paying the reputational costs, that's very adaptive.

And so we will, you know, it will push us that way.

And what I think these faith traditions do is they build on those innate impulses, these moral sentiments of, of,

wanting to care for others, of compassion, of gratitude, of wanting to pay back our debts or even pay them forward.

And they allow us to take those out of just being controlled by biological instinct and to allow us to tune them toward moral goals that we value.

And so, you know, a lot of these religious practices, what the science is showing is

The rituals aren't just superstitious things.

They actually affect what we're doing.

So take meditation.

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