Emotions as adaptive. Emotions are not tools of cognition, according to Rand. If this is true, why do people have emotions at all? What ro...

Gratitude as social glue. In Out of Character , David Desteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo make the following research-inspired remarks about gr...

Social Isolation and Compassion. Psychological research has found evidence that social isolation tends to numb a person's sense of comp...

Gratitude and trust. Although honesty (and presumably trust) are explicit Objectivist virtues, Rand did not appear eager to put any great e...

Objectivist Virtues and Compassion. The six primary Objectivist virtues are: rationality, honesty, integrity, productivity, pride, and jus...

Innate biases against diversity. There exists in many people a desire to preserve various uniformities. Many individuals, perhaps most indi...

Pride & Hubris. The Objectivist view of pride is actually much more conventional than Rand and her disciples make it out to be. Earned ...

Denial of Jealousy. From a naturalist point of view, it is difficult to escape the view that man is a product of an evolutionary process, a...

Jealousy. Although Rand did not have much to say about jealousy, apparently it was not an emotion well regarded by the founder of Objectiv...

Love. Rand's most sophisticated theory of love appears in The Romantic Manifesto : Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s...

T-1000 level Randroid Ed Cline has always been a creepy guy, but now he seems to be having psychotic episodes. In honour of the 10th anniver...

Sexual Attraction. Rand's views on sex constitute one of the most absurd doctrines in her philosophy -- so absurd, in fact, that many O...

Incest Avoidance. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt often confronts participants in his lab experiments with the following scenario: Julie ...

The Trolley Problem. Experimental psychologists are fond of posing the following moral problem to their subjects: A trolley is hurtling d...

Commenter Anon69 makes the excellent point that by evading normal standards of criticism, Objectivism is "defenseless against rational...

Moral Philosophy = Rationalization. There are convincing and powerful reasons to believe that nearly all that passes for what might be call...

Pervasiveness of Rationalization in Human Thought. Studies of unconscious brain processes (sometimes called "alien subroutines")...

Internal Conflicts Ineradicable. Rand's vision of the rational man contained a rather odd feature: he experienced no internal conflic...

Sam Anderson, in a review of Anne Heller's biography of Rand, notes: "Eyewitnesses say that [Rand] never lost an argument." G...

Art as "fuel." For Rand, one of the primary objectives of art was to serve as a kind of spiritual sustenance or "fuel":...