1. The ability to achieve intimacy, involvement and empathy with others, reading their thoughts and feelings by "recruiting" our intuitive inquiry skills, does not necessarily mean that we're always reading the real thoughts and feelings of others. Often we find ourselves ascribing thoughts and feelings to others that are not actually their intention. In fact, we have no way to accurately read the thoughts and feelings of others, but only to evaluate and make inferences. We can bring good and reasonable guesses based on what they say, what we read between the lines, what we see from their faces and their eyes, and what can be learned from their behavior and their way of life. This is the most impressive talent of the human being. But reading the thoughts and feelings of others, well as the emotional state and self-worth of others, is not more than reading the image of our own thoughts, beliefs and feelings and projecting them upon the other. What matters is not the other person's position, but what we think about the position of the other. When we, for example, see someone suffer and feel anxious, when we look at a picture that describes horror, we often react to our own mental images.

2. No wonder we often confuse the white and the colourless. We consistently call colourless things white (white vinegar, white spirit, white liquor, white diamonds, white light) and white things (paper, screens, walls) 'blank' or 'empty' — when actually they are full of white. This conflation makes us partially blind to white. Like the walls of our homes or the paper on which these words are printed, the colour hides in plain sight: neutral, natural, original. White, we conclude, is what things looked like before their purity was polluted by colour, and is therefore the condition to which they should return. This is the idea behind the detergent that 'brings back true whiteness' to clothes, the toothpaste that 'restores natural whiteness' to teeth, and the skin cream that promises a 'natural white' complexion. None of those substances is naturally or originally white, but we repeatedly convince ourselves otherwise.

3. Universalistic cultures believe that social values and standards take precedence over individual needs or claims by friends and relations; rules are intended to apply equally to the whole "universe" of members. Exceptions serve only to weaken the rule of law. For example, a rule that people should bear truthful witness in a court of law or give their honest judgment to an insurance company concerning a payment it is about to make is more important than particular family or friendship ties. This is not to say that particular ties are unimportant in universalistic cultures; rather, universal truth as embodied in the law is believed to be more important than these relationships. By contrast, particularistic cultures see the ideal culture in terms of human friendship, extraordinary achievement, unique situations, and close personal relationships. The spirit of the law is deemed to be more important than the letter of the law. Clearly, there are rules and laws in particularistic cultures, but these are designed simply to codify how people relate to one another. Rules are needed (if only to be able to make exceptions to them for particular cases), but people need to be able to count on their friends.

4. Determining the "state of scientific knowledge" is fairly straightforward from the angle of the standard view of science. Scientific knowledge is more or less dictated by nature: researchers pose questions and carefully design and carry out experiments, to which nature then responds with a loud and clear Yes or No. Uncertainty exists only in areas where not enough research has been done yet. A lack of transparency because of contradictory scientific results is not expected because nature is the same everywhere: researchers will always and everywhere generate the same results; if they don't, someone is making mistakes. However, the actual practice of scientific research shows another image. Certainly scientific controversies are the rule rather than the exception at the cutting edge of research. And yet this does not automatically lead us to conclude that one of the research groups involved must be acting in bad faith. Apparently, we assume in practice that nature does not dictate unambiguously what the response to a particular examined research question is.

5. In early battles over property the principles of law are rehearsed. The youngest children claim ownership of something based on the argument of their own desires: 'It's mine because I want it.' Later, around two years of age, they begin to argue with an acknowledgement of others' rights to claim the same property for themselves. Understanding others' ownership is a way of discovering that there are other individuals. The first arguments outlined by children are usually: 'I had it first'; 'They gave it to me.' This intuition that the first person to touch something wins indefinite rights to its usage does not disappear in adulthood. Heated discussions over a parking spot, a seat on a bus, or the ownership of an island by the first country to plant its flag there are private and institutional examples of these heuristics. Perhaps because of that, it is unsurprising that large social conflicts, like in the Middle East, are perpetuated by very similar arguments to those used in a dispute between two-year-olds: 'I got here first'; 'They gave it to me.'

6. If you get the flu, you likely experience fatigue and malaise, aches and chills, coughing and sneezing. If you are wise, you stay in bed and withdraw from social activities. These symptoms of infection are (unfortunately) familiar to all of us, because they are stereotyped —that is, they happen to all of us with more or less the same pattern when encountered with a pathogen such as influenza. Such symptoms of infection are also conserved throughout the animal kingdom, which gives us insight into their natural selection. What you may not know, even if you are well versed in science or medicine, is that these "symptoms" are not side effects of infection at all. That is, they are not initiated by the influenza virus itself, which would much prefer to remain undetected within its cozy host. Rather they are evidence of detection and retaliation by your immune system — these "sickness behaviors" are organized, adaptive strategies orchestrated by your own immune system and are critical for host survival. To put it bluntly, your own immune system is making you feel terrible, in order to make you better.

7. Psychological characteristics such as attitudes (e.g., being for or against immigration restrictions), beliefs (e.g., whether or not God exists), tastes (e.g, preferring the Beastie Boys or Beethoven), and habits (e.g., going to bed early or late), unlike emotions and moods, are at least somewhat stable over time, and they clearly reflect non-intellectual differences between people. However, psychologists still do not usually consider them true components of personality. The reason is that attitudes, beliefs, tastes and habits are normally quite narrow and restricted in their psychological relevance. Attitudes and beliefs concern specific propositions, tastes concern specific experiences, and habits concern specific actions. Personality characteristics, in contrast, have relatively broad relevance: they refer to generalized patterns of psychological functioning. For instance, people might be said have "authoritarian' personalities if, in addition to their specifically anti-immigration sentiment, they hold a variety of prejudiced, repressive, and highly conventional attitudes. Similarly, people who go to bed late might be said to be ambitious if this habit is part of a larger pattern of hard work and competitive striving, or extraverted and sensation-seeking if it is part of a pattern of relentless partying.

8. We can distinguish between objective and subjective probability. Objective probability is where what will happen is genuinely indeterminate. Radioactive decay could be one example. For any given radioactive atom, the probability of it decaying over the period of its half-life is 50-50. This means that, if you were to take ten such atoms, it is likely that five will decay over the period of the element's half-life and five will not decay. On at least some interpretations, it is genuinely indeterminate which atoms will fall into which category. Subjective probability, on the other hand, refers to cases where there may be no actual indeterminacy, but some particular mind or set of minds makes a probability judgement about the likelihood of some event. These subjects do so because they lack complete information about the causes that will determine the event. Their ignorance requires them to make a probabilistic assessment, usually by assigning a probability based on the number of occurrences of each outcome over a long sequence in the past.