Carl Jung explains how Anima and Animus affect men and women.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek draws a parallel between religion and environmentalism, by observing that a lot of people who feel environmentally conscious perform certain actions to alleviate their guilt and to indulge in their sense of altruism, rather than objectively assessing the actual impact of their actions, and spending time to understand the environmental science.

Carl Sagan 30+ years ago asked the question about who decides what is correct, and how scientific results should be interpreted: "Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if people don't know anything about it? [Science] is a way of skeptically interrogating the universe, with a fine understanding of human fallibility. [If we] are not skeptical of ones in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious."

Steven Pinker observes that there were a lot of improvements in the human condition over the last 200 years, and that, in their quest for people's attention, journalists mostly do not portray the positive, and instead focus predominantly on the negative aspects of the world, thus giving an incorrect impression about what the world is like.