This Huffpo article presents ten important psychological studies, many of them counter-intuitive, at least to those of us who aren’t yet familiar with these studies. Here are some defining traits of human animals:

We all have some capacity for evil.
We don’t notice what’s right in front of us.
Delaying gratification is hard — but we’re more successful when we do.
We can experience deeply conflicting moral impulses.
We’re easily corrupted by power.
We seek out loyalty to social groups and are easily drawn to intergroup conflict.
We only need one thing to be happy.
We thrive when we have strong self-esteem and social status.
We constantly try to justify our experiences so that they make sense to us.
We buy into stereotypes in a big way.