This reminds me of Girard's idea that Christianity (and others I'm sure) was effective because it showed things from the victim's point of view. I'm not making the claim that it fixed everything, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
> But there's something to be said for a set of values that emphasizes love, empathy, and reciprocity, regardless of the religion.
Such as how often the religious one fails to do that?
My impression is that there is a recurring theme that it is violent towards outgroups and even more violent towards ingroups that don’t conform exactly. Leaving only compassion towards an ever splintering sect for the brief time everyone believes the exact same thing.
Also not exclusive to Christianity, but I mostly only hear from the escapees.
I see that failing to practice what is preached does not invalidate the message.
Humans make lots of mistakes and the consequences of that are reflected in all of our institutions. Thankfully, those institutions eventually die away and new, hopefully improved ones grow in their place until the cycle repeats. Happens on all scales.
> The findings raise the possibility that one day treatments that disrupt the reward of intergroup aggression might help to reduce the costly and persistent human phenomenon of violence toward other groups
A little G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate should clear that right up!
Each individual person is liable to become a "them" once one asserts one's individuality from the group identity. Group coalitions that do not respect individuality often fall prey to base emotions as they collectively punish individual identities. Individual creators are largely responsible for the actual work, new ideas, innovations, things...
The feedback loop described in the OP creates groupthink, politically correct culture, an abundance of blind spots, & a narrow path of evolution specifically tailored to the group's worldview. Group "whips" are given positions of power to mete out punishment against those who cross lines defined by group & interpreted by the "whip".
If one sees all models as being false, the teleological fate of the OP's group feedback loop unchecked is group delusion, irrelevance, harming a perennial ever changing subgroup of outlier individuals, & eventual collapse. The perennial ever changing subgroup of outliers individuals is necessary to feed the base emotional reward circuitry of the "in group", a necessary sacrifice to cohere the "in group", feeding the group's evolutionary descent...
Perceived morality is important for the "whip". There's always a statement of alibi & justification while the "whip" is punishing others. "For the greater good" is often an alibi to justify the emotional reward circuitry "hit" of those afflicted with these addictions
I agree that Republicans are a group identity with the group problems. Just be careful that "the Republicans" is not the "out group" of any group identity that you may participate with. The effects described by the OP can be subtle & sneaky & applies to everyone. Just like a seemingly innocuous bug or an abstract primitive can cause deep cascading ramifications in a complex system. Symbols or proxies for thought effect one's entire worldview without through examination.
Claiming that someone is doing this is also a great way to deflect conversation away from the actual and material harm that many politicians inflict on the populace through their greed
I'm not American and I've only visited for four months total, so my view of the politics is mainly from the news and forums like this one. From this, given how often I see Republicans saying it's the Democrats who are restricting freedoms, I have to assume the two camps (as in being or the other as identity, not necessarily just voting red or blue last time) actually want to do different things — if you'll bear with the obvious stereotypes, reds want to have guns and limit birth control, while and blues want to have birth control and limit guns.
The freedoms that republicans care about is the freedom to deny gay people marriage, the freedom to purchase assault weapons before your brain fully matures and without any training whatsoever, the freedom to use your religion as an excuse to shit on people and indoctrinate the children of others
Democrats only care about corporations and profits.
Republicans are social conservatives, Democrats are fiscal conservatives
I thought Democrats also cared about keeping the church out of the state? Which is also a restriction on the freedom of the teachers to get preachy, and I can easily imagine someone upset and demanding "I want the right to pray before each class"… not that I would sympathise with them: my memories of school include being annoyed by the mandatory religion, as my parents sent me to a Catholic school (in the UK, though IIRC in the UK even non-religious schools are currently required to have regular Christian-themed assemblies).
If I consider that none of them represent my views, ethics, and moral structure then yes. I do think that their actions do more harm than good.
But the ingroup outgroups in this situation are those with money and power and those without. The political class represents money and power, nothing more and nothing less
The political class provides legislation to their constituents, the donors with money, while claiming that they care about regular working class Americans but doing literally nothing to ever help them
Republicans actively work to harm people through restrictive legislation and democrats inadvertently harm people through their careless and shitty legislation that on the surface sounds like it could help people but when you read the actual text its all bullshit carveouts for corporations to protect their exploitatively gained profits
They're just con artists gaming the country for money, plain and simple. But that's what happens when your cultural ideology puts money and profit and "the economy" above the people that make up the society
> reds want to have guns and limit birth control, while blues was to have birth control and limit guns.
This isn’t very accurate, FWIW (though easy to get this impression.) The vast, vast majority of Americans want access to birth control and want reasonable limits on guns (regardless of whether they would like to own guns themselves). I think it’s like over 90% in both cases.
You might be thinking of the debate over abortion, rather than birth control.
Reds might want to own guns more often, but they’re mostly in favor of more gun control than we have today. Blues also want more gun control that we have today, but are slightly more in favor of allowing abortions.
These debates, fwiw, are sideshow social signal and tribal politics. They are exaggerating and polarizing the reality of what the populace really wants. The actual distinction between red and blue is (was) fiscal policy. We’ve mostly stopped debating fiscal policy in good faith in this country, but nonetheless the terms “conservative” and “liberal” really came from how we want to tax and spend, and whether we believe in social services and safety nets especially at the federal level (democratic), or whether we prefer that states have more control and we spend less money on social services and disenfranchised people.
Something things you might want to consider. as this article points out human brains evolved to push the individual to identify with a group and be hostile to other groups because it improved fitness. Through most of human existence this group survival pressure outweighed objective rational perception of reality . Political parties often tap into this in group out group emotional connection. While I agree that Republican Party logic is often weak and often emotional, I would argue that the Democratic Party is as well, just on different issues.
Something thing you might want to consider. as this article points out human brains evolved to push the individual to identify with a group and be hostile to other groups because it improved fitness. Through most of human existence this group survival pressure outweighed objective rational perception of reality . Political parties often tap into this in group out group emotional connection. While I agree that Republican Party logic is often weak and often emotional, I would argue that the Democratic Party is as well, just on different issues.
Another thing to think about is that by attacking an “out group” (I assume you’re not a republican) in this post you are potentially showing the behavior described in the article.
Well I'm not democrat either, both parties do it to a degree, the republicans are just completely insane and super aggressive about it so its a bit more obvious
Libertarians also don't seem to recognise the inherently exploitative characteristics of capitalism and refuse to accept that regulation is necessary for the protection of workers and the populace from assholes with too much time, money, and power
Some of us are very aware of such exploitation, but we’re skeptical that we’ll be less exploited by those given political power to deal with those immoral capitalists. History is full of examples of party leaders in Marxist countries wining and dining while the populace lives in poverty. It happens when too much power rests in any institution. So I personally oppose large businesses as much as I oppose large government, and pretty much all large institutions in general(though a few types of them are almost unavoidable).
But what kind of policy does that opposition to large businesses translate to? How do you prevent them from actually arising?
Left answer to that is that large businesses are the result of unbounded concentration of capital. Left authoritarians (the ones I think you refer to as Marxists? even though not all of them are, and not all Marxists are authoritarian) want to limit it by state action. Left libertarians think that taking the government out of the picture and reworking property rights around some notion of usufruct is sufficient. But what's the right libertarian answer?
That's what I'm wondering. Maybe we agree about the apparent root cause of the issue but we need a tangible solution to it, which could be restructuring ownership of businesses to better suit the people that make up those businesses. Regulation is a way to do that, or other things. But whatever we do will take some sort of regulation, or those same people who have too much money and power are going to keep doing the same old shit
Government protecting property is regulation: it's literally saying "if you touch X, which we consider to be owned by Y, we'll hurt you". It's that regulation that allows people and corporations to accumulate property (and, in particular, capital) indefinitely, knowing that however much they have, the government will intervene on their behalf.
Now imagine the government saying something like "we don't consider X owned by Y; Y already has too much". This isn't regulation per se - nothing is regulated, and there's less enforcement, not more. The government isn't going around taking things away; it's just refusing to recognize X's claim and enforce it.
If people don't have the protection then it doesn't matter what the government does or doesn't do because those who do have power will do the same thing they always have. Shot on those who don't, that is my point
Note that the scientific materialist positivist view is effectively controlled by groups of scientists & journals which are funded by institutions...large pools of capital...controlled by socially powerful groups
Not precisely. "Envy" literally means what rhetorically can be rendered as "having eyes sewn shut": it means "not seeing" (Latin "invidia").
That the envious can be admitted to Purgatory and cleansed through penitence seems to signify that those eyes consciously sewn - which is the actual condition, as per the above - can be part of a process to develop a more subtle sight, also considering that envy is specified as grown out of a focus on earthly goods (so, an idea is to "close the earthly eyes" and learn to see the spiritual goods).
In other words, "if you can't see (which is envy) the spiritual goods, close your eyes to the earthly ones and refocus".
> The researchers had 35 male college students complete a competitive, aggressive task against either a student from their university or from what they were told was a rival university.
Male college students, an “aggressive task”, and a rival university.
College students are literally trained to associate out-competing rival universities as a fun and desirable activity. It’s the entire foundation of sports programs. This study feels like the authors tried to simulate a competitive sports program as closely as they could get away with in their lab environment and then tried to spin it as a profound observation about humanity in general.
This really just reads like “young male college students still enjoy competing against their rival university”
How do you say you associate with the University of Mississippi without saying that you associate with them? Ha. I work there and went to school there too, so those first few sentences(well, except for the playoffs remark lol) sound very familiar.
Fun times. You may remember me if you recall someone with a common first name and the last name of a bird(was there starting in 04); I certainly stayed around there long enough lol. Tended to keep to myself, though.
Were you in college in the US, or somewhere else? It may be more prevalent in the US, dunno. Just based on observations of US sports and cheerleader culture.
It's not universal among U.S. college students either. I went to a Div3 top-tier (academically) liberal arts college, and most people were oblivious to how our sports teams did, unless you were on the team or close friends with someone who was. Probably because we lost a large percentage of the time.
The sports culture is much more relevant at Div1 schools. These get a disproportionate amount of air time (at least as far as sports go), but that's largely because those are the schools where sporting matches are worth watching.
They themselves might have cared, but damn if I wear a purple shirt in Seattle folks are like Go Huskies to me, to the point where I think twice about putting it on or wearing it outside the house. I could give a damn about sports or nationalism, but lots of other idiots do.
That is why we go to great lengths to civilize ourselves. Sports fanaticism is a fetal nationalism. Maybe we should challenge our hardwired programming, it does seem to offer a lot of control in our actions.
Downvoted and reported, frankly. How can you do callously say something about this? You do realize sports fans are (for the most part) self aware of the inconsequence of a sports rivalry in the real world, right?
My wife would not let me wear a tie with Michigan colors to a wedding. Michigan and (the) Ohio State are rivals; she grew up near but did not go to Ohio State.
I chose my car color over my other preferred color (orange) for precisely this reason.
It’s fun to use little heuristics like this - and completely harmless considering the inconsequence of the decision. I know it doesn’t matter, but I can’t buy two cars, and I really could have gone either way. Is this really so far fetched?
I really enjoy trolling the Harvard grads I know by referring to their “time at Yale or Princeton or wherever.” Old school rivalries run deep and are a lot of fun to play up.
Also, for all of you in South Carolina, go Tigers (and Chants), booo Cocks!
I wonder if this research gives hints as to why rivalries are “fun”? Even when you know the in/out group distinction is silly, little aggressions like “boooo Cocks!” can tickle reward areas in the brain. Akin to how scary movies are fun even when you know you’re not in danger.
I’m a proud Gamecock, and maybe that’s why I’m all over this thread.
I just replied to a guy a few comments up about how I unironically chose a red car over orange (one of my favorite colors) because go, fight, win, kick ass, fuck Clemson!
We can all agree the SC state flag is pretty, I guess.
This research gives evidence that outgroup aggression feels good/rewarding. I’d tend to think this is hard-wired biologically. You’re right that it could conceivably be trained, but that’s not what it felt like for me as a young male in college.
While many people (myself included) could anecdotally say that aggression to an outgroup can feel good, it’s the job of science to look for the hard evidence in the brain. This quote from the researchers seemed key:
> “This finding helps to balance the narrative about the psychological processes that underlie aggression against outgroup members, which typically emphasizes negative emotional states such as anger and fear,” Chester said.
> This research gives evidence that outgroup aggression feels good/rewarding. I’d tend to think this is hard-wired biologically.
This research gives evidence that rival college competition is fun to male college students.
The point I was trying to make is that this is a specifically narrow finding with confounding factors (mirrors the structure of sports programs, which are significant social activities at many colleges).
The study authors stretched the narrow funding into a very general finding, which is heavy editorializing. This stretching gets a free pass from many because it feels truthy, but it’s not great science.
Ah, you think the social aspects confound the in/out group distinctions. But what other grouping would have been better? E.g. People from opposite sides of ethnic conflicts, members of bowling clubs vs non-members?
> This research gives evidence that rival college competition is fun to male college students
That’s not accurate. The research is based a-priori on knowing that competition is fun, and is asking the question “which specific parts of the brain are making it fun?”
The abstract concludes:
“Both before and after outgroup exclusion, aggression towards outgroup members was positively associated with activity in the ventral striatum during decisions about how aggressive to be towards their outgroup opponent. Aggression towards outgroup members was also linked to greater post-exclusion activity in the rostral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortexduring provocation from their outgroup opponent. These altered patterns of brain activity suggest that frontostriatal mechanisms may play a significant role in motivating aggression towards outgroup members.”
Perhaps, and studies such as these should have to withstand such questioning. But.....
The problem as I see it isn't expiremntal design. The problem is larger scientific "design." To learn something useful with a sufficiently nuances understanding would take a lot of studies. Replication, redesign, boundary testing of the hypothesis, re-theorizing, etc. Science is supposed to be a process.
With this, it may be possible to arrive at usable knowledge about human psychology and why/how we behave badly. This smattering of disparate studies, even if they were well designed and executed.... It just doesn't lead anywhere.
If expiremnts and studies were pieces in a larger scientific endeavour, I think both quality issues resilience to quality issues would improve naturally.
The authors might even agree with that summary, the paper talks more or less about picking people that give the strongest competitive signal. But the point wasn’t to check whether people enjoy competition, the point was to understand more about how the brain works, right? That does seem like useful research - even when we know we behave a certain way, we don’t always know exactly why, and we certainly have a long way to go toward understanding the brain, no?
Personally I think it’s interesting that the “aggressive task” was to push a computer button faster than the opponent. This isn’t “aggressive” in the way most people would imagine when you describe this study as “simulating” a competitive sports program. It’s more of a clinical/scientific concept of aggression and quite dissimilar from actually playing hockey or lacrosse, for example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Aggression_Paradigm) The participants were sitting alone inside a brain scanner playing an extremely basic video game, and being primed with some pure narrative about who their opponents and team mates were. Physical safety was not in question, and there was no interpersonal interaction (all other players were computer simulation). This says a lot about the power of narrative, and how much we operate on things we’re told and don’t have first hand knowledge of.
Also interesting: left-handed people were excluded. The paper doesn’t appear to say why, but I wonder if that was due to the design of the game UI (seems most likely), or if it was done for statistical reasons and/or known behavioral differences of left vs right handed people (this seems less likely, but possible?).
I would go a step further, and question if this even counts as an “outgroup” in the commonly used sense. These are just rival college teams, not people with opposing beliefs or structures.
A more charitable way to look at it might be 'we identified the specific neural correlates of competitive vs aggressive activity', but that's not as catchy. The authors make the point that they deliberately picked a mild kind of rivalry because it was fun and socially desirable, vs selecting for some deeply held antagonism that might be stressful to the subjects.
There is prior evidence that some people actively prefer seeing an opponent worse off (even at a cost to themselves) than merely outcompeting an opponent.
This is the classic trope that psychology studies in general don’t reveal truths about humanity, they reveal truths about (mostly white) American college students.
This is basically the story of the history of human beings, and of our close relatives, the chimpanzees. Escaping these (apparently) hard-wired behaviors is what education is for; humans don't have to act like animals. However, this is what humans revert to when education is dismantled, and when group-identity themes are forced on them - tribalism, nationalism, sectarian religious fanaticism, identitarianism, etc.
For example, Machiavellian types have long understood that whipping up religious fervor is a route to political power if they can be the ones who direct that aggression, and this can be applied to any religious organization, and similar in-group based ideological movements as well (communism, fascism).
It's particularly illustrative when a major religion is split by internal divisions and the two groups turn on each other with remarkable levels of savage violence, as with the Protestant-Catholic wars that raged across Europe for several hundred years, or the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam, a conflict that continues to this day and which is characterized by things like suicide bombings targeting mosques and so on. Typically you find the leaders of the various groups are political actors who work hand in hand with the priests/ministers/clerics/rabbis/preachers/ideologues to gain and consolidate political power, which, surprise, leads to the accumulation of wealth on their part. This was also a major justification for colonial European expansion in the Americas and genocidal attacks on native American populations (who, it must be said, also went to war with each other on similar grounds, see the Aztec Empire).
It's basically similar to in-group/out-group conflict in chimpanzee tribes, which is not surprising as chimps and humans share a fairly recent common ancestor.
During the four-year conflict, all males of the Kahama community were killed, effectively disbanding the community. The victorious Kasakela then expanded into further territory but were later repelled by another community of chimpanzees.
Forcing members of groups who hate each other to work together if they want to survive could be a way of ah, re-educating them... For example, take two such people, put them in a leaky rowboat out in the ocean, give one a paddle and one a bucket, and see if they can make it to shore. If they use their tools to attack each other instead of to cooperate, well... good riddance.
Your rowboat pair won't attack each other, because the point of attacking an out-group is to gain status in your in-group. It's a performance. If there's no audience, there's no performance
”While undergoing functional MRI, participants completed an aggression task against both an ingroup and an outgroup opponent in which their opponents repeatedly provoked them at varying levels and then participants could retaliate. Participants were then socially included and then excluded by two outgroup members and then completed the same aggression task against the same two opponents.”
I am not an expert but this seems like a dumpster fire in terms of experimental control.
I think this is nature's risk management mechanism at play. I believe nature has put a mechanism in our heads, which prevents the easy spread of global threats to humanity by dividing us (the society) to different subgroups. This division acts as a barrier for the contagion effects of different threats or at least slows them down significantly.
Let's take for example the current Crypto sale. People who invested in crypto are losing money, but fortunately nature created other individuals, who think crypto is a scam and they've never put their money on the table. They are safe compared the their peers.
An example, where this mechanism has been compromised by humanity is the civil aviation and the COVID spread. If we didn't have a sophisticated and integrated civil aviation industry COVID would have had a hard time spreading around the globe so fast. 100 years earlier and the virus would have needed many more months to spread.
So, I think nature deliberately (or evolutionary) put a mechanism in our heads, where we try to protect our own group and harm the outsiders. This reinforces nature's risk management.
In otherwords, water is wet. It's very easy to see that tribal behavior is hardwired into the brain. One just has to look at history and current events to see that.
I own a sports motorcycle. One of the first things you learn at the track is that your initial instincts in certain situations are wrong because physics says so. During the course you learn to remold or even completely change your instincts.
I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk instincts.
We have amazing technology and could do so much more, but we're still stuck with the parts of our brain that are millions of years old.
> I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk instincts.
And wouldn't studying the brain help lead us towards a better understanding of how to accomplish those goals? I'm not saying that this particular study is advancing us much, but helping identify how "obvious" human behaviors activate different parts of our brains does seem to be working towards that goal.
I'm just having a little difficulty reconciling your dismissive opening paired with your wonder of what might be possible for us as a species. Breakthroughs in science are rare - it's mostly small, incremental, and boring progress.
As a member of an "outgroup" (I'm over 40, in the tech industry -I never considered myself to be "on the outs," but have learned that I am, indeed), I can confirm, that, when profit is involved, no one is interested in changing their bias, and a scientific study won't make one whit of difference.
It seems that the only thing that causes change in our innate bias, is pain. When we are forced to confront our biases, because not doing so hurts (like crashing a racing bike), we will work hard to change it.
Otherwise, we will blithely continue "as we were."
“The findings raise the possibility that one day treatments that disrupt the reward of intergroup aggression might help to reduce the costly and persistent human phenomenon of violence toward other groups, Chester said.”
Well, considering that we have an extremely large number of folks that refuse to take treatments that would save their own lives, as well as the lives of those around them, and the Venn diagram of those folks, and ones that want to hurt "others," has a significant overlap, what odds do you give, of them participating in the treatments?
I don’t know, but I don’t see any reason to be skeptical that the future can’t improve, given history. You could have made the same argument about most medical treatments 400 years ago, and it’d turn out to be more or less completely wrong.
I would caution about treatments that are designed to affect that fundamental a level of "being human," though. That clip I referenced was from the movie Serenity, and "Miranda" was a planet, where they tried pretty much exactly what you are talking about. It was fiction, but there's a road, leading somewhere, reputed to be paved with good intentions...
> It seems that the only thing that causes change in our innate bias, is pain.
Funny enough, it is quite often love. Many former neo-nazis left the scene because they fell in love with a member of the "wrong race". It is kind of a cliche at this point.
Now whether it is that is getting to know a person of another race/culture/faith helps overcoming biases or if reproduction is simply biologically more pleasurable than bashing the outgroup, who knows.
This. I understand that researching this is a step in the right direction, but am disappointed that there are no good solutions to problems like these because they stem from basic biological functioning at some very deep level and this affects everyone, not just a tiny portion of people.
> It's very easy to see that tribal behavior is hardwired into the brain
All this study showed was that it was present in adult men, nothing about whether or not this is learned behavior or instinctual, or gender differences.
> It's very easy to see that tribal behavior is hardwired into the brain. One just has to look at history and current events to see that.
There are some people who would take issue with this. Their view being that one just has to look at history and current events to see the influence of Satan in human affairs.
It's tiresome when people complain about scientific research seeking to prove obvious things. One of science's most important lessons is that what's obvious and what's true are frequently not the same.
"Infants as young as nine months old prefer individuals who are nice to people like them and mean to people who aren’t like them, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science."
So in effect they found the biological basis for hate?
> But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in opposing groups?
A new study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University has used functional brain imaging technology to reveal a potential answer: It increases activity in the brain’s reward network.
I think the underlying assumption here is already worth thinking about: That interpersonal and societal behaviour might be a lot more driven by instincts than we'd like to believe - and that in particular the tendency of people to structure the social landscape into "us" and "them" groups might be biologically hardwired.
The other thing I believe would be useful to study at some time would be if there is some innate biological mechanism for sadistic behaviour, which in effect "flips the sign on the reward function" when we consider an action in particular contexts - so doing harm suddenly feels good and doing good feels bad. At least, that would explain to me, why in so many situations where a person has the power to make rules that others have to follow, the rules seem to skew towards being unpleasant, even if they wouldn't have to be rationally.
This is entirely unsurprising given what’s been seen in our primate cousins. They’ve been observed going to war with neighboring tribes, slaughtering all the males, slaughtering the young offspring of those makes months later, and taking the females for themselves. War, genocide, infanticide, rape…all the things we think of as “inhuman” and unnatural are practiced by our close relatives. Fighting an outgroup which shares less of your genes than your tribe seems pretty normal in nature and makes the origin of racism pretty intuitive, and yet we think of racism as some particularly Western/American cultural failure.
Nothing is more important for survival and thriving than belonging to a tribe. An isolated man is a dead man.
Also, we don't need neuroscience to condescend to us like this. Isn't it obvious? Surely, most people have engaged in team sports and have felt the exhilaration of working together to overcome an enemy tribe.
This also relates to the pleasure of harming others, even those not identified as members of an 'outgroup.' It is frowned upon by society, but most people like to hurt people. Why? Because the power to harm others is the power to defend yourself against them or knock them down in the struggle for hierarchical dominance. Those who are powerless often pose as saints, but if you give them power over others, they will become monsters--like the lowly wage worker who becomes a tyrant as soon as he's placed in management. We all have a devil inside us...and it's not from us being fallen creatures, but because life must take life in order to live. Life is an endless cycle of self-consumption, life consuming life...an ouroboros eating its tail--forever.
Neitzche said the worst complement someone can receive is that they never hurt anyone. If you aren't somehow dangerous, who will care about you? What is your value in the struggle for life?
For many affiliations, particularly political ones, your affiliation is more based on hating the outgroup than loving the ingroup. For example, I would wager that most Republicans hate Democrats more than they love Republicans and more progressives hate conservatives more than they love progressives. You need look no further than left and right leaning news sources to see this. A left leaning news source is far more about exposing people on the right than talking about how good the left is, and vice versa.
I wonder how much of that is a structural defect in our political system/human nature-intersects politics.
You get votes (and power) by promising to right wrongs the other side has perpetrated.
You don’t get nearly as much votes and power from actually righting those wrongs and, in fact, the removal of those wrongs may reduce the future power you have to make promises to fix them.
Recommended: Search Youtube for "Social evaluation by preverbal infants". We are basically born evil (to like people that hurt people that are not like us) and empathy (towards people that are different) is learned through society.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIt seems the same behaviors exist in the absence and presence of that religion
Right, just humans doing their thing and twisting literally anything to justify their pursuit of power. Christianity not necessary.
But there's something to be said for a set of values that emphasizes love, empathy, and reciprocity, regardless of the religion.
Such as how often the religious one fails to do that?
My impression is that there is a recurring theme that it is violent towards outgroups and even more violent towards ingroups that don’t conform exactly. Leaving only compassion towards an ever splintering sect for the brief time everyone believes the exact same thing.
Also not exclusive to Christianity, but I mostly only hear from the escapees.
In any case, what do you see?
I see that failing to practice what is preached does not invalidate the message.
Humans make lots of mistakes and the consequences of that are reflected in all of our institutions. Thankfully, those institutions eventually die away and new, hopefully improved ones grow in their place until the cycle repeats. Happens on all scales.
I also find the source material to harbor that alongside the pleasant things.
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one"
A little G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate should clear that right up!
The translation of the Chinese is roughly "I want to darken my ears and heart and become a stone."
Scroll about halfway down on this page to find some info: https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenityn...
The feedback loop described in the OP creates groupthink, politically correct culture, an abundance of blind spots, & a narrow path of evolution specifically tailored to the group's worldview. Group "whips" are given positions of power to mete out punishment against those who cross lines defined by group & interpreted by the "whip".
If one sees all models as being false, the teleological fate of the OP's group feedback loop unchecked is group delusion, irrelevance, harming a perennial ever changing subgroup of outlier individuals, & eventual collapse. The perennial ever changing subgroup of outliers individuals is necessary to feed the base emotional reward circuitry of the "in group", a necessary sacrifice to cohere the "in group", feeding the group's evolutionary descent...
Perceived morality is important for the "whip". There's always a statement of alibi & justification while the "whip" is punishing others. "For the greater good" is often an alibi to justify the emotional reward circuitry "hit" of those afflicted with these addictions
Democrats only care about corporations and profits.
Republicans are social conservatives, Democrats are fiscal conservatives
But the ingroup outgroups in this situation are those with money and power and those without. The political class represents money and power, nothing more and nothing less
The political class provides legislation to their constituents, the donors with money, while claiming that they care about regular working class Americans but doing literally nothing to ever help them
Republicans actively work to harm people through restrictive legislation and democrats inadvertently harm people through their careless and shitty legislation that on the surface sounds like it could help people but when you read the actual text its all bullshit carveouts for corporations to protect their exploitatively gained profits
They're just con artists gaming the country for money, plain and simple. But that's what happens when your cultural ideology puts money and profit and "the economy" above the people that make up the society
This isn’t very accurate, FWIW (though easy to get this impression.) The vast, vast majority of Americans want access to birth control and want reasonable limits on guns (regardless of whether they would like to own guns themselves). I think it’s like over 90% in both cases.
You might be thinking of the debate over abortion, rather than birth control.
Reds might want to own guns more often, but they’re mostly in favor of more gun control than we have today. Blues also want more gun control that we have today, but are slightly more in favor of allowing abortions.
These debates, fwiw, are sideshow social signal and tribal politics. They are exaggerating and polarizing the reality of what the populace really wants. The actual distinction between red and blue is (was) fiscal policy. We’ve mostly stopped debating fiscal policy in good faith in this country, but nonetheless the terms “conservative” and “liberal” really came from how we want to tax and spend, and whether we believe in social services and safety nets especially at the federal level (democratic), or whether we prefer that states have more control and we spend less money on social services and disenfranchised people.
Another thing to think about is that by attacking an “out group” (I assume you’re not a republican) in this post you are potentially showing the behavior described in the article.
Edit- grammer
Left answer to that is that large businesses are the result of unbounded concentration of capital. Left authoritarians (the ones I think you refer to as Marxists? even though not all of them are, and not all Marxists are authoritarian) want to limit it by state action. Left libertarians think that taking the government out of the picture and reworking property rights around some notion of usufruct is sufficient. But what's the right libertarian answer?
Not necessarily. For example, government reducing the scope of property right protection is less regulation, not more.
How does a government do anything without regulation? Is regulation not what government literally does?
Now imagine the government saying something like "we don't consider X owned by Y; Y already has too much". This isn't regulation per se - nothing is regulated, and there's less enforcement, not more. The government isn't going around taking things away; it's just refusing to recognize X's claim and enforce it.
Schadenfreude
It comes from envy, the second deepest level in Dante’s Inferno.
Dante’s cure for envy was sewing the eyes shut.
Not precisely. "Envy" literally means what rhetorically can be rendered as "having eyes sewn shut": it means "not seeing" (Latin "invidia").
That the envious can be admitted to Purgatory and cleansed through penitence seems to signify that those eyes consciously sewn - which is the actual condition, as per the above - can be part of a process to develop a more subtle sight, also considering that envy is specified as grown out of a focus on earthly goods (so, an idea is to "close the earthly eyes" and learn to see the spiritual goods).
In other words, "if you can't see (which is envy) the spiritual goods, close your eyes to the earthly ones and refocus".
Male college students, an “aggressive task”, and a rival university.
College students are literally trained to associate out-competing rival universities as a fun and desirable activity. It’s the entire foundation of sports programs. This study feels like the authors tried to simulate a competitive sports program as closely as they could get away with in their lab environment and then tried to spin it as a profound observation about humanity in general.
This really just reads like “young male college students still enjoy competing against their rival university”
This was not my experience in undergrad, literally at all. No idea where this comes from
It comes from many people’s experiences of collegiate sports which is full of rivalries, largely with no real basis. Except for LSU.
The sports culture is much more relevant at Div1 schools. These get a disproportionate amount of air time (at least as far as sports go), but that's largely because those are the schools where sporting matches are worth watching.
This person is ~30 years out of school, and the vehicle was an INCREDIBLE deal and exactly what the person was looking to buy (other than the colour).
The person never competed in sports and was a comp sci major. It runs deep for at many schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_hooliganism_in_the_Un...
Downvoted and reported, frankly. How can you do callously say something about this? You do realize sports fans are (for the most part) self aware of the inconsequence of a sports rivalry in the real world, right?
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/sports-fan-violence-factors...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_violent_spectator_inci...
http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problem/violent-sports-fans
It’s deep indeed.
It’s fun to use little heuristics like this - and completely harmless considering the inconsequence of the decision. I know it doesn’t matter, but I can’t buy two cars, and I really could have gone either way. Is this really so far fetched?
Pick 35 random male college students and you will get a lot of college sports fans.
Also, for all of you in South Carolina, go Tigers (and Chants), booo Cocks!
I completely agree with your speculation. It’s fun for me to even type: go fight win kick ass fuck Clemson. Ahhhh
I just replied to a guy a few comments up about how I unironically chose a red car over orange (one of my favorite colors) because go, fight, win, kick ass, fuck Clemson!
We can all agree the SC state flag is pretty, I guess.
While many people (myself included) could anecdotally say that aggression to an outgroup can feel good, it’s the job of science to look for the hard evidence in the brain. This quote from the researchers seemed key:
> “This finding helps to balance the narrative about the psychological processes that underlie aggression against outgroup members, which typically emphasizes negative emotional states such as anger and fear,” Chester said.
This research gives evidence that rival college competition is fun to male college students.
The point I was trying to make is that this is a specifically narrow finding with confounding factors (mirrors the structure of sports programs, which are significant social activities at many colleges).
The study authors stretched the narrow funding into a very general finding, which is heavy editorializing. This stretching gets a free pass from many because it feels truthy, but it’s not great science.
That’s not accurate. The research is based a-priori on knowing that competition is fun, and is asking the question “which specific parts of the brain are making it fun?”
The abstract concludes:
“Both before and after outgroup exclusion, aggression towards outgroup members was positively associated with activity in the ventral striatum during decisions about how aggressive to be towards their outgroup opponent. Aggression towards outgroup members was also linked to greater post-exclusion activity in the rostral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortexduring provocation from their outgroup opponent. These altered patterns of brain activity suggest that frontostriatal mechanisms may play a significant role in motivating aggression towards outgroup members.”
The problem as I see it isn't expiremntal design. The problem is larger scientific "design." To learn something useful with a sufficiently nuances understanding would take a lot of studies. Replication, redesign, boundary testing of the hypothesis, re-theorizing, etc. Science is supposed to be a process.
With this, it may be possible to arrive at usable knowledge about human psychology and why/how we behave badly. This smattering of disparate studies, even if they were well designed and executed.... It just doesn't lead anywhere.
If expiremnts and studies were pieces in a larger scientific endeavour, I think both quality issues resilience to quality issues would improve naturally.
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04152016
Personally I think it’s interesting that the “aggressive task” was to push a computer button faster than the opponent. This isn’t “aggressive” in the way most people would imagine when you describe this study as “simulating” a competitive sports program. It’s more of a clinical/scientific concept of aggression and quite dissimilar from actually playing hockey or lacrosse, for example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Aggression_Paradigm) The participants were sitting alone inside a brain scanner playing an extremely basic video game, and being primed with some pure narrative about who their opponents and team mates were. Physical safety was not in question, and there was no interpersonal interaction (all other players were computer simulation). This says a lot about the power of narrative, and how much we operate on things we’re told and don’t have first hand knowledge of.
Also interesting: left-handed people were excluded. The paper doesn’t appear to say why, but I wonder if that was due to the design of the game UI (seems most likely), or if it was done for statistical reasons and/or known behavioral differences of left vs right handed people (this seems less likely, but possible?).
This is pretty common in brain research: https://www.freethink.com/science/left-handed-people-brain-r...
There is prior evidence that some people actively prefer seeing an opponent worse off (even at a cost to themselves) than merely outcompeting an opponent.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
For example, Machiavellian types have long understood that whipping up religious fervor is a route to political power if they can be the ones who direct that aggression, and this can be applied to any religious organization, and similar in-group based ideological movements as well (communism, fascism).
It's particularly illustrative when a major religion is split by internal divisions and the two groups turn on each other with remarkable levels of savage violence, as with the Protestant-Catholic wars that raged across Europe for several hundred years, or the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam, a conflict that continues to this day and which is characterized by things like suicide bombings targeting mosques and so on. Typically you find the leaders of the various groups are political actors who work hand in hand with the priests/ministers/clerics/rabbis/preachers/ideologues to gain and consolidate political power, which, surprise, leads to the accumulation of wealth on their part. This was also a major justification for colonial European expansion in the Americas and genocidal attacks on native American populations (who, it must be said, also went to war with each other on similar grounds, see the Aztec Empire).
It's basically similar to in-group/out-group conflict in chimpanzee tribes, which is not surprising as chimps and humans share a fairly recent common ancestor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
During the four-year conflict, all males of the Kahama community were killed, effectively disbanding the community. The victorious Kasakela then expanded into further territory but were later repelled by another community of chimpanzees.
Forcing members of groups who hate each other to work together if they want to survive could be a way of ah, re-educating them... For example, take two such people, put them in a leaky rowboat out in the ocean, give one a paddle and one a bucket, and see if they can make it to shore. If they use their tools to attack each other instead of to cooperate, well... good riddance.
I am not an expert but this seems like a dumpster fire in terms of experimental control.
Let's take for example the current Crypto sale. People who invested in crypto are losing money, but fortunately nature created other individuals, who think crypto is a scam and they've never put their money on the table. They are safe compared the their peers. An example, where this mechanism has been compromised by humanity is the civil aviation and the COVID spread. If we didn't have a sophisticated and integrated civil aviation industry COVID would have had a hard time spreading around the globe so fast. 100 years earlier and the virus would have needed many more months to spread.
So, I think nature deliberately (or evolutionary) put a mechanism in our heads, where we try to protect our own group and harm the outsiders. This reinforces nature's risk management.
I own a sports motorcycle. One of the first things you learn at the track is that your initial instincts in certain situations are wrong because physics says so. During the course you learn to remold or even completely change your instincts.
I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk instincts.
We have amazing technology and could do so much more, but we're still stuck with the parts of our brain that are millions of years old.
And wouldn't studying the brain help lead us towards a better understanding of how to accomplish those goals? I'm not saying that this particular study is advancing us much, but helping identify how "obvious" human behaviors activate different parts of our brains does seem to be working towards that goal.
I'm just having a little difficulty reconciling your dismissive opening paired with your wonder of what might be possible for us as a species. Breakthroughs in science are rare - it's mostly small, incremental, and boring progress.
It seems that the only thing that causes change in our innate bias, is pain. When we are forced to confront our biases, because not doing so hurts (like crashing a racing bike), we will work hard to change it.
Otherwise, we will blithely continue "as we were."
One word: "Miranda."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVuzOamXEk
I would caution about treatments that are designed to affect that fundamental a level of "being human," though. That clip I referenced was from the movie Serenity, and "Miranda" was a planet, where they tried pretty much exactly what you are talking about. It was fiction, but there's a road, leading somewhere, reputed to be paved with good intentions...
Funny enough, it is quite often love. Many former neo-nazis left the scene because they fell in love with a member of the "wrong race". It is kind of a cliche at this point.
Now whether it is that is getting to know a person of another race/culture/faith helps overcoming biases or if reproduction is simply biologically more pleasurable than bashing the outgroup, who knows.
All this study showed was that it was present in adult men, nothing about whether or not this is learned behavior or instinctual, or gender differences.
The instincts that you like are also hardwired, and we'd also learn to overcome those. We could end up as the society in Brave New World.
There are some people who would take issue with this. Their view being that one just has to look at history and current events to see the influence of Satan in human affairs.
It's tiresome when people complain about scientific research seeking to prove obvious things. One of science's most important lessons is that what's obvious and what's true are frequently not the same.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/babies-pr...
On the other hand:
"People have found that even by 18 months of age, children have expectations about how things should be shared fairly."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19421644
> But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in opposing groups?
A new study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University has used functional brain imaging technology to reveal a potential answer: It increases activity in the brain’s reward network.
I think the underlying assumption here is already worth thinking about: That interpersonal and societal behaviour might be a lot more driven by instincts than we'd like to believe - and that in particular the tendency of people to structure the social landscape into "us" and "them" groups might be biologically hardwired.
The other thing I believe would be useful to study at some time would be if there is some innate biological mechanism for sadistic behaviour, which in effect "flips the sign on the reward function" when we consider an action in particular contexts - so doing harm suddenly feels good and doing good feels bad. At least, that would explain to me, why in so many situations where a person has the power to make rules that others have to follow, the rules seem to skew towards being unpleasant, even if they wouldn't have to be rationally.
Outsiders can be conceived as threats or competition for resources. So ve evolved that way.
Also, we don't need neuroscience to condescend to us like this. Isn't it obvious? Surely, most people have engaged in team sports and have felt the exhilaration of working together to overcome an enemy tribe.
This also relates to the pleasure of harming others, even those not identified as members of an 'outgroup.' It is frowned upon by society, but most people like to hurt people. Why? Because the power to harm others is the power to defend yourself against them or knock them down in the struggle for hierarchical dominance. Those who are powerless often pose as saints, but if you give them power over others, they will become monsters--like the lowly wage worker who becomes a tyrant as soon as he's placed in management. We all have a devil inside us...and it's not from us being fallen creatures, but because life must take life in order to live. Life is an endless cycle of self-consumption, life consuming life...an ouroboros eating its tail--forever.
Neitzche said the worst complement someone can receive is that they never hurt anyone. If you aren't somehow dangerous, who will care about you? What is your value in the struggle for life?
You get votes (and power) by promising to right wrongs the other side has perpetrated.
You don’t get nearly as much votes and power from actually righting those wrongs and, in fact, the removal of those wrongs may reduce the future power you have to make promises to fix them.