> "From an evolutionary perspective, it's kind of perplexing that it even exists, because you're decreasing your own fitness on behalf of others," Melamed said. "And yet, we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature."
I find this concluding remark really amusing. Even after performing the experiment, the researcher still can't really fathom the possibility that his views should be reassessed.
If this behavior is present in humans and many other species, couldn't it simply be that in a more sophisticated way it actually increases fitness? Faced with these observations, shouldn't you maybe reassess your ideas about evolution?
Doesn't seem perplexing to me either. Humans are tribal and their survival depends on teamwork of about ~100 people or so. This is natural on intimate scale.
What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.
As we can see, empathy for humans outside of the tribe is limited and so different gangs fight each other, let alone different countries.
Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.
If the world is divided into many super-tribes made up of millions of people (based on ethnicity, religion, etc), try to encourage mixture of those super-tribes at school, work, and socially. Then people have a maximum composition of different super-tribes within their personal 100-person tribe. This way people will be less likely to identify everyone from another super-tribe as part of the outgroup.
I think its in the human nature that we form groups and fight each other, heck we do it for fun too in games. For all humans on the planet to come together we would need a common opponent.
Naively, how about a global tree? Suppose you have a group of 25 people, of which 1 (or more, all these numbers are fluid) is also a member in a group one "level" up which also contains 25 people all representing their own 25-person group. Then just keep adding more levels until everyone's in the tree.
Importantly, these are not rulership positions. They're representatives representing the interest of their group one "level" down, which means these interests are sourced from the largest side of the tree and then negotiated/compromised as far up as is necessary.
The reason I think 25 is the right number is because IIRC people are only capable of maintaining 50 close relationships, so the idea is generally most people are friends with their home group + extras. But doing the math on the number of groups required, let's say 8 billion / 25 = 320 million groups needing representation, and log_25(320000000) gives us a little over 6 levels required to represent them all (if I mathematically modeled that correctly), so even a top-tier representative can easily have a couple of close friends per level.
> Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.
Small scale trial, a world exchange program where you could sign up, and basically you swap with someone random for a year. Before the swap happens both people get a week where they meet and discuss what is going on in their life. This can happen in a vacation resort somewhere.
Then the two people take over the life of the other person. It would be assumed that everyone would sorta- help the swapped person out a bit. The swap would need to have very specific requirements: Probably no spouse, the job needs to be similar, friends/coworkers need to be on board, finally the swappers need to blog once per day about the experiences.
Bank accounts would be locked out - the experiment pays the two individuals from a fresh account. Bills and Mortgages are locked or payed through other mechanisms during the experiment.
I think that even starting out with maybe 100 people, then scale to 1000 a year later, 10000 after that. I don't know if those numbers are unrealistic... but wouldn't it be interesting to see if empathy for other countries or even ways of life start to develop?
> What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.
I think the opposite is true. We cannot properly cooperate effectively on a large scale to solve humanity's biggest problems. Just look at the attempts for global nuclear disarmament, it has been a failure. Look at the accelerating impact of carbon on the environment, it has been a catastrophic failure.
I think while the article shows an interesting bit about human psychology, that we are all secretly altruists at heart, which I believe is true.. But what governs the important global decisions isn't humanity. They're massive organizations and these massive organizations (whether a nation state or mega-corp) are made of humans, but they're not human.
They operate in another way, just like an ant colony, the emergent behavior of many ants, operates in an entirely different way than an individual ant.
>"Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers."
It's all about abolishing hierarchical leadership, and the "one-to-many" dynamic. People who foment tribalism like Trump, for instance, are only effective in a mediated environment in which they are immune to any criticism and can pontificate from on high. In a one on one social situation, his behavior and attitude would be laughed at and ostracized because the vast majority of people are generally good and wish to be peaceful. But when they are able to atomize individuals and speak directly to them, the power of their rhetoric is irresistible, because it appeals directly to the person's identity. That's why Trump supporters will follow him off a cliff. He is them. His thoughts are their thoughts. And the basic human survival instinct kicks in when anyone attacks something you identify with so intimately.
The premise of The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) is that the unit of evolution isn't the individual but the gene. Individuals need not be selfish, their genes are, and genes compete with each other.
It's then easy to justify altruistic behavior when the best interests of an individual isn't up for considerations but the best interests of a gene. Selfishness isn't competing against yourself.
Use this drive to work with the evolutionary dynamics of populations in a "cheating" vs. "cooperating" and you get an arms race of cheaters vs cooperators which tends around some equilibrium which, going back to selfish genes, tends to balance the costs and rewards of selfishness which in lots of different creatures tends towards cooperation between individuals quite a lot.
It's pretty frightening that he's an "an associate professor of sociology" and he doesn't even know basic under-grad evolutionary theory, yet thinks it's ok for him to talk about it.
Basically spent his life and a bunch of money rediscovering the wheel when biologists could have told him this was the expected result.
Worse still, he talks about ants, which share 75% of their genes so actually do have a clear evolutionary reason to co-operate.
I've seen him on JRE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obmt_PkIfBE). I liked his observations on the baboon troupe and how changing group makeup led to a change of dynamics and the establishment of a more cooperative equilibrium.
Rutger Bregman's new book 'Humankind' is on this topic -- he poses that people are fundamentally good, and makes the point that the 'people are selfish by nature' mindset benefits certain ideologies, and increases the concentration of power.
But it’s clearly not one or the other. People are not entirely good or entirely selfish. I would agree that most people do the right thing most of the time, but all it takes is for a few % to do the selfish thing for the system to become dysfunctional.
Plus, sometimes (in some societies and professions) you really need to become a jerk, kick downwards and bootlick upwards. It's best to avoid such places and careers but it's very real.
Also I think most people are very blind to their own selfish and "bad person" behavior. This is why stories look so one sided and somehow the person telling the story always comes out as angelic.
The truth is, most people have things in their past where they benefited from some thing that left another person worse off. It's just rationalized as "tough luck, that's the rules, life is hard and I was stronger" or something.
The "Elephant in the brain" book has examples for this.
And weirdly enough I'll say an advice that you never ever hear: sometimes being selfish is okay. There actually are people, like myself, who are by default too soft/compassionate/justice-sensitive/honest/literal/ignorant of what the actual social and socially accepted behavior are vs what is explicitly stated.
The thing is, if you want to achieve success you will need to screw over some people in the process. Not constantly and all the time but maybe 2-3 times in your life? You have to be really lucky or extremely good to honestly keep that at 0. But as I said, most people err on the side of being blind to cases when they do this so they'd benefit from the standard advice. And of course many are just like "well, fuck him, I don't like him anyway, he rubs me the wrong way" and don't lose any sleep on the matter.
The cynical recipe could be: screw someone over, don't really introspect while doing it, reap the benefits, then admit to yourself that you did wrong, forgive yourself and promise to be nice later, noting that humans are sinful, fallible and imperfect and continue enjoying the benefits you reaped. You will be ahead, and now you have a nice story of how you did wrong things in the past but have wisened up since then. An ex-murderer who is now a normal citizen can become a hero or do motivational speaking, a normal guy who just never murdered is just a normal guy. (This is obviously not advocating murder or crime, I'm simply describing the pattern)
> Even after performing the experiment, the researcher still can't really fathom the possibility that his views should be reassessed.
I'm sorry? The quote seems pretty clear to me: Melamed is expressing that the result is surprising. He is clearly not refusing to believe it.
The ability to eludidate ones priors and explain their conflicts with data is, in fact, probably the most critical single component of "reassessing ones views".
> Melamed is expressing that the result is surprising. He is clearly not refusing to believe it.
I didn't say that he's refusing to believe the result. Rather, I found it amusing that he did not reassess his prior beliefs in light of new evidence. He continued to assume that collaborative/mutualistic behavior decreases fitness, even while noticing that many animals engage in it. He saw this as puzzling, when it may simply mean that this type of behavior doesn't actually decrease fitness.
> You don't think it's appropriate for a scientist to be puzzled by a result?
Definitely. However, there didn't seem to be an attempt to also question his existing theory regarding evolutionary fitness. Again, the results are only puzzling if you assume collaboration decreases fitness, but that assumption should always be open to reassessment.
> please make fun of my typos some more
No need for sarcasm, my comment was not intended to be snarky. The word could have been 'elude', 'elucidate' or smth else. I will go for 'elucidate' since it fits best in the context.
The Bhagavad Gita, a very old story, touches on this specific topic. In particular it mentions that everything is interconnected, everything affects everything else - in a way, we are all one.
Under that context, evolution is just change, it is not the improvement of one entity to the detriment of others. Also, given that everything is connected and we are all one, the more we help others, the more we help ourselves. It also says to widen our view of time and life, we usually think in terms of an animal/entity being born/living/dying, instead of thinking about the cycle of all species over thousands or millions of years.
Not that you need to be told this, but for anyone else curious, the Bhagavad Gita is so much more than an old story. If you are interested in reading it, I recommend having it read to you by a master, else the old cultural symbology and references will be lost on you or otherwise completely impenetrable.
It's a fascinating read, also incredibly eye opening to learn things that have been known and taught for thousands of years in other parts of the world, while in the West it seems like we are just beginning to discover them (and maybe have actively rejected them for a long time as well).
For ants and bees in particular I’ve sometimes heard the theory that it’s the ant/bee colony we should consider the organism, not the individual ants or bees. In large part because it’s the queen that mates and all the others are there to help the queen survive and pass on her genes.
That's in itself just begging the question. The genetic mechanism behind eusociality in bees and ants is haplodiploidy[1], which among other things makes the relatedness of workers up to 75% rather than the 50% between siblings in diploid organisms.
It's also ignorant. Kin/group selection and altruism has been researched for at least decades. The only debate is the mechanism, not the existent and value of it to the individual.
The point is that it's unintuitive, at least from a naive point of view. Kind of like hormesis, where exposure to harmful substances or radiation can actually be beneficial.
My grandma grew up on the fjords of Norway on an island with a population of ~100.
The island was split with a very large hill that separate the east from the west. On the west were the fishers, and on the east were the farmers.
Each side was taught to look down on and distrust the other side...
Humans are very tribal, and for most people, if a stranger looks like they could join the tribe, they might be offered help.
My black cousin in the military still gets pulled over by police all the time. When they want to search his vehicle, he is smart enough to ask for a warrant, after which they use the tactic ‘Lower your voice!’ to escalate.
How do you get people into a trial like this without the bias of either "people kind enough to spend time helping research" or "people who need money enough that being a paid test subject is worth their time"?
Might not matter for something like a vaccine trial, but for this?
My harsh and honest opinion is that this kind of research is useless and is mostly a waste of resources and most likely serves other motives than we may think (narratives, signaling etc).
All experiments with virtual money, with artificial lab setups, with people knowing they are in an experiment are very very biased.
Even if being mean would gain you some money in an artificial experiment, there are other social factors that can counteract this, including pleasing the experiment designers, thinking of yourself as a good person. People probably introspect more in these observed scenarios etc.
You know all those people writing their bachelor and master theses based on questionnaires filled out by random recruits from social media for the chance of winning a gift card? I see tons of those. Are they rigorous and valuable research? Unlikely, but at least they don't get into the press.
We keep falling for this stuff even after the replication crisis, because science is used by the masses as a replacement of the priesthood. People in labcoats must say to us with jargon that compassion is good. We are too afraid of and are still recovering from the shock of the early and crude interpretation of the Darwinian theory. So we crave the "people are good after all" message and when there is demand there will be supply.
Upvoted for the skepticism and the reality of how controlled experiments can produce desirable results that don't replicate.
I still believe people are good after all because I've been conducting a real-world study for nearly 3 years, off-and-on. I started out with a car, no money, and the assumption that I'd gotten good at identifying my needs, asking for them to be meet, and being seen/heard. I now suspect people who are actively working to unlearn their social conditioning are more willing to help others because they're willing to see some aspect of their own humanity in me. That seems to be the trend, at least. When people first see me, they often respond either by showing fear (referring to me as Charles Manson was something a stranger did a couple weeks ago), intrigue/curiosity (asking why I'm dressed the way I am, possibly asking to take a photo), smile and walk away, candidly catch me on film, compliment me for what I'm wearing, or thank me for what I'm wearing. It could also be that people who are unlearning toxic/limiting social norms value seeing others doing the same, which I definitely do with my fashion.
My experiments have led me through many adventures and now I'm writing this while next to my sleeping partner & 19-month old, so I'm not actively testing in the field as much. We're planning on expanding our community during the pandemic to find land to live on and people to live with. That's the next big experiment. We're hoping someone will simply give us land to conduct experiments in community building on.
My experiences could also have a bit to do with the fact that I'm white and perceived as a man, since I have a big beard.
Ultimately, I'd need way more people doing what I'm doing to see what really happens outside the cloak of white privilege.
Most people value prosocial beliefs and behaviors -- and do so more as they acquire life experience. However, there are some who are unable to do so and some who have been conditioned otherwise.
Regardless, the vast majority of people understand and appreciate the benefits of compassion.
These people value compassion, not because a research study informed them that they should, but because, in part, they have observed it for themselves: when they have been compassionate they realized that it made them feel good; when they have seen public policy informed by compassion in communities they saw how those communities thrived.
The intended audience for studies like these are those who want to do good and one benefit to them is to have a better understanding of how to do good more effectively.
And it is okay that not everybody is in that audience; the intended audience, their communities, and society as a whole benefit regardless.
At the same time, billions of people don’t kill the randos they chance upon most days.
How we annotate reality with numbers matters. I feel like your trying to find too specific a claim about reality, not the researchers
You’re isolating these headlines to make them useless.
There’s also tons of rhetoric others, outside your filter bubble, encounter about the end is nigh, send in the troops!
Not every piece of information that we like to share has to be in service of you, 1 in 7 billion
The study itself is more novel and creates more discourse than your comment. Which is a bigger waste of resources? People trying to learn data driven research and habit?
Or your being pedantic about the value as if to dissuade others from such mechanics unless they’re chasing a result you agree with
Yet we seem to spend little time calling for HN to disable comments to avoid the descent into entitled whining about others not achieving what you want, dad
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough, I'll try to be better in the future. I wanted to point out how "scientific research proves people are good after all" type headlines and the foundational problems of psychology as a discipline (including the replication crisis, the shobby practices and huge leaps of conclusion) and the societal need for a calming authority interact.
50 years ago it was all about seeing how we all carry evil within and need to overcome it (Zimbardo, Milgram), today we want to hear "we are fundamentally good". Of course this research is about one specific thing but people don't read it for that reason, just like people don't read many special niche articles usually. This is about us and we seek it out and nod along to these pop sci articles just like people nodded along to a beautiful preach ("of how true were the words of the Father Smith this Sunday"). And I'm not saying science is just another religion, obviously not. But we as a society want it to take on that role.
The issue is best analyzed from the side of why there is so much demand. The question of how the researchers conducted the study is secondary. It's way beyond pedantism on the methodology or trying to say people are bad.
I guess if the above sounds really foreign to you it may take some amount of reading to get a grip on these ideas, which won't fit in this comment. I'm not saying I'm definitely right, but it's at least useful to look at it from this angle.
...and who on average have very limited life experience.
A random subset of psych majors is going to have very different characteristics than a random subset of dining hall student employees is going to have very different characteristics than a subset of frat members.
I can't vouch for this particular study, but my experience in college has been that possible differences between 'subset of psych majors' and the rest of the population are among the earliest considerations to, well, consider.
You've just highlighted the key issue with studies, focus groups and marketing research. The population will always be biased - even the responses from the participants are likely to be biased because they are more likely to give a biased response. The insight that you get is marginally useful but nonetheless, it's better than no insight at all.
Selection bias (and mitigation of it) is a big topic, and worth googling, if you're interested. I recommend reading 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre, which is a fun read and goes into fascinating detail about various forms of bias in scientific studies and their reporting in the media, and how such problems can be managed.
Title of the paper: "The robustness of reciprocity: Experimental evidence that each form of reciprocity is robust to the presence of other forms of reciprocity"
I think the interesting point about this paper isn't the conclusion, which is unsurprising, but rather the methods used for confirming it (They use linear mixed models, which I hadn't encountered before).
Human morals/behavior aren't like a fractal that's the same at every level. Let's see a study like this where much larger amounts are in play.
As a young adult, my dad warned me that people are basically honorable up to about $10K. In practice, I've found everyone's threshold is different and fluctuates greatly with their individual situation and the broader economic situation. For example, right now I'm seeing otherwise successful and decent folks do really ugly things over 4 figure money.
> As a young adult, my dad warned me that people are basically honorable up to about $10K.
No way. $10k is the lower boundary to litigation being worth anybody's time. If somebody is going to defraud you, it's going to be for an amount less than $10k.
Amounts of money higher than that may entice people into doing things they otherwise wouldn't, sure, but there I'd submit that they were never honorable in the first place if they can be bought for the right price.
I've practised "paying it forward" and the rewards have been incredible. I've got way more back than I ever gave. People are always ready to be nice to each other, but sometimes wary of strangers.
I've seen the other side of it, too. Where people approach situations with a "what's in it for me" attitude, and get nowhere. Their fear of getting ripped off, or "losing" in the interaction, stops them from being trusted.
I once lived in a bilingual area in the States. Depending upon how I was dressed, I would be greeted in either english or spanish[1] when walking into a shop. My experience was that people were more helpful (to the extent of addressing me as "paisano") in spanish. I suspect this is because when I was greeted in english, I was being greeted as an out-group[2] member.
[1] hypothesis: if you have never learned to code-switch, you are probably a member of a preferred group.
[2] not necessarily due to being classified as anglophone, more likely due to being classified as tourist.
Read something once about the best way to interact with other humans. It boiled down to, you can scratch someone's back once but you don't scratch it again until they've scratched yours. If someone does it to you first be sure to pay them back.
Yep. As I recall, the origin of this idea comes from a series of competitions arranged by Robert Axelrod[1], where people submitted algorithms to participate in an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma[2] situation. Tit-for-tat was one of the simplest algorithms submitted, but yet it won the contest.
I would say people freely give who feel that they gain from the community far more than they give. And they do right by others when they feel the community is doing right by them.
And this is not PER INTERACTION but over the long haul.
People that are not connected to their community strongly, meaning they don't have mutliple adults protecting, disciplining and sustaining them, aren't as likely to do right by others or give freely.
Sons without fathers living in the home are far more likely to have behavioral problems. I think we grow into our social hierarchy or we seek to establish a new one that competes and clashes with the existing one.
Unfortunately, the trend more and more across most groups is single parent families.
There are people who have learned that being kind and generous attracts people, and once they have got them close to them, they start to use or abuse them, push them to feed their ego with praise and have them work for them to live a comfortable life.
The discussions with strangers with their narcissistic self-praises give them all the kick they desire to feel in their life. Nothing matters more to them.
- The oceans are filling with plastic so people with perfectly good tap water can drink bottled water
- Sea levels rising so people in deserts can cool their homes and offices to 60
- Aquifers drain for golf courses in the desert
- Sweatshops, data breaches, 9/11, etc
I'm sure terrorists feel they are doing right by someone when they blow something up, but even the most zealous must realize not everyone agrees with them.
You say including the ethical cost in the price removes the burden of choice, but I say excluding the cost in the price removes information for the consumer.
I feel like the lucky 10000[1] also applies to bad things as well. I remember in high school having a conversation about teen pregnancy with classmates that wanted to go into medicine and they didn't realize that sex education in some school districts was so poor that some teenagers literally didn't know that sex made babies. Not a huge amount, but more than 0%.
Sure, in many cases. I'd love to see externalities included in the price. But this is about people "doing the right thing". People know plastic bottles pollute. They know big cars pollute. Yet they buy them. Because many people do not do the right thing.
> People know plastic bottles pollute. They know big cars pollute. Yet they buy them.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you think global warming is a hoax and your city has no air quality problems, do you know big cars pollute? Do you know your plastic bottles pollute, if you always put them in a recycle bin (and never check to see what happens to the contents of those bins)?
It does, but the question is do "people" know that. I'd wager a good chunk of them haven't spent a second thinking about it. It's easier and happier to pat yourself for dropping your waste into the "right" bin and move on.
> People know big cars pollute. They don't care.
I don't think it's that simple. I think there's a strong consensus that "pollution" is bad, so resistance morphs into a denial that a particular thing is a pollutant. Restricting the discussion to CO2 for simplicity: if someone thinks global warming is a hoax, they'd deny that their car pollutes the air because they "know" CO2 doesn't cause any harm.
These people do not live where I live. Of course, my observation is a singular data point, but speaking with colleagues through the years, it seems everyone in this area is of the "I will help you, but what is in it for me" philosophy. I wonder where they picked these participants from.
My personal understanding of human nature is that it's capable of the whole range of attitudes, from violent selfishness to pure altruism.
I think the society you live in and the way you're brought up matter a lot in moderating these attitudes.
If you're taught that you should be selfish, that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there etc. then of course you'll lean towards selfishness and transactionalism.
This however is not a direct aspect of human nature, just a consequence of nurture.
Have you circulated your CV recently? I had thought people learn to be very transactional through either (a) prison, or (b) international relations, but clearly I am wrong.
(as to A, I know two prison guards. One of them is now retired, and he told me the speech he'd eventually figured out: "I don't care what they say you're in for. It's none of my business. I do care that we all stay cool. If everyone is cool, everything will be cool." Still transactional, but he claims everyone was mostly cool)
In my experience people's willingness to be kind is correlated more strongly with having shared problems that nearly nobody is exempt from. Some combination of an oppressive climate and limited local wealth seems to be the ticket for maximizing people's willingness to help each other out.
There is a class which is behavioral evolution from stanford which covers these topics. There are other frameworks to look at it from like individual selection theory (try to make sure your dna survives) kin selection (your family shares your dna so try to pass that on as well, even if you sacrifice yourself). There are even more ways to look but I’m too much of noob to elaborate on them. But bottom line some behaviors might not help you and your dna but similar enough dna for you to want to sacrifice yourself. Robert Sapolsky is the professor and you can find the lectures on youtube, highly recommend all though i only finished 4 of them so far.
On the other side, if you want to know when people are going to be selfish and harmful towards one another, look for the situation where they have unaccountable power over another without consequences. Every time.
There is a reason that the stereotype exists of the mad king or queen yelling “ off with their heads!” or feeling a pea under 18 mattresses or otherwise acting like a spoiled toddler. It’s the same reason that police walk around beating peaceful protesters and acting shocked and indignant that anyone would object. That’s what power turns a person into.
Is there not a consideration for the act being beneficial for the group (species) and that considerations have been elevated beyond either of the individuals concerns subconsciously? Ants are the obvious comparison, being very quick to sacrifice themselves to maintain a path to food for the group.
I think an underappreciated factor in the drake equation is whether an intelligent species is able to form and maintain societies. For all our issues as a species, we're surprisingly good at forming everything from tribes to nations...
Humans are interesting because we're one of the few semi-social animals. If you're tribe/village is whipped out, you'll die soon too. But just because your group flourishes doesn't mean your genes will even be passed on (like they would in an ant colony). So we have all these behaviours (like empathy and cooperation) but they're finely balanced and complex (unlike an ant that will die for the colony without hesitation). The lack of top down control and the requirement for cooperation means communication abilities are vital and have to be complex and suddenly you have a brain that needs to simulate other brains (empathy) and consciousness is born.
Reminds me of how some newspaper explained that "Covid showed us how unselfish we were all being" or something to that effect. They conveniently missed the part when everyone was hoarding toilet paper at the start of the crisis.
> They conveniently missed the part when everyone was hoarding toilet paper at the start of the crisis.
Factually, it is not true that everyone was hoarding toilet paper.
Also, you conveniently ignore that there was simultaneous recommendation to have supplies of everything for two weeks, in case you need quarantine - which means portion of people who were buying a lot were thinking the are following instructions.
We never saw a drastic shortage, though. The store was empty or had limited supplies for a week or two then they brought in a large shipment and everybody cooled off.
People were not hoarding, they were just buying a little bit more than usual. It's not irrational or 'hoarding' to buy 2x24 when normally you buy 1x24. It seems pretty reasonable actually. But when we all do that, it sells out immediately. It was 'significant increase in demand brought on by marginal and reasonable increases in individual behavior'.
Add to that the fact that people would typically use the toilet paper in offices and retail much of the day, but now had to supply their own at home. It's a whole different supply chain that was suddenly burdened with a situation it wasn't prepared for.
People shooting each other in the face comes normally hand in hand with a form of dehumanisation.
For example instead of thinking about humans which protests they think about rioters. Or they see certain kinds of humans depending on skin color or religion or similar as less "human" as some form of "malformed product of nature" and other bs*. This circumvents any instinctual natural protections humans have against harming each other. Oh and for example in case of companies humans (employees) tend to be reduced to a tool costing some money and giving something back. Similar thinks often apply to many politicians.
>For this study, which was done online, participants had to decide how much of a 10-point endowment to give to other people. The points had monetary value to the participants; giving cost them something.
Totally contrived study which completely ignores culture. Growing up in a shitty area in NYC for example will teach you that plenty of people are all too eager to act selfishly even when it is trivial to be considerate.
Soft sciences are a joke and they erode layman credibility in hard sciences.
Bending over once a year to pick up rubbish vs spending a day.
What we need it know is how to maximise it in more cases (for good or evil) these studies are more about clicks. You barely know what's going on when the cost is so low.
Apparently there are 4 motivators to benefit others.
One: The recipient of a kindness is inclined to do something nice for the giver in return.
Two: A person is motivated to do something nice to someone that she saw be generous to a third person.
Three: A person is likely to do good in the presence of people in their network who might reward their generosity.
Four: A person is likely to "pay it forward" to someone else if someone has done something nice for her.
They did a online "study" where they mixed and matched the motivators to see how it affected people's "giving" ( points tied to money ). It's hard to tell from the article, but the assumption was that #1 would dominate people's motivation to give ( return the favor ), but the "study" showed that all 4 motivations and all the permutations still influenced the giving.
So people do "right by each other" given these 4 motivators which ultimately is selfish because they all imply you have gotten something already or you hope to gain something by "doing right".
> "From an evolutionary perspective, it's kind of perplexing that it even exists, because you're decreasing your own fitness on behalf of others," Melamed said. "And yet, we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature."
I can't believe that a "scientist" would even say such nonsense. It isn't evolutionarily perplexing at all. We see it throughout all of nature because it doesn't decrease your fitness on behalf of others. Social networking and cooperation isn't evolutionarily perplexing.
> Apparently there are 4 motivators to benefit others.
The article says "Scientists previously had determined that four motivators influenced people to behave in a way that benefited other people."
But that completely leaves out the fact that, you know, sometimes helping other people feels good. Why do people watch a sunset? Why do they listen to music? Why do people do exercises or read books, or have sex? The most basic reason for anything is that it gives people pleasure.
Now, you can come up with some kind of evolutionary reason why those activities are pleasurable, but given that helping other people can be pleasurable, you don't need to come up with any deep psychological reason beyond that.
And really, from a moral point of view, the purpose of social reward / shame mechanisms is to get you to to act in a caring way towards other people, so that you experience the pleasure of doing so, and then start doing it for its own sake.
The best sort of person, after all, isn't the person who helps someone else for social status, or because they're afraid of retribution, or looking for a payback later. The best sort of person is the person who genuinely enjoys seeing someone else happy.
> The article says "Scientists previously had determined that four motivators influenced people to behave in a way that benefited other people."
I know. That's why I listed the 4 that was mentioned in the article.
The rest of your comment has nothing to do with my comment or the article so I'll just ignore it. Pleasure, morality and best person are really philosophical questions better left to another thread.
I completely reject this idea, it's 100% antithetical to the experience I've had in life. People are inherently bad and lack ethics until educated or exposed to it in a group setting. Even then a decent majority of people will continue to adopt a selfish mindset.
I'd posit that as you become wealthier and more successful, your capacity to practice empathy and "doing the right thing" significantly diminishes quickly to a zero sum. You cannot manage above N number "other people" you don't see and interact with in person without mentally converting them into a resource or a number.
The motivation to do the right thing drops out when you don't need societal / communal acceptance and validation of yourself and your actions.
When you're rich enough to not give a fuck, fuck em. I got mine.
I find this concluding remark really amusing. Even after performing the experiment, the researcher still can't really fathom the possibility that his views should be reassessed.
If this behavior is present in humans and many other species, couldn't it simply be that in a more sophisticated way it actually increases fitness? Faced with these observations, shouldn't you maybe reassess your ideas about evolution?