Classic psychology warped our view of human nature as cruel and selfish - but new research is more hopeful
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Classic psychological experiments like Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and the bystander effect theory, which have contributed to a perception of humans as inherently cruel and selfish, are now being reevaluated based on new findings. Contrary to these earlier theories, recent research suggests that humans have a natural inclination towards altruism and heroism.

Psychology has a repeatability problem. Turns out Zimbardo wasn’t completely honest about how hands-off the researchers were. The Stanford Prison Experiment is the latest famous experiment in psychology that is proving difficult to reproduce.

I remember learning about this in school and the point being driven home: humans are selfish, and the only thing holding society together is a fragile veneer of civility, ready to burst free the moment no one is looking.

What does a selfish human species imply about society? It means that any vision of a community-oriented society, any revolution or reformation that purports to progress beyond a free capitalist market system in order to end capitalist exploitation, is naïve — nay, illogical.

Science has long been regarded as a pure discipline, abstracted from any particular society because of its faithful empiricism. Leftists ought to keep in mind that science, as with all knowledge, has a social character which cannot be separated from its time and place, and not therefore from politics. Science is a tool which may be wielded for technological progress within an egalitarian society, but by the same token may be used to lend authority to a ruling class who almost exclusively possess the means by which that science is carried out.

”[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” —Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

  • teeforlove [they/them]9•7 months ago

    I don't think they teach SPE after the first psych 101 module in the first sem of undergrad, experiments like that and the Milgram experiments are the reason ethics approval board exists and became a necessity.

    Psychology has a repeatability problem

    Research in general does, but yeah, there are a lot of biases involved that need to be controlled for in psych experiments. Turns out measuring objective correlates of subjective behavior isn't so easy after all.

    • very_poggers_gay [they/them]3•7 months ago

      And when it does appear in intro psych courses, it's almost always in a "this was fucked up we can never let this happen again" type of way, though I doubt they really explore all the ways that it was fucked up, nor how that study and its cultural impact continue to do harm

      • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]2•7 months ago

        most of the time they act like the problem was that the thin veneer of society was removed, and not that a researcher did some bad shit for no reason.

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]1•7 months ago

      I really don't get what was wrong with the milgram experiment. You don't get to whine your conscience acted up if you didn't say no in the first place. They were bad people and they should feel bad an experiment exposed that.