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

  • @TraumaDumpling16•7 months ago

    every game 'journalism' site ever tried to make this same point when RUST came out (the crappy MMO survival game not the programming language or whatever), ignoring that your life in the game has no inherent value (its just a matter of re-obtaining resources, you respawn) and you can leave and come back any time, and the effect that might have on people's behaviors. everyone wants to explore the limits of what a game will let you do, because its all harmless fun. in a survival situation things are different, no one wants to die permanently or have their kids die permanently with no respawns of a minor infected bruise or cut after a fight when there's no hospitals and no political or practical reasons to do so. its pretty much always better to cooperate in survival situations, and with the exception of pre-existing ethnic conflict this holds pretty true for human behavior in real life disaster scenarios.

    • Bay_of_Piggies [he/him, comrade/them]12•7 months ago

      Its like if the word used to describe losing a sports match was "die" and you said you "killed" the other team if you win. Then folks acted like that said something about the human condition in life and death situations.