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

  • charly4994 [she/her, comrade/them]18•7 months ago

    In school they sorta paired this with Lord of the Flies when we were reading that one. There really wasn't any examination of the context in which it was written and how it was more a critique of how British boys would sail off to do horrible things in the colonies and come back as "real men" but with nobody to brutalize they split themselves and brutalized each other. Saw a few videos on the experiment a while ago where the 'researchers' would encourage awful behavior and tell people to keep going even when they were uncomfortable in doing it. It was such a fabricated study. Plainly Difficult has a lot of interesting looks at some awful science that's outright criminal and immoral.

    • emizeko [they/them]24•7 months ago

      when a group of boys was shipwrecked in real life, they helped each other

      https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

      • @GinAndJuche15•7 months ago

        That was a really good read, thanks for sharing it.

        Also,

        They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966.

        Lmao

      • D61 [any]5•7 months ago

        All about the "No Conch Life"...

      • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]4•7 months ago

        The boys went to Catholic school. Clearly the moral here is that protestants are evil.