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

  • 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.