[HN Gopher] Harming the 'outgroup' linked to elevated activity i...
___________________________________________________________________
Harming the 'outgroup' linked to elevated activity in the brain
reward circuitry
Author : edward
Score : 140 points
Date : 2022-06-17 05:42 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (neurosciencenews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neurosciencenews.com)
| escape_goat wrote:
| "While undergoing functional MRI, participants completed an
| aggression task against both an ingroup and an outgroup opponent
| in which their opponents repeatedly provoked them at varying
| levels and then participants could retaliate. Participants were
| then socially included and then excluded by two outgroup members
| and then completed the same aggression task against the same two
| opponents."
|
| I am not an expert but this seems like a dumpster fire in terms
| of experimental control.
| Bacito wrote:
| charlie0 wrote:
| In otherwords, water is wet. It's very easy to see that tribal
| behavior is hardwired into the brain. One just has to look at
| history and current events to see that.
|
| I own a sports motorcycle. One of the first things you learn at
| the track is that your initial instincts in certain situations
| are wrong because physics says so. During the course you learn to
| remold or even completely change your instincts.
|
| I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if we
| could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk
| instincts.
|
| We have amazing technology and could do so much more, but we're
| still stuck with the parts of our brain that are millions of
| years old.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Curious - what are these specific track lessons?
| dopeboy wrote:
| As a super sport rider who has never been on the track, I am
| curious as well.
| glitcher wrote:
| > I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if
| we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk
| instincts.
|
| And wouldn't studying the brain help lead us towards a better
| understanding of how to accomplish those goals? I'm not saying
| that this particular study is advancing us much, but helping
| identify how "obvious" human behaviors activate different parts
| of our brains does seem to be working towards that goal.
|
| I'm just having a little difficulty reconciling your dismissive
| opening paired with your wonder of what might be possible for
| us as a species. Breakthroughs in science are rare - it's
| mostly small, incremental, and boring progress.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| As a member of an "outgroup" (I'm over 40, in the tech
| industry -I never considered myself to be "on the outs," but
| have learned that I am, indeed), I can confirm, that, when
| profit is involved, no one is interested in changing their
| bias, and a scientific study won't make one whit of
| difference.
|
| It seems that the only thing that causes change in our innate
| bias, is _pain_. When we are forced to confront our biases,
| because not doing so _hurts_ (like crashing a racing bike),
| we will work hard to change it.
|
| Otherwise, we will blithely continue "as we were."
| cardanome wrote:
| > It seems that the only thing that causes change in our
| innate bias, is pain.
|
| Funny enough, it is quite often love. Many former neo-nazis
| left the scene because they fell in love with a member of
| the "wrong race". It is kind of a cliche at this point.
|
| Now whether it is that is getting to know a person of
| another race/culture/faith helps overcoming biases or if
| reproduction is simply biologically more pleasurable than
| bashing the outgroup, who knows.
| charlie0 wrote:
| This. I understand that researching this is a step in the
| right direction, but am disappointed that there are no good
| solutions to problems like these because they stem from
| basic biological functioning at some very deep level and
| this affects everyone, not just a tiny portion of people.
| dahart wrote:
| "The findings raise the possibility that one day treatments
| that disrupt the reward of intergroup aggression might help
| to reduce the costly and persistent human phenomenon of
| violence toward other groups, Chester said."
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, considering that we have an extremely large number
| of folks that refuse to take treatments that would save
| their own lives, as well as the lives of those around
| them, and the Venn diagram of those folks, and ones that
| want to hurt "others," has a significant overlap, what
| odds do you give, of them participating in the
| treatments?
|
| One word: "Miranda."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVuzOamXEk
| dahart wrote:
| I don't know, but I don't see any reason to be skeptical
| that the future can't improve, given history. You could
| have made the same argument about most medical treatments
| 400 years ago, and it'd turn out to be more or less
| completely wrong.
| sbf501 wrote:
| But he DOES race motorcycles. So there's that.
| car_analogy wrote:
| > I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if
| we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk
| instincts.
|
| The instincts that you _like_ are also hardwired, and we 'd
| also learn to overcome those. We could end up as the society in
| Brave New World.
| ChubbyGlasses wrote:
| > It's very easy to see that tribal behavior is hardwired into
| the brain
|
| All this study showed was that it was present in adult men,
| nothing about whether or not this is learned behavior or
| instinctual, or gender differences.
| xg15 wrote:
| So in effect they found the biological basis for hate?
|
| > _But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in
| opposing groups?
|
| A new study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth
| University has used functional brain imaging technology to reveal
| a potential answer: It increases activity in the brain's reward
| network._
|
| I think the underlying assumption here is already worth thinking
| about: That interpersonal and societal behaviour might be a lot
| more driven by instincts than we'd like to believe - and that in
| particular the tendency of people to structure the social
| landscape into "us" and "them" groups might be biologically
| hardwired.
|
| The other thing I believe would be useful to study at some time
| would be if there is some innate biological mechanism for
| sadistic behaviour, which in effect "flips the sign on the reward
| function" when we consider an action in particular contexts - so
| doing harm suddenly feels good and doing good feels bad. At
| least, that would explain to me, why in so many situations where
| a person has the power to make rules that others have to follow,
| the rules seem to skew towards being unpleasant, even if they
| wouldn't have to be rationally.
| archhn wrote:
| Nothing is more important for survival and thriving than
| belonging to a tribe. An isolated man is a dead man.
|
| Also, we don't need neuroscience to condescend to us like this.
| Isn't it obvious? Surely, most people have engaged in team sports
| and have felt the exhilaration of working together to overcome an
| enemy tribe.
|
| This also relates to the pleasure of harming others, even those
| not identified as members of an 'outgroup.' It is frowned upon by
| society, but most people like to hurt people. Why? Because the
| power to harm others is the power to defend yourself against them
| or knock them down in the struggle for hierarchical dominance.
| Those who are powerless often pose as saints, but if you give
| them power over others, they will become monsters--like the lowly
| wage worker who becomes a tyrant as soon as he's placed in
| management. We all have a devil inside us...and it's not from us
| being fallen creatures, but because life must take life in order
| to live. Life is an endless cycle of self-consumption, life
| consuming life...an ouroboros eating its tail--forever.
|
| Neitzche said the worst complement someone can receive is that
| they never hurt anyone. If you aren't somehow dangerous, who will
| care about you? What is your value in the struggle for life?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in
| opposing groups?
|
| Outsiders can be conceived as threats or competition for
| resources. So ve evolved that way.
| johndevor wrote:
| This reminds me of Girard's idea that Christianity (and others
| I'm sure) was effective because it showed things from the
| victim's point of view. I'm not making the claim that it fixed
| everything, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I dont see how it fixed anything related to harming the
| outgroup when popular interpretations and outcomes involved
| massive harming of outgroups
|
| It seems the same behaviors exist in the absence and presence
| of that religion
| katzgrau wrote:
| > It seems the same behaviors exist in the absence and
| presence of that religion
|
| Right, just humans doing their thing and twisting literally
| anything to justify their pursuit of power. Christianity not
| necessary.
|
| But there's something to be said for a set of values that
| emphasizes love, empathy, and reciprocity, regardless of the
| religion.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > But there's something to be said for a set of values that
| emphasizes love, empathy, and reciprocity, regardless of
| the religion.
|
| Such as how often the religious one fails to do that?
|
| My impression is that there is a recurring theme that it is
| violent towards outgroups and even more violent towards
| ingroups that don't conform exactly. Leaving only
| compassion towards an ever splintering sect for the brief
| time everyone believes the exact same thing.
|
| Also not exclusive to Christianity, but I mostly only hear
| from the escapees.
|
| In any case, what do you see?
| Nowado wrote:
| That's definitely an optimistic spin on Nietzschean resentment
| morality.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| Jesus himself preached against the human tendencies shown in
| this study:
|
| "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
| female, for you are all one"
| feet wrote:
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The Germans even have a word for it:
|
| Schadenfreude
|
| It comes from envy, the second deepest level in Dante's Inferno.
|
| Dante's cure for envy was sewing the eyes shut.
| sva_ wrote:
| I don't think Schadenfreude is dependant on whether or not the
| person is in the ingroup/outgroup.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Dante_
|
| Not precisely. "Envy" literally means what rhetorically can be
| rendered as "having eyes sewn shut": it means "not seeing"
| (Latin "invidia").
|
| That the envious can be admitted to Purgatory and cleansed
| through penitence seems to signify that those eyes consciously
| sewn - which is the actual condition, as per the above - can be
| part of a process to develop a more subtle sight, also
| considering that envy is specified as grown out of a focus on
| earthly goods (so, an idea is to "close the earthly eyes" and
| learn to see the spiritual goods).
|
| In other words, "if you can't see (which is envy) the spiritual
| goods, close your eyes to the earthly ones and refocus".
| morsch wrote:
| That's not what Schadenfreude is and neither does the word have
| any direct relation to envy ("Neid").
| prepend wrote:
| I thought it was related to envy because it's the joy
| experienced from the pain of others. And it's a response to
| the envy felt at the gain of others.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > The researchers had 35 male college students complete a
| competitive, aggressive task against either a student from their
| university or from what they were told was a rival university.
|
| Male college students, an "aggressive task", and a rival
| university.
|
| College students are literally trained to associate out-competing
| rival universities as a fun and desirable activity. It's the
| entire foundation of sports programs. This study feels like the
| authors tried to simulate a competitive sports program as closely
| as they could get away with in their lab environment and then
| tried to spin it as a profound observation about humanity in
| general.
|
| This really just reads like "young male college students still
| enjoy competing against their rival university"
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A more charitable way to look at it might be 'we identified the
| specific neural correlates of competitive vs aggressive
| activity', but that's not as catchy. The authors make the point
| that they deliberately picked a mild kind of rivalry _because_
| it was fun and socially desirable, vs selecting for some deeply
| held antagonism that might be stressful to the subjects.
|
| There is prior evidence that some people actively prefer seeing
| an opponent worse off (even at a cost to themselves) than
| merely outcompeting an opponent.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
| yunohn wrote:
| I would go a step further, and question if this even counts as
| an "outgroup" in the commonly used sense. These are just rival
| college teams, not people with opposing beliefs or structures.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| This research gives evidence that outgroup aggression feels
| good/rewarding. I'd tend to think this is hard-wired
| biologically. You're right that it could conceivably be
| trained, but that's not what it felt like for me as a young
| male in college.
|
| While many people (myself included) could anecdotally say that
| aggression to an outgroup can feel good, it's the job of
| science to look for the hard evidence in the brain. This quote
| from the researchers seemed key:
|
| > "This finding helps to balance the narrative about the
| psychological processes that underlie aggression against
| outgroup members, which typically emphasizes negative emotional
| states such as anger and fear," Chester said.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > This research gives evidence that outgroup aggression feels
| good/rewarding. I'd tend to think this is hard-wired
| biologically.
|
| This research gives evidence that rival college competition
| is fun to male college students.
|
| The point I was trying to make is that this is a specifically
| narrow finding with confounding factors (mirrors the
| structure of sports programs, which are significant social
| activities at many colleges).
|
| The study authors stretched the narrow funding into a very
| general finding, which is heavy editorializing. This
| stretching gets a free pass from many because it feels
| truthy, but it's not great science.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Ah, you think the social aspects confound the in/out group
| distinctions. But what other grouping would have been
| better? E.g. People from opposite sides of ethnic
| conflicts, members of bowling clubs vs non-members?
| dahart wrote:
| > This research gives evidence that rival college
| competition is fun to male college students
|
| That's not accurate. The research is based a-priori on
| knowing that competition is fun, and is asking the question
| "which specific parts of the brain are making it fun?"
|
| The abstract concludes:
|
| "Both before and after outgroup exclusion, aggression
| towards outgroup members was positively associated with
| activity in the ventral striatum during decisions about how
| aggressive to be towards their outgroup opponent.
| Aggression towards outgroup members was also linked to
| greater post-exclusion activity in the rostral and dorsal
| medial prefrontal cortexduring provocation from their
| outgroup opponent. These altered patterns of brain activity
| suggest that frontostriatal mechanisms may play a
| significant role in motivating aggression towards outgroup
| members."
| dalbasal wrote:
| Perhaps, and studies such as these _should_ have to withstand
| such questioning. But.....
|
| The problem as I see it isn't expiremntal design. The problem
| is larger scientific "design." To learn something _useful_ with
| a sufficiently nuances understanding would take a lot of
| studies. Replication, redesign, boundary testing of the
| hypothesis, re-theorizing, etc. Science is supposed to be a
| process.
|
| With this, it may be possible to arrive at usable knowledge
| about human psychology and why/how we behave badly. This
| smattering of disparate studies, even if they were well
| designed and executed.... It just doesn't lead anywhere.
|
| If expiremnts and studies were pieces in a larger scientific
| endeavour, I think both quality issues resilience to quality
| issues would improve naturally.
| feet wrote:
| >College students are literally trained to associate out-
| competing rival universities as a fun and desirable activity.
|
| This was not my experience in undergrad, literally at all. No
| idea where this comes from
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I was referring to college sports programs, which are a huge
| deal in the United States (where this study took place).
|
| Pick 35 random male college students and you will get a lot
| of college sports fans.
| wffurr wrote:
| Go to hell LSU! Gotta win the Egg Bowl over those scrubs at
| Mississippi State. Woo hoo we're in the playoffs!
|
| It comes from many people's experiences of collegiate sports
| which is full of rivalries, largely with no real basis.
| Except for LSU.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| How do you say you associate with the University of
| Mississippi without saying that you associate with them?
| Ha. I work there and went to school there too, so those
| first few sentences(well, except for the playoffs remark
| lol) sound very familiar.
| wffurr wrote:
| Class of '04, Computer Science. Hotty Toddy.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| We definitely were introduced to my state school's rivalry at
| my undergrad orientation. It's all in good fun, but certainly
| reinforced.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Were you in college in the US, or somewhere else? It may be
| more prevalent in the US, dunno. Just based on observations
| of US sports and cheerleader culture.
| feet wrote:
| Undergrad in the Midwest US
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's not universal among U.S. college students either. I
| went to a Div3 top-tier (academically) liberal arts
| college, and most people were oblivious to how our sports
| teams did, unless you were on the team or close friends
| with someone who was. Probably because we lost a large
| percentage of the time.
|
| The sports culture is much more relevant at Div1 schools.
| These get a disproportionate amount of air time (at least
| as far as sports go), but that's largely because those are
| the schools where sporting matches are worth watching.
| [deleted]
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Anecdotally, my wife's school (UNC) had a rival (Duke).
| Temple That's not weird or exceptional. There's long
| Wikipedia article about rivalries between universities: https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_rivalries_in_t...
| feet wrote:
| Is that something that's just cultural in the community or
| is it something explicitly taught by university
| orientation/course work?
| nverno wrote:
| Those campuses are seeped in that rivarly. You'll hear
| chants, speeches, etc. It's a tradition.
| casion wrote:
| To add on to this, I have a co-worker from a specific
| university who would not buy a car because it was a rival
| universities colour.
|
| This person is ~30 years out of school, and the vehicle
| was an INCREDIBLE deal and exactly what the person was
| looking to buy (other than the colour).
|
| The person never competed in sports and was a comp sci
| major. It runs deep for at many schools.
| sokoloff wrote:
| My wife would not let me wear a tie with Michigan colors
| to a wedding. Michigan and (the) Ohio State are rivals;
| she grew up near _but did not go to_ Ohio State.
|
| It's deep indeed.
| sitkack wrote:
| They themselves might have cared, but damn if I wear a
| purple shirt in Seattle folks are like Go Huskies to me,
| to the point where I think twice about putting it on or
| wearing it outside the house. I could give a damn about
| sports or nationalism, but lots of other idiots do.
| bseidensticker wrote:
| I think it's a little unfair to call people idiots for
| something that's extremely hardwired into their brains.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > idiots
|
| Downvoted and reported, frankly. How can you do callously
| say something about this? You do realize sports fans are
| (for the most part) self aware of the inconsequence of a
| sports rivalry in the real world, right?
| [deleted]
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I chose my car color over my other preferred color
| (orange) for precisely this reason.
|
| It's fun to use little heuristics like this - and
| completely harmless considering the inconsequence of the
| decision. I know it doesn't matter, but I can't buy two
| cars, and I really could have gone either way. Is this
| really so far fetched?
| jtdev wrote:
| christophilus wrote:
| I really enjoy trolling the Harvard grads I know by referring
| to their "time at Yale or Princeton or wherever." Old school
| rivalries run deep and are a lot of fun to play up.
|
| Also, for all of you in South Carolina, go Tigers (and
| Chants), booo Cocks!
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I'm a _proud_ Gamecock, and maybe that's why I'm all over
| this thread.
|
| I just replied to a guy a few comments up about how I
| unironically chose a red car over orange (one of my
| favorite colors) because _go, fight, win, kick ass, fuck
| Clemson!_
|
| We can all agree the SC state flag is pretty, I guess.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| I wonder if this research gives hints as to why rivalries
| are "fun"? Even when you know the in/out group distinction
| is silly, little aggressions like "boooo Cocks!" can tickle
| reward areas in the brain. Akin to how scary movies are fun
| even when you know you're not in danger.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| As a Gamecock fan, and a somewhat reasonable person (self
| described), I've been defending rivalries based on this
| exact case throughout this thread.
|
| I completely agree with your speculation. It's fun for me
| to even type: go fight win kick ass fuck Clemson. Ahhhh
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Oh no... Is this another "Harvard men do a study of Harvard men
| to find out about Harvard men" study?
|
| http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04152016
| salt-thrower wrote:
| This is the classic trope that psychology studies in general
| don't reveal truths about humanity, they reveal truths about
| (mostly white) American college students.
| dahart wrote:
| The authors might even agree with that summary, the paper talks
| more or less about picking people that give the strongest
| competitive signal. But the point wasn't to check whether
| people enjoy competition, the point was to understand more
| about how the brain works, right? That does seem like useful
| research - even when we know we behave a certain way, we don't
| always know exactly why, and we certainly have a long way to go
| toward understanding the brain, no?
|
| Personally I think it's interesting that the "aggressive task"
| was to push a computer button faster than the opponent. This
| isn't "aggressive" in the way most people would imagine when
| you describe this study as "simulating" a competitive sports
| program. It's more of a clinical/scientific concept of
| aggression and quite dissimilar from actually playing hockey or
| lacrosse, for example.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Aggression_Paradigm) The
| participants were sitting alone inside a brain scanner playing
| an extremely basic video game, and being primed with some pure
| narrative about who their opponents and team mates were.
| Physical safety was not in question, and there was no
| interpersonal interaction (all other players were computer
| simulation). This says a lot about the power of narrative, and
| how much we operate on things we're told and don't have first
| hand knowledge of.
|
| Also interesting: left-handed people were excluded. The paper
| doesn't appear to say why, but I wonder if that was due to the
| design of the game UI (seems most likely), or if it was done
| for statistical reasons and/or known behavioral differences of
| left vs right handed people (this seems less likely, but
| possible?).
| yunohn wrote:
| > Also interesting: left-handed people were excluded.
|
| This is pretty common in brain research:
| https://www.freethink.com/science/left-handed-people-
| brain-r...
| TexanFeller wrote:
| This is entirely unsurprising given what's been seen in our
| primate cousins. They've been observed going to war with
| neighboring tribes, slaughtering all the males, slaughtering the
| young offspring of those makes months later, and taking the
| females for themselves. War, genocide, infanticide, rape...all
| the things we think of as "inhuman" and unnatural are practiced
| by our close relatives. Fighting an outgroup which shares less of
| your genes than your tribe seems pretty normal in nature and
| makes the origin of racism pretty intuitive, and yet we think of
| racism as some particularly Western/American cultural failure.
| api wrote:
| Could be a comment to an alien report on why humanity didn't pass
| the great filter...
| insickness wrote:
| For many affiliations, particularly political ones, your
| affiliation is more based on hating the outgroup than loving the
| ingroup. For example, I would wager that most Republicans hate
| Democrats more than they love Republicans and more progressives
| hate conservatives more than they love progressives. You need
| look no further than left and right leaning news sources to see
| this. A left leaning news source is far more about exposing
| people on the right than talking about how good the left is, and
| vice versa.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I wonder how much of that is a structural defect in our
| political system/human nature-intersects politics.
|
| You get votes (and power) by promising to right wrongs the
| other side has perpetrated.
|
| You don't get nearly as much votes and power from actually
| righting those wrongs and, in fact, the removal of those wrongs
| may reduce the future power you have to make promises to fix
| them.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| Indeed, it seems more like a form of self defense than self
| affirmation
| timwaagh wrote:
| The secret to happiness
| dimal wrote:
| > The findings raise the possibility that one day treatments that
| disrupt the reward of intergroup aggression might help to reduce
| the costly and persistent human phenomenon of violence toward
| other groups
|
| A little G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate should clear that right up!
| wanda wrote:
| Wo Xiang Mei Er ,Mei Xin ,Bian Shi Tou
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Could you kind explain, provide the best translation, and
| reveal if that was a cultural reference?
| jhugo wrote:
| It's from Serenity, the film continuation of Firefly.
|
| The translation of the Chinese is roughly "I want to darken
| my ears and heart and become a stone."
|
| Scroll about halfway down on this page to find some info: h
| ttps://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenityn
| ...
| jxf wrote:
| Here's the original study: https://psyarxiv.com/fj5ht/
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is basically the story of the history of human beings, and
| of our close relatives, the chimpanzees. Escaping these
| (apparently) hard-wired behaviors is what education is for;
| humans don't have to act like animals. However, this is what
| humans revert to when education is dismantled, and when group-
| identity themes are forced on them - tribalism, nationalism,
| sectarian religious fanaticism, identitarianism, etc.
|
| For example, Machiavellian types have long understood that
| whipping up religious fervor is a route to political power if
| they can be the ones who direct that aggression, and this can be
| applied to any religious organization, and similar in-group based
| ideological movements as well (communism, fascism).
|
| It's particularly illustrative when a major religion is split by
| internal divisions and the two groups turn on each other with
| remarkable levels of savage violence, as with the Protestant-
| Catholic wars that raged across Europe for several hundred years,
| or the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam, a conflict that continues to
| this day and which is characterized by things like suicide
| bombings targeting mosques and so on. Typically you find the
| leaders of the various groups are political actors who work hand
| in hand with the
| priests/ministers/clerics/rabbis/preachers/ideologues to gain and
| consolidate political power, which, surprise, leads to the
| accumulation of wealth on their part. This was also a major
| justification for colonial European expansion in the Americas and
| genocidal attacks on native American populations (who, it must be
| said, also went to war with each other on similar grounds, see
| the Aztec Empire).
|
| It's basically similar to in-group/out-group conflict in
| chimpanzee tribes, which is not surprising as chimps and humans
| share a fairly recent common ancestor.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
|
| _During the four-year conflict, all males of the Kahama
| community were killed, effectively disbanding the community. The
| victorious Kasakela then expanded into further territory but were
| later repelled by another community of chimpanzees._
|
| Forcing members of groups who hate each other to work together if
| they want to survive could be a way of ah, re-educating them...
| For example, take two such people, put them in a leaky rowboat
| out in the ocean, give one a paddle and one a bucket, and see if
| they can make it to shore. If they use their tools to attack each
| other instead of to cooperate, well... good riddance.
| [deleted]
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Your rowboat pair won't attack each other, because the point of
| attacking an out-group is to gain status in your in-group. It's
| a performance. If there's no audience, there's no performance
| briantakita wrote:
| Each individual person is liable to become a "them" once one
| asserts one's individuality from the group identity. Group
| coalitions that do not respect individuality often fall prey to
| base emotions as they collectively punish individual identities.
| Individual creators are largely responsible for the actual work,
| new ideas, innovations, things...
|
| The feedback loop described in the OP creates groupthink,
| politically correct culture, an abundance of blind spots, & a
| narrow path of evolution specifically tailored to the group's
| worldview. Group "whips" are given positions of power to mete out
| punishment against those who cross lines defined by group &
| interpreted by the "whip".
|
| If one sees all models as being false, the teleological fate of
| the OP's group feedback loop unchecked is group delusion,
| irrelevance, harming a perennial ever changing subgroup of
| outlier individuals, & eventual collapse. The perennial ever
| changing subgroup of outliers individuals is necessary to feed
| the base emotional reward circuitry of the "in group", a
| necessary sacrifice to cohere the "in group", feeding the group's
| evolutionary descent...
|
| Perceived morality is important for the "whip". There's always a
| statement of alibi & justification while the "whip" is punishing
| others. "For the greater good" is often an alibi to justify the
| emotional reward circuitry "hit" of those afflicted with these
| addictions
| [deleted]
| feet wrote:
| >Group coalitions that do not respect individuality often fall
| prey to base emotions as they collectively punish individual
| identities
|
| Something I find strange is that US republicans claim to be the
| part of individual liberty and freedom, yet they're the ones
| who punish and restrict those things the most
| meany wrote:
| Something things you might want to consider. as this article
| points out human brains evolved to push the individual to
| identify with a group and be hostile to other groups because
| it improved fitness. Through most of human existence this
| group survival pressure outweighed objective rational
| perception of reality . Political parties often tap into this
| in group out group emotional connection. While I agree that
| Republican Party logic is often weak and often emotional, I
| would argue that the Democratic Party is as well, just on
| different issues.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| And that's why us libertarians hate the Republican party as
| much as the Democrats.
| feet wrote:
| Libertarians also don't seem to recognise the inherently
| exploitative characteristics of capitalism and refuse to
| accept that regulation is necessary for the protection of
| workers and the populace from assholes with too much time,
| money, and power
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Some of us are very aware of such exploitation, but we're
| skeptical that we'll be less exploited by those given
| political power to deal with those immoral capitalists.
| History is full of examples of party leaders in Marxist
| countries wining and dining while the populace lives in
| poverty. It happens when too much power rests in any
| institution. So I personally oppose large businesses as
| much as I oppose large government, and pretty much all
| large institutions in general(though a few types of them
| are almost unavoidable).
| int_19h wrote:
| But what kind of policy does that opposition to large
| businesses translate to? How do you prevent them from
| actually arising?
|
| Left answer to that is that large businesses are the
| result of unbounded concentration of capital. Left
| authoritarians (the ones I think you refer to as
| Marxists? even though not all of them are, and not all
| Marxists are authoritarian) want to limit it by state
| action. Left libertarians think that taking the
| government out of the picture and reworking property
| rights around some notion of usufruct is sufficient. But
| what's the right libertarian answer?
| feet wrote:
| That's what I'm wondering. Maybe we agree about the
| apparent root cause of the issue but we need a tangible
| solution to it, which could be restructuring ownership of
| businesses to better suit the people that make up those
| businesses. Regulation is a way to do that, or other
| things. But whatever we do will take some sort of
| regulation, or those same people who have too much money
| and power are going to keep doing the same old shit
| meany wrote:
| Something thing you might want to consider. as this article
| points out human brains evolved to push the individual to
| identify with a group and be hostile to other groups because
| it improved fitness. Through most of human existence this
| group survival pressure outweighed objective rational
| perception of reality . Political parties often tap into this
| in group out group emotional connection. While I agree that
| Republican Party logic is often weak and often emotional, I
| would argue that the Democratic Party is as well, just on
| different issues.
|
| Another thing to think about is that by attacking an "out
| group" (I assume you're not a republican) in this post you
| are potentially showing the behavior described in the
| article.
|
| Edit- grammer
| feet wrote:
| Well I'm not democrat either, both parties do it to a
| degree, the republicans are just completely insane and
| super aggressive about it so its a bit more obvious
| int_19h wrote:
| Group cohesion is more important for the Republicans at
| this point, because they're numerically inferior.
| briantakita wrote:
| I agree that Republicans are a group identity with the group
| problems. Just be careful that "the Republicans" is not the
| "out group" of any group identity that you may participate
| with. The effects described by the OP can be subtle & sneaky
| & applies to everyone. Just like a seemingly innocuous bug or
| an abstract primitive can cause deep cascading ramifications
| in a complex system. Symbols or proxies for thought effect
| one's entire worldview without through examination.
| feet wrote:
| Its all politicians, republicans are just the most insane
| and brazen about it
| [deleted]
| acheron wrote:
| Excellent example of what the article was talking about. What
| kind of dopamine hit did you get when you posted that?
| djmips wrote:
| Good point actually. :) This effect is all over comments in
| general.
| feet wrote:
| Claiming that someone is doing this is also a great way
| to deflect conversation away from the actual and material
| harm that many politicians inflict on the populace
| through their greed
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not American and I've only visited for four months total,
| so my view of the politics is mainly from the news and forums
| like this one. From this, given how often I see Republicans
| saying it's the Democrats who are restricting freedoms, I
| have to assume the two camps (as in being or the other as
| identity, not necessarily just voting red or blue last time)
| actually want to do different things -- if you'll bear with
| the obvious stereotypes, reds want to have guns and limit
| birth control, while and blues want to have birth control and
| limit guns.
| feet wrote:
| The freedoms that republicans care about is the freedom to
| deny gay people marriage, the freedom to purchase assault
| weapons before your brain fully matures and without any
| training whatsoever, the freedom to use your religion as an
| excuse to shit on people and indoctrinate the children of
| others
|
| Democrats only care about corporations and profits.
|
| Republicans are social conservatives, Democrats are fiscal
| conservatives
| ben_w wrote:
| I thought Democrats also cared about keeping the church
| out of the state? Which is also a restriction on the
| freedom of the teachers to get preachy, and I can easily
| imagine someone upset and demanding "I want the right to
| pray before each class"... not that I would sympathise
| with them: my memories of school include being annoyed by
| the mandatory religion, as my parents sent me to a
| Catholic school (in the UK, though IIRC in the UK even
| non-religious schools are currently required to have
| regular Christian-themed assemblies).
| feet wrote:
| Democrats only care as much as their corporate overlords
| pay them to care
| ben_w wrote:
| Are you putting both reds and blues in your personal
| outgroup?
| feet wrote:
| If I consider that none of them represent my views,
| ethics, and moral structure then yes. I do think that
| their actions do more harm than good.
|
| But the ingroup outgroups in this situation are those
| with money and power and those without. The political
| class represents money and power, nothing more and
| nothing less
|
| The political class provides legislation to their
| constituents, the donors with money, while claiming that
| they care about regular working class Americans but doing
| literally nothing to ever help them
|
| Republicans actively work to harm people through
| restrictive legislation and democrats inadvertently harm
| people through their careless and shitty legislation that
| on the surface _sounds_ like it could help people but
| when you read the actual text its all bullshit carveouts
| for corporations to protect their exploitatively gained
| profits
|
| They're just con artists gaming the country for money,
| plain and simple. But that's what happens when your
| cultural ideology puts money and profit and "the economy"
| above the people that make up the society
| dahart wrote:
| > reds want to have guns and limit birth control, while
| blues was to have birth control and limit guns.
|
| This isn't very accurate, FWIW (though easy to get this
| impression.) The vast, vast majority of Americans want
| access to birth control and want reasonable limits on guns
| (regardless of whether they would like to own guns
| themselves). I think it's like over 90% in both cases.
|
| You might be thinking of the debate over abortion, rather
| than birth control.
|
| Reds might want to own guns more often, but they're mostly
| in favor of more gun control than we have today. Blues also
| want more gun control that we have today, but are slightly
| more in favor of allowing abortions.
|
| These debates, fwiw, are sideshow social signal and tribal
| politics. They are exaggerating and polarizing the reality
| of what the populace really wants. The actual distinction
| between red and blue is (was) fiscal policy. We've mostly
| stopped debating fiscal policy in good faith in this
| country, but nonetheless the terms "conservative" and
| "liberal" really came from how we want to tax and spend,
| and whether we believe in social services and safety nets
| especially at the federal level (democratic), or whether we
| prefer that states have more control and we spend less
| money on social services and disenfranchised people.
| ChubbyGlasses wrote:
| This is a remarkably extreme take for what was actually
| presented in the article.
| bobthechef wrote:
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