Us vs. Them. Harming Members Of Outgroups Is Enjoyable

[Cheerful Charlie]

Google neurosciencenews.com, us vs them. MRI brain scans demonstrate harming members of outgroups stimulates our pleasure centers. Scientifically, we seem to be born morally evil.

 

[bilby]

Google neurosciencenews.com, us vs them. MRI brain scans demonstrate harming members of outgroups stimulates our pleasure centers. Scientifically, we seem to be born morally evil.

That’s exactly the kind of thing I expect idiots like you to say.

Hey, it works!

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Yeah! So's your old man! Yes it does feel good. A bad design decision on God's part it would seem.

 

[steve_bank]

Do we need an MRI to see that?

One way to frame it is to say morality is what the weak imposes on the strong.

Group identities make people feel good. Looking down on others enhances it.

Killing people in video games increases the feel good brain hormones and can be addictice.

 

[lpetrich]

Do we need an MRI to see that?

But an MRI can show us what we are thinking and feeling independently of what we report.

That's a problem with psychology more generally. The stronger sorts of results seem obvious, and those results make some people say "Why go through all the trouble to confirm what we already know?"

 

[BH]

None of the information surprises me.

 

[rousseau]

The most important thing to any given person is their personal well-being, which makes their family/friends the 'team', and people who aren't their family/friends at best irrelevant, and at worst competition.

Does that make us evil? Or does it mean we don't want to end up starving / homeless? People who are too empathetic at the expense of making calculated decisions often end up poor and destitute.

 

[abaddon]

Does that make us evil?

Nope. There's a world of difference between our instinctive impulses and our choices of behavior. You can't be born morally evil. That'd be a matter of whether we follow through on a harmful impulse.

Pleasure helps us do what's helpful to survive, pain reminds us not to do what isn't.

"Born evil". That's a christian sentiment.

 

[Elixir]

“The cruelty is the point.”

A big advantage for small minority groups that have acquired power, such as Qball Trumpsuckers, is that almost everyone is in their “outgroup”. So they can go about their day indulging in constant gratuitous cruelty with minimal risk of harming any ingroup members.

 

[rousseau]

Does that make us evil?

Nope. There's a world of difference between our instinctive impulses and our choices of behavior. You can't be born morally evil. That'd be a matter of whether we follow through on a harmful impulse.

Pleasure helps us do what's helpful to survive, pain reminds us not to do what isn't.

"Born evil". That's a christian sentiment.

Good points. Human nature seems to work a lot better with regards to survival when it uses simple heuristics like good/bad.

IIRC, it was Dawkins who talked about the 'tit-for-tat' strategy, and how it's a pretty effective survival mechanism. If someone does something 'good' for us we reward them, if someone does something 'bad' for us we punish them. In lieu of an ability to reason in a more nuanced way, it's an effective behavioral pattern.

 

[Jarhyn]

Google neurosciencenews.com, us vs them. MRI brain scans demonstrate harming members of outgroups stimulates our pleasure centers. Scientifically, we seem to be born morally evil.

I think a lot depends on the geometry of the target outgroup, and how we model our "harm".

We are born to prefer the in-group because the in-group is generally genetically closer than outgroups, but this can be hijacked away from the service of the Darwinian self, and pointed in some respects towards those who aspire to unilateral harm.

As such this is not necessarily evil, it's just incredibly easy for it to go that way.

“The cruelty is the point.”

A big advantage for small minority groups that have acquired power, such as Qball Trumpsuckers, is that almost everyone is in their “outgroup”. So they can go about their day indulging in constant gratuitous cruelty with minimal risk of harming any ingroup members.

And as you will note, they also tend to hate each other, everything about those others also being in their ingroups, as ingroup membership declines.

The mere presence of other ingroup members is often seen as an affront, an unacceptable and annoying limitation to the acceptable extent of the cruelty they may wantonly execute.

 

[Playball40]

If this is true, why am I having such a difficult time firing a person on my team? This person is not doing their job, driving UBER on company time and has no interest in getting better. BUT.....he's not an awful person. I feel badly for him.

 

[steve_bank]

MRI doe not tell what is being thought, it can indicate brain activity in n area.

What is being thought in a controlled experiment is an interpretation and conclusion.

I liastemedto a neuroscientist talk about an experiment.

He ran brain scans on the religious praying and contemplating god. By chnce he had secular scientists in his control group.

To make a long story short he concluded that the religious contemplating god and the secular contemplating the cosmos and science lit up te same areas in the brain.

His general conclusion was the religious and secular scientists had the same subjective experience. An interpretation of an experiment.

 

[steve_bank]

If this is true, why am I having such a difficult time firing a person on my team? This person is not doing their job, driving UBER on company time and has no interest in getting better. BUT.....he's not an awful person. I feel badly for him.

It could mean as the saying goes ' you lack the ability to make the hard decisions'.

I had to fire somebody once. He would not take direction and did whatever he felt like doing. I went rthrough a series of warnings and corrective action, set a time limit, and when it passed let him go. I dd not like doing it but I did it. Myself and the manufacturing manager agreed to give him a soft landing. We gave him a layoff so he could get unemployment.

He was not suited to the environment. Months later when I got a call for a job reference he was more suited to I gave him a good recommendation and he got the job.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

People can learn to fight such tendencies or surrender to them. Of course some sub-cultures can teach its members to not give in to such satisfying emotions, or to accept these things as reasonable. Racist groups, bad churches and leaders etc. But knowing that this is indeed a neuroscientific finding makes understanding that and avoiding evil acts because it feels good becomes a moral duty for intelligent people. Especially in this age of rampant Trumpism.

 

[Jarhyn]

If this is true, why am I having such a difficult time firing a person on my team? This person is not doing their job, driving UBER on company time and has no interest in getting better. BUT.....he's not an awful person. I feel badly for him.

Because, frankly, he is part of your in-group.

Your in-group, the in-group of most ethical people is "anyone not-an-awful-person", because we reshape our in-group to awfulness rather than difference

 

[Bronzeage]

I'm not buying into the general premise that a spot on an MRI means something definitive.