10 ms·

Harming the ‘outgroup’ linked to elevated activity in the brain reward circuitry

151 points by edward 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago
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.
- morsch 4y ago
  That's not what Schadenfreude is and neither does the word have any direct relation to envy ("Neid").
  - prepend 4y ago
    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.
- sva_ 4y ago
  I don't think Schadenfreude is dependant on whether or not the person is in the ingroup/outgroup.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    It means having pleasure at some other person’s pain
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > 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".
jxf 4y ago
Here's the original study: https://psyarxiv.com/fj5ht/ https://psyarxiv.com/fj5ht/
johndevor 4y ago
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.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      > 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?
      - katzgrau 4y ago
        > In any case, what do you see? I see that failing to practice what is preached does not invalidate the message. Humans make lots of mistakes and the consequences of that are reflected in all of our institutions. Thankfully, those institutions eventually die away and new, hopefully improved ones grow in their place until the cycle repeats. Happens on all scales.
dimal 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  我想昧耳，昧心，变石头
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Could you kind explain, provide the best translation, and reveal if that was a cultural reference?
    - jhugo 4y ago
      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: https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenitynovel.html https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenityn...
briantakita 4y ago
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 4y ago
  [deleted]
- feet 4y ago
  - briantakita 4y ago
    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.
    - deleted 4y ago
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> 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”
- feet 4y ago
  >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
  - wffurr 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Class of '04, Computer Science. Hotty Toddy.
timwaagh 4y ago
The secret to happiness
photochemsyn 4y ago
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 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 4y ago
  [deleted]
- circlefavshape 4y ago
escape_goat 4y ago
”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 4y ago
I think this is nature's risk management mechanism at play. I believe nature has put a mechanism in our heads, which prevents the easy spread of global threats to humanity by dividing us (the society) to different subgroups. This division acts as a barrier for the contagion effects of different threats or at least slows them down significantly. Let's take for example the current Crypto sale. People who invested in crypto are losing money, but fortunately nature created other individuals, who think crypto is a scam and they've never put their money on the table. They are safe compared the their peers. An example, where this mechanism has been compromised by humanity is the civil aviation and the COVID spread. If we didn't have a sophisticated and integrated civil aviation industry COVID would have had a hard time spreading around the globe so fast. 100 years earlier and the virus would have needed many more months to spread. So, I think nature deliberately (or evolutionary) put a mechanism in our heads, where we try to protect our own group and harm the outsiders. This reinforces nature's risk management.
charlie0 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Curious - what are these specific track lessons?
  - dopeboy 4y ago
    As a super sport rider who has never been on the track, I am curious as well.
- glitcher 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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."
xg15 4y ago
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.
DeathArrow 4y ago
>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.
api 4y ago
Could be a comment to an alien report on why humanity didn't pass the great filter...
TexanFeller 4y ago
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.
archhn 4y ago
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?
insickness 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  Indeed, it seems more like a form of self defense than self affirmation
bobthechef 4y ago
z3t4 4y ago
Recommended: Search Youtube for "Social evaluation by preverbal infants". We are basically born evil (to like people that hurt people that are not like us) and empathy (towards people that are different) is learned through society.

151 points by edward 4y ago

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.

morsch 4y ago
That's not what Schadenfreude is and neither does the word have any direct relation to envy ("Neid").
- prepend 4y ago
  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.
sva_ 4y ago
I don't think Schadenfreude is dependant on whether or not the person is in the ingroup/outgroup.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  It means having pleasure at some other person’s pain
mdp2021 4y ago
> 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".

jxf 4y ago

Here's the original study: https://psyarxiv.com/fj5ht/ https://psyarxiv.com/fj5ht/

johndevor 4y ago

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.

yieldcrv 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    > 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?
    - katzgrau 4y ago
      > In any case, what do you see? I see that failing to practice what is preached does not invalidate the message. Humans make lots of mistakes and the consequences of that are reflected in all of our institutions. Thankfully, those institutions eventually die away and new, hopefully improved ones grow in their place until the cycle repeats. Happens on all scales.

dimal 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
我想昧耳，昧心，变石头
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Could you kind explain, provide the best translation, and reveal if that was a cultural reference?
  - jhugo 4y ago
    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: https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenitynovel.html https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenityn...

briantakita 4y ago

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 4y ago
[deleted]
feet 4y ago
- briantakita 4y ago
  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.
  - deleted 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> 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”

feet 4y ago
>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
- wffurr 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Class of '04, Computer Science. Hotty Toddy.

timwaagh 4y ago

The secret to happiness

photochemsyn 4y ago

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 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 4y ago
[deleted]
circlefavshape 4y ago

escape_goat 4y ago

”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 4y ago

I think this is nature's risk management mechanism at play. I believe nature has put a mechanism in our heads, which prevents the easy spread of global threats to humanity by dividing us (the society) to different subgroups. This division acts as a barrier for the contagion effects of different threats or at least slows them down significantly. Let's take for example the current Crypto sale. People who invested in crypto are losing money, but fortunately nature created other individuals, who think crypto is a scam and they've never put their money on the table. They are safe compared the their peers. An example, where this mechanism has been compromised by humanity is the civil aviation and the COVID spread. If we didn't have a sophisticated and integrated civil aviation industry COVID would have had a hard time spreading around the globe so fast. 100 years earlier and the virus would have needed many more months to spread. So, I think nature deliberately (or evolutionary) put a mechanism in our heads, where we try to protect our own group and harm the outsiders. This reinforces nature's risk management.

charlie0 4y ago

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 4y ago
Curious - what are these specific track lessons?
- dopeboy 4y ago
  As a super sport rider who has never been on the track, I am curious as well.
glitcher 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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."

xg15 4y ago

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.

DeathArrow 4y ago

>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.

api 4y ago

Could be a comment to an alien report on why humanity didn't pass the great filter...

TexanFeller 4y ago

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.

archhn 4y ago

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?

insickness 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
Indeed, it seems more like a form of self defense than self affirmation

bobthechef 4y ago

z3t4 4y ago

Recommended: Search Youtube for "Social evaluation by preverbal infants". We are basically born evil (to like people that hurt people that are not like us) and empathy (towards people that are different) is learned through society.