Human Brains Are Wired to Blame Rather Than Praise | Hacker News Reader

Human Brains Are Wired to Blame Rather Than Praise

fortune.com

90 pointslxm49 comments

This looks like a brain mechanism finding to back up the well known psychological phenomenon called The Fundamental Attribution Error,[1] "the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in explaining social behavior." Simply put, we observe other people's noticeable behavior in social situations (which is most likely to be their BAD behavior, which gains more notice) as reflecting their (bad) character, while we figure that most of our own behavior toward other people is the best we can do under the circumstances. I've seen plenty of examples of this here on Hacker News, and if I acknowledge the research findings, I have to acknowledge that I've provided more than a few examples of that kind of behavior here on Hacker News over the years.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/real-men-dont-write-blo...

More specifically, the Fundamental Attribution Error says that the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation works when judging other people's behavior; instead, when judging our own behavior, we tend to overestimate the effect of the situation, and underestimate that of our own disposition/personality.

It would be interesting if they could add to the experiment cases where people had to judge themselves - but I guess it would be much more difficult to find a repeatable test for that.

Thanks for this, explains my own behaviour too. Only after I reached my thirties I became more thoughtful and analytical before speaking and with that came less blaming. It's still in my brain though but it doesn't come out much.

> Aristotle dealt quite the challenge to humanity when he issued his moral philosophy about the ‘perfect man,’ saying he does not “concern himself that others should be blamed.” Aristotle must have missed the brain scans.

WHat a weak way to finish the article - take a quote from a Greek philosopher you do not understand and look like a smart aleck while you are obviously oblivious to its actual meaning.

I blame society for such a weak finish.

Blame Aristotle.

I think it was a joke.

Then it certainly failed even at that.

To demonstrate that a joke failed, you have to show it didn't work for the bulk of an intended audience, not just that you personally didn't like it.

The fact that the rest of the audience laughed at a failed joke just demonstrates their bad taste and poor character.

Ironically you didn't do any better. You could have explained why the author didn't understand Aristotle and what the actual meaning of the quote is.

Was that on purpose?

Making a critical mistake can get you killed but doing anything awesome won't make your lifespan infinite. So, the natural tendency of human brain is to avoid mistakes for betterment of survival chances while not giving too much importance to any positive stuff happening to them.

The downside is too much and the upside is not that much.

  Just as solid rock
  is not shaken by the storm,
  even so the wise are not affected
  by praise or blame.

Dhammapada 81

Human brains raised in a hierarchical society based on relations of domination.

To elaborate: Emotional responses are very plastic. One can deliberately change the brain structures involved in those processes. It stands to reason that the brain structures we have without deliberate practice are not some neutral state of the human brain, but a reflection of our social context.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/

Abstract: In a recent visit to the United States, the Dalai Lama gave a speech at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Over the past several years, he has helped recruit Tibetan Buddhist monks for, and directly encouraged research on the brain and meditation in the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings from studies in this unusual sample as well as related research efforts, suggest that, over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains. In this article we discuss neuroplasticity, which encompasses such alterations, and the findings from these studies. Further, we comment on the associated signal processing (SP) challenges, current status and how SP can contribute to advance these studies.

Choice quote: "Expert meditators also showed less activation than novices in the amygdala during FA meditation in response to emotional sounds. Activation in this affective region correlated negatively with hours of practice in life, as shown in Figure 1(A). This finding may support the idea that, advanced levels of concentration are associated with a significant decrease in emotionally reactive behaviors that are incompatible with stability of concentration."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22661409

Abstract: The development of social emotions such as compassion is crucial for successful social interactions as well as for the maintenance of mental and physical health, especially when confronted with distressing life events. Yet, the neural mechanisms supporting the training of these emotions are poorly understood. To study affective plasticity in healthy adults, we measured functional neural and subjective responses to witnessing the distress of others in a newly developed task (Socio-affective Video Task). Participants' initial empathic responses to the task were accompanied by negative affect and activations in the anterior insula and anterior medial cingulate cortex--a core neural network underlying empathy for pain. Whereas participants reacted with negative affect before training, compassion training increased positive affective experiences, even in response to witnessing others in distress. On the neural level, we observed that, compared with a memory control group, compassion training elicited activity in a neural network including the medial orbitofrontal cortex, putamen, pallidum, and ventral tegmental area--brain regions previously associated with positive affect and affiliation. Taken together, these findings suggest that the deliberate cultivation of compassion offers a new coping strategy that fosters positive affect even when confronted with the distress of others.

Thank you so much for posting this. Are there any good sources for this type of information? I'm specifically interested in psychological/neurological differences between cultures. A similar example is Crazy Like Us [1]. It's fascinating how culture seems to thwart a full comprehension of psychology.

1: http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/d...

Check these out:

http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/DestructiveEmotions.pdf

http://www.amazon.ca/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific-Dialogu...

I agree. The idea of "wiring" of the brain is very old school. Would have been more interesting if the article (maybe the research did) asked how this wiring came to be: instinctive or nurture. Not a lot of our wiring is instinctive.

Is it correct to draw a comparison between these findings and those revealed by behavior economists such as Daniel Kahneman: blaming as part of system 1 thinking and praising drawn from system 2? It seems to fit nicely (and I like that). If it is acceptable, then perhaps it isn't correct to say that our brains are wired to blame rather than praise but instead that we blame quickly and praise slowly.

Whenever my code doesn't work, my first thought is: "The compiler made a mistake." :)

My job? lol.. do a hundred great things.. no one remembers. make one mistake... no one ever forgets.

This is every aspect of life though.

See: Bill Nguyen

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen

I don't get it, what am I missing?

Bill Nguyen is best known as the founder of Color, a much hyped then subsequently much lampooned photo app that failed rather conspicuously under the weight of its own PR, a la Cuil.

Based on the Wikipedia article, he apparently had a long track record of multiple impressive successes prior to Color, although none are nearly as well known.

Hence the parent's argument that Bill Ngyuen's life is an illustration of the true nature of the world: you can be successful 100 times, but if you fail once, it is only the failure that is remembered.

Check his company track record.

Or, as people in the trade say - good stage lightining / movie soundtrack is the one you don't remember hearing after you leave the theatre / cinema. If you do, it means you paid attention to it specifically, which means something went wrong.

Normally people do more good things to others than bad things. It's hard to estimate what the ratio is but I would say it's closer to 1000:1 than 10:1. If being at good is the baseline, it would make sense to ignore those events most of the time.

This wouldn't be to bad if people just put the same critical filters to their own ideas and actions as they put on others.

According to Kelly McGonical they put stricter filter on themselves. They appear more critical on your project because they we're so immensely critical of their own project, that it never got started.

that explains the internet

It also explains politics. I'm pretty sure that, if we were facing an extinction event courtesy a rather large and immovable asteroid, they'd spend the time we had left trying to see who they could blame other than themselves for curtailing efforts to expand beyond LEO.

That would make a great Sci-fi humorous short story.

I think 'wired' is the wrong word to use as it implies we're all kind of like that which isn't true. People who judge other people more harshly for their actions generally judge themselves pretty harshly too. The faults we see most in others are the faults we see in ourselves the most. If we were really wired this way than cognitive behavioral therapy wouldn't work, but I guess that depends on your definition of 'wired'. This is more a product of low self esteem than how we are 'wired'. I think the social conditions which are creating a society of low self esteem should be under a microscope instead.

>People who judge other people more harshly for their actions generally judge themselves pretty harshly too.

That sounds like the Jungian or MBTI J/P divide. When such person has good self esteem, that same trait makes him/her decisive "natural" leader.

But that theory is not in fashion right now. So take everything I said as speculation.

This makes perfect sense. There's a huge evolutionary advantage in calling attention to a bad actor (someone behaving in a way not advantageous to the tribe), because that person will either change, or be expelled from the group, or killed, which helps the group. However praising someone just makes them feel good, and is not a real motivator. Humans evolved to be violent and critical, because the tribes that didn't have that attribute got killed off, conquered, or died of starvation during hard times.

Every time someone armchairs evolutionary psychology on the Internet my brainstem tries to curl in on itself.

It stands to reason that the brain structures we have without deliberate practice are not some reflection of our social context, but a neutral state of the human brain, what with your aptly demonstrating the phenomenon being discussed even in light of professing awareness of an alleged "hierarchical society based on relations of dominance".

Expressing exasperation isn't assigning blame.

I guess having a negative reaction and voicing it is "assigning blame". That seems watered out though.

And being aware of some dynamic is totally different from being free or above its influence.

Making sense is not enough to be scientific. You can make up a plausible evolutionary cause for virtually any behavior. It's almost impossible to test those hypotheses. It's exasperating to even try to hold a conversation when the opening is something as reductionist and anti-scientific as the grandparent post.

... I don't think you caught what I did there.

I think the future of popularity voting algorithms will have to include blame. I wan't to be able to blame and plonk someone who inserts Native Ads in my News Stream. Voting Algorithms are currently doing the opposite. Reputable News Outlets can shift blame to anonymous voters for pushing Ads.

> This makes perfect sense.

Just-so stories have that trait.

"There's a huge evolutionary advantage in calling attention to good actors (someone behaving a way which is advantegeous to the tribe), because that person will have that behaviour reinforced, and the social proof will motivate others to follow suite. This helps the group."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

Oh now, it can be fun to think about. :) Can't blame a pal for wanting to share.

Is that consistent with armchairing any unproven theory?

I think of this:

http://www.craigflint.com/graphics/illustrations/justsoeleph...

Humans evolved meeting their survival needs collectively (in hunter-gatherer times). Language development aided this cooperative mode of production. So too would criticism and praise.

I've found reductionist social Darwinism lacks explanatory for these phenomena.

> "Humans evolved to be violent and critical, because the tribes that didn't have that attribute got killed off, conquered, or died of starvation during hard times."

Why are you so sure that it was competition and not cooperation that ensured the strength of a tribe?

Or to put it another way, could cooperation, even cooperation with those you dislike, also lead to a materially successful tribe?

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