Comment by everdayimhustln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdayimhustln | Hacker News Reader

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everdayimhustln

People aren't archetypes or labels; that's too black & white, un-nuanced thinking. Psychological and sociological reseach proved most people act however they're expected to within a given power dynamic circumstance, except for a few outliers which will go their own way, for anti- or pro-community.

This wrong "bad apples" analogy as it applies to police or genocide perpetrators also is dangerous because it's simply untrue. Well meaning people will commit atrocities if directed to by a superior authority figure; the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiments underscore this.

Instead, there must be social and business pressures brought to bear to prevent emboldened behavior with accountability. If there is boundaryless affluenza anarchy, spoiled brats will overtly behave however they wish. If there are consequences, the behavior will be reduced and become covert. There must be constant vigilance on the part of those stakeholders to enforce consistent accountability for professional/personal behavior.

Yes. It is a slow, slow decline into the kind of behavior described in the article that could have been stopped or mitigated at any point along the way but wasn't. Not necessarily in terms of how someone is deep down, but in terms of their understanding of how they can/should interact with people around them.

Rather than refuse to understand how someone could have gotten there, let's try to understand the assumptions they made along the way. Then rather than pretending we're unaffected by the culture around us, let's see if we share some of those assumptions. If we want to fix things rather than be blindsided by them, these are at least the first steps.

> Instead, there must be social and business pressures brought to bear to prevent emboldened behavior with accountability.

Some of the actions described in the article are crimes - these assholes should be prosecuted.

People must be responsible for their actions, even if an environment influenced their decisions. Yes, to fix the issue, there needs to be larger societal change. But individual perpetrators need punishment as well.

There are two reasons for this. First, punishment of the "bad apples" deters others in the future, and brings about the larger societal change. Second, as a basic principal of a free society, people must be held accountable for their actions.

some people are assholes, very few but some

What Milgram and Stanford experiments showed: ordinary people might do something evil if ordered by a person.

What this article is about: rich white men are sexist.

I fail to see the connection.

Sorry but no. The two experiments you cite are ancient and riddled with holes, they are red flags for any psychologist worth their salt. The people described in this article are sexist assholes, plain and simple. You can argue all about how the environment they grew up in made them that way, but not that that's not what they are.

Milgram's experiment has been replicated several time, even in several cultures. Good to know social psychology researchers are not "worth their salt"

And yeah, actually, your culture and socialization is a big part of what you are. You can blame them, but refusing to try and understand how they became assholes means nothing will change.

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