For Bonobos, it pays to have powerful allies
today.duke.edu
today.duke.edu
The researchers desperately need to take a night out in town and observer other humans a bit. They've acquired a biased view from being cooped up with university people for far too long. I feel like I see directly contradictory behavior on a weekly basis.
When you have low power and mistreat others, others will retaliate.
It's true that jerks can be in positions of power, but it's hard to say that people prefer them. Indeed, it appears that many people strongly dislike them, but that they are protected by their power and other people with power (a distinct minority).
It's exactly because they find themselves in such an environment that they're sheltered. You think the majority of humanity has access to safe-spaces, policed speech and diversity initiatives? US college campuses do not reflect reality.
The results seemed to indicate that Bonobos preferred those who were at the top of the social hierarchy. The experiment would only be decisive if they could find a way to deconvolve jerkishness from dominance.
The researchers say there may be a good reason for these puzzling results. It could be that bonobos interpret rudeness as a sign of social status and are simply trying to keep dominant individuals on their side. In other words, it pays to have powerful allies.
To test the idea, the team showed 24 bonobos another set of animated videos in which one cartoon character repeatedly prevents another one from claiming a coveted spot. The apes generally preferred the character who hogged the spot over the one who yielded.
For bonobos, schmoozing with dominant individuals could mean better access to food, mates or other perks, or less chance of being bullied themselves, Krupenye said.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens...
Rough out there.
> they showed 24 bonobos animated videos of a Pac-Man-like shape as it struggles to climb a hill. Then another cartoon shape enters the scene.
Nevermind the 'jerk' part, I'm impressed that researchers are interpreting ape preferences via cartoons
What's the evidence for that? Humans love people who mistreat others. We'll die for them and canonize them, for similar reasons as bonobos: they exude power, confidence, strength, certainty. A cursory overview of history and a lot of relationships will support that.
Happy to be wrong. What studies are they referring to?
The fact that bonobos prefer bullies and humans don’t suggests that an aversion to jerks is a fundamental aspect of human behavior that may be unique to our branch of the primate family tree.
In humans, the thinking goes, shunning wrongdoers not only helps people avoid bad partners, but also discourages wrongdoers from behaving badly in the first place. The threat of social rejection keeps them in check.
There are a lot of claims in a science article without much support. I don't imagine they are stating that without basis, but not familiar with the research.
I believe this bonobo study is considered salient precisely because it is trying to be an analogue to studies of humans that have found the opposite result.
So for you, an outsider, you see a guy being a jerk and his followers loving him for it. But his followers are not seeing him as a jerk. They see him as their champion who is leading them in a war of good against evil.
It is all relative.
Our unique talents also include abstract reasoning and communication as well as advanced tool making, yet most human beings are still acting within the mammalian level of behavior which mostly comprises pack warfare and alpha-dominance seeking, and we are all witness to the disastrous effects those sub-human tendencies are having upon each other as well as the Earth itself (via our short-term profit-seeking over the long-term well-being of the Earth for our descendants benefit).
Love -- via selfless service to others' happiness -- is the most unique of human traits as it facilitates our rising above our mammalian tendencies (literally, from a brain structure standpoint) to segregate and wage war upon others of any perceived difference, be it physical (ethnic) or ideological (form of religion, neighborhood, country, sexual orientation or identity, etc.).
Only by accepting the primacy of our free wills upon this Earth and the necessity of our training our minds to differentiate good from evil and then choosing the former can we stop the devastation of the Earth and its less fortunate individuals.
Until then, the vast majority of human beings will remain, as Wisdom states, "like the animals, only worse".
It can't be modeled scientifically. People deny it because it's in effect a dogma. I don't say that as a slight, our society is built on the notion of free will.
It's simply that the notions exist in a level of abstraction, so the point is moot if you continue living your day to day life, except insofar as you let it affect your mental state.