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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Social psychology is very hard. Making correct experiments is hard, costly, often unethical and highly culture-dependent.

You can only get so far with questionnaire handled to middle-class/high-class university students...

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Plus I would expect it would also be a function of the legal system. Some countries like France are typically hostile to self-defence / vigilanties as opposed to a country like the US. If you intervene and the assaulter gets hurt, you might be in significant legal troubles.

I was shocked to learn about the difference a while back, especially concerning first aid. In Germany you are facing criminal charges if you dont aid injured people, by either first aid or calling an ambulance. Then you have countries where not even dragging a person out of a burning car is protected under good Samaritan laws.

Yes, so researchers must be very careful to caveat their findings. Not only as footnotes in the middle of the article but also in general terms in abstract and introduction as those are the sections copied into newspapers and such. My 2c.

The stakes become even higher when people attempt to use Social Psychology as either the basis for moral frameworks or in evaluating morality. This can be problematic for a multitude of reasons (bias being the largest), and the biggest offender I've found is Jonathan Haidt and his 4 moral evaluators. Actually, I think in The Righteous Mind he's up to 5 now, time will tell if that continues to change with continued "no comment" about how, maybe, his approach is flawed.

Is that a defense or an indictment?

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