People try to do right by each other, no matter the motivation, study finds

> Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.

Small scale trial, a world exchange program where you could sign up, and basically you swap with someone random for a year. Before the swap happens both people get a week where they meet and discuss what is going on in their life. This can happen in a vacation resort somewhere.

Then the two people take over the life of the other person. It would be assumed that everyone would sorta- help the swapped person out a bit. The swap would need to have very specific requirements: Probably no spouse, the job needs to be similar, friends/coworkers need to be on board, finally the swappers need to blog once per day about the experiences.

Bank accounts would be locked out - the experiment pays the two individuals from a fresh account. Bills and Mortgages are locked or payed through other mechanisms during the experiment.

I think that even starting out with maybe 100 people, then scale to 1000 a year later, 10000 after that. I don't know if those numbers are unrealistic... but wouldn't it be interesting to see if empathy for other countries or even ways of life start to develop?

Naively, how about a global tree? Suppose you have a group of 25 people, of which 1 (or more, all these numbers are fluid) is also a member in a group one "level" up which also contains 25 people all representing their own 25-person group. Then just keep adding more levels until everyone's in the tree.

Importantly, these are not rulership positions. They're representatives representing the interest of their group one "level" down, which means these interests are sourced from the largest side of the tree and then negotiated/compromised as far up as is necessary.

The reason I think 25 is the right number is because IIRC people are only capable of maintaining 50 close relationships, so the idea is generally most people are friends with their home group + extras. But doing the math on the number of groups required, let's say 8 billion / 25 = 320 million groups needing representation, and log_25(320000000) gives us a little over 6 levels required to represent them all (if I mathematically modeled that correctly), so even a top-tier representative can easily have a couple of close friends per level.

> What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.

I think the opposite is true. We cannot properly cooperate effectively on a large scale to solve humanity's biggest problems. Just look at the attempts for global nuclear disarmament, it has been a failure. Look at the accelerating impact of carbon on the environment, it has been a catastrophic failure.

I think while the article shows an interesting bit about human psychology, that we are all secretly altruists at heart, which I believe is true.. But what governs the important global decisions isn't humanity. They're massive organizations and these massive organizations (whether a nation state or mega-corp) are made of humans, but they're not human.

They operate in another way, just like an ant colony, the emergent behavior of many ants, operates in an entirely different way than an individual ant.

>"Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers."

It's all about abolishing hierarchical leadership, and the "one-to-many" dynamic. People who foment tribalism like Trump, for instance, are only effective in a mediated environment in which they are immune to any criticism and can pontificate from on high. In a one on one social situation, his behavior and attitude would be laughed at and ostracized because the vast majority of people are generally good and wish to be peaceful. But when they are able to atomize individuals and speak directly to them, the power of their rhetoric is irresistible, because it appeals directly to the person's identity. That's why Trump supporters will follow him off a cliff. He is them. His thoughts are their thoughts. And the basic human survival instinct kicks in when anyone attacks something you identify with so intimately.

I think its in the human nature that we form groups and fight each other, heck we do it for fun too in games. For all humans on the planet to come together we would need a common opponent.

If the world is divided into many super-tribes made up of millions of people (based on ethnicity, religion, etc), try to encourage mixture of those super-tribes at school, work, and socially. Then people have a maximum composition of different super-tribes within their personal 100-person tribe. This way people will be less likely to identify everyone from another super-tribe as part of the outgroup.

I have benefitted from Dr. Sapolsky's video series as well. I recommend it to others fairly often.

I've seen him on JRE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obmt_PkIfBE). I liked his observations on the baboon troupe and how changing group makeup led to a change of dynamics and the establishment of a more cooperative equilibrium.

Daniel Batson spent his academic life researching altruism. His work is wonderful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batson

But it’s clearly not one or the other. People are not entirely good or entirely selfish. I would agree that most people do the right thing most of the time, but all it takes is for a few % to do the selfish thing for the system to become dysfunctional.

That's in itself just begging the question. The genetic mechanism behind eusociality in bees and ants is haplodiploidy[1], which among other things makes the relatedness of workers up to 75% rather than the 50% between siblings in diploid organisms.

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

> Melamed is expressing that the result is surprising. He is clearly not refusing to believe it.

I didn't say that he's refusing to believe the result. Rather, I found it amusing that he did not reassess his prior beliefs in light of new evidence. He continued to assume that collaborative/mutualistic behavior decreases fitness, even while noticing that many animals engage in it. He saw this as puzzling, when it may simply mean that this type of behavior doesn't actually decrease fitness.

Not sure what you meant by eludidate btw.

What's so surprising about it when "we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature." His own words.

If it is found throughout all of nature, shouldn't it be expected rather than surprising?

Evolution happens to populations, so it makes sense that the fitness of the population is what evolution affects.

Not that you need to be told this, but for anyone else curious, the Bhagavad Gita is so much more than an old story. If you are interested in reading it, I recommend having it read to you by a master, else the old cultural symbology and references will be lost on you or otherwise completely impenetrable.

It's pretty frightening that he's an "an associate professor of sociology" and he doesn't even know basic under-grad evolutionary theory, yet thinks it's ok for him to talk about it.

Basically spent his life and a bunch of money rediscovering the wheel when biologists could have told him this was the expected result.

Worse still, he talks about ants, which share 75% of their genes so actually do have a clear evolutionary reason to co-operate.

Indeed though even there you’ll have significant selection bias for psych v.s. other majors.

...and who on average have very limited life experience.

A random subset of psych majors is going to have very different characteristics than a random subset of dining hall student employees is going to have very different characteristics than a subset of frat members.

why would a biased insight be better than no insight? Depends on the amount of biasness, doesn't it?

Upvoted for the skepticism and the reality of how controlled experiments can produce desirable results that don't replicate.

I still believe people are good after all because I've been conducting a real-world study for nearly 3 years, off-and-on. I started out with a car, no money, and the assumption that I'd gotten good at identifying my needs, asking for them to be meet, and being seen/heard. I now suspect people who are actively working to unlearn their social conditioning are more willing to help others because they're willing to see some aspect of their own humanity in me. That seems to be the trend, at least. When people first see me, they often respond either by showing fear (referring to me as Charles Manson was something a stranger did a couple weeks ago), intrigue/curiosity (asking why I'm dressed the way I am, possibly asking to take a photo), smile and walk away, candidly catch me on film, compliment me for what I'm wearing, or thank me for what I'm wearing. It could also be that people who are unlearning toxic/limiting social norms value seeing others doing the same, which I definitely do with my fashion.

My experiments have led me through many adventures and now I'm writing this while next to my sleeping partner & 19-month old, so I'm not actively testing in the field as much. We're planning on expanding our community during the pandemic to find land to live on and people to live with. That's the next big experiment. We're hoping someone will simply give us land to conduct experiments in community building on.

My experiences could also have a bit to do with the fact that I'm white and perceived as a man, since I have a big beard.

Ultimately, I'd need way more people doing what I'm doing to see what really happens outside the cloak of white privilege.

Most people value prosocial beliefs and behaviors -- and do so more as they acquire life experience. However, there are some who are unable to do so and some who have been conditioned otherwise.

Regardless, the vast majority of people understand and appreciate the benefits of compassion.

These people value compassion, not because a research study informed them that they should, but because, in part, they have observed it for themselves: when they have been compassionate they realized that it made them feel good; when they have seen public policy informed by compassion in communities they saw how those communities thrived.

The intended audience for studies like these are those who want to do good and one benefit to them is to have a better understanding of how to do good more effectively.

And it is okay that not everybody is in that audience; the intended audience, their communities, and society as a whole benefit regardless.

At the same time, billions of people don’t kill the randos they chance upon most days.

How we annotate reality with numbers matters. I feel like your trying to find too specific a claim about reality, not the researchers

You’re isolating these headlines to make them useless.

There’s also tons of rhetoric others, outside your filter bubble, encounter about the end is nigh, send in the troops!

Not every piece of information that we like to share has to be in service of you, 1 in 7 billion

The study itself is more novel and creates more discourse than your comment. Which is a bigger waste of resources? People trying to learn data driven research and habit?

Or your being pedantic about the value as if to dissuade others from such mechanics unless they’re chasing a result you agree with

Yet we seem to spend little time calling for HN to disable comments to avoid the descent into entitled whining about others not achieving what you want, dad

I'd never even thought of that. Interesting. I'll have to compare notes with non-white friends.

I once lived in a bilingual area in the States. Depending upon how I was dressed, I would be greeted in either english or spanish[1] when walking into a shop. My experience was that people were more helpful (to the extent of addressing me as "paisano") in spanish. I suspect this is because when I was greeted in english, I was being greeted as an out-group[2] member.

[1] hypothesis: if you have never learned to code-switch, you are probably a member of a preferred group.

[2] not necessarily due to being classified as anglophone, more likely due to being classified as tourist.

Thanks I couldn't remember what it was called.

Yep. As I recall, the origin of this idea comes from a series of competitions arranged by Robert Axelrod[1], where people submitted algorithms to participate in an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma[2] situation. Tit-for-tat was one of the simplest algorithms submitted, but yet it won the contest.

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Being priced out is having the choice removed from you. This is about making the moral choice.

People know plastic bottles pollute, yet westerners continue to buy. Flint residents have an excuse. Most do not.

In my experience people's willingness to be kind is correlated more strongly with having shared problems that nearly nobody is exempt from. Some combination of an oppressive climate and limited local wealth seems to be the ticket for maximizing people's willingness to help each other out.

Humans are interesting because we're one of the few semi-social animals. If you're tribe/village is whipped out, you'll die soon too. But just because your group flourishes doesn't mean your genes will even be passed on (like they would in an ant colony). So we have all these behaviours (like empathy and cooperation) but they're finely balanced and complex (unlike an ant that will die for the colony without hesitation). The lack of top down control and the requirement for cooperation means communication abilities are vital and have to be complex and suddenly you have a brain that needs to simulate other brains (empathy) and consciousness is born.

Ha. That was also happening here.

We never saw a drastic shortage, though. The store was empty or had limited supplies for a week or two then they brought in a large shipment and everybody cooled off.

Add to that the fact that people would typically use the toilet paper in offices and retail much of the day, but now had to supply their own at home. It's a whole different supply chain that was suddenly burdened with a situation it wasn't prepared for.

This. There is an amazing Black Mirror episode that treads on this subject: Men Against Fire (S03E05) [1]

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

> The article says "Scientists previously had determined that four motivators influenced people to behave in a way that benefited other people."

I know. That's why I listed the 4 that was mentioned in the article.

The rest of your comment has nothing to do with my comment or the article so I'll just ignore it. Pleasure, morality and best person are really philosophical questions better left to another thread.