Those experiments don't distinguish between jealousy and intolerance for injustice or unfairness from a third party.
In the capuchin studies, given that they usually express their displeasure at the experimenter rather than the other monkey and also spontaneously share it's reasonable to view it as the latter.
This whole crab bucket mentality of 'it's unfaaaiiir that minimum wages get raised' rather than fighting to get the benefit for everyone is a distinctly neoliberal and american mindset that you have to 'deserve' to survive or be comfortable.
Not even Wikipedia asserts that the experiment proves anything. And even if it did, the burden is on you to prove that "fairness in human relations" is relevant to this thread.
That's exactly why I said:
employee / employer relations are not "human relations"
Since that's what we are talking about - I'm asking why this is relevant.
But since you responded with smug condescension, it seems like your more interested in implying that I'm stupid (don't understand) and you're clever (I can tutor) than responding in good faith.
I find the experiment skewed. Or more precisely, that it is not meant to investigate human behaviour or psychology. It is rather precisely designed to support a chosen result to support a given world view. The fact that it has been ran for 50 years is a strong indication of this.
IOW, the experimenter wanted to be able to arrive at the conclusion that difference in performance was unrelated to workers and designed the experiment so it would give this result. In short, this demonstrate few things outside of a very artificially setup situation, where the workers have no say and the job is predestined to fail.
Anyone who worked anywhere knows very well that there are actually vast difference between two workers.
It's difficult to achieve some kind of objectivity. Of course no one wants to believe that they are innately bad or easily coerced into doing terrible things to other human beings, so it seems like it would be very natural to expect them to lash out at the methods of the experiment.
I'm slightly concerned that more people here don't get this. The whole point of an experiment is to have a hypothesis, perform a test, observe the result, and make some conclusion related to your original hypothesis.
It seems like what most people wanted was a "challenge". I don't have any issue with that, but call a duck a duck. If this really was a social "experiment", you have to expect people to behave as they would in society, including leaches.
This experiment is a reminder of why we can't have nice things on an honor system. There will _always_ be actors who game the system - typically for personal gain, but sometimes for the lols.
My harsh and honest opinion is that this kind of research is useless and is mostly a waste of resources and most likely serves other motives than we may think (narratives, signaling etc).
All experiments with virtual money, with artificial lab setups, with people knowing they are in an experiment are very very biased.
Even if being mean would gain you some money in an artificial experiment, there are other social factors that can counteract this, including pleasing the experiment designers, thinking of yourself as a good person. People probably introspect more in these observed scenarios etc.
You know all those people writing their bachelor and master theses based on questionnaires filled out by random recruits from social media for the chance of winning a gift card? I see tons of those. Are they rigorous and valuable research? Unlikely, but at least they don't get into the press.
We keep falling for this stuff even after the replication crisis, because science is used by the masses as a replacement of the priesthood. People in labcoats must say to us with jargon that compassion is good. We are too afraid of and are still recovering from the shock of the early and crude interpretation of the Darwinian theory. So we crave the "people are good after all" message and when there is demand there will be supply.
Selflessness and compassion (at least, for that which occurred from wrong behavior) are common among people who are ignorant of the importance of justice (which may be defined as revealing things as they really are) and the danger of compromising with injustice. Also, in order not to lose all of one's money, one needs to be careful not to be deceived (which requires keeping oneself and acting to serve oneself and the world, rather than selflessness). Are you sure the experiment was able to control for those two issues?
interesting. i realise that there must be much more evidence and study than is contained in that article, but it struck me that for the particular experiment they gave the people with the harder task may have a stronger sense of being "owed" something, since they made more effort, and that maybe this stronger sense of entitlement leads them to take more rewards...?
It isn't, and doesn't claim to be, an experiment on the economic consequences. But it absolutely is an experiment on human psychology, which as far as I can tell is all it claims to be.
> It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.
I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?
I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.
There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?
Yes, but then the experiment kinda proves the opposite of the point it was trying to prove. As it were, people largely agree with each other as to what's reasonable and what is not.
No he's not because the experiment doesn't depend on them. Social science researchers use these kinds of sudden differences in laws all the time to study their effects. People in general can look at the outcomes too if they're obvious enough.
To be flippant, it sounds like you're quick to assume bad faith, which would seem to support the first point you quote.
The experiment they ran was to try to get terrible papers published in authoritative journals in certain fields. If they succeeded, this would point towards a serious problem with established practice in those fields; their suspicion of such a problem might be labeled a "chip on their shoulder" or a "hypothesis". According to what they say, they succeeded.
As for it being "identitarian madness" and "coming out of the academic and activist left"—do you think either of those parts is false or is irrelevant to what they're studying? If not, how would you suggest they talk about it?
In the capuchin studies, given that they usually express their displeasure at the experimenter rather than the other monkey and also spontaneously share it's reasonable to view it as the latter.
This whole crab bucket mentality of 'it's unfaaaiiir that minimum wages get raised' rather than fighting to get the benefit for everyone is a distinctly neoliberal and american mindset that you have to 'deserve' to survive or be comfortable.
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