• EABOD25@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    50
    ·
    21 days ago

    Uhh we studied wolves in captivity and learned all we need to know about every single psychological mentality of every vertebrate in the wild including humans. Educate yourself /s

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    21 days ago

    There’s the pseudoscience, then there’s the useful stuff. Natural selection is a good rational for human cooperation, for instance, and can be a way to explain why we have a conscience and feel guilt, etc… You know, apes together strong.

    Of course, it’s also still hypothetical, but it’s at least better than the philosophical/metaphysical way we explain why we behave ourselves. Just wish the good stuff wasn’t drown out by people with dumb takes.

    • RustyEarthfire@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      20 days ago

      The problem is there isn’t anything “useful” for understanding humans [in evolutionary psychology]. Yes we can come up with plausible evolutionary justifications for behavior like cooperation, but they are basically untestable and useless for predictions.

      Edited to clarify I mean specifically evolutionary psychology.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        20 days ago

        it’s perfectly usable for predictions, basic evolutionary psychology tells me that humans are hilariously deeply programmed to be social, and knowing that gives you the confidence to make use of it.

        Just like monkeys grooming each other, we humans can simply give small gifts or go out of our way to do something nice, and that will create trust between people extremely quickly with barely any effort.
        I gave an old dusty xbox to a neighbouring family with kids and that was a significant enough gift that their dad basically instantly classed me as a friend and a few weeks later he came over with homemade pierogis.

        Just thinking about our evolution and looking a bit at recorded history kinda provides a user manual for being human, honestly.

        • benni@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          20 days ago

          I agree with your sentiment about positive social interactions being important.

          But the thing is, and I think that’s what the poster you were replying to meant, that you need zero knowledge about evolution to notice that. Everyone notices it in daily life. Scientific studies give us evidence about our social nature. If we didn’t know about evolution, the conclusion would still be the same: we are deeply programmed to be social. If the same conclusion is reached with or without a specific piece of information, then that information is useless for predictions, like the previous poster said. Or are you in all seriousness telling me that the reason you gifted your XBox to a kid was that you have an understanding of evolution??? And without that understanding, you wouldn’t have thought of making that gift?

    • yesman@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      21 days ago

      If I want to aggravate someone who’s into Jung, I ask them about the “accusations”. When they question “what accusations”, I say “the accusations that he plagiarized much of his work from the ghosts in the many, many seances he attended”.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        21 days ago

        I’ll just quote the man himself: “I’m glad I’m Jung, and not a Jungian”.

        He didn’t want the Red and Black Books to be released, not so much because he was embarrassed but because it was his personal myth, his own way to draw lines in the sand of his unconscious, complete with all his own flaws and hang-ups, and now we have people running around declaring it to be the metaphysical end-all-be-all truth. And he knew it would happen.

        He also said stuff like “To understand me, you first have to understand Freud and Adler”. Cue modern-day Jungians dismissing Freud and Adler out of hand.

        So when people get their Ph.D proposals about Jung rejected with the words “That’d be religion, not psychology” I’m not even mad. It’s just that it happens to be that religion, myth, is a universal psychological phenomenon and studying it as such is quite valuable. Time’s not ripe, it seems, to do it without inadvertently spawning a cult following confusing the map for the territory, and even worse their prophet’s map for their own map.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          20 days ago

          this is why i quite like humanists.uk, they recognized that our brains just really like religion and made a system that satisfies that while being fully transparent about what it is, and takes steps to avoid turning into a cult and doing harm.

          no, we don’t think there’s a god, but that doesn’t mean everything religious has to be rejected, we can just take the good parts and do them just because people like doing them.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            20 days ago

            Those kinds of things cover a lot, in particular the community aspect and basic coming of age stuff, but they can’t really get into the layers that mystics access. I think one approach to do it well without tripping up is to talk to the ancestors while being, on reflection, perfectly aware that you’re talking to your own genome. “Ancestors” as in think of your parents, no, earlier, your grandparents, you met them, your great-grandparents, you’ve heard stories, your great-great-grandparents, nope haven’t heard stories but you know where they’re from, go as far as you need to not have any idea about who those individuals were, but still have a sense of ancestry. That’s where it is. And once you’ve managed to get laid using your six times great-grandparent’s rizz, when you can freely access it, feel free to identify those aspects as, say, Freyr and Freya. But not before, that’s idolatry.

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    21 days ago

    There’s probably some link between human genetics and psychology. It makes sense knowing how other mammals work. However the studies are overwhelmingly so flawed and irreproducible that the entire field can be dismissed