Sun Sep 11, 2016 03:51 PM
Moved to WordsFromRob blog.
There is a dark instinct hiding in each and every one of us. It was programmed into primates by evolution. It’s the trigger for bullying, bigotry, racism, sexism, and other social ills.
My hypothesis is that we all have an instinct for aggressive behavior against others that are perceived as weaker or lower status, especially when competition is involved. Bullying behavior isn’t something new. What is unknown, but what I suspect, is that our instinctive emotional responses to others in competition will vary depending on the perceived status level of the competitor and that these emotional responses are within all or most of us. Even those who have been bullied before will have bully tendencies towards weaker opponents.
I’m going to propose a psychological experiment (probably to the University of Washington Department of Psychology). Experiment volunteers will be paired with a competitor in a knowledge quiz or some other competition. In the control group, the competitor will just be a computer response picked by someone helping in the experiment. The volunteer will only see a computer response and not know who is providing those responses. In the first experimental group, the competitor will be a smaller or weaker person than the volunteer. In the second experimental group, the competitor will be a bigger or stronger person than the volunteer. What the volunteer doesn’t know is that the competitor is provided with answers to the questions to study before the quiz, or the competitor has some other edge in the competition.
In this experiment, the competitor will probably score higher in the competition that the volunteer. After the competition, the volunteer will fill out a word association form. This is used in psychology to determine subconscious emotional states that the person is feeling which the person might not be fully aware of. I expect that the volunteers that are paired with lower status competitors will provide higher negative and aggressive responses in the word association form than the volunteers in the control group and the volunteers paired with higher status competitors.
Why should this experiment be done and what would the point of it be? I would like to demonstrate that none of us are immune to this dark instinct. Beyond the experiment, I think nurturing variables can control our impulses, behavioral responses, and even tamper the magnitude of the negative instinct as well.
Further experiments (or a large enough initial experiment with a varied population of volunteers) can cover demographic variables that might influence this negativity. These demographic variables can include: strong patriarchy in family, religious influence, education level of family, income level of family, gender, and etc. I suspect that as other experiments have shown, education and income level of their families will have the strongest behavioral impact. I also suspect that those from the lowest and highest income earning families will feel the most negativity towards lower status competitors. Other experiments can prime the volunteers with empathy feelings before the competition, or allow the volunteers to work together in a team to work on a puzzle.
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