Overview
Is human nature fundamentally selfish or compassionate? In this talk Molly Crockett explores the history of ideas about human nature as well as empirical work investigating how our beliefs about human nature can create self-fulfilling prophecies. Historically, selfishness and compassion have been considered as products of genetic evolution, with the implication that evolutionary mismatches between our stone-age brains and modern environments hamper our capacity for compassion. For instance, the biologist E.O. Wilson famously ascribed the problems of humanity to “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” To solve these problems, many suggest we need to understand human emotions and design technology around it — an approach that rests on hidden assumptions about human nature and its capacity for change.
More recent work highlights the role of cultural evolution in shaping our compassion for others. On this account, the stories we tell about human nature are just as important as our genetics in guiding the way we relate to one another. Through social learning, we accumulate beliefs about who we are and who we ought to be. These beliefs can create self-fulfilling prophecies in our private and public lives. Molly shares research investigating how social learning unfolds in online social networks, with a focus on learning and sharing moral expressions. She presents evidence that algorithmic amplification exploits social learning biases that evolved to promote cooperation, resulting in distorted beliefs about collective compassion. These distorted beliefs had global consequences during the COVID-19 pandemic, as pessimism about collective compassion shaped nationalistic policy-making around the distribution of vaccines, even while public attitudes favored global compassion.
Molly concludes by exploring how people alive today might be able to impact the compassion of future generations through the stories we tell about human nature and the technologies we design to share them.
- SRI 218 sessions
- June 3, 2024Garrison, New York
