this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Our culture teaches children that animals are there to serve us, even to the point of hurting them (food, medical research, hunting, etc). I believe compassion is something that can be taught to children, but I think our culture and many families within it tend to teach cruelty instead. And most of us aren't capabable of the self reflection needed to change our disposition in regards to empathy until the prefrontal cortex develops.
Environmental factors, many of which capitalism produces as negative externalities, affect how the prefrontal cortex develops in addition to how it socializes us towards antisocial behavior. To name some of the less obvious factors: trauma, substance use, and financial stress/insecurity.
Additionally, the gene expression for anti-social behavior surely is adapted to turn on when most beneficial to the survival of the organism.
I don't have a study handy as most of this is stuff I learned taking human services classes. I can look for a paper on nature vs nurture and antisocial behavior specifically if you'd like. Or epigenetics and antisocial behavior. If my comment wasn't enough.
My evidence is extremely anecdotal, but generally speaking, the people I meet whi care more about other people make less money, and the people who care less about people make more money.
Children (at least in the US) are generally taught that "sharing is caring," and yet you still see children who don't share, along with children who do share. Regardless of this, though, I think that sharing is in our nature as humans, since what set humans apart from neanderthals is our comradery and need for socialization. There's a reason that sociopathy is considered a disorder in our society (even though I think the term disorder is overused).
Genetic expressions can certainly change due to environmental factors, but only so much. There are probably a decent amount of people who were affected by capitalistic nurture into having more sociopathic tendencies (like, they were on some kind of line where it could've gone either way), but I also think that there are many people who regardless of nurture, still care about other people.
In a theoretical society that rewards caring about people, I think there would be a number of people who have purely selfish intentions who would do good things for other people purely to get ahead in life, just like those same people in capitalism would step on top of other people to get ahead in life. In this specific case, I think intentions speak more than actions.
Of course, intentions aren't exactly something that can be measured, especially if people are dishonest about them.
I tried finding a study but everything I found was paywalled. I did find an article with numerous citations. The tldr is that genes only contribute 50%. Epigenetics, social conditioning, and environmental factors (brain damage for instance) take up the other 50%. In other words, without outside factors the antisocial personality genes don't manifest as antisocial personality disorder. They don't alone have enough influence.
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/psychopath-genes-born-not-made/
"I tried finding a study but everything I found was paywalled."
Fucking priceless. The entire conversation in a single throw away line. Well done. 👏
To be fair the article I linked is probably more accessible than the studies it cites.
But yeah, I pecked around trying to get a few promising papers to open. And forgot about sci hub so shared the article instead.