Jun 16, 2025 05:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 17, 2025 05:08 PM by C C.)
Why resisting social pressure is harder than you think
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1087735
EXCERPTS: Whether you have a rebellious personality or not, most people imagine they are better at overcoming pressure to violate their own principles than they really are, finds a new study. Researchers found that most individuals think they would be more likely than the average person to disobey an immoral or unlawful order from an authority figure.
This phenomenon, called the “better-than-average effect,” reveals that people are fairly resistant to internalizing beliefs that may harm their self-perceptions. In extreme cases, ignoring how everyone is subject to social pressure could leave a person vulnerable to the desires of malicious actors.
[...] These results were almost identical to obedience levels reported by previous studies and correctly fit the team’s theory that most would underpredict their likely obedience in a classic Milgram scenario. This suggests that in the absence of real compliance pressures, even fully imagining yourself in a situation can still lead a person to underestimate its influence on them.
“Just reading about a situation is not sufficient, as doing so doesn’t really internalize the point that we're all really susceptible to these pressures,” said Mazzocco. The study also likens the perceived difference between predicted and actual obedience to watching a horror movie play out from the safety of home versus the certainty of actually being pursued by someone... (MORE - details, no ads)
Did animals provide the blueprints for human culture
https://aeon.co/essays/did-animals-provi...an-culture
EXCERPTS: But how did culture begin? [...] humans make and do things because only we have culture, and when those things we make and do change over time, we call it history. When animals make and do things, we call it instinct, not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it evolution, not history.
Anthropologists have pointed out that this is an unusual way of thinking: at what point did we stop merely evolving from our long line of hominid ancestors, cross an irreversible threshold from nature to culture, and kickstart history?
[...] deep inside caves across Europe, some of the earliest evidence of human paintings and engravings made by our ancestors and their relatives – dating back 65,000 years or more – echoes marks left by other animals.
[...] In several caves in France, such as Bara-Bahau, Baume-Latrone and Margot, human-made finger flutings or ‘meanders’ follow earlier cave bear scratches. Some of these long lines of finger-combed grooves are superimposed directly over claw marks. Others are located near the bear-made traces, echoing their orientation.
In Aldène cave in the south of France, human artists ‘completed’ earlier animal markings. More than 35,000 years ago, a single engraved line added above the gouges left by a cave bear created the outline of a mammoth from trunk to tail – the claw marks were used to suggest a shaggy coat and limbs.
In Pech-Merle, the same cave where Lemozi mistook cave bear claw marks as human carvings of a wounded shaman, a niche within a narrow crawlway is marked by four cave bear claw marks. These marks are associated with five human handprints, rubbed in red ochre, that date to the Gravettian period, about 30,000 years ago.
For Lorblanchet and Bahn, the association between the traces of cave bear paws and human hands is no accident: ‘It is remarkable (and the Gravettians doubtless noticed it),’ they wrote, ‘that a rubbed adult hand, with fingers slightly apart, leaves a trace identical in size to that of an adult cave bear clawmark.’
Nonhuman carvings laid the literal and figurative foundations for human art...
[...] For millennia, beavers built the lake landscapes and fertile hunting grounds that made human life flourish. As Coles and Orme showed, these animals also provided people with architectural models and, in some cases, the very materials with which to build structures. Yet, the histories we write about Star Carr begin with the human platform-builders, not the beavers.
[...] Whether tracing over the grooves left by other animals in caves or borrowing the wooden materials beavers had used to build their homes, early humans paid close attention to the different forms of life around them. That attention also extended to plants... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1087735
EXCERPTS: Whether you have a rebellious personality or not, most people imagine they are better at overcoming pressure to violate their own principles than they really are, finds a new study. Researchers found that most individuals think they would be more likely than the average person to disobey an immoral or unlawful order from an authority figure.
This phenomenon, called the “better-than-average effect,” reveals that people are fairly resistant to internalizing beliefs that may harm their self-perceptions. In extreme cases, ignoring how everyone is subject to social pressure could leave a person vulnerable to the desires of malicious actors.
[...] These results were almost identical to obedience levels reported by previous studies and correctly fit the team’s theory that most would underpredict their likely obedience in a classic Milgram scenario. This suggests that in the absence of real compliance pressures, even fully imagining yourself in a situation can still lead a person to underestimate its influence on them.
“Just reading about a situation is not sufficient, as doing so doesn’t really internalize the point that we're all really susceptible to these pressures,” said Mazzocco. The study also likens the perceived difference between predicted and actual obedience to watching a horror movie play out from the safety of home versus the certainty of actually being pursued by someone... (MORE - details, no ads)
Did animals provide the blueprints for human culture
https://aeon.co/essays/did-animals-provi...an-culture
EXCERPTS: But how did culture begin? [...] humans make and do things because only we have culture, and when those things we make and do change over time, we call it history. When animals make and do things, we call it instinct, not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it evolution, not history.
Anthropologists have pointed out that this is an unusual way of thinking: at what point did we stop merely evolving from our long line of hominid ancestors, cross an irreversible threshold from nature to culture, and kickstart history?
[...] deep inside caves across Europe, some of the earliest evidence of human paintings and engravings made by our ancestors and their relatives – dating back 65,000 years or more – echoes marks left by other animals.
[...] In several caves in France, such as Bara-Bahau, Baume-Latrone and Margot, human-made finger flutings or ‘meanders’ follow earlier cave bear scratches. Some of these long lines of finger-combed grooves are superimposed directly over claw marks. Others are located near the bear-made traces, echoing their orientation.
In Aldène cave in the south of France, human artists ‘completed’ earlier animal markings. More than 35,000 years ago, a single engraved line added above the gouges left by a cave bear created the outline of a mammoth from trunk to tail – the claw marks were used to suggest a shaggy coat and limbs.
In Pech-Merle, the same cave where Lemozi mistook cave bear claw marks as human carvings of a wounded shaman, a niche within a narrow crawlway is marked by four cave bear claw marks. These marks are associated with five human handprints, rubbed in red ochre, that date to the Gravettian period, about 30,000 years ago.
For Lorblanchet and Bahn, the association between the traces of cave bear paws and human hands is no accident: ‘It is remarkable (and the Gravettians doubtless noticed it),’ they wrote, ‘that a rubbed adult hand, with fingers slightly apart, leaves a trace identical in size to that of an adult cave bear clawmark.’
Nonhuman carvings laid the literal and figurative foundations for human art...
[...] For millennia, beavers built the lake landscapes and fertile hunting grounds that made human life flourish. As Coles and Orme showed, these animals also provided people with architectural models and, in some cases, the very materials with which to build structures. Yet, the histories we write about Star Carr begin with the human platform-builders, not the beavers.
[...] Whether tracing over the grooves left by other animals in caves or borrowing the wooden materials beavers had used to build their homes, early humans paid close attention to the different forms of life around them. That attention also extended to plants... (MORE - missing details)