The evolutionary advantages of playing victim
https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the-evo...ng-victim/
INTRO: Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims’ own wrongdoings.
Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do.
Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility.
Scholars from the Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia created a victim-signaling scale that measures how frequently people tell others of the disadvantages, challenges, and misfortunes they suffer. Those who scored higher on this victim-signaling scale were found to be more likely to virtue-signal—to outwardly display signs of virtuous moral character—while simultaneously placing less importance on their own moral identity. In other words, victim signalers were more interested in looking morally good but less interested in being morally good than those who less frequently signal their victimhood.
In one study, participants who scored higher on virtuous victim signaling (the combination of victim signaling and virtue signaling) were, on average, more likely to lie and cheat in a coin-flip task in order to earn a bonus payment. In another study, participants were asked to imagine a scenario involving a colleague (with whom they were in competition) in which “something felt off,” even though the colleague behaved in a genial manner. Highly virtuous victim signalers were more likely to interpret this ambiguous behavior as discriminatory, and to make accusations about mistreatment from the colleague that were never described in the scenario... (MORE)
Slime Mold Doesn't Have a Brain, But It Can 'Remember' Where to Find Food
https://www.sciencealert.com/slime-mold-...found-food
INTRO: It may be a single-celled organism, but the slime mould Physarum polycephalum has some pretty fascinating tricks up its pretty yellow sleeves. Now new research has found that it seems to "remember" where it previously found sources of food - even without a brain or nervous system. This could help explain how network organisms can not just live, but thrive, in complex environments, the researchers said - and could also be a key to understanding the mechanisms of memory formation in such species.
P. polycephalum is one of the most peculiar forms of life on Earth. It is neither plant, animal, or fungus, but a species of complex, single-celled amoeba of the protist kingdom (sort of the catch-all group for anything that can't be neatly categorized in the other three kingdoms).
Early in its life cycle, P. polycephalum exists as a single cell with a single nucleus, but later it merges with other cells to form a huge single cell with millions of nuclei inside. This is the plasmodium stage, and the organism can grow to cover an area up to several square meters. Its body consists of a complex network of interconnected tubes, the squeezing of which creates flow between different regions. This network can rapidly grow and reorganize itself to maximize its use of its environment.
In 2000, Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki of RIKEN discovered that P. polycephalum was capable of solving a simple maze to reach a food source. Since then, scientists have discovered several intelligent-like behaviors, like being able to efficiently solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, and 'remembering' substances.
In its latest trick, biological physicists Mirna Kramar and Karen Alim of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany have discovered, P. polycephalum uses the very architecture of its body to store memories about where it has previously found food... (MORE)
https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the-evo...ng-victim/
INTRO: Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims’ own wrongdoings.
Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do.
Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility.
Scholars from the Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia created a victim-signaling scale that measures how frequently people tell others of the disadvantages, challenges, and misfortunes they suffer. Those who scored higher on this victim-signaling scale were found to be more likely to virtue-signal—to outwardly display signs of virtuous moral character—while simultaneously placing less importance on their own moral identity. In other words, victim signalers were more interested in looking morally good but less interested in being morally good than those who less frequently signal their victimhood.
In one study, participants who scored higher on virtuous victim signaling (the combination of victim signaling and virtue signaling) were, on average, more likely to lie and cheat in a coin-flip task in order to earn a bonus payment. In another study, participants were asked to imagine a scenario involving a colleague (with whom they were in competition) in which “something felt off,” even though the colleague behaved in a genial manner. Highly virtuous victim signalers were more likely to interpret this ambiguous behavior as discriminatory, and to make accusations about mistreatment from the colleague that were never described in the scenario... (MORE)
Slime Mold Doesn't Have a Brain, But It Can 'Remember' Where to Find Food
https://www.sciencealert.com/slime-mold-...found-food
INTRO: It may be a single-celled organism, but the slime mould Physarum polycephalum has some pretty fascinating tricks up its pretty yellow sleeves. Now new research has found that it seems to "remember" where it previously found sources of food - even without a brain or nervous system. This could help explain how network organisms can not just live, but thrive, in complex environments, the researchers said - and could also be a key to understanding the mechanisms of memory formation in such species.
P. polycephalum is one of the most peculiar forms of life on Earth. It is neither plant, animal, or fungus, but a species of complex, single-celled amoeba of the protist kingdom (sort of the catch-all group for anything that can't be neatly categorized in the other three kingdoms).
Early in its life cycle, P. polycephalum exists as a single cell with a single nucleus, but later it merges with other cells to form a huge single cell with millions of nuclei inside. This is the plasmodium stage, and the organism can grow to cover an area up to several square meters. Its body consists of a complex network of interconnected tubes, the squeezing of which creates flow between different regions. This network can rapidly grow and reorganize itself to maximize its use of its environment.
In 2000, Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki of RIKEN discovered that P. polycephalum was capable of solving a simple maze to reach a food source. Since then, scientists have discovered several intelligent-like behaviors, like being able to efficiently solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, and 'remembering' substances.
In its latest trick, biological physicists Mirna Kramar and Karen Alim of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany have discovered, P. polycephalum uses the very architecture of its body to store memories about where it has previously found food... (MORE)