You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Be Selfish or Kind? Kindness from Parents Begets Kindness and Prosocial Behavior in Children
Prosocial parents will essentially breed more prosocial children for the next generation, while selfish parents will not breed more selfishness and to the next generation
wait, if only prosocial people pass on their values shouldn't selfishness be dying out naturally?
Sorry, I corrected the wording to make it less absolute lol
There is still selfishness, and maybe more intensity will develop depending on life experience and environment. But as another commenter said "My dad was an abusive, sociopathic narcissist. It turned my older brother into a monster. I went the other direction". As the post mentioned, there is less identification in many cases when the bonds of trust and empathy are not there.
It was not meant as a criticism towards your wording. I actually disagree with the underlying article and as I always say: Disagreement is much more fun than a "I agree 100%" circle-thing ;).
This is not meant personal and I also don't want to make the argument that selfish behavior is better than social behavior. The main thing that gets me, that this is statistical research based on surveys. As someone who knows how easy psyche and numbers can be manipulated, I do not trust any conclusions based on that. That is why I started by disputing the conclusion :).
On the topic: I do not see social behavior as a necessarily good thing or selfishness necessarily as bad. There are many people who are not satisfied with their lives, but instead of thinking about how they can improve their lives which would be the essence of selfishness, they try to make social problems responsible for their lives. It can be even worse when they seek social justice for a group of people they are not a part of. Parents that are nice can also fail at preparing a child for life. Life can be an asshole.
The above are just some examples of how nice and being social can backfire. As someone, who is interested in politics and identifies as a socialist, I do value social behavior over selfishness, but it sounded much too black and white in your post.
Selfishness can also mean whatever ones does for oneself in a rational context always includes what is non-harmful or beneficial for others as well. Doing things that don't harm others is good for us. Acting selfishly for our own benefit in a rational manner is best for all, one could say.
The caterpillar does indeed need to struggle out of the chrysalis, and other example. But that's not the general idea, although valid to suggest as applying. Anyhoot, I get your reservations, but I tend to agree with the overall message, as children from the same parents can sometimes mimic the selfishness and other times not be like those parents. The same can be said for the reverse with empathetic and supportive parents, but this is not to say to baby them like you seem to suggest. I can picture the general idea they are putting forth, despite there lacking a larger sample size or more verification. It's valid from my view of things. I don't think they, or I, tried to paint it as black and white, sorry if it came out that way by maybe not explicitly covering how these qualities aren't absolute, or exclusive.
That is the main thing I tried to get across. ;)
I do not think you tried to paint it in any way, but the original article did. It might be that I am just very biased in general towards statistics and especially the ones based on surveys. To shortly explain that:
People in a poll might not be honest. Just because someone says he is social does not mean he actually is.
Statistics can only discover correlation, but people tend to make causation conclusions.
Studies are often conducted to reach a certain conclusion, so there is a incentive to rig the surveys in slight ways (maybe even subconsciously) that help to reach said conclusion.
There is no reason to apologize to someone like me, who has severe trust issues when it comes to statistics (and my personal life :D). Thank you for your extensive replies.
Good point. Perhaps there are so many parents endorsing self-enhancement and so few self-transcendence, that the scale still tips heavily in favour of selfishness in each succeeding generation.