The other day, I got on my soapbox bit about productivity, how humans work and how we don't need to choose between having this nice happy world where people are allowed to help each other and "actually being productive"
I also described humans as a social and equitable animal that wants to help others. But... I don't have any scientific citations on hand for that; I've seen research around it over the years, I just don't have references on hand.
This feels like something that @grimalkina or @KFosterMarks might know more about, since it seems very up your alley, but I haven't dug into the citations of your papers yet enough to know if the answer I'm looking for is buried in there or not :blobfoxpleading:
What exactly are you looking for literature on? Not sure I'm parsing from the original post here. The false dichotomy between collaboration and productivity? The tendency for some humans to be social? Or equitable? I think if you give me something more specific, I might be able to point you in the direction of some scholarly lit that has informed my own thinking...
@KFosterMarks I seem to recall reading research at some point that had a fairly strong refuting of the idea that humans are inherently evil and selfish and backstabbing and that it's impossible to build a society where equitability works. But I don't know if that was research in the "we studied humans and found that they're wired that way" sense or just "we found a few groups that managed to pull it off, neat"
@KFosterMarks it is! I love curiosity nerds! I like to say infodumping about your special interests is my love language and I just love watching people get excited about what they learned and how they learned it and how that shaped how they view the world and and and and
@hazelweakly Okay SAME SAME SAME! This is getting a little meta, but I recently did a little dive on how "humility" is defined as a construct by folks who research it, and learned about "intellectual humility" - you strike me as someone with a high level of intellectual humility! My favorite kind of person 😍 Here's an interesting "current state" paper if you're so inclined: https://www.darylvantongeren.com/s/Van-Tongeren-et-al-2019-CDPS.pdf
In fact, maybe I can ask you to vet an idea: I've been gently cajoling @grimalkina and @CSLee to write what I'm calling "An Annotated (Auto)Bibliography", which is essentially a piece in which they would summarize 3-5 pieces of scholarly literature that has had an outsize impact on their thinking. Each annotation would include a narrative on how that research/work impacted their thinking at the time, and continues to influence their software engineering research work today.
@hazelweakly Does that sound like something you think would be valuable or interesting to folks interested in empirical software engineering research? As a software engineer and engineering leader (and, yeah, a curious nerd), I want this from our Dev Success Lab researchers!
@KFosterMarks yes! I'd love that! Some of the most useful blog posts that I've seen have been the equivalent of survey papers. I've wanted to write one myself :)
It's so useful to find out what was influential, what was useful, get a survey about what's out there, and why. I love those types of things so much 😍
@hazelweakly Oh my gosh, ALMOST EVERY POST I WRITE could use further clarifying - I love the method of throwing ideas out there, seeing what hits with folks, and then clarifying where it's asked for! I adore you for this original post, to be clear!
k, broad strokes, it is absolutely scientific consensus that humans are social, and that social structures definitionally include wanting to help others. Sometimes it also includes wanting to hurt others (e.g., protection, war, also social activities). So it is important to not be like "we never do bad things" about it, but fundamentally socially involved for both our survival & what most of us want, yes.
e.g.,
Social bonds in specific domains like friendship or school: Massen, J., Sterck, E., & de Vos, H. (2010). Close social associations in animals and humans: functions and mechanisms of friendship. Behaviour, 147(11), 1379-1412.
Juvonen, J. (2006). Sense of belonging, social bonds, and school functioning.
OR, evolution & obvs of social cognition, widely studied not only in us, but animals.
Key citations could also be in an economic direction. For example, wide scientific consensus that public education (which we invest in together as a collective) has been an enormous triumph for us. Same with investing in science.
Basically this question is so big, I can't scope it down to a single voice of evidence or area. But it is consensus in MANY areas that we hold and want to achieve social goals.
@hazelweakly@KFosterMarks Again, obviously not all those social goals are good. The existence of racism and other atrocities is direct enough proof of that.
I would argue the fact that we have societies at all is evidence that there is a lot of good though. The fact that we have families and friendships and ingroups at all. Many ways in which our social goals can be perverted but many ways in which they are thought to be fundamentally about us wanting to be in relationship with others.
@hazelweakly@KFosterMarks now there's always a lot of hot philosophical debating about whether people's behaviors towards others are ever "altruistic" or if we're fundamentally transactional because we "get something" out of doing good for others. I consider that philosophy not science, and I am not personally interested in it, lol. I am too much of a social constructivist to care, I am like, even if we "transact" that doesn't mean we are cold backstabby utilitarians.
@hazelweakly@KFosterMarks also fwiw, I feel those philosophical debates are really fixated on individual identity -- like, it's possible for us to be very dynamic about what we live as our "identity" in a moment like we identify with movements and cultures and communities all the time, to the extent that people die for others and for causes, and I feel that kind of ability in our cognition/sociocognitive capacities is fascinating because it truly breaks down the wall between self and others
@grimalkina@KFosterMarks yeah, that makes a lot of sense! The dynamic nature of identity and the self and all of those things is super fascinating to me and I find it so weird that we keep not even thinking about that at all or figuring out how to take advantage of how our brains actually work in group settings
Thanks for your thoughts on this! It means a lot and it was illuminating ❤️
@grimalkina@KFosterMarks that helps a ton! I'm also a pretty big social constructivist in that regard. Whether or not something is transactional or altruistic or whatever doesn't matter a lot to me. The thing I'm more curious about is how we build those in groups and sustain them, especially as they get larger and larger over time. Can we build societies and planet-scale social structures that are healthy and sustainable, or are we "doomed" in that regard?
All the research I've seen suggests that humans are wired to be able to do this within groups they consider their in-group, but not in a larger setting. Which doesn't mean we can't do it, but that it'll take overcoming the norm to do so.
@josh@hazelweakly@KFosterMarks While fully acknowledging the ultimate garbage fire of horrible human behavior at scale, I don't totally agree with this.
Some examples: humans rapidly respond to help strangers in crisis and develop rapid immediate reasons to create new in-groups in natural disasters. There can be high malleability to how we see identities over time. There is a lot of capacity for people to take compassion stances that go beyond their lifetimes
@josh@hazelweakly@KFosterMarks I also think it is dangerous to claim that things are "wired" in human beings. That is a bit of neuroreductionism that the neuroscientists I'm around don't agree with, certainly on the level of something like social behaviors. We can use our brains for a lot of very diverse strategies.
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