Has anyone speculated on just how or why this evolved in the human brain? It seems a bit counter productive looking at it through a evolutionary lens.
Of course, the why/how sometimes doesn’t matter because one still needs to deal with reality as it is, and how one interacts with it in a satisfying way rather than generating a bunch of internal conflict.
The punishment response is beneficial for attacking others with; that it can also be self-directed could be viewed as a bug, but it’s also a feature: self-punishment lowers the motivation for others to punish us. The counterfactual part exists because you have to be able to compare behavior against what a social standard is, in order to know what to punish. And being able to consider counterfactuals at all is evolutionarily-useful for learning.
In general, I view the way modern societies treat their children as an unintended exploit of the machinery. If you’re more concerned with your children’s compliance than growth, social punishment is an extremely easy stick to reach for that creates high compliance, at the cost of stunting personal growth in adulthood. If you compare to how hunter-gatherer tribes raise their children, “modern” childraising appears shockingly abusive, invasive, and neglectful, all at the same time. So it probably wasn’t so problematic in the ancestral environment.
In modern societies, children’s public (and to some extent private) behavior is considered to reflect on the parents, which provides immense pressure for parents to make their children pretend to be more mature than they actually are, and social punishment allows you to make children act more mature, while silently depriving them of the experiences they need to actually become mature.
Has anyone speculated on just how or why this evolved in the human brain? It seems a bit counter productive looking at it through a evolutionary lens.
Of course, the why/how sometimes doesn’t matter because one still needs to deal with reality as it is, and how one interacts with it in a satisfying way rather than generating a bunch of internal conflict.
The punishment response is beneficial for attacking others with; that it can also be self-directed could be viewed as a bug, but it’s also a feature: self-punishment lowers the motivation for others to punish us. The counterfactual part exists because you have to be able to compare behavior against what a social standard is, in order to know what to punish. And being able to consider counterfactuals at all is evolutionarily-useful for learning.
In general, I view the way modern societies treat their children as an unintended exploit of the machinery. If you’re more concerned with your children’s compliance than growth, social punishment is an extremely easy stick to reach for that creates high compliance, at the cost of stunting personal growth in adulthood. If you compare to how hunter-gatherer tribes raise their children, “modern” childraising appears shockingly abusive, invasive, and neglectful, all at the same time. So it probably wasn’t so problematic in the ancestral environment.
In modern societies, children’s public (and to some extent private) behavior is considered to reflect on the parents, which provides immense pressure for parents to make their children pretend to be more mature than they actually are, and social punishment allows you to make children act more mature, while silently depriving them of the experiences they need to actually become mature.