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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   26734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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You don’t appear to understand that the gene is already associated with aspects of prosociality in a number of studies which compare Europeans to Europeans and Europeans to Asians and Asians to Asians. You should think about it as one important variable in a long equation. It’s not the variable that controls for violent behavior per se, or impulsivity, or default IQ. It seems to control for whether you are sensitive to the feelings of other people, how sensitive, etc. Those are different variables. The reason Pakistan probably has high AA prevalence is because they are a collectivist Asian nation that historically practiced female infanticide and favored males, with each one of these attributes being correlated to AA frequency. In any case I just found a study which looked at a random sample of Pakistani women, and in the random control condition there was a 96% rate of AA.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811915000592

It has been shown that carriers of the G relative to A allele of rs53576 show enhanced empathic parenting (Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJzendoorn, 2008) and higher empathic accuracy (Rodrigues et al., 2009). Moreover, individuals homozygous for the G allele show higher trust, empathic concern, and prosocial behavior than A allele carriers (Tost et al., 2010, Kogan et al., 2011, Krueger et al., 2012, Smith et al., 2014

It has been shown that G compared to A allele carriers of OXTR rs53576 exhibit higher dispositional empathy and social-emotional sensitivity (Rodrigues et al., 2009; Lucht et al., 2009; Tost et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2014) and that OXTR knockout mice display a variety of aberrant social and emotional behaviors (Takayanagi et al., 2005).

We also showed evidence for distinct associations between OXTR rs53576 and differential NAcc activity in response to racial outgroup and ingroup individuals' pain. A/A but not G/G individuals showed increased NAcc activity to racial outgroup versus ingroup individual's pain. Thus the two antagonistic motivational systems related to ingroup favoritism (i.e., the ACC and Nacc) show opposite patterns of associations with OXTR rs53576. The NAcc reward-related activity is observed both when viewing images of loved ones (Aron et al., 2005) and when witnessing disliked ones receiving painful stimulation (Singer et al) reflecting modulations of human reward activity by emotional processes. Although current societies do not tolerate explicit negative emotions toward racial outgroup individuals, social distinctions based on race develop during economic or status competition between two or more social groups (Spickard, 1992) and result in racial ingroup favoritism in many societies and situations (Devine et al., 2002;Johnson et al., 2002; Greenwald et al., 2009; Drwecki et al., 2011). Ingroup favoritism may enhance collective group processes that have fostered our survival during evolution by enhancing our individual ability to adapt to group living (Caporael, 1997). The genetic effects reported here may be a part of the evolutionary heritage of neural correlates involved in multiple cognitive/affective capacities that support the development and maintenance of group membership (Brewer and Caporael, 1990).

(C-F) The NAcc activity to racial out-group individuals' pain predicted altruistic motivation as measured by the assigned intensity of electric shocks to racial out-group members in AA but not GG individuals.

Our findings further indicate that whether 588 observing others' suffering induces increased activity in the reward system is not only affected by the intergroup relationships between an observer and a target but also modulated by one's genetic makeup (e.g., OXTR rs53576). However, it should be noted that, even though our participants intended to give stronger electric shocks to racial outgroup compared to ingroup individuals, our work lacked a direct measure of pleasure associated with electric shocks assigned to racial outgroup individuals. Thus whether the NAcc activity observed in our work reflected a pleasure of observing racial outgroup individuals' pain is still an open issue.

This is enough to explain the behavior of Pakistanis in the UK. AA gene appear to take pleasure in causing other groups pain, and they feel less guilt and feel less empathy. This is never going to be a problem among, say, Chinese Americans selected for intelligence who also have dispositionally low impulsivity, and have been molded by Chinese collectivist values to be nice to everyone. (Although, maybe it is in other ways: spying, hiring decisions….). But it’s going to be a problem with Pakistanis due to a variety of religious and cultural factors: the insane in-group interest that makes them marry cousins, the group dynamics of Islam, and then whatever genetic traits make Pakistanis corrupt in Pakistan

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