Are Humans Inherently Good Or Evil?

Are humans inherently good or evil? Are we born altruistic saints who are temporarily corrupted by bad influences, or are we born selfish sinners who need taming by society? The debate over human nature is probably as old as humanity itself.

What does psychology say about this question? Here are some studies that shed light on whether humans are inherently good or evil.

We hurt others when ordered to… but we’d rather hurt ourselves instead

Imagine this: An experimenter tells you that you’re a “teacher” administering a memory test to another participant who is a “learner”. Every time the “learner” gets an answer wrong, you have to give them an electric shock of increasing voltage, even up to a fatal shock. How much would you hurt the other person? Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram tried this experiment to test obedience to authority, where the “learner” was actually an actor pretending to scream in pain and plead for mercy. He was shocked (pun intended) to find that 65% of participants went all the way to a fatal voltage when ordered to. Milgram’s classic study has been often cited as proof that humans are quite ready to hurt others.

However…

Milgram’s study has been questioned by psychologists who have done their own investigations and found other results. In a 2014 study by University College London, participants got cash rewards for increasing the electric shocks, either for themselves or for the other participant. The results were much brighter than Milgram’s original study, as participants were much more willing to shock themselves for extra money than shocking the stranger, suggesting that we still place a large value on the suffering of others.

Children enjoy the misfortunes of others… but they also sympathize with them

If you want to see the natural state of humanity, why not look to young children? They’re all innocent little angels uncorrupted by society, right? Well, you might want to think again. A study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology showed that even four-year-olds experience schadenfreude, the pleasure of witnessing the misfortunes of others. Children judged stories of characters falling out of trees or into muddy puddles to be entertaining and funny, especially if the children thought the characters “deserved it.” A similar study published in Nature Human Behaviour showed that preschoolers would rather pay to watch antisocial puppets being hit than spend the money on stickers. Sadly, psychology has demonstrated that even from a young age, humans possess an innate sense of ruthlessness and punishment.

However…

Psychology has also found an innate sense of sympathy in young children. In the study mentioned before, the children judging the stories may have felt pleasure about the “bad characters” experiencing misfortunes, but they also felt sorry for them at the same time. Even when it comes to sharing resources, young children go out of their way to achieve justice and address misfortunes. In one study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, pairs of two-year-olds were given a set of marbles to play with. In most cases, the toddlers spontaneously divided the marbles between themselves equally or near equally. In a variant of the experiment, the toddlers were each assigned unequal numbers of marbles to begin with. In a third of trials, the more fortunate toddler gave marbles to the less fortunate toddler without prompting, showing we have the innate capacity to respond to misfortunes.

We blame other people for their suffering… but we help them anyway

Do you believe that everyone gets what they deserve? We commonly hear that “what goes around, comes around,” or that successful people have worked hard to get where they are. Psychology has shown that we tend to believe in a “Just World” where justice generally prevails and people are eventually compensated for fortunes and misfortunes. But this also means that we are prone to the negative assumption that the unfortunate must have done something to deserve their fate. When study participants are asked to explain the poor, rape victims, AIDS patients, cancer patients, quadriplegics and traffic accident survivors, they twist or invent facts so misfortunes are self-inflicted rather than just being victims. Research suggests that we cling to this belief as a coping mechanism, even at the expense of others.

However…

Research also suggests that we are predisposed to trust and help other people by default. In a lab experiment, participants were given some money and they could choose how much to keep in a private fund or contribute to a common fund that was distributed among other participants. Even though the participants were all anonymous and the ideal strategy is to distrust everyone else and keep everything in your private fund, people consistently put most of their money into the common fund. The authors call this instinct “strong reciprocity”, where we help people despite being unrelated to them and not expecting anything in return.

So there you have it, studies showing that humans are inherently evil and inherently good. Sorry, there are no easy answers in psychology! What do you think? Let us know in the comments below. And don’t forget to like and share this article if you think it will help someone else. The studies and references used are listed in the description below. 

References

• Blass, T. (Ed.). (1999). Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm.
• Crockett, M. J., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Siegel, J. Z., Dayan, P., & Dolan, R. J. (2014). Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(48), 17320-17325.
• Gintis, H. (2000). Strong reciprocity and human sociality. Journal of theoretical biology, 206(2), 169-179.
• Mendes, N., Steinbeis, N., Bueno-Guerra, N., Call, J., & Singer, T. (2018). Preschool children and chimpanzees incur costs to watch punishment of antisocial others. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(1), 45-51.
• Montada, L. (1998). Belief in a just world: A hybrid of justice motive and self-interest?. In Responses to victimizations and belief in a just world (pp. 217-246). Springer, Boston, MA.
• Schulz, K., Rudolph, A., Tscharaktschiew, N., & Rudolph, U. (2013). Daniel has fallen into a muddy puddle–Schadenfreude or sympathy?. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31(4), 363-378.
• Ulber, J., Hamann, K., & Tomasello, M. (2015). How 18-and 24-month-old peers divide resources among themselves. Journal of experimental child psychology, 140, 228-244.