Any student of humanity should be familiar with these "10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies ". This list comes from PsyBlog. While I'm generally disappointed with Internet science popularization, this blog seems like it provides a good entry point to psychological studies. Several of these studies are relevant to the topics we discuss here, but three were particularly interesting to me:

• War, Peace and the Role of Power in Sherif's Robbers Cave Experiment : This study (inadvertantly) investigated the dynamics that can result when a powerful group tries to manipulate less powerful groups. I hope that our guys in Iraq have considered these dynamics.
• Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Bias : Many (most? all?) people assume that their own thinking is representative of human thinking in general, and tend to think poorly of others who disagree.
• How to Avoid a Bad Bargain: Don't Threaten : Humans don't always act as "utility maximizing agents" (at least if you define "utility" as being independent of others in society) even when they are playing a simple game where they are instructed to maximize their score. This basically found that people exhibited spiteful behavior against others playing the game.

My first thought on these studies is that they illustrate particular personalities, and not necessarily some immutable aspect of human behavior. In the "false consensus" study, the subjects apparently assumed that others thought like they did, yet I'm familiar with a number of people who tend to assume that they think differently than others -- that they are "ahead of the curve" and others tend to hold wrong opinions. Similarly, not everyone is inherently competitive or spiteful. Many people really just care about their absolute wealth, not their relative wealth. I think that many libertarians have this perspective ("self-centered" if you will), and have trouble understanding that others are fundamentally competitive ("status seeking"). Sometimes, "mental socialists" criticize "self-centered" individuals for not having intrinsic concern for their fellow man, while ignoring that "mental socialism" often takes nasty forms, such as spite and hyper-competitiveness.

Any view of human society needs to take into account the extent that people are driven by these different psychological tendencies.

Cross posted to Freedom Democrats