What is the evolutionary value of blushing? It seems not to be to our advantage to do it, to involuntarily reveal our inner emotions. If we're trying to manipulate or lie, actions in furtherance of individual goals as opposed to the goals of others, blushing would not seem to be helpful. And yet everyone blushes, except the psychopath.
Interpretation
Blushing reveals our true emotions, highlighting a conflict between honesty and manipulation.
Frans De Waalβs quote examines the seemingly paradoxical nature of blushing as an involuntary emotional response that reveals our true feelings, which can be seen as a disadvantage when one is attempting to deceive or manipulate others. Despite its lack of apparent evolutionary advantage, the fact that all humans blush, save for psychopaths, suggests that it plays a significant role in our social interactions and may reflect empathy and honesty, key components of forming trust and connections within a community.
In practice
During a psychology class discussion on emotional expressions and their social implications.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
For people raised and programmed on the patriarchal religions of today, religions that affect even the most secular aspects of our society, perhaps there remains a lingering, almost innate memory of sacred shrines and temples tended by priestesses who served in the religion of the original supreme deity. In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven. At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?
Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.
The two greatest things that all men aim at in any free government are liberty and permanency. We have had liberty enough - too much perhaps in some respects - but at all events, liberty to our hearts content.
One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.