Getting along with others

So I was yakking with Pop tonight about an issue that he recently shared with me. First some background: Pop is a very agreeable, quiet guy. He is that nice guy that people are always wishing they could find and marry. He's absolutely super to pretty much everyone. Pop is doing his masters in biochemistry. Last week (while I was studying for my stats midterm) Pop called to talk...and since Pop loves the phone this wasn't surprising...what was surprising was that he wanted to do the talking...Pop is getting pushed around big time. Apparently the lab he works in includes some older Research assistants and post docs who treat him and the other MA1's like crap. They're negative and rude and demanding, unreasonably. Pop clearly doesn't like confrontation because I spent an hour trying to convince him to stand up for himself.

My thought is this: why do some people come to treat others SO poorly...especially in a lab where the point of a lab is to share and produce research. I mean they aren't gaining anything from this behavior, except maybe a pathetic sense of power. I've been really lucky, I've always worked with people who were sharing and positive. I can't even comprehend being treating so disrespectfully - which really begs the question, how can we come to treat others as lesser humans...

I recently heard a lecture that had made a great deal of sense of this issue...Bear with me. The talk was given by Yale professor, Dr. Paul Bloom, who is a fantastic lecturer. He suggested that the reason things like the holocaust can happen is that we are capable of seeing others as physical objects, rather than social objects. In fact we are both but it is effortful to conceive of things as both. Generally we conceive of others as social beings, but there are certain things that can encourage us to come to see others as physical things instead.

This is based around research on disgust. There are a few things that elicit disgust in everyone...meat, bad smells, feces...if we come to associate others with these things, it is easier for us to switch how we think about them. For example, research shows that if you put people in a badly smelling room, they will be meaner to others than if they are put in a room without any odors. In fact, we see this every day. Think about homeless people and how we tend to feel about them and behave around them. We often do not treat them like another human being and say it is because they smell bad, look bad, don't take care of themselves. In essence, we take these disgust cues as cues to their human value. This also leads to blaming the victim.

Anyway, the point is that when we associate people with negative things, whether these associations are fairly or appropriately assigned or not, the person comes to connote negativity and we start to see them less as social beings and more as physical ones. And this shift allows us to modify our behavior to treat people in less respectfull ways.

That's probably a really poor representation of Dr. Bloom's work, but it's fascinating to say the least...I haven't read it, but I bet his book on this topic, Descartes Baby, is great. And I think Pop is gonna talk to his prof...