I'm kind of intrigued by this question. My gut reaction is to say that we're selfish. One professor writes, "A greedy unselfconscious self-interest is the way evil manifests itself in our time." And economics often assumes self-interest as a guiding force. But I've been trying to research the topic (email me if you want articles), and it seems to be getting more and more complicated. To start with, a lot of the psychology is written from an evolutionary perspective, as people try to reason out whether pro-social behavior benefits survival. But the main complication is that from my research, it would seem that both cooperation and competitive drives are innate. Or perhaps they're just picked up from interaction in society? I don't know.
This short blog post is a good place to start looking into the question more.
Possible impact to debate: to establish whether cooperation is feasible; to support the necessity of competition; to argue that the more superior mindset is the one that is more natural. It all depends on what the research shows. And I don't know enough to say, but it doesn't look like there's a clear-cut consensus among psychologists. So you could use what you find out for either aff or neg.
2 comments:
I think that selfishness if innate in human nature- as in fallen human nature. But selfishness is more "natural" doesn't mean that it is "Right" or more valuable. If you argue that you should go with the system that is "natural", you leave it open for the negative to slam back with some idealistic sounding rhetoric of not just blindly following what comes naturally, but doing what is "right".
I would just like to note that the "are you a robot" thing was "shessad" which sounds like an awesome word.
I think both competition and cooperation are drive by selfishness: the first a desire to be better, the second a desire for community and solidarity. Both are selfish in that they fulfill different human needs. Theoretically, at least, from the perspective of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, cooperation must come first. Because while competition fill a need of higher consciousness, cooperation caters to a more basic primal need. People employ either cooperation or competition as a result of selfishness, a desire to cater to their own needs.
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