[squozzer]

I'm not sure we can do much to understand the role of authority without understanding the role of conditioning in what makes people act.

For instance, why are most schools so regimented and rule-rich? For efficiency, certainly, but not all school rules increased efficiency. I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.

[forapurpose]

> I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.

If it existed, it seems like there would be evidence of this, in the literatures of educational research, training, and school management. I doubt there is conspiracy of school principals.

Schools are bureaucracies, and like every bureaucracy they have rules, often rules that seem nonsensical to people who haven't had to manage one. People feel like companies and other organizations are overly regimented too.

[barry-cotter]

Every single government primary and secondary education system on Earth is a direct descendant of the Prussian one. Non-existent to very limited choice of how one spends ones time, constant ranking and grading to inure people to dominance behaviours that do not come naturally, and all in groups that are age normed rather than competence or ability normed.

School doesn’t have a singular purpose because there’s no one out there who designed it but learning definitely isn’t in the top five things it does. The people who did design the progenitor of modern school systems designed it to get people to sit down, shut up and do as they were told, and to love the government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.ht...

[TomMarius]

I don't think that's true. For one, there are many publications about strict education and until relatively recently, it was the leading school of thought; we have movies featuring them, even praising them (Harry Potter for example - that was an example of a school lead as a benevolent dictatorship - that of course turned out bad later in the series). For two, people mostly don't read books about parenting but then they're parenting their kids somehow - how? Well, with whatever they picked up from their parents, TV, fiction books... Isn't it possible that it might be the same with teaching? I have some experience with working in education. Most of my former colleagues almost never think about the way they teach; you ask them why did they punish a student for disobedience (aka "he drank water even though I told him not to") and they say "because that's how it's done", you asked them why are they explaining something in that way and they don't know, they just do.

[s-shellfish]

The problem is if there's a survival benefit to becoming rigidly obedient, insulating this information would be valuable. Think about pyramid schemes.

[specialist]

Filed under "believe, but cannot prove":

Whereas I thought anxiety (or lack of) was first order predictor someone's behavior (eg conservative vs liberal), I now think the root is someone's fear response.

Reformulated: fear -> anxiety -> (submission to) authority

[AmericanChopper]

I think that’s a pretty cynical view. You could just as easily say it’s about discipline. To be successful in pretty much anything requires discipline and some level of regimented behaviour.

[projektir]

Why is the cynical view not appropriate? I'm much more suspicious of the idea that something was implemented with everyone's best interests in mind if there isn't strong evidence pointing there.

> To be successful in pretty much anything requires discipline and some level of regimented behaviour.

There's no evidence to confirm this statement, even though it may sound like common sense.

And this post reads odd. The current school model is very old. If schools exist to instill discipline, and discipline is required for success, I'd expect everyone to be super successful right now.

[AmericanChopper]

There is overwhelming evidence to confirm that statement. Conscientiousness is the greatest predictor of lifetime success besides intelligence, and discipline is a core element of consciousness.

You’re postulating that the entire education system is conspiring together to teach children a sense of self-discipline as part of some oppressive conditioning scheme. Any form of achievement in life requires discipline. It’s completely irrational to suggest otherwise.

[jokoon]

What kind of evidence? How do you define success?

Society and civilization are built around discipline and order, but it doesn't mean you require those qualities to have success.

The role of school is to teach people to fit into a civilized world. It is not oppressive, it's not always conditioning, but it's a mean to give people a chance to live a comfortable life inside the frame of civilization. Success is a different thing.

[AmericanChopper]

>What kind of evidence? How do you define success?

Scientific evidence, and in every possibly way you could define success.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/

>This article investigates how personality and cognitive ability relate to measures of objective success (income and wealth) and subjective success (life satisfaction, positive affect, and lack of negative affect) in a representative sample of 9,646 American adults. In cross-sectional analyses controlling for demographic covariates, cognitive ability, and other Big Five traits, conscientiousness demonstrated beneficial associations of small-to-medium magnitude with all success outcomes.

This is only one example, these results are replicated in many, many other studies.

>Society and civilization are built around discipline and order, but it doesn't mean you require those qualities to have success.

Conforming to societies expectations really has nothing to do with this. No matter what it is you want to achieve in life, and no matter how passionate you might be about it, any worthwhile archievement in life requires discipline. Relationships, art, sports, philosophy, career... Achievement in any of those areas requires discipline.

Even if society was in a total state of disorder, you’d still need discipline to get what you want from life.

[jokoon]

I have a hard time with psychology as a science, it was showed many studies were not reproducible. I like psychology, but studying success and finding that discipline=success really seems like using some layman vocabulary to tell people the source of why they're unsuccessful in life, which reminds me of motivational speaking, which I despise with passion. Diagnosing people with lack of discipline is more a questions of morals, ideology of life and philosophy than science. It's not something you can do or do with results, and often it will just be about motivational speaking, which is often scamming.

Conscientious people also often are conformists, which to me is not a good thing.

"Big Five personality traits" and the HEXACO models seems like pseudo science to me, because I don't think you can precisely define those things with a study of behavior, and come with relevant and applicable notions of those metrics.

We are in an age of the study of AI, and psychology sounds like it's the alchemy of the study of the brain. It might work in some places, but I don't think we can rely on it. Worse, I hardly think you can use psychology in a thoughtful process of helping people without sounding like a madman.

[projektir]

I think me and you have very different requirements for "overwhelming evidence" when it comes making a sociological claim. These are extremely difficult claims to prove and get overtuned pretty frequently. If it's a claim that seems to change every 5 years and is highly reliant on the society it was based on, the evidence for it was probably never overwhelming.

I'm not sure if there's much to conscientousness besides the associated correlation with obedience to authority making it easier to get benefits from said authority.

> You’re postulating that the entire education system is conspiring together...

I'm not really postulating that, it's rather unnecessary. Lots of bad things are done to humans and bought as cargo cult without anyone singularly conspiring for it. It's sufficient a general philosophical belief set to have been present long enough to influence some system or structure, and then you can get stuck with it for a few hundred years. This happens all the time to everything from parenting models to gender stereotypes. It's much more insidious than some people conspiring because it lives much longer than any given person.

> Any form of achievement in life requires discipline. It’s completely irrational to suggest otherwise.

Given that there are carefree goofballs getting what they want and extremely hardworking, dilligent single mothers working three jobs... I think such a strong belief in discipline is much more irrational.

It's rather self-focused, if you think about it. You think you're more powerful than the world.

[AmericanChopper]

Without trying to be rude, you’re talking from a position of complete ignorance on this topic. For starters, this is about psychology not sociology. The big five and intelligence are the only measurable qualities that been used consistently and over time to make predictions. This isn’t some flash in the pan pop-science, out of everything the field has produced, the big five is one of the only things you could point to and say “that’s definently science”, and out of them conscientiousness makes the strongest predictions of all.

You also don’t seem to even know what conscientiousness is.

>Conscientiousness is the personality trait of a person who shows an awareness of the impact that their own behavior has on those around them. Conscientious people are generally more goal-oriented in their motives, ambitious in their academic efforts and at work, and feel more comfortable when they are well-prepared and organized.

It can be broken down further into subcategories if orderliness and industriousness. Neither of those qualities are related to “obedience to authority”. Agreeableness is, but agreeableness is an entirely different personality trait. Industrious people are often very disagreeable.

[projektir]

No, people are not ignorant simply because they disagree with you or use different and perfectly applicable terms. The might think the topic is much bigger than its field of study, though.

> For starters, this is about psychology not sociology.

It's both. How humans are educated is absolutely sociology and most psychological topics relate to sociology some way or another since it's basically impossible to separate humans from their society. This is really not the point you should have went with if you wanted to score points calling someone ignorant.

> The big five and intelligence are the only measurable qualities that been used consistently and over time to make predictions.

You consider the Big Five acceptable because you are comparing it to other psychological models, but that's not the standard. The standard is in the hard sciences. This is not overwhelming evidence. This is "it's all right", maybe "it's better than nothing". The theory of evolution has overwhelming evidence.

These is not trivial conclusions that are being made here. The conclusions that are made from things like Big Five will affect our schools, our workplaces, our governments, our lives. It needs to be rock solid if it's to be bought as dogma. It's not sufficient for it to be better than the rest, or occasionally be predictive. The "evidence" for Big Five is hugely reliant on self-evaluations.

You're deriving "Any form of achievement in life requires discipline" from something that's mostly correlation, and you're using two term sets that are imprecisely defined: "achievement" and "discipline". How can there be overwhelming evidence for something so imprecise? How much discipline does a given person have? How does this interact with things like "grew up poor" or "had poor nutrition"? How much achievement is achievement? Is a happy person with 2 kids more achievement than a person with a 180k job? A study can look at one or the other but can it tell me who has more achievement? "There's mostly a positive trend between this thing and this other stuff" is not "overwhelming evidence".

Pretty much all our measurements of achievements and conscientousness correlate heavily with "acceptable and equipped for present society". Conscientousness is beneficial in a world where it's important to show up on time so you don't get fired and keep track of 30 different bills. Big surprise. What about a society where these things are not that important? Oh, wait, we don't have one. Put this in the bucket where larks are happier than night owls. How is this glaring problem with these styles of observations not obvious to you?

This is the entire problem with sociology, and, yes, I say sociology, because the problem with pretty much all psychology is that it forgets it's also pretty much always sociology.

> You also don’t seem to even know what conscientiousness is.

Here's the thing: terms like discipline or grit are much older than the Big Five model. "conscientousness" is not really a term people would use but that's effectively what it is a proxy for. But the term you used is "discipline". People are not obliged to use the Big Five's specific definition. Discipline is extremely strongly associated with conformity and authority obedience in human cultures. The topic of this discussion is about discipline instilled in education, a very authoritative environment. Another one that comes to mind is military. There's going to be a relationship there and your studies won't be able to get rid of it.

> It can be broken down further into subcategories if orderliness and industriousness. Neither of those qualities are related to “obedience to authority”. Agreeableness is, but agreeableness is an entirely different personality trait. Industrious people are often very disagreeable.

It's not really entirely different, it's been bucketed under a general "Stability": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188690...

One of the criticisms of Big Five is that it overlaps with itself a lot: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...

It seems strange to say that a given factor is "entirely different" for a model known for its overlap. It seems further strange to get attached to specifics here when there are different styles of splitting up the model and when there are preexisting definitions of terms like "discipline".

> This isn’t some flash in the pan pop-science

Except it is. Google conscientiousness, grit, etc., and see how many articles will pop up. It's all the rage right now, and has gotten popular mostly due to a mix of influences Gardner and Dweck, the studies from both of which are very suspect. It's not really Big Five that made it popular.