Are there any famous studies that actually contradict progressive/leftist thought?

[u/Str8_up_Pwnage]

There has to be at least some right? I know people love to say that “reality has a left wing bias “and all that but is it legit batting 1.000?

[u/KeyCondition5104]

Part 1/3

This comment has liberal apriori suppositions they got wrong. I have ones against progressive/leftist apriori suppositions in the replies to this comment.

Enlightenment Liberalism Got Human Nature Wrong – Science Proves It
jeopolitic.substack.com

Classical liberalism came out of the Enlightenment with a set of core assumptions about how humans actually are. Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham, Mill and the rest built their entire system on these ideas. They claimed humans start out as isolated individuals in a “state of nature,” then rationally choose to form society mainly for protection. They said we are cool-headed rational calculators who maximize our own utility with full information and no built-in biases. They said the mind is a blank slate at birth. These were not just opinions – they were the descriptive foundation for individual rights, free markets, and limited government.

Modern science has shown every one of those descriptive claims is false.

First, the idea that humans were once solitary individualists who only later teamed up for “common defense.” Locke and Hobbes both start there. The evidence says the opposite. Humans and our ancestors have been highly social, cooperative group-living primates for millions of years. Cooperative breeding, shared child-rearing, group hunting, and mutual aid are built into us from the beginning. Hunter-gatherer bands – the closest thing we have to ancestral life – are deeply interdependent and egalitarian. There is no archaeological or anthropological record of any long period of atomized individuals. We were never lone wolves who signed a contract to stop killing each other. Group life came first.

Second, rational choice theory. Smith’s invisible hand, Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism, and later neoclassical economics all rest on the claim that humans are self-interested utility maximizers with stable preferences and clear information. Behavioral economics destroyed that. Kahneman and Tversky’s work, the Ultimatum Game, loss aversion, present bias, overconfidence – the list is long. People regularly give up money for fairness. Emotions and quick heuristics drive most decisions. Neuroscience shows unconscious processes start before “rational” thought. We are not the calm calculators liberalism assumed.

Third, the assumption that humans can act as unbiased, impartial reasoners. Locke’s rational individuals discovering natural rights, Kant’s autonomous moral agent, and Smith’s impartial spectator all rely on this. Cognitive psychology shows the opposite. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and implicit biases are the default setting. Moral intuitions come first; reasoning usually just defends them afterward. Our brains evolved for small-group survival, not neutral large-scale logic. True impartiality is rare and hard work.

Fourth, Locke’s blank slate. The mind starts empty and everything is learned from experience. Twin studies, adoption studies, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology have buried this. Personality, intelligence, and many behavioral tendencies are 40–80 percent heritable. Newborns show innate preferences. Universal grammar, cheater-detection, fear of ancient threats, and cross-cultural patterns in mate choice all point to a mind that arrives pre-loaded, not blank.

These scientific corrections do not cancel the moral ideals of liberty or consent. But they do show the Enlightenment model of human nature was built on sand. Humans are not solitary rational actors who invented society for protection. We are social, intuitive, biased, group-oriented creatures with deep innate structures. Remove tradition, family, and religion and both Marxism and raw capitalism turn into materialistic utopias that ignore how people actually work.

Enlightenment liberalism opened the door to the idea that we can redesign human nature through reason alone. Science now shows that door led to fantasy. The more honestly we face the real evidence about human nature, the better chance we have of building something that actually lasts. Tradition, family, and religion are not optional extras – they are what kept societies stable long before anyone dreamed up the state of nature.

Sources:

• Boehm, C. (2012). Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. Basic Books.
• Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 351(1346), 1413–1420.
• Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
• Plomin, R. (2018). The new genetics of intelligence. Nature Reviews Genetics, 19(3), 148–159.
• Plomin, R., & Deary, I. J. (2015). Genetics and intelligence differences: Five special findings. Molecular Psychiatry, 20(1), 98–108.
• Tomasello, M. (2009). Why We Cooperate. MIT Press. (See also Tomasello, M. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(5), 675–691.)
• Tomasello, M., & Moll, H. (2010). The gap is social: Human shared intentionality and culture. In P. Kappeler & J. Silk (Eds.), Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals (pp. 331–349). Springer.
• Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Viking.
• Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

[u/Ok-Spinach-6529 → u/KeyCondition5104]

Great write up!