Grasping At Straws While Hanging By A Thread

"Someone who is aggressive while they're playing a game is showing that they're really selfish."

"It's what they'd really want to do if they could [get away with it]."

Ah yes, the old "generous people are just acting altruistically but are really hiding what they'd really like to do" line of crap.   

Well, if you don't think the reality of someone who ACTS generously or unselfishly isn't a definitive difference between them and someone who lies, cheats steals and robs widows and orphans, try being on the receiving end of those two actions, I guarantee you, you will notice a difference.   Anyone who wants to pretend there is not a definitive difference in the most real of reality is delusional, though I know there are many supposed experts in human behavior who will pretend just that.   

Well, the fact is that someone who forecloses on the property at Baltimore or Pennsylvania in a game of Monopoly seems to know something that a more scientifically inclined person doesn't.  They aren't actually putting someone out of their home and onto the street, they aren't taking their sustenance or livelihood, they aren't taking a place which is full of their family memories and, perhaps the heritage their parents sacrifice heroically to give them.   The person who is losing Monopoly to them doesn't' really care about it, they don't really suffer anything from it because the thing they are losing is an imaginary fiction, not their home.   To assert that the two things have anything to do with each other, have the same moral characteristic is an absurd delusion based in the remarkable inability of so many in the social sciences to not realize that words can mean more than one thing and that the metaphors which games are constructed out of have utility merely within the unimportant conventions of games. 

That, by the way, is especially true when you're playing against a machine.  A remarkable number of people can understand that machines are not people or other living beings to whom we  have moral obligations.  Any psychologist who pretends that obviously never considered the moral issues involved when they scrap their old computer for a newer model.   It's not anything like having to wonder if it's the less cruel choice to have your pet euthanized.  

The denial of the reality of the most potent and obvious difference between some one who follows that morality which is established in the despised Abrahamic religions and some one who doesn't on the basis of "what they really would like to do" should have marked psychology as a load of B.S. from late in the 19th century.  

That it wasn't noted to be crap might indicate a preferred way of seeing life through crap colored glasses on the part of sour, cynical and hateful men because it allowed them to feel better about themselves.   Or don't they like it when someone plays their game with them as the subject?   I wouldn't claim such an assertion is science, however, without a level of rigorous study, the honest acheivement of which I don't, for a minute, believe is humanly or scientifically possible.  I'm not as dishonest as they are about that.  

No matter how much you might like to be able to discern the answer to such questions, if you can't do it, whatever you pass off as the answer isn't science, no matter how many suckers you can get to or compel to pretend it is.   Maybe people who are selling that line of crap have a desire to figure everyone operates on the same level of dishonesty as the lower grade of carny hucksters.  It's worked in university science faculties since the late 19th century.