BuddhaBeettle

Remember all those posts that sometimes will come up in r/relationship advice or subs like that portraying really vulnerable people that are really down on their luck (“Im a single mom/dad and have to do horrible things so that my children can eat” “Im an abused teen and can’t escape my home” “Im trying to escape a borderline cult” etc etc)?

Now, Im sure at least some of those were fake to begin with (I don’t have anything against those subs or those stories, but you can’t guarantee every single one of them is true). Now imagine if they could put a little edit in the end “thank you all, you are so kind, I managed to sign up into reddit’s content program, so if you want to help make sure to upvote and leave some gold, it means so much”.

In those subs, people were already helping out how they could (I would often see people offering to send food or stuff to OPs home, things like that)… so that’s not gonna backfire at all if its implemented.

Kbin already counts upvotes and boosts, similar to reddit karma.
But it could perhaps be something that stays hidden for everyone but yourself and moderators (provided you are participating in their magazine, otherwise anyone could open a magazine to see everyone elses karma)

But in all seriousness, we would probably ask them what they think about reddit’s working environment and a few questions like that, and then everybody would move along

Pretty much like this:

Some people fake it with children to fake appeareances (they may not care about the child, but they do care about the opinion of the parents or anyone watching), I find it way more telling when looking how they treat animals and pets, since those are often percieved as “inferior beings” and its harder to fake it.

I personally trust my dog’s opinion on people upon meeting them.

Sorry for the long ass answer. I happened to study this for a while.

Paul Ekman had this “theory of basic emotions” that were supposedly universal for humans and had their set of “innate” gestures for each one.
For his original works, he travelled to some secluded communities and registered that the expressions for “happiness / fear / anger / disgust / sadness / surprise” were supposedly shared among human kind.
Why do I say supposedly? Because a lot of Ekman’s theory was disproved (for example, he claimed each emotion had an area of the brain dedicated to it, or at least some unique structure, which fMRI studies are not finding to be true, even if there is a lot we still don’t know on human emotion). There’s also claims that he contamined his data when he went to these secluded communities, and influenced (probably unknowingly) his results to make everyone’s expressions match the ones he expected for each emotion.

So… are there universal expresions of emotion? Not an easy answer. The physical responses more linked to survival probably are (say fight/ flight in response to fear, startle in response to surprise). The more social ones? don’t know, some may be heavily influenced by culture. You would have to make a study on very young, blind babies from different cultures or something of the sort which would not be easy. Also there’s the thing that babies cannot tell you what emotion they are experimenting, even if you can asume some (loud noise and baby is crying probably equals fear, BUT the baby can’t confirm it, which is a methodological problem for some Scientists).

If this interests you, Ledoux has some great approachable work on the “survival circuits” of the brain that explain emotion in a way comparable to animals and linked to their evolutional value.

I do feel like Im in some kind of multiverse alright. Its new and weird, but also quite nice, knowing that many platforms are connected.