Nel blog Beautiful minds dello Scientific American viene esaminato il comportamento noto come “Moral Grandstanding” (il mettersi in mostra segnalando agli altri la propria superiorità morale).

… since we are such a social species, the human need for social status is very pervasive, and often our attempts at sharing our moral and political beliefs on public social media platforms involve a mix of genuine motives with social status motives. As one team of psychologists put it, yes, you probably are “virtue signaling” (a closely related concept to moral grandstanding), but that doesn’t mean that your outrage is necessarily inauthentic. It just means that we often have a subconscious desire to signal our virtue, which when not checked, can spiral out of control and cause us to denigrate or be mean to others in order to satisfy that desire. When the need for status predominates, we may even lose touch with what we truly believe, or even what is actually the truth.

Un successivo articolo su Guardian riprende l’idea, e la riesamina alla luce di due diverse concezioni storiche, quella Freudiana (… while it’s an unacceptably Freudian stance to take, these days, it probably makes sense to view a lot of life this way: to assume that everyone you encounter is engaged in trying to meet various emotional needs, of which they’re at least partly unaware) e quella Junghiana ( the therapist James Hollis ponders Jung’s observation “that whatever is denied within us is likely to come back to us in the outer world as fate”.)

Immagine da pixabay.