Socialization accounts for damn near all of a person's behavior,
I'm just gonna say this is real bad psychology and you're gonna have a helluva time making a valid empirical case for it
At least if you mean it in the sense I think you do, and you probably do
It's self-evident. A person is not born with his ideas. They're learned. They're taught. They're the result of observation of the world around you and how the world interacts with you, using your own natural inclinations (to whatever degree those exist) and potential as a template upon which to build.
OK so what you're arguing amounts to environmental determinism
If all you are is what you've been fed by your environment then there is no case to be made for ever assigning responsibility to anyone for any of their actions
After all Hitler was just a product of his environment, it could have been anyone, right?
This is an extremely naive view of it.
Realizing the impact of environment on an individual doesn't mean that you can't respond to that person's behavior; it just causes you to think differently about how to do so and what it means to do so.
For instance, you can still punish people for things that they do. This serves the purpose of influencing their behavior towards what is more acceptable, and to deter potential violation from other people in the future.
It also makes you actually think about what social forces are in play. If someone does something terrible, you should ask
why they've done something terrible, and try to make things better in order to prevent it.
You decided to bring up Hitler for some weird reason, so yes, I'll bite: It COULD have been someone else. There was a lot of pre-existing racial/ethnic/nationalistic prejudice in Germany at the time; it was bound to come to a boiling point given the right conditions, and post-WWI conditions for Germany were terrible. The country becoming zealously nationalistic and militaristic was not some rabbit Hitler pulled out of his hat; they were in severe debt due to the post-war economic penalties levied against them after WWI, which is really great if you want a country to feel pissed off and develop such tendencies as what led to WWII. So yeah, there are sure as hell reasons why Hitler turned out the way he did, but no, I don't know all of them, because I'm damned if I know what Hitler's parents, education, or social environment were like, but that which I do know makes it not very surprising at all that a person like that existed and rose to power. He did not invent nationalism, or militarism, or eugenics, or racism, or anti-semitism, or anything like that. These are qualities reflected in the place and time in which he lived, were reflected in the other political/military leaders of Germany (to varying degrees), and undoubtedly influenced him more than he influenced them (aside from his serving as a warning to the future).
And more on topic, which we're getting hella far away from, the notion that it's socially irresponsible to publish idealized images of sexy women because it could have negative effects on real women is also preposterous. ANY form of publication or expression or speech could have negative effects on people. If I clearly and articulately express my reasons for being agnostic, and an extremely religious person reads it, and my views threaten their worldview such that they enter an inner crisis where the underpinnings of their world seem to crumble and they aren't able to reconcile my reasoning with their personal notions of how things should be, then is it socially irresponsible of me to have said those things?
This is an extremely poor comparison. If you're giving people information on a worldview that differs from their own, and their psychology crumbles because of it, then obviously they were inadequately prepared to deal with the possibility of any worldview existing aside from their own; the problem isn't that you gave them more ideas to chew on, it's that something about how they were raised/developed/lived caused them to be unable to cope with ideas that aren't their own, and
that's the terrible part.
The key thing is that you're being constructive, whereas the media
relies on changing people's view of what is naturally beautiful to something that is
not even natural. What you described in your religious example is honest and constructive; this is dishonest and is designed (intentionally or not) to create a culture of unhealthy celebrity-worship and idolization, which the media rely on in order to sell product. I don't think it's some kind of crazy intentional conspiracy on part of the media; I think it's just business principles at work, which happen to be unethical when you really think about them.
Or what if I portray people like Mother Theresa, Gandhi, and MLK as role models, and people become discouraged and depressed as they are unable to live up to those examples?
Except that
those were real people. If you want a better analogy, it's like if you
make shit up about Mother Theresa or Ghandi or MLK Jr. to make them look even better than they were, and say that the way they were is the ONLY way to be a great person. This does happen sometimes! Role models get played up to be more than they actually were, and sometimes it's implied that there are only certain few ways to be great people. This is unhealthy as well!
Conversely, if the media acted the way they do in your analogy, they wouldn't be photoshopping or airbrushing anyone, and wouldn't necessarily promote them as the sole standard of beauty either.
Whatever. Beauty is in the neurons of the beholder, and we all have neurons wired up in fundamentally similar ways, the design of which, incidentally, is largely affected by its previous owners having been horny as fuk
This is flat-out false. There are certain markers for beauty that carry over across time and space (such as "does this person appear healthy and child-bearing"), but the particulars vary remarkably across culture, especially since people wind up associating different things with, say, health. For instance, heavyset women were once in vogue in European society (from which ours is derived anyway, if you live in Europe, Australia, or North America, so we're not even talking an extremely foreign cultural influence here), and if I had to give you a reason for it, it would be that people associated it with being healthy, since obesity was less a problem than was people not getting enough to eat, especially amongst the poor. These days, it's the opposite: The more common health problem is obesity (again, worse with the poor), so thinness is associated with health as a reaction. It's not exactly a coincidence. These trends can get out of hand too in a hypercorrective fashion, as is obvious if you pay attention: Women are quick to get called "chubby" even if they're at a perfectly healthy weight, and eating disorders aren't exactly uncommon.
Point is, more is up to environmental influence than you think. If what you said were true, then cultural standards for beauty simply wouldn't vary very much, unless you somehow think
that's genetic too, and I basically already ruled that out as a possibility.
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Topic: Nude model does photoshoot with no photoshop, other women call her a fake woman (Read 29336 times)