If people in general really cared a lot about their children experiencing a minimum of pain, I would not expect some common parenting strategies to exist.
Well, there is an easy experiment we can do. Just find a mother with her son out walking around, grab the son and start torturing him, and observe the mother’s response.
I think she would probably react negatively if you grabbed her son and gave him a lollipop, too. If his father, however, grabbed the son and started hitting him on some pretense or other, a certain percentage of mothers sampled probably would not protest.
Good point, we need a control group where we grab the son and then do nothing. Then we compare the reactions to the group where we grabbed the son and tortured him.
If people in general really cared a lot about their children experiencing a minimum of pain, I would not expect some common parenting strategies to exist.
Well, there is an easy experiment we can do. Just find a mother with her son out walking around, grab the son and start torturing him, and observe the mother’s response.
I think she would probably react negatively if you grabbed her son and gave him a lollipop, too. If his father, however, grabbed the son and started hitting him on some pretense or other, a certain percentage of mothers sampled probably would not protest.
Good point, we need a control group where we grab the son and then do nothing. Then we compare the reactions to the group where we grabbed the son and tortured him.
I would expect the negative reaction to be much more severe in the case of torture.
Certainly. But there is something of a confounding factor involved.