Oh. You’re using pride as a generic term and treating all pride as equivalent. This is a meaningless way to look at the idea of pride. Pride is directed. A person doesn’t just feel pride, they feel pride about something.
Analyzing anger the way you have pride would yield the same idea, that anger is nearly meaningless, or at least lacking in any predictive value. Without discussing where the emotion is directed, yeah, it can’t tell us much about what the action the emotion encourages.
Once you start discussion the object of someone’s pride, the actions become more obvious. Proud of your kid? You’re a lot more likely to reward them. Proud of your job? You’re more likely to talk about it. Proud of your country? You’re probably more likely to demand policies that you see as elevating your country above others.
I would expect that those who feel pride in their genes are more likely to demonstrate confident behaviors than those who are not. For less positive behaviors, I would expect that some people proud of their genes might treat others without similar genetic gifts poorly. In extreme cases, pride in one’s genes would almost certainly result in overt racism.
Why are people confident about their genes not more prone to feel responsible and compassionate to others’ less lucky ones’ needs, just like many rich people donate great sums of money to charity (in extreme cases) or famous musicians giving charity shows?
These are great questions. And it’s worthwhile to note that different displays of pride are certainly possible. This doesn’t necessarily imply that pride has no predictive power. It seems to indicate instead that different types of pride manifest differently.
Authentic pride is experienced when the attribution of success is internal, unstable, and controllable (Lewis, 2007; Tracy et al., 2009). Authentic pride is associated with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, satisfying social relationships, high self-esteem, prosocial behaviors, achievement-orientation and mental health (Tracy and Robins, 2007a,b; Tracy et al., 2009; Cheng et al., 2010).
Hubristic pride is experienced if the attribution of success is external, stable, and uncontrollable (Lewis, 2007; Tracy et al., 2009). In contrast to authentic pride, it is related to more antisocial and aggressive behaviors. It is associated with disagreeableness, neuroticism, lack of conscientiousness, narcissism, problematic relationships, and poor mental health outcomes (Tracy and Robins, 2007a,b; Tracy et al., 2009; Cheng et al., 2010).
In this Taxonomy, genetic pride would be hubristic so this paper would imply that it has some likely negative effects.
I am in no way an expert in this and would be happy to see evidence against my expectations. But it was not hard to find scholarly papers supporting the gist of what I said.
> This doesn’t necessarily imply that pride has no predictive power
Do you realize that in such subtle matters as personal attitudes and feelings there is no way even to properly define the variables, let alone to set up a reproducible experiment?
So we come to my starting point - the word “pride” can have 1000 different flavors for different people, leading to different outcomes. And we can’t possibly measure any correlation because we don’t yet know how to define and detect the subjective.
Then you have unlimited opportunities to write tons of pseudo scientific psychological papers focusing on one “kind” of pride and some group of people, inevitably filtering the observations and words through your own filters.
This is related to fundamental philosophical problem of qualia if you’re interested.
Your analysis here is circular. You essentially state that it’s hard to measure the impact of pride so we shouldn’t try, which sure, you can hold that opinion I guess. But it kind of flies in the face of your original position that it’s not predictive. “Hard to understand” is not at all the same as “meaningless”.
This also rings extremely hollow. There’s nothing about your claim that is specific to pride. You can apply your criticism to any aspect of human behavior. Humans are hard to predict. This is not a particularly novel insight.
Right. But there are no rules about what exactly it motivates you to.
Same pride can motivate someone to kill, others — to do charity.