On: Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Beha...

[LudwigNagasena]

What is very damaging about it? Beyond facilitating A/B/O fan fiction, of course.

[namanyayg → LudwigNagasena]

That people (usually males) believe this fanfiction also applies to human society and change their behaviours to be perceived as alpha

[LudwigNagasena → namanyayg]

I don’t think many people would base their behaviour off wolves, parrots, gudgeons, mollusks or whatnot. That’s such a random species to choose.

If anything, I would conjecture that the causality is actually in reverse: the ideas of pecking orders and dominance hierarchies were well-established in the scientific communities among zoologists and social psychologists (and even in common parlance), so people who studied wolves didn’t question external validity of their studies on captive wolves.

[the_af → LudwigNagasena]

The wolf is not a random animal. It's a big predator associated in popular culture with aggression and dominance, e.g "a wolf in sheep's clothes", "the wolf of wall street", etc.

[wryoak → the_af]

Both of those describe deceivers (though the latter may not originally have), not aggressors or dominators.

Given humanity’s long history of antagonism towards wolves, it is a very strange animal after which to choose to model one’s own behavior.