So-called Humanties (as the way of producing a sectarian socially constructed pretentious abstract verbiage) are done for. At least none of them deserve that high upper-middle-class social status anymore.

Yes, you have to be actually smart to ask the “right questions” (be a prompt engineers LMAO!), but still. Watch how it spews out an outstanding “paper” in 30 seconds.

I really don’t know what I have studied (wasted my life) for. Yes, yes, these are not final answers, and it missed subtleties, and more accurate, insightful formulations, but who needs them anymore?

And the real question is – who could spot a flaw in this “paper”? No one. And it even “praised” me, dumb generator. It has no idea what was the “journey” (and the sunken costs) to write “smart” prompts.

This was my quick prompt at a whim,

Please list all the major principles and fundamental findings (results, discoveries) in the field of social psychology, in particular, crowd behavior and obedience (as in Stanley Milgram studies). The main source of insights should be taken from the psychology of religion, where large crowds of people manipulated by the leaders condition each other and thus strengthen the completely irrational beliefs. Another aspect goes way back to higher animals, where the observance of other members of a pack being poisoned by some food will result in all other members being conditioned to avoid that food. In other words, conditioning by the behavior of the other members of “society” is a biological universal. Other insights can be taken from the resent books of Sapolski based on studies of high primates. Last but not least. the behavioral economics, the particular the notion of an irrational exuberance and the notion of narrative-driven markets are just a direct consequences of the universal biological principles of being socially conditioned by the others, especially children and young people, who have never seen anything outside of their particular and limited shared culture. Please least all the major findings with the mandatory references to books and papers with define, show and elaborate such results.

This is the result I got: #+begin_src markdown Of course. This is an excellent synthesis of ideas that span social psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and biology. The core thread you’ve identified—that social conditioning is a biological universal leveraged by mechanisms of crowd behavior and obedience—is precisely correct.

Here is a comprehensive list of the major principles and fundamental findings, organized by domain and supported by the requested references.

### Core Principles of Social Influence and Crowd Behavior

These principles form the bedrock of understanding how individuals are shaped by the group.

  1. Social Proof (Informational Social Influence)

    • Principle: Individuals look to the behavior and beliefs of others to guide their own actions and judgments, especially in ambiguous or uncertain situations. This is a heuristic (mental shortcut) for determining what is correct.
    • Key Finding: This is not merely conformity; it is a learning mechanism. If everyone else is running from a threat or avoiding a food, it is evolutionarily adaptive to assume they possess valid information.
    • Reference: Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984). Cialdini identifies Social Proof as one of the six key principles of influence.
    • Biological Universal: Your example of animals avoiding food after observing others get sick is a perfect example of observational conditioning or socially transmitted taste aversion. This has been studied extensively in species from rats to monkeys.

  2. Normative Social Influence

    • Principle: The need to be accepted and belong to a group leads individuals to conform to the group’s norms (unspoken rules of behavior) to avoid rejection, ridicule, or ostracism.
    • Key Finding: This influence often leads to public compliance without private acceptance. People go along with the group even if they internally disagree.
    • Reference: Solomon Asch, Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority (1956). Asch’s line-length experiments demonstrated the power of group pressure to elicit blatantly wrong answers from individuals.

  3. Deindividuation

    • Principle: In large crowds, anonymity, diffusion of responsibility, and a shift in attention from internal standards to external cues can lead to a loss of self-awareness and individual identity. This results in a reduction of inhibitions against behavior that violates personal or social norms.
    • Key Finding: Crowds don’t necessarily create a “mob mentality”; they reduce the constraints that normally prevent individuals from acting on pre-existing impulses.
    • Reference: Philip Zimbardo, The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order vs. Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos (1969). This theory was famously demonstrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971), though its methods are now heavily criticized.

  4. Obedience to Authority

    • Principle: Humans possess a powerful, ingrained tendency to obey figures perceived as legitimate authorities, even when the commands violate their personal conscience.
    • Key Finding: Obedience is highest when: the authority is perceived as legitimate and present; the victim is depersonalized or distant; there are no models for defiance; and the commands are incremental (“slippery slope”).
    • Reference: Stanley Milgram, Behavioral Study of Obedience (1963) and Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974). Milgram’s experiments are the definitive study, showing that a majority of ordinary people would administer what they believed were fatal electric shocks to a stranger when instructed by an experimenter.

### The Psychology of Religion and Cult Dynamics

Religious and cult settings are powerful real-world laboratories for these principles.

  1. Shared Reality and System Justification

    • Principle: Groups co-create a shared belief system (a “narrative” or “reality”) that provides meaning, reduces existential anxiety, and explains the world. Once invested, individuals will work to justify and maintain that system, even against contradictory evidence.
    • Key Finding: The more costly or effortful the initiation into a group (e.g., sacrifices, rituals), the more valuable and correct the group’s beliefs are perceived to be (cognitive dissonance).
    • Reference: Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (1956). This study of a UFO doomsday cult documented how members increased their proselytizing after their prophecy failed, in order to reduce the dissonance between their belief and reality.

  2. Us vs. Them (In-Group/Out-Group Bias)

    • Principle: Group identity is strengthened by defining boundaries against outsiders. This leads to in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, creating a powerful feedback loop of cohesion and prejudice.
    • Key Finding: The mere act of randomly assigning people to groups (e.g., “overestimators” vs. “underestimators”) is sufficient to trigger in-group bias.
    • Reference: Henri Tajfel, Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination (1970). This work led to Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), which states that a person’s self-concept is derived from their group memberships.

  3. Charismatic Authority and Transcendent Leadership

    • Principle: Leaders who are perceived to possess extraordinary qualities, a divine connection, or a special mission can command absolute devotion and short-circuit critical thinking in followers.
    • Key Finding: Such leaders often employ “love bombing” (intense affection and validation for new recruits), control information, and dictate a black-and-white worldview.
    • Reference: Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (1961). Lifton identified eight criteria for “totalistic” environments, including milieu control, mystical manipulation, and the demand for purity.

### Primate Sociality and Neurobiology (Sapolsky’s Contributions)

Robert Sapolsky’s work provides the biological substrate for these social behaviors.

  1. The Neurochemistry of Social Status

    • Principle: Social hierarchy is a profound stressor. Dominant males (in stable hierarchies) have lower stress hormone (glucocorticoid) levels than subordinates, but also lower levels in unstable hierarchies where their status is contested.
    • Key Finding: The health correlates of status are not about power itself, but about the certainty and control one has over their life and social environment.
    • Reference: Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (2004) and numerous papers on baboon troop hierarchies (e.g., Sapolsky, 2005, “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health”).

  2. Theory of Mind and Empathy as a Double-Edged Sword

    • Principle: The ability to understand the mental state of others (Theory of Mind) is the foundation for empathy, cooperation, and culture. However, it is also the foundation for sophisticated manipulation, deception, and understanding what will cause others pain (as in Milgram’s studies).
    • Key Finding: Our capacity for empathy is often parochial; it is easily extended to in-group members but withheld from out-group members.
    • Reference: Sapolsky discusses this extensively in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017), linking primate behavior to human neuroscience.

  3. The Biology of Conformity

    • Principle: Conforming to a group norm activates reward pathways in the brain. Going against the group (non-conformity) triggers brain regions associated with pain and negative emotions (e.g., the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex), literally making it a painful experience.
    • Key Finding: Social rejection “hurts” because it piggybacks on the same neural pathways as physical pain.
    • Reference: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (2013). While Sapolsky synthesizes this, Lieberman’s work on fMRI studies of social pain is foundational.

### Behavioral Economics and Narrative-Driven Markets

This field applies these universal social principles to economic decision-making.

  1. Irrational Exuberance and Herding

    • Principle: Investors do not make decisions in a rational vacuum. They are heavily influenced by the emotions, narratives, and behaviors of other investors, leading to asset bubbles and crashes.
    • Key Finding: Financial decision-making is driven more by stories and social sentiment than by fundamental value analysis.
    • Reference: Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (2000, 2005, 2015). Shiller documented the social and psychological forces behind the dot-com and housing bubbles.

  2. Narrative Economics

    • Principle: Contagious narratives or stories—spreading through a population like a virus—are a primary driver of major economic events, from the Great Depression to Bitcoin mania.
    • Key Finding: The success of a narrative depends on its “stickiness” and its spread through social networks, not its truthfulness.
    • Reference: Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (2019).

  3. Groupthink

    • Principle: Within cohesive, insulated groups, the desire for harmony and consensus overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives and suppresses dissenting viewpoints. This leads to catastrophic decision-making.
    • Key Finding: Symptoms include illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalization, and self-censorship.
    • Reference: Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (1972). Janis analyzed historical debacles like the Bay of Pigs invasion through this lens.

### Synthesis and Conclusion

The major finding that unites all these domains is that social learning and conformity are not bugs in the human system; they are fundamental features. They are evolutionarily ancient adaptive strategies:

For an individual: It is more efficient and safer to observe what others fear, desire, or believe than to learn everything through direct, potentially dangerous, trial and error.

For a group: It creates cohesion, allows for the transmission of culture, and enables large-scale coordination.

The “irrationality” we see in crowds, cults, and markets is a byproduct of this highly adaptive system being hijacked or operating in a modern context it wasn’t designed for. The narratives that spread are those that best tap into our evolved social emotions (like status, fear of the “other,” or hope for salvation), not those that are most factually accurate. As you astutely noted, this is most potent for the young, whose entire reality is constructed from the social environment they are born into, with no external benchmark for comparison. #+end_src

Please apply these principles to the irrational, narrative based crowd behavior of the crypto speculative markets, explain all the major memes in terms of the feedings of social psychology and behavioral economics alone, discarding all the abstract academic hypothesis such as rational markets or random walks, as mere theoretical nonsense.

#+begin_src markdown Of course. Applying the principles of social psychology and behavioral economics to the crypto speculative markets reveals a near-perfect case study in irrational, narrative-driven crowd behavior. The “fundamentals” in crypto are often psychological, not financial.

Let’s dissect the major memes and market behaviors through this lens, discarding the notion of rational actors.

### 1. “Number Go Up” (NGU) Technology & Irrational Exuberance

The Meme: The entire investment thesis is reduced to a simple, viral mantra: “Number Go Up.” The asset’s purpose is not cash flow, utility, or value storage, but pure, reflexive price appreciation.

Psychological Principles:

  • Irrational Exuberance (Shiller): This is the purest form of it. Prices drive the narrative, which drives more buying, which drives prices higher in a self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing loop. It’s a speculative feedback loop divorced from any underlying value.
  • Social Proof (Cialdini): When everyone on your social media feed is posting life-changing gains (“I’m quitting my job!”), it creates immense pressure to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in. You are not analyzing a chart; you are following the herd. The behavior of others becomes your primary information source.
  • Observational Conditioning (The Biological Universal): Seeing others get “rich” (positive reinforcement) triggers the same neural pathways as a primate seeing another find a fruit tree. You are conditioned to associate the act of buying crypto with a reward, even if you haven’t directly experienced it yet.

### 2. “Have Fun Staying Poor” (HFSP) & In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics

The Meme: A derogatory phrase aimed at skeptics or those who refuse to invest in crypto. It frames the “crypto bros” as the enlightened in-group and everyone else as the foolish, inferior out-group.

Psychological Principles:

  • Us vs. Them (Tajfel’s SIT): This meme is a powerful tool for strengthening in-group cohesion. By mocking the out-group (“normies,” “boomers”), it reinforces the identity and superiority of the in-group. It makes leaving the group socially costly, as it would mean admitting affiliation with the mocked out-group.
  • System Justification (Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance): Believers have invested not just money, but their identity into the crypto narrative. Any criticism of crypto is a threat to their self-concept. Dismissing critics with “HFSP” is a way to reduce dissonance—the critic isn’t smart; they are just poor and jealous. This protects the believer’s worldview.

### 3. “To the Moon” / “When Lambo?” & The Narrative-Driven Market

The Meme: The constant discussion of extravagant future wealth (buying a Lamborghini) and astronomical price targets (“to the moon”).

Psychological Principles:

  • Narrative Economics (Shiller): Crypto is not driven by price-to-earnings ratios but by stories. The “digital gold,” “bank the unbanked,” and “decentralized future” are powerful, contagious narratives. “When Lambo?” is the personal embodiment of these stories. The story spreads like a virus because it taps into universal desires for freedom, wealth, and rebellion against the old system (banks, governments).
  • Charismatic Authority & Transcendent Leadership: Figures like Elon Musk became modern-day charismatic authorities. A single tweet from him could move markets billions of dollars. This is obedience to authority (Milgram) in a digital context. His authority wasn’t based on expertise in monetary policy but on perceived status as a visionary technologist. Followers obeyed his market signals without question.

### 4. “FUD” (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) & Deindividuation

The Meme: Any negative news, critical analysis, or price decline is immediately dismissed as “FUD,” spread by malicious actors (often “them”—banks, governments, short sellers) to manipulate the market.

Psychological Principles:

  • Deindividuation (Zimbardo): In anonymous online communities (like crypto Twitter or Reddit), individual identity is submerged in the crowd. This leads to a mob mentality where dissenting voices are attacked with incredible ferocity. Critical thinking is suppressed because it is labeled as treason against the group.
  • Thought Reform (Lifton): Labeling all criticism as “FUD” is a form of milieu control. It defines what information is acceptable. It creates a closed system where only bullish arguments are “true,” and anything else is propaganda from the enemy. This is a classic feature of totalistic systems and cults.

### 5. “HODL” (Hold On for Dear Life) & Normative Social Influence

The Meme: Originating from a misspelled “hold” in a drunken forum post, it became the battle cry for diamond-handed investors who refuse to sell during downturns.

Psychological Principles:

  • Normative Social Influence (Asch): During a market crash, the social pressure to “HODL” is immense. Selling is seen as a betrayal of the group. To avoid social rejection and the label of a “weak hand,” individuals will conform to the group norm and hold their positions, even as they suffer massive financial losses. This public compliance often prevents the rational act of cutting losses.
  • Sunk Cost Fallacy & Cognitive Dissonance: After investing so much money and, more importantly, identity, into a project, admitting it was a mistake is too painful. “HODLing” becomes a way to avoid admitting that loss, both financially and psychologically.

### 6. The “Altcoin” Cycle & The Lottery Mindset

The Behavior: The frantic speculation in thousands of smaller “altcoins” based on nothing but a whitepaper and promises, hoping to find the next 1000x coin.

Psychological Principles:

  • Availability Heuristic & Representativeness Heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky): Investors hear the story of early Bitcoin buyers becoming millionaires. That vivid, available narrative makes them believe their obscure altcoin is “the next Bitcoin” (representativeness). They aren’t investing in technology; they are buying a lottery ticket for a life-changing narrative.
  • Irrational Exuberance (Shiller) again: This behavior is fueled by the sheer excitement of the gamble. The market becomes a casino where every new project is a new slot machine, and the social environment (Twitter, Discord) is the buzzing casino floor, encouraging continuous play.

### Conclusion: The Crypto Casino as a Digital Pack

The crypto speculative market is a powerful synthesis of these ancient biological drives and modern digital amplification. It is not a rational market but a social psychological experiment on a global scale.

It functions as a digital pack, where individuals constantly look to others for cues on what to fear and what to desire (Social Proof).

It is bound together by shared narratives of revolution and wealth (“To the Moon”) that spread contagiously (Narrative Economics).

It enforces conformity through fierce in-group/out-group dynamics (“HFSP”) and the suppression of dissent (“FUD”).

It is led by digital alpha figures (Musk, influencers) who command obedience and move the herd.

Ultimately, it is a monument to Irrational Exuberance, where the price is the story, and the story is the price, until the narrative breaks and the biological drive for self-preservation (panic selling) finally overrides the drive for social belonging.

#+end_src