In Christian ethical and anthropological discourse, the concept of “human nature” represented one of the main criteria from which norms for social and individual ethics derived. The age of Enlightenment brought about a serious criticism of this concept refusing its metaphysical justification. New opinions prevailed in philosophical and scientific discourse of that time. They rejected existence of common anthropological determinants and supported a thesis claiming that people are primarily formed in society and that the concept of “human nature” entails a risk of abuse of power by promoting only one view of the human being. The presented paper studies the relevance of this concept today and examines it from the perspective of Jonathan Haidt’s social psychology, which, as the author claims, contributes to better understanding of human nature. Standard metaphysical and theological definitions of human nature that prevailed mostly in Christian discourse needs to be extended by including findings from social and exact sciences and use them as a suitable medium for a dialogue in a pluralistic environment, and push the limits of our knowledge about humans.
Since the 1970s, social psychology has investigated real human behavior to an increasingly smaller degree. The author of the article suggests that the phenomenon of cognitive revolution in psychology naturally boosted the interest of researchers in such phenomena like attitudes, values, social judgments and stereotypes; at the same time, it decreased interest in others important topics like aggression, social influence or altruism. In recent decades, we have also witnessed a growing conviction among social psychologists that explaining why people perform certain actions holds greater importance that demonstrating the conditions under which people really display particular reactions. The key question appears in this situation of whether social psychology remains of science of (real) behavior, and whether the current condiction of the discipline is desirable or rather pathological.