Talk:Crab mentality

Quality of the article... Sources for the veracity of the metaphor?
I was kind of disappointed coming to this article. I apologize in advance to the authors and those who bothered to gather reference material.

The sources seem a bit anecdotical to me. They include lots of newspaper opinion pieces that give an impression by some author, which doesn't seem very authoritative to me (but what do I know?), such as the "twenty years of poetry" or the "hindu businessline". This looks to me not like scientific reality, but personal impressions, a bit like looking at you friends and family to make medical statistics, it's not false and can be interesting, but not authoritative.

After a bit of pondering this comment ;-), these are the 3 questions I would expect to be answered in the article:
 * is the expression used?
 * does it describe a sociological reality?
 * do crabs actually act like that?

All in all, I am not a subject matter expert, but I would expect language experts for the use of the expression, sociology studies for whether it is a reality in human behavior, and biology studies demonstrating whether it is true for crabs.

At the moment most sources answer question 1 (is it used?), some provide anecdotal evidence that it really happens, and none mention the actual crabs. In fact the actual reality about crabs seems accepted as fact here.

I would also expect the 3 questions to be distinguished. Here they are mashed together, so that the article reads like a dictionary: it tells the reader what the expression means and gives examples, but doesn't actually conclude on its reality.

Maybe this is just my impression. Let's say that it's an interesting read but not a quality I'd expect from wikipedia.

Oh, in any case I would strongly recommend getting at least rid of reference inquirer... it speaks mainly of hermit crabs and apart from the introduction does not speak of the crab mentality at all (in fact according to the article, hermit crabs actually help each other!). Jrob kiwi (talk) 13:29, 20 December 2019 (UTC)


 * ok so I did at the least the removal of the enquirer. As for the rest, unfortunately I don't have the competence or resources.Jrob kiwi (talk) 15:48, 11 March 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree, this article is of very poor quality. For all we know, it's one of those totally made up articles that cites sources in circles. Nabeel_co (talk) 07:47, 4 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Well it isn't a totally made-up article. The earliest reference I can find to crabs in a bucket (and this doesn't mean to say there aren't even earlier references out there somewhere), is in a book called Politics and Prejudice in Contemporary Hawaii, published in 1976 – a quarter of a century before Wikipedia was founded (Quote: "Kamakawiwoole cited as an example the "Alamihi crab syndrome" in which Hawaiians are likened to crabs in a bucket. When one tries to get out of the bucket, the rest pull him back"). Crab mentality is 100% real to those who experience it or observe it. Just because you haven't, doesn't mean it's all made up. Firebrace (talk) 19:53, 4 June 2021 (UTC)


 * This is all anecdotal, and the cited "evidence" is of zero value. It's useful to have an article explaining the term, as with the alleged boiling frog effect, but let's not pretend it has a scientific basis. I've edited accordingly JQ (talk) 09:52, 26 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I personally found this article interesting, yet lacking in information. I would like to know if the myth of crabs keeping each other in a bucket is true and the history behind the phrase "crab mentality" 2601:681:81:4400:A9DB:B18B:F50D:49B1 (talk) 05:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Poor description
eg. "crab mentality is often a reactive, non-rational behavior that seeks to level the playing field by pulling others down, even though there are no direct benefits to the individual" -- a level playing field has obvious benefits to the individuals against whom it was previously tilted, so it can hardly be described as 'non-rational' to seek such a thing. This phrasing perhaps unwittingly reveals the problem with the entire article. Parts of it read like the kind of polemic Ayn Rand might write. 79.77.74.158 (talk) 01:30, 6 April 2024 (UTC)