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a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals

It applies well in the movie it was written for, in the context of extraterrestrial life existing as fugitives on earth, but there are of course other circumstances where a person can be a dumb panicky animal and a group of people can be reasonable.

I have a petty thing about a movie that I have spoken about but nobody seems to share my anguish. It's the famous "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?" zinger from Happy Gilmore, my mind is locked on the fact that Adam Sandler literally wrote the script, he made him say that dumb line so his character could respond in such a way.

I call it appeal to cinema. It's something my dad has picked up and gives me the same frustration and the thought "oh, this conversation is going nowhere in a hurry."

I remember one time he announced to me that he would "change the question" which is like going "now imagine yourself as this strawman."

This is just like in Idiocracy, probably.

Lord of the Flies is one of the biggest ones of these. MFer heard about people surviving collectively after a shipwreck, wrote a book about how humans can't do that, and now people cite it like it's a historical document

The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It's possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it's also possible that it was included for many other reasons.

People do this with all sorts of shit: from movies, to the bible, to things politicians say. It's just them laundering their own opinion through some perceived authority.

We're talking about the humanities, not STEM here. It's not like there's a social physics with firm predictive formulas for individual or even aggregate human behavior we can use instead. I get what you're saying, and I don't disagree that the narrative priorities of a given author should be taken into account when using fictional works like this, but... Surely you wouldn't say that Dostoevsky's The Idiot or an arbitrary Discworld novel haven't got anything real and useful to teach us about actual human behavior?