— The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
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Introduction
And as a third point, by the time you finish this book, you’ll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are “biological” and those that would be described as, say, “psychological” or “cultural.” Utterly intertwined. – Page 4
when you think categorically, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are. If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures. – Page 6
A behavior has just occurred. Why did it happen? Your first category of explanation is going to be a neurobiological one. What went on in that person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, your next category of explanation, a little earlier in time. What sight, sound, or smell in the previous seconds to minutes triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? On to the next explanatory category. What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behavior? And by now you’ve increased your field of vision to be thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and short-term endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. And you just keep expanding. What features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli? Then you go further back to the childhood of the individual, their fetal environment, then their genetic makeup. And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding until considering events umpteen millennia ago and the evolution of that behavior. – Page 6
One: The Behavior
Is “aggression” about thought, emotion, or something done with muscles? Is “altruism” something that can be studied mathematically in various species, including bacteria, or are we discussing moral development in kids? – Page 16
Cold-blooded goodness seems oxymoronic, is unsettling. – Page 19
Two: One Second Before
The core of innate fear (aka a phobia) is that you don’t have to learn by trial and error that something is aversive. – Page 36
When we stop fearing something, it isn’t because some amygdaloid neurons have lost their excitability. We don’t passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn’t anymore.* – Page 38
the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do. – Page 45
The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it’s not fully online until people are in their midtwenties. – Page 45
Economo neurons (aka spindle neurons). At first they seemed to be unique to humans, but we’ve now found them in other primates, whales, dolphins, and elephants.* That’s an all-star team of socially complex species. – Page 46
The PFC is essential for categorical thinking, for organizing and thinking about bits of information with different labels. – Page 48
The frontal cortex aids the underdog outcome, fueled by thoughts supplied from influences that fill the rest of this book—stop, those aren’t your cookies; you’ll go to hell; self-discipline is good; you’re happier when you’re thinner—all giving some lone inhibitory motor neuron more of a fighting chance. – Page 49
Antecedent strategies generally work better, as they keep the barn door closed from the start. These are about thinking/ feeling about something else (e.g., that great vacation), or thinking/ feeling differently about what you’re seeing – Page 60
More activation of pain pathways at the news of the person’s good fortune predicted more dopaminergic activation after learning of their misfortune. – Page 67
Dopaminergic responses to reward, rather than being absolute, are relative to the reward value of alternative outcomes. In order to accommodate the pleasures of both mathematics and orgasms, the system must constantly rescale to accommodate the range of intensity offered by particular stimuli. The response to any reward must habituate with repetition, so that the system can respond over its full range to the next new thing. – Page 67
the dopamine system codes for discrepancy from expectation— – Page 68
Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world. – Page 69
once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. – Page 70
anticipatory dopamine release peaks with the greatest uncertainty as to whether a reward will occur.* – Page 73
In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.* – Page 74
I will argue that it is wrong to think that understanding must lead to forgiveness—mainly because I think that a term like “forgiveness,” and others related to criminal justice (e.g., “evil,” “soul,” “volition,” and “blame”), are incompatible with science and should be discarded. – Page 79
However, the guy’s awful, impulsive act is equally “biological” with or without a PFC. – Page 79
Three: Seconds To Minutes Before
Raise an infant rat or monkey with an abusive mother, and it becomes more attached to her. – Page 82
The brain does similar things when contemplating beautiful minds, hearts, and cheekbones. And assumes that cheekbones tell something about minds and hearts. – Page 88
forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; – Page 91
pain does not cause aggression; it amplifies preexisting tendencies toward aggression. – Page 91
when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest. – Page 91
Four: Hours To Days Before
This leads to a hugely informative point: the more experience a male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In other words, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it’s a function of social learning. – Page 101
“There is a weak and inconsistent association between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults, and … administration of testosterone to volunteers typically does not increase their aggression.” – Page 101
When looking at faces expressing strong emotions, we tend to make microexpressions that mimic them; testosterone decreases such empathic mimicry.* – Page 102
Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety. 5 This explains the “winner” effect in lab animals, where winning a fight increases an animal’s willingness to participate in, and its success in, another such interaction. – Page 102
Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic. 6 Testosterone boosts impulsivity and risk taking, making people do the easier thing when it’s the dumb-ass thing to do. – Page 103
This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X. – Page 104
Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression. – Page 107
Among marmoset and titi monkeys, which both pair-bond, oxytocin strengthens the bond, increasing a monkey’s preference for huddling with her partner over huddling with a stranger. – Page 110
oxytocin inhibits the central amygdala, suppresses fear and anxiety, – Page 112
more prosocial (when discussing a time of personal suffering), as well as more sensitive to social approval. And the neuropeptide made people more responsive to social reinforcement, enhancing performance in a task where correct or wrong answers elicited a smile or frown, – Page 113
The hormone increases the accuracy of assessments of other people’s thoughts, with a gender twist—women improve at detecting kinship relations, while men improve at detecting dominance relations. – Page 114
oxytocin enhances charitability—but only in people who are already so. – Page 115
Thus, oxytocin makes you more prosocial to people like you (i.e., your teammates) but spontaneously lousy to Others who are a threat. – Page 116
androgens in females should affect the “aggression” parts of the brain but not the “reproduction/ maternalism” parts. – Page 121
The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur in that zebra or lion, designed to get them through that crisis and reestablish homeostasis.* – Page 125
Moreover, during stress, long-term building projects—growth, tissue repair, and reproduction—are postponed until after the crisis; – Page 125
For primates the definition of a stressor expands beyond merely a physical challenge to homeostasis. In addition, it includes thinking you’re going to be thrown out of homeostasis. – Page 126
The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful—various aspects of brain function are enhanced; – Page 127
During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we’re more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poorly and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data. – Page 131
There’s an additional depressing reason why stress fosters aggression—because it reduces stress. – Page 131
glucocorticoids narrow who counts as enough of an “Us” to evoke empathy. – Page 133
Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains. – Page 136
Five: Days To Months Before
Forming memories doesn’t require new synapses (let alone new branches or neurons); it requires the strengthening of preexisting synapses. – Page 138
there’s plasticity at the other end of the neuron, where axons can sprout offshoots that head off in novel directions. – Page 144
Six: Adolescence; Or, Dude, Where’S My Frontal Cortex?
This chapter’s key fact is that the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the midtwenties. – Page 154
In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex. – Page 155
Thus, frontal cortical maturation during adolescence is about a more efficient brain, not more brain. – Page 157
We primates aren’t driven out at adolescence. Instead we desperately crave novelty.* – Page 162
This suggests that in adolescents strong rewards produce exaggerated dopaminergic signaling, and nice sensible rewards for prudent actions feel lousy. – Page 164
Unlike adults, they are still better at first-than third-person perspective taking (“ How would you feel in her situation?” versus “How does she feel in her situation?”). – Page 167
As adolescents mature, they increasingly distinguish between intentional and accidental harm, – Page 167
Interestingly, as adolescents age, there is less differentiation between recommended punishment for intentional and unintentional damage to objects. – Page 168
As empathic pain increases, your own pain becomes your primary concern. – Page 169
Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes. – Page 173
Seven: Back To The Crib, Back To The Womb
Empathy is shifting from the concrete world of “Her finger must hurt, I’m suddenly conscious of my own finger” to ToM-ish focusing on the pokee’s emotions and experience. – Page 180
Both stages are ego-oriented—obedience and self-interest (what’s in it for me?). Kohlberg found that children are typically at this level up to around ages eight through ten. – Page 182
Conventional moral reasoning is relational (about your interactions with others and their consequences); most adolescents and adults are at this level. – Page 183
Stage 5: It depends. What circumstances placed the cookie there? Who decided that I shouldn’t take it? Would I save a life by taking the cookie? It’s nice when clear rules are applied flexibly. Now the judge would think: “Yes, the bank’s actions were legal, but ultimately laws exist to protect the weak from the mighty, so signed contract or otherwise, that bank must be stopped.” Stage 6: It depends. Is my moral stance regarding this more vital than some law, a stance for which I’d pay the ultimate price if need be? It’s nice to know there are things for which I’d repeatedly sing, “We Will Not Be Moved.” This level is egoistic in that rules and their application come from within and reflect conscience, where a transgression exacts the ultimate cost—having to live with yourself afterward. It recognizes that being good and being law-abiding aren’t synonymous. – Page 183
Naturally, the question becomes how moral reasoning and moral intuitionism interact. As we’ll see, (a) rather than being solely about emotion, moral intuition is a different style of cognition from conscious reasoning; and (b) conversely, moral reasoning is often flagrantly illogical. Stay tuned. – Page 185
So kids improve at delayed gratification. Mischel’s next step made his studies iconic—he tracked the kids afterward, seeing if marshmallow wait time predicted anything about their adulthoods. Did it ever. Five-year-old champs at marshmallow patience averaged higher SAT scores in high school (compared with those who couldn’t wait), with more social success and resilience and less aggressive* and oppositional behavior. – Page 187
“What do children need from their mothers?”: love, warmth, affection, responsiveness, stimulation, consistency, reliability. What is produced in their absence? Anxious, depressed, and/ or poorly attached adults.* – Page 189
when abortions become readily available in an area, rates of crime by young adults decline about twenty years later. Surprise—this was highly controversial, but it makes perfect, depressing sense to me. What majorly predicts a life of crime? Being born to a mother who, if she could, would have chosen that you not be. – Page 190
Why do we often become attached to a source of negative reinforcement, seek solace when distressed from the cause of that distress? – Page 192
“If Mom is around (and I thus don’t secrete glucocorticoids), I should get attached to any strong stimulus. – Page 193
“attachment [by such an infant] to the caretaker has evolved to ensure that the infant forms a bond to that caregiver regardless of the quality of care received.” – Page 193
childhood adversity can atrophy and blunt the functioning of the hippocampus and frontal cortex. But it’s the opposite in the amygdala— – Page 196
anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. – Page 197
Cultures (starting with parents) raise children to become adults who behave in the ways valued by that culture, – Page 202
permissive parenting, the aberration that supposedly let Boomers invent the 1960s. There are few demands or expectations, rules are rarely enforced, and children set the agenda. Adult outcome: self-indulgent individuals with poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance, plus poor social skills thanks to living consequence-free childhoods. – Page 203
children acquire the accent of their peers, not their parents). – Page 204
peer influences are underappreciated, but parents still are plenty important, including by influencing what peer groups their kids experience. – Page 204
What is social play in the young? Writ large, it’s an array of behaviors that train individuals in social competence. Writ medium, it’s fragments of the real thing, bits and pieces of fixed action patterns, a chance to safely try out roles and improve motor skills. Writ small and endocrine, it’s a demonstration that moderate and transient stress—“ stimulation”—is great. Writ small and neurobiological, it’s a tool for deciding which excess synapses to prune. – Page 204
studies demonstrating that near-term fetuses hear (what’s going on outside the womb), taste (amniotic fluid), and remember and prefer those stimuli after birth. This was shown experimentally—inject lemon-flavored saline into a pregnant rat’s amniotic fluid, and her pups are born preferring that flavor. – Page 210
Elements of language are also learned in utero—the contours of a newborn’s cry are similar to the contours of speech in the mother’s language. – Page 210
prenatal testosterone exposure had masculinizing organizational effects, so that these females as adults responded to the activational effects of testosterone and estrogen as males would. This challenged dogma that sexual identity is due to social, not biological, influences. – Page 213
Testosterone exposure throughout pregnancy produced daughters who were “pseudohermaphrodites”—looked like males on the outside but had female gonads on the inside. When compared with control females, these androgenized females did more rough-and-tumble play, were more aggressive, and displayed male-typical mounting behavior and vocalizations – Page 214
these androgenized females were as interested as control females in infants. Thus, testosterone has prenatal organizational effects on some but not all behaviors. – Page 215
when human males don’t experience the organizational prenatal effects of testosterone, you get female-typical behaviors and identification. – Page 216
The picture is complicated further—AIS individuals raised female have higher-than-expected rates of being gay, and of having an other-than-female or neither-female-nor-male-sex/ gender self-identification. Argh. – Page 217
higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). – Page 218
such rat pups, as adults, are more attentive mothers—passing this trait epigenetically to the next generation.* Thus, adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, “programming” them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood. 76 – Page 220
as more researchers flock to the subject, the quality of studies has declined. – Page 221
Freud, Bowlby, Harlow, Meaney, from their differing perspectives, all make the same fundamental and once-revolutionary point: childhood matters. – Page 222
Eight: Back To When You Were Just A Fertilized Egg
95 percent of DNA is noncoding. – Page 226
buried in that are the keys to the kingdom, the instruction manual for when to transcribe particular genes, the on/ off switches for gene transcription. A gene doesn’t “decide” when to be photocopied into RNA, to generate its protein. Instead, before the start of the stretch of DNA coding for that gene is a short stretch called a promoter*—the “on” switch. What turns the promoter switch on? Something called a transcription factor (TF) binds to the promoter. – Page 226
Genes are regulated by all the incarnations of environment. In other words, genes don’t make sense outside the context of environment. Promoters and transcription factor introduce if/ then clauses: “If you smell your baby, then activate the oxytocin gene.” – Page 227
the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment. – Page 228
the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how the environment regulates genes). Reflecting that, a disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs. – Page 228
Time to unmoor another cherished idea, namely that genes inherited from your parents (i.e., what you started with as a fertilized egg) are immutable. – Page 231
Plant “stress” such as drought induces transpositions in particular cells, where the plant metaphorically shuffles its DNA deck, hoping to generate some novel savior of a protein. – Page 232
In humans transpositional events occur in stem cells in the brain when they are becoming neurons, making the brain a mosaic of neurons with different DNA sequences. – Page 232
If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.* It is a population measure, where a heritability score indicates the percentage of total variation attributable to genetics. – Page 241
The Difference Between a Trait Being Inherited and Having a High Degree of Heritability – Page 242
Study a gene in only one environment and, by definition, you’ve eliminated the ability to see if it works differently in other environments (in other words, if other environments regulate the gene differently). And thus you’ve artificially inflated the importance of the genetic contribution. The more environments in which you study a genetic trait, the more novel environmental effects will be revealed, decreasing the heritability score. – Page 244
most of the gene variants were so sensitive to environment that gene/ environment interactions occurred even in these obsessively similar lab settings, where incredibly subtle (and still unidentified) environmental differences made huge differences in what the gene did. – Page 248
radical conclusion: it’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment. – Page 248
“It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than … to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.” It’s appropriate to figure out if lengths or widths explain more of the variability in a population of rectangles. But not in individual ones. – Page 248
the effects of this genetic variant can be understood only by considering other, nongenetic factors in individuals’ lives, such as childhood adversity and adult provocation. 47 – Page 255
Nine: Centuries To Millennia Before
we’ll rely on an intuitive definition of culture that has been emphasized by Frans de Waal: “culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by nongenetic means. – Page 271
The tremendous collectivist emphasis on the group produces a greater degree of in-group bias than among individualist culture members. – Page 275
“social interdependence fosters holistic thinking.” – Page 279
When East Asians domesticated rice and invented collectivist society, there was massive selection against the 7R variant; in Kidd’s words, it was “nearly lost” in these populations.* – Page 281
in this most studied of cultural contrasts, we see clustering of ecological factors, modes of production, cultural differences, and differences in endocrinology, neurobiology, and gene frequencies.* – Page 281
Worldwide, monotheism is relatively rare; to the extent that it does occur, it is disproportionately likely among desert pastoralists (while rain forest dwellers are atypically likely to be polytheistic). This makes sense. Deserts teach tough, singular things, a world reduced to simple, desiccated, furnace-blasted basics that are approached with a deep fatalism. – Page 283
The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. – Page 290
it’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES (e.g., the answer to “How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES. – Page 293
Higher population density predicted tighter cultures—both high density in the present and, remarkably, historically, in the year 1500. – Page 297
High-density living doesn’t make rats more aggressive. Instead it makes aggressive rats more aggressive. (This echoes the findings that neither testosterone, nor alcohol, nor media violence uniformly increases violence. Instead they make violent individuals more sensitive to violence-evoking social cues.) In contrast, crowding makes unaggressive individuals more timid. In other words, it exaggerates preexisting social tendencies. – Page 298
violence can arise “due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves.” They then showed that the clarity of borders matters as well. Good, clear-cut fences—e.g., mountain ranges or rivers between groups—make for good neighbors. “Peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups, allowing for partial autonomy within a single country,” – Page 301
desert cultures are prone toward monotheistic religions; rain forest dwellers, polytheistic ones. Nomadic pastoralists’ deities tend to value war and valor in battle as an entrée to a good afterlife. Agriculturalists invent gods who alter the weather. As noted, once cultures get large enough that anonymous acts are possible, they start inventing moralizing gods. Gods and religious orthodoxy dominate more in cultures with frequent threats (war, natural disasters), inequality, and high infant mortality rates. – Page 304
evolution is about passing copies of your genes into the next generation. In 1988 Chagnon published the remarkable report that Yanomamö men who were killers had more wives and offspring than average—thus passing on more copies of their genes. This suggested that if you excel at waging it, war can do wonders for your genetic legacy. – Page 312
You need to consider the reproductive success of all killers, including the many who were themselves killed as young warriors, distinctly curtailing their reproductive success. Not doing so is like concluding that war is not lethal, based solely on studies of war veterans. – Page 314
HG societies expend lots of collective effort on enforcing fairness, indirect reciprocity, and avoidance of despotism. This is accomplished with that terrific norm-enforcement mechanism, gossip. HGs gossip endlessly, and as studied by Polly Wiessner of the University of Utah, it’s mostly about the usual: norm violation by high-status individuals. 77 People magazine around the campfire.* Gossiping serves numerous purposes. It helps for reality testing (“ Is it just me, or was he being a total jerk?”), passing news (“ Two guesses who just happened to get a foot cramp during the hairiest part of the hunt today”), and building consensus (“ Something needs to be done about this guy”). Gossip is the weapon of norm enforcement. – Page 324
However, “war”—both in the sense that haunts our modern world and in the stripped-down sense that haunted our ancestors—seems to have been rare until most humans abandoned the nomadic HG lifestyle. – Page 325
what is most consequential is childhood, the time when cultures inculcate individuals into further propagating their culture. In that regard, probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex—the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms. – Page 326
culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists. – Page 327
Ten: The Evolution Of Behavior
Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: – Page 329
“green-beard effect”; if an organism has a gene that codes for both growing a green beard and cooperating with other green bearders, green bearders will flourish when mixed with non–green bearders. – Page 341
Tit for Tat drives other strategies to extinction. Tit for Tat has four things going for it: Its proclivity is to cooperate (i.e., that’s its starting state). But it isn’t a sucker and punishes defectors. It’s forgiving—if the defector resumes cooperating, so will Tit for Tat. And the strategy is simple. – Page 348
a world away from “animals behave for the good of the species.” Instead, this is the circumstance of a genetically influenced trait that, while adaptive on an individual level, emerges as maladaptive when shared by a group and where there is competition between groups (e.g., for an ecological niche). – Page 363
There’s a fascinating historical example of how wrong it feels when someone chooses strangers over kin. This is the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy in Stalin’s Soviet Union. 57 Young Pavlik, according to the official story, was a model citizen, an ardent flag-waving patriot. In 1932 he chose the state over his kin, denouncing his father (for supposed black marketeering), who was promptly arrested and executed. Soon afterward the boy was killed, allegedly by relatives who felt more strongly about kin selection than he did. – Page 368
The critics used the “is versus ought” contrast, saying, “Sociobiologists imply that when an unfair feature of life is the case, it is because it ought to be.” And the sociobiologists responded by flipping is/ ought around: “We agree that life ought to be fair, but nonetheless, this is reality. Saying that we advocate something just because we report it is like saying oncologists advocate cancer.” – Page 384
Eleven: Us Versus Them
Us/ Them-ing based on minimal shared traits is like psychological rather than genetic green-beard effects. We feel positive associations with people who share the most meaningless traits with us. – Page 390
Being disgusted by another group’s abstract beliefs isn’t naturally the role of the insula, which evolved to care about disgusting tastes and smells. Us/ Them markers provide a stepping-stone. Feeling disgusted by Them because they eat repulsive, sacred, or adorable things, slather themselves with rancid scents, dress in scandalous ways—these are things the insula can sink its teeth into. – Page 398
“Stereotyping isn’t a case of lazy, short-cutting cognition. It isn’t conscious cognition at all.” Such automaticity generates statements like “I can’t put my finger on why, but it’s just wrong when They do that.” Work by Jonathan Haidt of NYU shows that in such circumstances, cognitions are post-hoc justifications for feelings and intuitions, – Page 400
testing things in ways that can support but not negate your hypothesis; – Page 403
Our cognitions run to catch up with our affective selves, searching for the minute factoid or plausible fabrication that explains why we hate Them. – Page 404
Breaking Bad obsessive, – Page 405
“race” is a biological continuum rather than a discrete category—for example, unless you cherry-pick the data, genetic variation within race is generally as great as between races. – Page 407
there is no evolutionary legacy of humans encountering people of markedly different skin color. – Page 407
we have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, have their importance evaporate in an instant. – Page 410
Then there’s the high-warmth/ low-competence categorization—the mentally disabled, people with handicaps, the elderly.* And the categorization of low warmth/ high competence. It’s how people in the developing world tend to view the European culture that used to rule them,* and how many minority Americans view whites. It’s the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, and of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (and, to a lesser extent, of rich people by poorer people everywhere). – Page 411
For high warmth, high competence (i.e., Us), there’s pride. Low warmth, high competence—envy. High warmth, low competence—pity. Low warmth, low competence—disgust. – Page 412
Various overt strategies have been found to decrease implicit biases. A classic one is perspective taking, which enhances identification with Them. For example, in a study concerning age bias, having subjects take the perspective of older individuals more effectively reduced bias than merely instructing subjects to inhibit stereotypical thoughts. Another is to consciously focus on counterstereotypes. – Page 419
in order to lessen the adverse effects of Us/ Them-ing, a shopping list would include emphasizing individuation and shared attributes, perspective taking, more benign dichotomies, lessening hierarchical differences, and bringing people together on equal terms with shared goals. – Page 422
Twelve: Hierarchy, Obedience, And Resistance
across various taxa (e.g., “birds,” “ungulates” or “primates”), the bigger the average size of the social group in the species, (a) the larger the brain, relative to total body size, and (b) the larger the neocortex, relative to total brain size. – Page 429
Lots of inequality in a community makes for low social capital (trust and a sense of efficacy), and that’s the most direct cause of the poor health. – Page 441
we use the same circuitry in the orbitofrontal PFC when we evaluate the moral goodness of an act and the beauty of a face. – Page 443
Liberals and conservatives are equally capable of thinking past gut personal attributions to subtler situational ones—when asked to do so, both are equally adept at dispassionately presenting the viewpoints of the opposite camp. It’s that liberals are more motivated to push toward situational explanations. Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance. – Page 447
The conservative need for predictability and structure obviously fuels the emphases on loyalty, obedience, and law and order. 40 It also gives insights into a puzzling feature of the political landscape: how is it that over the last fifty years, Republicans have persuaded impoverished white Americans to so often vote against their own economic self-interest? Do they actually believe that they’re going to win the lottery and then get to enjoy the privileged side of American inequality? Nah. The psychological issues of needing structured familiarity show that for poor whites, voting Republican constitutes an implicit act of system justification and risk aversion. Better to resist change and deal with the devil that you know. – Page 451
gay conservatives show more implicit antigay biases than do gay liberals. Better to hate who you are, if that bolsters a system whose stability and predictability are sources of comfort. – Page 451
in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists. 42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers, unburdened by motivated correction. – Page 452
Moreover, when conservatives, but not liberals, are instructed to use reappraisal techniques (e.g., “Try to view the images in a detached, unemotional way”), they express less conservative political sentiments. In contrast, a suppression strategy (“ Don’t let your feelings show when you’re looking at this image”) doesn’t work. As we saw, make a liberal tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted, and they become more conservative. – Page 453
Kass has argued for what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance,” where disgust at something like human cloning can be “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond wisdom’s power completely to articulate it.” The visceral level, with or without post-hoc rationalization, is all you need in order to know what’s right. If it makes you puke, then you must rebuke. 47 The monumental flaw is obvious. Different things disgust different people; whose gag reflex wins? Moreover, things once viewed as disgusting are viewed differently now (e.g., the idea of slaves having the same rights as whites would probably have struck most white Americans circa 1800 as not just economically unworkable but disgusting as well). – Page 454
“bad barrel” theory—the issue isn’t how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it’s how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad. In another apt metaphor, rather than concentrating on one evil person at a time, what Zimbardo calls a “medical” approach, one must understand how some environments cause epidemics of evil, a “public health” approach. – Page 465
Compliance increases when guilt is diffused—even if I hadn’t done it, it still would have happened. 77 Statistical guilt. This is why, historically, people were not executed with five shots fired from one gun. Instead there were five guns fired simultaneously—a firing squad. Firing squads traditionally took the diffusion of responsibility a step further, where one member was randomly given a blank instead of a real bullet. That way, a shooter could shift from the comforting irrationality that “I only one fifth killed him” to the even better “I may not even have shot him.” – Page 471
Eichmann’s seeming normalcy supplied us, thanks to Hannah Arendt, with the notion of the banality of evil. Zimbardo, in his recent writing, emphasizes the “banality of heroism.” – Page 475
We’re really out there as a species in that sometimes our high-status individuals don’t merely plunder and instead actually lead, actually attempt to facilitate the common good. We’ve even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion. A magnificent achievement. Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable to five-year-olds deciding who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland. – Page 476
Thirteen: Morality And Doing The Right Thing, Once You’Ve Figured Out What That Is
when facing a moral quandary, activation in the amygdala, vmPFC, and insula typically precedes dlPFC activation. – Page 482
De Waal perceives even deeper implications—the roots of human morality are older than our cultural institutions, than our laws and sermons. – Page 487
Emotion and social intuition are not some primordial ooze that gums up that human specialty of moral reasoning. Instead, they anchor some of the few moral judgments that most humans agree upon. – Page 488
we judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions. – Page 493
“Overall cheating is not limited by risk; it is limited by our ability to rationalize the cheating to ourselves.” – Page 493
the lower the social capital in a country, the higher the rates of antisocial punishment. – Page 496
Collectivist and individualistic cultures also differ in how moral behavior is enforced. As first emphasized by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict in 1946, collectivist cultures enforce with shame, while individualistic cultures use guilt. – Page 502
In the sense used by most in the field, including these authors, shame is external judgment by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame requires an audience, is about honor. Guilt is for cultures that treasure privacy and is about conscience. Shame is a negative assessment of the entire individual, guilt that of an act, making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner. Effective shaming requires a conformist, homogeneous population; effective guilt requires respect for law. Feeling shame is about wanting to hide; feeling guilt is about wanting to make amends. Shame is when everyone says, “You can no longer live with us”; guilt is when you say, “How am I going to live with myself?”* – Page 502
Greene’s “dual process” model, stating that we are usually a mixture of valuing means and ends. What’s your moral philosophy? If harm to the person who is the means is unintentional or if the intentionality is really convoluted and indirect, I’m a utilitarian consequentialist, and if the intentionality is right in front of my nose, I’m a deontologist. – Page 505
When facing Me-versus-Us moral dilemmas of resisting selfishness, our rapid intuitions are good, honed by evolutionary selection for cooperation in a sea of green-beard markers. 35 And in such settings, regulating and formalizing the prosociality (i.e., moving it from the realm of intuition to that of cogitation) can even be counterproductive, a point emphasized by Samuel Bowles.* In contrast, when doing moral decision making during Us-versus-Them scenarios, keep intuitions as far away as possible. Instead, think, reason, and question; be deeply pragmatic and strategically utilitarian; take their perspective, try to think what they think, try to feel what they feel. – Page 511
Fourteen: Feeling Someone’S Pain, Understanding Someone’S Pain, Alleviating Someone’S Pain
an as-if state carries the danger that you experience her pain so intensely that your primary concern becomes alleviating your own distress. – Page 523
Insofar as the ACC cares about the meaning of pain, it’s just as concerned with the abstractions of social and emotional pain—social exclusion, anxiety, disgust, embarrassment—as with physical pain. – Page 529
So how do we go from the ACC as this outpost of self-interest, monitoring your pain and whether you are getting what you think you deserve, to the ACC allowing you to feel the pain of the wretched of the earth? I think the link is a key issue of this chapter—how much is an empathic state actually about yourself? 17 “Ouch, that hurt” is a good way to learn not to repeat whatever you just did. But often, even better is to monitor someone else’s misfortune—“ That sure seems to have hurt her; I’m staying away from doing that.” Crucially, the ACC is essential for learning fear and conditioned avoidance by observation alone. Going from “She seems to be having a miserable time” to “Thus I should avoid that” requires an intervening step of shared representation of self: “Like her, I wouldn’t enjoy feeling that way.” Feeling someone else’s pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they’re in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on. – Page 530
It is an enormous cognitive task for humans to overcome that, to reach an empathic state for someone who is different, unappealing. A hospital chaplain once described to me how he has to actively make sure that he is not preferentially visiting patients who were “YAVIS”—young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, or social. – Page 532
achieving the same level of perspective taking for a Them as for an Us requires greater frontocortical activation. This is the domain where you must suppress the automatic and implicit urges to be indifferent, if not repulsed, and do the creative, motivated work of finding the affective commonalities.* – Page 533
“Empathy fatigue” can thus be viewed as the state when the cognitive load of repeated exposure to the pain of Thems whose perspective is challenging to take has exhausted the frontal cortex. – Page 534
When it comes to empathic states, “emotion” and “cognition” are totally false dichotomies; you need both, but with the balance between the two shifting on a continuum, and the cognition end of it has to do the heavy lifting when the differences between you and the person in pain initially swamp the similarities. – Page 535
Consistently, about 10 percent of the PMC neurons devoted to doing movement X also activated when observing someone else doing movement X—very odd for neurons a few steps away from commanding muscles to move. – Page 536
Look at someone in pain with the instruction to take a self-oriented perspective, and the amygdala, ACC, and insular cortex activate, along with reports of distress and anxiety. Do the same with an other-oriented perspective, and all are less likely. And the more extreme the former state, the more likely that someone’s focus will be to lessen their own distress, to metaphorically look the other way. – Page 543
In other studies volunteers underwent either empathy training (focusing on feeling the pain of someone in distress) or compassion training (focusing on a feeling of warmth and care toward that distressed person). 51 The former would generate the typical neuroimaging profiles, including heavy amygdala activation, and a negative, anxious state. Those with compassion training did not, showing heavy activation instead in the (cognitive) dlPFC, coupling of activation between the dlPFC and dopaminergic regions, more positive emotions, and a greater tendency toward prosociality. – Page 545
there’s the danger that the empathic pain is so intense that you can only come up with solutions that would work for you, rather than ones that might help the sufferer. – Page 546
when anxiously seeing a doctor about something worrisome, “I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.” – Page 546
comparisons of self-assessments of happiness at the beginning and end of the day showed that neither the larger amount of money nor the opportunity to spend it on oneself increased happiness; only spending it on someone else did. – Page 546
subjects made happy by reducing inequity, even at a cost to themselves, were also the most charitable. The authors appropriately interpret this as reflecting a compassionate act with elements independent of self-interest. – Page 550
one of the most puzzling and even off-putting of us at our best is “cold-blooded” kindness. Yet, as we’ve seen, a fair degree of detachment is just what is needed to actually act. Better that than our hearts racing in pained synchrony with the heart of someone suffering, if that cardiovascular activation mostly primes us to flee when it all becomes just too much to bear. Which brings us to a final point. Yes, you don’t act because someone else’s pain is so painful—that’s a scenario that begs you to flee instead. But the detachment that should be aimed for doesn’t represent choosing a “cognitive” approach to doing good over an “affective” one. – Page 551
Fifteen: Metaphors We Kill By
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments. What these studies show is that if those metaphorically dirtied hands have been unmetaphorically washed in the interim, they’re less likely to reach out to try to balance the scales. – Page 565
Metaphors about weight, density, texture, temperature, interoceptive sensations, time, and distance are just figures of speech. Yet the brain confusedly processes them with some of the same circuits that deal with the physical properties of objects. – Page 568
By the time we get to humans, the process is mostly cognitive—we can think our way to deciding who is a relative, who is an Us. And thus, as we saw, we can be manipulated into thinking that some individuals are more related to us, and others less so, than they actually are—pseudokinship and pseudospeciation. – Page 570
Sixteen: Biology, The Criminal Justice System, And (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will
progress—“ It’s not him. It’s his disease.” In other words, at times biology can overwhelm anything resembling free will. – Page 585
the obvious absurdity of implying that something neurobiologically magical happens on the morning of someone’s eighteenth birthday, endowing them with adult levels of self-control. – Page 589
Gazzaniga fully accepts the entirely material nature of the brain but nonetheless sees room for responsibility. “Responsibility exists at a different level of organization: the social level, not in our determined brains.” – Page 591
Of all the stances of mitigated free will, the one that assigns aptitude to biology and effort to free will, or impulse to biology and resisting it to free will, is the most permeating and destructive. – Page 598
In the words of philosopher Hilary Bok, “The claim that a person chose her action does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or states caused it; it simply redescribes it.” 23 This is a point I’ve made throughout the book, namely that description and correlation are nice, but actual causal data are the gold standard (e.g., “When you raise the levels of neurotransmitter X, behavior Z happens more often”). – Page 599
It’s not that there’s “less” biology in those circumstances related to social behavior. It’s that it’s qualitatively different biology. – Page 602
Add enough factors, many of which, possibly most of which, have not yet been discovered, and eventually your multifactorial biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation. – Page 603
People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces. – Page 603
We’re only a first few baby steps into understanding any of this, so few that it leaves huge, unexplained gaps that perfectly smart people fill in with a homunculus. Nevertheless, even the staunchest believers in free will must admit that it is hemmed into tighter spaces than in the past. – Page 607
people in the future will look back at us as we do at purveyors of leeches and bloodletting and trepanation, as we look back at the fifteenth-century experts who spent their days condemning witches, that those people in the future will consider us and think, “My God, the things they didn’t know then. The harm that they did.” – Page 608
you’d do nothing about criminals, that they’d be free to walk the streets, wreaking havoc. Let’s trash this one instantly—no rational person who rejects free will actually believes this, would argue that we should do nothing because, after all, the person has frontal damage, or because, after all, evolution has selected for the damaging trait to traditionally be adaptive, or because, after all … People must be protected from individuals who are dangerous. The latter can no more be allowed to walk the streets than you can allow a car whose brakes are faulty to be driven. Rehabilitate such people if you can, send them to the Island of Misfit Toys forever if you can’t and they are destined to remain dangerous. – Page 608
Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures “deserves” to be banned from driving. Crowds of goitrous yahoos don’t excitedly mass to watch the epileptic’s driver’s license be publicly burned. – Page 610
If we deny free will when it comes to the worst of our behaviors, – Page 612
I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. – Page 613
Seventeen: War And Peace
All involve personal and communal ritualized behaviors that comfort in times of anxiety; however, many of those anxieties were created by the religion itself. – Page 622
frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds. – Page 626
the opposite is needed to minimize threat and anxiety—groups encountering each other in equal numbers and treatment, in a neutral setting free of agitprop and where there is institutional oversight of the venture. Most important, interactions work best when there is a shared goal, especially when it is successful. This revisits chapter 11—a shared goal reprioritizes Us/ Them dichotomies, bringing this novel combined Us to the forefront. – Page 627
The workplace is a particularly effective place for contact to do its salutary thing. Decreased prejudice about the Thems at work often generalizes to Thems at large, and even sometimes to other types of Thems. – Page 627
automatic other-race-face amygdala responses can be undone when subjects think of that face as belonging to a person, not a Them. – Page 628
Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—“ This is for me, not for you.” Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. – Page 642
victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as opposed to “anger validation therapy”) show improvements in general health, cardiovascular function, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. – Page 642
In Gettysburg most deaths were caused by artillery, not the infantry on the ground. In the heat of crazed battle, most men would load, tend to the wounded, shout orders, run away, or wander in a daze. Similarly, in World War II only 15 to 20 percent of riflemen ever fired their guns. The rest? Running messages, helping people load ammunition, tending to buddies—but not aiming a rifle at someone nearby and pulling a trigger. – Page 644
The deepest trauma is not the fear of being killed. It’s doing the close-up, individuated killing, – Page 646
It’s remarkable the things humans can spend their lives studying. You can be a coniologist or a caliologist, studying dust or birds’ nests, respectively. There are batologists and brontologists, pondering brambles and thunder, and vexillologists and zygologists, with their dazzling knowledge of flags and of methods for fastening things. On and on—odontology and odonatology, phenology and phonology, parapsychology and parasitology. A rhinologist and a nosologist fall in love and have a child who becomes a rhinological nosologist, studying the classification of nose diseases. – Page 647
Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us. – Page 652
A key point of the previous chapter was that those in the future will look back on us and be appalled at what we did amid our scientific ignorance. A key challenge in this chapter is to recognize how likely we are to eventually look back at our current hatreds and find them mysterious. – Page 668
Epilogue
Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning. – Page 672
Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don’t forget that the same applies to our best behaviors. – Page 674
Appendix 1: Neuroscience 101
the more neurons that neuron A projects to, by definition, the more neurons it can influence; however, the more neurons it projects to, the smaller its average influence will be at each of those target neurons. – Page 686
What might we call the consequence of some types of atypically wide associative nets of neurons? Creativity. – Page 702
Appendix 3: Protein Basics
The amino acid sequence of a protein influences the unique shape( s) of that protein. Dogma used to be that amino acid sequence determines the shape( s) of that protein, but it turns out that the shape is also subtly altered by things like temperature and acidity—in other words, environmental influences. – Page 712
Index
regardless of whether the person had undergone a sex change yet, the dimorphic brain regions in transgender individuals resembled the sex of the person they had always felt themselves to be, not their “actual” sex. In other words, it’s not the case that transgender individuals think they’re a different gender than they actually are. It’s more like they got stuck with the bodies of a different sex from who they actually are. – Page 790
one thing that I’m not going anywhere near is this New Age–y notion: “Of course we have free will. You can’t say that our behaviors are determined by a mechanistic universe, because the universe is indeterminate, because of quantum mechanics.” Argh. What anyone sensible who has thought about this will point out is that (a) the consequences of the subatomic indeterminacy of quantum mechanics (about which I understand zero) don’t ripple upward enough to influence behavior, and (b) if they did, the result wouldn’t be the freedom to will your behavior. It would be the utter randomization of behavior. In the words of philosopher/ neuroscientist Sam Harris, a free will trasher, if quantum mechanics actually played a role in any of this, “Every thought and action would seem to merit the statement ‘I don’t know what came over me.’” Except you wouldn’t actually be able to make that statement, since you’d just be making gargly sounds because the muscles in your tongue would be doing all sorts of random things. – Page 790