10Our proposal has garnered much research interest in recent years, which has produced both challenges and support for the idea.
11More generally, behavioral synchrony is associated with increasing levels of oxytocin, the hormone associated with bonding and affiliation. Lack of social mirroring has been found to be associated with more stress and increased cortisol levels.
12In some as yet unpublished studies we found that children between ages four and five begin to select to practice those problems that they have reason to anticipate they will need to master in the future.
13Social engineering need not be based on totalitarian edicts but can be democratically agreed on and scientifically tested. For example, the 2009 Nobel prizewinner of economics, the late Elinor Ostrom, produced research that provides guidance on how groups can effectively manage common resources and avoid overexploitation. In particular, she suggests that there need to be clearly defined rules of entitlement, an individual’s duties should be proportional to allocated benefits, and adequate conflict resolution mechanisms must be in place. Sanctioning of free-riders should be done by the community itself, should start mildly (as we have seen, threats to reputation are often enough), and gradually increase for repeated transgressions. Governance should involve collective decision making. Given that this was found to work for others, perhaps it works for your group. People may hence deliberately choose to organize themselves along such lines.
14Some comparative psychologists differentiate this further. For instance, the copying of another’s goals is distinguished from the copying of the means to achieving those goals. Both may involve an understanding of a model’s intention, but the former, often dubbed “emulation,” need not involve the copying of the exact actions of the model. It has been suggested that apes emulate rather than imitate, but this distinction is not always clear.
15One study did find that when capuchin monkeys were copied by a human, they displayed something similar to the chameleon effect: showing more affiliate behavior toward the imitator than toward another who did not copy them.
16There are other “transmission biases” in humans, such as conformity, success, and prestige biases, that may be important to cumulative culture.
NINE
Right and Wrong
Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.
—CHARLES DARWIN
I GREW UP IN A small town in Germany in a house that my grandmother built with her own two hands after the war. She was alone with her two girls at the time—my grandfather had been killed on the eastern front. The old house had been destroyed by bombing. My mother, seven years old in 1945, hid for days with her younger cousin in a hole in the ground as the bombs rained down. She never liked to talk about the war, but as I grew up, I started to question why anyone would have ever wanted to drop bombs on our town. It is difficult to describe how painful it was to discover that my people, even if not my family members, were responsible for arguably the most heinous genocide in history. Learning that the nice old man down the road used to be an SS officer disgusted me and made me skeptical about any elderly Germans. When I first set foot in a concentration camp as a teenager and saw for myself the furnaces in which people were burnt, I cried in despair at humankind.
Morality is the division of thoughts and behaviors into right and wrong. We have a conscience with which we evaluate our choices and those of others. If the moral sense is the most important difference between human and animals, as Darwin proclaimed, how can people commit such atrocities? Of course, humans violate at times what their own conscience dictates. Most ordinary drafted soldiers, like my grandfather, simply had no choice but to follow orders, short of rebellion or desertion. Stuck in such a situation, many of them, no doubt, believed the propaganda, seeing themselves as the good guys—as difficult as that may be to imagine.1 But what about those who committed the worst atrocities? Surely the guards at the concentration camps could not possibly have killed so many innocent, defenseless people and thought they were doing the right thing? Had they—and other perpetrators of such atrocities in history—lost their capacity for empathy and compassion, their conscience and morality?
In his diary, the concentration camp doctor Johann Kremer described the deep bond he felt with his poor little canary. When the bird died, he noted the endless sympathies he experienced as it succumbed to its agonies. In other entries, he outlines his gruesome work at Auschwitz, such as removing the organs of the executed. One of the most notoriously brutal concentration camp guards was one Hildegard Lächert, aka Bloody Brigitte, who also was a nurse and mother of three. It seems that even these people were not amoral—they had compassion, and they helped others, but they did not apply their morals to the humans in their camp.2 Victims were construed as vermin, toward whom they could act in ruthless ways.
We argue a lot about what is moral and what is immoral. Yet it seems humans generally have some morals, however skewed they may appear to be.
WHATEVER OUR SPECIFIC MORALS ARE, it is clear that we take pleasure in acting morally, and it pains us when we think we acted immorally. In guiding our behavior, conscience and morality are crucial to human long-term cooperation and cultural evolution. What are their psychological bases? According to Frans de Waal, the foundation of morality can be subdivided into three broad levels: (1) the basic building blocks of empathy and reciprocity; (2) the group pressures that keep individuals in line; and (3) the capacity for self-reflective moral reasoning and judgment. I will discuss each of these in turn.
Excepting those, like psychopaths, who may be pathologically incapable,3 human beings are all able to feel empathy and compassion for others. Empathy is sometimes equated with mind-reading capacities. However, humans can take another’s perspective based either on inference or on complex empathic simulation (sometimes called “cold” and “hot” processes, respectively). Note that psychopaths may be good at inferential mind reading and use this reasoning to devise more sadistic tortures. What de Waal and others mean, then, when they refer to empathy as a moral building block is the more specific capacity for sympathetic concern for others’ well-being. We can share in others’ feelings and, as a result, be motivated to relieve their suffering or enhance their happiness. We try to avoid unnecessarily hurting other group members and are instead inclined to lend a helping hand. In turn, other people are compassionate and helpful to us.
As we saw, a key driver for cooperation with unrelated others is reciprocity: we support those who helped us and vice versa. We have a sense of fairness that monitors whether the giving and taking are roughly in balance. Because cultures are the product of persistent, long-term cooperation, it may not be far-fetched to suppose that human nature has evolved traits that support reciprocity and compassion. To kick off a cycle of reciprocal helping, someone has to first be kind.
Are humans inherently good-natured? Michael Tomasello and colleagues have offered evidence that human infants, well before they can be indoctrinated by moral teachings, have a fundamental prosocial urge. They share resources, help others achieve their goals, and provide useful information. At eight months my daughter, Nina, surprised me by starting to take a bite of a biscuit and then feeding me instead. Research suggests that toddlers help others even when there is no apparent reward or praise. They start pointing out where something is hiding by one year of age. They do so to help you, even if they do not want the object themselves, and they stop pointing when you have found it. If you have dropped something, they tend to fetch it for you. Once they acquire language, children tend to tell the truth and often contribute to the goals of conversations with useful bits of information. All these findings fit nicely with Tomasello’s thesis: infants relate to other human minds in a deeply social way. By eighteen months they show clear signs of sympathy and console others in distress. Toddlers wave good-bye, smile, and laugh. They take turns smothering you, and each other, with hugs and kisses.
While such a picture of infant goodness may make you warm and fuzzy, it is far too rosy to be quite complete. Infants, just like adults, are not always nice. Young children can be awfully self-centered and lacking in compassion. The expression “the terrible twos” has its basis in reality. Toddlers often take what they want, throw a tantrum if they cannot get it, and subsequently refuse to cooperate at all. Children can be cruel, unhelpful, and downright annoying. The idea that they are good to begin with is therefore not entirely compelling.
Young toddlers help less than older toddlers, especially when it is at a cost to them. They initially require much prompting from adults to engage in prosocial behavior. Even three-year-olds, in research using games in which they can give rewards to themselves and others, turn out to be quite selfish. They are happy to take more than their “fair share.” As they become older they increasingly make choices that avoid inequality, even when it is to their disadvantage to do so. Between ages three and seven children begin to increasingly direct their helping to those who (a) are closely related, (b) have reciprocated in the past, and (c) have been observed sharing with others. In other words, with experience they increasingly cooperate with those with whom cooperation ultimately makes the most sense: family, friends, and people with a good reputation for reciprocity. Although it remains possible that some prosocial inclinations have become part of our innate nature, these results suggest that experience shapes children’s prosociality and therefore that these tendencies are socially, rather than biologically, inherited. Even by age one a child will have had plenty of experience with rewards and approval, either directly or indirectly, for prosocial behaviors. Similarly, they will have experienced plenty of examples of antisocial behavior being punished. Indeed, as soon as they can walk, they keep encountering the limits of acceptable behavior, as adults give frequent feedback.
NATURE IS CRUEL. THERE IS no escaping the fact that all animals have to consume other organisms for sustenance. Even vegetarians and vegans can only restrict which organisms they choose to eat, not whether to eat any. The Darwinian perspective on life, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest, appears to suggest that humans, like other animals, should be inherently selfish. In various situations an individual’s interest is in conflict with the interests of others, and humans evidently are sometimes willing to hurt each other.
Thomas Hobbes observed that reasons for human quarrels typically fall into three distinct categories. The first is competition for limited resources. Those who are good at forcing their way past others to obtain food, territory, or a mate leave more offspring in the next generation than those who are not. Thus it is not surprising that this form of aggression is widespread and already common in infancy. The second is self-protection. When potentially attack-minded people are around, even a peace-loving person may be forced to defend himself. One form of self-defense is a preemptive strike. Therefore, even two parties that do not want to pursue aggression for the first reason may end up fighting because both are suspicious.
To stop the other from striking first, cold war politicians (and evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker) tell us the best strategy is credible deterrence: if you strike me, rest assured I will get you too. We reciprocate bad deeds just as we do good deeds. An individual who demonstrates a capacity and willingness to retaliate against any aggressor may increase her likelihood of being left in peace by others. For deterrence to be credible, it is important to demonstrate determination and capacity. You need to reliably settle your scores, as apparent lack of resolve may invite ruthless adversaries to exploit this perceived weakness. Pinker argues that the need for credible deterrence leads to Hobbes’s third reason for human aggression: quarrels over “trifles” such as disagreements, insults, or other signs of disrespect. People fight tooth and nail over seemingly banal and inane things, from parking spots to flippant remarks about one’s mother. The reason may be that backing down in these matters undermines one’s reputation, one’s honor. Indeed, people fight much more over trifles when there are witnesses than when there are none. Revenge, feuds, and so on follow naturally.
Hobbes thought uncivilized human life was not noble but “nasty, brutish and short.” Only civilizations with government monopolies on violence offered an escape from these cycles of threat, aggression, and retaliation. Centralized powers can ensure that aggressors will be punished and so reduce the reason to pursue aggression for any of the three reasons. The risk of being caught by the police is a disincentive to use violence to take what you want. There is subsequently less reason to attack preemptively or to retaliate every affront in an effort to deter others. This way, Hobbes suggested, humans’ aggressive tendencies can be pacified, and civilized society can flourish. There can be little doubt that law and order can reduce violence and increase overall cooperation, but this is not to say that humans are naturally bad.
The view that humans are inherently bad is probably just as misleading as the view that humans are naturally good. Infants are not simply born bad (and then are civilized) or good (and then corrupted) but have both prosocial and antisocial tendencies. We are a species of contradictions: we take others’ blood, and we donate our own. Our distinct cultural evolution relies on our extraordinary capacity for cooperation, yet we can cooperate to commit genocide. We can be selfless and compassionate but also greedy and merciless. We all have what might be called angelic and demonic tendencies. From a moral perspective, only one is desirable, but from an evolutionary point of view, both can provide distinct adaptive advantages in certain circumstances.
SOCIAL PRESSURE, OR WHAT de Waal referred to as level 2 morality, is clearly not limited to state-enforced, institutionalized law. Cooperative groups have goals that all members have in common, such as territorial defense or sharing of certain resources. To contribute to these common goals, group members may be willing to put pressure on others, through reward and punishment, approval and disapproval. Many unwritten social norms guide how we ought to behave. For example, in some cultures we line up at a counter; in such places, people do not look kindly on those who cut into line. Whatever the norms, we all have a stake in maintaining a harmonious social environment that discourages cheating and encourages compliance to norms of cooperation. As Albert Einstein wrote, “In the last analysis, every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondly on institutions such as courts of justice and police.”
Mutual trust is the belief that the other person is going to do “the right thing.” Each human group has inherited rules about proper conduct: the obligatory, the forbidden, and the virtuous. They represent a social contract comprising rights and responsibilities: you must do X, you are not allowed to do Y, and it is especially good of you to do Z. Although there is much cultural diversity, certain moral rules appear universal. Obligations typically include reciprocating favors, keeping promises, and protecting weaker members of the group from harm. Most groups prohibit killing, stealing, and lying.4 The reason for this is obvious: people who frequently lie, kill, and steal from each other will not build lasting cooperative societies. Finally, virtuous actions go beyond the call of duty. Successfully protecting the group and its interests at the risk of personal injury or death is generally regarded as heroic. Such acts enhance one’s reputation and attract rewards. Together, moral codes are the user manuals that make human cooperative societies work.
Recall from the previous chapter that cooperation is always risky because people may cheat—there always exists the temptation to take the rewards of cooperation without paying the price. Or they may want rights without duties. If too many individuals give in to such temptation, cooperation collapses.5 This explains why cooperation in animals is mostly based on kinship rather than on complex and vulnerable systems of reciprocity and reputation. Humans, on the other hand, handled this problem by creating norms that made fairness obligatory, cheating forbidden, and generosity virtuous. Such standards make others’ behavior predictable and encourage trusting co
operation. Critically, as we saw in the previous chapter, compliance with these norms is enforced not only by the individuals directly affected but also by others in the group who reward virtue and punish violations (indirect reciprocity). The economist Ernst Fehr has shown that third-party punishment can lead to stable cooperation, whereas lack of sanctioning leads to a decline in cooperation.
Various studies show that people are willing to punish norm violations even when they do not benefit, it is costly, and they themselves have cheated before.6 Punishment is typically based on strong moral conviction and has a profound consequence on general adherence to a moral code. Without it, the temptation to free ride and cheat is high. Throughout history people have gone to great lengths to detect and deal with immorality (often leading to zealous prosecution). Similarly, acts of valor are rewarded and recognized not only by those who directly benefited but by others as well. In general, a good reputation attracts future cooperation. Being honest, law-abiding, and generous can therefore be a rewarding strategy.
Indeed, studies on hunter-gatherer societies suggest that people have a tendency to act for the greater good, rather than for their own immediate personal interests, as was long assumed. Moreover, experiments in economics have demonstrated that people often prefer win/win situations over outcomes in which they win and another loses. People often make generous offers when they could be selfish, reject “unfair” offers even if it means losing resources, share when they do not need to, and contribute to public goods even when they could get away with not giving anything. We believe in a better world—and we tell others about it. Every day millions of sermons are delivered about how we ought to act.
The Gap Page 23
