Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Contact

  As introduced in chapter 11, many have speculated that inter-group tensions are reduced by contact—when people get to know one another, everyone gets along. But despite that salutary possibility, intergroup contact readily elevates hostilities.18

  As seen in chapter 9, intergroup contact worsens things when the two groups are treated unequally or are unequal in number; where the smaller group is surrounded; where intergroup boundaries are ambiguous; when the groups vie to display symbols of their sacred values (e.g., Northern Irish Protestants marching with Orangemen flags through Catholic neighborhoods). Elbows rubbed raw.

  Obviously, 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.

  Under those conditions, sustained intergroup contact generally decreases prejudices, often to a large extent and in a generalized, persistent manner. This was the conclusion of a 2006 meta-analysis of some five hundred studies comprising over 250,000 subjects from thirty-eight countries; beneficial effects were roughly equal for group differences in race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. As examples, a 1957 study concerning desegregation of the Merchant Marines showed that the more trips white seamen took with African Americans, the more positive their racial attitudes. Same for white cops as a function of time spent with African American partners.19

  A more recent meta-analysis provides additional insights: (a) The beneficial effects typically involve both more knowledge about and more empathy for the Thems. (b) 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. (c) Contact between a traditionally dominant group and a subordinate minority usually decreases prejudice more in the former; the latter have higher thresholds. (d) Novel routes of interacting—such as sustained online relationships—can work a bit as well.20

  All good news. Contact theory has prompted an experimental approach where people, most typically adolescents or young adults, from groups in conflict are brought together for anything from one-hour discussions to summer camps. They’ve most frequently involved Palestinians and Israelis, Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants, or opposing groups from the Balkans, Rwanda, or Sri Lanka, with the idea that participants will return home and spread their attitudinal shifts. This notion of germination prompted the name of one such program, Seeds of Peace.

  Group pictures show Muslims and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Tutsis and Hutu, Croats and Bosnians arm in arm; this is better than puppies. Do the programs work? Depends on what counts as “working.” According to one expert, Stephen Worchel of the University of Hawaii, effects are generally positive—less fear and more positive views of Thems, more of a perception of Thems as heterogeneous, more recognition of faults of the Us, and more of a perception of oneself as an atypical Us.

  This is the immediate aftermath. Disappointingly, these effects are usually transient. Individuals from across lines rarely stay in touch; in one survey of Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, 91 percent were not. Persistent reductions in prejudice usually involve exceptionalism—“Yes, most Thems are awful, but I hung out with a Them once who was okay.” When there is major transformation, the peace-mongering convert loses street cred back home when they broadcast this. For example, no prominent peace activist has emerged from the thousands of participants in the Middle Eastern Seeds of Peace.*

  Here’s a way to think about contact: instead of hating a Them for what his ancestors did, you await the day that you’re irritated with him for, say, eating the last s’more, or setting the office thermostat too low, or never returning to its proper place in the barn that plowshare that used to be a sword. Now, that’s progress. The core of that thought is Susan Fiske’s demonstration that automatic other-race-face amygdala responses can be undone when subjects think of that face as belonging to a person, not a Them. The ability to individuate even monolithic and deindividuated monsters can be remarkable.

  A moving example of this is told by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in her book A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Cape Town: David Philip, 2003). Gobodo-Madikizela, raised in a black township of apartheid South Africa, managed to forge an educational path all the way to a PhD in clinical psychology. As a free South Africa dawned, she worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where she had a task to give anyone pause. It concerned Eugene de Kock, the man with the most literal apartheid-era blood on his hands. De Kock had commanded the elite counterinsurgency unit of the South African Police and personally overseen kidnappings, torture, and murders of black activists. He had been tried, convicted, and given a life sentence. Gobodo-Madikizela was to interview him about his death squad; clinical psychologist that she is, over the course of over forty hours talking with him, her main focus became to understand this man.

  He was a predictably multifaceted, contradictory, real human, rather than an archetype. He was remorseful in some ways, unrepentant in others; indifferent to some of his appalling brutality while proud of his patchwork of principles about whom he wouldn’t kill; he pointed fingers at his bosses (who mostly escaped justice by depicting him as a rogue vigilante rather than the civil servant of apartheid that he was) while emphasizing his command of his killers. He shattered her by tentatively asking if he had killed any of her loved ones (he had not).

  And Gobodo-Madikizela found herself deeply troubled by her growing empathy for de Kock.

  A defining moment came one day when de Kock was recounting something that made him markedly distressed. Gobodo-Madikizela reflexively reached out and—a taboo act—touched his finger between the jail bars. The next morning her arm felt leaden, as if paralyzed by the touch. She struggled with whether her granting him this contact was a sign of her power or his (with him somehow manipulating her into the act). When she next saw him, he compounded her storm of feelings by thanking her and confessing that it was his trigger hand that she had touched. No, this was not the start of an unlikely friendship, as violins play in the background. But the automaticity, the empathy implicit in her reaching out to him, shows that somehow, remarkably, the tenuous elements of Us-ness she now shared with de Kock had dominated at that moment.

  Burning and Unburning Bridges

  A phenomenon in many settings of conflict is burning cultural bridges as a way to forge a new, powerful Us category. Consider the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. The brunt of British colonialism in Kenya had focused on one tribe, the Kikuyu, who had the bad luck of living on precisely the rich farm land that the colonials appropriated; Kikuyu suffering finally boiled over into the Mau Mau insurrection.*

  The agricultural Kikuyu were not particularly bellicose (unlike, say, the nearby pastoralist Maasai, who had been terrorizing the Kikuyu forever), and inculcating new Mau Mau fighters required powerful symbolic effort. Oath making had great cultural significance to Kikuyus, and Mau Mau oath making notoriously involved horrendous violations of Kikuyu norms and taboos, acts guaranteeing shunning at home. The message was clear: “You have burned a bridge; your only Us is us.”

  This strategy is often used in a horrifying realm of modern violence, namely rebel groups transforming kidnapped children into soldiers.21 Sometimes this involves new recruits having to burn symbolic cultural bridges. But also, perhaps reflecting recognition of kids’ limited abstract cognition, something more concrete is employed—the forced killing of family members by such children. We are your family now.

  When child soldiers are liberated, their chances of growing into healthy, functioning adults soars if a relative is fou
nd who will accept them. If a bridge is unburned.22

  —

  As I write, there’s news of the rescue of a few of the two-hundred-plus Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped in 2014 by the terrorist group Boko Haram. What these girls experienced is unimaginable—terror, pain, forced labor, endless rapes, pregnancies, AIDS. And as these few are returned home, many are shunned—for their AIDS, for the belief that they’ve been brainwashed into being sleeper terrorists, for the rape-born children they carry. This does not auger well for their being anything other than broken forever.

  Chapter 11 emphasized pseudospeciation, when Thems are made to seem so different that they hardly count as human. Chapter 15 considered the skill of demagogues at this, framing hated Thems as insects, rodents, bacteria, malignancies, and feces. That provides a clear punch line: be wary of rabble-rousers who frame Thems as things to step on, spray with toxins, or flush down toilets. Simple.

  But pseudospeciating propaganda can be subtler. In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23

  The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die.

  Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.”

  Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

  Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggots and cancer and shit. But also beware when it is our empathic intuitions, rather than our hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals.

  Cooperation

  As explored in chapter 10, understanding the evolution of cooperation poses two challenges.

  The first is the fundamental problem of how cooperation ever starts; the dispiriting logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that whoever takes the first cooperative step becomes one step behind.

  As we saw, one plausible solution concerns founder populations—when a subset of a population becomes isolated and its average degree of relatedness rises, fueling cooperation through kin selection.24 Should that founder population rejoin the general population, their cooperative tendencies will outcompete everyone else, thus propagating cooperation. Another solution involves green-beard effects, that poor man’s version of kin selection, where a genetic trait generates a conspicuous marker and a cooperative bent toward bearers of that marker. In that setting the green beard–less will be outcompeted unless they also evolve cooperation. As we saw, green-beard effects occur in various species.

  This raises the second challenge, namely understanding why humans are so extraordinarily cooperative with nonrelatives. We hold elevator doors open for strangers, take turns at four-way stop signs, get off buses in an orderly manner. We build cultures involving millions of people sharing conventions. This requires more than founder effects and green beards; in the years since Hamilton and Axelrod made “tit for tat” trendy, tons of work has explored human-specific mechanisms for fostering cooperation. There are many.

  Open-ended play. Two individuals play the Prisoner’s Dilemma, knowing that after a single round, they’ll never meet again. Rationality decrees that you defect; there’ll never be a chance to catch up if you fall behind in that first round. What about two rounds? Well, the second round requires noncooperation for the same reasons the single-round game does. In other words, it never makes sense to cooperate in the final round. Thus, round 2 behavior determined, the game defaults to a single-round game—where the rational strategy is to defect. Three rounds? The same. In other words, playing for a known number of rounds biases against cooperation, and the more rational the players, the more they foresee this. It’s open-ended play that fosters cooperation—an unknown number of rounds, producing the shadow of the future, where retribution is possible and the advantages of sustained mutual cooperation accumulate with increasing numbers of interactions.25

  Multiple games. Two individuals play two games against each other simultaneously (alternating rounds between the two) where one game has a much lower threshold for establishing cooperation than the other. Once cooperation is established in that less cutthroat game, there is psychological spillover of cooperation into the other. This is why managers of tense, competitive offices bring in soothing outsiders to lead trust games, hoping that the low-threshold demands for trust there will spill over into work life.

  Open-book play. This is where the other player can see if you’ve been a jerk to people in the past. Reputation is a powerful facilitator of cooperation. That’s what a moralizing god is about—the book whose play is eternally open. As we saw in chapter 9, everyone from hunter-gatherers to urbanites gossip, doing so to open reputation books wider.26

  Open-book play mediates a uniquely sophisticated type of human cooperation, namely “indirect reciprocity.” Person A helps person B, who helps C, who helps D. . . . The reciprocity between two individuals in a closed interaction is like barter. But indirect, pay-it-forward reciprocity is like money, where the common currency is reputation.27

  Punishment

  Other animals don’t have reputations or ponder whether their interactions are open-ended. However, punishment to promote cooperation occurs in numerous species—this is shown when a male baboon who is being an aggressive brute to a female is chased out of the troop for a while by the victim and her relatives. Punishment can strongly facilitate cooperation, but its implementation is potentially double-edged in humans.

  All cultures show some degree of willingness to pay a cost to punish norm violators, and high degrees of willingness correlate with high levels of prosociality. One study examined rural Ethiopians who subsisted on selling charcoal made from wood from local forests—a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: no one is likely to spontaneously limit logging to keep the forest healthy. The study showed that villages with high average levels of willingness to administer costly punishment in an economic game were the ones with the most patrols to prevent overcutting of trees and the healthiest forests. And as seen in chapter 9, cultures with gods who punish norm violations are atypically prosocial.28

  A complication in costly punishment is the cost—the danger that the costs of monitoring for and punishing violations may outweigh the benefits of the cooperation induced. A solution is to reduce surveillance after long stretches of cooperation—in other words, to trust. For example, probably very few Amish purchase costly retinal-scanner home security systems.29

  Another complication co
ncerns who does the punishing. In other species it is usually the victim, the second party. By definition, punishment in two-person games in humans (e.g., the Ultimatum Game) is always by the second party. In that setting the punisher forgoes the measly share offered, (a) in the hopes of deriving visceral satisfaction from depriving the first party of their larger share (and, as seen in the last chapter, that is a major motivator of punishment, fueled by the amygdala and insula); (b) in an effort to shape the first party into making fairer offers to the second party in the future; or (c) as an altruistic act, hoping to shape the first party into being more decent to whomever they play next. This is complex for second parties, balancing costs and benefits, heart and mind, birds in the hand and in the bush. It might also result in the first party being offended by the rejection and becoming even less cooperative thereafter—an outcome in some game scenarios.30

  Humans uniquely and very effectively boost cooperation through third-party punishment meted out by objective outsiders. However, such punishing can be costly to the third party, meaning that there’s the evolutionary challenge not just of jump-starting cooperation but also of jump-starting altruistic third-party punishment.31

  The answer, as repeatedly derived by humans, is to add layers. Develop secondary punishment, punishing someone who fails to do third-party punishment—the world of honor codes, where you’re punished if you don’t report a violation. An alternative is to reward third-party punishers—humans make livings as cops and judges. Moreover, recent theoretical and empirical work shows that being a conspicuous third-party punisher makes people trust you. But who monitors third-party punishers? Here is where you get people to share and lower the cost by taking sociality to the max—costs are shouldered by everyone, and free riders are punished (e.g., we pay taxes and punish tax evaders). When the moving parts are balanced, you generate extraordinary levels of cooperation.32