The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  The answer to the question “Who should we believe?” turned out to be: neither. Compared to the benchmark of the story itself, and to the recall of the disinterested third-person narrators, both victims and perpetrators distorted the stories to the same extent but in opposite directions, each omitting or embellishing details in a way that made the actions of their character look more reasonable and the other’s less reasonable. Remarkably, nothing was at stake in the exercise. Not only had the participants not taken part in the events, but they were not asked to sympathize with the character or to justify anyone’s behavior, just to read and remember the story from a first-person perspective. That was all it took to recruit their cognitive processes to the cause of self-serving propaganda.

  The diverging narratives of a harmful event in the eyes of the aggressor, the victim, and a neutral party are a psychological overlay on the violence triangle in figure 2–1. Let’s call it the Moralization Gap.

  The Moralization Gap is part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. “Good” can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic. The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20th-century social psychology. An early exposé was the sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), Robert Trivers’s Deceit and Self-Deception, and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.23 Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.24

  Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals. People congregate in groups not because they are robots who are magnetically attracted to one another but because they have social and moral emotions. They feel warmth and sympathy, gratitude and trust, loneliness and guilt, jealousy and anger. The emotions are internal regulators that ensure that people reap the benefits of social life—reciprocal exchange and cooperative action—without suffering the costs, namely exploitation by cheaters and social parasites.25 We sympathize with, trust, and feel grateful to those who are likely to cooperate with us, rewarding them with our own cooperation. And we get angry at or ostracize those who are likely to cheat, withdrawing cooperation or meting out punishment. A person’s own level of virtue is a tradeoff between the esteem that comes from cultivating a reputation as a cooperator and the ill-gotten gains of stealthy cheating. A social group is a marketplace of cooperators of differing degrees of generosity and trustworthiness, and people advertise themselves as being as generous and trustworthy as they can get away with, which may be a bit more generous and trustworthy than they are.

  The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator. Like opposing counsel in a lawsuit over a tort, the social plaintiff will emphasize the deliberateness, or at least the depraved indifference, of the defendant’s action, together with the pain and suffering the plaintiff endures. The social defendant will emphasize the reasonableness or unavoidability of the action, and will minimize the plaintiff’s pain and suffering. The competing framings shape the negotiations over amends, and also play to the gallery in a competition for their sympathy and for a reputation as a responsible reciprocator.26

  Trivers, the first to propose that the moral emotions are adaptations to cooperation, also identified an important twist. The problem with trying to convey an exaggerated impression of kindness and skill is that other people are bound to develop the ability to see through it, setting in motion a psychological arms race between better liars and better lie detection. Lies can be spotted through internal contradictions (as in the Yiddish proverb “A liar must have a good memory”), or through tells such as hesitations, twitches, blushes, and sweats. Trivers ventured that natural selection may have favored a degree of self-deception so as to suppress the tells at the source. We lie to ourselves so that we’re more believable when we lie to others.27 At the same time, an unconscious part of the mind registers the truth about our abilities so that we don’t get too far out of touch with reality. Trivers credits George Orwell with an earlier formulation of the idea: “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”28

  Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called “the self” can be both deceiver and deceived. It’s easy enough to show that people are liable to self-serving biases, like a butcher’s scale that has been miscalibrated in the butcher’s favor. But it’s not so easy to show that people are liable to self-deception, the psychological equivalent of the dual books kept by shady businesses in which a public ledger is made available to prying eyes and a private ledger with the correct information is used to run the business.29

  A pair of social psychologists, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, have devised an ingenious experiment that catches people in the act of true, dualbook self -deception.30They asked the participants to cooperate with them in planning and evaluating a study in which half of them would get a pleasant and easy task, namely looking through photographs for ten minutes, and half would get a tedious and difficult one, namely solving math problems for fortyfive minutes. They told the participants that they were being run in pairs, but that the experimenters had not yet settled on the best way to decide who got which task. So they allowed each participant to choose one of two methods to decide who would get the pleasant task and who would get the unpleasant one. The participants could just choose the easy task for themselves, or they could use a random number generator to decide who got which. Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves. Later they were given an anonymous questionnaire to evaluate the experiment which unobtrusively slipped in a question about whether the participants thought that their decision had been fair. Human hypocrisy being what it is, most of them said it was. Then the experimenters described the selfish choice to another group of participants and asked them how fairly the selfish subject acted. Not surprisingly, they didn’t think it was fair at all. The difference between the way people judge other people’s behavior and the way they judge their own behavior is a classic instance of a self-serving bias.

  But now comes the key question. Did the self-servers really, deep down, believe that they were acting fairly? Or did the conscious spin doctor in their brains just say that, while the unconscious reality-checker registered the truth? To find out, the psychologists tied up the conscious mind by forcing a group of participants to keep seven digits in memory while they evaluated the experiment, including the judgment about whether they (or others) had acted fairly. With the conscious mind distracted, the terrible truth came out: the participants judged themselves as harshly as they judged other people. This vindicates Trivers’s theory that the truth was in there all along.

  I was happy to discover the result, not just because the theory of self-deception is so elegant that it deserves to be true, but because it offers a glimmer of hope for humanity. Though acknowledging a compromising truth about ourselves is among our most painful experiences—Freud posited an armamentarium of defense mechanisms to postpone that dreadful day, such as denial, repression, projection, and reaction formation—it is, at least in principle, possible. It may take ridicule, it may take argument, it may take time, it may take being distracted, but people have the means to recognize that they are not always in the right. Still, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about self-deception. In the absence of these puncturings, the overwhelming tendency is for people to misjudge the harmful acts
they have perpetrated or experienced.

  Once you become aware of this fateful quirk in our psychology, social life begins to look different, and so do history and current events. It’s not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It’s that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist. And each side has assembled a historical narrative and database of facts consistent with its sincere belief. 31For example:

  • The Crusades were an upwelling of religious idealism that were marked by a few excesses but left the world with the fruits of cultural exchange. The Crusades were a series of vicious pogroms against Jewish communities that were part of a long history of European anti-Semitism. The Crusades were a brutal invasion of Muslim lands and the start of a long history of humiliation of Islam by Christendom.

  • The American Civil War was necessary to abolish the evil institution of slavery and preserve a nation conceived in liberty and equality. The American Civil War was a power grab by a centralized tyranny intended to destroy the way of life of the traditional South.

  • The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was the act of an evil empire drawing an iron curtain across the continent. The Warsaw Pact was a defensive alliance to protect the Soviet Union and its allies from a repeat of the horrendous losses it had suffered from two German invasions.

  • The Six-Day War was a struggle for national survival. It began when Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, the first step in its plan to push the Jews into the sea, and it ended when Israel reunified a divided city and secured defensible borders. The Six-Day War was a campaign of aggression and conquest. It began when Israel invaded its neighbors and ended when it expropriated their land and instituted an apartheid regime.

  Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily we tend to think of historical memory as a good thing, but when the events being remembered are lingering wounds that call for redress, it can be a call to violence. The slogans “Remember the Alamo!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember the Lusitania!” “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Remember 9/11!” were not advisories to brush up your history but battle cries that led to Americans’ engaging in wars. It is often said that the Balkans are a region that is cursed with too much history per square mile. The Serbs, who in the 1990s perpetrated ethnic cleansings in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, are also among the world’s most aggrieved people.32 They were inflamed by memories of depredations by the Nazi puppet state in Croatia in World War II, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, and the Ottoman Turks going back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. On the six hundredth anniversary of that battle, President Slobodan Milošević delivered a bellicose speech that presaged the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

  In the late 1970s the newly elected separatist government of Québec rediscovered the thrills of 19th-century nationalism, and among other trappings of Québecois patriotism replaced the license-plate motto “La Belle Province” (the beautiful province) with “Je Me Souviens” (I remember). It was never made clear exactly what was being remembered, but most people interpreted it as nostalgia for New France, which had been vanquished by Britain during the Seven Years’ War in 1763. All this remembering made Anglophone Quebeckers a bit nervous and set off an exodus of my generation to Toronto. Fortunately, late-20th-century European pacifism prevailed over 19th-century Gallic nationalism, and Québec today is an unusually cosmopolitan and peaceable part of the world.

  The counterpart of too much memory on the part of victims is too little memory on the part of perpetrators. On a visit to Japan in 1992, I bought a tourist guide that included a helpful time line of Japanese history. There was an entry for the period of the Taishō democracy from 1912 to 1926, and then there was an entry for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. I guess nothing interesting happened in Japan in the years in between.

  It’s disconcerting to realize that all sides to a conflict, from roommates squabbling over a term paper to nations waging world wars, are convinced of their rectitude and can back up their convictions with the historical record. That record may include some whoppers, but it may just be biased by the omission of facts we consider significant and the sacralization of facts we consider ancient history. The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone’s self-deception is invisible to them.

  For example, few Americans today would second-guess the participation of “the greatest generation” in the epitome of a just war, World War II. Yet it’s unsettling to reread Franklin Roosevelt’s historic speech following Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and see that it is a textbook case of a victim narrative. All the coding categories of the Baumeister experiment can be filled in: the fetishization of memory (“a date which will live in infamy”), the innocence of the victim (“The United States was at peace with that nation”), the senselessness and malice of the aggression (“this unprovoked and dastardly attack”), the magnitude of the harm (“The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost”), and the justness of retaliation (“the American people in their righteous might will win”). Historians today point out that each of these ringing assertions was, at best, truthy. The United States had imposed a hostile embargo of oil and machinery on Japan, had anticipated possible attacks, had sustained relatively minor military damage, eventually sacrificed 100,000 American lives in response to the 2,500 lost in the attack, forced innocent Japanese Americans into concentration camps, and attained victory with incendiary and nuclear strikes on Japanese civilians that could be considered among history’s greatest war crimes.33

  Even in matters when no reasonable third party can doubt who’s right and who’s wrong, we have to be prepared, when putting on psychological spectacles, to see that evildoers always think they are acting morally. The spectacles are a painful fit.34 Just monitor your blood pressure as you read the sentence “Try to see it from Hitler’s point of view.” (Or Osama bin Laden’s, or Kim Jong-il’s.) Yet Hitler, like all sentient beings, had a point of view, and historians tell us that it was a highly moralistic one. He experienced Germany’s sudden and unexpected defeat in World War I and concluded that it could be explained only by the treachery of an internal enemy. He was aggrieved by the Allies’ murderous postwar food blockade and their vindictive reparations. He lived through the economic chaos and street violence of the 1920s. And Hitler was an idealist: he had a moral vision in which heroic sacrifices would bring about a thousand-year utopia.35

  At the smaller scale of interpersonal violence, the most brutal serial killers minimize and even justify their crimes in ways that would be comical if their actions were not so horrific. In 1994 the police quoted a spree killer as saying, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistolwhipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.”36 A serial rapist-murderer interviewed by the sociologist Diana Scully claimed to be “kind and gentle” to the women he captured at gunpoint, and that they enjoyed the experience of being raped. As further proof of this kindness, he noted that when he stabbed his victims “the killing was always sudden, so they wouldn’t know it was coming.”37 John Wayne Gacy, who kidnapped, raped, and murdered thirty-three boys, said, “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator,” adding, without irony, “I was cheated out of my childhood.” His victimization continued into adulthood, when the media inexplicably tried to make him into “an asshole and a scapegoat.
”38

  Smaller-time criminals rationalize just as readily. Anyone who has worked with prisoners knows that today’s penitentiaries are filled to a man with innocent victims—not just those who were framed by sloppy police work but those whose violence was a form of self-help justice. Remember Donald Black’s theory of crime as social control (chapter 3), which seeks to explain why a majority of violent crimes don’t bring the perpetrator a tangible benefit.39 The offender is genuinely provoked by an affront or betrayal; the reprisal that we deem to be excessive—striking a sharp-tongued wife during an argument, killing a swaggering stranger over a parking spot—is from his point of view a natural response to a provocation and the administration of rough justice.

  The unease with which we read these rationalizations tells us something about the very act of donning psychological spectacles. Baumeister notes that in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator.40 Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe that the harm is ultimately explicable. The viewpoint of the moralist, in contrast, is the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it was perpetrated. And for all the feeble ratiocination we mortals throw at it, it remains a cosmic mystery, a manifestation of the irreducible and inexplicable existence of evil in the universe. Many chroniclers of the Holocaust consider it immoral even to try to explain it.41