These are just a couple of the countless ways our intuitions about the world lead us astray: we rewrite our past to fit present beliefs and moods, we badly misinterpret the source and meaning of our emotions, we are subject to the hindsight bias where after the fact we surmise that we knew it all along, we succumb to the self-serving bias where we think we are far more important than we really are, we see illusory correlations that do not exist (superstitions), and we fall for the confirmation bias where we look for and find evidence for what we already believe. Our intuitions also lead us to fear the wrong things. Let us return to Adam Smith. According to Smith’s theory, our moral sentiments lead us to observe what happens to others, empathize with their pain, then turn to our own self-interest in dreaded anticipation of the same disaster befalling us. The week I wrote this section the ABC television news program 20/20 ran a story about kids who dropped heavy stones off freeway overpasses that smashed through car windows, killing or maiming the passengers within. The producers appealed to the fearful side of our nature by introducing viewers to the hapless victims with mangled faces and shattered lives, evoking our empathy; they then engaged our self-love with the rhetorical question: “could this happen to you?”
Could it? Not likely. In fact, it is so unlikely you would be better off worrying about lightning striking you. Then why do we worry about such matters? Because our moral intuitions have been hijacked by what University of Southern California sociologist Barry Glassner calls a “culture of fear.”13 Who created this culture? Ultimately we did, by buying into the rumors and hearsay that pass for factual data fed to us by the media and other sources. But those factoids and reports had to come from somewhere. Follow the money and those who traffic in fear mongering. Politicians, for example, can win elections by grossly exaggerating (and sometimes outright lying about) crime and drug-use percentages under their opponent’s watch. Advocacy groups profit (literally) from fear campaigns that heighten an expectation of doom (to be thwarted just in time, if the donor’s contribution is beefy enough). Think of conservatives decrying the demise of the family or liberals proclaiming the destruction of the environment.
Religions play on our fears by hyping up the doom and gloom of this world to make the next world seem all the more appealing. On May 17, 1999, an evangelical Christian friend of mine insisted that we are in the “end times” because the Bible prophesied an increase in immorality and malfeasance. Since everyone knows crime is an epidemic problem in America that worsens by the year (“just look at the recent Columbine shooting,” he enthused), the end is nigh. I remember the date because it was the same day the FBI released its findings that we are in the midst of the longest decline in crime rates since the bureau began collecting data in 1930. In other words, we are confronted with the paradox of being more fearful than we have ever been at the same time that things have never been so safe. “In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier,” Glassner explains, yet the “majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s youth.” Ditto the economy, where “the unemployment rate was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster.”14 In this century alone modern medicine and social hygiene practices and technologies have nearly doubled our life span and improved our health immeasurably, but Glassner points out that if you tally up the reported disease statistics, out of 280 million Americans, 543 million of us are seriously ill!
How can this be? Benjamin Disraeli had an answer: lies, damn lies, and statistics. We may be good storytellers, but we are lousy statisticians. Glassner shows, for example, that women in their forties believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, but their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. He notes that some “feminists helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two of three teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men” when in reality it “is more like one in ten, but some feminists continued to cultivate the scare well after the bogus stat had been definitively debunked.”15 The bigger problem here is the law of large numbers, where million-to-one odds happen 280 times a day in America, and of those the most sensational dozen make the evening news, especially if captured on video. Stay tuned—film at eleven!
Herein lies the problem for our moral sensibilities. We are fed numbers daily that we cannot comprehend about threats to our security we cannot tolerate. Better safe than sorry, right? Not necessarily. Pathological fear takes a dramatic toll on our psyches and wallets. “We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year,” Glassner notes, “on largely mythical hazards like road rage, on prison cells occupied by people who pose little or no danger to others, on programs designed to protect young people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims of metaphorical illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel—which is already safer than other means of transportation—safer still.”16
Of all the institutions feeding our fears, the media takes center stage for sensationalism (“if it bleeds, it leads”). An Emory University study revealed that the leading cause of death in men—heart disease—received the same amount of coverage as the eleventh-ranked vector: homicide. Not surprising, drug use, the lowest-ranking risk factor associated with serious illness and death, received as much attention as the second-ranked risk factor, poor diet and lack of exercise. From 1990 to 1998, America’s murder rate decreased by 20 percent while the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased by an incredible 600 percent (and this doesn’t count O. J. Simpson stories). The fact is, there is no evidence that secondhand smoke causes cancer or that cell-phone use generates brain tumors; likewise, Gulf War Syndrome appears to be a chimera, television does not cause violence, Satanic cults are phantasmagorical, most recovered memories of childhood abuse are nothing more than false memories planted by bad therapists, silicon breast implants cause nothing more than metastatic litigation, the drug war was lost decades ago, and the drug emperor has no clothes—he’s butt naked and it’s high time someone said it. We would be well-advised to remember the law of large numbers, and to keep in mind that we have selective memory of the most egregious events and that most of our fears are illusory—the vaporous product of a culture of fear of which we are both creators and victims.17
These notable shortcomings to our intuitive instincts aside, however, there is something quite empowering about intuition that cannot be dismissed, especially in the moral realm. In fact, intuition is so ingrained into the human psyche that it cannot be separated from intellect (witness the aforementioned intuitive afflictions). So integrated are intuition and intellect that I have coalesced them into what I call the Captain Kirk Principle, from an episode of Star Trek entitled “The Enemy Within.”18 Captain James T. Kirk has just beamed up from planet Alpha 177, where magnetic anomalies have caused the transporter to malfunction, splitting Kirk into two beings. One is cool, calculating, and rational. The other is wild, impulsive, and irrational. Rational Kirk must make a command decision to save the landing party now stranded on the planet because of the malfunctioning transporter. (Why they could not just send down a shuttle craft to rescue them is never explained, and thus this episode has contributed to the long list of Star Trek bloopers.) Because his intellect and intuition have been split, Kirk is paralyzed with indecision, bemoaning to Dr. McCoy: “I can’t survive without him [irrational Kirk]. I don’t want to take him back. He’s like an animal—a thoughtless, brutal animal. And yet it’s me.” This psychological battle between intellect and intuition was played out in nearly every episode of Star Trek in the characters of the ultrarational Mr. Spock and hyperemotional Dr. McCoy, with Captain Kirk as the near-perfect embodiment of both. Thus, I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.19
For most scientists, intuition is the bête noire of a rational life, the enemy within to beam away faster than a Vulcan in heat. Yet the
Captain Kirk Principle is now finding support from a rich new field of scientific inquiry brilliantly summarized by psychologist David G. Myers, who demonstrates through countless well-documented experiments that intuition—“our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason”20—is as much a part of our thinking as analytic logic. Physical intuition, of course, is well known and accepted as part of an athlete’s repertoire of talents—Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods come to mind. But there are social, psychological, and moral intuitions as well that operate at a level so fast and subtle that they cannot be considered a product of rational thought. Harvard’s Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, for example, discovered that the evaluations of teachers by students who saw a mere thirty-second video of the teacher were remarkably similar to those of students who had taken the entire course. Even three two-second video clips of the teacher yielded a striking .72 correlation with the course student evaluations!21 How can this be? We have an intuitive sense about people that allows us to make reasonably accurate snap judgments about them.
Research consistently shows how even unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. In one experiment, for example, researchers flashed emotionally positive scenes (a kitten or a romantic couple) or negative scenes (a werewolf or a dead body) for forty-seven milliseconds before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally charged scenes, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photos had been associated with the positive scenes.22 In other words, something registered somewhere in the brain. That also appears to be the situation in the case of a patient who was unable to recognize her own hand, and when asked to use her thumb and forefinger to estimate the size of an object was unable to do it. Yet when she reached for the object her thumb and forefinger were correctly placed.23 Another study revealed that stroke patients who have lost a portion of their visual cortex are consciously blind in part of their field of vision. When shown a series of sticks, they report seeing nothing, yet unerringly identify whether the unseen sticks are vertical or horizontal.24 That’s weird.
Intuition especially plays a powerful role in “knowing” other people. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist will work out for you is your initial reaction in the first five minutes of the first session. 25 The reason for this is because for psychotherapy (talk therapy), research shows that no one modality or style is better than any other. It does not matter what type or how many degrees the therapist has, or what particular school the therapist attended, or whom the therapist trained under. What matters most is how well suited the therapist is for you, and only you can make that judgment, one best made through intuition, not intellect. Similarly, people with dating experience know within minutes whether or not they will want to see a first date again. That assessment is not made through tallying up the pluses and minuses of the date in some intellectual process equivalent to a mental ledger; we don’t usually ask for a date’s resume or curriculum vitae before agreeing to a second date. But we do perform something like this in a quick intuitive assessment based on subtle cues—body language, facial expressions, voice tone and volume, wit and humor, politeness, and so forth—all of which can be assessed relatively quickly.
To the extent that lie detection through the observation of body language and facial expressions is accurate (overall not very), women are better at it than men because they are more intuitively sensitive to subtle cues. In experiments in which subjects observe someone either truth telling or lying, although no one is consistently correct in identifying the liar, women are correct significantly more often than men.26 Women are also superior in discerning which of two people in a photo was the other’s supervisor, whether a male-female couple is a genuine romantic relationship or a posed phony one, and when shown a two-second silent video clip of an upset woman’s face, women guess more accurately then men whether she is criticizing someone or discussing her divorce.27 People who are highly skilled in identifying “micromomentary” facial expressions are also more accurate in judging lying. In testing such professionals as psychiatrists, polygraphists, court judges, police officers, and secret service agents on their ability to detect lies, only secret service agents trained to look for subtle cues scored above chance. Most of us are not good at lie detection because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do. Subjects with damage to the brain that renders them less attentive to speech are more accurate at detecting lies, such as aphasic stroke victims who were able to identify liars 73 percent of the time when focusing on facial expressions (normal subjects did no better than chance). In support of an evolutionary explanation of a moral sense, research shows that we may be hardwired for such intuitive thinking: a patient with damage to parts of his frontal lobe and amygdala (the fear center) is prevented from understanding social relations or detecting cheating, particularly in social contracts, even though cognitively he is otherwise normal.28 Cheating detection in social relations, such as in the role of gossip in small groups, is a vital part of our evolutionary heritage.
Although most secular theories of morality are rationalist theories, recent research on moral intuition reveals that the Captain Kirk Principle is at work in the moral realm as well. University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example, has demonstrated that the mind makes quick and automatic moral judgments similar to how we make aesthetic judgments. We do not reason our way to a moral decision; we jump right in, then later rationalize the quick decision. Our moral intuitions are more emotional than rational. Haidt’s “social intuitionist” theory says that moral feelings come first, then the rationalization of those moral feelings. “Could human morality really be run by the moral emotions, while moral reasoning struts about pretending to be in control?” Haidt asks. He answers his own question thusly: “Moral judgment involves quick gut feelings, or affectively laden intuitions, which then trigger moral reasoning.”29 In other words, research supports our usual distinction between morality (thoughts and behaviors about right and wrong) and ethics (theories about moral thoughts and behaviors). In this context, ethics is an expression of emotional moral intuitions aimed at convincing others of the rational validity of our intuitions.
Consider the following moral dilemma and how our moral intuitions respond: you witness a runaway trolley headed for five people. If you throw a switch to derail the trolley, it will save the five but send it down another track to kill one person. Would you do it? Most people say that they would. Rationally, it seems justified: sacrificing one life to save five seems like the logical thing to do. However, consider this minor modification of the moral dilemma: you witness a runaway trolley headed for five people. You can stop the trolley by pushing a person onto the track, killing that one individual but saving five lives in the process. Would you do it? It is the same moral calculation, but most say they would not do it. Why? Princeton University’s Joshua Greene believes he has found a reason through brain imaging technology. In presenting these moral dilemmas to subjects and recording what is going on inside their brains as they think about them, the second scenario of pushing the subject onto the tracks triggered the subjects’ brains to light up in their emotional areas (normally active when feeling sad and frightened) much more than when they were thinking about the first scenario.30 The difference in these two scenarios is that in the first one the subject is emotionally detached by being one step removed from the killing process—to save five lives by killing one person, one has only to flip a switch to derail the trolley car. The trolley killed the individual, not the subject. In the second scenario the subject is emotionally involved—to save five lives by killing one person, one has to be directly and viscerally responsible for killing another person. Moral judgment is not calculatingly rational. It is intuitively emotional.
Cognitive biases also play a powerful role in our moral intuitions. The self-serving bias, for example, which dictates that we tend to see ourselves in a more positive light th
an others actually see us, leads us to think we are more moral than others. National surveys, for instance, show that most businesspeople believe they are more moral than other businesspeople.31 Even social psychologists who study moral intuition think they are more moral than other social psychologists!32 And we all believe that we will be rewarded for our ethical behavior. A U.S. News & World Report study asked Americans who they think is most likely to make it to heaven: 19 percent said O. J. Simpson, 52 percent said former President Bill Clinton, 60 percent said Princess Diana, 65 percent chose Michael Jordan, and, not surprisingly, 79 percent elected Mother Teresa. But the person survey takers thought most likely to go to heaven, at 87 percent, was the survey taker him- or herself!33
Consistent with these experimental results are studies that show people are more likely to rate themselves superior in “moral goodness” than in “intelligence,” and community residents overwhelmingly see themselves as caring more about the environment and other social issues than other members of the community do.34 In one College Entrance Examination Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, none rated themselves below average in the category “ability to get along with others,” 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent said they were in the top 1 percent.35 Likewise, just as behaviors determine perceptions—smokers overestimate the number of people who smoke, for example—moral behaviors determine moral perceptions: liars overestimate the number of lies other people tell. One study found that people who cheat on their spouses and income taxes overestimate the number of others who do so.36
Science of Good and Evil Page 21