Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  There is a complication, though. As most of us observed, exploited, or experienced as kids, bullying targets aren’t selected at random. Kids with the metaphorical “kick me” signs on their backs are more likely to have personal or family psychiatric issues and poor social and emotional intelligence. These are kids already at risk for bad adult outcomes, and adding bullying to the mix just makes the child’s future even bleaker.

  The picture of the bullies is no surprise either, starting with their disproportionately coming from families of single moms or younger parents with poor education and employment prospects. There are generally two profiles of the kids themselves—the more typical is an anxious, isolated kid with poor social skills, who bullies out of frustration and to achieve acceptance. Such kids typically mature out of bullying. The second profile is the confident, unempathic, socially intelligent kid with an imperturbable sympathetic nervous system; this is the future sociopath.

  There is an additional striking finding. You want to see a kid who’s really likely to be a mess as an adult? Find someone who both bullies and is bullied, who terrorizes the weaker at school and returns home to be terrorized by someone stronger.43 Of the three categories (bully, bullied, bully/bullied), they’re most likely to have prior psychiatric problems, poor school performance, and poor emotional adjustment. They’re more likely than pure bullies to use weapons and inflict serious damage. As adults, they’re most at risk for depression, anxiety, and suicidality.

  In one study kids from these three categories read scenarios of bullying.44 Bullied victims would condemn bullying and express sympathy. Bullies would condemn bullying but rationalize the scenario (e.g., this time it was the victim’s fault). And bully/bullied kids? They would say bullying is okay. No wonder they have the worst outcome. “The weak deserve to be bullied, so it’s fine when I bully. But that means I deserve to be bullied at home. But I don’t, and that relative bullying me is awful. Maybe then I’m awful when I bully someone. But I’m not, because the weak deserve to be bullied. . . .” A Möbius strip from hell.*

  A KEY QUESTION

  We’ve now examined adult consequences of childhood adversity and their biological mediators. A key question persists. Yes, childhood abuse increases the odds of being an abusive adult; witnessing violence raises the risk for PTSD; loss of a parent to death means more chance of adult depression. Nevertheless, many, maybe even most victims of such adversity turn into reasonably functional adults. There is a shadow over childhood, demons lurk in corners of the mind, but overall things are okay. What explains such resilience?

  As we’ll see, genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors. Be sexually abused as a child, or witness violence, and your adult prognosis is better than if you had experienced both. Experience childhood poverty, and your future prospects are better if your family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45

  A SLEDGEHAMMER

  What happens when everything goes wrong—no mother or family, minimal peer interactions, sensory and cognitive neglect, plus some malnutrition?46

  These are the Romanian institution kids, poster children for just how nightmarish childhood can be. In the 1980s the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu banned contraceptives and abortions and required women to bear at least five children. Soon institutions filled with thousands of infants and kids abandoned by impoverished families (many intent on reclaiming their child when finances improved).* Kids were warehoused in overwhelmed institutions, resulting in severe neglect and deprivation. The story broke after Ceauşescu’s 1989 overthrow. Many kids were adopted by Westerners, and international attention led to some improvements in the institutions. Since then, children adopted in the West, those eventually returned to their families, and those who remained institutionalized have been studied, primarily by Charles Nelson of Harvard.

  As adults, these kids are mostly what you’d expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis.

  And their brains? Decreased total brain size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Except for the amygdala. Which is enlarged. That pretty much says it all.

  CULTURE, WITH BOTH A BIG AND A LITTLE C

  Chapter 9 considers the effects of culture on our best and worst behaviors. We now preview that chapter, focusing on two facts—childhood is when culture is inculcated, and parents mediate that process.

  There is huge cultural variability in how childhood is experienced—how long and often kids are nursed; how often they are in contact with parents and other adults; how often they’re spoken to; how long they cry before someone responds; at what age they sleep alone.

  Considering cross-cultural child rearing often brings out the most invidious and neurotic in parents—do other cultures do a better job at it? There must be the perfect combo out there, a mixture of the Kwakiutl baby diet, the Trobriand sleeping program, and the Ituri approach to watching Baby Mozart videos. But there is no anthropological ideal of child rearing. Cultures (starting with parents) raise children to become adults who behave in the ways valued by that culture, a point emphasized by the anthropologist Meredith Small of Cornell University.47

  We begin with parenting style, a child’s first encounter with cultural values. Interestingly, the most influential typology of parenting style, writ small, grew from thinking about cultural styles, writ large.

  Amid the post–World War II ruins, scholars tried to understand where Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Tojo, and their minions came from. What are the roots of fascism? Two particularly influential scholars were refugees from Hitler, namely Hannah Arendt (with her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism) and Theodor Adorno (with the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, coauthored with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford). Adorno in particular explored the personality traits of fascists, including extreme conformity, submission to and belief in authority, aggressiveness, and hostility toward intellectualism and introspection—traits typically rooted in childhood.48

  This influenced the Berkeley psychologist Diana Baumrind, who in the 1960s identified three key parenting styles (in work since replicated and extended to various cultures).49 First is authoritative parenting. Rules and expectations are clear, consistent, and explicable—“Because I said so” is anathema—with room for flexibility; praise and forgiveness trump punishment; parents welcome children’s input; developing children’s potential and autonomy is paramount. By the standards of the educated neurotics who would read (let alone write . . .) this book, this produces a good adult outcome—happy, emotionally and socially mature and fulfilled, independent and self-reliant.

  Next is authoritarian parenting. Rules and demands are numerous, arbitrary, and rigid and need no justification; behavior is mostly shaped by punishment; children’s emotional needs are low priorities. Parental motivation is often that it’s a tough, unforgiving world and kids better be prepared. Authoritarian parenting tends to produce adults who may be narrowly successful, obedient, conformist (often with an undercurrent of resentment that can explode), and not particularly happy. Moreover, social skills are often poor because, instead of learning by experience, they grew up following orders.

  And then there is 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 l
iving consequence-free childhoods.

  Baumrind’s trio was expanded by Stanford psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin to include neglectful parenting.50 This addition produces a two-by-two matrix: parenting is authoritative (high demand, high responsiveness), authoritarian (high demand, low responsiveness), permissive (low demand, high responsiveness), or neglectful (low demand, low responsiveness).

  Importantly, each style usually produces adults with that same approach, with different cultures valuing different styles.

  Then comes the next way cultural values are transmitted to kids, namely by peers. This was emphasized in Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption. Harris, a psychologist without an academic affiliation or doctorate, took the field by storm, arguing that the importance of parenting in shaping a child’s adult personality is exaggerated.51 Instead, once kids pass a surprisingly young age, peers are most influential. Elements of her argument included: (a) Parental influence is often actually mediated via peers. For example, being raised by a single mother increases the risk of adult antisocial behavior, but not because of the parenting; instead, because of typically lower income, kids more likely live in a neighborhood with tough peers. (b) Peers have impact on linguistic development (e.g., children acquire the accent of their peers, not their parents). (c) Other young primates are mostly socialized by peers, not mothers.

  The book was controversial (partially because the theme begged to be distorted—“Psychologist proves that parents don’t matter”), drawing criticism and acclaim.* As the dust has settled, current opinion tends to be that peer influences are underappreciated, but parents still are plenty important, including by influencing what peer groups their kids experience.

  Why are peers so important? Peer interactions teach social competence—context-dependent behavior, when to be friend or foe, where you fit in hierarchies. Young organisms utilize the greatest teaching tool ever to acquire such information—play.52

  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.

  The historian Johan Huizinga characterized humans as “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player, with our structured, rule-bound play—i.e., games. Nevertheless, play is universal among socially complex species, ubiquitous among the young and peaking at puberty, and all play involves similar behaviors, after some ethological translating (e.g., a dominant dog signals the benevolence needed to initiate play by crouching, diminishing herself; translated into baboon, a dominant kid presents her rear to someone lower ranking).

  Play is vital. In order to play, animals forgo foraging, expend calories, make themselves distracted and conspicuous to predators. Young organisms squander energy on play during famines. A child deprived of or disinterested in play rarely has a socially fulfilling adult life.

  Most of all, play is intrinsically pleasurable—why else perform a smidgen of a behavioral sequence in an irrelevant setting? Dopaminergic pathways activate during play; juvenile rats, when playing, emit the same vocalizations as when rewarded with food; dogs spend half their calories wagging their tails to pheromonally announce their presence and availability for play. As emphasized by the psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, the opposite of play is not work—it’s depression. A challenge is to understand how the brain codes for the reinforcing properties of the variety of play. After all, play encompasses everything from mathematicians besting each other with hilarious calculus jokes to kids besting each other by making hilarious fart sounds with their armpits.

  One significant type of play involves fragments of aggression, what Harlow called “rough and tumble” play—kids wrestling, adolescent impalas butting heads, puppies play-biting each other.53 Males typically do it more than females, and as we’ll see soon, it’s boosted by prenatal testosterone. Is rough-and-tumble play practice for life’s looming status tournament, or are you already in the arena? A mixture of both.

  Expanding beyond peers, neighborhoods readily communicate culture to kids. Is there garbage everywhere? Are houses decrepit? What’s ubiquitous—bars, churches, libraries, or gun shops? Are there many parks, and are they safe to enter? Do billboards, ads, and bumper stickers sell religious or material paradises, celebrate acts of martyrdom or kindness and inclusiveness?

  —

  And then we get to culture at the level of tribes, nations, and states. Here, briefly, are some of the broadest cultural differences in child-rearing practices.

  Collectivist Versus Individualist Cultures

  As will be seen in chapter 9, this is the most studied cultural contrast, typically comparing collectivist East Asian cultures with überindividualist America. Collectivist cultures emphasize interdependence, harmony, fitting in, the needs and responsibilities of the group; in contrast, individualist cultures value independence, competition, the needs and rights of the individual.

  On average, mothers in individualist cultures, when compared with those in collectivist ones, speak louder, play music louder, have more animated expressions.54 They view themselves as teachers rather than protectors, abhor a bored child, value high-energy affect. Their games emphasize individual competition, urge hobbies involving doing rather than observing. Kids are trained in verbal assertiveness, to be autonomous and influential. Show a cartoon of a school of fish with one out front, and she’ll describe it to her child as the leader.*

  Mothers in collectivist cultures, in contrast, spend more time than individualist mothers soothing their child, maintaining contact, and facilitating contact with other adults. They value low arousal affect and sleep with their child to a later age. Games are about cooperation and fitting in; if playing with her child with, say, a toy car, the point is not exploring what a car does (i.e., being automobile), but the process of sharing (“Thank you for giving me your car; now I’ll give it back to you”). Kids are trained to get along, think of others, accept and adapt, rather than change situations; morality and conformity are nearly synonymous. Show the cartoon of the school of fish, and the fish out front must have done something wrong, because no one will play with him.

  Logically, kids in individualist cultures acquire ToM later than collectivist-culture kids and activate pertinent circuits more to achieve the same degree of competence. For a collectivist child, social competence is all about taking someone else’s perspective.55

  Interestingly, kids in (collectivist) Japan play more violent video games than do American kids, yet are less aggressive. Moreover, exposing Japanese kids to media violence boosts aggression less than in American kids.56 Why the difference? Three possible contributing factors: (a) American kids play alone more often, a lone-wolf breeding ground; (b) Japanese kids rarely have a computer or TV in their bedroom, so they play near their parents; (c) Japanese video-game violence is more likely to have prosocial, collectivist themes.

  More in chapter 9 on collectivist versus individualist cultures.

  Cultures of Honor

  These cultures emphasize rules of civility, courtesy, and hospitality. Taking retribution is expected for affronts to the honor of one’s self, family, or clan; failing to do so is shameful. These are cultures filled with vendettas, revenge, and honor killings; cheeks aren’t turned. A classic culture of honor is the American South, but as we’ll see in chapter 9, such cultures occur worldwide and with certain ecological correlates. A particularly lethal combo is when a culture of victimization—we were wronged last week, last decade, last millennium—is coupled with a culture of honor’s ethos of retribution.

  Parenting in cultures of honor tends to be authoritarian.57 Kids are aggressive, partic
ularly following honor violations, and staunchly endorse aggressive responses to scenarios of honor violation.

  Class Differences

  As noted, an infant baboon learns her place in the hierarchy from her mother. A human child’s lessons about status are more complex—there is implicit cuing, subtle language cues, the cognitive and emotional weight of remembering the past (“When your grandparents emigrated here they couldn’t even . . .”) and hoping about the future (“When you grow up, you’re going to . . .”). Baboon mothers teach their young appropriate behavioral context; human parents teach their young what to bother dreaming about.

  Class differences in parenting in Western countries resemble parenting differences between Western countries and those in the developing world. In the West a parent teaches and facilitates her child exploring the world. In the toughest corners of the developing world, little more is expected than the awesome task of keeping your child alive and buffered from the menacing world.*

  In Western cultures, class differences in parenting sort by Baumrind’s typologies. In higher-SES strata, parenting tends to be authoritative or permissive. In contrast, parenting in society’s lower-SES rungs is typically authoritarian, reflecting two themes. One concerns protecting. When are higher-SES parents authoritarian? When there is danger. “Sweetie, I love that you question things, but if you run into the street and I scream ‘Stop,’ you stop.” A lower-SES childhood is rife with threat. The other theme is preparing the child for the tough world out there—for the poor, adulthood consists of the socially dominant treating them in an authoritarian manner.

  Class differences in parenting were explored in a classic study by the anthropologist Adrie Kusserow of St. Michael’s College, who did fieldwork observing parents in three tribes—wealthy families on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; a stable, blue-collar community; and a poor, crime-ridden one (the last two both in Queens).58 The differences were fascinating.