Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  A fascinating 2014 Science paper strengthens the rice/collectivism connection by exploring an exception.22 In parts of northern China it’s difficult to grow rice, and instead people have grown wheat for millennia; this involves individual rather than collective farming. And by the standard tests of individualist versus collectivist cultures (e.g., draw a sociogram, which two are most similar of a rabbit, dog, and carrot?)—they look like Westerners. The region has two other markers of individualism, namely higher rates of divorce and of inventiveness—patent filings—than in rice-growing regions. The roots of individualism, likes those of wheat, run deep in northern China.

  The links between ecology, mode of production, and culture are shown in a rare collectivist/individualist study not comparing Asians and Westerners.23 The authors studied a Turkish region on the Black Sea, where mountains hug the coastline. There, in close proximity, people live by fishing, by farming the narrow ribbon of land between the sea and the mountains, or as mountain shepherds. All three groups had the same language, religion, and gene stock.

  Herding is solitary; while Turkish farmers and fishermen (and women) were no Chinese rice farmers, they at least worked their fields in groups and manned their fishing boats in crews. Herders thought less holistically than farmers or fishermen—the former were better at judging absolute length of lines, the other two at relative judgments; when shown a glove, a scarf, and a hand, herders grouped gloves and scarves categorically, while the others grouped relationally, pairing gloves and hands. In the authors’ words, “social interdependence fosters holistic thinking.”

  This theme appears in another study, comparing Jewish boys from either observant Orthodox homes (dominated by endless shared rules about beliefs and behaviors) with ones from far more individualist secular homes. Visual processing was more holistic in the Orthodox, more focused in the secular.24

  The East Asian/Western collectivist/individualist dichotomy has a fascinating genetic correlate.25 Recall from the last chapter dopamine and DRD4, the gene for the D4 receptor. It’s extraordinarily variable, with at least twenty-five human variants (with lesser variability in other primates). Moreover, the variation isn’t random, inconsequential drift of DNA sequences; instead there has been strong positive selection for variants. Most common is the 4R variant, occurring in about half of East Asians and European Americans. There’s also the 7R variant, producing a receptor less responsive to dopamine in the cortex, associated with novelty seeking, extroversion, and impulsivity. It predates modern humans but became dramatically more common ten to twenty thousand years ago. The 7R variant occurs in about 23 percent of Europeans and European Americans. And in East Asians? 1 percent.

  Y. Ding et al., “Evidence of Positive Selection Acting at the Human Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene Locus,” PNAS 99 (2002): 309.

  Visit bit.ly/2nsuHz9 for a larger version of this graph.

  So which came first, 7R frequency or cultural style? The 4R and 7R variants, along with the 2R, occur worldwide, implying they already existed when humans radiated out of Africa 60,000 to 130,000 years ago. Classic work by Kenneth Kidd of Yale, examining the distribution of 7R, shows something remarkable.

  Starting at the left of the figure above, there’s roughly a 10 to 25 percent incidence of 7R in various African, European, and Middle Eastern populations. Jumping to the right side of the figure, there’s a slightly higher incidence among the descendants of those who started island-hopping from mainland Asia to Malaysia and New Guinea. The same for folks whose ancestors migrated to North America via the Bering land bridge about fifteen thousand years ago—the Muskoke, Cheyenne, and Pima tribes of Native Americans. Then the Maya in Central America—up to around 40 percent. Then the Guihiba and Quechua of the northern parts of South America, at around 55 percent. Finally there are the descendants of folks who made it all the way to the Amazon basin—the Ticuna, Surui, and Karitiana—with a roughly 70 percent incidence of 7R, the highest in the world. In other words, the descendants of people who, having made it to the future downtown Anchorage, decided to just keep going for another six thousand miles.* A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history.

  And then in the middle of the chart is the near-zero incidence of 7R in China, Cambodia, Japan, and Taiwan (among the Ami and Atayal). When East Asians domesticated rice and invented collectivist society, there was massive selection against the 7R variant; in Kidd’s words, it was “nearly lost” in these populations.* Maybe the bearers of 7R broke their necks inventing hang gliding or got antsy and tried to walk to Alaska but drowned because there was no longer a Bering land bridge. Maybe they were less desirable mates. Regardless of the cause, East Asian cultural collectivism coevolved with selection against the 7R variant.*

  Thus, in this most studied of cultural contrasts, we see clustering of ecological factors, modes of production, cultural differences, and differences in endocrinology, neurobiology, and gene frequencies.* The cultural contrasts appear in likely ways—e.g., morality, empathy, child-rearing practices, competition, cooperation, definitions of happiness—but also in unexpected ones—e.g., where, within milliseconds, your eyes look at a picture, or you’re thinking about bunnies and carrots.

  PASTORALISTS AND SOUTHERNERS

  Another important link among ecology, mode of production, and culture is seen in dry, hardscrabble, wide-open environments too tough for agriculture. This is the world of nomadic pastoralism—people wandering the desert, steppes, or tundra with their herds.

  There are Bedouins in Arabia, Tuareg in North Africa, Somalis and Maasai in East Africa, Sami of northern Scandinavia, Gujjars in India, Yörük in Turkey, Tuvans of Mongolia, Aymara in the Andes. There are herds of sheep, goats, cows, llamas, camels, yaks, horses, or reindeer, with the pastoralists living off their animals’ meat, milk, and blood and trading their wool and hides.

  Anthropologists have long noted similarities in pastoralist cultures born of their tough environments and the typically minimal impact of centralized government and the rule of law. In that isolated toughness stands a central fact of pastoralism: thieves can’t steal the crops on someone’s farm or the hundreds of edible plants eaten by hunter-gatherers, but they can steal someone’s herd. This is the vulnerability of pastoralism, a world of rustlers and raiders.

  This generates various correlates of pastoralism:26

  Militarism abounds. Pastoralists, particularly in deserts, with their far-flung members tending the herds, are a spawning ground for warrior classes. And with them typically come (a) military trophies as stepping-stones to societal status; (b) death in battle as a guarantee of a glorious afterlife; (c) high rates of economic polygamy and mistreatment of women; and (d) authoritarian parenting. It is rare for pastoralists to be pastoral, in the sense of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

  Worldwide, monotheism is relatively rare; to the extent that it does occur, it is disproportionately likely among desert pastoralists (while rain forest dwellers are atypically likely to be polytheistic). This makes sense. Deserts teach tough, singular things, a world reduced to simple, desiccated, furnace-blasted basics that are approached with a deep fatalism. “I am the Lord your God” and “There is but one god and his name is Allah” and “There will be no gods before me”—dictates like these proliferate. As implied in the final quote, desert monotheism does not always come with only one supernatural being—monotheistic religions are replete with angels and djinns and devils. But they sure come with a hierarchy, minor deities paling before the Omnipotent One, who tends to be highly interventionist both in the heavens and on earth. In contrast, think of tropical rain forest, teeming with life, where you can find more species of ants on a single tree than in all of Britain. Letting a hundred deities bloom in equilibrium must seem the most natural thing in the world.

  Pastoralism fosters cultures of honor. As introduced in chapter 7, these are about rules of civil
ity, courtesy, and hospitality, especially to the weary traveler because, after all, aren’t all herders often weary travelers? Even more so, cultures of honor are about taking retribution after affronts to self, family, or clan, and reputational consequences for failing to do so. If they take your camel today and you do nothing, tomorrow they will take the rest of your herd, plus your wives and daughters.*

  Few of humanity’s low or high points are due to the culturally based actions of, say, Sami wandering the north of Finland with their reindeer, or Maasai cow herders in the Serengeti. Instead the most pertinent cultures of honor are ones in more Westernized settings. “Culture of honor” has been used to describe the workings of the Mafia in Sicily, the patterns of violence in rural nineteenth-century Ireland, and the causes and consequences of retributive killings by inner-city gangs. All occur in circumstances of resource competition (including the singular resource of being the last side to do a retributive killing in a vendetta), of a power vacuum provided by the minimal presence of the rule of law, and where prestige is ruinously lost if challenges are left unanswered and where the answer is typically a violent one. Amid those, the most famous example of a Westernized culture of honor is the American South, the subject of books, academic journals, conferences, and Southern studies majors in universities. Much of this work was pioneered by Nisbett.27

  Hospitality, chivalry toward women, and emphasis on social decorum and etiquette are long associated with the South.28 In addition, the South traditionally emphasizes legacy, long cultural memory, and continuity of family—in rural Kentucky in the 1940s, for example, 70 percent of men had the same first name as their father, far more than in the North. When coupled with lesser mobility in the South, honor in need of defense readily extends to family, clan, and place. For example, by the time the Hatfields and McCoys famously began their nearly thirty-year feud in 1863,* they had lived in the same region of the West Virginia/Kentucky border for nearly a century. The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery. Yet when offered the command of the Union Army by Lincoln, Lee wrote, “I wish to live under no other government and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor.” When Virginia chose secession, he regretfully fulfilled his sense of honor to his home and led the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

  In the South, defense of honor was, above all, an act of self-reliance.29 The Southerner Andrew Jackson was advised by his dying mother to never seek redress from the law for any grievances, to instead be a man and take things into his own hands. That he certainly did, with a history of dueling (even fatally) and brawling; on his final day as president, he articulated two regrets in leaving office—that he “had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun.” Carrying out justice personally was viewed as a requirement in the absence of a functional legal system. At best, legal justice and individual justice were in uneasy equilibrium in the nineteenth-century South; in the words of the Southern historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Common law and lynch law were ethically compatible. The first enabled the legal profession to present traditional order, and the second conferred upon ordinary men the prerogative of ensuring that community values held ultimate sovereignty.”

  The core of retribution for honor violations was, of course, violence. Sticks and stones might break your bones, but names will cause you to break the offender’s bones. Dueling was commonplace, the point being not that you were willing to kill but that you were willing to die for your honor. Many a Confederate boy went off to war advised by his mother that better he come back in a coffin than as a coward who fled.

  The result of this all is a long, still-extant history of high rates of violence in the South. But crucially, violence of a particular type. I once heard it summarized by a Southern studies scholar describing the weirdness of leaving the rural South to start grad school in a strange place, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where families would get together at Fourth of July picnics and no one would shoot each other. Nisbett and Dov Cohen have shown that the high rates of violence, particularly of murder, by white Southern males are not features of large cities or about attempts to gain material goods—we’re not talking liquor store stickups. Instead the violence is disproportionately rural, among people who know each other, and concerns slights to honor (that sleazebag cousin thought it was okay to flirt with your wife at the family reunion, so you shot him). Moreover, Southern juries are atypically forgiving of such acts.30

  R. Nisbett and D. Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

  Visit bit.ly/2neHKTg for a larger version of this graph.

  Southern, but not Northern, college studies show strong physiological responses to a social provocation.

  Visit bit.ly/2mNCQ4g for a larger version of this graph.

  Southern violence was explored in one of the all-time coolest psychology studies, involving the use of a word rare in science journals, conducted by Nisbett and Cohen. Undergraduate male subjects had a blood sample taken. They then filled out a questionnaire about something and were then supposed to drop it off down the hall. It was in the narrow hallway, filled with file cabinets, that the experiment happened. Half the subjects traversed the corridor uneventfully. But with half, a confederate (get it? ha-ha) of the psychologists, a big beefy guy, approached from the opposite direction. As the subject and the plant squeezed by each other, the latter would jostle the subject and, in an irritated voice, say the magic word—“asshole”—and march on. Subject would continue down the hall to drop off the questionnaire.

  What was the response to this insult? It depended. Subjects from the South, but not from elsewhere, showed massive increases in levels of testosterone and glucocorticoids—anger, rage, stress. Subjects were then told a scenario where a guy observes a male acquaintance making a pass at his fiancée—what happens next in the story? In control subjects, Southerners were a bit more likely than Northerners to imagine a violent outcome. And after being insulted? No change in Northerners and a massive boost in imagined violence among Southerners.

  Where do these Westernized cultures of honor come from? Violence between the Crips and the Bloods in LA is not readily traced to combatants’ mind-sets from growing up herding yak. Nonetheless, pastoralist roots have been suggested to explain the Southern culture of honor. The theory as first propounded by historian David Hackett Fischer in 1989: Early American regionalism arose from colonists in different parts of America coming from different places.31 There were the Pilgrims from East Anglia in New England. Quakers from North Midlands going to Pennsylvania and Delaware. Southern English indentured servants to Virginia. And the rest of the South? Disproportionately herders from Scotland, Ireland, and northern England.

  Naturally, the idea has some problems. Pastoralists from the British Isles mostly settled in the hill country of the South, whereas the honor culture is stronger in the Southern lowlands. Others have suggested that the Southern ethos of retributive violence was born from the white Southern nightmare scenario of slave uprisings. But most historians have found a lot of validity in Fischer’s idea.

  Violence Turned Inward

  Culture-of-honor violence is not just about outside threat—the camel rustlers from the next tribe, the jerk at the roadhouse who came on to some guy’s girlfriend. Instead it is equally defined by its role when honor is threatened from within. Chapter 11 examines when norm violations by members of your own group provoke cover-ups, excuses, or leniency, and when they provoke severe public punishment. The latter is when “you’ve dishonored us in front of everyone,” a culture-of-honor specialty. Which raises the issue of honor killings.

  What constitutes an honor killing? Someone does something considered to tarnish the reputation of the family. A family member then kills the despoiler, often publicly, thereby r
egaining face. Mind-boggling.

  Some characteristics of honor killings:

  While they have been widespread historically, contemporary ones are mostly restricted to traditional Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities.

  Victims are usually young women.

  Their most common crimes? Refusing an arranged marriage. Seeking to divorce an abusive spouse and/or a spouse to whom they were forcibly married as a child. Seeking education. Resisting constraining religious orthodoxy, such as covering their head. Marrying, living with, dating, interacting with, or speaking to an unapproved male. Infidelity. Religious conversion. In other words, a woman resisting being the property of her male relatives. And also, stunningly, staggeringly, a frequent cause of honor killings is being raped.

  In the rare instances of men being subject to honor killings, the typical cause is homosexuality.