Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Then there’s the high-warmth/low-competence categorization—the mentally disabled, people with handicaps, the elderly.* And the categorization of low warmth/high competence. It’s how people in the developing world tend to view the European culture that used to rule them,* and how many minority Americans view whites. It’s the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, and of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (and, to a lesser extent, of rich people by poorer people everywhere). And it’s the same derogation—they’re cold, greedy, cleverly devious, clannish, don’t assimilate,* have loyalties elsewhere—but, dang, they sure know how to make money, and you probably should go to one who is a doctor if you have something serious.

  People tend toward consistent feelings evoked by each of the extremes. For high warmth, high competence (i.e., Us), there’s pride. Low warmth, high competence—envy. High warmth, low competence—pity. Low warmth, low competence—disgust. Stick someone in a brain scanner, show them pictures of low-warmth/low-competence people, and there’s activation of the amygdala and insula but not of the fusiform face area or the (emotional) vmPFC—a profile evoked by viewing disgusting objects (although, once again, this pattern shifts if you get subjects to individuate, asking them to think about what food this homeless person likes, rather than “anything they can find in garbage cans”).* In contrast, viewing low-warmth/high-competence or high-warmth/low-competence individuals activates the vmPFC.

  The places between the extremes evoke their own characteristic responses. Individuals who evoke a reaction between pity and pride evoke a desire to help them. Floating between pity and disgust is a desire to exclude and demean. Between pride and envy is a desire to associate, to derive benefits from. And between envy and disgust are our most hostile urges to attack.

  What fascinates me is when someone’s categorization changes. The most straightforward ones concern shifts from high-warmth/high-competence (HH) status:

  HH to HL: This is watching a parent decline into dementia, a situation evoking extremes of poignant protectiveness.

  HH to LH: This is the business partner who turns out to have been embezzling for decades. Betrayal.

  And the rare transition from HH to LL—a buddy who made partner in your law firm, but then “something happened” and now he’s homeless. Disgust mingled with bafflement—what went wrong?

  Equally interesting are shifts from other categorizations. There’s when you shift your perception of someone from HL to LL—the janitor whom you condescendingly greet each day turns out to think you’re a jerk. Ingrate.

  There’s the shift from LL to LH. When I was a kid in the sixties, the parochial American view of Japan was LL—the shadow of World War II generating dislike and contempt—“Made in Japan” was about cheap plastic gewgaws. And then, suddenly, “Made in Japan” meant outcompeting American car and steel manufacturers. Whoa. A sense of alarm, of being caught napping at your post.

  Then there’s the shift from LL to HL. This is when a homeless guy finds someone’s wallet and does cartwheels to return it—and you realize that he’s more decent than half your friends.

  Most interesting to me is the transition from LH status to LL, which invokes gloating, glee, schadenfreude. I remember a great example of this in the 1970s, when Nigeria nationalized its oil industry and there was the (delusionally misplaced, it turns out) belief that this would usher in wealth and stability. I recall a Nigerian commentator crowing that within the decade, Nigeria would be sending foreign aid to its ex–colonial overlord, Great Britain (i.e., Brits would be shifting from LH to LL).

  The glee explains a feature of persecution of LH out-groups, namely to first degrade and humiliate them to LL. During China’s Cultural Revolution, resented elites were first paraded in dunce caps before being shipped to labor camps. Nazis eliminated the mentally ill, already LL, by unceremoniously murdering them; in contrast, premurder treatment of the LH Jews involved forcing them to wear degrading yellow armbands, to cut one another’s beards, to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes before jeering crowds. When Idi Amin expelled tens of thousands of LH Indo-Pakistani citizens from Uganda, he first invited his army to rob, beat, and rape them. Turning LH Thems into LL Thems accounts for some of the worst human savagery.

  These variations are sure more complicated than chimps associating rivals with spiders.

  One strange human domain is the phenomenon of developing a grudging respect, even a sense of camaraderie, with an enemy. This is the world of the probably-apocryphal mutual respect between opposing World War I flying aces: “Ah, monsieur, if it were another time, I would delight in discussing aeronautics with you over some good wine.” “Baron, it is an honor that it is you who shoots me out of the sky.”

  This one’s easy to understand—these were knights, dueling to the gallant death, their Us-ness being their shared mastery of the new art of aerial combat, soaring above the little people below.

  But surprisingly, the same is shown by combatants who, instead of soaring, were cannon fodder, faceless cogs in their nation’s war machine. In the words of a British infantry grunt serving in the bloodbath of trench warfare in World War I, “At home one abuses the enemy, and draws insulting caricatures. How tired I am of grotesque Kaisers. Out here, one can respect a brave, skillful, and resourceful enemy. They have people they love at home, they too have to endure mud, rain and steel.” Whispers of Us-ness with people trying to kill you.58

  And then there is the even stranger world of differing feelings about the economic versus the cultural enemy, the relatively new enemy versus the ancient one, or the distant alien enemy versus the neighboring enemy whose miniscule differences have been inflated. These are the differing subjugations that the British Empire inflicted on the Irish next door versus on Australian aborigines. Or Ho Chi Minh, rejecting the offer of Chinese troops on the ground during the Vietnam War, with a statement to the effect of “The Americans will leave in a year or a decade, but the Chinese will stay for a thousand years if we let them in.” And what’s most pertinent about byzantine Iranian geopolitics—the millennia-old Persian antipathy toward the Mesopotamians next door, the centuries-old Shiite conflicts with Sunnis, or the decades-old Islamic hatred of the Great Satan, the West?*

  No discussion of the oddities of human Us/Them-ing is complete without the phenomenon of the self-hating ________ (take your pick of the out-group), where out-group members buy into the negative stereotypes and develop favoritism for the in-group.59 This was shown by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in their famed “doll studies,” begun in the 1940s. They demonstrated with shocking clarity that African American children, along with white children, preferred to play with white dolls over black ones, ascribing more positive attributes (e.g., nice, pretty) to them. That this effect was most pronounced in black kids in segregated schools was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.* Roughly 40 to 50 percent of African Americans, gays and lesbians, and women show automatic IAT biases in favor of whites, heterosexuals, and men, respectively.

  Some of My Best Friends

  The “honorable enemy” phenomenon raises another domain of human peculiarity. Even if he could, no chimp would ever deny that the neighboring chimps remind him of spiders. None would feel bad about it, urge others to overcome that tendency, teach their children to never call one of those neighboring chimps a “spider.” None would proclaim that he can’t distinguish between Us chimps and Them chimps. And these are all commonplace in progressive Western cultures.

  Young humans are like chimps—six-year-olds not only prefer to be with kids like themselves (by whatever criteria) but readily say so. It isn’t until around age ten that kids learn that some feelings and thoughts about Thems are expressed only at home, that communication about Us/Them is charged and contextual.60

  Thus there can be striking discrepancies in Us/Them relations between what people claim they believe
and how they act—consider differences between election poll results and election results. This is shown experimentally as well—in one depressing study, subjects claimed they’d be very likely to proactively confront someone expressing racist views; yet actual rates were far lower when they were unknowingly put in that position (note—this is not to say that this reflected racist sentiments; instead it likely reflected social-norm inhibitions being stronger than the subjects’ principles).61

  Attempts to control and repress Us/Them antipathies have the frontal cortex written all over them. As we saw, a subliminal fifty-millisecond exposure to the face of another can activate the amygdala, and if exposure is long enough for conscious detection (about five hundred milliseconds or more), the initial amygdala activation is followed by PFC activation and amygdala damping; the more PFC activation, particularly of the “cognitive” dlPFC, the more amygdala silencing. It’s the PFC regulating discomfiting emotions.62

  Behavioral data also implicate the frontal cortex. For example, for the same degree of implicit racial prejudice (as shown with the IAT), the bias is more likely to be expressed behaviorally in individuals with poor frontal executive control (as shown with an abstract cognitive task).63

  Chapter 2 introduced the concept of “cognitive load,” where a taxing frontal executive task diminishes performance on a subsequent frontal task. This occurs with Us/Them-ing. White subjects do better on certain behavior tests when the tester is white as opposed to black; subjects whose performance declines most dramatically in the latter scenario show the greatest dlPFC activation when viewing other-race faces.64

  The cognitive load generated by frontal executive control during interracial interactions can be modulated. If white subjects are told, “Most people are more prejudiced than they think they are,” before taking the test with a black tester, performance plummets more than if they are told, “Most people perform worse [on a frontal cortical cognitive test] than they think they did.” Moreover, if white subjects are primed with a command reeking of frontal regulation (“avoid prejudice” during an interracial interaction), performance declines more than when they are told to “have a positive intercultural exchange.”65

  A different type of executive control can occur in minority Thems when dealing with individuals of the dominant culture—be certain to interact with them in a positive manner, to counter their assumed prejudice against you. In one startling study African American subjects were primed to think about either racial or age prejudice, followed by an interaction with someone white.66 When the prime was racial, subjects became more talkative, solicited the other person’s opinion more, smiled more, and leaned forward more; the same didn’t occur when subjects interacted with another African American. Think about chapter 3’s African American grad student intentionally whistling Vivaldi each evening on the way home.

  Two points are worth making about these studies about executive control and interactions with Thems:

  Frontal cortical activation during an interracial interaction could reflect: (a) being prejudiced and trying to hide it; (b) being prejudiced and feeling bad about it; (c) feeling no prejudice and working to communicate that; (d) who knows what else. Activation merely implies that the interracial nature of the interaction is weighing on the subject (implicitly or otherwise) and prompting executive control.

  As per usual, subjects in these studies were mostly university students fulfilling some Psych 101 requirement. In other words, individuals of an age associated with openness to novelty, residing in a privileged place where Us/Them cultural and economic differences are less than in society at large, and where there is not only institutionalized celebration of diversity but also some actual diversity (beyond the university’s home page with the obligatory picture of smiling, conventionally good-looking students of all races and ethnicities peering in microscopes plus, for good measure, a cheerleader type fawning over a nerdy guy in a wheelchair). That even this population demonstrates more implicit antipathy to Thems than they like to admit is pretty depressing.

  MANIPULATING THE EXTENT OF US/THEM-ING

  What situations lessen or exacerbate Us/Them-ing? (I define “lessen” as decreased antipathy toward Thems and/or decreased perception of the size or importance of contrasts between Us and Them. Here are some brief summaries, a warm-up for the final two chapters.

  The Subterranean Forces of Cuing and Priming

  Subliminally flash a picture of a hostile and/or aggressive face, and people are subsequently more likely to perceive a Them as the same (an effect that does not occur in-group).67 Prime subjects subliminally with negative stereotypes of Thems, and you exacerbate Them-ing. As noted in chapter 3, amygdala activation* in white subjects seeing black faces is increased if rap music is playing in the background and lessened if music associated with negative white stereotypes—heavy metal—is played instead. Moreover, implicit racial bias is lessened after subliminal exposure to counterstereotypes—faces of popular celebrities of that race.

  Such priming can work within seconds to minutes and can persist; for example, the counterstereotype effect lasted at least twenty-four hours.68 Priming can also be extraordinarily abstract and subtle. An example concerned differences in electroencephalographic (EEG) responses in the brain when looking at same- versus different-race faces. In the study the other-race response lessened if subjects unconsciously felt they were drawing the person toward them—if they were pulling a joystick toward themselves (versus pushing it away) at the time.

  Finally, priming is not equally effective at altering all domains of Them-ing; it is easier to subliminally manipulate warmth than competence ratings.

  These can be powerful effects. And to be more than merely semantic, the malleability of automatic responses (e.g., of the amygdala) shows that “automatic” does not equal “inevitable.”

  The Conscious, Cognitive Level

  Various overt strategies have been found to decrease implicit biases. A classic one is perspective taking, which enhances identification with Them. For example, in a study concerning age bias, having subjects take the perspective of older individuals more effectively reduced bias than merely instructing subjects to inhibit stereotypical thoughts. Another is to consciously focus on counterstereotypes. In one such study automatic sexual biases were lessened more when men were instructed to imagine a strong woman with positive attributes, than when they were instructed to attempt stereotype suppression. Another strategy is to make implicit biases explicit—show people evidence of their automatic biases. More to come concerning these strategies.69

  Changing the Rank Ordering of Us/Them Categories

  This refers to the multiple Us/Them dichotomies we carry and the ease of shifting their priority—shifting automatic categorizing by race to categorizing by shirt color or manipulating math performance by emphasizing either gender or ethnicity. Shifting which categorization is at the forefront isn’t necessarily a great thing and may just constitute six of one, half a dozen of the other—for example, among European American men, a photograph of an Asian woman applying makeup makes gender automaticity stronger than ethnic automaticity, while a picture of her using chopsticks does the opposite. More effective than getting people to shift a Them of one category into merely another type of Them, of course, is to shift the Them to being perceived as an Us—emphasizing attributes in common.70 Which brings us to . . .

  Contact

  In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport proposed “contact theory.”71 Inaccurate version: if you bring Us-es and Thems together (say, teenagers from two hostile nations brought together in a summer camp), animosities disappear, similarities become more important than differences, and everyone becomes an Us. More accurate version: put Us-es and Thems together under very narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things.

  Some of those effective narrower circumstances: there are roughly equal numbers from each side; everyone�
��s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral, benevolent territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a task they care about (say, the summer campers turning an overgrown meadow into a soccer field).72

  Essentialism Versus Individuation

  This harks back to two important earlier points. First, that Thems tend to be viewed as homogeneous, simple, and having an unchangeable (and negative) essence. Second, that being forced to think of a Them as an individual can make them seem more like an Us. Decreasing essentialist thinking via individuation is a powerful tool.

  One elegant study showed this. White subjects were given a questionnaire assessing the extent of their acceptance of racial inequalities, after being given one of two primes.73 The first bolstered essentialist thinking about race as invariant and homogeneous—“Scientists pinpoint the genetic underpinnings of race.” The other prime was antiessentialist—“Scientists reveal that race has no genetic basis.” Being primed toward essentialism made subjects more accepting of racial inequalities.

  Hierarchy

  Predictably, making hierarchies steeper, more consequential, or more overt worsens Them-ing; the need for justification fuels those on top to pour the stereotypes of, at best, high warmth/low competence or, worse, low warmth/low competence onto the heads of those struggling at the bottom, and those on the bottom reciprocate with the simmering time bomb that is the perception of the ruling class as low warmth/high competence.74 Fiske has explored how those on top perceiving the underclass as high warmth/low competence can stabilize the status quo; the powerful feel self-congratulatory about their presumed benevolence, while the subordinated are placated by the sops of respect. Supporting this, across thirty-seven countries, higher levels of income inequality correlate with more of the condescension of HL perceptions trickling down. Jost has explored this in a related way, examining how myths of “No one has it all” can reinforce the status quo. For example, the cultural trope of “poor but happy”—the poor are more carefree, more in touch with and able to enjoy the simple things in life—and the myth of the rich as unhappy, stressed, and burdened with responsibility (think of miserable, miserly Scrooge and those warm, loving Cratchits) are great ways to keep things from changing. The trope of “poor but honest,” by throwing a sop of prestige to Thems, is another great means of rationalizing the system.*