Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  A Really Odd Thing That We Do Now and Then

  Amid the unique features of human hierarchies, one of the most distinctive and recent is this business of having leaders and choosing who they are.

  As discussed, outdated primatology confused high rank with “leadership” in silly ways. An alpha male baboon is not a leader; he just gets the best stuff. And while everyone follows a knowledgeable old female when she chooses her foraging route in the morning, there is every indication that she is “going” rather than “leading.”

  But humans have leaders, anchored in the unique notion of the common good. What counts as the common good, and the leader’s role in fostering it, obviously varies, ranging from leading the horde in the siege of a castle to leading a bird-watching walk.

  Even more newfangled is humans choosing their leaders, whether selecting a clan head by acclamation around the campfire, or a three-year-long presidential campaign season topped with the bizarreness of the Electoral College. How do we choose leaders?

  A frequent conscious component of decision making is to vote for experience or competence rather than for stances on specific issues. This is so common that in one study faces judged to look more competent won elections 68 percent of the time.26 People also make conscious voting choices based on single, potentially irrelevant issues (e.g., voting for assistant county dogcatcher based on the candidates’ stances on drone warfare in Pakistan). And then there’s the facet of American decision making that baffles citizens of other democracies, namely voting for “likability.” Just consider Bush v. Kerry in 2004, where Republican pundits suggested that people’s choice for the most powerful position on earth should reflect which guy you’d rather have a beer with.

  At least as interesting are the automatic and unconscious elements of decision making. As probably the strongest factor, of candidates with identical political stances, people are more likely to vote for the better-looking one. Given the preponderance of male candidates and officeholders, this mostly translates into voting for masculine traits—tall, healthy-looking, symmetrical features, high forehead, prominent brow ridges, jutting jaw.27

  As first raised in chapter 3, this fits into the larger phenomenon of attractive people typically being rated as having better personalities and higher moral standards and as being kinder, more honest, more friendly, and more trustworthy. And they are treated better—for the same résumé, being more likely to be hired; for the same job, getting a higher salary; for the same crime, being less likely to be convicted. This is the beauty-is-good stereotype, summarized in an 1882 quote by Friedrich Schiller: “Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty.”28 This is the flip side of the view that disfigurement, illness, and injury are karmic payback for one’s sins. And as we saw in chapter 3, we use the same circuitry in the orbitofrontal PFC when we evaluate the moral goodness of an act and the beauty of a face.

  Other implicit factors come into play. One study examined the campaign speeches of candidates in every prime minister election in Australian history.29 In 80 percent of elections the winner was the one to use more collective pronouns (i.e., “we” and “us”), suggesting an attraction to candidates who speak on everyone’s behalf.

  There are also contingent automatic preferences. For example, in scenarios concerning war, both Western and East Asian subjects prefer candidates with older, more masculine faces; during peacetime, it’s younger, more feminine faces. Furthermore, in scenarios involving fostering cooperation between groups, intelligent-looking faces are preferred; at other times more intelligent faces are viewed as less masculine or desirable.30

  These automatic biases fall into place early in life. One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.31

  Scientists doing these studies often speculate as to why such preferences have evolved; frankly, much of this feels like just-so stories. For example, in analyzing the preference for leaders with more masculine faces during war, the authors noted that high testosterone levels produce both more masculine facial features (generally true) and more aggressive behavior (not true, back to chapter 4), and that aggressiveness is what you want in a leader during times of war (personally, not so sure about that one). Thus, preferring candidates with more masculine faces increases the odds of landing the aggressive leader you need to triumph in war. And everyone then passes on more copies of their genes. Voilà.

  Regardless of causes, the main point is the power of these forces—five-year-olds with 71 percent accuracy demonstrate that these are some very generalized, deeply entrenched biases. And then our conscious cognitions play catch-up to make our decision seems careful and wise.

  OH, WHY NOT TAKE THIS ONE ON? POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS

  So humans keep getting weirder—multiple hierarchies and having leaders and occasionally choosing them and doing so with some silly, implicit criteria. Now let’s plunge into politics.

  Frans de Waal introduced the term “politics” into primatology with his classic book Chimpanzee Politics, using it in the sense of “Machiavellian intelligence”—nonhuman primates struggling in socially complex manners to control access to resources. The book documents chimpanzee genius for such maneuvering.

  This is “politics” in the traditional human sense as well. But I will use a more restricted, starry-eyed sense, which is politics being the struggle among the powerful with differing visions of the common good. Forget liberals accusing conservatives of waging war on the poor. Ditto conservatives accusing those depraved liberals of destroying family values. Cutting through this posturing, we’ll assume that everyone equally desires that people do as well as possible, but differs as to how best to accomplish this. In this section we’ll focus on three issues:

  Do political orientations tend to be internally consistent (e.g., do people’s opinions about their town’s littering policy and about military actions in Somewhere-istan come as an ideological package)? Quick answer: usually.

  Do such consistent orientations arise from deep, implicit factors with remarkably little to do with specific political issues? Yup.

  Can one begin to detect the bits of biology underlying these factors? Of course.

  The Internal Consistency of Political Orientation

  The previous chapter examined the remarkable consistency in Us/Them orientations—people who dislike a particular out-group on economic grounds are likelier than chance to dislike another group on historical grounds, another on cultural, and so on.32 Much the same is true here—social, economic, environmental, and international political orientations tend to come in a package. This consistency explains the humor behind a New Yorker cartoon (pointed out by the political psychologist John Jost) showing a woman modeling a dress for her husband and asking, “Does this dress make me look Republican?” Another example concerns the bioethicist Leon Kass, who not only has had influential conservative stances on human cloning, finding the possibility “repugnant,” but also finds it repugnant when people display the “catlike activity” of licking ice cream cones in public. More to come on his issues, including with licking ice cream cones. What this internal consistency suggests is that political ideology is merely one manifestation of broader, underlying ideology—as we’ll see, this helps explain conservatives being more likely than liberals to have cleaning supplies in their bedrooms.

  Naturally, strict consistency in political ideology isn’t always the rule. Libertarians are a mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism; conversely, black Baptist churches are traditionally economically liberal but socially conservative (for example, rejecting both gay rights and the idea that gay rights are a form of civil rights). Moreover, neither extreme of political ideology is monolithic (and ignoring that, I’ll be simplifying throughout by using “liberal” and “left
-wing” interchangeably, as well as “conservative” and “right-wing”).

  Nonetheless, the building blocks of political orientation tend to be stable and internally consistent. It’s usually possible to dress like a Republican or lick ice cream like a Democrat.

  Implicit Factors Underlying Political Orientation

  If political ideology is but one manifestation of larger internal forces pertinent to everything from cleaning supplies in the bedroom to ice cream consumption, are there psychological, affective, cognitive, and visceral ways in which leftists and rightists tend to differ? This question has produced deeply fascinating findings; I’ll try to corral them into some categories.

  INTELLIGENCE

  Oh, what the hell? Let’s begin with something inflammatory. Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology.33 Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). One particularly thorough demonstration of this involved more than fifteen thousand subjects in the UK and United States; importantly, the links among low IQ, RWA, and intergroup prejudice were there after controlling for education and socioeconomic status. The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

  INTELLECTUAL STYLE

  This literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable intellectually with ambiguity; this is covered below. The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls “integrative complexity.”

  In one study conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head.34

  This differing attributional style extends way beyond politics. Tell liberals or conservatives about a guy who trips over someone’s feet while learning a dance, ask for a snap assessment, and everyone does personal attribution—the guy’s clumsy. It’s only with time that the liberals go situational—maybe the dance is really difficult.

  Obviously this dichotomy isn’t perfect. Rightists did personal attribution for Lewinsky-gate (Bill Clinton’s rotten) while leftists did situational (it’s a vast right-wing conspiracy), and things ran the opposite with Nixon and Watergate. However, they are pretty reliable.

  Why the difference? Liberals and conservatives are equally capable of thinking past gut personal attributions to subtler situational ones—when asked to do so, both are equally adept at dispassionately presenting the viewpoints of the opposite camp. It’s that liberals are more motivated to push toward situational explanations.

  Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance.

  Proportion of rulings in favor of the prisoner s by ordinal position. Circled points indicate the first decision in each of the three decision sessions; tick marks on x axis denote every third case; dotted line denotes food break. Because unequal session lengths resulted in a low number of cases for some of the later ordinal positions, the graph is based on the first 95% of the data from each session.

  While logical, this just turfs us to asking where the liberal ideology causing the dissonance comes from in the first place. As we’ll see, it comes from factors having little to do with cognitive style.

  These findings suggest that it’s easier to make a liberal think like a conservative than the other way around.35 Or, stated in a familiar way, increasing cognitive load* should make people more conservative. This is precisely the case. The time pressure of snap judgments is a version of increased cognitive load. Likewise, people become more conservative when tired, in pain or distracted with a cognitive task, or when blood alcohol levels rise.

  Recall from chapter 3 that willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games. A real-world example of this is startling (see graph on previous page)—in a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings, prisoners were granted parole at about a 60 percent rate when judges had recently eaten, and at essentially a 0 percent rate just before judges ate (note also the overall decline over the course of a tiring day). Justice may be blind, but she’s sure sensitive to her stomach gurgling.36

  MORAL COGNITION

  Another minefield. Surprise, people at both ends of the political spectrum accuse the other side of impoverished moral thought.37 One direction of this is seemingly bolstered by chapter 7’s Kohlberg stages of moral development. Liberals, steeped in civil disobedience, tend to be at a “higher” Kohlberg stage than are conservatives, with their fondness for law and order. Are rightists less intellectually capable of reasoning at a more advanced Kohlberg stage, or are they less motivated to do so? Seemingly the latter—rightists and leftists are equally capable of presenting the other’s perspective.

  Jonathan Haidt of NYU provides a very different view.38 He identifies six foundations of morality—care versus harm; fairness versus cheating; liberty versus oppression; loyalty versus betrayal; authority versus subversion; sanctity versus degradation. Both experimental and real-world data show that liberals preferentially value the first three goals, namely care, fairness, and liberty (and, showing an overlap with Kohlbergian formulations, undervaluing loyalty, authority, and sanctity is in many ways synonymous with postconventional thinking). In contrast, conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Obviously, this is a big difference. Is it okay to criticize your group to outsiders? Rightists: no, that’s disloyal. Leftists: yes, if justified. Should you ever disobey a law? Rightists: no, that undermines authority. Leftists: of course, if it’s a bad law. Is it okay to burn the flag? Rightists: never, it’s sacred. Leftists: come on, it’s a piece of cloth.

  These differing emphases explain a lot—for example, the classical liberal view is that everyone has equal rights to happiness; rightists instead discount fairness in favor of expedient authority, generating the classical conservative view that some socioeconomic inequality is a tolerable price for things running smoothly.

  What does it mean that, in Haidt’s view, conservatives count up six (moral foundations) on their toes and liberals only three? Here is where internecine sniping starts. Conservatives embrace Haidt’s characterization of liberals as being morally impoverished, with half their moral foundations atrophied.* The opposite interpretation, espoused by Jost, and Joshua Greene of Harvard, is that liberals have more refined moral foundations, having jettisoned the less important, more historically damaging ones that conservatives perseverate on—in effect, liberals count from one to three, while conservatives really only count four to six.

  Why are conservatives more concerned with “binding foundations” like loyalty, authority, and sanctity, often stepping-stones to right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation? This segues to the next section.

  AFFECTIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES

  Research consistently shows that leftists and rightists differ in overlapping categories of emotional makeup. To summarize: on the average, rightists are made more anxious by ambiguity and have a stronger need for closure
, dislike novelty, are more comforted by structure and hierarchy, more readily perceive circumstances as threatening, and are more parochial in their empathy.

  The conservative dislike of ambiguity has been demonstrated in numerous apolitical contexts (e.g., responses to visual illusions, taste in entertainment) and is closely related to the differing feelings about novelty, which by definition evokes ambiguity and uncertainty.39 The differing views of novelty certainly explain the liberal view that with correct reforms, our best days are ahead of us in a novel future, whereas conservatives view our best days as behind us, in familiar circumstances that should be returned to, to make things great again. Once again, these differences in psychological makeup play out in apolitical realms as well—liberals are more likely to own travel books than are conservatives.

  The conservative need for predictability and structure obviously fuels the emphases on loyalty, obedience, and law and order.40 It also gives insights into a puzzling feature of the political landscape: how is it that over the last fifty years, Republicans have persuaded impoverished white Americans to so often vote against their own economic self-interest? Do they actually believe that they’re going to win the lottery and then get to enjoy the privileged side of American inequality? Nah. The psychological issues of needing structured familiarity show that for poor whites, voting Republican constitutes an implicit act of system justification and risk aversion. Better to resist change and deal with the devil that you know. Harking back to the last chapter, gay conservatives show more implicit antigay biases than do gay liberals. Better to hate who you are, if that bolsters a system whose stability and predictability are sources of comfort.