Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Intertwined with these variables is the Left/Right difference in tendency to see things as threatening, particularly when conservatism is anchored in authoritarianism. Life is filled with ambiguity, most of all with the novel future, and if those make you anxious, lots of things will seem threatening. Now, a “threat” can be abstract, such as to your self-esteem; there are few political differences in the perception of such threats. The differences concern concrete threats to your keister.

  This helps explain political stances—“I have a list here of two hundred communist spies working in the State Department” is a pretty good demonstration of imagined threat.* The difference in threat perception can be apolitical. In one study subjects had to rapidly do a task when a word flashed up on a screen. Authoritarian conservatives, but not liberals, responded more rapidly to threatening words like “cancer,” “snake,” or “mugger” than to nonthreatening words (e.g., “telescope,” “tree,” “canteen”). Moreover, as compared with liberals, such conservatives are more likely to associate “arms” with “weapons” (rather than with “legs”), more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening, and more easily conditioned to associate negative (but not positive) stimuli with neutral stimuli. Republicans report three times as many nightmares as do Democrats, particularly ones involving loss of personal power. As the saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.

  Related to this is “terror-management theory,” which suggests that conservatism is psychologically rooted in a pronounced fear of death; supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their mortality makes them more conservative.41

  These differences in threat perception help explain the differing views as to role of government—providing for people (the leftist view; social services, education, etc.) or protecting people (the rightist view; law and order, the military, etc.).*

  Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality—it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers, unburdened by motivated correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and the Left increases.

  As emphasized, political ideology is just one manifestation of intellectual and emotional style. As a great example, a four-year-old’s openness to a new toy predicts how open she’ll be as an adult to, say, the United States forging new relations with Iran or Cuba.43

  And of Course, Some Underlying Biology

  We’ve now seen that political orientation is usually stable and internally consistent across a range of disparate issues, and that it is typically merely one manifestation of a package of cognitive and affective style. Stepping deeper, what are the biological correlates of differing political orientations?

  Back to the insular cortex and its role in mediating gustatory and olfactory disgust in mammals and in mediating moral disgust in humans. Recall from the last chapter how you can reliably stoke hatred of Thems by making them seem viscerally disgusting. When people’s insulae activate at the thought of Thems, you can check one thing off your genocide to-do list.

  This recalls a remarkable finding—stick subjects in a room with a smelly garbage can, and they become more socially conservative.44 If your insula is gagging from the smell of dead fish, you’re more likely to decide that a social practice of an Other that is merely different is, instead, just plain wrong.

  This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding—social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals. In one study subjects were exposed to either positively or negatively charged emotional images,* and galvanic skin resistance (GSR, an indirect measure of sympathetic nervous system arousal) was measured. The biggest autonomic responses to negative (but not positive) emotional images were in conservatives opposed to gay marriage or premarital sex (while GSR response was unrelated to nonsocial issues like free trade or gun control). Concerns about hygiene and purity sure predict valuing of sanctity.45

  Related to that, when confronted with something viscerally disturbing, conservatives are less likely to use reappraisal strategies (e.g., when seeing something gory, thinking, “This isn’t real; it’s staged”). Moreover, when conservatives, but not liberals, are instructed to use reappraisal techniques (e.g., “Try to view the images in a detached, unemotional way”), they express less conservative political sentiments. In contrast, a suppression strategy (“Don’t let your feelings show when you’re looking at this image”) doesn’t work. As we saw, make a liberal tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.46

  Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust. In addition, conservatives are more likely to think that disgust is a good metric for deciding whether something is moral. Which recalls Leon Kass, the bioethicist with the ice cream–licking issues. He headed George W. Bush’s bioethics panel, one that, thanks to Kass’s antiabortion ideology, greatly restricted embryonic stem cell research. Kass has argued for what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance,” where disgust at something like human cloning can be “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond wisdom’s power completely to articulate it.” The visceral level, with or without post-hoc rationalization, is all you need in order to know what’s right. If it makes you puke, then you must rebuke.47

  The monumental flaw is obvious. Different things disgust different people; whose gag reflex wins? Moreover, things once viewed as disgusting are viewed differently now (e.g., the idea of slaves having the same rights as whites would probably have struck most white Americans circa 1800 as not just economically unworkable but disgusting as well). It’s disgusting, the things people weren’t disgusted by in the past. Disgust is a moving target.

  Thus issues anchored in the insula help explain differences in political orientation; this point will be returned to in chapter 17.48 Additional neurobiological differences have been demonstrated. Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of gray matter in the cingulate cortex (with its involvement in empathy), whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala (with, of course, its starring role in threat perception). Moreover, there’s more amygdala activation in conservatives than in liberals when viewing a disgusting image or doing a risky task.

  But not all the findings fit easily. For example, when looking at disgusting images, conservatives also show relatively greater activation of a hodgepodge of other brain regions—the basal ganglia, thalamus, periaqueductal gray, (cognitive) dlPFC, middle/superior temporal gyrus, presupplementary motor, fusiform, and inferior frontal gyrus. How all those fit together isn’t clear.

  Naturally, one must ask: have behavior geneticists reported genetic influences on political orientation? Twin studies report heritability of about 50 percent for political orientation. Genomewide survey approaches have identified genes whose polymorphic variants were associated with political orientation. Most of the genes had no known functions, or were previously thought to be unrelated to the brain; those whose brain-related functions were known (for example, one coded for a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate) don’t teach much about political orientation. As an interesting gene/environment interaction, the “risk-taking” version of the D4 dopamine receptor gene is associated with liberals—but only in people with lots of friends. Moreover, some studies show a genetic association with people’s likelihood of voting, independent of political orientation.49

  Interesting. However, the approach comes with all of chapter 8’s caveats—most findings haven’t been replicated, reported effects are small, and these are published in political science journals rather than genetics journals. Finally, to th
e extent that genes are related to political orientation, links are likely to be via intervening factors, such as the tendency toward anxiety.

  OBEDIENCE AND CONFORMITY, DISOBEDIENCE AND NONCONFORMITY

  So humans have multiple simultaneous hierarchies and hierarchies built around abstractions, and occasionally choose leaders who labor for the common good.50 Add to that obedience to leaders. This is utterly different from a schlub of a baboon obediently surrendering his spot in the shade to the looming alpha male. Instead humans show obedience to authority that transcends any given occupant of a throne (the king is dead; long live the king), to the very notion of authority. Its elements range from loyalty, admiration, and emulation to brownnosing, sycophancy, and instrumental self-interest, and can range from mere compliance (i.e., the public conformity of going along, without actually agreeing) to drinking the Kool-Aid (i.e., identifying with the authority and internalizing and extending its beliefs).

  Obedience is closely intertwined with conformity, a concept central to the previous chapter but considered here. Both consist of going along; the former with the group, the latter with authority. And for us the commonalities are what matter. Moreover, the opposites—disobedience and nonconformity—are also intertwined and range from the independence of marching to a different drummer to the intentionality and mirrored determinism of anticonformity.

  Importantly, these are value-free terms. Conformity can be great—it’s helpful if everyone in a culture agrees on whether shaking your head up and down means yes or no. Conforming is necessary for the benefits of the wisdom of the crowd. And it can be truly comforting. But obviously conformity can be horrendous—joining in on bullying, oppressing, shunning, expelling, killing, just because everyone else is on board.

  Obedience can be swell too, ranging from everyone stopping at stop signs to (to the embarrassment of my pseudoanarchist adolescence) my kids listening when my wife and I say it’s bedtime. And malign obedience obviously underlies “just following orders”—from goose-stepping to Jonestown’s wretched obeying the command to kill their children.

  Roots

  Conformity and obedience have deep roots, as evidenced by their presence in other species and in very young humans.

  Animal conformity is a type of social learning—a subordinate primate does not have to be thrashed by some bruiser in order to express subordination to him; everyone else’s doing so can be sufficient.*51 The conformity has a familiar human tinge to it. For example, a chimp is more likely to copy an action if he sees three other individuals do it once each than if one other individual does it three times.* Moreover, learning can include “cultural transmission”—in chimps, for example, this includes learning types of tool construction. Conformity relates to social and emotional contagion where, say, a primate aggressively targets an individual just because someone else is already doing so. Such contagion even works between groups. For example, among marmosets aggression in a group becomes more likely if aggressive vocalizations are heard from the neighboring group. Other primates are even subject to the social contagion of yawning.*52

  My favorite example of nonhuman conformity is so familiar that it could come right out of high school. A male grouse courts a female who, alas, doesn’t feel magic in the air and rebuffs him. The researchers then make him seem like the hottest stud on the prairie—by surrounding him with some rapt, stuffed female grouse. Soon the reluctant maiden is all over him, pushing her statuesque rivals aside.53

  An even clearer demonstration of animal conformity was shown in a beautiful study of chimpanzees by Frans de Waal. In each of two groups the alpha female was separated from the rest and shown how to open a puzzle box containing food. Crucially, the two were shown different, equally difficult ways of doing it. Once the females had mastered their approaches, the chimps in each group got to watch their alpha female strut her stuff repeatedly with the puzzle box. Finally everyone got access to the puzzle box and promptly copied their alpha’s technique.54

  Thus this is a cool demonstration of the spread of cultural information. But something even more interesting happened. A chimp in the group would occasionally stumble onto the alternative method—and would then abandon it, going back to doing it the “normal” way. Just because everyone else was doing so.* The same phenomenon was subsequently shown in capuchin monkeys and wild birds.

  Thus animals will perform one version of a behavior not because it is better but simply because everyone else does. Even more striking, animal conformity can be detrimental. In a 2013 study Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews presented wild vervet monkeys with two bins of maize, dyed either pink or blue.55 One color tasted fine; the other had a bitter additive. The monkeys learned to avoid the latter and months later still ate only the “safe”-colored maize—even after the additive was omitted.

  As infants were born or adults who had grown up elsewhere migrated into the group, they conformed to this food choice, learning to eat only the same color food as everyone else. In other words, forgoing half the potential food just because of the need to fit in—monkeys joining the herd, acting like sheep, going over the cliff like lemmings. One example starkly displays the same in humans: in life-threatening emergencies (e.g., a restaurant fire), people frequently attempt to escape by following the crowd in what they know to be the wrong direction.

  The deeply ingrained nature of human conformity and obedience in humans is shown by the ages when they are apparent. As detailed in chapter 7, zillions of pages have been written about conformity and peer pressure in kids. One study nicely demonstrates the continuity of conformity between us and other species. This was the report that a chimp was more likely to conform to the behaviors of three individuals doing a behavior once each than to one individual doing the behavior three times. The study showed the same in two-year-old humans.

  The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second.56

  Neural Bases

  This last study raises the question of what occurs in the brain under these circumstances. Our usual cast of brain regions pops up in informative ways.

  The influential “social identity theory” posits that our concept of who we are is heavily shaped by social context—by the groups we do or don’t identify with.*57 In that view, conformity and obedience, while certainly about avoiding punishment, are at least as much about the positives of fitting in. When we imitate someone’s actions, our mesolimbic dopamine system activates.* When we choose incorrectly in a task, the dopaminergic decline is less if we made the decision as part of a group than if we did so as an individual. Belonging is safety.

  In numerous studies a subject in a group answers some question, finds out after that—oh no!—everyone else disagrees, and can then change their answer.58 No surprise, the discovery that you are out of step activates the amygdala and insular cortex; the more activation, the greater your likelihood of changing your mind, and the more persistent the change (as opposed to the transient change of compliant public conformity). This is a profoundly social phenomenon—people are more likely to change their answer if you show them a picture of the person(s) who disagrees with them.

  When you get the news that everyone else disagrees with you, there is also activation of the (emotional) vmPFC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the nucleus accumbens. This is a network mobilized during reinforcement learning, where you learn to modify your behavior when there is a mismatch between what you expected to happen and what actually did. Find out that everyone disagrees with you and this network activates. What is it basically telling you? Not just that you’re different from everyone else. That you’re wrong. Being different = being wrong. The greater the activatio
n of this circuit, the greater the likelihood of changing answers to conform.59

  Like most of the neuroimaging literature, these studies are merely correlative. Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.60

  Back to the contrast between conforming taking the form of “You know what, if everyone says they saw B, I guess I did too; whatever” and its taking the form of “Now that I think about it, I didn’t actually see A; I think I saw B; in fact I’m certain of it.” The latter is associated with activation of the hippocampus, the brain region central to learning and memory—the revisionism involves you literally revising your memory. Remarkably, in another study this process of conforming was also associated with activation of the occipital cortex, the brain region that does the primary processing of vision—you can almost hear the frontal and limbic parts of the brain trying to convince the occipital cortex that it saw something different from what it actually saw. As has been said, winners (in this case, in the court of public opinion) get to write the history books, and everyone else better revise theirs accordingly. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. That dot you saw was actually blue, not red.61

  Thus the neurobiology of conforming consists of a first wave of anxiety where we equate differentness with wrongness, followed by the cognitive work needed to change our opinion. These findings obviously come from an artificial world of psych experiments. Thus they’re only a faint whisper of what occurs when it’s you against the rest of the jury, when it’s you being urged to join the lynch mob, when it’s you choosing between conforming and being deeply lonely.