Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  With groups, issues of numbers come into play—how many other voices are urging you to join the cool kids? Recall how among chimps or two-year-old humans, one individual doing something three times does not evoke the conformity of three individuals doing the same act once each. Echoing this, follow-up studies by Asch showed that conformity first kicks in when there are at least three people unanimously contradicting what the subject thinks, with maximum conformity first evoked by around half a dozen contradictors. But this is the artificial world of lab subjects judging the length of a line—in the real world the conforming power of a lynch mob of six doesn’t approach that of a mob of a thousand.76

  WHAT IS BEING REQUIRED AND IN WHAT CONTEXT

  Two issues stand out. The first is the persuasive power of the incremental. “You were okay shocking the guy with 225 volts, but not with 226? That’s illogical.” “Come on, we’re all boycotting their businesses. Let’s shut them down; it’s not like anyone patronizes them. Come on, we’ve shut down their businesses, let’s loot them; it’s not like the stores are doing them any good.” We rarely have a rational explanation for an intuitive sense that a line has been crossed on a continuum. What incrementalism does is put the potential resister on the defensive, making the savagery seem like an issue of rationality rather than of morality. This represents an ironic inversion of our tendency to think in categories, to irrationally inflate the importance of an arbitrary boundary. The descent into savagery can be so incremental as to come with nothing but arbitrary boundaries, and our descent becomes like the proverbial frog cooked alive without noticing. When your conscience finally rebels and draws a line in the sand, we know that it is likely to be an arbitrary one, fueled by implicit subterranean forces—despite your best attempts at pseudospeciation, this victim’s face reminds you of a loved one’s; a smell just wafted by that took you back to childhood and reminds you of how life once felt innocent; your anterior cingulate neurons just had breakfast. At such times, a line having finally been drawn must be more important than its arbitrariness.

  The second issue concerns responsibility. When debriefed afterward, compliant teachers typically cited how persuasive they found the information that the learner had been informed of the risks and had given consent. “Don’t worry, you won’t be held responsible.” The Milgram phenomenon also showed the coercive power of misdirecting responsibility, when researchers would seek compliance by emphasizing that the teacher’s responsibility was to the project, not the learner—“I thought you said you were here to help.” “You’re a team member.” “You’re ruining things.” “You signed a form.” It’s hard enough to respond with “This isn’t the job I signed up for.” It’s that much harder when the fine print reveals that this is what you signed up for.

  Compliance increases when guilt is diffused—even if I hadn’t done it, it still would have happened.77 Statistical guilt. This is why, historically, people were not executed with five shots fired from one gun. Instead there were five guns fired simultaneously—a firing squad. Firing squads traditionally took the diffusion of responsibility a step further, where one member was randomly given a blank instead of a real bullet. That way, a shooter could shift from the comforting irrationality that “I only one fifth killed him” to the even better “I may not even have shot him.” This tradition was translated into modern execution technology. Lethal injection machines used in prison executions come with a dual control system—two syringes, each filled with a lethal dose, two separate delivery systems, two buttons pressed simultaneously by two different people—at which point a random binary generator would secretly determine which syringe was emptied into a bucket and which into a human. And then the record would be erased, allowing each person to think, “Hey, I may not even have given him any drug.”

  Finally, responsibility is diffused by anonymity.78 This comes de facto if the group is large enough, and large groups also facilitate individual efforts at anonymity—during the Chicago riots of 1968, many police notoriously covered their name tags before setting on the unarmed antiwar demonstrators. Groups also facilitate conformity by institutionalizing anonymity; examples range from the KKK to Star Wars’ Imperial Storm Troopers to the finding that in traditional human societies, warriors who transform and standardize their appearance before battle are more likely to torture and mutilate their enemies than warriors from cultures that don’t transform themselves. All use means to deindividuate, where the goal may not be to ensure that a victimized Them won’t be able to recognize you afterward as much as to facilitate moral disengagement so that you won’t be able to recognize you afterward.

  THE NATURE OF THE VICTIM

  No surprise, compliance becomes easier when the victim is an abstraction—say, the future generations who will inherit this planet. In Milgram follow-ups, compliance declined if the learner was in the same room as the teacher and would plummet if the two had shaken hands. Ditto if psychological distance was shortened by perspective taking—what would it feel like if you were in their shoes?

  Predictably, compliance is also decreased when the victim is individuated.79 However, don’t let the authority individuate victims for you. In one classic Milgram-esque study, the scientists would “accidentally” allow a teacher to overhear their opinion of the learner. “Seems like a nice guy” versus “This guy seems like an animal.” Guess who’d get more shocks?

  Authorities rarely ask us to administer shocks to those whom they label as nice guys. It’s always to the animals. Implicit in the latter categorization’s evoking more compliance is our having ceded power to the authorities or to the group to create the narrative. One of the greatest wellsprings of resistance is to seize back the narrative. From “children of exceptionalities” to the Paralympics, from gay-pride marches to “never again,” from Hispanic Heritage Month to James Brown singing, “Say It Out Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a major step toward victims’ resistance is to gain the power to define themselves.

  THINGS BROUGHT TO THE TABLE BY THE PERSON BEING PRESSURED

  Some personality traits predict resistance to the pressure to comply: not valuing being conscientious or agreeable; being low in neuroticism; scoring low on right-wing authoritarianism (any particular authority is more likely to be questioned if you already question the very concept of authority); social intelligence, which may be mediated by an enhanced ability to understand things like scapegoating or ulterior motives. And where these individual differences come from is, of course, the end product of most of the preceding chapters.80

  What about gender? Milgram-like studies have shown that women average higher rates than men of voicing resistance to the demands to obey . . . but higher rates, nonetheless, of ultimately complying. Other studies show that women have higher rates than men of public conformity and lower rates of private conformity. Overall, though, gender is not much of a predictor. Interestingly, rates of conformity in Asch-like studies increase in mixed-sex groups. When in the presence of the opposite sex, perhaps there’s less desire to seem like a rugged individualist than fear of seeming foolish.81

  Finally, of course, we are the products of our culture. In broad cross-cultural surveys, Milgram and others showed more compliance in subjects from collectivist than from individualist cultures.82

  STRESS

  Exactly as with Us/Them-ing, people are more likely to conform and obey at times of stress, ranging from time pressure to a real or imagined outside threat to a novel context. In stressful settings rules gain power.

  ALTERNATIVES

  Finally, there is the key issue of whether you perceive alternatives to the actions demanded of you. It can be a solitary task to reframe and reappraise a situation, to make the implicit explicit, to engage in perspective taking, to question. To imagine that resistance is not futile.

  A huge help in doing that is evidence that you are not alone. From Asch and Milgram on, it’s clear that the presence of anyone else pushing back against the pressure can b
e galvanizing. Ten against two in a jury room is a world of difference from eleven against one. One lone voice crying out in the wilderness is a crank. Two voices joined together form a nidus of resistance, offer the start of an oppositional social identity.

  It certainly helps to know that you are not alone, that there are others who are willing to resist, that there are those who have done so in the past. But often something still holds us back. Eichmann’s seeming normalcy supplied us, thanks to Hannah Arendt, with the notion of the banality of evil. Zimbardo, in his recent writing, emphasizes the “banality of heroism.” As discussed in various chapters, people who heroically refuse to look the other way, who do the right thing even when it carries the ultimate cost—tend to be surprisingly normal. The stars didn’t align at their births; doves of peace did not envelop them where they strode. They put their pants on one leg at a time. This should be a huge source of strength for us.

  SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

  We’re just like numerous other social species in terms of having marked status differences among individuals and hierarchies that emerge from those differences. Like many of these other species, we’re fantastically attuned to status differences, are sufficiently fascinated by them that we monitor status relations in individuals who are irrelevant to us, and can perceive status differences in a blink of an eye. And we find it deeply unsettling, with the amygdala leading front and center, when status relations are ambiguous and shifting.

  As in so many other species, our brains, particularly the neocortex and most particularly the frontal cortex, have coevolved with the social complexity of status differences. It takes a lot of brainpower to make sense of the subtleties of dominance relations. This is no surprise, given that “knowing your place” can be so contextual. Navigating status differences is most challenging when it comes to attaining and maintaining high rank; this requires cognitive mastery of Theory of Mind and perspective taking; of manipulation, intimidation, and deceit; and of impulse control and emotion regulation. As with so many other primates, the biographies of our most hierarchically successful members are built around what provocations are ignored during occasions where the frontal cortex kept a level head.

  Our bodies and brains, like those of other social species, bear the imprint of social status, and having the “wrong” rank can be corrosively pathogenic. Moreover, the physiology is not so much about rank per se as about its social meaning in your species and particular group, the behavioral advantages and disadvantages, and the psychological baggage of a particular rank.

  And then we’re unlike any other species on earth in that we belong to multiple hierarchies, are psychologically adept at overvaluing those in which we excel, and maintain internal standards that can trump objective rank in their impact.

  Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of its caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.

  We’re really out there as a species in that sometimes our high-status individuals don’t merely plunder and instead actually lead, actually attempt to facilitate the common good. We’ve even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion. A magnificent achievement. Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable to five-year-olds deciding who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland.

  Stripped to their idealistic core, our political differences concern differing visions of how best to bring about the common good. We tend to come as internally consistent packages of political stances ranging from the small and local to the mammoth and global. And with remarkable regularity our stances reflect our implicit, affective makeup, with cognition playing post-hoc catch up. If you really want to understand someone’s politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more important, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.

  Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd. When we discover we are out of step with everyone else, our amygdalae spasm with anxiety, our memories are revised, and our sensory-processing regions are even pressured to experience what is not true. All to fit in.

  Finally, the pull of conformity and obedience can lead us to some of our darkest, most appalling places, and far more of us can be led there than we’d like to think. But despite that, even the worst of barrels doesn’t turn all apples bad, and “Resistance” and “Heroism” are often more accessible and less rarefied and capitalized than assumed. We’re rarely alone in thinking this is wrong, wrong, wrong. And we are usually no less special or unique than those before us who have fought back.

  Thirteen

  Morality and Doing the Right Thing, Once You’ve Figured Out What That Is

  The two previous chapters examined the thoroughly unique contexts for some human behaviors that are on a continuum with behaviors in other species. Like some other species, we make automatic Us/Them dichotomies and favor the former—though only humans rationalize that tendency with ideology. Like many other species, we are implicitly hierarchical—though only humans view the gap between haves and have-nots as a divine plan.

  This chapter considers another domain rife with human uniqueness, namely morality. For us, morality is not only belief in norms of appropriate behavior but also the belief that they should be shared and transmitted culturally.

  Work in the field is dominated by a familiar sort of question. When we make a decision regarding morality, is it mostly the outcome of moral reasoning or of moral intuition? Do we mostly think or feel our way to deciding what is right?

  This raises a related question. Is human morality as new as the cultural institutions we’ve hatched in recent millennia, or are its rudiments a far older primate legacy?

  This raises more questions. What’s more impressive, consistencies and universalities of human moral behavior or variability and its correlation with cultural and ecological factors?

  Finally, there will be unapologetically prescriptive questions. When it comes to moral decision making, when is it “better” to rely on intuition, when on reasoning? And when we resist temptation, is it mostly an act of will or of grace?

  People have confronted these issues since students attended intro philosophy in togas. Naturally, these questions are informed by science.

  THE PRIMACY OF REASONING IN MORAL DECISION MAKING

  One single fact perfectly demonstrates moral decision making being based on cognition and reasoning. Have you ever picked up a law textbook? They’re humongous.

  Every society has rules about moral and ethical behavior that are reasoned and call upon logical operations. Applying the rules requires reconstructing scenarios, understanding proximal and distal causes of events, and assessing magnitudes and probabilities of consequences of actions. Assessing individual behavior requires perspective taking, Theory of Mind, and distinguishing between outcome and intent. Moreover, in many cultures rule implementation is typically entrusted to people (e.g., lawyers, clergy) who have undergone long training.

  Harking back to chapter 7, the primacy of reasoning in moral decision making is anchored in child development. The Kohlbergian emergence of increasingly complex stages of moral development is built on the Piagetian emergence of increasingly complex logical operations. They are similar, neurobiologically. Logical and moral reasoning about the correctness of an economic or ethical decision, respectively, both activate the (cognitive) dlPFC. People with obsessive-compulsive disorder get mired
in both everyday decision making and moral decision making, and their dlPFCs go wild with activity for both.1

  Similarly, there’s activation of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) during Theory of Mind tasks, whether they are perceptual (e.g., visualizing a complex scene from another viewer’s perspective), amoral (e.g., keeping straight who’s in love with whom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), or moral/social (e.g., inferring the ethical motivation behind a person’s act). Moreover, the more the TPJ activation, the more people take intent into account when making moral judgments, particularly when there was intent to harm but no actual harm done. Most important, inhibit the TPJ with transcranial magnetic stimulation, and subjects become less concerned about intent.2

  The cognitive processes we bring to moral reasoning aren’t perfect, in that there are fault lines of vulnerability, imbalances, and asymmetries.3 For example, doing harm is worse than allowing it—for equivalent outcomes we typically judge commission more harshly than omission and must activate the dlPFC more to judge them as equal. This makes sense—when we do one thing, there are innumerable other things we didn’t do; no wonder the former is psychologically weightier. As another cognitive skew, as discussed in chapter 10, we’re better at detecting violations of social contracts that have malevolent rather than benevolent consequences (e.g., giving less versus more than promised). We also search harder for causality (and come up with more false attributions) for malevolent than for benevolent events.

  This was shown in one study. First scenario: A worker proposes a plan to the boss, saying, “If we do this, there’ll be big profits, and we’ll harm the environment in the process.” The boss answers: “I don’t care about the environment. Just do it.” Second scenario: Same setup, but this time there’ll be big profits and benefits to the environment. Boss: “I don’t care about the environment. Just do it.” In the first scenario 85 percent of subjects stated that the boss harmed the environment in order to increase profits; however, in the second scenario only 23 percent said that the boss helped the environment in order to increase profits.4