Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Bloom also emphasizes how highly aroused empathy pushes us toward psychologically easy acts that generate the least cognitive load. In those times suffering that is local, that concerns an identified appealing individual, and that is of a type with which you’re familiar readily counts for more than suffering that is distant, involves a group, and is an alien form of pain.* Aroused empathy produces tunnel-visioned compassion that can wind up misplaced. As the philosopher Jesse Prinz emphasizes, the point is not whose pain pains us the most but who most needs our help.

  Are There Ever Any Bloody Altruists?

  Stop the presses; science has proven that it can feel good to do good, complete with activation of the mesolimbic dopamine system. This doesn’t even require a brain scanner. In a 2008 study in Science, subjects were given either five dollars or twenty dollars; half were instructed to spend it that day on themselves, half on someone else (ranging from a friend to a charity). And comparisons of self-assessments of happiness at the beginning and end of the day showed that neither the larger amount of money nor the opportunity to spend it on oneself increased happiness; only spending it on someone else did. And particularly interesting is that other subjects, told about the design, predicted the opposite—that happiness would be raised most by spending on oneself, and that twenty dollars would buy more happiness than five.53

  The question, of course, is why doing good can feel good, which raises the classic question: is there ever a selfless act that contains no element of self-interest? Does doing good feel good because there’s something in it for you? I’m sure not going to tackle this from a philosophical perspective. For biologists the most frequent stance is anchored in chapter 10’s evolutionary view of cooperation and altruism, one that always contains some element of self-interest.

  Is this surprising? Pure selflessness is clearly going to be an uphill battle if the very part of the brain most central to an empathic state—the ACC—evolved to observe and learn from others’ pain for your own benefit.54 The self-oriented rewards of acting compassionately are endless. There’s the interpersonal—leaving the beneficiary in your debt, thus turfing this from altruism to reciprocal altruism. There are the public benefits of reputation and acclaim—the celebrity swooping into a refugee camp for a photo op with starving kids made joyful by her incandescent presence. There’s that strange version of reputation that comes in the rare cultures that have invented a moralizing god, one who monitors human behavior and rewards or punishes accordingly; as we saw in chapter 9, it is only when cultures get large enough that there are anonymous interactions among strangers that they tend to invent moralizing gods. A recent study shows that across a worldwide range of religions, the more people perceive their god(s) to monitor and punish, the more prosocial they are in an anonymous interaction. Thus there is the self-interested benefit of tipping the cosmic scale in your favor. And probably most inaccessibly, there is the purely internal reward of altruism—the warm glow of having done good, the lessened sting of guilt, the increased sense of connection to others, the solidifying sense of being able to include goodness in your self-definition.

  Science has been able to catch the self-interest component of empathy in the act.55 As noted, some of the self-interest reflects concerns about self-definition—personality profiles show that the more charitable people are, the more they tend to define themselves by their charitability. Which comes first? It’s impossible to tell, but highly charitable people tend to have been brought up by parents who were charitable and who emphasized charitable acts as a moral imperative (particularly in a religious context).

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  How about the self-interested reputational rewards of being altruistic, the cachet of conspicuous largesse rather than conspicuous consumption? As emphasized in chapter 10, people become more prosocial when reputation rides on it, and personality profiles also show that highly charitable people tend to be particularly dependent on external approval. Two of the studies just cited that showed dopaminergic activation when people were being charitable came with a catch. Subjects were given money and, while in a brain scanner, decided whether to keep the money or donate. Being charitable activated dopamine “reward” systems—when there was an observer present. When no one was present, dopamine tended to flow most when subjects kept the money for themselves.

  As emphasized by the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, the purest form of charity, the most stripped of self-interest, is when both the giver and the recipient are anonymous.* And, as shown in those brain scanners, this is perhaps the rarest form as well.

  Intuitively, if good acts must be motivated by self-interest, the reputational motive, the desire to be the biggest spender at the charity auction, seems most worthy of irony. In contrast, the motivation to think of yourself as a good person seems a pretty benign one. After all, we’re all searching for a sense of self, and better that particular sense than to assure yourself that you’re tough, scary, and not to be messed with.

  Is the element of self-interest ever truly absent? One 2007 study in Science examined this.56 Subjects (in brain scanners, of course) were unexpectedly given varying amounts of money. Then, some of the time they were “taxed” (i.e., told that a certain percentage of that money would be forcibly given to a food bank), some of the time given the opportunity to donate that amount voluntarily. In other words, the exact same amount of public “good” was accomplished in each case, but the former constituted enforced civic duty while the latter was a purely charitable act. Thus, if someone’s altruism is purely other-oriented, without a smidgen of self-interest, the two circumstances are psychologically identical—those in need are being helped, and that’s all that matters. And the more different the scenarios feel, the more self-interest is coming into play.

  The results were complex and interesting:

  a. The more people’s dopaminergic reward systems activated when they unexpectedly received money, the less activation there was when they were either taxed or asked to donate. In other words, the greater the love of money, the more painfully it is parted with. No surprise there.

  b. The more dopaminergic activation there was when someone was taxed, the more voluntarily charitable they were. Being taxed could not have been welcome to the most self-interested—money was being taken from them. For subjects who instead showed heavy activation of dopaminergic systems in that circumstance, any self-interest of losing money was more than compensated for by the knowledge that people in need were being helped. This taps into the last chapter’s exploration of inequity aversion and is consistent with findings that in some circumstances, when a pair of strangers are openly given unequal amounts of reward, there is typically dopaminergic activation in the one with the good luck when some of the reward is transferred afterward to make things more even. Thus it’s little surprise in the present study that subjects made happy by reducing inequity, even at a cost to themselves, were also the most charitable. The authors appropriately interpret this as reflecting a compassionate act with elements independent of self-interest.57

  c. There was more dopaminergic activation (and more self-reports of satisfaction) when people gave voluntarily than when they were taxed. In other words, a component of the charitability was about self-interest—it was more pleasing when those in need were helped by voluntary efforts than when giving was forced.

  What does this show? That we’re reinforced by varying things and to varying extents—getting money, knowing that the needy are being cared for, feeling the warm glow of doing a good thing. And that it is rare to be able to get the second type of pleasure with no dependence on the third—it appears to truly be rare to scratch an altruist and see an altruist bleed.

  CONCLUSIONS

  All things considered, it is a pretty remarkable thing that when an individual is in pain, we (i.e., we humans, primates, mammals) often are induced to be in a state of pain also. There have been some mighty interesting twists and turns for that one to have evolved. />
  But at the end of the day, the crucial issue is whether an empathic state actually produces a compassionate act, to avoid the trap of empathy being an end unto itself. The gap between the state and the act can be enormous, especially when the goal is for the act to be not only effective but also pristine in its motives.

  For someone reading this book, a first challenge in bridging that gap is that much of the world’s suffering is felt by distant masses experiencing things that we haven’t an inkling of—diseases that don’t touch us; poverty that precludes clean water, a place to live, the certainty of a next meal; oppression at the hands of political systems that we’ve been spared; strictures due to repressive cultural norms that might as well be from another planet. And everything about us makes those the hardest scenarios for us to actually act—everything about our hominin past has honed us to be responsive to one face at a time, to a face that is local and familiar, to a source of pain that we ourselves have suffered. Yes, best that our compassion be driven by the most need rather than by the most readily shared pain. Nevertheless, there’s no reason why we should expect ourselves to have particularly good intuitions when aiming to heal this far-flung, heterogeneous world. We probably need to be a bit easier on ourselves in this regard.

  Likewise, we should perhaps ease up a bit on the scratching-an-altruist problem. It has always struck me as a bit mean-spirited to conclude that it is a hypocrite who bleeds. Scratch an altruist and, most of the time, the individual with unpure motives who bleeds is merely the product of “altruism” and “reciprocity” being evolutionarily inseparable. Better that our good acts be self-serving and self-aggrandizing than that they don’t occur at all; better that the myths we construct and propagate about ourselves are that we are gentle and giving, rather than that we prefer to be feared than loved, and that we aim to live well as the best revenge.

  Finally, there is the challenge of a compassionate act being left by the wayside when the empathic state is sufficiently real and vivid and awful. I’m not advocating that people become Buddhists in order to make the world a better place. (Nor am I advocating that people don’t become Buddhists; what is the sound of one atheist waffling?) Most of us typically require moments of piercing, frothing shared pain to even notice those around us in need. Our intuitions run counter to doing it any other way—after all, just as one of the most frightening versions of humans at their worst is “cold-blooded” killing, one of the most puzzling and even off-putting of us at our best is “cold-blooded” kindness. Yet, as we’ve seen, a fair degree of detachment is just what is needed to actually act. Better that than our hearts racing in pained synchrony with the heart of someone suffering, if that cardiovascular activation mostly primes us to flee when it all becomes just too much to bear.

  Which brings us to a final point. Yes, you don’t act because someone else’s pain is so painful—that’s a scenario that begs you to flee instead. But the detachment that should be aimed for doesn’t represent choosing a “cognitive” approach to doing good over an “affective” one. The detachment isn’t slowly, laboriously thinking your way to acting compassionately as an ideal utilitarian solution—the danger here is the ease with which you can instead think your way to conveniently concluding this isn’t your problem to worry about. The key is neither a good (limbic) heart nor a frontal cortex that can reason you to the point of action. Instead it’s the case of things that have long since become implicit and automatic—being potty trained; riding a bike; telling the truth; helping someone in need.

  Fifteen

  Metaphors We Kill By

  EXAMPLE 1

  Stretching back at least to that faux pas about the golden calf at Mt. Sinai, various branches of Abrahamic religions have had a thing about graven images. Which has given us aniconism, the banning of icons, and iconoclasts, who destroy offensive images on religious grounds. Orthodox Judaism has been into that at times; ditto for Calvinists, especially when it came to those idolatrous Catholics. Currently it’s branches of Sunni Islam that deploy literal graven-image police and consider the height of offense to be images of Allah and Muhammad.

  In September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoon images of Muhammad on its editorial page. It was a protest against Danish censorship and self-censorship about the subject, against Islam being a sacred cow in a Western democracy where other religions are readily criticized satirically. None of the cartoons suggested reverence or respect. Many explicitly linked Muhammad with terrorism (e.g., him wearing a bomb as a turban). Many were ironic about the ban—Muhammad as a stick figure with a turban, Muhammad (armed with a sword) with a blackened rectangle over his eyes, Muhammad in a police lineup alongside other bearded men with turbans.

  And as a direct result of the cartoons, Western embassies and consulates were attacked, even burned, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Churches were burned in northern Nigeria. Protesters were killed in Afghanistan, Egypt, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Turkey (typically either by mob stampedes or by police containing rioters). And non-Muslims were killed in Nigeria, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt as revenge for the cartoons.

  In July 2007 drawings by a Swedish artist of Muhammad’s head with a dog’s body provoked much the same. In addition to deadly protests, the Islamic State of Iraq offered $100,000 for the artist’s killing, Al-Qaeda targeted the artist for death (along with staffers from Jyllands-Posten), assassination plots were stopped by Western authorities, and one attempt killed two bystanders.

  In May 2015 two gunmen attacked an antianiconist event in Texas where a $10,000 prize was offered for the “best” depiction of Muhammad. One person was injured before the gunmen were killed by police.

  And, of course, on January 7, 2015, two brothers, French-born sons of Algerian immigrants, massacred the staff of Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve.

  EXAMPLE 2

  In the Battle of Gettysburg fierce fighting occurred between the Union First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry and Confederate Twenty-eighth Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment.1 At one point Confederate soldier John Eakin, carrying the regimental flag of the Twenty-eighth Virginia, was shot three times (a typical fate of soldiers carrying the colors, who were preferential targets). Mortally wounded, Eakin handed the flag to a comrade, who was promptly killed. The flag was then taken up and displayed by Colonel Robert Allen, who was soon killed, then by Lieutenant John Lee, who was soon injured. A Union soldier, attempting to seize the colors, was killed by Confederates. Finally Private Marshall Sherman of the First Minnesota captured the flag, along with Lee.

  EXAMPLES 3, 4, AND 5

  In mid-2015 Tavin Price, a mentally challenged nineteen-year-old, was killed by gangbangers in Los Angeles for wearing red shoes, a rival gang’s color. His dying words, in front of his mother, were “Mommy, please. I don’t want to die. Mommy, please.”2

  In October 1980 Irish Republican prisoners at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland began a hunger strike protesting, among other things, their being denied political-prisoner status by having to wear prison garb. The British government acceded to their demands as a first prisoner slipped into a coma fifty-three days later. In a similar strike a year later in the Maze, ten Irish political prisoners starved themselves to death over forty-six to seventy-three days.

  By 2010 karaoke clubs throughout the Philippines had removed the Frank Sinatra song “My Way” from their playlists because of violent responses to the singing of it, including a dozen killings. Some of the “‘My Way’ killings” were due to poor renditions (which apparently often results in killings), but most were thought linked to the macho lyrics. “‘I did it my way’—it’s so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights,” explained the owner of a singing school in Manila to the New York Times.

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  In other words, pe
ople are willing to kill or be killed over a cartoon, a flag, a piece of clothing, a song. We have some explaining to do.

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  Throughout this book we’ve repeatedly gained insights into humans by examining other species. Some of the time the similarities have been most pertinent—dopamine is dopamine in a human or a mouse. Sometimes the interesting thing is our unique use of the identical substrate—dopamine facilitates a mouse’s pressing of a lever in the hopes of getting some food and a human’s praying in the hopes of entering heaven.

  But some human behaviors stand alone, without precedent in another species. One of the most important realms of human uniqueness comes down to one simple fact, namely that this is not a horse:

  Anatomically modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago. But behavioral modernity had to wait more than another 150,000 years, as evidenced by the appearance in the archaeological record of composite tools, ornamentation, ritualistic burial, and that stunning act of putting pigment on the wall of a cave.*3 This is not a horse. It’s a great picture of a horse.

  When René Magritte placed the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) beneath a picture of a pipe, in his 1928 painting The Treachery of Images, he was highlighting the shaky nature of imagery. The art historian Robert Hughes writes that this painting is a “visual booby-trap” set off by thought, and that “this sense of slippage between image and object is one of the sources of modernist disquiet.”4

  Magritte’s goal was to magnify and play with the distance between an object and its representation; these are coping mechanisms against that modernist disquiet. But for that human putting pigment to wall in Lascaux Cave more than seventeen thousand years ago, the point was the opposite: to minimize the distance between the two, to be as close as possible to possessing the real horse. As we say, to capture its likeness. To gain its power, as imbued in a symbol.