Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Next, subjects sat in either a hard or a soft chair (to quote the authors, “We primed subjects by the seat of their pants”). Sit in the former and they were more likely to perceive individuals as stable and unemotional, to be less flexible in economic game play. This is remarkable—haptic sensations in your butt influencing whether you think someone is a hard-ass. Or hard-hearted instead of a softie.

  Similar intermixing of the real and the metaphorical occurs with temperature sensation. In another study from Bargh’s group, the researcher, hands full with something, would ask a subject to briefly hold a cup of coffee for them. Half the subjects held warm coffee, half iced coffee. Subjects then read about some individual and answered questions about them. Subjects who held the warm cup rated the individual as having a warmer personality (without altering ratings about other characteristics). In the next part of the study, the temperature of a held object altered subjects’ generosity and levels of trust—cold hands, cold heart. And a more activated insula, as shown in a follow-up study.25

  Our brains also confuse metaphorical and literal interoceptive information. Recall that remarkable study showing that in a real-world situation, a major predictor of whether a prisoner would be granted parole was how recently the judge had eaten. Empty stomach, harsher judgment. Other work has shown that when people are hungry, they become less generous with money and show more future discounting (i.e., are more likely to want reward X now, rather than wait for reward 2X). Hungering for fame and fortune are just metaphors—yet our brain pulls circuits related to real hunger into the mix. Moreover, we use more abstract levels of cognition when thinking about distant events. Ask people to make a list of the items they’d bring on a camping trip taking place either tomorrow or in a month; if the former, the list contains more specific subcategories. In another study subjects were shown a graph of the average amount of paper used by an office over time. There is a steady increase until the most recent time period:26

  Subjects were then asked to predict what would happen in the next time period. Half the subjects were told that the office was nearby. Result: those subjects did a microanalysis, preferentially paying attention to that final X trending downward, perceiving it to be meaningful, the start of a pattern:

  Down the hall

  But subjects told that the office was on the other side of the planet tended to view the data points at a macro level of analysis, paying attention to the overall pattern and seeing that downturn as a mere aberration:

  Far away

  What’s going on in these studies? Metaphors about weight, density, texture, temperature, interoceptive sensations, time, and distance are just figures of speech. Yet the brain confusedly processes them with some of the same circuits that deal with the physical properties of objects.

  DUCT TAPE

  The essence of a symbol is its ability to serve as a stand-in for the real thing and, remarkably, we’re not the only species where a signifier, independent of what it signifies, can gain a power of its own. As discussed in chapter 2, if you condition a rat to associate a bell with a reward, about half of rats eventually come to find the bell itself rewarding.

  So we’ve now examined cold drinks and cold personalities; lying through your teeth and then yearning for mouthwash; our hearts aching for someone else’s pain. Our metaphorical symbols can gain a power all their own. But insofar as metaphors are the apogee of our capacity for symbolic thought, it’s thoroughly weird that our top-of-the-line brains can’t quite keep things straight and remember that those metaphors aren’t literal. Why?

  The answer harks back to a concept first introduced in chapter 10—evolution is a tinkerer, an improviser. So humans are evolving capacities for abstractions like morality and deep violations of it, for experiencing empathy of unprecedented intensity, and for conscious assessment of the affiliative nature of someone’s temperament—moral disgust, feeling someone’s pain, warm and cold personalities. Given how short a time behaviorally modern humans have existed, this has occurred in a blink of an eye. There hasn’t been enough time to evolve completely new brain regions and circuits for handling these novelties. Instead, tinkering occurred—“Hmm, extreme negative affect elicited by violations of shared behavioral norms. Let’s see . . . Who has any pertinent experience? I know, the insula! It does extreme negative sensory stimuli—that’s, like, all that it does—so let’s expand its portfolio to include this moral disgust business. That’ll work. Hand me a shoehorn and some duct tape.”

  The key to evolution as an improviser rather than inventor is chapter 10’s concept of exaptation—some trait evolves for some purpose and is co-opted when it turns out to be useful for something else. And soon feathers are aiding flight, in addition to regulating body temperature, and the insula helps get us into heaven, in addition to purging our guts of toxins. The latter is a case of what has been called “neural reuse.”27

  This isn’t to say it’s been an easy process, that magically one day neurons that help make you puke are suddenly involved in running the president’s bioethics panel. It is insanely interesting to me that the most unique neurons in our brains, the recently evolved and slow-developing von Economo neurons, are predominantly housed in the anterior cingulate and insula. And that the neurodegenerative disease frontotemporal dementia, destined to eventually destroy the entire fancy neocortex, takes out von Economo neurons first—there’s something extra fancy (and thus expensive and vulnerable) about those cells. The tinkering and improvising was inspired.

  What’s most interesting is that we see the beginnings of the “I know, let’s persuade the ACC and insula to volunteer for these new jobs” in other species. As we saw in chapter 14, the emotional contagion and protoempathy that a rodent can feel for another one in pain is centered in the anterior cingulate. And full-blown von Economo neurons are also found in those same brain regions in the other apes, elephants, and cetaceans—evolution’s Mensa club—and exist in rudimentary forms in monkeys. It’s unclear if, say, a blue whale wants to wash its flippers after a social-norm violation, but a handful of other species seem to have taken the first steps into this strange new territory along with us.

  THE METAPHORICAL DARK SIDE

  Our brains’ confusion of the metaphorical with the literal literally matters. Back to chapter 10 and the evolutionary emphasis on kin selection. We saw the array of mechanisms used by various species for recognizing kin and degree of relatedness—e.g., genetically shaped pheromonal signatures and imprinting on the female whose birdsong you heard a lot while you were still inside an egg. And we saw that among other primates there are cognitive components as well (recall male baboons’ degree of paternalism being predicted by their likelihood of being the father). By the time we get to humans, the process is mostly cognitive—we can think our way to deciding who is a relative, who is an Us. And thus, as we saw, we can be manipulated into thinking that some individuals are more related to us, and others less so, than they actually are—pseudokinship and pseudospeciation. There are numerous ways to get someone to think that an Other is so different that they barely count as human. But as propagandists and ideologues have long known, if you want to get someone to feel that an Other hardly counts as human, there’s only one way to do it—engage the insula. And the surest way to do that is with metaphor.

  In 1994 many Westerners became aware of the existence of the nation of Rwanda for the first time. The mountainous Central African country is tiny, with one of the highest population densities in the world. Way back when, it had been filled with hunter-gatherers who, as per usual, had been displaced over the last millennium by agriculturalists and pastoralists, who came to form the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, respectively. It remains debated whether they arrived around the same century and whether they were actually ethnically distinct groups, but the Hutu and Tutsi Us/Them-ed with a vengeance. The minority Tutsi traditionally dominated the Hutu, reflecting the common herdsman/farmer power dynamics of Africa; German and
Belgian colonials, in the classic divide and conquer, exploited and inflamed the tribal animosities further.

  With independence in 1962 came a turning of tables and Hutu domination of the government. Discrimination and violence against Tutsis drove many out of the country; over the subsequent years, many Tutsi refugee populations in neighboring countries gave rise to rebel groups seeking to invade Rwanda and establish safe havens there for Tutsis. Predictably, this increased anti-Tutsi militancy among Hutus and resulted in further discrimination and massacres. One of the ironies of what was to come, reflecting the uncertainty as to whether the Hutu and Tutsi were historically even separate people, was that it wasn’t always possible to distinguish the two—identity cards were required to indicate ethnicity.

  By 1994 the Rwandan president, the dictator Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu military man who had seized power in 1973, was under sufficient pressure from Tutsi rebel groups that he signed a power-sharing peace accord with the rebels. This was viewed as a sellout by the growing “Hutu Power” extremist bloc. On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by a missile as it approached the capital, Kigali, killing all on board. It is still unclear whether the assassination was carried out by Tutsi rebels or Hutu Power elements in the military who were intent on both eliminating Habyarimana and laying the blame on Tutsis. In any case, within a day Hutu militants had killed essentially all moderate Hutus in the government, seized power, officially laid blame for the assassination on Tutsis, and urged all Hutus to take revenge. And most Hutus complied. Thus began what is now known as the Rwandan genocide.*

  The killing ran for approximately one hundred days (until it was finally halted by Tutsi rebels gaining control). During that time, there was not only a Final Solution–style attempt to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda but also killing of Hutus who were married to Tutsis, who attempted to protect Tutsis, or who refused to participate in killings. By the time it was done, approximately 75 percent of Tutsis—between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people—and around 100,000 Hutu had been killed. Roughly one out of every seven Rwandans. This translated into five times the rate of killing during the Nazi Holocaust. It was mostly ignored by the West.28

  Five times the rate. For those of us schooled in the modern Western world’s atrocities, some translation is needed. The Rwandan genocide did not involve tanks, airplanes dropping bombs, or shelling of civilians. There were no concentration camps, no transport trains, no Zyklon B. There was no bureaucratic banality of evil. There were hardly even many guns. Instead Hutu—from peasant farmers to urban professionals—bludgeoned their Tutsi neighbors, friends, spouses, business partners, patients, teachers, students. Tutsis were beaten with sticks until they were dead, killed with machetes after being gang-raped and sexually mutilated, trapped in sanctuaries that were then burned to the ground. An average of roughly ten thousand people per day. As perhaps the genocide’s single most shocking atrocity, in the town of Nyange, the local Catholic priest, a Hutu named Athanase Seromba, gave sanctuary to between 1,500 and 2,000 Tutsi, many of them his parishioners, and then led the Hutu militia that ultimately killed every person inside his church. Rivers ran red, not just metaphorically.*

  How could this have happened? There are many components to the answer. The populace had a long tradition of unquestioning obedience to authority, a helpful trait to develop in a brutally dictatorial nation. Hutu militants had for months before been distributing machetes to the Hutu populace. The government-controlled radio station (the main form of mass media in this marginally literate country) proclaimed that the intent of the invading Tutsi rebels was to kill every Hutu, and that one’s Tutsi neighbors were a fifth column preparing to join in. And there was another meaningful factor. The anti-Tutsi propaganda was ceaselessly dehumanizing, with the infamous pseudospeciation of Tutsis being referred to only as “cockroaches.” Stamp out the cockroaches. The cockroaches are planning to kill your children. The cockroaches [the supposedly devious and seductive Tutsi women] will steal your husbands. The cockroaches [Tutsi men] will rape your wives and daughters. Stamp out the cockroaches, save yourselves, kill the cockroaches. And with insular cortices ablaze, machetes in one hand and transistor radios in the other, most Hutus did.*

  The aftermath

  Dehumanization, pseudospeciation. The tools of the propagandists of hate. Thems as disgusting. Thems as rodents, as a cancer, as a transitional species, Thems as reekingly malodorous, as living in hives of chaos that no normal human would. Thems as shit. Get the insulae of your followers to confuse the literal and metaphorical, and you’re 99 percent of the way there.

  A GLIMMER

  A goal might be to use the good side of a double-edged sword to cut loose the silver linings of clouds and save them for rainy days. Or something metaphorically like that. The tool of the propagandist is to effectively exploit symbols of revulsion in the service of hate. But the odd literal metaphoring of our brains can also provide the peacemaker with a highly effective tool.

  In a moving, important 2007 paper in Science, the American/French anthropologist Scott Atran, along with Robert Axelrod (of chapter 10’s Prisoner’s Dilemma fame) and Richard Davis, a conflict expert at Arizona State University, considered the power of what they called “sacred values” in conflict resolution.29 These are straight out of Greene’s world of two different cultures of shepherds fighting over a commons, each with a different moral vision as to what is correct, each passionately focused on “rights” whose meaning and power are incomprehensible to the other side. Sacred values are defended far out of proportion to their material or instrumental importance or likelihood of success, because to any group such values define “who we are.” And therefore, not only are attempts to reach compromises on such issues by using material incentives unlikely to be productive, but they can be insultingly counterproductive. You can’t buy us off into dishonoring that which we hold sacred.

  Atran and colleagues have studied the roles played by sacred values in the context of Middle East conflict. In a world of sheer rationality where the brain didn’t confuse reality with symbols, bringing peace to Israel and Palestine would revolve solely around the concrete, practical, and specific—placement of borders, reparations for Palestinian land lost in 1948, water rights, the extent of militarization allowed to Palestinian police, and so on. Solving those nuts-and-bolts issues may be a way of ending war, but peace is not the mere absence of war, and making true peace requires acknowledging and respecting the sacred values of Them. Atran and colleagues found that, from the person in the street to the highest offices of power, sacred values loomed large. They interviewed senior Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, asking what he sees as a requirement for true peace. This included, of course, reparations to Palestinians for the homes and lands they lost almost seventy years ago. Necessary but not sufficient. “Let Israel apologize for our tragedy in 1948,” he added. And current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in discussing with them what was needed for true peace, cited not only instrumental issues of security but also how the Palestinians must “change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations.” As the authors state, “In rational-choice models of decision-making, something as intangible as an apology [or getting the likes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion out of schoolbooks] could not stand in the way of peace.” Yet they do, because in recognizing the enemy’s sacred symbols, you are de facto recognizing their humanity, their capacity for pride, unity, and connection to their past and, probably most of all, their capacity for experiencing pain.*

  “Symbolic concessions of no apparent material benefit may be key in helping to solve seemingly intractable conflicts,” write the authors. In 1994 the Kingdom of Jordan became the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. It ended war, bringing to an end decades of hostilities. And it created a successful road map for the two nations to coexist, built around addressing material and instrumental issues—water rights (e.g., Israel would give Jordan fifty million cubic meters of water a
nnually), joint efforts to combat terrorism, joint efforts to facilitate tourism between the countries. But it wasn’t until a year later that one saw evidence that something resembling a true peace was forming. It followed the creation of yet another martyr for peace, the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the architects of the Oslo Peace Accord, by a right-wing Israeli extremist. Extraordinarily, King Hussein came to Rabin’s funeral and eulogized him, addressing his widow in the front row:

  My sister, Mrs. Leah Rabin, my friends, I had never thought that the moment would come like this when I would grieve the loss of a brother, a colleague and a friend.

  Hussein’s presence and words were obviously irrelevant to any of the rational stumbling blocks to peace. And were immeasurably important.30

  A similar arc can be seen in Northern Ireland, where an IRA ceasefire in 1994 facilitated an end to the violence of the Troubles and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement laid the groundwork for Republicans and Unionists to coexist, for ex-Unionist demagogues and ex-IRA gunmen to serve in a government together. Much of the agreement was material or instrumental, but there were elements of sacred values addressed—for example, the establishment of a Parades Commission to ensure that neither group had inflammatory, symbol-laden parades in the other’s neighborhoods in Belfast. But in many ways the most palpable sign of a lasting peace came from an unexpected corner. The unity government formed after the agreement was led by Peter Robinson as first minister and Martin McGuinness as deputy first minister. The former had been a Unionist firebrand, the latter a leader of the political wing of the IRA; they were two men who epitomized the hatreds of the Troubles. They had a functional working relationship but nothing more than that and had famously refused to ever actually shake hands (something that even Rabin and Yasir Arafat had managed). What finally broke the ice? In 2010 Robinson was upended in a major scandal involving his politician wife, who had committed some major financial improprieties in the name of another type of impropriety—funneling money to her nineteen-year-old lover. And history was then made when McGuinness offered, and Robinson accepted, a commiserative handshake. A guy-code sacred-value moment.*31