Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  The moving parts were examined in a fascinating 2010 Science paper. The authors studied 113,000 online participants, who each purchased an item (a souvenir photo) under one of the following conditions:33

  Could buy for a set price. (This was the control condition.)

  Could pay whatever they wanted; sales soared but people tended to pay tiny amounts, putting the “store” in the red.

  Were charged the original price, knowing that the company gave X percent of earnings to charity; sales increased, but less than X percent, and the store lost money.

  Could pay whatever they wanted, with half of that going to a charity. This boosted both sales and the price voluntarily paid, yielding profits for the store and a large charitable contribution.

  In other words, while evidence of corporate social responsibility (scenario C) boosts sales a bit, it’s far more effective when the individual and the business share social responsibility and the individual determines the amount of money donated.

  Choosing Your Partner

  As we’ve seen, cooperators outcompete more numerous noncooperators to the extent that the former can find one another. This is the logic behind green beards facilitating finding a kindred soul (if not kin). Thus, when that element is introduced into a game (with the ability to refuse to play with someone), cooperation soars, and more cheaply than by punishing defectors.34

  —

  These findings reveal numerous theoretical routes for fostering cooperation, and with real-life equivalents; moreover, we’ve learned a lot about which work best when. This is how we’ve evolved to collectively raise barns for neighbors, plant and harvest the whole village’s rice crop, or coordinate marching-band members to form a picture of their school’s mascot.

  And, oh yeah, to reiterate an idea aired previously, “cooperation” is a value-free term. Sometimes it takes a village to ransack a neighboring village.

  Reconciliation, and Things That Are Not Synonymous with It

  “So I’d caught a colobus monkey and was eating, getting to the good part, when this guy comes by, starts really begging for some. This got on my nerves and I snarled at him. Instead of taking a hint, he lunges, grabs the monkey’s arm, starts yanking—so I bit his shoulder. He cleared out fast and sat at the other end of the clearing, his back to me.

  “Once I calmed down, I thought a bit. To be honest, I probably should have shared some food with him. And while he definitely crossed a line when he grabbed, I probably should have nipped him instead of a real bite. So I’m feeling kind of bad. And besides, we work well together on patrols—it’s probably good if we sort things out.

  “So I take the monkey, sit near him. We’re all awkward—he’s not looking at me, I pretend there’s a nettle between my toes. But eventually I give him some of the meat, he grooms me a bit. The whole thing was stupid, we should have done that in the first place.”

  If you’re a chimp, reconciliation is easy once your heart rate returns to normal. Sometimes for us too—touch a friend’s shoulder, give a self-effacing grimace, say, “Hey, look, just now I was being a—” and they cut you off, saying, “No, no, it was me. I shouldn’t . . .” and things are okay.

  Easy. How about when everyone’s trying to patch things up after your people have slaughtered three quarters of theirs, or after they came as colonials, stole your land, and forced you to live in slum “homelands” for decades? Trickier.

  We’re the only species that institutionalizes reconciliation and that grapples with “truth,” “apology,” “forgiveness,” “reparations,” “amnesty,” and “forgetting.”

  The apogee of institutionalized complexity is the truth and reconciliation commission (TRC). The first came in the 1980s, and they’ve been depressingly useful ever since, occurring, for example, in Bolivia, Canada, Australia, Nepal, Rwanda, and Poland. Some TRCs have been in stable countries (Canada and Australia) facing up to their long history of abuse of indigenous peoples. Most, however, have come after a nation emerged from a bloody, divisive transition—a dictator overthrown, a civil war settled, a genocide halted. The popular perception is that their purpose is for perpetrators of abuse to confess, express remorse, and beg for forgiveness from victims, who then grant it, resulting in tearful embraces between the two.

  But instead TRCs are typically exercises in pragmatism, where perpetrators basically say, “This is what I did, and I vow to never harm your people again,” and the victims basically say, “Okay, we vow to not seek extrajudicial retribution.” An often towering achievement, if less heartwarming.

  Probably the best-studied TRC was South Africa’s after the defeat of apartheid. It came with enormous moral legitimacy, being overseen by Desmond Tutu, and gained further legitimacy by, though overwhelmingly focusing on the acts of whites, also examining atrocities by African liberation fighters. Hearings were public and included victims getting to tell their stories. More than six thousand of the perpetrators testified and applied for amnesty; this was granted to 13 percent.

  What happened to the tearful forgiveness scenarios? What about perpetrators at least showing remorse for their actions? It was not required, and few did. The goal was not to transform those individuals; it was to increase the odds that the shattered nation would function. In follow-up studies by the South African Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, victim participants commonly felt “that the TRC had been more successful at the national than the local level.” Many were outraged that there were no apologies, no reparations, that many perpetrators remained in their jobs. Interestingly, echoing chapter 15, many were equally angry about symbolic changes that had not occurred—not only is this killer still a cop, but there’s still a holiday/monument/street name celebrating apartheid. A wide majority of black (but not white) South Africans saw the TRC as fair and successful, and it accompanied South Africa’s miraculously transitioning to freedom, rather than descending into civil war. Thus TRCs show the differences between reconciliation and the likes of remorse and forgiveness.*35

  As every parent knows, a transparently insincere apology accomplishes little and can even worsen things. But deep remorse is different. The New Yorker recounts the story of Lu Lobello, an American Iraq War veteran who accidentally killed three members of a family, collateral damage during a firefight; haunted by it, he spent nine years tracking down the survivors to apologize. Or consider Hazel Bryan Massery, the snarling white teenager at the center of the iconic 1957 civil-rights-movement photograph of Elizabeth Eckford attempting to integrate Little Rock Central High School. A few years later Massery contacted Eckford to apologize.36

  Do apologies “work”? It depends. One issue is what the person is apologizing for, ranging from the concrete (“I’m sorry I broke your toy”) to the global and essentialist (“I’m sorry I’ve viewed your people as not fully human”). Another is what the apologizer aims to do about their remorse. And there’s the makeup of the recipient of the apology. Studies show that (a) victims who are oriented toward the workings of a collective system respond most to apologies that emphasize failure of that system (“I’m sorry, we police are supposed to protect, not break laws”); (b) victims most oriented to relationships respond most to apologies that are empathic (“I’m sorry for the pain that I caused you, for taking your son”); and (c) victims who are most autonomous and independent respond most to apologies accompanied by offers of compensation. There is also the issue of who is apologizing. What does it mean that in 1993 Bill Clinton apologized to Japanese Americans for their World War II internment? While the apology was laudable, and accompanied by reparative money, could Clinton speak for FDR?37

  The issue of reparations is immensely complicated. At one extreme, reparations can be the ultimate proof of sincerity. This is at the heart of the slavery reparations movement—so much of America’s growth into economic privilege was built on slavery, and so many of the subsequent benefits of the successful economy have been systematicall
y denied to African Americans, that there should be reparations to the descendants of slaves. At the other extreme, reparations meant to purchase forgiveness offend—this was the reasoning behind the newly born state of Israel’s refusal of reparations from Germany, unless it was accompanied by adequate remorse.

  At the end of these steps might arise one of the strangest things humans do—we forgive.38 For starters, forgiving is not forgetting. If nothing else, that’s neurobiologically unlikely. A rat learns to associate a bell with a shock and freezes when it hears it. When the next day the bell repeatedly sounds without being accompanied by a shock, causing the freezing behavior to “extinguish,” the memory trace of that learning does not evaporate. Instead it is overlaid with newer learning—“Today the bell is not bad news.” As proof, suppose that the day after that, the bell again signals shock. If the initial learning of “bell = shock” had been erased, it would take as long this day to learn the association as it did the first. Instead there is rapid reacquisition: “bell = shock again.” Forgiving someone doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten what he did.

  There is a subset of victims who claim to have forgiven the perpetrator, to have relinquished their anger and desire for punishment. I include the word “claim” not to imply skepticism but to indicate that forgiveness is a self-reported state that can be claimed but not proven.

  Forgiveness can occur as a religious imperative. In the June 2015 Charleston church massacre, white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Two days later, at Roof’s arraignment, stunningly, family members of the dead were there to forgive him and pray for his soul.39

  Forgiveness can take extraordinary cognitive reappraisal. Consider the case of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton.40 In 1984 Thompson-Cannino was raped by a stranger. In a police lineup she identified Cotton with great certainty; despite claiming innocence, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In the years after, friends tentatively wondered if she could now put the nightmare behind her. “Like hell I’m able to” would be her response. She was consumed with her hatred for Cotton, with her desire to harm him. And then, more than ten years into his prison sentence, DNA evidence exonerated Cotton. Another man had done it; he was incarcerated in Cotton’s prison for other rapes and bragged about getting away with this one. Thompson-Cannino had identified the wrong man and convinced a jury. Issues of hatred or forgiveness were now on the other foot.

  When they finally met, after Cotton’s release and pardon, Thompson-Cannino said, “If I spent every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life telling you that I’m sorry, can you ever forgive me?” And Cotton said, “Jennifer, I forgave you years ago.” His ability to do so involved profound reappraisal: “Forgiving Jennifer for picking me out of that lineup as her rapist took less time than people think. I knew she was a victim and was hurting real bad. . . . We were the victims of the same injustice by the same man, and this gave us a common ground to stand on.” A complete reappraisal that made them Us in their victimhood. The two now lecture together about the need for judicial reform.

  Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—“This is for me, not for you.” Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. To quote Booker T. Washington, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” Belittle and distort and consume. Forgiveness seems to be at least somewhat good for your health—victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as opposed to “anger validation therapy”) show improvements in general health, cardiovascular function, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Chapter 14 explored how compassion readily, perhaps inevitably, contains elements of self-interest. The compassionate granting of forgiveness epitomizes this.41

  We’ve now focused on forgiveness, apology, reparation, reconciliation, and the extent to which TRCs were about reconciliation rather than forgiveness. What about the “truth” part? It facilitates the healing process enormously. In the TRCs, perpetrators spilling truth—detailed, exhaustive, unflinching, and public—was the highest priority for victims. It’s the need to know what happened; it’s getting the villain to say the words; it’s to show the world, “Look what they did to us.”

  Recognizing Our Irrationalities

  Despite the claims of some economists, we are not rational optimization machines. We are more generous in games than logic predicts; we decide if someone is guilty based on reasoning but then decide their punishment based on emotion; roughly half of us make different decisions about sacrificing one to save five, depending if it involves pushing a person versus pulling a lever; we effortlessly resist cheating in circumstances where no one would know; we make strong moral decisions without being able to explain why. Thus it’s a good idea to recognize the systematic features to our irrationality.

  Sometimes we aim to eliminate these irrationalities. Perhaps the most fundamental one is the common visceral resistance to a simple fact—you don’t make treaties with friends; it’s to be expected that you passionately hate those whose hands you are about to shake, and that can’t be an impediment to doing so. Another domain concerns discrepancies between our conscious opinions and what our implicit biases lead us to do. As we saw, Us/Them edges can be softened when implicit biases are made explicit. Doing so need not eliminate that bias—after all, you can’t readily reason yourself out of a belief that you weren’t originally reasoned into. Instead, revealing implicit biases indicates where to focus your monitoring to lessen their impact. This notion can be applied to all the realms of our behaviors being shaped by something implicit, subliminal, interoceptive, unconscious, subterranean—and where we then post-hoc rationalize our stance. For example, every judge should learn that judicial decisions are sensitive to how long it’s been since they ate.

  Another example to watch out for is the human potential for irrational optimism. For example, while people might accurately assess the risk of a behavior, they tend toward distortive optimism when assessing risk to themselves—“Nah, that couldn’t happen to me.” Irrational optimism can be great; it’s why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed. But as emphasized by the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, irrational optimism in warfare is disastrous. This can range from the theologically optimistic conviction that God is on your side to the tendency of military strategists to overestimate their side’s capabilities and underestimate those of the opposition—“piece of cake, full steam ahead” becomes the logical conclusion.42

  A final domain of irrationality that must be recognized concerns chapter 15’s “sacred values,” where purely symbolic acts can count for more than hard-nosed material concessions. Rationality may be key to establishing peace, but the irrational importance of sacred values is key to establishing lasting peace.

  Our Incompetence at and Aversion to Killing

  Video cameras are sufficiently ubiquitous these days to make “privacy” a threatened phenomenon. One consequence of such ubiquity is that scientists can be voyeuristic in new ways. Which has produced an interesting finding.

  It concerns riots in soccer stadiums—“football hooliganism,” battles between ethnic or nationalist groups, partisans of each team, or often right-wing skinheads going at it. Footage of such events shows that few people actually fight. Most are on the sidelines watching or running around like agitated, headless chickens. Of those who fight, most throw an ineffectual punch or two before discovering that punching makes your hand hurt. The actual fighters are a tiny subset. As stated by one researcher, “humans are bad at [close-range, hand-to-hand] violence, even if civilization makes us a bit better at it.”43

  Even more interesting is the evidence of our strong inhibitions against doing grievous harm to someone up close.

  The definitive exploration of this is the 1995 book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill
in War and Society, by David Grossman, a professor of military science and retired U.S. Army colonel.44

  He frames the book around something noted after the Battle of Gettysburg. Of the almost 27,000 single-load muskets recovered from the field, almost 24,000 of them were loaded and unfired; 12,000 were loaded multiple times, 6,000 loaded three to ten times. Lots of soldiers were standing there thinking, “I’m going to shoot soon, yes I am, hmm, maybe I should reload my rifle first.” These weapons were recovered from the thick of the battlefield, from men whose lives were at risk while they were reloading. In Gettysburg most deaths were caused by artillery, not the infantry on the ground. In the heat of crazed battle, most men would load, tend to the wounded, shout orders, run away, or wander in a daze.

  Similarly, in World War II only 15 to 20 percent of riflemen ever fired their guns. The rest? Running messages, helping people load ammunition, tending to buddies—but not aiming a rifle at someone nearby and pulling a trigger.

  Psychologists of warfare emphasize how, in the heat of battle, people don’t shoot another human out of hatred or obedience, or even from knowing that this enemy is trying to kill them. Instead it’s the pseudokinship of bands of brothers—to protect your buddies, to not let the guys next to you down. But outside those motivations, humans show a strong natural aversion to killing at close range. The most resistance is against hand-to-hand combat with a knife or bayonet. Next comes short-range firing with a pistol, then long-range firing, all the way to the easiest, which is bombs and artillery.

  The resistance can be psychologically modified. It’s easier when you aren’t targeting an identified individual—throwing a grenade into a group rather than shooting at one person. Killing as an individual is harder than in a group—while only that small subset of World War II riflemen fired their weapons, nearly all weapons operated by a team (e.g., machine guns) were fired. Responsibility is diluted, much as when a firing squad would know that one of them had received a blank, allowing every shooter to know that they might not have actually killed someone.