Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  * I have no idea what it is that I just wrote. . . .

  * Ditto.

  * Two important points: This intergroup bias effect was demonstrable in males but not females and was most pronounced when males were looking at pictures of other males. Second, shortly after publication the paper was retracted; apparently a data-coding error called into question some of the findings; however, those described here were unaltered by this error, and I think they are perfectly valid. Out of commendable cautiousness, the authors, all top researchers, retracted the paper.

  * A powerful example of this is seen in the first war of Indian independence, also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, of 1857. Indian soldiers—sepoys—serving in the British East India Company’s army rebelled when it became known that the bullets they were issued were greased in either tallow, derived from cows, or lard, from pigs—major offenses to the Hindu and Muslim soldiers, respectively. Mind you, this was not the British colonial overlords doing something offensive to the core cultural values of either group—for example, declaring Allah a false prophet or banning polytheistic worship. Virtually every culture on earth has food prohibitions, often pretty arbitrary ones meant to merely signal core values (kosher laws for Orthodox Jews, for example, revolve around zoological arcana about whether a species has a cloven hoof) but that eventually gain a huge power. Before it was over, the Sepoy Mutiny killed more than 100,000 Indians.

  * Animate too, in ways that no doubt make historical sense, but still. For example, in French the kidney is masculine but the bladder feminine; the trachea is feminine, the esophagus masculine.

  * This study, of avid Yankees and Red Sox fans, also showed that this neuroimaging pattern was strongest among individuals who self-reported the highest likelihood of feeling aggressive toward a fan from the other side (after controlling for the person’s general level of aggression).

  * I heard a brutally cynical joke years ago built around the zero-sum notion that anything that is bad for Them is automatically good for Us: So God appears to all the leaders on earth and announces that he is destroying the world because of human sinfulness. The American president assembles his cabinet and says, “I have good news and bad news. God exists, but he is going to destroy earth.” The premier of the Soviet Union (this was told during the atheistic days of the USSR) pulls together his advisers and says, “I have bad news and worse news. God exists, and he’s going to destroy earth.” And the prime minister of Israel tells his cabinet, “I have good news and great news. God exists, and he’s going to destroy the Palestinians for us.”

  * These scenarios of members of ethnic, religious, or racial groups eager to publicly punish a shameful in-group member can cut both ways—which behavior constitutes acting shamefully? During the 1969 Chicago Seven trial, presided over by a Jewish judge, Julius Hoffman, the chief provocateur of the defendants, the Jewish Abbie Hoffman (no relation), would insult and taunt the judge by yelling, “You are a shanda fur die goyim [Yiddish for “disgrace in front of the gentiles”]. You would have served Hitler better.”

  * This plays out currently with the deep resentment of many in the Muslim American community that they are especially obligated to condemn Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and will be under a cloud of suspicion if they do not. “I refuse to condemn, not because I don’t condemn, but . . . because doing so would mean that I agree that I deserve to be asked,” states the Arab American writer Amer Zahr.

  * Examples of “good alien” movies include The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Cocoon (1985), Avatar (2009), and, of course, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Meanwhile, the numerous “bad alien” movies include The Blob (1958), Liquid Sky (1982), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), and, naturally, Alien (1979). The bad/good alien ratio is consistent over the decades (in other words, it’s not the case that the 1950s were disproportionately filled with scary alien movies so that the directors weren’t called by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the 1960s filled with good-alien efforts of stoned directors just back from Kathmandu). I thank Katrina Hui, a student research assistant, who did this analysis.

  * Interestingly, research has shown a similar pattern with conspiracy theorists. People who believe that aliens landed in New Mexico way back when have a higher-than-chance likelihood of also believing that Princess Di was murdered at the behest of the other royals. And just to show how irrational this all is, as long as you don’t ask them about both scenarios too close in time to each other, people who believe that Di was murdered . . . also . . . believe at a higher-than-chance level that she faked her own death and is, say, living under an assumed name in Wisconsin.

  * How is such priming done? The subject is given a series of scrambled sentences and has to scramble them. In one group most of the sentences discuss things that tap into the concept of loyalty (“teammates helps Jane her”), while the other group’s sentences are about equality (“fairness advocates Chris for”).

  * In a follow-up study, one that, incongruously, I was involved in, similar issues were examined concerning one target individual—Barack Obama—during the 2008 election season. Subjects were presented with swatches of different shades of brown and were asked which most accurately matched Obama’s skin color. Women who viewed him as more white were more likely to vote for him at their time of ovulation; women who viewed him as more black showed the opposite. Of note, these are small effects. Electability is in the eye, and the hormone status, of the beholder.

  * As a historical oddity, Nazi Germany had the strictest laws in the world concerning the humane treatment and euthanizing of animals. The dogs went with far less suffering than their owners.

  * Just to subtly hint at what I thought of the debacle.

  * This one puzzles me intensely. When I was a kid, I decided that bullies would be nicer to me if I knew vast amounts about football. This was during the glory days of the Packers in the Vince Lombardi era; thus I decided that they were the team I favored. I memorized and irritatingly spouted every pointless bit of trivia I could find on them, watched my first (and pretty much only) football game, which turned out to be the Packers legendarily defeating the Cowboys for the 1967 championship with a fourth-down touchdown from the one-yard line, with sixteen seconds remaining, played in minus-fifteen-degree weather. And that’s it. My football obsession faded when I decided that knowing baseball factoids would be more advantageous (this was fortuitous, living in Brooklyn—soon after came the miraculous 1969 championship season for the hapless Mets). I’ve never been to a professional football game, can’t tell you anything about the Packers since (I don’t even know if Bart Starr is still their quarterback, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he’s retired by now), basically ignore football. Yet almost fifty years later, if I happen to hear once every few years that the Packers are having a good or bad season, my mood is briefly influenced by the news; if I see a photograph of people playing football and they include the Packers, I’m sure I preferentially look at them versus the other team, am made fleetingly happy by it being them; I felt excited the one time I met someone from Green Bay and, after thirty seconds of chatting pointlessly with them about the Packers of the sixties, felt a near-spiritual connection with them. It’s just plain weird. And sure demonstrates the unlikely power that “belonging” can have.

  * I once got pulled into this silly, fun venture. There is a diner called Buck’s near Stanford that is famed as a place where venture capitalists come to make deals over power breakfasts; apparently, legendary Silicon Valley companies have been born at its tables. A Silicon Valley newspaper persuaded me, as a primatologist, to tag along with a reporter and do ethological observations of venture capitalist dominance interactions in their natural habitat at Buck’s. We monitored one table with two opposing pairs of business guys negotiating something. Each side had a tanned, fit alpha male, presumably the boss; each side had a subaltern toady, weighed down
with folders and spreadsheets. The toadies interacted with each other constantly, pushing papers at each other, jabbing fingers in the air, grimacing. The two bosses floated above it, their chairs angled to conspicuously ignore each other, their cell phones miraculously ringing each time the other side attempted to talk to them—they’d wave an imperious, dismissive hand at the opponent and take the call. Occasionally, the toadie would ask his boss something privately and, with a display of Mandarin minimalism, the boss would briefly nod his head and change the course of history. Negotiations concluded, seemingly to everyone’s satisfaction, hands were shaken, breakfast was left ritualistically untouched, and everyone departed. The reporter and I scrambled over to the window to observe them in the parking lot. Adversarial interactions over with, the Us/Them-ing shifted—the subalterns scurried off to their sensible little Priuses while the two Masters of the Universe remained chatting, each retrieving a tennis racket from his SUV, amiably comparing them, each trying out a swing or two with the other’s. At that moment the face of each one’s faithful toady probably wouldn’t have even activated the fusiform face area in his boss; instead, the most important Us concerned the enjoyable presence of someone else who could commiserate about the hassles of alimony for a third ex-wife.

  * Such heterogeneity is hard to appreciate in the United States, where most African Americans descend from a few West African tribes that constitute 1 to 2 percent of the total tribal variability in Africa. One of the consequences of this, the fact that drugs are now marketed that preferentially target hypertension among African Americans, seemingly reifies the biological race concept but actually tells you more about the biology of descendants of a small subset of West Africans than about race as a whole.

  * This is not always the case, though. Much analysis went into the acquittal of O. J. Simpson by a jury that included eight African American women. Would their most pertinent group identification be one of gender—and thus responsive to Simpson’s history of domestic violence—or of race—yet another African American man potentially being framed by the criminal justice system? The rest, as they say, is history.

  * The story has a double layer of poignancies. Prior to the war, one of Armistead’s closest friends was Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding a brigade at the battle . . . on the Union side. The dying Armistead asked after Hancock’s well-being and requested that Bingham send his warm greetings to his old friend.

  * The punch line here is how such individuals barely register with us as people—as we’ll see, neuroimaging supports this. A recent finding highlights the opposite concerning the weird American legal notion of “corporate personhood”—when people contemplate the morality of corporate actions, they activate Theory of Mind networks, just as when contemplating the morality of actions of fellow humans.

  * With the reminder that “competence” is used not in the everyday sense where “low competence” would seem pejorative but simply as a measure of agency.

  * With “competence” here not being skill at being rocket scientists but rather the efficacy those people had when they got it into their heads to, say, steal your ancestral lands.

  * In my experience in East Africa, the charge by African men that the “Hindis” (i.e., Indo-Pakistanis, most of whose families have lived in East Africa for generations) are not “real Africans” is often code for “They won’t sleep with us.”

  * Here’s an example of how things, naturally, are more complicated than this simple matrix. Insofar as we view low-warmth/low-competence individuals as dehumanized objects, we objectify them. But “objectify” more frequently denotes sexualization of women. In one study men with high degrees of hostile sexism showed less activation of the medial PFC (along with other brain regions associated with Theory of Mind and perspective taking) when looking at pictures of women. But only if the pictures were particularly sexualized. And there was a world of difference between how a hostilely sexist male viewed a sexually provocative picture of a woman versus a picture of a homeless person. In the words of the authors, the study shows that “diminished mental state attribution is not unique to targets that people prefer to avoid.”

  * As I write, the Shiite/Sunni dichotomy dominates, producing the profound incongruity of both Iranian and American forces battling ISIS fighters in Iraq. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  * To see how little has changed, see the 2005 documentary A Girl Like Me, by the then seventeen-year-old filmmaker Kiri Davis: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BxFRu_Sow.

  * Where activation is, I think, an appropriate marker for negative Them-ing.

  * An extensive health psychology literature shows that “poor but happy” is mostly nonsense—poverty gives rise to higher rates of major depressive and anxiety disorders, suicide, and stress-related disease. As we’ll see in a later chapter, “poor but honest” has more truth to it.

  * My apologies for how baboon-centric the examples in the coming pages will be; it reflects my thirty-plus years hanging around them.

  * Nice evidence that we’re not always just like other animals: Those antihierarchical Buddhists have a text, the Vinaya Pitaka, that instructs monks to defecate not in the order of seniority but in the order of arrival at the toilet. There is hope for this planet.

  * Implicit in this is the fact these males and females have separate hierarchies. In general, females of the highest-ranking family can push around the lowest-quartile rankings of males, though males otherwise dominate females.

  * Note: The correlation between neocortex size and group size across primate species probably reflects each trait influencing the other, i.e., coevolution of the two traits. The neuroimaging study shows that a bigger social group can cause interesting parts of the brain to expand (in ways having far more to do with the neural plasticity of chapter 5 than with genes and evolution).

  * An example of this that I found to be excruciatingly uncomfortable: I used to play in a regular pickup soccer game at Stanford. I was terrible, which was widely and tolerantly recognized by all. One of the best, most respected players was a Guatemalan guy who happened to be a janitor in my building. At soccer he’d call me Robert (on the rare occasion when anything I did was relevant to play). And when he came to empty the garbage from my office and lab, no matter how much I tried to get him to stop, it would be “Dr. Sapolsky.”

  * Given how unlikely it is that those soon-to-be-dominant individuals with the largest-of-the-large PFC/STCs just happened to be placed in the largest groups.

  * Probably to speed things along, using animals that would learn the shock/bar-pressing relationship the fastest.

  * This applies to more global periods of duress as well; it turns out that despite the image of such periods as increasing polarization, it is the rare leftist who becomes more implicitly leftist at such times (stay tuned).

  * Interestingly, Haidt does not characterize himself as conservative, although recent interviews suggest that this is shifting.

  * While it is debatable whether McCarthy actually felt threatened (or even believed a word of what he spewed), he certainly knew how to exploit others with that tendency.

  * Importantly, while conservatives may be more sensitive to feeling threatened, they’re not necessarily more empathic to threat to someone else—conservatives are more likely to be skeptical about the validity of someone else’s physical pain, more likely to frame it as malingering and dependent manipulation..

  * Negative images included someone eating worms, excrement floating in a toilet, a bloody wound, and an open sore teeming with maggots. Fun.

  * This has even been shown to involve formal transitive logic. Animal A loses a dominance interaction with animal B. Animal A then observes animal B losing a dominance interaction to animal C. Animal A then, on his first encounter with animal C, gives a subordination signal. This has been shown in various primate species, rats, birds, and even fish.

 
; * The study also showed, with nice ethological logic, that the same conforming did not occur in orangutans, who are solitary primates.

  * Chimp yawning is most readily evoked by watching yawning by another familiar chimp, next-most readily by watching a familiar human yawning, followed by an unfamiliar human yawning; however, contagious yawning is not evoked by an unfamiliar chimp or an unfamiliar primate species (a baboon).