Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  * I’d love to know what is going on in the heads of chimps when they abandon their alternative method. Are they activating the amygdala, initiating a stress response? What is a chimp’s equivalent of worrying about seeming like a dork?

  * Social identity theory is most associated with the Polish/French/British psychologist Henri Tajfel. As will be seen, Tajfel, pondering why normal people join the herd in doing awful things, was but one of the many scientists in this field whose lives had been personally scorched by the Holocaust.

  * What, if anything, such mimicry has to do with “mirror neurons” will await the discussion in chapter 14 as to what, if anything, mirror neurons have to do with empathy.

  * As a slick part of the design, it wasn’t the actor in the next room doing this emoting. Instead, pressing the shock button of each particular intensity triggered the playing of a particular recording of sounds commensurate with that shock intensity. This would standardize the supposed agony of the learner from one subject to the next.

  * E.g., “So, the scientists found that 65 percent of the subjects were willing to shock the learner to death and then eat his heart. And in the prison study, get this, 65 percent of the guards also became cannibals. It’s, like, freaky that they got the same number.”

  * Cool real-life coincidence that isn’t coincidental—Milgram and Zimbardo knew each other as classmates in their high school in the Bronx.

  * One study inspired by Milgram was the Hofling hospital experiment, in which nurses, unaware that they were in an experiment, would be ordered by an unknown doctor to give a dangerously high dose of a medication to a patient. Despite their knowing of the danger, twenty-one out of twenty-two nurses were willing to comply.

  * Ironic Beginning Department: the SPE was funded by the U.S. military, which was interested in making military prisons run better.

  * Remember, these were predominantly psychologically sound college students. In the SPE nearly all of them had indicated at the beginning that they would rather be a prisoner than a guard, and a number indicated that they had volunteered in order to learn what prison would be like, expecting to be jailed at some point for civil-rights or antiwar activity. And as is often underemphasized in accounts of the SPE, many of the prisoners, as well as the guards, were deeply distressed afterward, having seen how readily they were broken into passivity.

  * One teacher, for example, became a conscientious objector during Vietnam, prompted by his horror at his behavior in the study.

  * And reflecting this, Zimbardo’s recent work examines defiance of unjust authority.

  * The authors of the study also included a category of repellent acts that were nevertheless not moral transgressions, once again matched for a sibling involvement—drinking your sibling’s urine, eating your sibling’s scab.

  * And to demonstrate how much this is tapping into the social brains of these kids, this works only if the shapes are personified with eyes.

  * Dogs differed from primates in two interesting ways that make sense, both dogwise and primatewise. Primates would get pissed and stop working if there was a difference in the quality of the reward (grape versus cucumber); in contrast, dogs didn’t distinguish quality (bread versus sausage), only whether one was rewarded and the other not. Second, while many monkeys refused to accept an eventual reward and would never cooperate again, dogs all eventually came around, after enough entreaties to “shake” by the human.

  * But what if the monkey chooses the two-marshmallow option over the marshmallow/celery one because, well, having any sort of situation with two marshmallows on the scene was just so much more exciting? The authors did a nice control—when there was no monkey in the adjacent space, the choice would be random as to what food was deposited in the second space.

  * Actually, the trolley problem was invented by the British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967.

  * And as alluded to earlier, people with vmPFC damage are strongly and equally willing to pull the lever or push the person. You see the same if you give people a benzodiazepine (a tranquilizer like Valium). The vmPFC and amygdala are calmed down (both by direct actions of the drug and secondarily via damping of the sympathetic nervous system), and people are more willing to push.

  * I kind of wish the authors had indicated the name of the bank, just in case I’m ever considering depositing money in a Swiss bank and want to be able to immediately check one candidate off my list of possible banks.

  * And recall from the last chapter how Haidt has shown that liberals place more of an emphasis than conservatives do on harm and fairness issues, while conservatives disproportionately value loyalty, respect, and purity. Haidt drolly refers to these studies as his “cross-cultural” research, conjuring images of him with pith helmet and mosquito net, trekking through the likes of Berkeley and Provo.

  * Just as an off-the-cuff example, if I were to find myself in the middle of a religious service and suddenly suffer from hideously loud, malodorous flatulence, I’d sure hope I was hanging out with Quakers rather than, say, a bunch of the boys from the Taliban at Friday prayer.

  * Just to bring another term into the mix, most in the field seem to categorize embarrassment as a transient, low-rent version of shame. Its regulatory power is shown by the Semai people of the Malay Peninsula, who say, “There is no authority here but embarrassment.”

  * Which, to emphasize something that we all truly know but have trouble remembering, is not synonymous with happiness. Extensive research on happiness, ranging from longitudinal studies of the same individuals over time to huge cross-cultural studies of tens of thousands of subjects in dozens of countries, all show the same thing: when people rise out of abject poverty, they most definitely tend to become happier. But above the level of struggling to eke out an existence, there is remarkably little relationship between income and happiness.

  * Bowles cites a great example of this, where sanctions decrease in-group prosociality: Some parents are habitually late picking up their kids at their preschool. “Please don’t do it,” the school e-mails all parents. “It delays our wonderful staff from being able to leave work.” This helps, but still there are some parents who are habitually late. So the school institutes a sanctions program—each time you’re late, we add a charge to your bill. And the rate of parental tardiness worsens. Why? Because the transgression has been moved from the realm of in-group social intuition (“Hey, I shouldn’t be selfish toward members of our school community”) to a more calculated realm (“Okay, I’m willing to incur an increased cost for my convenience”). This might also be a way to frame the explanation for why, in that cross-cultural study of small-scale societies discussed above, those with the most market integration had the most prosocial game play—what markets and cash economies do is shift a world of reciprocal altruism from the realm of social intuition to social calculation.

  * These themes bear a strong resemblance to those of the economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow—rather than framing things in a moral arena, his analysis is of the differing strengths and weaknesses of fast intuitive thinking and slow analytical thinking in the realm of economics.

  * Although the neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his book Lying, argues that all lying—even white lies, lies to spare someone’s feelings, lies accomplishing the proverbial heroics of, say, hiding a runaway slave—are wrong.

  * Just to reiterate, starting with those social yeast, deception is not limited to primates. Deception along similar lines to that observed in capuchins has been reported in those brilliant corvid birds; moreover, behaviors such as plover birds feigning injury to lure a predator away from its nest have been interpreted as tactical deception. (“Don’t eat the babies. Look, come after me! I’ve got more meat and I can’t get away because I’m injured.”) Similar deception has also been reported in other birds, some ungulates, and cuttlefis
h.

  * Prompting two great quotes, one generally attributed to the politician Sam Rayburn (“Son, always tell the truth. Then you’ll never have to remember what you said the last time.”) and the other from eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher Johann Lavater (“He who is passionate and hasty is generally honest; it is your cool dissembling hypocrite of whom you should be beware.”).

  * As assessed by scores on a subpart of a psychopathy questionnaire or by a history of successfully conning people. Importantly, the studies included not only a control group of normal individuals but also a control group of psychopaths who just happened not to be compulsive liars.

  * The amygdaloid involvement is probably pertinent to a case report from some French neurologists concerning a man who had a seizure every time he lied during business negotiations. He was found to have a tumor pressing on his amygdala; once it was removed, the seizures went away (there was no mention of whether the guy was still lying at work). The authors called this “Pinocchio syndrome.”

  * Or stated another way, the chimps were less susceptible to superstitious behavior than were the humans.

  * They gave up more readily in a difficult task and experienced less pleasure—showing less of a preference for sucrose-flavored water.

  * This is determined with a “hot-plate test.” A mouse is placed on a room-temperature hot plate; the temperature of the plate is gradually raised. You can tell the instant when the heat first becomes uncomfortable—the mouse lifts a paw (at which point the mouse is removed). What was the plate’s temperature at that point? That’s the mouse’s pain threshold.

  * Reading about these animals experiencing this sure induces an empathic state.

  * “Is associated with”—that’s pretty uninformative. For simplicity, I’ve ignored there being all sorts of subparts to the ACC; depression is associated with increased activation in some and decreased in others. Overall, it fits a picture of ACC dysfunction being centrally involved in the suffocating, permeating sadness of depression.

  * With that truly important proviso that this applies only to within-group interactions. When dealing with a Them, as we saw, oxytocin makes people more hostile and xenophobic.

  * It can be an informative political litmus test to consider whose pain you readily feel (e.g., a fetus versus a homeless person). “What it means to be liberal or conservative became ideologically solidified around the problem of [empathy for only certain types of] pain,” writes one political scientist.

  * For those who care, it’s the premotor cortex, along with the supplementary motor area and primary somatosensory cortex.

  * Back to Keltner’s work—when comparing the wealthy and the poor, guess whose hearts speed up when they’re forced to pay attention to someone else’s suffering?

  * I am on astonishingly thin ice writing about Buddhist thought, which is why we’re now going to quickly transition to the terra firma of considering what neuroscientists have found out about Buddhists.

  * With the hope that the distancing thoughts are along the lines of “This is how I do good,” rather than, say, “I think I’ll have a chicken salad sandwich for lunch.”

  * A colleague of mine used to sardonically talk about his hope that the spouse of some senator would come down with the neurological disease that he studied—then, finally, someone powerful would empathize with sufferers of that disease and steer more grant money in the direction of research.

  * I once benefited in a Maimonides-esque scenario when I, sitting on a toilet in a Starbucks, discovered much too late that there was no toilet paper. Soon someone else entered; hearing him rummaging around one of the urinals, I tentatively begged for a charitable act—“Uh, hey, when you’re done, could you tell the people at the counter that there is no toilet paper here?” “Sure,” answered the anonymous voice, and soon a barista’s hand appeared underneath the toilet stall door offering, if not alms for the poor, TP for the stranded. The trick now is how to re-create this scenario with subjects in brain scanners. This may not, in fact, have been the perfect anonymous interaction. While the Good Samaritan who carried my message and I were anonymous to each other, he wasn’t to the baristas. And for all I know, they promptly gave him a free latte or praised him in song or offered to mate with him. So now we need to know whether the guy expected any/all of these things to happen when he agreed to help me. More research is needed.

  * Lest we get carried away with ourselves, there is good evidence that some of the most impressive cave paintings were done by Neanderthals rather than humans. But by now, who cares about those silly species designations, what with all the human/Neanderthal mating now shown to have been going on?

  * Let alone being so much inside said groove as to be grooved yourself, i.e., groovy.

  * Just consider what is inherent in the fact that numerous languages worldwide have grammatical genders, with some nouns designated as masculine, others as feminine. The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky has shown how grammatical gender can influence thought. In one study she showed that German speakers tend to associate the word “bridge” (which is feminine in German) with attributes such as “beautiful,” “elegant,” or “slender,” while Spanish speakers (for whom “bridge” is masculine) tend toward associations with “big,” “strong,” “towering,” and “sturdy.”

  * Interestingly, harking back to earlier chapters on hierarchy and status, the authors also found that being of lower socioeconomic status predicted a greater degree of moralizing purity, but not moralizing justice or harm avoidance.

  * Which harks back to our confusing goodness with beauty (thus giving lesser jail sentences to those people with symmetrical faces, etc.). As first introduced in chapter 3, we use similar brain circuits, activating the medial orbitofrontal cortex, when contemplating whether an act is moral as when contemplating whether a face is beautiful.

  * Habyarimana’s plane also carried Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of neighboring Burundi, an equally small, impoverished nation with the same history of Hutu/Tutsi conflict. It soon had its own ethnic civil war.

  * And continue to. In the aftermath of the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front rebel army’s victory, approximately two million Rwandan Hutus fled the country, fearing reprisals (of which there have been remarkably few under the government of rebel leader Paul Kagame). The massive refugee camps formed in the eastern Congo by the fleeing Hutus were soon under the control of the defeated Hutu militias and became a breeding ground for attacks on Rwanda and the two subsequent Congo wars, which killed millions.

  * I’ve been mighty interested in the history of the Rwandan genocide. I spent time in Rwanda a few years before it occurred, looking at mountain gorillas on its border with the Congo. Predictably, pathetically, stupidly, poignantly, something-ly, I came away thinking of the people there as kind and generous. I assume that most everyone I encountered wound up dead, killers, and/or refugees. At moments when I wonder why anyone should bother writing a book like this, I taunt myself by thinking, “Golly gee, if only I’d teamed up with the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny to give some lectures in Rwanda about the biology of pseudospeciation, all of this could have been prevented.”

  * As a sacred-values issue that either does or doesn’t seem ironic, depending on your politics, the authors cite how the newborn State of Israel in 1948, in a terrible economic state, nonetheless refused compensation money from Germany for property of Jews murdered by the Nazis—until Germany publicly expressed contrition.

  * The coming of peace to Northern Ireland was laden with other instances of sacred values and symbolism. For example, around the time that the Reverend Ian Paisley, as bloody-handed a Unionist as there was, became first minister in Northern Ireland, the Catholic president of the Republic of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, sent Paisley and his wife a fiftieth wedding-anniversary gift—a wooden bowl. This was rife with meaning, as it was
crafted from a tree at the Irish site of the Battle of the Boyne, where in 1690 the Protestant William of Orange defeated Catholic James II. That victory was critical to the subsequent centuries of Protestant domination in Ireland, an endless point of pain for Catholics and pride for Protestants (who would commemorate the victory every July 12 with provocative marches through Catholic neighborhoods that usually ended in violence). For Ahern to acknowledge the sacred historical significance of the site for Unionists was enormous. Paisley soon reciprocated by visiting the site with Ahern, bringing him a 1685 musket as a gift and talking about the significance of the site for all the Irish people.