Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  Another central aspect of the suicidal person’s cognitive deconstruction, says Baumeister, is a dramatic increase in concrete thought. Like the intrusively high self-awareness discussed earlier, this concreteness is often conveyed in suicide notes. Several review articles have noted the relative paucity of “thinking words” in suicide notes, which are abstract, meaningful, high-level terms. Instead, they more often include banal and specific instructions, such as “Don’t forget to feed the cat” or “Remember to take care of the electric bill.” Real suicide notes are usually suspiciously void of contemplative or metaphysical thoughts, whereas fake suicide notes, written by study participants, tend to include more abstract or high-level terms (“Someday you’ll understand how much I loved you” or “Always be happy”). One old study even found that genuine suicide notes contained more references to concrete objects in the environment—physical things—than did “fake” (simulated) suicide notes.

  What this cognitive shift to concrete thinking reflects, suggests Baumeister, is the brain’s attempt to slip into idle mental labor, thereby avoiding the suffocating feelings that we’ve been describing. Many suicidal college students, for example, exhibit a behavioral pattern of burying themselves in dull, routine academic busywork in the weeks beforehand, presumably to enter a sort of “emotional deadness” that is “an end in itself.” When I was a suicidal adolescent, I remember reading voraciously; it didn’t matter what it was that I read—mostly junk novels, in fact—since it was only to replace my own thoughts with those of the writer’s. For the suicidal, other people’s words can be pulled over one’s exhausting ruminations like a seamless glove being stretched over a distractingly scarred hand.

  Even the grim, tedious details of organizing one’s own suicide can offer a welcome reprieve: “When preparing for suicide, one can finally cease to worry about the future, for one has effectively decided that there will be no future. The past, too, has ceased to matter, for it is nearly ended and will no longer cause grief, worry, or anxiety. And the imminence of death may help focus the mind on the immediate present.”

  * * *

  Step 6: Disinhibition. We’ve now set the mental stage, but it is of course the final act that separates suicidal ideation from an actual suicide. Baumeister speculates that behavioral disinhibition, which is required to overcome the intrinsic fear of causing oneself pain through death, not to mention the anticipated suffering of loved ones left behind to grieve, is another consequence of cognitive deconstruction. This is because it disallows the high-level abstractions (reflecting on the inherent “wrongness” of suicide, how others will feel, even concerns about self-preservation) that, under normal conditions, keep us alive.

  A theoretical analysis by the psychiatrist Kimberly Van Orden and her colleagues sheds some additional light on this component of behavioral disinhibition. These authors point out that while there is a considerable number of people who want to kill themselves, suicide itself remains relatively rare. This is largely because, in addition to suicidal desire, the individual needs the “acquired capability for suicide,” which involves both a lowered fear of death and an increased physical pain tolerance. Suicide hurts, literally. One acquires this capability, according to these authors’ model, by being exposed to related conditions that systematically habituate the individual to physical pain. For example, one of the best predictors of suicide is a nonlethal prior suicide attempt.

  But a history of other fear-inducing, physically painful experiences also places one at risk. Physical or sexual abuse as a child, combat exposure, and domestic abuse can also “prep” the individual for the physical pain associated with suicidal behavior. In addition, heritable variants of impulsivity, fearlessness, and greater physical pain tolerance may help to explain why being suicidal often runs in families. Van Orden and her coauthors also cite some intriguing evidence that habituation to pain is not so much generalized to just any old suicide method as often specific to the particular method used to end one’s own life. For example, a study on suicides in the U.S. military branches found that guns were most frequently associated with army personnel suicides, hanging and knots for those in the navy, and falling and heights for those in the air force.

  * * *

  So there you have it. It’s really not a pretty picture. But again, I do hope that if you ever are unfortunate enough to experience these cognitive dynamics in your own mind—and I, for one, very much have—or if you suspect you’re seeing behaviors in others that indicate these thought patterns may be occurring, this information helps you to meta-cognitively puncture suicidal ideation. If there is one thing I’ve learned since those very dark days of my suicidal years, it’s that scientific knowledge changes perspective. And perspective changes everything. Everything.

  And, as I alluded to at the start, always remember: you’re going to die soon enough anyway; even if it’s a hundred years from now, that’s still the blink of a cosmic eye. In the meantime, live like a scientist—even a controversial one with only a colleague or two in all the world—and treat life as a grand experiment, blood, sweat, tears, and all. Bear in mind that there’s no such thing as a failed experiment—only data.

  “Scientists Say Free Will Probably Doesn’t Exist, Urge ‘Don’t Stop Believing!’”

  Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that you have agreed, as a secret agent in some confidential military operation, to travel back in time to the year 1894. To your astonishment, it’s a success! And now—after wiping away the magical time-traveling dust from your eyes—you find yourself on the fringes of some Bavarian village, hidden in a camouflaging thicket of wilderness against the edge of town, the distant, disembodied voices of nineteenth-century Germans mingling atmospherically with the unmistakable sounds of church bells.

  Quickly you survey your surroundings: you seem to be directly behind a set of old row houses; white linens have been hung out to dry; a little stream tinkles behind you; windows have been opened to let in the warm springtime air. How quaint. No one else appears to be about, although occasionally you glimpse a pedestrian passing between the narrow gaps separating the houses. And then you notice him. There’s a quiet, solemn-looking little boy nearby, playing quietly with some toys in the dirt. He looks to be about five years old—a mere kindergartner, in the modern era. It’s then that you’re reminded of your mission: This is the town of Passau in southern Germany. And that’s no ordinary little boy. It’s none other than young Adolf Hitler. What would you do next?

  This scenario is, rather unfortunately for us, in the realm of science fiction. But how you answer the hypothetical question—and others like it—is a matter for psychological scientists, because among other things it betrays your underlying assumptions about whether Hitler, as well as the decisions he made later in his life, was simply the product of his environment acting on his genes or whether he could have acted differently by exerting his “free will.” Most scientists in this area aren’t terribly concerned over whether free will does or does not exist; instead, they focus on how people’s everyday reasoning about free will, particularly in the moral domain, influences their social behaviors and attitudes.

  We’ve already met one of the leading investigators in this area, Roy Baumeister, who so effectively disarmed the psychology underlying suicidal thoughts. Here’s Baumeister’s take on the psychology of free will:

  At the core of the question of free will is a debate about the psychological causes of action. That is, is the person an autonomous entity who genuinely chooses how to act from among multiple possible options? Or is the person essentially just one link in a causal chain, so that the person’s actions are merely the inevitable product of lawful causes stemming from prior events, and no one ever could have acted differently than he or she actually did?…

  To discuss free will in terms of scientific psychology is therefore to invoke notions of self-regulation, controlled processes, behavioral plasticity, and conscious decision-making.

  With this understanding o
f what psychologists study when they turn their attention to people’s beliefs in free will, let’s return to the Hitler example above. In your role of this time-traveling secret agent from the twenty-first century, you’ve been equipped with the following pieces of information. First, the time-traveling technology is still in its infancy, and researchers are doubtful that it will ever succeed again. Second, you have only ten minutes before being zapped back into the present (and two of those minutes have already elapsed since you arrived). Third, you’ve been informed that seven minutes is just enough time to throttle a five-year-old with your bare hands and to confirm, without a doubt, that the child is dead. This means that you have only one minute left to decide whether or not to kill the little boy.

  But you have other options. Seven minutes is also enough time, you’ve been told by your advisers, to walk into the Hitler residence and hand-deliver to Alois and Klara, Adolf’s humorless father and kindly, retiring mother, a specially prepared package of historical documents related to the Holocaust, including clear photographs of their son as a mustachioed führer and a detailed look at the Third Reich four decades later. Nobody knows precisely what effect this would have, but most modern scholars believe that this horrifying preview of World War II would meaningfully alter Adolf’s childhood. Perhaps Klara would finally leave her domineering, abusive husband; Alois, unhappy with the idea of his surname becoming synonymous with all that is evil, might change his ways and become a kinder parent; or they might both sit down together with the young Adolf and share with him disturbing death-camp images and testimonies from Holocaust survivors that are so shocking and terrifying that even Adolf himself would come to disdain his much-hated adult persona. But can Adolf really change the course of his life? Does he have free will? Do any of us?

  One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial. We’ll get back to little Adolf shortly. (Which do you think is the antisocial decision here, to kill or not to kill the Hitler boy?) But before making your decision, have a look at what the science says. The first study to directly demonstrate the antisocial consequences of deterministic beliefs was done by the psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. In their report in Psychological Science, Vohs and Schooler invited thirty undergraduates into their lab to participate in what was ostensibly a study about mental arithmetic in which they were asked to calculate the answers to twenty math problems (for example, 1 + 8 + 18 − 12 + 19 − 7 + 17 − 2 + 8 − 4 = ?) in their heads. But, as social psychology experiments often go, testing something as trivial as the students’ math skills was not the real purpose of the study.

  Prior to taking the math test, half the group (fifteen participants) were asked to read the following passage from Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis:

  “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons … although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.

  In contrast, the other fifteen participants read a different passage from the same book, but one in which Crick makes no mention of free will. And, rather amazingly, when given the opportunity, this second group of people cheated significantly less on the math test than those who read Crick’s free-will-as-illusion passage above. (The study was cleverly rigged to measure cheating: participants were led to believe that there was a “glitch” in the computer program, and that if the answer appeared on the screen before they finished the problem, they should hit the space bar and finish the test honestly. The number of space bar clicks throughout the task therefore indicated how honest they were being.) These general effects were replicated in a second experiment using a money allocation task in which participants who were randomly assigned to a determinism condition and asked to read statements such as “A belief in free will contradicts the known fact that the universe is governed by lawful principles of science” essentially stole more money than those who’d been randomly assigned to read statements from a free-will condition (for example, “Avoiding temptation requires that I exert my free will”) or a neutral condition with control statements (for example, “Sugarcane and sugar beets are grown in 112 countries”).

  Vohs and Schooler’s findings reveal a rather strange dilemma facing social scientists: If a deterministic understanding of human behavior encourages antisocial behavior, how can we scientists justify communicating our deterministic research findings? In fact, there’s a rather shocking line in this Psychological Science article, one that I nearly overlooked on my first pass. Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”

  Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. Perhaps they’re right. Consider the following example.

  A middle-aged man hires a prostitute, knowingly exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted infection and exploiting a young drug addict for his own pleasure. Should the man be punished somehow for his transgression? Should we hold him accountable? Most people, I’d wager, wouldn’t hesitate to say yes to both questions.

  But what if you thought about it in the following slightly different, scientific terms? The man’s decision to have sex with this woman was in accordance with his physiology at that time, which had arisen as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of similar traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Even his ability to inhibit or “override” these forces, or to understand his own behavior, is the product itself of these forces! What’s more, this man’s brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather, his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioral algorithms that responded, either normally or in error, in ways that had favored genetic success in the ancestral past.

  Given the combination of these deterministic factors, could the man have responded any other way to the stimuli he was confronted with? Attributing personal responsibility to this sap becomes merely a social convention that reflects only a naive understanding of the causes of his behaviors. Like us judging him, this man’s self merely plays the role of spectator in his body’s sexual affairs. There is only the embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general nature. The self is only a deluded creature that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member.

  If this deterministic understanding of the man’s behaviors leads you to feel even a smidgen more sympathy for him than you otherwise might have, that reaction is precisely what Vohs and Schooler are warning us about. How can we fault this “pack of neurons”—let alone punish him—for acting as his nature dictates, even if our own nature would have steered us otherwise? What’s more, shouldn’t we be more sympathetic toward our own moral shortcomings? After all, we can’t help who we are either. Right?

  In fact, a study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply exposing people to deterministic statements, such as “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules,” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared with those who read statements endorsing
the idea of free will, such as “I demonstrate my free will every day when I make decisions,” or those who simply read neutral statements, such as “Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface.” Participants who’d been randomly assigned to the deterministic condition, for example, were less likely than those from the other two groups to give money to a homeless person or to allow a classmate to use their cellular phone. In discussing the societal implications of these results, Baumeister and his coauthors echo Vohs and Schooler’s concerns about “insulating the public” from a detailed understanding of the causes of human social behaviors: “Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior, but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.”

  These laboratory findings that demonstrate the antisocial consequences of viewing individual human beings as hapless pinballs trapped in a mechanical system—even when, in point of fact, that’s pretty much what we are—are enough to give me pause in my scientific proselytizing. Returning to innocent little Adolf, we could, of course, play with this particular example forever. It’s an unpalatable thought, but what if one of the children slaughtered at Auschwitz would have grown up to be even more despised than Hitler, as an adult ordering the deaths of ten million? Isn’t your ability to make a decision a question fundamentally about your own free will? And so on. But the point is not to play the what-if Hitler game in some infinite regress but rather to provoke your intuitions about free will without asking you directly whether you believe in it or not. As any good scientist knows, what people say they believe doesn’t always capture their private psychology.

  In this case, it’s not so much your decision to kill the child or to deliver the package to his parents that research psychologists would be interested in. Rather, it’s how you would justify your decision (for example, “I’d kill him because [fill in the blank here]” or “I’d deliver the package because [fill in the blank]”) that would illuminate your thinking about Hitler’s free will. On the face of it, strangling an innocent five-year-old seems rather antisocial, and so perhaps hearing a deterministic message before answering this question would lead you to kill him (for instance, “Hitler is evil, he will grow up to murder people no matter what—he has no free will to do otherwise”). For some people, however, the decision not to kill the innocent boy is the antisocial one, because it may well mean the unthinkable for more than six million fellow human beings.