Are Humans inherently Evil?
Behave by Robert Sapolsky
I have a few recurrent dilemmas that torment me from time to time.
Are some people inherently evil or are mostly good people driven to evil acts because of circumstance, mental derangement or group-think? Think Rwanda genocide or atrocities during India Pakistan partition.
How is it possible to get human beings to kill children in the name of religion when no religion would support murder?
If there is no free will as neuroscience and biology are leading us to believe, then how can there be human agency- the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
Is it possible to run a business and win without ever being unethical?
One would have to look in many different disciplines to even attempt to answer these questions with conviction — Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, and Ethics among others.
Robert Sapolsky somehow manages to draw from all these different disciplines to bring to life, a clearer picture of ‘Why we do what we do?’ What drives us to peaks of altruism and depths of atrocities.
One of the beauties of Behave is its structure. Sapolsky creates a chronological image of what happens in our bodies and environments immediately before the action to what happened in the environment or the family tree centuries before it. Let me elaborate; when we commit a certain act like stopping the car at a red light when everyone seems
to be jumping it or bursting in a fit a rage and using expletives, there are physical changes that happen in our body and brain a few split seconds before the action is committed. Sapolsky addresses it in a chapter called ‘One Second Before’ primarily through neurobiology. Simply put, it is an explanation of what happened in the brain that gave the command and in the body that executed it right before you committed an act.
The second chapter addresses ‘Seconds to Minutes before’. If an action is committed, odds are that a few seconds or minutes before the actual act, something happened in your body or environment that influenced your action; It could be a sensory trigger like something you heard, saw or smelt or it could be an unconscious cue (hold your breath) like ‘skin color’ or ‘race.
The third chapter addresses ‘Hours to days before’. Here Sapolsky uses the science of endocrinology to explain how our hormones can make us more sensitive to social triggers or emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our pre-existing tendencies. E.g. testosterone makes us sensitive to triggers of aggression but only if you are already prone to aggression, a stressful event in the days leading to the act impairs our impulse control, executive decision making while making us less empathetic.
‘Days to Months before’ is the next chapter where he tackles the issue of what happened in the prior months that shaped the outcome. #Metoo movement was as its peak as I was reading the book and this chapter helped me analyze why action against people like Harvey Weinstein happened now in response to the voices of women when so many previous attempts had failed. Sapolsky suggests that days to months is sufficient time for enormous changes in the brain structure causing individual behavior to change; people throughout the Arab world moving from being voiceless to toppling tyrants, , Mandela from prisoner to statesman, and Alyssa Milano from being a victim to a catalyst.
Then the story of ‘Behave’ moves on to what happened in your adolescent years followed by the analysis of your time in the crib and in the womb, and the time when you were just an egg, and how all of that influenced an act today.
This first part of the book deals with an individual and the interplay of genes, the human body, and the brain that experiences and acts on the basis of millions of environmental stimuli. An important takeaway from this section for me was that; genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead, they are about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, and vulnerabilities.
In the second section, he analyses some prevalent behaviors such as ‘Us vs. Them’, hierarchy, empathy, and free will in the context of an individual and society as a whole.
Us Vs. them: Sapolsky avers ‘From massive, breathtaking barbarity to countless pricks of microaggression, ‘ Us vs. Them’ has produced oceans of pain. Yet our generic goal is not to cure us of Us/Them dichotomizing. It can’t be done unless our amygdala is destroyed, in which case, everyone seems like us’.
One of the frameworks that I loved in this chapter describes our relationship with different types of ‘Thems’. We tend to categorize ‘thems’ along two axes; warmth and competence. These two axes produce a matrix with four corners; there are groups that we rate ‘high’ on both warmth and competence- our CEO friend, there is the other extreme, low in both warmth and competence — the beggar on the street. Next is the high warmth low competence category which includes the elderly, people with handicaps, and last is the category of low warmth, high competence people like the rulers or politicians. According to Sapolsky, people tend toward consistent feelings evoked by each extreme
- For high warmth, high competence (i.e. Us) we feel pride
- Low warmth, high competence- Envy
- High Warmth, low competence- pity
- Low warmth, low competence- disgust
The fascinating discussion is when someone’s categorization changes
HH to HL: Watching a parent decline into dementia
HH to LH: A business partner who cheated you
HH to LL: a friend who made partner in the law firm but was diagnosed with late-stage cancer
LL to HL: a homeless beggar finds a wallet and goes out of his way to return it to the rightful owner
We all belong to multiple categories of Us and their relative importance can rapidly change. Secondly, all ‘Thems ‘ are not the same and we have complex taxonomies about different types of ‘thems’ and the responses they evoke.
‘In order to lessen the adverse effects of Us/Them-ing, a shopping list would include emphasizing individuation and shared attributes, perspective taking, lessening hierarchical differences, and bringing people together on equal terms with shared goals.
The Question of Morality
The author dedicates a few chapters to the confusing labyrinth of morality which is hugely influenced by our deep-rooted desires for conformity and obedience. The pull of conformity and obedience can lead us to some of our darkest, most appalling places, and far more of us can be led there than we’d like to think.
Compliance increases when guilt is diffused- even if I hadn’t done it, it still would have happened. That is why historically people were not executed with five shots fired from the same gun. Instead, there were five guns fired simultaneously- a firing squad. Firing squads traditionally took the diffusion of responsibility a step further, where one member was randomly given a blank instead of real bullet. That way, a shooter could shift from the comforting irrationality that ‘I only one fifth killed him ‘to even better ‘ I may not even have shot him’.
Here was the final big takeaway for me. Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do- given the same situational forces. Thus, what becomes vital is to understand the circumstances that push us towards actions, we thought we were far better than or that reveal strength we never suspected we had.
Our worst behaviors, the ones we condemn and punish are products of our biology. We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about. But we must remember that the same applies to our best behaviors. Individuals no more exceptional than us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans.
Originally published at http://reconnectinglearning.com on June 12, 2018.
