Read EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial Online
Authors: Marc Hauser
When we lower our sense of another’s value, we are willing to violate our sense of the sacred, engaging in trade-offs that are normally taboo. Experiments by the psychologists Philip Tetlock and Jonathan Haidt help us see what is sacred by asking individuals what they would pay to do something sacrilegious
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. If something is sacred, of great moral worth either personally or to your group, could you be paid off by a wealthy investor to give up the object or engage in an act against it? For each of the acts below, think about your payoff point in dollars from $0 (for free) to $1 million, including the option of saying that you would never do it for any amount of money. Keep in mind that if you choose to carry out an act and receive payment you will not suffer any consequences:
If you are like the subjects in these experiments, the mere process of considering a payoff, even for a short period of time, will have turned your stomach into knots and triggered a deep sense of disgust. This is because violating the sacred is akin to violating our sense of humanness. It is playing with the devil, accepting a Faustian offer of money to strip something of its moral worth. As Haidt notes, even though it is sacrilege to accept payment across different moral concerns, including avoiding harm, acting fairly, and respecting authority, different experiences can modulate the aversion we feel when we imagine such transgressions. Women typically demand more money for each of these acts than men, and more often reject them as taboo. Those who lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum either ask for more money or consider the act taboo when compared to liberals, and this is especially the case for questions focused on acting against an in-group (race), an authority figure (political leader), or one’s purity (blood transfusion). What this suggests is that certain experiences can distort what we consider morally worthy or sacred. It suggests that we can flip our values in the face of tempting alternatives. It suggests that we can be tempted to treat others as moral zeroes.
The scientific evidence presented in this section reveals that our decisions to treat others according to different moral principles or norms is powerfully affected by our sense of what counts as another human being. What counts includes at least two important dimensions, one focused on agency and the other on experience. These dimensions determine whether we blame or praise someone, punish or rehabilitate them, and ultimately, include or exclude them from the inner circles of moral agents or moral patients. Those who fall outside these two inner circles are morally worthless. Those who are morally worthless can be destroyed or banished. Some things are justifiably excluded and fit with our general sense of reality — rocks, dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic balls, and pieces of glass. Other things are excluded because they don’t fit with our values of what reality should be. This is where distortion and denial enter the process. This is where we create walls around members of one group in order to keep others out. This is where we express partiality instead of the impartiality that Lady Justice champions with her two balanced scales and blindfold-covered eyes. This is where we exclude others from our inner sanctum in order to justify great harms. How is the inner sanctum set up and put into action over a lifetime, sometimes for legitimate causes and sometimes for illegitimate and unconscionable causes?
Populating the inner sanctum
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor, remarked that “anti-Semitism is the oldest group prejudice in history.”
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This claim may well be true of human written history, but is most definitely false if one considers the fact that all social animals and human societies, including the hunter-gatherer groups that are descendants of people that predated the Jews, hate some individuals and love others. Prejudice, though often based on deep seated ideological biases and stereotypes that humans invent, is, at root, a form of partiality. Every social animal expresses partiality. This is a highly adaptive and ancient psychology, promoting the care of young, investment in mates, and escape strategies against enemies. Humans are no different, except for the role that our unique brains play in fueling partiality with ideology and symbolism. Sometimes when we express our partiality it is for the noble cause of caring for our children and for defending ideological beliefs surrounding humanitarian causes, including defense of basic human rights. Sometimes when we express our partiality, it is for the ignoble cause of destroying others. In this section, I explain how human partiality works, from its earliest incarnation in infancy to its most articulated and culturally developed form in adulthood
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At birth, newborns prefer to listen to people speaking their native language over those speaking another language. Soon thereafter, infants prefer to listen to their native dialect over a non-native dialect, and look longer at people from their own race than those from another race. This suggests that prior to any significant cultural indoctrination, infants can discriminate between different languages, dialects, and racial groups — all markers of group identity. But do they care about these differences? Do they form social preferences based on these distinctions? Would a young baby prefer to take a toy from an unfamiliar person who speaks the same or different language, from the same or different race? To answer these questions, the developmental psychologist Katharine Kinzler gave five months old babies a test.
Babies born into families of one race and one language sat on their mother’s lap in front of two monitors, each presenting short video clips of different people. After watching the videos, Kinzler created a bit of magic. The people in the monitor appeared to emerge from the image and offer the baby a toy. The trick: a real person, hidden beneath the monitor, synchronized her reach with the reach in the monitor. Who would the baby choose given that both people offered the same toy? Babies grabbed the toy from people speaking the native over non-native language and the native-accent over the non-native accent, but showed no preference for the native race. Thus, early in life the connection between discrimination and social preference is well established for language, but not for race. When do things change for race?
Kinzler carried out another series of experiments on race with one group of two and a half-year old children and a second group of five-year olds. Though these two age groups required different methods, both focused on the child’s preferences, including who they would share toys with and who they would prefer as friends. The two and a half year olds showed no preferences, whereas the five year olds preferred their own race. Race is therefore a slowly developing category, at least in terms of its impact on social preferences, and especially when contrasted with both language and accent.
Kinzler took these studies one step further to ask: What’s more important to a young child building an inner sanctum of trusted others — race or language? Would they rather interact with someone of the same race who speaks a foreign language or someone of a different race who speaks the native language? Using similar procedures, Kinzler showed that by five years of age, language trumps race. Children would rather interact with someone from a different race speaking the same language than someone of the same race speaking a foreign language.
Why would language trump race? Kinzler’s answer relies on an idea developed by the evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban. Imagine a hunter-gatherer in South Africa, living during the earliest stages of our evolutionary history. Consider the fact that this individual was constantly in search of food to eat, places to sleep, and water to drink. Consider further that this individual had to compete with others to satisfy his desire for such resources. As soon as this individual moved outside of his primary living area, he met strangers. All were from the same race given that racial differences didn’t emerge until relatively late in human evolution, well after our ancestors took their first steps out of Africa. If we are thinking about an evolved psychology for bonding with members of our own group and fighting those outside, our ancestors would have been blind to race as it was not yet an emergent property of our species. Language was, however, a property of our species, one that varied across populations. A hunter-gatherer walking the plains of South Africa would indeed have run into people speaking either a completely different language, or the same language with a different dialect. New languages are not easily acquired and nor are new dialects. It takes talent to speak a new language or dialect without a trace of ones origins.
The babies in Kinzler’s experiments tell us something important: race and language are both discriminable from an early age, but language precedes race in terms of its prejudicing effects on infants’ social preferences. Language trumps race because it is a better predictor of membership within the inner sanctum, at least early in life. Ultimately, both language and race are used to close off some from the inner sanctum and allow others in. But this is only the beginning of our prejudicial outlook. With time and experience, we not only discriminate against others using finer and finer distinctions, but use our discriminating powers to close more doors. This is a process that I discussed in the context of Fehr’s research showing that children are more likely to share candy with kids from the same school than with kids from a different school. This is a process that grows, creating rich cooperative networks within communities — think religious groups — and equally rich antagonistic networks with those outside the community — again, think religious groups.
Closed doors
As adults, we tend to rely on rules of thumb to guide our social interactions, including who we trust and who we distrust. We tend to trust those we know more than those we don’t know. Within the circle of those we know, we believe those who are more like us than those who are unlike us, using unchangeable parts of the body (race, height, eye color), flexible psychological features (food preferences, sports’ interests, religious beliefs), and features that vary within a constrained space of possibilities (language and intelligence). Together, these different dimensions cause us to close the door on some and open it to others. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, a point that I briefly made in the last section and that I will explain in greater detail in
chapter 3
: in a world with limited resources, there is strong pressure to help our kin and friends within the group, and to keep strangers at bay. This ancient capacity will always be with us, despite our attempts at equality and impartiality.
Consider language again. If you can’t understand someone because they speak a foreign language or because their accent in the native language is too heavy, then the issue is not trust, but comprehension. But what if you can understand the person perfectly well, but they speak with a foreign accent, either one from a different country (such as a Frenchman speaking English) or one from the same country but a different region (such as a Southerner from Georgia asking a New Yorker for directions)?
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Subjects in an experiment first listened to people reading trivia, such as “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can,” and then judged whether the sentence was true or false. If the sentence was read in a foreign accent, subjects were more likely to say that it was false than if it was read in the native accent. Subjects voiced this opinion even though the experimenter told them that the reader was not expressing an opinion, but merely reading the passage as instructed. In a second experiment, British subjects listening to a non-guilty plea by a person on trial were more likely to judge the person as guilty if he committed a blue collar crime and spoke with a non-standard British accent (e.g., Australian). In contrast, they were more likely to judge a white collar criminal as guilty if he spoke with a standard British accent. Even within the class of British accents, biases emerged: subjects from the Worcester region were more likely to judge supposed criminals as guilty if they spoke with a Birmingham accent than with a Worcester accent. Together, these studies paint a bleak picture: accents from an out-group are perceived as less truthful than others, and in the context of a criminal case, more guilty as well.
Accents are learned early in life. Once in place, our accents are both clear markers of our origins and difficult to undue. As such, they are reliable indicators of at least one dimension of group membership. What about dimensions that can readily be acquired at any point in life and just as easily dropped? How do these influence not only our perception of those who share these dimensions in common, but how we treat them?
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In the last chapter I discussed a study by Tania Singer in which both men and women showed more pain empathy — as revealed by activation in the insula region of the brain — when they watched a cooperator experiencing pain. Men also showed a reduction of activity in this area when a cheater experienced pain, and increased activity in a reward area — the nucleus accumbens. We feel compassion for those who cooperate with us, as cooperation is a sign of group solidarity and membership. We lack these feelings toward cheaters because they are either competitors outside of our group or individuals inside who don’t deserve to be. When a cheater has been caught and punished for his crime, we rejoice, feeling schadenfreude for just deserts.
Singer took this work further, asking whether an individual’s support for a sport’s team — a dimension that can be acquired and dropped at will — might similarly modulate both the feeling of pain empathy as well as reward. Whether playing on a team or supporting them as a fan, we identify the players as members of our group, and those on other teams as members of an out-group. Subjects in the experiment — all soccer fanatics — sat in a scanner and watched as a player from their favorite team or a rival experienced pain. Next, Singer provided subjects with three options for interacting with these players: help them by personally taking on some of the pain they would receive, let them take on all the pain but watch a video as distraction, or let them take on all the pain and watch as it happens. Option one is costly altruism, two is blissful ignorance, and three is schadenfreude.