Human. Part 4

These studies have been extended to the world beyond college students. The games were played with fifteen small-scale societies on four continents and in New Guinea. Although the results were more widely varied (lowball offers were more readily accepted in some societies and not in others), the researchers concluded that in none of the societies did people play with a completely selfish behavior. How they played varied with how important local cooperation was and how dependent they were on marketing and trading goods. The individual player's personal economic status or demographic had no effect, and the play patterns pretty much resembled their everyday interactions.38 The more the society engaged in reciprocal trade beyond their kinship ties, the more equitable the offers were.

THE SUFFERING MODULE.

A concern for suffering, or a sensitivity to or a dislike of signs of physical pain in others, and a dislike for those who cause the pain, is a good adaptation for a mother raising an infant who has a long period of dependency. Any adaptation that increases the offspring's chance of survival would have been selected for, and an ability to detect suffering in one's offspring fits this criterion. Sympathy, compa.s.sion, and empathy most likely have their distant origins in mimicry, which result in mother-offspring bonding and attachment, which in turn tend to increase survival of offspring. The virtues Haidt concludes societies derive from this intuitive ethic are compa.s.sion and kindness, but we could add righteous anger.

THE HIERARCHY MODULE.

Hierarchy has to do with navigating in a social world where status matters. We evolved in social groups that were rife with dominance and status, both social and s.e.xual. Our cousins the chimps are forever concerned about rank and dominance, and so are humans. Even in egalitarian societies, hierarchy exists in social status, work organizations, and s.e.xual compet.i.tion. No matter how egalitarian the society, some individuals will be more fit, more attractive, and thus ranked higher by the opposite s.e.x. And somebody has to run the committee meetings, or chaos ensues. Intuitive behaviors that led to maneuvering this social web by being respectful to dominants or wielding power with aplomb would have been successful. We saw how the emotions of guilt and shame worked in social exchange, but they can also nudge one to act in a socially acceptable way, helping one navigate the hierarchical social world. Guilt is the belief that one has caused harm or suffering and can motivate helpful behavior, especially if one is caught in a reprehensible act, whereupon guilt becomes shame. Shame is violating a social norm knowing that someone is watching. It motivates one to hide or withdraw, which indicates that one understands the violation and is less likely to be attacked for committing it. Guilt and shame can be motivators for all the moral modules. Embarra.s.sment is often felt around people of higher status. It motivates one to present oneself properly and show respect for those in authority, thus avoiding conflict with more powerful individuals, increasing the odds of survival. We learned in the last chapter that the reward for those who punished cheaters was increased status. Other emotions that are a.s.sociated with hierarchy are respect and awe, or resentment. Virtues based in hierarchy are respect, loyalty, and obedience.

THE IN-GROUP/OUT-GROUP COALITION MODULE.

Coalitions are prevalent in chimpanzee society and among other social mammals, such as dolphins. They are endemic among humans, who organize themselves spontaneously into mutually exclusive groups. There are the sugar people and the salt people, farmers and herders, dog lovers and cat lovers. It is almost comic (if it didn't lead to so much tragedy) to look at an atlas of the world and see how many countries do not like their neighbors. Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides have found evidence for a specialized module that codes for coalition recognition.39 In an evolutionary world where kin groups live together, where hostile neighboring bands can be encountered, and where shifting power struggles erupt in social groups, it would be beneficial to be able to recognize patterns of cooperation, compet.i.tion, and political allegiance. Visible markers that suggested who was allied with whom would be important. Arbitrary cues, such as skin color, accent, or manner of dress, would become significant only if they had predictive validity for coalitional membership. Otherwise they would be unimportant. The hunter-gatherer societies in which we evolved would rarely, if ever, have come into contact with groups of another race. They rarely moved more than a short distance. But race could be used as a coalition marker in the right circ.u.mstances because it is highly visible. In sociological tests in the past, people always categorized other people according to race, no matter what social context they presented.

To test if there might be a module that specialized in coalition recognition rather than race recognition, which did not make evolutionary sense, Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides created a social context in which race was not predictive of a cooperative alliance. They found this drastically decreased the extent to which subjects noticed race. They also demonstrated that any visual marker (they used shirt color) that is correlated with patterns of cooperation and alliance would be encoded, and in fact was encoded more strongly than race. It was only four minutes into their experiment when their subjects no longer noticed race. They concluded that people are good at picking up on changing patterns of alliance, and this is why they can adapt to different social worlds, one where race was not the coalition predictor.

Various emotions can be aroused by coalition membership: compa.s.sion for other groups (by Shriners and walkathon partic.i.p.ants, for example), contempt for other groups (nonsmokers' feelings for smokers), anger (by nonsmokers against smokers), guilt (for not supporting your group), shame (for betraying your group), embarra.s.sment (for letting "the team" down), and grat.i.tude (house owners to firemen). So this module would work: Recognized as part of my group: good, approach; not part of my group: bad, avoid. Coalition recognition has its roots in mimicry; like mannerisms generate a positive bias. Virtues that are sp.a.w.ned from in-group coalitions are trust, cooperation, self-sacrifice, loyalty, patriotism, and heroism.

THE PURITY MODULE.

Purity has its roots in defending against disease: bacteria, fungi, and parasites-what Matt Ridley considers the compet.i.tion.40 Without their threatening presence, there is no need for gene recombination or s.e.xual (versus as.e.xual) reproduction. We wouldn't have to keep up with the Joneses, or in this case the Escherichia coli or the Entamoeba histolytica, which are constantly mutating to get better at attacking us so they can reproduce and survive. Disgust is the emotion that protects purity. Haidt suggests that the emotion of disgust arose when hominids became meat eaters. It appears to be a uniquely human emotion.41 Obviously your dog doesn't feel it. Look what he eats. Disgust is only one of the four reasons that humans reject food, but we share the other three reasons with other animals: distaste, inappropriateness (a stick), and danger. Disgust implies the knowledge of the origins or the nature of food. Young infants will reject food that is bitter, but disgust doesn't appear until around age five. Haidt and his colleagues suggest that the emotion of disgust initially acted as a food rejection system, evidenced by its connection to nausea, concerns with contamination (contact with a disgusting substance), and facial expressions a.s.sociated with it, which mostly use the nose and mouth. They refer to this as core disgust.

Initially, disgust would guard against disease transmitters, such as rotting corpses and carca.s.ses, rotting fruit, feces, parasites, vomit, and the ill. Haidt suggests, "Human societies, however, need to reject many things, including s.e.xual and social 'deviants.' Core disgust may have been preadapted as a rejection system, easily harnessed to other kinds of rejection."41 Its purview expanded, and at some point disgust became more generalized to include aspects of appearance, bodily functions, and some activities, including overindulgence and some occupations, such as those having to do with corpses.

But if disgust evolved to serve these important adaptive functions-food selection and disease avoidance-then it is particularly surprising that the disgust response is almost totally lacking in young children. Indeed, young children will put almost anything into their mouths, including feces, and the full disgust response (including contamination sensitivity) is not in place until around the age of five to seven. Contamination sensitivity is also not found, so far as we know, in any non-human species.* Caution is therefore warranted in proposing that disgust is important for biological survival. The social functions of disgust...may be more important than its biological functions.41 Indeed when the researchers had people from many different countries list things that they found disgusting, they could be grouped into three general categories beyond that of core disgust. The first category was things that reminded people of their animal nature, including death, s.e.x, hygiene, all body fluids except tears (which only humans have), and body envelope violations such as a missing part, deformity, or obesity. The next category consisted of things that were thought to risk interpersonal contamination, which turns out to be less a form of body product contamination (people were only slightly less reluctant to wear laundered clothes of another) than of contamination of their essence. People were more reluctant to wear the clothes of a murderer or of Adolph Hitler, than of a well-liked person. The majority of things listed as disgusting by people from India fell in this category. The last grouping was moral offenses. For American and j.a.panese subjects, the majority of disgusting things on their lists came from this category, although they were very different. Americans were disgusted at the violation of a person's rights and dignity, whereas j.a.panese were disgusted at violations to a person's place in society.

Disgust has a cultural component that varies among cultures, and children are coached as to what it includes. This module mostly likely had biological origins, which have widely expanded to include disgust that is not only elicited by food but now can even include the actions of others. Unconsciously this module would say, Disgusting: dirty, bad, avoid; clean: good, approach. I recently saw a sign that read, CLEAN HANDS MAKE GOOD FOOD. The purity module is alive and well in Santa Barbara.

Over the pa.s.sage of time, religious and secular laws and rituals have been made regulating food and bodily functions, including hygiene, health, and diet. Once these laws are accepted, their violation results in a negative bias and a moral intuition. Other religious and moral concerns have been generalized to the purity of the mind and body. Many cultures make virtues of cleanliness, chast.i.ty, and purity.

Thalia Wheatley and Haidt42 have run an experiment to see if they could affect moral judgments by increasing an emotion. They hypnotized two groups of people and told one group that whenever they read the word that, they would be disgusted, and told the other group they would be disgusted by the word often. Then they had them read stories that had either one or the other word in them. Each group found the moral stories with their hypnotically suggested word in it more disgusting. They even found that one-third of people will judge a story with no moral violation in it somewhat morally wrong. Schnall, Haidt, and Clore tried a different approach by asking subjects moral questions while seated either at a dirty desk strewn with used fast-food wrappers and tissues or at a clean desk. People who had tested at the upper end of the scale for "private body consciousness" (those who are more aware of their physical state) made more severe moral judgments when sitting at the dirty desk. A take-home lesson from this is that if you have had a forbidden party at your parents' house while they are gone for the weekend, be sure the house is spotless when they get home, because if they find out about it and the house is dirty...

So if we all have these universal modules, why are cultures so different in their moral standards? Haidt and Joseph answer this question by looking at the link between our innate moral intuitions and the socially defined virtues. In Hauser's model, we have an innate preparedness to respond to the social world in particular constrained ways. That means some things are easier to learn than others, and some things can't be learned at all. Studies on animals have shown that some things can be taught with just one trial, others can take hundreds of trials, and some can never be learned. The cla.s.sic example for humans is the fact that it is very easy to be taught to be afraid of snakes but nearly impossible to be taught to be afraid of flowers. Our fear module is prepared to learn about snakes, which were a danger in our ancestral environment, but not flowers, which weren't. When you ask children what they are afraid of, the answer is lions and tigers and monsters, but not cars, which are very much more likely to hurt them nowadays. Likewise, some virtues are easily learned, whereas others are not. It is easy to learn to punish cheaters; it is difficult to learn to forgive them.

Virtues are what the culture has defined as morally praiseworthy. Different cultures value the output of the moral modules differently. Different cultures will link more than one module together so they apply to broader stimuli. Hindus have linked purity to hierarchy and coalitions and come up with a caste system. Monarchies have done much the same and ended up with a cla.s.s system, royals keeping their bloodlines pure within a hierarchy of n.o.bility. Cultures may define the virtues elicited by the different modules differently. Fairness is considered a virtue, but with what as its basis-fairness based on need? Or fairness based on those who work harder? Or fairness based on equal distribution? And consider loyalty. Certain societies value loyalty to family whereas others value loyalty to peer groups or a hierarchical structure, such as a town or country. In some cultures there may be complex virtues derived from different modules that are linked together to create a super virtue such as honor, derived from the hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity modules in most traditional cultures.30 THE RATIONAL PROCESS.

With modules seemingly for almost everything, when does rational thinking kick in? Balzac marked the moment in Modeste Mignon with the statement "In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is simply seeing clearly."43 When this may happen is under debate at the current time. When are we motivated to think rationally? Well, we are motivated when we want to find the optimal solution. But what is the optimal solution? Is it the actual truth, or is it one that verifies how you see the world, or one that maintains your status and reputation?

Let us say you want the accurate actual truth unaffected by any bias you have. This is easier when moral interpretations are not at stake. For example, "I really want to know which medication is best for me, and I don't care how much it costs, where it came from, who makes it, how often I have to take it, or whether it is a pill, an injection, or a salve." That is a much less threatening question than "Is it OK to harvest organs from condemned felons?" The other condition is that we have enough time to think about it, so the automatic response doesn't kick in. On the spur of the moment, will you take one of the darling kittens being offered in front of the grocery store back to the apartment where you aren't allowed to have pets and your roommate is allergic to cat dander? Or do you go home and think about it? And of course, one has to have the cognitive ability to understand and use information that is pertinent.

Then again, even when we are trying to think rationally, we may not be. Research has shown that people will use the first argument that satisfies their opinion and then stop thinking. David Perkins, a Harvard psychologist, calls this the "makes sense" rule.44 However, what people consider makes sense varies widely. It is the difference between anecdotal evidence (an isolated story that presumes a cause and effect) and factual evidence (a proven cause and effect.) For instance, a woman may believe birth control pills will make her sterile, because her aunt took birth control pills in the past, and now she can't get pregnant. Anecdotal evidence, one story, was all she needed to support her opinion, and it made sense. However, she does not consider the possibility that her aunt may have been unable to get pregnant before she started taking the birth control pills, nor the possibility her aunt could have been infected with s.e.xually transmitted bacteria, such as gonorrhea or chlamydia, that caused scarring in the Fallopian tubes-which in fact is the leading cause of infertility. She also does not know that using birth control pills will actually preserve her fertility better than nonhormonal methods (factual evidence). Predominantly, people use anecdotal evidence.45, 46 Try this example, one of many that Deanna Kuhn, a psychologist at Columbia University, used to investigate knowledge acquisition: Which statement is stronger?

A. Why do teenagers start smoking? Smith says it's because they see ads that make smoking look attractive. A good-looking guy in neat clothes with a cigarette in his mouth is someone you would like to be like.

B. Why do teenagers start smoking? Jones says it's because they see ads that make smoking look attractive. When cigarette ads were banned from TV, smoking went down.

In a large group of students ranging from eighth grade to graduate school, few understood the differences between the two types of argument these represented, although the graduate students did the best. The first is anecdotal, and the second is factual. The implications of this are that even if a person seeks to make a rational judgment, most people don't use information in an a.n.a.lytical manner.47 Looking at our evolutionary environment, Haidt points out that if our moral judgment machinery were designed to always be accurate, the results could be disastrous if you occasionally sided with the enemy, against your friends and family.1 He presents the social intuitionist model of moral reasoning. After the intuitive judgment and the post-hoc reasoning occur, Haidt suggests that there are four possible circ.u.mstances in which this intuitive judgment may be altered. The first two involve the social world either by reasoned (not necessarily rational) persuasion or by merely doing what everyone else is doing (again, not necessarily rational). He suggests rational reasoning has an opportunity to bloom when an issue gets discussed with another person.

Remember those social groups I talked about in the last chapter, in relation to gossip? And what does gossip accomplish? It helps set standards of moral behavior in a community. And what does everyone love to gossip about? Juicy tidbits, and the juiciest of all are moral violations. That will turn a desultory conversation into a hot one. It's much more interesting to learn that Sally is having an affair with a married man than to hear that she is having a party. You can feel righteous yourself, and agree with your friend that married men are off-limits, but what if you don't agree with your friend? What if you know that the man is married to a gold digger who married him for his money, they have no children, their house is now part.i.tioned in two-she is on one side having extravagant parties, and he is on the other spending his spare time managing the Web site for the local United Way-and they have no contact, except for her refusing to sign divorce papers? Can you two have a rational discussion of facts and leave with someone having changed his or her mind?

It depends on how strongly your emotions have kicked in on the case. We have already learned that people will tend to agree with people they like, so if the issue is neutral or of little consequence, or if an argument hasn't already arisen, then social persuasion can come into play. These persuasive arguments may or may not be rational, as we just learned. You will use anything you think will persuade the other to your viewpoint. If the two of you have really strong reactions, then don't waste your time. And of course, really strong reactions are what are at stake with moral issues. There is a reason for the adage of not talking about religion or politics over a meal. Strong emotions lead to arguments, which are disruptive to the taste buds and lead to indigestion.

As Robert Wright puts it in his book The Moral Animal, "By the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done." In steps the interpreter, and the bad news is, your interpreter is a lawyer. Wright describes the brain as a machine for winning arguments, not as a truth finder. "The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue."48 He points out that one would think that if we were rational creatures, then at some point, we should wonder at the probability of always being right. Come to think of it, if we were all rational creatures, wouldn't we all use pocket protectors?

Persuasion can come in the form of merely being in a group of people. How many times have you thought people act like sheep? For instance, my daughter related her experience at the San Diego train station the day before Thanksgiving. The train was late arriving, and when it was finally available for boarding, only one of the several doors to the platform was standing open. A long line of people formed at that door. She walked to one of the closed doors and pushed it open and stepped onto the train. Many studies have been done to ill.u.s.trate how people are influenced by those around them. The creators of the TV show Candid Camera did some of their most hilarious skits with this in mind.

Solomon Asch, a pioneer of social psychology, did a cla.s.sic experiment. He set up a room of eight subjects (seven of whom were "plants") and showed them a line. After concealing that line, he showed them another line that was obviously much longer. He asked each person in the room if one of the lines was longer than the other, but asked the real subject last. If the first seven people all said the lines were of equal length, the majority of test subjects agreed with them.49 Social pressure made a person say something that was obviously incorrect.

Stanley Milgram was a student of Asch. After receiving his doctorate in social psychology, he did some shock experiments that were truly shocking. No persuasion was involved here, just obedience. He told his subjects he was researching the effects of punishment on learning. However, what he was really researching was obedience to an authority figure. He measured the willingness of his subjects to obey an authority figure, the researcher, who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their consciences. He told his subjects they were randomly a.s.signed to play either a teacher or a student role. The subject, however, was always a.s.signed the teacher role. Milgram told the teacher to administer an electric shock to the student (who, unbeknownst to the teacher, was an actor playing the part) every time the student got an answer wrong on a word-matching memory task, and to increase the shock for each mistake. The actor was not actually shocked but pretended to be. The subject playing the teacher was told that real shocks were being given. The instrument panel on the shock machine read "slight shock" on one side of a dial and "severe shock" on the other, with numerical values from 0 to 30. Having previously asked people what they would do in such a circ.u.mstance, he expected most people would stop at a level of 9. However, he was quite wrong. The subjects continued shocking the student to an average intensity of 20 to 25, with or without prodding from the experimenter, even when the student was screaming or asking to leave. And 30 percent went to the highest-level shock even when the student was pretending to be listless or unconscious! If the teacher and student were in closer proximity, however, there was a 20 percent drop in obedience, suggesting that empathy encouraged disobedience.50, 51 This study has been replicated in many countries. Obedience to the instructions has been universal in several countries where the studies have been replicated, but among the countries, it varied from Germany, where 85 percent were willing to send the highest levels of shocks, to Australia, where it dropped to 40 percent. This is an interesting finding, considering that modern Australia was originally populated by prisoners, a rather disobedient gene pool! In the United States, 65 percent followed the instructions. That may be good news for traffic laws, but we know where blind obedience leads.

Haidt's third possible scenario in which rational judgment is most likely to be used is what he refers to as the reasoned judgment link. In this instance, a person logically reasons out a judgment and overrides his intuition. Haidt suggests that this happens only when the initial intuition is weak and the a.n.a.lytical capacity is high. Thus, if it is a low-profile case, in which there is no emotional investment or only a little, the lawyer might go on vacation. If you are lucky, a scientist*52 covers for him-but don't count on it. If it is a high-profile issue, and the intuition is strong, an a.n.a.lytical mind can force logic on its owner, but he may end up with a dual att.i.tude, with his intuition just below the surface. So just maybe, if it is a high-profile case, the scientist may sit in on the argument and later, while sipping a digestivo, nudge the lawyer to shut up already.

The fourth possible scenario is the private reflection link. Here, a person may have no intuition at all about an issue, or might be mulling over the situation, when suddenly a new intuition hits her that may override the initial one. This can happen by imagining yourself on the other side of the issue. Then you are presented with two competing intuitions. However, as Haidt points out, is this really rational thinking? Aren't you right smack back in Damasio's lap needing an emotional bias to help you pick between the two?

MORAL BEHAVIOR.

How much does all this matter? Does moral reasoning correlate with moral behavior? Do people who rationally evaluate moral behavior act in a more moral way? Apparently not exactly. There appear to be two variables that do correlate to moral behavior: intelligence and inhibition. Criminologists have found that criminal behavior is inversely related to intelligence, independent of race or social-economic cla.s.s.53 Augus...o...b..asi found that IQ was positively related to honesty.54 In this context, inhibition basically refers to self-control or the ability to override an objective that your emotional system wants. You may want to sleep in, but you will get up to go to work.

Researchers headed by Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Columbia University, have been doing a very interesting long-term study on inhibition. They began with a study of preschoolers, using a food reward. One by one, children were seated at a table and asked which was better, one marshmallow or two. We all know what they answered. On the table were a marshmallow and a bell. The researcher (let's call her Jeanne) told the child (Tom) that she had to leave the room for a few minutes, and when she returned, he could have two marshmallows. However, if Tom wanted her to come back early, then he could ring the bell, but if he did that, she would give him only one marshmallow. Ten years later, the researchers sent questionnaires to the parents about their then adolescent children, and found that those who delayed eating the marshmallow longer in preschool were rated as more likely to exhibit self-control in frustrating situations, less likely to yield to temptation, more intelligent, and less distractible when trying to concentrate, and they earned higher SAT scores.55 The team continues to follow these people today.

How does self-control work? How does one say no to a tempting stimulus? Why did some of those kids wait until the researcher returned while staring at the marshmallow? In the adult world, why are some people able to refuse the Death by Chocolate cake on the dessert tray, or drive at the speed limit while everyone is pa.s.sing them?

In order to explain how that aspect of willpower, "the ability to inhibit an impulsive response that undoes one's commitment," aka self-control, works, Walter Mischel and his colleague Janet Metcalfe proposed that there are two types of processing. One is "hot" and the other is "cool"; they involve neural systems that are distinct but still interact.56 The hot emotional system is specialized for quick emotional processing. It responds to a trigger and makes use of the amygdala-based memory. This is the "go" system. The cool cognitive system is slower and is specialized for complex spatiotemporal and episodic representation and thought. The researchers call it the "know" system. Its neuronal basis is in the hippocampus and the frontal lobes. Does this sound familiar? In their theory, they stress that the interaction of these two systems is of critical importance to self-regulation and to decision making in regard to self-control. The cool system develops later in life and becomes increasingly active. How the two systems interact depends on age, stress (under increasing stress, the hot system takes over), and temperament. Studies have shown that criminal behavior decreases with age,57 giving support to the idea that the cool system that increases self-control becomes more active with age.

MORALITY-FREE HUMANS: THE CASE OF THE PSYCHOPATH.

What about psychopaths? Are they different from most criminals or just way worse? Psychopaths appear different on neuroimaging studies.58 They have specific abnormalities that can be differentiated from simply antisocial individuals and normal individuals. This suggests that their amoral behavior is due to specific malformations of the cognitive structure of the brain. Psychopaths exhibit high intelligence and rational thinking. They are not delusional. They know the rules of society and of moral behavior, but a moral precept is just a rule to them.59 They don't understand that it is OK to suspend the societal rule "Do not eat with your hands at the table," but it is not OK to suspend the moral rule "Do not spit in the face of the person next to you at the table." They have a measurable decrease in ectodermal response to emotionally significant60 and empathetic stimuli61 compared with normal control subjects. They don't have the moral emotions of empathy, guilt, or shame. Although they do not show impulsive behavior in one sense, they do have a one-track mindedness that is not inhibited, which distinguishes them from normal individuals. It appears that they are born psychopaths.

PUTTING YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS.

It has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most recent studies, none has been found,62, 63 except in one study done on young adults, in which there was a small correlation.64 As one might predict based on what we have learned so far, moral behavior, as evidenced by helping others, is more correlated with emotion and self-control. Interestingly, Sam and Pearl Oliner, professors at Humboldt State University and founding directors of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Inst.i.tute, studied moral exemplars by looking at European rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.65 Whereas 37 percent were empathically motivated (suffering module), 52 percent were primarily motivated by "expressing and strengthening their affiliations with their social groups" (coalition module), and only 11 percent were motivated by principled stands (rational thinking).

The Religion a.s.sumption.

Where does religion fit in with all of this? If we have these moral intuitions we are born with, what's up with religion? Good question. But you have made an a.s.sumption. Haven't you a.s.sumed that morals came from religion and that religion is about morals? Religions have been around since the very beginnings of human culture, but in fact, only sometimes do they have anything to do with morality and the salvation of a soul. You might say "But my religion does, and it is true, and all the other ones are false." Why are you so special? Every other religion thinks the same thing. Think about the coalition in-group intuitive bias. Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist who studies the transmission of cultural knowledge at Washington University in Saint Louis, points out that it is a common temptation to search for the origin of religion in general human urges, such as the desire to define a moral system or explain natural phenomena. He attributes this to people's incorrect a.s.sumptions about religion and psychological urges. With our current research techniques, we are able to do better than just throw ideas about religion out into the wind; we can prove or disprove many of them. He has come up with a list of commonly posited reasons for the origins of religion, and he suggests a different viewpoint.66 Do not say...

But say...

Religion answers people's metaphysical questions.

Religious thoughts are typically activated when people deal with concrete situations this crop, that disease, this new birth, this dead body, etc.).

Religion is about a transcendent G.o.d.

It is about a variety of agents: ghouls, ghosts, spirits, ancestors, G.o.ds, etc., in direct interaction with people.

Religion allays anxiety.

It generates as much anxiety as it allays: Vengeful ghosts, nasty spirits, and aggressive G.o.ds are as common as protective deities.

Religion was created at time t in human history.

There is no reason to think that the various kinds of thoughts we call "religious" all appeared in human cultures at the same time.

Religion is about explaining natural phenomena.

Most religious explanations of natural phenomena actually explain little but produce salient mysteries.

Religion is about explaining mental phenomena (dreams, visions).

In places where religion is not invoked to explain them, such phenomena are not seen as intrinsically mystical or supernatural.

Religion is about morality and the salvation of the soul.

The notion of salvation is particular to a few doctrines (Christianity and doctrinal religions of Asia and the Middle East) and unheard of in most other traditions.

Religion creates social cohesion.

Religious commitment can (under some conditions) be used as a signal of coalitional affiliation, but coalitions create social fission (secession) as often as group integration.

Religious claims are irrefutable; that is why people believe them.

There are many irrefutable statements that no one believes; what makes some of them plausible to some people is what we need to explain.

Religion is irrational/superst.i.tious (therefore not worthy of study).

Commitment to imagined agents does not really relax or suspend ordinary mechanisms of belief formation; indeed it can provide important evidence for their functioning (and therefore should be studied attentively).

TABLE 1: Do's and Don'ts in the Study of Religion. From Pascal Boyer, "Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (2003): 11924.

When we talk about anything the brain believes or does, we have to go back to its structure and function. Religions are ubiquitous and thus are easy to acquire and transmit. They are tapping into modules that are used for nonreligious social activities but, as Marc Hauser said, are "prepared" to be used in other related ways. There is not just one part of the brain that is used in religious thought; there are many areas that come into play. People who are religious do not have a brain structure that atheists and agnostics do not have. But remember, the brain is also constrained. As Boyer puts it, there is a limited catalog of concepts; religion is not a domain where anything goes. For instance, in most religions, invisible dead souls are lurking somewhere, but invisible thyroid glands are not. G.o.ds are either people, animals, or man-made objects with some ability beyond the normal, but otherwise they still conform to what we know about the world. A G.o.d has a theory of mind and may or may not have empathy, but a G.o.d would never be a pile of cow dung, for instance, or just a thumb.

People do not require the same standard of evidence for religion that they do for other aspects of their life. Why do people pick some parcels of incoming information and not others to use for their belief systems? What we have learned about bias and emotion should help us out with that. The a.n.a.lytical mind is rarely called in to help. Another interesting aspect has recently been teased out of some research subjects. What people say they believe and believe they believe, and what they actually believe, are two different things. Instead of the omnipresent, all-doing, all-knowing G.o.d that they say they believe in, when they are not focused on their beliefs, they use another concept of G.o.d that is humanlike. This G.o.d has serial attention (does only one thing at a time), a particular location, and a particular viewpoint.67 Now that we know about the interpreter, why doesn't that surprise us?

Boyer says religions seem "natural" because "a variety of mental systems, functionally specialized for the treatment of particular (non-religious) domains of information, are activated by religious notions and norms, in such a way that these notions and norms become highly salient, easy to acquire, easy to remember and communicate, as well as intuitively plausible."68 Let's look at our list of the moral intuitions and see how different aspects of religions can be seen as by-products of them.

SUFFERING.

That one is easy. Many religions speak to the relief of suffering, or wallow in it, or even seek to ignore it.

RECIPROCITY.

Easy again. Many natural and personal disasters are explained as G.o.d's or the G.o.ds' payback for bad behavior, that is, punishing cheaters. Also, the social exchange is ubiquitous in religion: "If you kill a bunch of innocent infidels, then you will go to paradise and have seventy virgins at your beck and call." Does that work for women, too? Or "If you renounce all physical desires, then you will be happy." Or "If I do this rain dance perfectly, then it will rain." Or "If you cure my disease, then I will never do such and such again."

HIERARCHY.

Easy again. We can look at status. The person with the (appearance) of the highest morals is given higher status and more trust. Gandhi was known to have been quite successful with the women (status). Popes ruled vast stretches of Europe at one time (status, power, hierarchy). And how about the Ayatollah? Many religions are set up with a hierarchical structure; the most obvious is the Catholic Church, but it is not alone. Many Protestant religions, Islam, and Judaism all have hierarchical structures. Even in primitive societies, the witch doctors held places of esteem and power in their communities. The Greek, Roman, and Norse G.o.ds also had hierarchical structures, as do the Hindu G.o.ds. G.o.d is the big cheese, or there is a top G.o.d, like Zeus or Thor. You get the picture. The virtues of respect, loyalty, and obedience all morph over onto religious beliefs.

COALITIONS AND IN-GROUP/OUT-GROUP BIAS.

Does anyone really need this spelled out? As in "My religion is right (in-group); your religion is wrong (out-group)"-just like soccer teams. Religion in its positive in-group form does create a community whose members help each other, as do many social groups, but in its extreme form it has been responsible for much of the killing in the history of the world. Even Buddhists are divided into rival sects.

PURITY.

This too is obvious. "Uncontaminated food is good" has led to many religious food rituals and prohibitions. "Uncontaminated body is good" has led to certain s.e.xual practices, or s.e.x itself, being viewed as dirty and impure. How many primitive religions used virgins for sacrifice? We can start with the Aztecs and Incas and build. Women who have been raped are considered impure by the Muslim religion and are regularly murdered by their male relatives in the practice of "honor killing," a twisted combination of the purity and hierarchy modules. Buddhism has its "pure land" where all who call upon the Buddha will be guaranteed rebirth.

Has religion provided a survival advantage? Has it been selected for by evolution? Attempts to prove this have not been satisfactory because no one single characteristic has been found that generates religion, as we can see from Boyer's table. Natural selection, however, has been at work on the mental systems that religion uses or, as some think, parasitizes. Religions can be thought of as giant social groups with strong coalitions, often with hierarchical structures, and reciprocity based on notions of purity either of body, mind, or both. Giant social groups can have a survival advantage, whether they are based on religion or not. Ideology can strengthen coalitionary bonds, and that in itself can increase group survival. So are religions examples of group selection? This is a highly controversial question. D. S. Wilson points out that more is known about the evolution of the spots on a guppy than is known about the elements of religion.69 This is a work in progress.

Can understanding how morality and religion came to be help us today? If we understand that our brain is a machine for hunter-gatherers in small groups, full of intuitive modules that react in certain ways, that it is not yet molded for huge societies, can that allow us to function better in our current world? It seems it can. Matt Ridley70 gives the example caused by the phenomenon known as the "tragedy of the commons," which was unfortunately misnamed by Garrett Hardin, a biologist. He apparently did not distinguish between open-access free-for-alls and communally owned property. The phenomenon should have been named the "tragedy of the free-for-alls." Land that is free for all is subject to cheaters in social exchange. An individual would think, "If everyone can fish, hunt, and graze livestock on this land, then I should get as much as I can now, because if I don't, someone else will, and there will be none left for me and my family."

However, Hardin used grazing commons as his free-for-all example. What he didn't know was that most grazing commons were not free-for-alls. They were carefully regulated community property. Ridley points out that free-for-alls and regulated commons are two very different things. "Carefully regulated" means that each member owns a right to something, such as fishing in a particular area, grazing a set number of animals, or having specific areas to graze. Now it is in the owner's interest to maintain that area, which makes it possible to set up a long-term social exchange: "If I graze only ten sheep and you graze only ten sheep, then we will not overgraze the common, and it will sustain us for a long period." Cheating no longer becomes attractive.

Unfortunately, this misunderstanding of what was happening in much communal property led many economists and environmentalists in the 1970s to conclude that the only way to solve the cheating problem (which didn't even exist in many communal setups) was to nationalize communal property. Instead of several patches of communally managed lands, one huge government-managed patch was created. This has resulted in fisheries being overfished, land being overgrazed, and wildlife being overhunted, because the fisheries, land, and wildlife became a free-for-all on a grand scale. There were not enough enforcers to detect the cheaters, and only fools wouldn't take all they could while they could.

Ridley explains that this has been a disaster for the wildlife of Africa, where most countries nationalized their lands in the 1960s and 1970s. The wildlife was now owned by the government, and although it still did the same damage to crops and competed for grazing, it was no longer a source of food or revenue-except for poachers. There was no motivation to protect it and every motivation to get rid of it. Officials in Zimbabwe, however, realized what was happening. They gave ownership of the wildlife back to the communities, and presto, the att.i.tudes of the locals toward wildlife changed, and the animals became valuable and worth maintaining. The amount of private land owned by the villagers now devoted to wildlife has doubled.70 Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who has studied well-managed local commons for years, has shown in the laboratory that groups, when allowed to communicate and develop their own methods of fining free riders, can manage communal resources almost perfectly.71 And it turns out that those things that can be managed are those things that can be owned. We are territorial, just like chimps and many other animals. Thus, understanding our intuitive reciprocity and its constraints, and the fact that we are most comfortable in smallish groups, can lead to better management practices, better laws, and better governments. This is just like understanding that the plant you bought that came from the desert should not be watered as if it came from the tropics.

DO ANIMALS HAVE A MORAL SENSE?.

Now this is an interesting question. Of course when we humans ask it, we are asking it from our own perspective, and the implied question is really Do animals have a moral sense like ours? I have just presented the case that many stimuli induce an automatic process of approval (approach) or disapproval (avoid), which may lead to a full-on emotional state. The emotional state produces a moral intuition that may motivate an individual to action. These moral intuitions have sprung from common behaviors we share with other social species, such as being territorial; having dominance strategies to protect territory; forming coalitions to garner food, s.p.a.ce, and s.e.x; and reciprocity. We share some aspects of this chain of events with other social species, and in fact we have the same emotional reactions, which we term moral, to some of the same inciting stimuli. We get angry at property violations or attacks on our coalition, just as chimps and dogs do. So in that sense, some animals have an intuitive morality that is species-based, centered on their own social hierarchies and behaviors, and affected by the emotions that they possess.

The differences lie in the wider range and complexity of moral emotions that humans have, such as shame, guilt, embarra.s.sment, disgust, contempt, empathy, and compa.s.sion, and in the behaviors these have contributed to. The most notable of these behaviors is prolonged reciprocal altruism, of which humans are the undisputed grand masters, but humans can also indulge in altruism and expect no reciprocity. I know that all you dog owners are now going to tell me that your dog feels shame when you walk into the house and see that he has just chewed your new shoes. But to feel shame, embarra.s.sment, or guilt, which Haidt calls the self-conscious emotions, an animal must have self-awareness beyond recognizing his visible body and be conscious of that self-awareness. We are going to talk more about self-awareness and consciousness in chapter 8, but the short version for now is that the presence of this expanded sense of self in other animals has yet to be discovered. Your scowl at the sight of the gnawed Guccis and your terse comment are what your dog is reacting to. The alpha animal is angry. The moral emotions of shame and embarra.s.sment have their animal roots in submissive behavior but have become more complex. You recognize this submissive cowering in your dog and call it shame, but that is a more complex emotion than it is feeling. Its emotion is fear of a swat or of getting dragged off the couch, not guilt or shame.

But in humans there is something going on in addition to more complex emotions and their repercussions: the post hoc need to interpret the moral judgment or behavior. The human brain alone seeks an explanation for the automatic reaction that it has no clue about. This is the unique interpretive function of the human brain in action. I suspect that this is also the point where humans put a value judgment on their actions: good behavior or bad. To what degree the value judgment may match the emotional approach/withdraw scale is an interesting question. There are the occasions, however, when the rational self becomes an earlier partic.i.p.ant in the judgment and informs the behavior. We humans can inhibit our emotionally driven responses. Then the conscious, self-aware mind steps in, bellies up to the bar, and takes command. That is a uniquely human moment.

CONCLUSION.

David Hume and Immanuel Kant were both right in a way. As the neurobiology of moral behavior becomes fleshed out, we shall see that some of our repugnance for killing, stealing, incest, and dozens of other actions is as much a result of our natural biology as are our s.e.xual organs. At the same time, we will also realize that the thousands of customs that people generate to live in cooperation with each other are rules generated by the thousands of social interactions we have every day, week, month, and year of our lives. And all of this comes from (and for) the human mind and brain.

One could say most of our life is spent battling the conscious rational mind and the unconscious emotional system of our brain. At one level, we know that by experience. In politics, a good outcome happens when the rational choice is consonant with the emotions of the time. A lousy political decision occurs when a rational choice is made at a time when the emotions of the populace are at odds with the projected outcome. On a personal level, it can go a different way. A poor personal decision can be the product of a powerful emotion overriding a simple rational directive. For all of us, this battle is continuing and never seems to go away.

It is as if we are not yet comfortable with our rational, a.n.a.lytic mind. In terms of evolution, it is a new ability that we humans have recently come upon, and we appear to use sparingly. But, using our rational mind, we have come across other uniquely human traits: the emotion of disgust and a sensitivity to contamination, the moral emotions of guilt, shame, and embara.s.sment, blushing, and crying. We have also found that religions are large social groups that have their foundation in the notion of purity of either mind or body, another uniquely human construct with its roots in the moral emotion of disgust. And the know-it-all interpreter is there, coming up with explanations for our unconscious moral intuitions and behaviors. And we have our a.n.a.lytical brain occasionally chiming in. Not only that, there is even more going on that we aren't conscious of. Stay tuned....

Chapter 5.

I FEEL YOUR PAIN.

If my heart could do my thinking, would my brain begin to feel?

-Van Morrison.

WHEN YOU SEE ME SMASH MY FINGER IN A CAR DOOR, DO you wince as if it happened to you? How do you know the milk your wife just sniffed is bad without her saying anything? Do you know how a finalist for the women's gold medal gymnastic compet.i.tion feels when you see her miss a landing on the balance beam, fall, and break her ankle? How is that different from when you see a mugger running from his victim, trip in a pothole, fall down, and break his ankle? Why can you read a novel and feel emotions engendered by the story? They are just words on a page. Why can a travel brochure make you smile?