Human. Part 3

Ekman has studied people's ability to detect liars, and it is pretty pathetic. Most people aren't very good at it, even though they may think they are (once again deceiving themselves). They perform at the same rate as chance guessing. However, he has found some professionals to be good at it: Secret Service agents are the best, and next best are some psychotherapists. Out of twelve thousand people whom he has tested, he found only twenty who were naturally excellent lie detectors!71 One problem inherent in reading facial expressions is that one reads the emotion but does not necessarily understand the reason for the emotion and so misinterprets it. We will learn more about this in later chapters. You may realize that a person is scared and think it is because he is lying to you and is frightened that you will figure that out, but it could be that he is scared because he didn't lie and is being falsely accused and he thinks that you won't believe him.

Of course not all deception is nefarious. Out of politeness, people will often act as if they are enjoying themselves when they are not, such as complimenting you on the fish dish when in reality fish makes them gag. Or they are laughing at that really bad joke that you have already told too many times before. These are small-stakes lies without major repercussions.

People learn to manage their expressions, but Ekman has found microexpressions that result from trying to conceal emotions. Most people don't see them, but you can learn to spot them. Fabricated expressions can also be hard to spot. For instance, the false smile: There are two muscles princ.i.p.ally involved in real smiling, the zygomaticus major, which pulls the corners of the mouth up, and the orbicularis oculi pars lateralis, which, along with pulling up the cheeks and causing crow's-feet, also pulls down the lateral border of the eyebrow. The orbicularis oculi muscle is not under voluntary control, so that in a fake smile the lateral border of the eyebrow does not depress, although a fully contracted zygomaticus can push the cheeks up to form crow's-feet.

If we are good at spotting cheaters in social exchange, why do we find it hard to spot liars? Lying has become prevalent in the population, so wouldn't mechanisms of detection have evolved? Ekman offers several explanations. First, he suggests that in the environment in which we evolved, lying wasn't as prevalent because there were fewer opportunities. People lived openly in groups. The lack of privacy would have made the chances of detection high, and discovery would have been made by direct observation of behavior rather than having to rely on judgments of demeanor. Second, uncovered lies would have resulted in a bad reputation. Today, our environment is very different. Opportunities to lie abound, and we live behind closed doors. You can escape from a bad reputation, although it may be costly, by changing jobs, towns, countries, or spouses, and we haven't been prepared by evolution to detect lies from demeanor. So why haven't we learned how to detect them if we don't have the power innately? Perhaps because our parents teach us not to identify their lies, such as stories to cover up s.e.xual activity and who knows what all. It may be that we also prefer not to catch liars, because being suspicious rather than trusting makes relations.h.i.+ps difficult to establish and keep. Or we may want to be misled because we have a stake in not knowing the truth. The truth may set you free, but it may also set you free with four kids and no income. Often the reason is politeness: What we are told is all that the teller wants us to know, and we don't steal information that is not given to us.

But perhaps it is language, as it has evolved recently in humans, that is the problem. Understanding and interpreting language is a conscious process that involves much cognitive energy. If we are concentrating on what is being said, rather than letting visual perceptions and vocal clues register in our conscious brain, we may be lessening our detective powers. Gavin de Becker, in his book The Gift of Fear,72 advises people to trust the phenomenon that he defines as "knowing without knowing why." He is an expert in predicting violent behavior, and he has found that most victims of violence have received warning signs without realizing it. Has our social training taught us not to detect deception? Do we reinterpret what we actually see? There is more work to be done.

Lying to Ourselves.

Isn't lying to ourselves counterproductive? As the saying goes, if you can't trust yourself, then whom can you trust? Remember our cheater detector in social exchange? It pays to be cooperative, while being vigilant for cheaters. But you really don't have to be cooperative. You just have to appear cooperative. All you need is a good rep. You don't actually have to deserve it.

You mean being a hypocrite, right? Hypocrites make my blood boil.

Not so fast. Everyone (except for me, of course) is a hypocrite. It apparently is just easier to see from the outside than the inside. As we just learned, to pull this off, it helps not to consciously know that you are pulling a fast one, because then you will have less anxiety and thus less chance of getting busted.

Dan Batson at the University of Kansas has done a series of experiments73, 74 with rather shocking results. Students were given the opportunity to a.s.sign themselves and another student (actually fict.i.tious) to different tasks. One task was more desirable (the chance to earn raffle tickets). The other task had no chance to earn raffle tickets and was described as boring. The students were told that the other partic.i.p.ant would think the a.s.signment was made by chance. They were also told that most partic.i.p.ants thought that flipping a coin was the fairest way to a.s.sign the tasks, and a coin was provided for partic.i.p.ants to flip if they wished. After the experiment, virtually all partic.i.p.ants said that either a.s.signing the other partic.i.p.ant the better task or using the coin flip was more moral. Yet only about half flipped the coin. Of the nonflippers, 80 to 90 percent a.s.signed themselves the better task and, contrary to the laws of probability, the same was true among those who flipped the coin. The students who flipped the coin all rated themselves as being more moral than the nonflippers, even when they fiddled with the results.

This outcome was replicated in numerous studies, even when the coin was labeled to avoid ambiguities in the coin toss. Some partic.i.p.ants flipped the coin to appear fair, yet still served self-interest by ignoring the results and giving the better task to themselves-and still rated themselves as being more moral for simply having tossed the coin! That is called moral hypocrisy. The results were duplicated even when the students were told that after their decision they would have to tell the other partic.i.p.ant how they arrived at it. With one discrepancy, more flipped the coin (75 percent) and reported this was how they had made the decision; however, the percent of flippers who gave themselves the better task remained the same. Batson states, "The benefits to oneself of moral hypocrisy are obvious: One can reap the material rewards of acting selfishly and also garner the social and self-rewards of being seen and seeing oneself as upstanding and moral."

Partic.i.p.ants who had scored highly on various moral responsibility tests were more likely to flip the coin, yet among coin flippers, the high moral scorers were no less likely to a.s.sign themselves the better task than were those who scored low. Thus, those with a greater sense of moral responsibility did not show signs of greater moral integrity; they actually showed signs of greater hypocrisy! They were more likely to appear moral (flip the coin) but no more likely to actually be moral (allow the coin flip to determine the task a.s.signment).

The only time partic.i.p.ants stopped cheating with the coin flip (and they all did) was when they made their decision while sitting in front of a mirror. Apparently, having to face the discrepancy between one's stated moral standard to be fair versus unfairly ignoring the result of the coin flip was too much. Those who wished to appear moral had to actually be moral. Maybe we need more mirrors. That might help with the increasing obesity problem, too.

OK, so we lie to ourselves and have a difficult time spotting other liars. This isn't good news for your gossip exchange quest. You may need to take one of Paul Ekman's cla.s.ses* on how to spot liars, but in the meantime, at least you can watch eyebrows and know that your coworkers aren't going to be good at spotting your lies, unless the high stakes at the office make you a little more anxious.

BACK TO THE BIG BRAIN AND MALE MATING STRATEGY.

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, has a problem with language. No, he can talk just fine. He is concerned about why it evolved. Most speech appears to transfer useful information from the speaker to the listener, and it costs time and energy. It seems to be altruistic. What fitness benefit can be attained by giving another individual good information? Reviewing the original argument of Richard Dawkins and John Krebs, Miller states, "Evolution cannot favor altruistic information-sharing any more than it can favor altruistic food-sharing. Therefore, most animals' signals must have evolved to manipulate the behavior of another animal for the signaler's own benefit."75 And other animals have evolved to ignore them, because it didn't pay to listen to manipulators. Those who did are not ancestors.

There are a few signals that are given credence: those that are reliable. These are the ones that say, "I'm poisonous," "I'm faster than you," or "Don't even think about it, I'm stronger than you." Then there are the warnings from relatives, like "There's a leopard!" and the fitness indicators, like "Babe, have you seen my tail?" Miller concludes there are no credible models that can show evolution favors signals that carry any other kind of information, as long as there are incentives for deception. And when there is compet.i.tion, there are always incentives for deception. Human language is a hotbed of deception because it can talk about other times and places when the listener was not present, such as: "The trout I caught yesterday was twenty-six inches." Or "I left you a gazelle leg in that tree over the hill. Oh, gee, it's gone? Musta been that lion." "It has only been driven by my grandmother to the store and back." And the infamous "I was working late at the office last night."

How could reliable information-sharing have evolved? By sharing information, the teller does not necessarily lose his benefits. In fact, information-sharing could have benefits through kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Although Miller admits that this is mostly right, and probably how language initially emerged, when he looks at the real behavior of people, it doesn't quite fit the predictions of kins.h.i.+p and reciprocity models. If you look at language as information, it brings more benefit to the listener than to the talker, so we should have evolved into great listeners and reluctant talkers. Instead of resenting the motormouth, or the self-absorbed talker, or the speaker who drones on for an extra fifteen minutes, we should be irritated with people who sit enthralled with what we say and make no effort to tell about themselves. Everyone has something to say, and in conversations people are oftentimes thinking about what they are going to say next rather than listening to the other person. Books on procedure have been written to make rules about who may talk when. We should have evolved huge ears and only a rudimentary speaking apparatus to gather what we could, rather than the elaborate ability to speak language and the more rudimentary hearing that we have.

Considering this conundrum, Miller proposes that language's complexities evolved for verbal courts.h.i.+p. This solves the altruism problem by providing a s.e.xual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and the female. "Language complexity could have evolved through a combination of runaway s.e.xual selection, mental biases in favor of well articulated thoughts, and fitness indicator effects."75 Miller does not suggest that s.e.xual selection accounts for the big brain in its entirety, just perhaps 10 percent.

A related theory has been presented by anthropologist Robbins Burling, who wondered why, when a rudimentary form of language was all that was needed for hunting, trade, and tool making, a more complex form emerged. He suggests that after language's initial emergence, its increasing complexity was the result of male orators competing for social status, the most eloquent gaining reproductive advantages. He lists evidence of this reproductive advantage from various societies, ranging from the Yanomami to India and ancient Greece. Although his theory largely addresses the question of leaders.h.i.+p, he concludes, "We need our very best language for winning a lover."76 Hold on a minute. Are you saying that the big brain is for flirting? Does that mean that Frenchmen have the biggest brains?

It might. Get out the saws, we'll have to do a study.

Consider what is involved in human courts.h.i.+p. If you are having a random conversation with someone, that person may be mildly skeptical. However, with courts.h.i.+p the stakes are high. If you are successful, it may pay off with offspring. You have to bring out the big guns because your listener is going to be highly critical on all fronts. She will automatically evaluate whether it makes sense, conforms to what she knows and believes, is at all interesting or novel, and whether she can begin to infer intelligence, education, social savvy, status, knowledge, creativity, a sense of humor, personality, and character. "How about those Sox?" is not going to do it for her. Remember how long it took Bill Murray to get the courts.h.i.+p right in Groundhog Day?

Verbal courts.h.i.+p is not limited to the one-on-one encounter. Public speaking also advertises your charms and status, as does anything that improves your intellectual cachet. As Miller states, "Language puts minds on public display, where s.e.xual choice could see them clearly for the first time in evolutionary history."75 This is a little confusing. If guys are so good at talking, how come they have the reputation of not communicating? And if males are selected for their verbal courts.h.i.+p abilities, how come it is women who have the reputation for being big talkers? Well, remember that verbal courts.h.i.+p is a two-way street and is considered a fitness indicator. That means it is difficult and costly in terms of time and energy that could be spent in compet.i.tion for survival resources. Once he has his mate, it doesn't pay the male to continue with the high-cost performance. Instead of talking his head off, he may get by with just a couple of sentences, unless s.e.x is withheld, and then there may be a return of flowery speech. Women, however, have an incentive to continue their verbal courts.h.i.+p, because they want to keep the male around to help provide for their offspring.

SOCIAL PLAY AND BRAIN SIZE?.

This is a hard one to figure out. What is the point of social play? It uses a lot of energy and time, to accomplish what? No one really knows the answer to this question, but there are many ideas being batted around. It is generally thought that most youthful animal play is practice. Practice in stalking, chasing, and fleeing, a way to buff up physically,77, 78 develop motor and cognitive skills,79 hone fighting skills,80, 81 and become more physically adept at recovering from sudden shocks, such as loss of balance and falling over, and more emotionally adept at handling stressful situations.82 Think about a pile of kittens. However, Elisabetta Palagi, from the University of Pisa, who has studied play behavior in bon.o.bos and chimps, thinks the theories about play have focused too much on long-term rather than immediate benefits, and this focus may have limited the understanding of some of the adaptive significance of play. This could be especially true about play behavior in adults. Although play behavior is most common in young animals, in many species, like chimpanzees, bon.o.bos, and humans, adults also play.

But why do adults do it? Why do they play when they no longer need to practice? In a study of the chimpanzee colony housed in the ZooParc de Beauval in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, France-ten adults and nine immature chimps-she found that not only did the chimps groom each other the most just before chow time, but the adults and juveniles also played together the most just before chow time.83 Chimps are compet.i.tive, and feeding time is stressful for them. Grooming stimulates the release of beta-endorphins.84, 85 Palagi thinks grooming and play may limit aggression and increase tolerance, a contribution toward conflict management during periods of high stress. This would be an immediate benefit rather than a long-term one, and would be beneficial to both youngsters and adults.

Humans take social play to greater heights than the chimps and bon.o.bos. One more theory for adult play comes from Geoffrey Miller, our s.e.xual selection expert. He suggests that the increased cost of play with age makes it a reliable indicator of youthfulness, energy, fertility, and fitness. "Well, he had his eye on that young filly, and all of sudden he is out windsurfing and playing tennis again. He is acting like a teenager." In fact, Miller says that the ability to invent and appreciate new ways of displaying physical fitness is a uniquely human ability, aka sports-the intersection of mind and physical strength.75 Another universal: All cultures have them. As with other animals, human males play in compet.i.tive sports more than females. In order to prevent compet.i.tors from killing each other, and to determine who wins, sports have come up with rules, although you might not realize it when watching soccer matches. Monetary rewards are a recent invention. In the past, the only reward was status, but that was good enough. Winning at sports is a reliable fitness indicator, and the reward is attracting high-quality s.e.xual partners.

CONCLUSION.

The s.h.i.+ft to becoming highly social is what the human is all about. Lots of animals have some degree of social organization but none revel in it the way we do. As our brain became larger so too did our social group size. Something triggered our interest in the other guy, in living and cooperating in groups. Richard Wrangham has a captivating theory about the role of cooking as being the facilitator of such a huge s.h.i.+ft in primate life. Other ideas include the need to fight off predators and to find food. Whatever the reason, others now argue that our higher intellectual skills arose as an adaptation to our newly evolved social needs. Understanding being social is fundamental to understanding the human condition.

With the importance of social groups now well understood, it is easy to see discussions emerge about whether or not natural selection might also work on groups versus individuals. It is a complex argument with much to say not only on both sides of the issue but also in the attempts to reconcile the question into theories that cover both sides. However these matters are finally settled and agreed to by all, here we are with big brains, living in social groups and better for it. As we move on, realizing our social nature is deeply rooted in our biology not simply in our cognitive theories about ourselves, we begin to see how the rest of our human equipment helps to guide us through the social maze.

Chapter 4.

THE MORAL COMPa.s.s WITHIN.

You have the morals of a rabbit, the character of a slug, and the brain of a platypus.

-Cybill Shepherd, as Maddie in the TV show Moonlighting, 1985.

IF A MARTIAN WERE TO SHOW UP AND WATCH THE EVENING news with you, there probably would be no limit to the number of martinis he would need to believe that we humans are not inherently violent, amoral, and without purpose. The news drones on. It might start at the local police blotter, with the hit-and-runs, the stop-and-shop store holdups and murders, the domestic abuse, and the shenanigans down at city hall, then proceed to the beheadings in Iraq, the retaliation bombings by the United States, the starvation in Africa, the AIDS epidemic, the plight of illegal immigrants, and on and on. "Holy smokes," the Martian might say. "Your species is bad news." Well, is it?

There are roughly six billion people on earth, and those six billion people more or less get along. Does that mean all six billion get along? If we a.s.sume only 1 percent are bad eggs in one way or another, that means sixty million people are making trouble for the rest of us. That is a lot of mischief, and if it is 5 percent, one can see there are three hundred million troublemakers in the world. Material for the evening news is everywhere, and for some reason we want to know about the problems, not the joys of the human condition.

We are left with the amazing fact that somehow at least 95 percent of us get along, and possess some kind of common mechanisms that guide us through the social mora.s.s or complexities of everyday life. I can remember the day my daughter and I found ourselves walking down a side street in Beijing. We had been guided to the wide boulevards by Tiananmen Square, and all seemed grand and proportionate. But as we took off down the side street to experience some local shopping, we were shocked by the density of people and by how we stood out in both height and demeanor. But we were also shocked by how quickly we all adapted, how the two of us became part of the social flow and milieu in a matter of minutes. Everything from simply crossing the street to buying an item all flowed easily and naturally. I have had more unnatural exchanges on Ca.n.a.l Street in New York than in Beijing.

As a species, we don't like to kill, cheat, steal, and be abusive. We go out of our way to a.s.sist in tragedies, emergencies, and the like. Indeed, emergency workers, such as search-and-rescue Park Rangers, have to be trained not to be heroes, not to take undue risks to save the lives of others. Soldiers have to get pumped up and be beside themselves to kill. Booze in the military is there not to relieve pain but to disinhibit, so horrendous acts can be carried out. So why are we basically a good bunch of animals?

We humans like to think of ourselves as rational beings. We like the idea that if we are presented with a problem, we can invent a list of solutions, pros and cons, evaluate each one, and then decide which is the best choice. After all, our rationality is what separates us from "being animals." But do we really decide upon a solution because it is the most rational? Why does your friend ask you, when you are presenting your list of choices, "What does your gut tell you?"

When we are presented with a moral decision, is it our rational self that comes forth and makes the decision, or is it our gut, our intuitive self, that first comes up with the judgment, and our rational self afterward tries to come up with the reasons? Do we have a set of moral beliefs that we base rational decisions on, and if so, where does it come from? Does it come intuitively from within, or consciously from outside us? Do we come off the a.s.sembly line with a standard set of moral instincts, or are they aftermarket add-ons?

The world's great philosophers have been arguing over these questions for centuries. Plato and Kant believed conscious rationality is behind our moral actions. Hume favored an immediate emotional feeling of right or wrong. Until recently, all one could do was bat these ideas around without any concrete evidence, but things have changed. With our current research techniques, we can answer many of these questions. In what follows, we are going to discover more about our intuitive selves and how they affect our moral decisions. We are going to see that we actually have hardwired ethical programming that has been selected for, and we will see what these ethical programs are concerned with. We are going to discover how our social world shapes them and turns some into virtues in one culture but not in another.

DO WE HAVE HARDWIRED ETHICAL PROGRAMMING?.

To begin with, let me pose a moral dilemma to you, one that has been designed by researchers to demonstrate our intuitive moral judgment. Jonathon Haidt, the very clever psychologist at the University of Virginia whom we met in chapter 3, has come up with a provocative question he puts to his students: Julie and Mark are sister and brother. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it with each other again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other.1 The students are asked, was it OK for them to make love? The story was designed to call upon all of one's gut instincts and moral intuitions. Most people will say that it was wrong and disgusting. But Haidt knew that before he started his experiment. He wanted to dig deeper, to get to the root reasoning, if any, we all must use. So he urges his students on: "Tell me why. What does your rational brain say?" Not unexpectedly, many answer that inbreeding could cause a deformed infant or that they could be hurt emotionally. But remember, they used two forms of birth control, so that is not the problem, and we already have been told that they weren't emotionally hurt but actually grew closer. Haidt tells us that eventually most students will say, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong." But if it is wrong, and you can't explain why, is that a rational judgment or an intuitive one? Have we been taught a rational rule by our parents or culture or religion that it is morally wrong to have s.e.x with your sibling because it may lead to birth defects, or is it hardwired knowledge that we have a difficult time overruling with rational arguments?

Where did the incest taboo come from? Incest taboos are one of those human universals we talked about in the last chapter. All cultures have incest taboos. Edward Westermarck, in 1891, figured out how they develop. Because humans cannot recognize their siblings automatically, by sight, for example, he proposed that humans have evolved an innate mechanism whose function is to discourage incest. This mechanism operated by causing a person to be uninterested in or averse to having s.e.x with those he had spent a lot of time with when a child.2 This will work most times in preventing incest. This rule predicts that childhood friends and stepsiblings who were brought up together, as well as full siblings, would all be found not to marry.

Support for this idea has come from Israeli kibbutzim,3 where unrelated children are brought up together. They form lifelong friends.h.i.+ps but very rarely marry. More evidence for this theory is found in the ancient custom among some people in Taiwan called s.h.i.+mpua marriage, in which the family raises the future wife of their son from infancy. These marriages often result in no offspring, simply because the partners do not find each other s.e.xually appealing.4 Debra Lieberman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Hawaii, expanded upon these findings.5 She was interested not only in kin recognition as it related to incest and reciprocal altruism, but also in how personal incest taboos ("s.e.x with my sibling is wrong") become generalized opposition ("incest is wrong for everyone"). Did this come from parents or society, or did it come spontaneously from within? She asked her subjects to fill out a family questionnaire, and then asked them to rank from least morally wrong to most morally wrong a list of nineteen third-party acts that included sibling incest, child molestation, dope smoking, and murder. She found that there was only one variable that significantly predicted the degree of moral wrongness a subject ranked third-party sibling incest. This was the length of time spent under the same roof as a child and early adolescent with an opposite-s.e.x sibling. The longer one lived in the same house with an opposite-s.e.x sibling, the more morally wrong third-party incest was considered. It was not affected by relatedness (the sibling could have been adopted or a stepsibling); by parental, subject, or peer att.i.tude toward s.e.xual behavior; by s.e.xual orientation; or by how long the parents had been married.

Why this is important to our current topic is that the moral att.i.tude against incest in general was not increased by learned social or parental instruction, nor was it increased by the degree of relatedness to the sibling. It was increased only by the amount of time that the subject had actually spent living under the same roof with their sibling (related or otherwise) while being raised. This is not a rationally learned behavior and att.i.tude that was taught to us by our parents or friends or religious teacher. If it were rational, then it would not apply to adopted siblings or to stepsiblings. It is a trait that has been selected because it worked in most situations to avoid producing offspring that were less healthy due to inbreeding and the expression of recessive genes. We got it at the factory.

But our conscious, rational brain does not know that all this is going on. Our conscious brain works on a "need to know" basis, and all it needs to know is that siblings are having s.e.x and that is bad. When you are asked, "Why is it bad?" things get interesting. Now you are activating your conscious reasoning system-your interpreter, which doesn't know the above answer unless you have studied the literature on incest avoidance recently. No problem, reasons will come pouring out of your brain anyway!

This is pertinent to research that I have done on people who have had the connection (the corpus callosum) between the two hemispheres of their brains severed for medical reasons. What this does is isolate the right hemisphere from the speech center, which usually is in the left hemisphere, so not only can't the right hemisphere communicate with the left hemisphere, it can't talk to anyone else either. With special equipment, you can tell the right hemisphere to do something by giving a visual command to one eye, such as "pick up a banana." The right hemisphere controls the motor movement on the left side of the body, so the left hand will pick up the banana. Then if you ask the person, "Why did you pick up the banana?" the left brain's speech center answers, but it doesn't know why the left hand picked up the banana, because the right hemisphere can't tell it that it read a command to do so. The left hemisphere gets the visual input that there is indeed a banana in the left hand. Does it say, "Gosh, I don't know?" Hardly! It will say, "I like bananas," or "I was hungry," or "I didn't want it to fall on the floor." I call this the interpreter module. The intuitive judgment comes out automatically, and when asked to explain, out pops the interpreter to make a rational explanation, keeping everything neat and tidy.

Another factor that we seem to understand intuitively is intent in social exchange. That means if someone doesn't reciprocate in a social exchange by accident, it is not recognized as cheating, but if someone intentionally does not reciprocate, it is recognized. Three- and four-year-old children will judge an action in a story of social exchange as being "naughty" if the behavior was on purpose, but not if it was done by accident.6 Chimpanzees can judge intention; when someone is trying to grab some food for them but can't reach it, they don't get upset, but they will get upset when someone can reach it but won't.7 Lawrence Fidd.i.c.k, a lecturer in psychology at James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia, has shown that in detecting cheaters in social exchange, individuals detect intentional cheaters at a higher rate than accidental cheaters, whereas in precautionary contracts (such as "if you work with dogs, then you need a rabies vaccination"), intentional and unintentional cheaters are detected to an equal degree.8 This ability was predicted by Fidd.i.c.k, using his a.s.sumption that there are two separate innate circuits in the brain, one for social exchange, where it is beneficial not to detect accidental cheating, and a separate one for precautionary measures, where it would be more beneficial to detect all cheating. If all were logical in the brain, you would be able to detect cheaters equally in both circ.u.mstances, independent of intent.

IT'S NOT ALL RATIONAL.

Further evidence that all is not rational conscious decision making began with a Vermonter who lived in the 1800s. Phineas Gage was a railroad construction foreman who was hardworking, good at business, well mannered, civil, and respected. One September morning in 1848 he set off to work, not knowing he was about to have a textbook example of a bad day and become the most famous neurological trauma survivor. That morning, rocks were to be blasted with gunpowder to clear a path for the tracks. A hole was drilled into the rock and filled with gunpowder. A fuse was to be laid, covered with sand, and tamped down with a long iron rod, and then the charge was to be detonated. Unfortunately, Phineas must have been distracted, because he tamped down the gunpowder before the sand had been added, and the gunpowder exploded, blasting the tamping iron on a trajectory through Gage's head. It entered at the left cheek, pa.s.sed through his eye socket, through portions of his frontal lobes and out the top of his skull, landing about twenty-five to thirty yards behind him.

This was no pixie-stick-sized rod. It was three feet seven inches long, weighed thirteen and a half pounds, and measured one and a quarter inches in diameter at one end, tapering over a distance of about one foot to a diameter of a quarter inch at the other. It can be seen at the medical museum at Harvard. It seems unbelievable, but Gage was unconscious for only about fifteen minutes and then was able to speak coherently and rationally! He was reported the next day by the local paper to be pain free.9 Through the ministrations of his doctor, John Martyn Harlow, he survived the injury and subsequent infection, and was able to return home to Lebanon, Vermont, after two months, though it took much longer to recover his stamina.

Although this is story enough, it is not why he has become famous. Phineas Gage had changed. His memory and reason were the same, but his personality was light-years away from that of the affable man he had been. "He was now fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows. He was also impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action. His friends said he was 'No longer Gage.'"10 He no longer acted in a socially acceptable way. There was some chunk of brain that had been damaged that caused this change, even though his reasoning and memory were unaffected.

More recently, Antonio Damasio and his colleagues have had a series of "Gage-like" patients with similar lesions (although as a result of surgery or trauma rather than tamping rods), and they all have something in common. They too are no longer themselves and have lost their ability to act in a socially accepted way. The first was a patient named Elliot,11 who had a tumor removed from his frontal lobes. Before the surgery, he was a responsible husband, father, and employee. A few months later, his life was in shambles. He had to be prodded to get out of bed, he couldn't manage his time at work, he couldn't plan for the immediate or distant future, his finances were a mess, and his family had left him. He had seen several doctors who did not know what to make of him, because all the tests he had taken showed his brain was functioning well. He scored above average on intelligence tests, and when presented with problems, he could come up with well-thought-out lists of possible solutions. His sensory and motor skills were unchanged, as were conventional memory, speech, and language. However, Damasio noticed that he showed a flattened affect, that is, his emotions, both primary and social, were severely impaired.

Elliot could no longer function in a socially accepted way. He had a difficult time making appropriate decisions, and Damasio hypothesized that the reason was that he no longer had emotions. He proposed that before we make a decision, when an option presents itself, an emotional response is evoked. If it is a negative emotion, the option is eliminated from consideration before rational a.n.a.lysis begins. Damasio proposed that emotions play a major role in decision making, and that the fully rational brain is not a complete brain. These findings have contributed to a grand reevaluation of the contributions of emotions to the decision-making process. It turns out that no matter how many rational ideas a person is able to come up with, emotion is necessary to make the decision, and that includes deciding on moral dilemmas.

MAKING DECISIONS.

People make decisions all day long. Should I get up now or doze a while longer? What should I wear today? What should I have for breakfast? Should I exercise now or later? So many decisions, you don't even realize you are making them. As you drive to work you are deciding when to put your foot on the accelerator, the brake, and perhaps the clutch. You are also adjusting your speed and your route to get to work on time, turning the radio dial, and perhaps talking on your cell phone. The interesting and scary thing is that your brain can think consciously about only one thing at a time. All those other decisions are being made automatically.

There are two types of automatic processes. Driving is an example of intentional (you have the intention of driving to work) and goal-directed (get to work on time) processes that have been learned over time until they become automatic; so is playing the piano or riding a bicycle. The second type is preconscious processing of perceptual events: You perceive a stimulus by seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching, and your brain processes it before your conscious mind is aware that you have perceived it. This takes place effortlessly and without intention or awareness. It turns out that what this automatic processing is doing is placing all your perceptions on a negative (the room is white, I don't like white) to positive (the room is brightly colored, I like bright colors) scale and biasing your decisions one way (something about this place isn't calling to me...let's keep looking) or the other (I bet this place is good, let's eat here). Your automatic processing is helping you to answer the evolutionarily significant question, "Should I approach or avoid?" This is called affective priming, and it affects your behavior. If I asked why you don't want to eat at the first place, you will give a reason, but it most likely won't be "I get a negative flash in a white room." It would more likely be "Oh, it just didn't look all that exciting."

John Bargh at New York University has placed volunteers in front of a computer screen and told them that he would flash words on the screen. They were to tap a key with their right hand if they thought it was a bad word (such as vomit or tyrant) or tap a key with their left hand if it was a good word (such as garden or love). What they didn't know was that he was also flas.h.i.+ng words on the screen for a hundredth of a second (too fast for them to consciously realize) before he would flash the word they were to judge. What happened was, if he flashed a negative word on the screen first, followed by a negative word the volunteer was aware of, the volunteer responded faster than if he had not been primed. If a good word was flashed after the negative word, he would take longer to tap the key, because more time was required to adjust from the subliminal negative impression.12 Bargh has later shown that if he exposed subjects to words describing rude behavior and then instructed the subjects to tell someone in another room when they were done, they were more likely to interrupt that person to tell them (66 percent of partic.i.p.ants) than if they had had no affective priming (38 percent), and they were less likely to interrupt if they had been primed with polite words (16 percent).13 Error management theory predicts that one should be biased toward committing errors that are less costly.14 In thinking about evolution, one would postulate that those who survived were those who reacted more quickly, that is, automatically, to a negative cue, and a negativity bias should have been selected for. After all, it is more important to detect something that will hurt, kill, or make you sick than it is to react to seeing a bush with berries on it. There will always be another bush, but not if you are killed by that lion. Well, we do have a negativity bias! Big time. Subjects will pick angry faces out of a neutral crowd faster than happy faces.15 One c.o.c.kroach or worm will spoil a good plate of food, but a delicious meal sitting on top of a pile of worms will not make the worms edible. And extremely immoral acts have an almost indelible negative effect: Psychology undergraduate students were asked how many lives a person would have to save, each on individual occasions and each at risk to his or her own life, to be forgiven for the murder of one. Their median response was twenty-five.16 This negativity bias has been doc.u.mented and reviewed by Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman at the University of Pennsylvania, who tell us that it appears to be ubiquitous in our lives. Negative stimuli raise blood pressure, cardiac output, and heart rate.17 They grab our attention (newspapers thrive on bad news). We are better able to read negative than positive emotions in other people. The negativity bias affects our moods, our way of forming impressions of people, our search for the perfect (one tiny smudge in a rare book will bring down its value), and our moral judgments. We even have a greater number of negative emotions, and we have more words for pain than for good sensations.16 Rozin and Royzman have suggested that the adaptive value of the negativity bias has four components: Negative events are potent. You can be killed!

Negative events are complex. Should you run, fight, freeze, or hide?

Negative events can happen suddenly. There's a snake! There's a lion! And they need to be dealt with quickly-a good reason that faster automatic processing would have been selected for.

Negative events can be contagious-spoiled food, dead bodies, sick people.

Earlier, when we discussed emotions, we learned that incoming information pa.s.ses first through the thalamus, then to the sensory processing areas, and then to the frontal cortex. However, there was a shortcut through the amygdala, which responds to patterns that were a.s.sociated with danger in the past. The amygdala not only affects your motor system but also can change your thinking. Your quick emotional response of fear or disgust or anger to the threatening (negative) incoming information will color how you process further information. It concentrates your attention on the negative stimulus. You aren't thinking the mozzarella looks fresh, the basil is fragrant, the tomatoes are red and juicy; you are thinking, Yuck, there is a greasy hair on my plate, and I am not going to eat this. In fact, I'm never eating here again. This is our negativity bias.

There are some things that affect us in a positive manner, although there is no equivalent to the emergency status given to negative stimuli. One of these effects is with unconscious mimicry. Bargh and Tanya Chartrand have found that people who were a.s.signed to do a task with a stranger were more likely to like the stranger, and find their interactions to be smoother, when the stranger copied their mannerisms. They also tended to mimic the mannerisms of the stranger without later being aware they had.18 The researchers hypothesize that automatic mimicry increases liking and serves the purpose of facilitating social interactions. When you first meet someone, you get an impression, and these first impressions are usually almost identical to ones formed with longer contact and observation.19 In fact, different observers will have a remarkably similar rating of a stranger's personality, and that rating is in remarkable agreement with the stranger's self-rating of those personality traits.20 Mimicry is what makes a newborn baby copy his mother's expressions, sticking out his tongue when she does and smiling when she does. A related positive effect is that people tend to agree with others whom they like21 (your friend tells you her neighbor is a jerk, so you will tend to agree), unless agreement leads to conflicts with what the person already knows (you know her neighbor personally and think she is nice). Even your physical position will unconsciously affect your bias. People like novel stimuli better if their arms are flexed (accepting) than if they are extended (pus.h.i.+ng away).22 In one study, half the subjects pulled a lever toward them if a word was positive, or pushed it away if it was negative, and the other half did the opposite. The subjects reacted faster to positive words if they were pulling the lever. Experimenters tried it again with just pus.h.i.+ng for all words, or pulling for all words, and the reaction time was faster if the pushers saw a negative word than if they saw a positive word, and it was opposite for the pullers; their reaction was faster for the positive words.23 All decisions we make are based on whether to approach or withdraw, including our moral decisions. If it is good, we approach; if it is bad, we withdraw; and these decisions are affected by the bias mechanisms, which in turn can elicit emotions that come as standard equipment from the baby factory.

THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF MORAL JUDGMENTS.

Now try this scenario, known as the trolley dilemma:.

A runaway trolley is headed for five people, who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save them is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one person instead of five. Should you turn the trolley in order to save five people at the expense of one?

If you are like most people, you will say yes, it is better to save five than one.

Now try this one:.

As before, a trolley threatens to kill five people. You are standing next to a large stranger on a footbridge crossing above the tracks, between the oncoming trolley and five workmen on the tracks below. Pus.h.i.+ng the large stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below will stop the trolley. He will die if you do this, but the five workmen will not be killed. Should you save the five others by pus.h.i.+ng this stranger to his death?24 Most people will answer no to this one. Why this dichotomy, when the actual numbers are no different in the two dilemmas? What is your interpreter saying now?

Joshua Greene, a philosopher-turned-neuroscientist at Harvard, thinks it is because the first scenario is more impersonal. You push a b.u.t.ton and have no physical contact. The second one is personal. You actually have to physically push the stranger off. Greene looks to our evolutionary environment to solve this problem. Our ancestors lived in an environment of small social groups whose members were known to each other and whose dealings were regulated by emotions and were all on a personal level. It would then make sense that we should have evolved a hardwired emotional response to personal moral dilemmas, a response selected for survival or reproductive success. Indeed, when he used fMRI to look at areas in the brain that were being used in the above dilemmas, Greene found that with the personal dilemma, the brain areas a.s.sociated with emotion and social cognition had increased activity. Dilemmas that were impersonal were not a part of the ancient environment, so when faced with the impersonal dilemma, the brain has no default reaction and has to resort to actual conscious thinking. With impersonal dilemmas, areas a.s.sociated with abstract reasoning and problem solving showed increased activity.25 Marc Hauser, however, thinks there are too many other variables in these dilemmas to narrow it down to personal versus impersonal. The results can also be explained in terms of a philosophical principle that it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving a greater good, but not to use harm to achieve it26-which is to say, the means don't justify the ends. This is then discussing action based on intent. The intent in the first is to save as many as possible; the intent of the second is not to harm the innocent bystander.

Perhaps we can say it like this: Flipping the switch is emotionally neutral, neither good nor bad. So we get no help from intuitive bias or emotion; we then think about the problem rationally: One dying and saving five is better than five dying and saving one. In the second dilemma however, pus.h.i.+ng an innocent person off a bridge is not emotionally neutral. It feels bad: Don't do it. Indeed, if you were the large person, the idea of jumping off the bridge yourself most likely would never even enter your head. Very bad. Jana Borg and colleagues, at Dartmouth College, decided to explore further. They found that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) is used for the harder personal scenarios, and for the easy ones, the anterior STS. They postulate that the posterior STS may be used in thought-provoking, first-time scenarios, and the anterior portion may be more involved in previously resolved, more routine decisions.27 ACTION VERSUS NO ACTION.

We began by observing that we can make a moral judgment quickly, automatically. Even though we may not be able to explain it logically, we will keep on trying. In incest avoidance, we saw an example of hardwired behavior that we consider moral. In the trolley dilemma, we have seen that moral judgments are not completely rational. They depend on the circ.u.mstances (automatic bias, personal or impersonal situations). They depend on whether action or no action is required. They also depend on intent and emotions (Damasio's patient Elliot). We have found that some automatic pathways are learned over time (driving), and some are inherent (approach-avoidance with a negativity bias). The latter can be affected by emotions, which also have been hardwired to varying degrees. Now we need to know a bit more about how the brain works.

It was thought in the past-and some still think so today, although their numbers are dwindling-that the brain is a general-purpose organ that can work on any problem with equal ability. If this were true, though, we should pick up molecular biology as easily as we learn to talk, and we definitely should not be able to figure out the great evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides' social-exchange questions better than we do logic questions. It appears our brains have neuronal circuits that have developed over evolutionary time that do indeed do specific jobs.

The concept of a brain with specialized circuits for specific problems is called the modular brain theory. I first wrote about this years ago in The Social Brain. It seemed logical, considering how most neuropsychological knowledge at the time emphasized how focal brain lesions produced discrete and specific deficits in patients. If a specific part of the brain is damaged, there are specific disorders of language, thought, perception, attention, and so on. And nowhere were such phenomena more dramatic than in split-brain patients, proving that the left side of the brain is specialized for one set of capacities and the right side for another kind.

More recently, the idea of modularity has been augmented by evolutionary psychologists. Cosmides and Tooby, for example, define modules as "units of mental processing that evolved in response to selection pressures." Yet, from considering the neurologic literature, it is clear that modules are not like isolated cubes stacked up neatly in the brain. Modern brain imaging studies have shown that the circuits for these modules can be widely scattered. And modules are defined by what they do with information, not by the information they receive (the input or stimulus that triggers them). Clearly, over evolutionary time, these modules evolved to react in specific ways to specific stimuli in the environment.

But our world has changed too fast for evolution to keep up with it. More types of information are going in, but the modules are still triggered in the same old ways. Although the range of stimuli is broader, their automatic responses still occur.

Furthermore, the brain is constrained. There are things it just cannot do, cannot learn, and cannot comprehend. For the same reason, a dog cannot comprehend that, or why, you care so much about the Gucci shoes he just chewed up-after all, leather is leather-but he is getting the general feeling that maybe it was a bad move. There are some things the brain learns in just one try, and there are some things that take many attempts. The idea that the brain can't do everything is a hard concept, since it is difficult to conceive of things our brain can't grasp. Like, please explain the fourth dimension again, and that thing about time not being linear. The brain is basically lazy. It will do the least amount of work it can. Because using intuitive modules is easy and fast and requires the least amount of work, that is the default mode of the brain.

What is being proposed now by many researchers studying morals and ethics1 is that we have modules that have evolved to deal with specific circ.u.mstances common to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. They lived in a social world made up of groups mostly of related people. Occasionally they met up with other bands of people, some more closely related than others, but they all needed to deal with the problems of survival, which included eating and not being eaten. Since this was a social world, the specific circ.u.mstances they often had to deal with involved other individuals, and some of these circ.u.mstances involved what we consider to be moral or ethical issues. These modules produce specific intuitive concepts that have allowed us to create the societies we live in.

ETHICAL MODULES: WHAT ARE THEY? WHERE DO THEY COME FROM?.

The proposal is that a stimulus induces 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. Reasoning about the judgment or action comes afterward, as the brain seeks a rational explanation for an automatic reaction it has no clue about. This includes moral judgments, which are not often the result of actual moral reasoning. Occasionally, however, the rational self does truly partic.i.p.ate in the judgment process.

Marc Hauser points out that there are three possible scenarios for intuitive processes. At one end of the spectrum of opinion are those who believe there are specific inborn moral rules: It is wrong to kill, steal, or cheat; it is good to help, be fair, and keep promises. On the opposite end of the argument, some maintain that we are born with no intuitions, just the proverbial blank slate, an ability to learn moral rules. Thus you could just as easily learn that cheating and incest are good and fairness is wrong. Then there is the middle position, which Hauser favors, believing we are born with some abstract moral rules and a preparedness to acquire others, just as we are born with a preparedness to acquire language. Thus our environment, our family, and our culture constrain and guide us to a particular moral system, as they do to a particular language.

From what we have seen so far, the middle path seems the most likely. To find where these abstract moral rules come from, Hauser looks at 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. Social reciprocity, having been taken by humans to heights unheard of in the animal world, provides a treasure trove in the search for abstract moral rules. The specific circ.u.mstances needed for social reciprocity to exist, as shown by researchers in game theory, require not only that the cheaters be detected but also that they be punished. Otherwise, cheaters, who invest less but receive an equal benefit, will outcompete the noncheaters and take over. If cheaters take over, reciprocity crumbles. Humans have evolved two abilities that are necessary for prolonged reciprocal social exchange: the ability to inhibit actions over time (that is, delayed gratification) and punishment of cheaters in reciprocal exchange. These currently are on the short list of uniquely human capacities.28 Haidt and his colleague, Craig Joseph at Northwestern University, have come up with a list of universal moral modules* after comparing research on human universals, cultural differences in morality, and the precursors of morality in chimpanzees. Their findings also derive from the similar set of common behaviors that Hauser uses, but they add one cla.s.s of abstract intuitions that are derived from the uniquely human emotion of disgust. Their five modules are reciprocity, suffering, hierarchy, boundaries between in-groups and out-groups (coalitions), and purity.29, 30 Not everyone will agree on these, but as Haidt and Joseph point out, they cover the wide range of moral virtues, which they define as characteristics of a person who is considered morally praiseworthy. Their list encompa.s.ses moral concerns in the world's cultures, not just Western cultures.

All such lists provide us with avenues of study. They aren't by any means definitive. Virtues are not universal. They are what a specific society or culture values as morally good behavior that can be learned. Various cultures emphasize various aspects of the above five modules, and this is what drives cultural differences in morality. This is the part of Hauser's middle path that is influenced by society. Richard Shweder, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, proposes three areas of moral concern: the ethic of autonomy, which is concerned with an individual's rights, freedoms, and welfare; the ethic of community, which is concerned with protecting families, communities, and nations; and the ethic of divinity, which is concerned about the spiritual self and physical and mental purity.31 Haidt and Joseph favor a similar schema: They place the concern for suffering and reciprocity under the ethic of autonomy, the concern for hierarchy and coalitional boundaries under the ethic of community, and the concern for purity under the ethic of divinity.

I will address these separate modules, the input that activates them (the environmental trigger), the moral emotions that they elicit, and the moral intuition (the output) that results. As Damasio surmised, emotions are the catalyst, and they help us to explain why all is not rational in the world. Although on the surface it may seem that a fully rational world would be a better one, however, on just a quick look, we can nix that idea. For instance, the cla.s.sical question in economics is why ever leave a tip in a restaurant that you will never go back to? That is not rational. Why not dump your sick husband or wife and get a healthy one? That would be more rational. Why spend public money on the severely handicapped, when they will rarely be able to repay it?

Haidt also makes the point that moral emotions aren't just for being nice. "There is more to morality than altruism and niceness. Emotions that motivate helping behavior are easy to label as moral emotions, but emotions that lead to ostracism, shaming, and murderous vengeance are no less a part of our moral nature. The human social world is a miraculous and tenuous co-construction of its partic.i.p.ants, and any emotion that leads people to care about that world, and to support, enforce, or improve its integrity should be considered a moral emotion, even when the actions taken are not 'nice.'"32 Oddly enough, Robert Frank, an economist, stepped into the world of the psychologists, philosophers, and the selfish gene. He suggests that moral sentiments are consistent with the selfish-gene theory. It can be to a selfish person's advantage to have moral sentiments that are visibly expressed by moral emotions, which predispose him not to cheat. Moral emotions, which are difficult to counterfeit, advertise that you have a conscience and would suffer uncomfortable feelings of guilt if a promise were broken. For instance, you know you can trust what the infallible blusher tells you. She cannot tell a lie without turning beet red. Humans are the only animal that blushes. Another visible sign of an emotion are tears. Humans are the only animal that cries. Although other animals have tear ducts, they produce tears only to keep the eye healthy. They do not produce tears with emotions.

Moral sentiments and emotions can be a commitment device that allows potential partners in trade or social exchange to get past the first round of exchange without cutting and running.33 In short, they solve the commitment problem in personal relations.h.i.+ps and in social exchange, which is: Why would anyone ever go into partners.h.i.+p with someone else in the first place? A rational person would never go into partners.h.i.+p with someone else because of the high probability that the other rational person would cheat, because if the opportunity presented itself, there would be no rational reason not to. How could you ever convince another rational person that you wouldn't cheat? It doesn't make sense not to.

Why would any rational person get married when they read the divorce rate or when they can have s.e.x with innumerable others without the expense? Why would you ever start a business with someone? Why would you ever lend anyone money? Emotions solve the problem. Love and trust can lead to marriage, trust to partners.h.i.+ps. The fear of feeling guilt or shame prevents you from cheating, and you know (because of your theory of mind) that your partner would also feel the same way. Anger and rage against a cheater is a deterrent. Possessing a theory of mind allows one to plan one's actions, taking into account how they will affect the beliefs and desires of another. If you cheat someone, they will get angry and retaliate. You don't want to feel the embarra.s.sment when the other person finds out, nor do you want the retaliation, so you don't cheat.

One type of moral emotion, however, is not limited to a single module, as we will soon see. Here is an overview of the five moral modules most commonly postulated.

The Moral Modules.

THE RECIPROCITY MODULE.

Social exchange is the glue that holds societies together, and it is emotions that hold social exchange together. It is probable that many of the moral emotions arose in the context of reciprocal altruism and have precursors that can be seen in infants and other animals. If you recall, in order for social exchange to work, social contracts have to be made and honored. These take the form, If I do this for you, then you will do an equal amount for me sometime in the future. Robert Trivers, who helped us out in the previous chapter by explaining kin altruism, believes when looking at reciprocal altruism that emotions are what mediates between our intuitions and behavior. We will engage in reciprocity with those we trust, and we trust those who reciprocate. Individuals who didn't like being cheated and did something about it, and individuals who felt guilty if they cheated and didn't like that feeling, were the ones who were necessary to allow reciprocity to exist-by creating a society in which the honest would not be outcompeted by cheaters. Although there is evidence that reciprocity exists in a few other animals such as vampire bats and guppies, it exists only on a one-to-one basis. Humans will gossip and tell others who is a violator and who is trustworthy.

The moral emotions connected with reciprocity are sympathy, contempt, anger, guilt, sh