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There are many kinds of meditation, but they all have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a nonanalytical way.34
The goal of meditation is to change automatic thought processes, thereby taming the elephant. And the proof of taming is the breaking of attachments.
Andy’s pleasures and pains are determined by the choices my wife and I make.
Once again, losses loom larger than gains, so even if Charles grows steadily wealthier, thoughts about money may on average give him more unhappiness than happiness.
For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose.
The discovery is that meditation tames and calms the elephant. Meditation done every day for several months can help you reduce substantially the frequency of fearful, negative, and grasping thoughts, thereby improving your affective style.
Western approaches to problems more typically involve pulling out a tool box and trying to fix what’s broken. That was Lady Philosophy’s approach with her many arguments and reframing techniques. The toolbox was thoroughly modernized in the 1960s by Aaron Beck.
the Freudian approach in which “the child is father to the man.” Whatever ails you is caused by events in your childhood, and the only way to change yourself now is to dig through repressed memories, come up with a diagnosis, and work through your unresolved conflicts.
The more space he gave them to run through their self-critical thoughts and memories of injustice, the worse they felt.
As I suggested in the last chapter, we often use reasoning not to find the truth but to invent arguments to support our deep and intuitive beliefs (residing in the elephant).
Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
A depressed person’s mind is filled with automatic thoughts supporting these dysfunctional beliefs, parti...
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thoughts: “I’m a terrible father” (this is called “personalization,” or seeing the event as a referendum on the self rather than as a minor medical issue); “Why do I always do such terrible things to my children?” (“overgeneralization” combined with dichotomous “always/never” thinking); “Now she’s going to have brain damage” (“magnification”); “Everyone will hate me” (“arbitrary inference,” or jumping to a conclusion without evidence).
Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.
A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking.
Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.
On the first day of therapy, the rider doesn’t realize that the elephant is controlling him, that the elephant’s fears are driving his conscious thoughts.
(The elephant learns best from daily practice; a weekly meeting with a therapist is not enough.)
You can’t win a tug of war with an angry or fearful elephant, but you can—by gradual shaping of the sort the behaviorists talked about—change your automatic thoughts and, in the process, your affective style.
When cognitive therapy is done very well it is as effective as drugs such as Prozac for the treatment of depression,38 and its enormous advantage over Prozac is that when cognitive therapy stops, the benefits usually continue because the elephant has been retrained. Prozac, in contrast, works only for as long as you take it.
Marcel Proust wrote that “the only true voyage . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.”41
My research indicates that a small set of innate moral intuitions guide and constrain the world’s many moralities, and one of these intuitions is that the body is a temple housing a soul within.45
cortical lottery
The epigraphs that opened this chapter are true. Life is what we deem it, and our lives are the creations of our minds. But these claims are not helpful until augmented by a theory of the divided self (such as the rider and the elephant) and an understanding of negativity bias and affective style.
Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually.
WHEN THE SAGES PICK a single word or principle to elevate above all others, the winner is almost always either “love” or “reciprocity.”
In the rest of this chapter I’ll explain how we came to adopt reciprocity as our social currency, and how you can spend it wisely.
Ultrasociality4—living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor—evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom: among hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps); termites; naked mole rats; and humans.
The human mind finds kinship deeply appealing, and kin altruism surely underlies the cultural ubiquity of nepotism. But even in the mafia, kin altruism can take you only so far. At some point you have to work with people who are at best distant relations, and to do so you’d better have another trick up your sleeve.
What would you do if you received a Christmas card from a complete stranger? This actually happened in a study in which a psychologist sent Christmas cards to people at random. The great majority sent him a card in return.8
people have a mindless, automatic reciprocity reflex. Like other animals, we will perform certain behaviors when the world presents us with certain patterns of input.
Cialdini sees human reciprocity as a similar ethological reflex: a person receives a favor from an acquaintance and wants to repay the favor.
So what is really built into the person is a strategy: Play tit for tat. Do to others what they do unto you. Specifically, the tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction; but after that, do to your partner whatever your partner did to you on the previous round.10 Tit for tat takes us way beyond kin altruism. It opens the possibility of forming cooperative relationships with strangers.
Most interactions among animals (other than close kin) are zero-sum games: One animal’s gain is the other’s loss.
But life is full of situations in which cooperation would expand the pie to be shared if only a way could be found to cooperate without being exploited.
Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit for tat. Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the
gains from non-zero-sum games.13
The “organ” is a metaphor—nobody expects to find an isolated blob of brain tissue the only function of which is to enforce reciprocity.
Alan Sanfey17 and his colleagues at Princeton had people do just that; the researchers then looked at what parts of the brain were more active when people were given unfair offers.
Perhaps the most impressive finding from Sanfey’s study is that people’s ultimate response—accept or reject—could be predicted by looking at the state of their brains moments before they pressed a button to make a choice.
Those subjects who showed more activation in the insula than in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex generally went on to reject the unfair offer; those with the reverse pattern generally accepted it.
Woody Allen once described his brain as his “second favorite organ,” but for all of us it’s by far the most expensive one to run.
But the only theory that explains why animals in general have particular brain sizes is the one that maps brain size onto social group size. Robin Dunbar19 has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.
Dunbar suggests that language evolved as a replacement for physical grooming.20 Language allows small groups of people to bond quickly and to learn from each other about the bonds of others. Dunbar notes that people do in fact use language primarily to talk about other people—to find out who is doing what to whom, who is coupling with whom, who is fighting with whom. And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
gossip.
We are motivated to pass on information to our friends; we even sometimes say, “I can’t keep it in, I have to tell somebody.” And when you do pass on a piece of juicy gossip, what happens? Your friend’s reciprocity reflex kicks in and she feels a slight pressure to return the favor.
Gossip elicits gossip,
Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information.
Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others.
People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions.
