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December 17, 2023 - January 7, 2024
This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend.
Where I am definitely trying to sound pejorative and worse is when this ahistorical view of judging people’s behavior is moralistic. Why would you ignore what came before the present in analyzing someone’s behavior? Because you don’t care why someone else turned out to be different from you.
To understand where your intent came from, all that needs to be known is what happened to you in the seconds to minutes before you formed the intention to push whichever button you choose. As well as what happened to you in the hours to days before. And years to decades before. And during your adolescence, childhood, and fetal life. And what happened when the sperm and egg destined to become you merged, forming your genome. And what happened to your ancestors centuries ago when they were forming the culture you were raised in, and to your species millions of years ago. Yeah, all that.
the intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.
One much-noted study suggested that hunger makes us less forgiving. Specifically, across more than a thousand judicial decisions, the longer it had been since judges had eaten, the less likely they were to grant a prisoner parole. Other studies also show that hunger changes prosocial behavior. “Changes”—decreasing prosociality, as with the judges, or increasing it? It depends. Hunger seems to have different effects on how charitable subjects say they are going to be, versus how charitable they actually are,[*] or where subjects have either only one or multiple chances to be naughty or nice in
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Stick a volunteer in a brain scanner and flash up pictures of faces. And in a depressing, well-replicated finding, flash up the face of someone of another race and in about 75 percent of subjects, there is activation of the amygdala, the brain region central to fear, anxiety, and aggression.[*] In under a tenth of a second.[*]
It’s the same with hunger. Here’s one study that should stop you in your tracks (and was first referred to in the last chapter). The researchers studied a group of judges overseeing more than a thousand parole board decisions. What best predicted whether a judge granted someone parole versus more jail time? How long it had been since they had eaten a meal. Appear before the judge soon after she’s had a meal, and there was a roughly 65 percent chance of parole; appear a few hours after a meal, and there was close to a 0 percent chance.[*],[28]
What are the effects of a history of prolonged discrimination? A brain that is in a resting state of don’t-let-your-guard-down vigilance, that is more reactive to perceived threat, and a PFC burdened by a torrent of reporting from the vmPFC about this constant state of dis-ease.[39] To summarize this section, when you try to do the harder thing that’s better, the PFC you’re working with is going to be displaying the consequences of whatever the previous years have handed you.
am put into a detached, professorial, eggheady sort of rage by the idea that you can assess someone’s behavior outside the context of what brought them to that moment of intent, that their history doesn’t matter.
It’s 2022. Same cohort with, again, one person destined to go off the rails forty years hence. Again, here are their blood samples. This time, this century, you use them to sequence everyone’s genome. You discover that one individual has a mutation in a gene called MAPT, which codes for something in the brain called the tau protein. And as a result, you can accurately predict that it will be that person, because by age sixty, he will be showing the symptoms of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia.[11]
Someone’s history can’t be ignored, because all we are is our history.
Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipotent Someone doling out the consequences?
Hunter-gatherers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99 percent of human history, do not invent moralizing gods. Sure, their gods might demand a top-of-the-line sacrifice now and then, but they have no interest in whether humans are nice to each other. Everything about the evolution of cooperation and prosociality is facilitated by stable, transparent relationships built on familiarity and the potential for reciprocity; these are precisely the conditions that would make for moral constraint in small hunter-gatherer bands, obviating the need for some god eavesdropping. It was not until humans
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Another complication in these theist/atheist studies is obvious to anyone who has been stranded on a desert island with a Unitarian and an evangelical Southern Baptist—religion and religiosity are crazy heterogeneous. Which religion? Is someone a lifelong adherent or a recent convert? Is the person’s religiosity mostly about their personal relationship with their deity, with their coreligionists, with humans in general? Is their god all about love or smiting? Do they typically pray alone or in a group? Is their religiosity more about thoughts, emotions, or ritualism?[*],[17]
Once you actually observe what people do, rather than listen to what they say, there’s no difference between theists and atheists in rates of blood donations, amount of tipping, or compliance with “honor system” payments; ditto for a lack of difference in being altruistic, forgiving, or evincing gratitude. Furthermore, there’s no difference in being aggressive or vengeful in experimental settings where subjects can retaliate against a norm violation (for example, by administering what they believe to be a shock to someone).[20]
Thus, observe what people do rather than what they say, and the differences in prosociality between theists and atheists mostly disappears.
The lesson for studying free-will believers versus skeptics is obvious. Collectively, the studies examining what people actually do in an experimental setting show no difference in ethical behavior between the two groups. Old, Rich, Socialized Women versus Young, Poor, Solitary Guys Back to that self-selection challenge: when compared with atheists, religious people are more likely to be female, older, married, and of higher socioeconomic status, and to have a larger and more stable social network.
Now we’re getting somewhere. When religious people are not thinking about their religious principles, they sink into the same immoral muck as atheists. But remind them of what really matters, and the halo comes out.
Jonathan Haidt of New York University groups moral concerns into five domains—those related to obedience, loyalty, purity, fairness, and harm avoidance. His influential work has shown that political conservatives and highly religious people tilt in the direction of particularly valuing obedience, loyalty, and purity. The Left and the irreligious, in contrast, are more concerned with fairness and harm avoidance. This can be framed with highfalutin philosophy.
Thus, if you’re trying to decide who is more likely to run amok with antisocial behaviors, atheists will look bad if the question is “How much of your money would you give to charity for the poor?” But if the question is “How much of your money would you pay in higher taxes for more social services for the poor?” you’ll reach a different conclusion.[27]
excellent book!
Even after controlling for factors like self-reporting or demographic correlates of religiosity, and after considering broader definitions of prosociality, religious people still come through as being more prosocial than atheists in some experimental as well as real-world settings. Which leads us to a really crucial point: religious prosociality is mostly about religious people being nice to people like themselves. It’s mostly in-group.
Thus, a variety of studies shows that when it comes to theists versus nontheists being kind to someone, it really depends on who that someone
How do you decide shortly after this sentence to change your behavior and grab a brownie? If the world is deterministic on the level that matters, isn’t everything thus already determined? The answer is that we don’t change our minds. Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, are changed by circumstances around us.
No Aplysia, encountering another one, would say, “It’s been a tough season, thanks for asking, lots and lots of shocks, no idea why. I had to build new synapses on every neuron in my siphon. I guess my gill is safe now, but I sure don’t feel safe. This has been hell on my partner.” We’re watching a machine that did not choose to change its behavior; its behavior was changed by circumstances via logical, highly evolved pathways.[2]
To appreciate that, what happens to lab rats if, when they were pups, they were intermittently separated from their mothers for a while? Rats that experienced such “maternal separation” early in life are, as adults, a mess. They are more anxious, show more of a glucocorticoid response to mild stress, don’t learn as well, are easier to addict to alcohol or cocaine. It is a model for how one type of early-life adversity in humans produces dysfunctional adults, and people know tons about how each of those changes comes about in the brain.[6]
The last chapter’s point was that while change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed by the world around us, and one consequence of that is that we are also changed as to what sources of subsequent change we seek.
“Someone’s kid gets diagnosed with cancer, that’s one thing. Someone’s kid gets diagnosed with schizophrenia, neighbors did not come over with casseroles.”[*]
“science progresses one funeral at a time”).
The long explorations in this chapter all show the same thing: we can subtract responsibility out of our view of aspects of behavior. And this makes the world a better place.
a battle between the rights of the individual and the greater good. We certainly saw just how incendiary this could be during early COVID-19, with those jackass don’t-tell-me-what-to-do coronavirus parties, where super-spreaders killed droves of people by practicing unsafe exhalation.
any version of preemptive constraint would have to be in the context of a world in which people truly accept that terrible people are produced by terrible circumstances (one minute before, one hour before . . . ). We have a really long way to go.
As studied by psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, gods invented by cultures built on small social groups have no interest in human affairs. It’s only when communities get large enough that there’s the possibility for anonymous actions, or interactions between strangers, that we see invention of “moralizing” gods who know if you’ve been bad or good. Consonant with this, across an array of religions, the more that deities are viewed as punitive, the more people are prosocial to anonymous, distant coreligionists.[*],[21]
recent, first-of-its-kind national survey of victims of violent crime reported, by a wide margin, a preference that criminal justice focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution, and that expenditures be increased for crime prevention rather than incarceration.[34] Those
As we’ve seen, rejection of free will doesn’t doom you to break bad, not if you’ve been educated about the roots of where our behavior comes from. Trouble is, that requires education.
Sure, if you have a burn patient on the edge of death, probably hold off on telling them that their family didn’t survive. But otherwise, it’s usually good to go with the truth, especially about free will—faith can sustain, but nothing devastates as surely as the discovery that your deeply held faith has been misplaced all along. We claim we’re rational beings, so go and prove it. Deal. But “Toughen up, there’s no free will” isn’t remotely the point.
In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear.
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And we need to accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done; ultimately, that hatred is sadder than hating the sky for storming, hating the earth when it quakes, hating a virus because it’s good at getting into lung cells. This is where the science has brought us as well.
