Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

What this internal consistency suggests is that political ideology is merely one manifestation of broader, underlying ideology—as we’ll see, this helps explain conservatives being more likely than liberals to have cleaning supplies in their bedrooms.

the links among low IQ, RWA, and intergroup prejudice were there after controlling for education and socioeconomic status. The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

in a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings, prisoners were granted parole at about a 60 percent rate when judges had recently eaten, and at essentially a 0 percent rate just before judges ate (note also the overall decline over the course of a tiring day). Justice may be blind, but she’s sure sensitive to her stomach gurgling.36

The differing views of novelty certainly explain the liberal view that with correct reforms, our best days are ahead of us in a novel future, whereas conservatives view our best days as behind us, in familiar circumstances that should be returned to, to make things great again.

Better to hate who you are, if that bolsters a system whose stability and predictability are sources of comfort.

These differences in threat perception help explain the differing views as to role of government—providing for people (the leftist view; social services, education, etc.) or protecting people (the rightist view; law and order, the military, etc.).* Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality—it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers, unburdened by motivated correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and the Left increases.

The visceral level, with or without post-hoc rationalization, is all you need in order to know what’s right. If it makes you puke, then you must rebuke.47 The monumental flaw is obvious. Different things disgust different people; whose gag reflex wins? Moreover, things once viewed as disgusting are viewed differently now (e.g., the idea of slaves having the same rights as whites would probably have struck most white Americans circa 1800 as not just economically unworkable but disgusting as well). It’s disgusting, the things people weren’t disgusted by in the past. Disgust is a moving target.

transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC;

What is thid

this process of conforming was also associated with activation of the occipital cortex, the brain region that does the primary processing of vision—you can almost hear the frontal and limbic parts of the brain trying to convince the occipital cortex that it saw something different from what it actually saw. As has been said, winners (in this case, in the court of public opinion) get to write the history books, and everyone else better revise theirs accordingly. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. That dot you saw was actually blue, not red.

Gaslighting explained

when it’s you choosing between conforming and being deeply lonely.

Fucking fuck

The descent into savagery can be so incremental as to come with nothing but arbitrary boundaries, and our descent becomes like the proverbial frog cooked alive without noticing. When your conscience finally rebels and draws a line in the sand, we know that it is likely to be an arbitrary one, fueled by implicit subterranean forces—despite your best attempts at pseudospeciation, this victim’s face reminds you of a loved one’s; a smell just wafted by that took you back to childhood and reminds you of how life once felt innocent; your anterior cingulate neurons just had breakfast. At such times, a line having finally been drawn must be more important than its arbitrariness.

warriors who transform and standardize their appearance before battle are more likely to torture and mutilate their enemies than warriors from cultures that don’t transform themselves. All use means to deindividuate, where the goal may not be to ensure that a victimized Them won’t be able to recognize you afterward as much as to facilitate moral disengagement so that you won’t be able to recognize you afterward.

What about gender? Milgram-like studies have shown that women average higher rates than men of voicing resistance to the demands to obey . . . but higher rates, nonetheless, of ultimately complying. Other studies show that women have higher rates than men of public conformity and lower rates of private conformity. Overall, though, gender is not much of a predictor.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder get mired in both everyday decision making and moral decision making, and their dlPFCs go wild with activity for both.1

The pattern of activation in these regions predicts moral decisions better than does the dlPFC’s profile. And this matches behavior—people punish to the extent that they feel angered by someone acting unethically.8

And monkey 2 would then typically fling the cucumber at the human or bash around in frustration. Most consistently, they wouldn’t give the pebble the next time. As the Nature paper was entitled, “Monkeys reject unequal pay.”

Lol

doing the study with a single monkey, switching from grapes to cucumbers would not evoke refusal. Nor would it if both monkeys got cucumbers.

Sometimes other primates are fair when it’s at no cost to themselves. Back to capuchin monkeys. Monkey 1 chooses whether both he and the other guy get marshmallows or it’s a marshmallow for him and yucky celery for the other guy. Monkeys tended to choose marshmallows for the other guy.* Similar “other-regarding preference” was shown with marmoset monkeys, where the first individual got nothing and merely chose whether the other guy got a cricket to eat (of note, a number of studies have failed to find other-regarding preference in chimps).16

Contemplate consigning the person to death by pushing them, and it’s vmPFC (and amygdala), the visceral profile of moral intuition.

Fun to contemplate the trolley problems and see what amygdala activation feels like

It is a nightmare of a person who, with remorseless sociopathy, believes it is okay to steal, kill, rape, and plunder. But far more of humanity’s worst behaviors are due to a different kind of person, namely most of the rest of us, who will say that of course it is wrong to do X . . . but here is why these special circumstances make me an exception right now. We use different brain circuits when contemplating our own moral failings (heavy activation of the vmPFC) versus those of others (more of the insula and dlPFC).

we have entered complicated terrain when we can make sense of an interchange where a masochist says, “Beat me,” and the sadist sadistically answers, “No.”

the lower the social capital in a country, the higher the rates of antisocial punishment. In other words, when do people’s moral systems include the idea that being generous deserves punishment? When they live in a society where people don’t trust one another and feel as if they have no efficacy.

the large religions invent gods who do third-party punishment. No wonder this predicts these religions’ adherents being third-party punishers themselves.

while no one can raid farmers and steal all their crops, someone can rustle a herd overnight—and if this sum’a bitch gets away with insulting my family, he’ll be coming for my cattle next.

Shame is when everyone says, “You can no longer live with us”; guilt is when you say, “How am I going to live with myself?”*

Damn i got too mich of both

about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative. As has been said, gossip (with the goal of shaming) is a weapon of the weak against the powerful. It has always been fast and cheap and is infinitely more so now in the era of the Scarlet Internet.

What’s your moral philosophy? If harm to the person who is the means is unintentional or if the intentionality is really convoluted and indirect, I’m a utilitarian consequentialist, and if the intentionality is right in front of my nose, I’m a deontologist.

when doing moral decision making during Us-versus-Them scenarios, keep intuitions as far away as possible. Instead, think, reason, and question; be deeply pragmatic and strategically utilitarian; take their perspective, try to think what they think, try to feel what they feel. Take a deep breath, and then do it all again.

no other species can be poker-faced. And we have language, that extraordinary means of manipulating the distance between a message and its meaning.

Subjects were over 2,500 college students from twenty-three countries, and higher rates of corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud in a subject’s country predicted higher rates of lying. This is no surprise, after chapter 9’s demonstration that high rates of rule violations in a community decrease social capital, which then fuels individual antisocial behavior.

activation of the dlPFC will reflect both the struggle to resist temptation and the executive effort to wallow effectively in the temptation, once you’ve lost that struggle. “Don’t do it” + “if you’re going to do it, do it right.”

polygraph tests (i.e., lie detectors). In the classic form, the test detected arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, indicating that someone was lying and anxious about not getting caught. The trouble is that you’d get the same anxious arousal if you’re telling the truth but your life’s over if that fallible machine says otherwise. Moreover, sociopaths are undetectable, since they don’t get anxiously aroused when lying. Plus subjects can take countermeasures to manipulate their sympathetic nervous system. As a result, this use of polygraphs is no longer admissible in courts.

Is resisting temptation at every turn an outcome of “will,” of having a stoked dlPFC putting Satan into a hammerlock of submission? Or is it an act of “grace,” where there’s no struggle, because it’s simple; you don’t cheat? It was grace. In those who were always honest, the dlPFC, vlPFC, and ACC were in veritable comas when the chance to cheat arose. There’s no conflict. There’s no working hard to do the right thing. You simply don’t cheat.

“Why did you never cheat? Is it because of your ability to see the long-term consequences of cheating becoming normalized, or your respect for the Golden Rule, or . . . ?” The answer is “I don’t know [shrug]. I just don’t cheat.” This isn’t a deontological or a consequentialist moment. It’s virtue ethics sneaking in the back door in that moment—“I don’t cheat; that’s not who I am.” Doing the right thing is the easier thing.

the ACC is an “all-purpose alarm that signals when ongoing behavior has hit a snag.”

oxytocin works in the ACC—selectively block oxytocin effects in the ACC, and voles don’t console.

Make people feel wealthy, and they take more candy from children. What explains this pattern? A number of interrelated factors, built around the system justification described in chapter 12—wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence—all great ways to decide that someone else’s distress is beneath your notice or concern.

Having your pain validated is swell; having it alleviated is better.

“I do it as an act of kindness to my knees.” And this is certainly in line with the Buddhist approach to compassion, which views it as a simple, detached, self-evident imperative rather than as requiring vicarious froth. You act compassionately toward one individual because of a globalized sense of wishing good things for the world.

Being charitable activated dopamine “reward” systems—when there was an observer present. When no one was present, dopamine tended to flow most when subjects kept the money for themselves.

"do the right thing and dont let anyone find out" my favorite psychological challenge

Better that our good acts be self-serving and self-aggrandizing than that they don’t occur at all; better that the myths we construct and propagate about ourselves are that we are gentle and giving, rather than that we prefer to be feared than loved, and that we aim to live well as the best revenge.

The key is neither a good (limbic) heart nor a frontal cortex that can reason you to the point of action. Instead it’s the case of things that have long since become implicit and automatic—being potty trained; riding a bike; telling the truth; helping someone in need.

His dying words, in front of his mother, were “Mommy, please. I don’t want to die. Mommy, please.”2

Oh my god i feel sick

The neurotransmitter substance P plays a central role in communicating painful signals from pain receptors in skin, muscles, and joints up into the brain. It’s got pain-ometer written all over it. And remarkably, its levels are elevated in clinical depression, and drugs that block the actions of substance P can have marked antidepressant properties. Stubbed toe, stubbed psyche.

The insula mediates visceral responses to norm violations, and the more activation, the more condemnation. And this is visceral, not just metaphorically visceral—for example, when I heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, “feeling sick to my stomach” wasn’t a mere figure of speech.

The physiological core of gustatory disgust is to protect yourself against pathogens. The core of the intermixing of visceral and moral disgust is a sense of threat as well.

the displaced need to impose cleanliness and order runs and ruins the lives of people suffering from the archetypal anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Handle the rough puzzle pieces and the interactions were rated as less coordinated, smooth, or successful (it’s not clear, however, if those subjects were more likely, at home that evening, to use coarse language in describing their rough day).

haptic sensations in your butt influencing whether you think someone is a hard-ass. Or hard-hearted instead of a softie.

“Hmm, extreme negative affect elicited by violations of shared behavioral norms. Let’s see . . . Who has any pertinent experience? I know, the insula! It does extreme negative sensory stimuli—that’s, like, all that it does—so let’s expand its portfolio to include this moral disgust business. That’ll work. Hand me a shoehorn and some duct tape.”