Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

you can’t begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior. But just as important, second, you’re just as much up the creek if you rely only on biology; this is said for the benefit of a style of molecular fundamentalist who believes that the social sciences are destined to be consumed by “real” science.

displacement aggression can decrease the perpetrator’s stress hormone levels; giving ulcers can help you avoid getting them.

There’s empathy versus sympathy, reconciliation versus forgiveness, and altruism versus “pathological altruism.”4 For a psychologist the last term might describe the empathic codependency of enabling a partner’s drug use. For a neuroscientist it describes a consequence of a type of damage to the frontal cortex—in economic games of shifting strategies, individuals with such damage fail to switch to less altruistic play when being repeatedly stabbed in the back by the other player, despite being able to verbalize the other player’s strategy.

Pathological altruism

It’s a crucial unifying concept that testosterone’s effects are hugely context dependent.

This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.

In human studies testosterone didn’t raise baseline activity in the amygdala; it boosted the amygdala’s response and heart-rate reactivity to angry faces (but not to happy or neutral ones). Similarly, testosterone did not make subjects more selfish and uncooperative in an economic game; it made them more punitive when provoked by being treated poorly, enhancing “vengeful reactive aggression.”

As proposed in 1990 by the superb behavioral endocrinologist John Wingfield of the University of California at Davis, and colleagues, the idea is that rising testosterone levels increase aggression only at the time of a challenge. Which is precisely how things work.

When testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn’t prompt aggression. Instead it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status. This changes things enormously.

Participants played the Ultimatum Game (introduced in chapter 2), where you decide how to split money between you and another player. The other person can accept the split or reject it, in which case neither of you gets anything. Prior research had shown that when someone’s offer is rejected, they feel dissed, subordinated, especially if news of that carries into future rounds with other players. In other words, in this scenario status and reputation rest on being fair. And what happens when subjects were given testosterone beforehand? People made more generous offers.

The hormone increases the accuracy of assessments of other people’s thoughts, with a gender twist—women improve at detecting kinship relations, while men improve at detecting dominance relations.

sometimes oxytocin and vasopressin make us more prosocial, but sometimes they make us more avid and accurate social information gatherers.

As we saw, oxytocin (and vasopressin) decreases aggression in rodent females. Except for aggression in defense of one’s pups, which the neuropeptide increases via effects in the central amygdala (with its involvement in instinctual fear).

vasopressin enhances aggression in paternal prairie vole males. This finding comes with a familiar additional contingency.

so it does not increase aggression in non paternal prairie vole males or other non paternal species males?

oxytocin makes you more prosocial to people like you (i.e., your teammates) but spontaneously lousy to Others who are a threat. As emphasized by De Dreu, perhaps oxytocin evolved to enhance social competence to make us better at identifying who is an Us.

In De Dreu’s second study, Dutch student subjects took the Implicit Association Test of unconscious bias.fn14 And oxytocin exaggerated biases against two out-groups, namely Middle Easterners and Germans.47

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is. As we will see in chapter 8, the same applies to the regulation of genes relevant to these neuropeptides.

calling hating your enemis- like some Finns hating Russians - who want to kill your children for xenophobia is problematic. Maybe it is more like caring and loving thus hating

There are Bedouins in Arabia, Tuareg in North Africa, Somalis and Maasai in East Africa, Sami of northern Scandinavia, Gujjars in India, Yörük in Turkey, Tuvans of Mongolia, Aymara in the Andes. There are herds of sheep, goats, cows, llamas, camels, yaks, horses, or reindeer, with the pastoralists living off their animals’ meat, milk, and blood and trading their wool and hides.

life of the pastoralist 1:

Anthropologists have long noted similarities in pastoralist cultures born of their tough environments and the typically minimal impact of centralized government and the rule of law. In that isolated toughness stands a central fact of pastoralism: thieves can’t steal the crops on someone’s farm or the hundreds of edible plants eaten by hunter-gatherers, but they can steal someone’s herd.

Militarism abounds. Pastoralists, particularly in deserts, with their far-flung members tending the herds, are a spawning ground for warrior classes. And with them typically come (a) military trophies as stepping-stones to societal status; (b) death in battle as a guarantee of a glorious afterlife; (c) high rates of economic polygamy and mistreatment of women; and (d) authoritarian parenting.

Life of pastoralist 3:

Pastoralism fosters cultures of honor. As introduced in chapter 7, these are about rules of civility, courtesy, and hospitality, especially to the weary traveler because, after all, aren’t all herders often weary travelers?

Life of a pastoralist 4:

cultures of honor are about taking retribution after affronts to self, family, or clan, and reputational consequences for failing to do so. If they take your camel today and you do nothing, tomorrow they will take the rest of your herd, plus your wives and daughters.

life... part 5:

the most famous example of a Westernized culture of honor is the American South, the subject of books, academic journals, conferences, and Southern studies majors in universities. Much of this work was pioneered by Nisbett.27

honor killings typically differ from garden-variety domestic violence in several ways: (a) The latter is usually committed by a male partner; the former are usually committed by male blood relatives, often with the approval of and facilitation by female relatives. (b) The former is rarely an act of spontaneous passion but instead is often planned with the approval of family members. (c) Honor killings are often rationalized on religious grounds, presented without remorse, and approved by religious leaders. (d) Honor killings are carried out openly

Both empirical and theoretical work suggests that in addition, in unstable environments stratified societies are “better able to survive resource shortages [than egalitarian cultures] by sequestering mortality in the lower classes.” In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death.

Inventing unequality

though, stratification is not the only solution to such instability—this is where hunter-gatherers benefit from being able to pick up and move. A score of millennia after the invention of inequality, Westernized societies at the extremes of the inequality continuum differ strikingly.

Inequality versus equality.

High-density living doesn’t make rats more aggressive. Instead it makes aggressive rats more aggressive.

In contrast, crowding makes unaggressive individuals more timid. In other words, it exaggerates preexisting social tendencies.

According to Stephen Corry of Survival International, a human-rights organization that advocates for indigenous tribal peoples, “Pinker is promoting a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward ‘Brutal Savage’, which pushes the debate back over a century and is still used to destroy tribes.”

they are fanatics at Survival International even if at same time doing good work. But witch-hunts against Pinker and Diamond is what they are doing. Discusting

Wrangham pretty much ignores bonobos, with their far lower levels of violence than chimps, female social dominance, and absence of hostile territoriality.

and sorry to say bonobo males are three times more violent than chimps according to Science 2024 article by Phie Jacobs

There are fascinating hints about the antiquity of this. Big-game hunting by hominins 400,000 years ago has been documented; bones from animals butchered then show cut marks that are chaotic, overlapping at different angles, suggesting a free-for-all. But by 200,000 years ago the contemporary HG pattern is there—cut marks are evenly spaced and parallel, suggesting that single individuals butchered and dispensed the meat.

Boehm documents such judicial killings in nearly half the pure HG cultures. What transgressions merit them? Murder, attempts at grabbing power, use of malicious sorcery, stealing, refusal to share, betrayal of the group to outsiders, and of course breaking of sexual taboos. All typically punished this way after other interventions have failed repeatedly.

I do think it is reasonably clear that it wasn’t until humans began the massive transformation of life that came from domesticating teosinte and wild tubers, aurochs and einkorn, and of course wolves, that it became possible to let loose the dogs of war.

When facing Me-versus-Us moral dilemmas of resisting selfishness, our rapid intuitions are good, honed by evolutionary selection for cooperation in a sea of green-beard markers.35 And in such settings, regulating and formalizing the prosociality (i.e., moving it from the realm of intuition to that of cogitation) can even be counterproductive, a point emphasized by Samuel Bowles.

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.

if you feel highly distressed, whether due to resonating with someone else’s problems or because of your own, tending to your own needs readily becomes the priority.49

Then there’s the danger that the empathic pain is so intense that you can only come up with solutions that would work for you, rather than ones that might help the sufferer. And there is the problem of empathy impeding your doing what’s necessary—it’s not great if a parent is so vicariously distressed by their child being distressed that they forgo vaccinations.

He reviews the reasons for punishment: As we see from game theory studies, because punishment fosters cooperation. Because it is in the fabric of the evolution of sociality. And most important, because it can feel good to punish, to be part of a righteous and self-righteous crowd at a public hanging, knowing that justice is being served.

why do we punish even if the free will is an illusion of cource

If we deny free will when it comes to the worst of our behaviors, the same must also apply to the best.