(Also listed below are excerpts from Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" 2008)
For my two part review of this book see Steven Pinker "Better Angels of Our Nature" ignores most important root causes of violence and Steven Pinker "Better Angels" Provides Limited Disclosure of Human Psychological & Animal Experiments
One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.56)
For as long as I have known how to eat with utensils, I have struggled with the rule of table manners that says that you may not guide food onto your fork with your knife. To be sure, I have the dexterity to capture chunks of food that have enough mass to stay put as I scoot my fork under them. But my feeble cerebellum is no match for finely diced cubes or slippery little spheres that ricochet and roll at the touch of the tines. I chase them around the plate, desperately seeking a ridge or a slope that will give me the needed purchase, hoping they will not reach escape velocity and come to rest on the tablecloth. On occasion I have seized the moment when my dining companion glances away and have placed my knife to block their getaway before she turns back to catch me in this faux pas. Anything to avoid the ignominy, the boorishness, the intolerable uncouthness of using a knife for some purpose other than cutting. Give me a lever long enough, said Archimedes, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. But if he knew his table manners, he could not have moved some peas onto his fork with his knife!
I remember, as a child, questioning this pointless prohibition. What is so terrible, I asked, about using your silverware in an efficient and perfectly sanitary way? I's not as if I were asking to eat mashed potatoes with my hands. I lost the argument, as all children do, when faced with the rejoinder “Because I said so," and for decades I silently grumbled about the unintelligibility of the rules of etiquette. Then one day, while doing research for this book, the scales fell from my eyes, the enigma evaporated, and I forever put aside my resentment of the no-knife rule. I owe this epiphany to the most important thinker you have never heard of, Norbert Elias (1897 1990). (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.59)
(Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.59)
Now let's consider the implications of the centuries-long decline in homicide in Europe. Do you think that city living, with its anonymity, crowding, immigrants, and jumble of cultures and classes, is a breeding ground for violence? What about the wrenching social changes brought on by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution? Is it your conviction that small-town life, centered on church, tradition, and fear of God, is our best bulwark against murder and mayhem? Well, think again. As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer. And that brings us back to the ideas of Norbert Elias, the only theory left standing. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.64)
A homicide rate measured in percentage points is still remarkably high, and well into the 18th and 19th centuries violence was a part of the lives of respectable men, such as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Boswell quotes Samuel Johnson, who presumably had no trouble defending himself with words, as saying, “I have beat many a fellow, but the rest had the wit to hold their tongues.”50 Members of the upper classes eventually refrained from using force against one another, but with the law watching their backs, they reserved the right to use it against their inferiors. As recently as 1859 the British author of The Habits of a Good Society advised:
There are men whom nothing but a physical punishment will bring to reason, and with these we shall have to deal at some time of our lives. A lady is insulted or annoyed by an unwieldy bargee, or an importunate and dishonest cabman. One well-dealt blow settles the whole matter.... A man therefore, whether he aspires to be a gentleman or not, should learn to box.... There are but few rules for it, and those are suggested by common sense. Strike out, strike straight, strike suddenly; keep one arm to guard, and punish with the other. Two gentlemen never fight; the art of boxing is brought into use in punishing a stronger and more imprudent man of a class beneath your own.51 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.82-5) also cited in Informalization: Manners and Emotions Since 1890
(Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.82-5)
The Habits of a Good Society 1859 PDF
Why has the South had such a long history of violence? The most sweeping answer is that the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe. The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early" to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their -- arms which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.98-101)
Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: ‘This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual’ (Elias 1939/2000: 380). In the opening scene of the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. In a similar vein, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contains the lyrics ‘Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.’ All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: ‘How can you be a mensch without a zager?’ She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.110-1)
(Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.110-1/70)
The decivilizing effects hit African American communities particularly hard. They started out with the historical disadvantages of second-class citizenship, which left many young people teetering between respectable and underclass lifestyles just when the new antiestablishment forces were pushing in the wrong direction. They could count on even less protection from the criminal justice system than white Americans because of the combination of old racism among the police and the new indulgence by the judicial system toward crime, of which they were disproportionately the victims.126 Mistrust of the criminal justice system turned into cynicism and sometimes paranoia, making self-help justice seem the only alternative.127 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.114-5/72)
The other usual suspect in explaining crime trends, the economy, did little better in explaining this one. Though unemployment went down in the United States in the 1990s, it went up in Canada, yet violent crime decreased in Canada as well.140 France and Germany also saw unemployment go up while violence went down, whereas Ireland and the U.K. saw unemployment go down while violence went up.141 This is not as surprising as it first appears, since criminologists have long known that unemployment rates don’t correlate well with rates of violent crime.142 (They do correlate somewhat with rates of property crime.) Indeed, in the three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the American homicide rate fell by another 14 percent, leading the criminologist David Kennedy to explain to a reporter, “The idea that everyone has ingrained into them—that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse—is wrong. It was never right to begin with.”143
Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.144 But the Gini coefficient, the standard index of income inequality, actually rose in the United States from 1990 to 2000, while crime was falling, and it had hit its low point in 1968, when crime was soaring.145 The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state’s governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence.146 (For example, in unequal societies, poor neighborhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.)
Yet another false lead may be found in the kind of punditry that tries to link social trends to the “national mood” following current events. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led to enormous political, economic, and emotional turmoil, but the homicide rate did not budge in response. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.119/74-5)
Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate.162 Also, since people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping men in prison beyond a certain point does little to reduce crime. For all these reasons, there is an optimum rate of incarceration. It’s unlikely that the American criminal justice system will find it, because electoral politics keep ratcheting the incarceration rate upward, particularly in jurisdictions in which judges are elected rather than appointed. Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent’s television ads as “soft on crime” and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men.
A second way in which Leviathan became more effective in the 1990s was a ballooning of the police.163 In a stroke of political genius, President Bill Clinton undercut his conservative opponents in 1994 by supporting legislation that promised to add 100,000 officers to the nation’s police forces. Additional cops not only nab more criminals but are more noticeable by their presence, deterring people from committing crimes in the first place. And many of the police earned back their old nickname flatfoots by walking a beat and keeping an eye on the neighborhood rather than sitting in cars and awaiting a radio call before speeding to a crime scene. In some cities, like Boston, the police were accompanied by parole officers who knew the worst troublemakers individually and had the power to have them rearrested for the slightest infraction.164 In New York, police headquarters tracked neighborhood crime reports obsessively and held captains’ feet to the fire if the crime rate in their precinct started to drift upward.165 The visibility of the police was multiplied by a mandate to go after nuisance crimes like graffiti, littering, aggressive panhandling, drinking liquor or urinating in public, and extorting cash from drivers at stoplights after a cursory wipe of their windshield with a filthy squeegee. The rationale, originally articulated by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in their famous Broken Windows theory, was that an orderly environment serves as a reminder that police and residents are dedicated to keeping the peace, whereas a vandalized and unruly one is a signal that no one is in charge.166 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.122-5/77-8)
Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime; he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being tortured again. (Today this experiment would not be approved by committees for the protection of human subjects in research.) The judge then abolished the use of torture in his court. The writer Daniel Mannix recounts another demonstration:The Duke of Brunswick in Germany was so shocked by the methods used by Inquisitors in his duchy that he asked two famous Jesuit scholars to supervise the hearings. After a careful study the Jesuits told the Duke, “The Inquisitors are doing their duty. They are arresting only people who have been implicated by the confession of other witches.”
“Come with me to the torture chamber,” suggested the Duke. The priests followed him to where a wretched woman was being stretched on the rack. “Let me question her,” suggested the Duke. “Now woman, you are a confessed witch. I suspect these two men of being warlocks. What do you say? Another turn of the rack, executioners.”
“No, no!” screamed the woman. “You are quite right. I have often seen them at the Sabbat. They can turn themselves into goats, wolves, and other animals.”
“What else do you know about them?” demanded the Duke.
“Several witches have had children by them. One woman even had eight children whom these men fathered. The children had heads like toads and legs like spiders.”
The Duke turned to the astonished Jesuits. “Shall I put you to the torture until you confess, my friends?”25
One of the Jesuits, Father Friedrich Spee, was so impressed that he wrote a book in 1631 that has been credited with ending witchcraft accusations in much of Germany. The persecution of witches began to subside during the 17th century, when several European states abolished it. The year 1716 was the last time a woman was hanged as a witch in England, and 1749 was the last year a woman was burned as a witch anywhere in Europe.26 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.138-9/87)
The power of despots to kill on a whim is the backdrop to stories told throughout the world. The wise King Solomon proposed to resolve a maternity dispute by butchering the baby in question. The backdrop to the Scheherazade story is a Persian king who murdered a new bride every day. The legendary King Narashimhadev in Orissa, India, demanded that exactly twelve hundred artisans build a temple in exactly twelve years or all would be executed. And in Dr. Seuss’s The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, the protagonist is nearly beheaded for being unable to remove his hat in the presence of the king. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.158-9/99)
But during the military revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, states began to form professional standing armies. They conscripted large numbers of men from a cross section of society rather than just from the dregs at the bottom. They used a combination of drill, indoctrination, and brutal punishment to train them for organized combat. And they instilled in them a code of discipline, stoicism, and valor. The result was that when two of these armies clashed, they could rack up high body counts in a hurry. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.236-7/144-5)
Also, neither wealth nor peace comes from having valuable stuff in the ground. Many poor and war-torn African countries are overflowing with gold, oil, diamonds, and strategic metals, while affluent and peaceable countries such as Belgium, Singapore, and Hong Kong have no natural resources to speak of. There must be a third variable, presumably the norms and skills of a civilized trading society, that causes both wealth and peace. And even if poverty does cause conflict, it may do so not because of competition over scarce resources but because the most important thing that a little wealth buys a country is an effective police force and army to keep domestic peace. The fruits of economic development flow far more to a government than to a guerrilla force, and that is one of the reasons that the economic tigers of the developing world have come to enjoy a state of relative tranquillity.31 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.307/186)
These authors did not compile their lists by indiscriminately piling up every historical episode in which a lot of people died. They are careful to note, for example, that the Native American population was decimated by disease rather than by a program of extermination, while particular incidents were blatantly genocidal. In an early example, Puritans in New England exterminated the Pequot nation in 1638, after which the minister Increase Mather asked his congregation to thank God “that on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to Hell.”134 This celebration of genocide did not hurt his career. He later became president of Harvard University, and the residential house with which I am currently affiliated is named after him (motto: Increase Mather’s Spirit!). (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.332-3/203)
Though the abundance of genocides over the millennia belies the centuryof-genocide claim, one still wonders about the trajectory of genocide before, during, and since the 20th century. Rummel was the first political scientist to try to put some numbers together. In his duology Death by Government (1994) and Statistics of Democide (1997) he analyzed 141 regimes that committed democides in the 20th century through 1987, and a control group of 73 that did not. He collected as many independent estimates of the death tolls as he could find (including ones from pro- and antigovernment sources, whose biases, he assumed, would cancel each other out) and, with the help of sanity checks, chose a defensible value near the middle of the range.148 His definition of “democide” corresponds roughly to the UCDP’s “one-sided violence” and to our everyday concept of “murder” but with a government rather than an individual as the perpetrator: the victims must be unarmed, and the killing deliberate. Democides thus include ethnocides, politicides, purges, terrors, killings of civilians by death squads (including ones committed by private militias to which the government turns a blind eye), deliberate famines from blockades and confiscation of food, deaths in internment camps, and the targeted bombing of civilians such as those in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.149 Rummel excluded the Great Leap Forward from his 1994 analyses, on the understanding that it was caused by stupidity and callousness rather than malice.150 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.336-7/205)
All this was in response to a threat that has killed a trifling number of Americans. The nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks were literally off the chart—way down in the tail of the power-law distribution into which terrorist attacks fall.181 According to the Global Terrorism Database of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (the major publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks), between 1970 and 2007 only one other terrorist attack in the entire world has killed as many as 500 people.182 In the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 165, a shooting spree by two teenagers at Columbine High School in 1999 killed 17, and no other attack has killed as many as a dozen. Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340, and the number killed after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11. While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.183 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.344-5/210)
In their article “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel,” Margo Wilson and Martin Daly have documented that traditional laws all over the world treat women as the property of their fathers and husbands. Property laws entitle owners to sell, exchange, and dispose of their property without encumbrance, and to expect the community to recognize their right to redress if the property is stolen or damaged by others. With the woman’s interests unrepresented in this social contract, rape becomes an offense against the enfranchised men who own her. Rape was conceptualized as a tort for damaged goods, or as the theft of valuable property, as we see in the word rape itself, a cognate of ravage, rapacious, and usurp. It follows that a woman who was not under the protection of a highborn, propertied man was not covered by rape laws, and that the rape of a wife by her husband was an incoherent notion, like stealing one’s own property. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.396-7/242)
During the long, sad history of violence against children, even when infants survived the day of their birth it was only to endure harsh treatment and cruel punishments in the years to come. Though hunter-gatherers tend to use corporal punishment in moderation, the dominant method of child-rearing in every other society comes right out of Alice in Wonderland: “Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes.”154 The reigning theory of child development was that children were innately depraved and could be socialized only by force. The expression “Spare the rod and spoil the child” has been attributed to an advisor to the king of Assyria in the 7th century BCE and may have been the source of Proverbs 13:24, “He that spareth the rod hateth his son: But he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”155 A medieval French verse advised, “Better to beat your child when small than to see him hanged when grown.” The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (Increase’s son) extended the concern for the child’s well-being to the hereafter: “Better whipt than Damn’d.”156
As with all punishments, human ingenuity rose to the technological challenge of delivering experiences that were as unpleasant as possible. DeMause writes of medieval Europe:That children with devils in them had to be beaten goes without saying. A panoply of beating instruments existed for that purpose, from cat-o’-nine tails and whips to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of sticks, the discipline (a whip made of small chains), the goad (shaped like a cobbler’s knife, used to prick the child on the head or hands) and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters. The beatings described in the sources were almost always severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began in infancy, were usually erotically tinged by being inflicted on bare parts of the body near the genitals and were a regular part of the child’s daily life.157
Severe corporal punishment was common for centuries. One survey found that in the second half of the 18th century, 100 percent of American children were beaten with a stick, whip, or other weapon.158 Children were also liable to punishment by the legal system; a recent biography of Samuel Johnson remarks in passing that a seven-year-old girl in 18th-century England was hanged for stealing a petticoat.159 Even at the turn of the 20th century, German children “were regularly placed on a red-hot iron stove if obstinate, tied to their bedposts for days, thrown into cold water or snow to ‘harden’ them, [and] forced to kneel for hours every day against the wall on a log while the parents ate and read.”160 During toilet training many children were tormented with enemas, and at school they were “beaten until [their] skin smoked.” (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.428-9/261-2)
But whatever the causes were, they did not stop in the 1930s. Benjamin Spock’s perennial bestseller Baby and Child Care was considered radical in 1946 because it discouraged mothers from spanking their children, stinting on affection, and regimenting their routines. Though the indulgence of postwar parents was a novelty at the time (widely and spuriously blamed for the excesses of the baby boomers), it was by no means a high-water mark. When the boomers became parents, they were even more solicitous of their children. Locke, Rousseau, and the 19th-century reformers had set in motion an escalator of gentleness in the treatment of children, and in recent decades its rate of ascent has accelerated.
Since 1950, people have become increasingly loath to allow children to become the victims of any kind of violence. The violence people can most easily control, of course, is the violence they inflict themselves, namely by spanking, smacking, slapping, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other forms of corporal punishment. Elite opinion on corporal punishment changed dramatically during the 20th century. Other than in fundamentalist Christian groups, it’s rare today to hear people say that sparing the rod will spoil the child. Scenes of fathers with belts, mothers with hairbrushes, and teary children tying pillows to their bruised behinds are no longer common in family entertainment.
At least since Dr. Spock, child-care gurus have increasingly advised against spanking.175 Today every pediatric and psychological association opposes the practice, though not always in language as clear as the title of a recent article by Murray Straus: “Children Should Never, Ever, Be Spanked No Matter What the Circumstances.”176 The expert opinion recommends against spanking for three reasons. One is that spanking has harmful side effects down the line, including aggression, delinquency, a deficit in empathy, and depression. The cause-and-effect theory, in which spanking teaches children that violence is a way to solve problems, is debatable. Equally likely explanations for the correlation between spanking and violence are that innately violent parents have innately violent children, and that cultures and neighborhoods that tolerate spanking also tolerate other kinds of violence.177 The second reason not to spank a child is that spanking is not particularly effective in reducing misbehavior compared to explaining the infraction to the child and using nonviolent measures like scolding and time-outs. Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong, and if the only reason they have to behave is to avoid these penalties, then as soon as Mom’s and Dad’s backs are turned they can be as naughty as they like. But perhaps the most compelling reason to avoid spanking is symbolic. Here is Straus’s third reason why children should never, ever be spanked: “Spanking contradicts the ideal of nonviolence in the family and society.”
Have parents been listening to the experts, or perhaps coming to similar conclusions on their own? Public opinion polls sometimes ask people whether they agree with statements like “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking” or “There are certain circumstances when it is all right to smack a child.” The level of agreement depends on the wording of the question, but in every poll in which the same question has been asked in different years, the trend is downward. Figure 7–17 shows the trends since 1954 from three American datasets, together with surveys from Sweden and New Zealand. Before the early 1980s, around 90 percent of respondents in the English-speaking countries approved of spanking. In less than a generation, the percentage had fallen in some polls to just more than half. The levels of approval depend on the country and region: Swedes approve of spanking far less than do Americans or Kiwis, and Americans themselves are diverse, as we would expect from the southern culture of honor.178 In a 2005 survey, spanking approval rates ranged from around 55 percent in northern blue states (those that tend to vote for Democrats), like Massachusetts and Vermont, to more than 85 percent in southern red states (those that tend to vote for Republicans), like Alabama and Arkansas.179 Across the fifty states, the rate of approval of spanking tracks the homicide rate (the two measures show a correlation of 0.52 on a scale from -1 to 1), which could mean that spanked children grow up to be killers, but more likely that subcultures that encourage the spanking of children also encourage the violent defense of honor among adults.180 But every region showed a decline, so that by 2006 the southern states disapproved of spanking in the same proportion that the north-central and mid-Atlantic states did in 1986.181 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.434-7/265-7)
Psychological consequences aside, the moral case against bullying is ironclad. As Calvin observed, once you grow up, you can’t go beating people up for no reason. We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations, and social norms, and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other than laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view. The increased valuation of children, and the universalizing of moral viewpoints of which it is a part, made the campaign to protect children from violence by their peers inevitable. So too the effort to protect them from other depredations. Children and teenagers have long been victims of petty crimes like the theft of lunch money, vandalism of their possessions, and sexual groping, which fall in the cracks between school regulations and criminal law enforcement. Here too the interests of younger humans are increasingly being recognized. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.442-3/269)
Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. All I had to do was throw the rat in the box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat.
But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death.
As the experiment was being explained to me, I had already sensed it was wrong. Even if the procedure had gone perfectly, the rat would have spent twelve hours in constant anxiety, and I had enough experience to know that laboratory procedures don’t always go perfectly. My professor was a radical behaviorist, for whom the question “What is it like to be a rat?” was simply incoherent. But I was not, and there was no doubt in my mind that a rat could feel pain. The professor wanted me in his lab; I knew that if I refused, nothing bad would happen. But I carried out the procedure anyway, reassured by the ethically spurious but psychologically reassuring principle that it was standard practice. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.454-5/276)
The decline of child abuse in the 1990s coincided in part with the decline of adult homicide, and its causes are just as hard to pinpoint. Finkelhor and Jones examined the usual suspects. Demography, capital punishment, crack cocaine, guns, abortion, and incarceration can’t explain the decline. The prosperity of the 1990s can explain it a little, but can’t account for the decline in sexual abuse, nor a second decline of physical abuse in the 2000s, when the economy was in the tank. The hiring of more police and interveners from social service agencies probably helped, and Finkelhor and Jones speculate that another exogenous factor may have made a difference. The early 1990s was the era of Prozac Nation and Running on Ritalin. The massive expansion in the prescription of medication for depression and attention deficit disorder may have lifted many parents out of depression and helped many children control their impulses. Finkelhor and Jones also pointed to nebulous but potentially potent changes in cultural norms. The 1990s, as we saw in chapter 3, hosted a civilizing offensive that reversed some of the licentiousness of the 1960s and made all forms of violence increasingly repugnant. And the Oprahfication of America applied a major stigma to domestic violence, while destigmatizing—indeed beatifying—the victims who brought it to light. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.44?/268)
If I were to put my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile. The decades of the Rights Revolutions were the decades of the electronics revolutions: television, transistor radios, cable, satellite, long-distance telephones, photocopiers, fax machines, the Internet, cell phones, text messaging, Web video. They were the decades of the interstate highway, high-speed rail, and the jet airplane. They were the decades of the unprecedented growth in higher education and in the endless frontier of scientific research. Less well known is that they were also the decades of an explosion in book publishing. From 1960 to 2000, the annual number of books published in the United States increased almost fivefold. 305 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.476-7/290)
At the smaller scale of interpersonal violence, the most brutal serial killers minimize and even justify their crimes in ways that would be comical if their actions were not so horrific. In 1994 the police quoted a spree killer as saying, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistolwhipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.”36 A serial rapist-murderer interviewed by the sociologist Diana Scully claimed to be “kind and gentle” to the women he captured at gunpoint, and that they enjoyed the experience of being raped. As further proof of this kindness, he noted that when he stabbed his victims “the killing was always sudden, so they wouldn’t know it was coming.”37 John Wayne Gacy, who kidnapped, raped, and murdered thirty-three boys, said, “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator,” adding, without irony, “I was cheated out of my childhood.” His victimization continued into adulthood, when the media inexplicably tried to make him into “an asshole and a scapegoat.”38
Smaller-time criminals rationalize just as readily. Anyone who has worked with prisoners knows that today’s penitentiaries are filled to a man with innocent victims—not just those who were framed by sloppy police work but those whose violence was a form of self-help justice. Remember Donald Black’s theory of crime as social control (chapter 3), which seeks to explain why a majority of violent crimes don’t bring the perpetrator a tangible benefit.39 The offender is genuinely provoked by an affront or betrayal; the reprisal that we deem to be excessive—striking a sharp-tongued wife during an argument, killing a swaggering stranger over a parking spot—is from his point of view a natural response to a provocation and the administration of rough justice.
The unease with which we read these rationalizations tells us something about the very act of donning psychological spectacles. Baumeister notes that in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator.40 Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe that the harm is ultimately explicable. The viewpoint of the moralist, in contrast, is the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it was perpetrated. And for all the feeble ratiocination we mortals throw at it, it remains a cosmic mystery, a manifestation of the irreducible and inexplicable existence of evil in the universe. Many chroniclers of the Holocaust consider it immoral even to try to explain it.41 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.494-500/301)
The most obvious form of aggression in the animal kingdom is predation. Hunters such as hawks, eagles, wolves, lions, tigers, and bears adorn the jerseys of athletes and the coats of arms of nations, and many writers have blamed human violence, as William James did, on “the carnivore within.” Yet biologically speaking, predation for food could not be more different from aggression against rivals and threats. Cat people are well aware of the distinction. When their animal companion sets its sights on a beetle on the floorboards, it is crouched, silent, and intently focused. But when one alley cat faces off against another, the cat stands tall, fur erect, hissing and yowling. We saw how neuroscientists can implant an electrode into the Rage circuit of a cat, press a button, and set the animal on attack mode. With the electrode implanted in a different circuit, they can set it on hunting mode and watch in amazement as the cat quietly stalks a hallucinatory mouse.45
Like many systems in the brain, the circuits that control aggression are organized in a hierarchy. Subroutines that control the muscles in basic actions are encapsulated in the hindbrain, which sits on top of the spinal cord. But the emotional states that trigger them, such as the Rage circuit, are distributed higher up in the midbrain and forebrain. In cats, for example, stimulating the hindbrain can activate what neuroscientists call sham rage. The cat hisses, bristles, and extends its fangs, but it can be petted without it attacking the petter. If, in contrast, they stimulate the Rage circuit higher up, the resulting emotional state is no sham: the cat is mad as hell and lunges for the experimenter’s head.46 Evolution takes advantage of this modularity. Different mammals use different body parts as offensive weapons, including jaws, fangs, antlers, and in the case of primates, hands. While the hindbrain circuits that drive these peripherals can be reprogrammed or swapped out as a lineage evolves, the central programs that control their emotional states are remarkably conserved.47 That includes the lineage leading to humans, as neurosurgeons discovered when they found a counterpart to the Rage circuit in the brains of their patients. ....
The Rage circuit is a pathway that connects three major structures in the lower parts of the brain.48 In the midbrain there is a collar of tissue called the periaqueductal gray—“gray” because it consists of gray matter (a tangle of neurons, lacking the white sheaths that insulate output fibers), “periaqueductal” because it surrounds the aqueduct, a fluid-filled canal that runs the length of the central nervous system from the spinal cord up to large cavities in the brain. The periaqueductal gray contains circuits that control the sensorimotor components of rage. They get inputs from parts of the brain that register pain, balance, hunger, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and hearing (particularly the shrieks of a fellow rat), all of which can make the animal irritated, frustrated, or enraged. Their outputs feed the motor programs that make the rat lunge, kick, and bite.49 One of the oldest discoveries in the biology of violence is the link between pain or frustration and aggression. When an animal is shocked, or access to food is taken away, it will attack the nearest fellow animal, or bite an inanimate object if no living target is available.50
The periaqueductal gray is partly under the control of the hypothalamus, a cluster of nuclei that regulate the animal’s emotional, motivational, and physiological state, including hunger, thirst, and lust. The hypothalamus monitors the temperature, pressure, and chemistry of the bloodstream and sits on top of the pituitary gland, which pumps hormones into the bloodstream that regulate, among other things, the release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands and the release of testosterone and estrogen from the gonads. Two of its nuclei, the medial and ventrolateral, are parts of the Rage circuit. “Ventral” refers to the belly side of the animal, as opposed to its “dorsal” or back side. The terms were grandfathered over to the human brain as it evolved its perpendicular perch atop a vertical body, so in the human brain “ventral” points to our feet and “dorsal” to the top of our scalp.
Modulating the hypothalamus is the amygdala, Latin for “almond,” the shape it takes in the human brain. The amygdala is a small, multipart organ connected to brain systems for memory and motivation. It applies the emotional coloring to our thoughts and memories, particularly fear. When an animal has been trained to expect a shock after a tone, the amygdala helps to store the connections that give the tone its aura of anxiety and dread. The amygdala also lights up at the sight of a dangerous predator or of a threatening display from a member of the same species. In the case of humans, for example, the amygdala responds to an angry face.
And sitting on top of the entire Rage circuit is the cerebral cortex—the thin layer of gray matter on the outer surface of the cerebral hemispheres where the computations behind perception, thinking, planning, and decision-making are carried out. Each cerebral hemisphere is divided into lobes, and the one at the front, the frontal lobe, computes decisions relevant to how to behave. One of the major patches of the frontal lobes sits on top of the eye sockets in the skull, also known as orbits, so it is called the orbitofrontal cortex, orbital cortex for short.51 The orbital cortex is densely connected to the amygdala and other emotional circuits, and it helps integrate emotions and memories into decisions about what to do next. When the animal modulates its readiness to attack in response to the circumstances, including its emotional state and any lessons it has learned in the past, it is this part of the brain, behind the eyeballs, that is responsible. By the way, though I have described the control of rage as a topdown chain of command—orbital cortex to amygdala to hypothalamus to periaqueductal gray to motor programs—the connections are all two-way: there is considerable feedback and cross talk among these components and with other parts of the brain.
As I mentioned, predation and rage play out very differently in the behavioral repertoire of a carnivorous mammal and are triggered by electrical stimulation of different parts of the brain. Predation involves a circuit that is part of what Panksepp calls the Seeking system.52A major part of the Seeking system runs from a part of the midbrain (not shown in figure 8–1) via a bundle of fibers in the middle of the brain (the medial forebrain bundle) to the lateral hypothalamus, and from there up to the ventral striatum, a major part of the so-called reptilian brain. The striatum is composed of many parallel tracts (giving it a striated appearance), and it is buried deep in the cerebral hemispheres and densely connected to the frontal lobes.
The Seeking system was discovered when the psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner implanted an electrode into the middle of a rat brain, hooked it up to a lever in a Skinner box, and found that the rat would press the lever to stimulate its own brain until it dropped of exhaustion.53 Originally they thought they had found the pleasure center in the brain, but neuroscientists today believe that the system underlies wanting or craving rather than actual pleasure. (The major realization of adulthood, that you should be careful about what you want because when you get it you may not enjoy it, has a basis in the anatomy of the brain.) The Seeking system is held together not just by wiring but by chemistry. Its neurons signal to each other with a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Drugs that make dopamine more plentiful, like cocaine and amphetamines, jazz the animal up, while drugs that decrease it, like antipsychotic medications, leave the animal apathetic. (The ventral striatum also contains circuits that respond to a different family of transmitters, the endorphins or endogenous opiates. These circuits are more closely related to enjoying a reward once it arrives than to craving it in anticipation.)
The Seeking system identifies goals for the animal to pursue, like access to a lever that it may press to receive food. In more natural settings, the Seeking system motivates a carnivorous animal to hunt. The animal stalks its quarry in what we can imagine is a state of pleasant anticipation. If successful, it dispatches the prey in a quiet bite that is completely unlike the snarling attack of rage.
Animals can attack both in offense and in defense.54 The simplest trigger of an offensive attack is sudden pain or frustration, the latter delivered as a signal from the Seeking system. The reflex may be seen in some of the primitive responses of a human being. Babies react with rage when their arms are suddenly pinned at their sides, and adults may lash out by swearing or breaking things when they hit their thumb with a hammer or are surprised by not getting what they expect (as in the technique of computer repair called percussive maintenance). Defensive attacks, which in the rat consist of lunging at the head of an adversary rather than kicking and biting its flank, are triggered by yet another brain system, the one that underlies fear. The Fear system, like the Rage system, consists of a circuit that runs from the periaqueductal gray through the hypothalamus to the amygdala. The Fear and Rage circuits are distinct, connecting different nuclei in each of these organs, but their physical proximity reflects the ease with which they interact.55 Mild fear can trigger freezing or flight, but extreme fear, combined with other stimuli, can trigger an enraged defensive attack. Forward panic or rampage in humans may involve a similar handoff from the Fear system to the Rage system.
Panksepp identifies a fourth motivational system in the mammalian brain that can trigger violence; he calls it the Intermale Aggression or Dominance system.56 Like Fear and Rage, it runs from the periaqueductal gray through the hypothalamus to the amygdala, connecting yet another trio of nuclei along the way. Each of these nuclei has receptors for testosterone. As Panskepp notes, “In virtually all mammals, male sexuality requires an assertive attitude, so that male sexuality and aggressiveness normally go together. Indeed, these tendencies are intertwined throughout the neuroaxis, and to the best of our limited knowledge, the circuitry for this type of aggression is located near, and probably interacts strongly with, both Rage and Seeking circuits.”57 To psychologize the anatomy, the Seeking system leads a male to willingly, even eagerly, seek out an aggressive challenge with another male, but when the battle is joined and one of them is in danger of defeat or death, focused fighting may give way to blind rage. Panksepp notes that the two kinds of aggression, though they interact with each other, are neurobiologically distinct. When certain parts of the medial hypothalamus or striatum are damaged, the animal is more likely to attack a prey animal or an unwitting experimenter, but less likely to attack another male. And as we shall see, giving an animal (or a man) testosterone does not make him testy across the board. On the contrary, it makes him feel great, while putting a chip on his shoulder when he is faced with a rival male.58 One look at a human brain and you know you are dealing with a very unusual mammal. Figure 8–2, with its transparent cortex, shows that all the parts of the rat brain have been carried over to the human brain, including the organs that house the circuits for rage, fear, and dominance: the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the periaqueductal gray (which is found inside the midbrain, lining the cerebrospinal canal running through it). The dopaminefueled striatum, whose ventral portion helps set goals for the whole brain to seek, is also prominent.
(Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.496-500/303-6)
With the possible exception of Jain priests, all of us engage in predatory violence, if only against insects. In most cases the temptation to prey on humans is inhibited by emotional and cognitive restraints, but in a minority of individuals these restraints are absent. Psychopaths make up 1 to 3 percent of the male population, depending on whether one uses the broad definition of antisocial personality disorder, which embraces many kinds of callous troublemakers, or a narrower definition that picks out the more cunning manipulators.80 Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half the serious crimes.81 They also perpetrate nonviolent crimes like bilking elderly couples out of their life savings and running a business with ruthless disregard for the welfare of the workforce or stakeholders. As we saw, the regions of the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amygdala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or unresponsive in psychopaths, though they may show no other signs of pathology.82 In some people, signs of psychopathy develop after damage to these regions from disease or an accident, but the condition is also partly heritable. Psychopathy may have evolved as a minority strategy that exploits a large population of trusting cooperators.83 Though no society can stock its militias and armies exclusively with psychopaths, such men are bound to be disproportionately attracted to these adventures, with their prospect of plunder and rape. As we saw in chapter 6, genocides and civil wars often involve a division of labor between the ideologues or warlords who run them and the shock troops, including some number of psychopaths, who are happy to carry them out.84 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.510-1/310-1)
The neurobiology of revenge begins with the Rage circuit in the midbrain-hypothalamus-amygdala pathway, which inclines an animal who has been hurt or frustrated to lash out at the nearest likely perpetrator.174 In humans the system is fed by information originating from anywhere in the brain, including the temporoparietal junction, which indicates whether the harm was intended or accidental. The Rage circuit then activates the insular cortex, which gives rise to sensations of pain, disgust, and anger. (Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged by another person.)175 None of this is enjoyable, and we know that animals will work to turn off electrical stimulation of the Rage system.
But then the brain can slip into a different mode of information processing. Proverbs like “Revenge is sweet,” “Don’t get mad; get even,” and “Revenge is a dish best served cold” are hypotheses in affective neuroscience. They predict that patterns of activity in the brain can shift from an aversive anger to a cool and pleasurable seeking, the kind that guides the pursuit of delectable food. And as so often happens, the folk neuroscience is correct. Dominique de Quervain and his collaborators gave a sample of men the opportunity to entrust a sum of money to another participant who would invest it for a profit, and then either share the total with the investor or keep it for himself.176 (The scenario is sometimes called a Trust game.) Participants who had been cheated out of their money were then given the chance to levy a punitive fine on the faithless trustee, though sometimes they would have to pay for the privilege. As they were pondering the opportunity, their brains were scanned, and the scientists found that a part of the striatum (the core of the Seeking system) lit up—the same region that lights up when a person craves nicotine, cocaine, or chocolate. Revenge is sweet, indeed. The more a person’s striatum lit up, the more he was willing to pay to punish the crooked trustee, which shows that the activation reflected a genuine desire, something that the person would pay to have consummated. When the participant did choose to pay, his orbital and ventromedial frontal cortex lit up—the part of the brain that weighs the pleasure and pain of different courses of action, in this case presumably the cost of the revenge and the satisfaction it afforded.
Revenge requires the disabling of empathy, and that too can be seen in the brain. Tania Singer and her collaborators ran a similar experiment in which men and women had their trust rewarded or betrayed by a fellow participant.177 Then they either experienced a mild shock to their fingers, watched a trustworthy partner get shocked, or watched their double-crosser get shocked. When a trustworthy partner got shocked, the participants literally felt their pain: the same part of the insula that lit up when they were shocked lit up when they saw the nice guy (or gal) get shocked. When the double-crosser got shocked, the women could not turn off their empathy: their insula still lit up in sympathy. But the men hardened their hearts: their own insula stayed dark, while their striatum and orbital cortex lit up, a sign of a goal sought and consummated. Indeed, those circuits lit up in proportion to the men’s stated desire for revenge. The results are in line with the claim by difference feminists such as Carol Gilligan that men are more inclined toward retributive justice and women more toward mercy.178 The authors of the study, though, caution that the women may have recoiled from the physical nature of the punishment and might have been just as retributive if it had taken the form of a fine, criticism, or ostracism.179 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.530-1/324-5)
Another brake on sadism is a cultural taboo: the conviction that deliberate infliction of pain is not a thinkable option, regardless of whether it engages one’s sympathetic inhibitions. Today torture has been explicitly prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. 242 Unlike ancient, medieval, and early modern times when torture was a form of popular entertainment, today the infliction of torture by governments is almost entirely clandestine, showing that the taboo is widely acknowledged—though like most taboos, it is at times hypocritically flouted. In 2001 the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz addressed this hypocrisy by proposing a legal mechanism designed to eliminate sub rosa torture in democracies.243 The police in a ticking-bomb scenario would have to get a warrant from a disinterested judge before torturing the lifesaving information out of a suspect; all other forms of coercive interrogation would be flatly prohibited. The most common response was outrage. By the very act of examining the taboo on torture, Dershowitz had violated the taboo, and he was widely misunderstood as advocating torture rather than seeking to minimize it.244 Some of the more measured critics argued that the taboo in fact serves a useful function. Better, they said, to deal with a ticking-bomb scenario, should one ever occur, on an ad hoc basis, and perhaps even put up with some clandestine torture, than to place torture on the table as a live option, from which it could swell from ticking bombs to a wider range of real or imagined threats.245
But perhaps the most powerful inhibition against sadism is more elemental: a visceral revulsion against hurting another person. Most primates find the screams of pain of a fellow animal to be aversive, and they will abstain from food if it is accompanied by the sound and sight of a fellow primate being shocked.246 The distress is an expression not of the monkey’s moral scruples but of its dread of making a fellow animal mad as hell. (It also may be a response to whatever external threat would have caused a fellow animal to issue an alarm call.)247 The participants in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, who obeyed instructions to deliver shocks to a bogus fellow participant, were visibly distraught as they heard the shrieks of pain they were inflicting.248 Even in moral philosophers’ hypothetical scenarios like the Trolley Problem, survey-takers recoil from the thought of throwing the fat man in front of the trolley, though they know it would save five innocent lives.249 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.552-3/338)
Macy, Willer, and Ko Kuwabara then wanted to show the false-consensus effect in real people—that is, to see if people could be cowed into criticizing other people whom they actually agreed with if they feared that everyone else would look down on them for expressing their true beliefs.283 The sociologists mischievously chose two domains where they suspected that opinions are shaped more by a terror of appearing unsophisticated than by standards of objective merit: wine-tasting and academic scholarship.
In the wine-tasting study, Macy et al. first whipped their participants into a self-conscious lather by telling them they were part of a group that had been selected for its sophistication in appreciating fine art. The group would now take part in the “centuries-old tradition” (in fact, concocted by the experimenters) called a Dutch Round. A circle of wine enthusiasts first evaluate a set of wines, and then evaluate one another’s wine-judging abilities. Each participant was given three cups of wine and asked to grade them on bouquet, flavor, aftertaste, robustness, and overall quality. In fact, the three cups had been poured from the same bottle, and one was spiked with vinegar. As in the Asch experiment, the participants, before being asked for their own judgments, witnessed the judgments of four stooges, who rated the vinegary sample higher than one of the unadulterated samples, and rated the other one best of all. Not surprisingly, about half the participants defied their own taste buds and went with the consensus. .....
It’s one thing to say that a sour wine has an excellent bouquet or that academic balderdash is logically coherent. It’s quite another to confiscate the last bit of flour from a starving Ukrainian peasant or to line up Jews at the edge of a pit and shoot them. How could ordinary people, even if they were acquiescing to what they thought was a popular ideology, overcome their own consciences and perpetrate such atrocities? (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.564-5/346-7)
In the previous chapter we explored the circuitry of the brain that underlies our tendencies to violence; now let’s see the parts that underlie our better angels. The search for empathy in the human brain has confirmed that vicarious feelings are dimmed or amplified by the rest of the empathizer’s beliefs. Claus Lamm, Daniel Batson, and Jean Decety had participants take the perspective of a (fictitious) patient with ringing in his ears while he got “treated” with an experimental cure consisting of blasts of noise over headphones, which made the patient visibly wince.27 The pattern of activity in the participants’ brains as they empathized with the patient overlapped with the pattern that resulted when they themselves heard the noise. One of the active areas was a part of the insula, the island of cortex that, as we have seen, represents literal and metaphorical gut feelings (see figure 8–3). Another was the amygdala, the almond-shaped organ that responds to fearful and distressing stimuli (see figure 8–2). A third was the anterior medial cingulate cortex (see figure 8–4), a strip of cortex on the inward-facing wall of the cerebral hemisphere that is involved in the motivational aspect of pain—not the literal stinging sensation, but the strong desire to turn it off. (Studies of vicarious pain generally don’t show activation in the parts of the brain that register the actual bodily sensation; that would be closer to a hallucination than to empathy.) The participants were never put in the kind of situation that evokes counterempathy, like competition or revenge, but their reactions were pushed around by their cognitive construal of the situation. If they had been told that the treatment worked, so the patient’s pain had been worthwhile, their brains’ vicarious and distressed responses were damped down. ....
In one of the odder experiments in the field of behavioral economics, Ernst Fehr and his collaborators had people play a Trust game, in which they hand over money to a trustee, who multiplies it and then returns however much he feels like to the participant.31Half the participants inhaled a nasal spray containing oxytocin, which can penetrate from the nose to the brain, and the other half inhaled a placebo. The ones who got the oxytocin turned over more of their money to the stranger, and the media had a field day with fantasies of car dealers misting the hormone through their showroom ventilating systems to snooker innocent customers. (So far, no one has proposed spraying it from crop dusters to accelerate global empathic consciousness.) Other experiments have shown that sniffing oxytocin makes people more generous in an Ultimatum game (in which they divide a sum while anticipating the response of a recipient, who can veto the deal for both of them), but not in a Dictator game (where the recipient has to take it or leave it, and the proposer needn’t take his reaction into account). It seems likely that the oxytocin network is a vital trigger in the sympathetic response to other people’s beliefs and desires. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.578-9/355-6)
Another set of experiments tested a second ulterior motive to helping, namely the desire to be seen as doing the socially acceptable thing.54 This time, rather than manipulating sympathy experimentally, Batson and his collaborators exploited the fact that people spontaneously vary in how sympathetic they feel. After the participants heard Elaine worrying aloud about the impending shocks, they were asked to indicate the degree to which they felt sympathetic, moved, compassionate, tender, warm, and soft-hearted. Some participants wrote high numbers next to these adjectives; others wrote low ones.
Once the procedure began, and long-suffering Elaine started getting zapped and was visibly unhappy about it, the experimenters used sneaky ways of assessing whether any desire on the part of the participants to relieve her distress sprang from pure beneficence or a desire to look good. One study tapped the participants’ mood with a questionnaire, and then either gave them the opportunity to relieve Elaine by doing well on a task of their own, or simply dismissed Elaine without the participant being able to claim any credit. The empathizers felt equally relieved in both cases; the nonempathizers only if they were the ones that set her free. In another, the participants had to qualify for an opportunity to take Elaine’s place by scoring well in a letterfinding task they had been led to believe was either easy (so there was no way to fake a bad performance and get off the hook) or hard (so they could take a dive and plausibly get out of being asked to make the sacrifice). The nonempathizers took the dive and did worse in the so-called hard task; the empathizers did even better on the hard task, where they knew an extra effort would be needed to allow them to suffer in Elaine’s stead. The emotion of sympathy, then, can lead to genuine moral concern in Kant’s sense of treating a person as an end and not a means to an end—in this case, not even as a means to the end of feeling good about having helped the person. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.584-5/359)
The neurobiology of violence is a target-rich area for natural selection. Selective breeding of mice for four or five generations can produce a strain that is markedly more or less aggressive than an off-the-shelf lab mouse.136 Violence in humans, of course, is fantastically more complicated than violence in mice, but if variations among people in their inclinations toward or away from violence are heritable, selection could certainly favor whichever variants result in more surviving offspring, which would change the concentration of the inciting and pacifying genes over time. So first we must establish whether any portion of the variation in aggression among people is caused by variation in their genes, that is, whether aggression is heritable. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.614-5/378-9)
..... When life insurance was first introduced, people were outraged at the very idea of assigning a dollar value to a human life, and of allowing wives to bet that their husbands would die, both of which are technically accurate descriptions of what life insurance does.186 The insurance industry mounted advertising campaigns that reframed the product as an act of responsibility and decency on the part of the husband, who would simply be carrying out his duty to his family during a period in which he happened not to be alive.
Tetlock distinguishes three kinds of tradeoffs. Routine tradeoffs are those that fall within a single relational model, such as choosing to be with one friend rather than another, or to purchase one car rather than another. Taboo tradeoffs pit a sacred value in one model against a secular value in another, such as selling out a friend, a loved one, an organ, or oneself for barter or cash. Tragic tradeoffs pit sacred values against each other, as in deciding which of two needy transplant patients should receive an organ, or the ultimate tragic tradeoff, Sophie’s choice between the lives of her two children. The art of politics, Tetlock points out, is in large part the ability to reframe taboo tradeoffs as tragic tradeoffs (or, when one is in the opposition, to do the opposite). A politician who wants to reform Social Security has to reframe it from “breaking our faith with senior citizens” (his opponent’s framing) to “lifting the burden on hardworking wage-earners” or “no longer scrimping in the education of our children.” Keeping troops in Afghanistan is reframed from “putting the lives of our soldiers in danger” to “guaranteeing our nation’s commitment to freedom” or “winning the war on terror.” The reframing of sacred values, as we will see, may be an overlooked tactic in the psychology of peacemaking. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.630-1/389)
REASON
Reason appears to have fallen on hard times. Popular culture is plumbing new depths of dumbth, and American political discourse has become a race to the bottom.206 We are living in an era of scientific creationism, New Age flimflam, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and resurgent religious fundamentalism.
As if the proliferation of unreason weren’t bad enough, many commentators have been mustering their powers of reason to argue that reason is overrated. During the honeymoon following George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, editorialists opined that a great president need not be intelligent, because a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to the triangulations and equivocations of overeducated mandarins. After all, they said, it was the Harvard-educated best and the brightest who dragged America into the quagmire of Vietnam. “Critical theorists” and postmodernists on the left, and defenders of religion on the right, agree on one thing: that the two world wars and the Holocaust were the poisoned fruit of the West’s cultivation of science and reason since the Enlightenment.207
Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact. Behavioral economists exult in showing how human behavior departs from the rational-actor theory, and the journalists who publicize their work waste no opportunity to smack the theory around. The implication is that since irrationality is inevitable, we may as well lie back and enjoy it. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.642-3/396)
Reason can also be a force against violence when it abstracts violence itself as a mental category and construes it as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. The Greeks of Homer conceived of their devastating wars as the handiwork of sadistic puppeteers on high.220 That, to be sure, required a feat of abstraction: they lifted themselves out of a vantage point from which war is the fault of one’s eternally treacherous enemies. Yet blaming the gods for war does not open up many practical opportunities for mere mortals to reduce it. Moralistic denunciations of war also single it out as an entity, but they provide few guidelines on what to do when an invading army is at one’s doorstep. A real change came in the writings of Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, and other modern thinkers: war was intellectualized as a game-theoretic problem, to be solved by proactive institutional arrangements. Centuries later some of these arrangements, such as Kant’s triad of democratization, trade, and an international community, helped to drive down the rate of war in the Long Peace and the New Peace. And the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused when Kennedy and Khrushchev consciously reframed it as a trap for the two of them to escape without either side losing face.
None of these rationales for rationality speaks to Hume’s point that rationality is merely a means to an end, and that the end depends on the thinker’s passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony, if the reasoner wants peace and harmony. But it can also lay out a road map to war and strife, if the reasoner delights in war and strife. Do we have any reason to expect that rationality should orient a reasoner to wanting less violence? (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.646-7/399)
Lest you think this judgment a slander on our forebears, consider some of the convictions that were common in the decades before the effects of rising abstract intelligence began to accumulate. A century ago dozens of great writers and artists extolled the beauty and nobility of war, and eagerly looked forward to World War I. One “progressive” president, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the decimation of Native Americans was necessary to prevent the continent from becoming a “game preserve for squalid savages,” and that in nine out of ten cases, “the only good Indians are the dead Indians.”257 Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university, praised the Ku Klux Klan, cleansed the federal government of black employees, and said of ethnic immigrants, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” 258 A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove a hundred thousand American citizens into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the young Winston Churchill wrote of taking part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in the British Empire. In one of those jolly little wars, he wrote, “we proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” Churchill defended these atrocities on the grounds that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” and he said he was “strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He blamed the people of India for a famine caused by British mismanagement because they kept “breeding like rabbits,” adding, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” 259 (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.658-9/406-7)
In one arena, however, politicians really do seem to be swimming against the Flynn Effect: American presidential debates. To those who followed these debates in 2008, three words are enough to make the point: Joe the Plumber. The psychologists William Gorton and Janie Diels quantified the trend by scoring the sophistication of candidates’ language in the debates from 1960 through 2008.292 They found that the overall sophistication declined from 1992 to 2008, and the quality of remarks on economics began a free fall even earlier, in 1984. Ironically, the decrease in sophistication in presidential debates may be the product of an increase in the sophistication of political strategists. Televised debates in the waning weeks of a campaign are aimed at a sliver of undecided voters who are among the least informed and least engaged sectors of the electorate. They are apt to make their choice based on sound bites and one-liners, so the strategists advise the candidates to aim low. The level of sophistication cratered in 2000 and 2004, when Bush’s Democratic opponents matched him platitude for platitude. This exploitable vulnerability of the American political system might help explain how the country found itself in two protracted wars during an era of increasing peace.
There is a reason that I made reason the last of the better angels of our nature. Once a society has a degree of civilization in place, it is reason that offers the greatest hope for further reducing violence. The other angels have been with us for as long as we have been human, but during most of our long existence they have been unable to prevent war, slavery, despotism, institutionalized sadism, and the oppression of women. As important as they are, empathy, self-control, and the moral sense have too few degrees of freedom, and too restricted a range of application, to explain the advances of recent decades and centuries. (Steven Pinker "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 p.668-9/413)
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Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012
The most widely used measure of these implicit attitudes is the Implicit Attitude Test (IAT), developed by Tony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and my UVA (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.58-63)
Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ But rather ‘What’s in it for my group?” Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.” They’re like the array of bumper-stickers people put on their car showing the political causes, universities, and sports teams they support. Our politics is groupish, not selfish. (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.86-7)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 extended excerpts
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 excerpts at "I’m Right and You’re Wrong, and Here’s Why, You Lunkhead"
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 excerpts at "Righteous Mind - V. Against Socrates, again"
Evolutionary theorists often speak of genes as being “selfish,” meaning that they can only influence an animal to do things that will spread copies of that gene. But one of the most important insights into the origins of morality is that “selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity. Altruism toward kin is not a puzzle at all. Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking.13 A big step toward its solution came in 1971 when Robert Trivers published his theory of reciprocal altruism.14
Trivers noted that evolution could create altruists in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor. We humans are obviously just such a species. Trivers proposed that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play “tit for tat.” We’re usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we’re selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us.
Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. If we play our cards right, we can work with others to enlarge the pie that we ultimately share. Hunters work together to bring down large prey that nobody could catch alone. Neighbors watch each other’s houses and loan each other tools. Coworkers cover each other’s shifts. For millions of years, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of reaping these benefits without getting suckered. Those whose moral emotions compelled them to play “tit for tat” reaped more of these benefits than those who played any other strategy, such as “help anyone who needs it” (which invites exploitation), or “take but don’t give” (which can work just once with each person; pretty soon nobody’s willing to share pie with you).15 The original triggers of the Fairness modules are acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us. We feel pleasure, liking, and friendship when people show signs that they can be trusted to reciprocate. We feel anger, contempt, and even sometimes disgust when people try to cheat us or take advantage of us.16
The current triggers of the Fairness modules include a great many things that have gotten linked, culturally and politically, to the dynamics of reciprocity and cheating. On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. This is a major theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I visited in October 2011 (see figure 7.5). On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hard working Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).17
Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes. 3. The Loyalty/betrayal Foundation
In the summer of 1954, Muzafar Sherif convinced twenty-two sets of working-class parents to let him take their twelve-year-old boys off their hands for three weeks. He brought the boys to a summer camp he had rented in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. There he conducted one of the most famous studies in social psychology, and one of the richest for understanding the foundations of morality. Sherif brought the boys to the camp in two groups of eleven, on two consecutive days, and housed them in different parts of the park. For the first five days, each group thought it was alone. Yet even still, they set about marking territory and creating tribal identities.
One group called themselves the “Rattlers,” and the other group took the name “Eagles.” The Rattlers discovered a good swimming hole upstream from the main camp and, after an initial swim, they made a few improvements to the site, such as laying a rock path down to the water. They then claimed the site as their own, as their special hideout, which they visited each day. The Rattlers were disturbed one day to discover paper cups at the site (which in fact they themselves had left behind); they were angry that “outsiders” had used their swimming hole.
A leader emerged in each group by consensus. When the boys were deciding what to do, they all suggested ideas. But when it came time to choose one of those ideas, the leader usually made the choice. Norms, songs, rituals, and distinctive identities began to form in each group (Rattlers are tough and never cry; Eagles never curse). Even though they were there to have fun, and even though they believed they were alone in the woods, each group ended up doing the sorts of things that would have been quite useful if they were about to face a rival group that claimed the same territory. Which they were.
On day 6 of the study, Sherif let the Rattlers get close enough to the baseball field to hear that other boys—the Eagles—were using it, even though the Rattlers had claimed it as their field. The Rattlers begged the camp counselors to let them challenge the Eagles to a baseball game. As he had planned to do from the start, Sherif then arranged a weeklong tournament of sports competitions and camping skills. From that point forward, Sherif says, “performance in all activities which might now become competitive (tent pitching, baseball, etc.) was entered into with more zest and also with more efficiency.”18 Tribal behavior increased dramatically. Both sides created flags and hung them in contested territory. They destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons (socks filled with rocks), and would often have come to blows had the counselors not intervened.
We all recognize this portrait of boyhood. The male mind appears to be innately tribal—that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success in conflicts between groups (including warfare).19 The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.20
Despite some claims by anthropologists in the 1970s, human beings are not the only species that engages in war or kills its own kind. It now appears that chimpanzees guard their territory, raid the territory of rivals, and, if they can pull it off, kill the males of the neighboring group and take their territory and their females.21 And it now appears that warfare has been a constant feature of human life since long before agriculture and private property.22 For millions of years, therefore, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions that could fend off challenges and attacks from rival groups. We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins. (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.136-9)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 chapter 7 PDF
5. The Sanctity/degradation Foundation
In early 2001, Armin Meiwes, a German computer technician, posted an unusual advertisement on the Web: “Looking for a well-built 21-to-30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” Hundreds of men responded by email, and Meiwes interviewed a few of them at his farmhouse. Bernd Brandes, a forty-three-year-old computer engineer, was the first respondent who didn’t change his mind when he realized that Meiwes was engaging in mere fantasy. (Warning: squeamish readers should skip the entire next paragraph.)
On the evening of March 9, the two men made a video to prove that Brandes fully consented to what was about to happen. Brandes then took some sleeping pills and alcohol, but he was still alert when Meiwes cut off Brandes’s penis, after being unable to bite it off (as Brandes had requested). Meiwes then sautéed the penis in a frying pan with wine and garlic. Brandes took a bite of it, then went off to a bathtub to bleed to death. A few hours later Brandes was not yet dead, so Meiwes kissed him, stabbed him in the throat, and then hung the body on a meat hook to strip off the flesh. Meiwes stored the flesh in his freezer and ate it gradually over the next ten months. Meiwes was ultimately caught, arrested, and tried, but because Brandes’s participation was fully voluntary, Meiwes was convicted only of manslaughter, not murder, the first time the case went to trial.35
If your moral matrix is limited to the ethic of autonomy, you’re at high risk of being dumbfounded by this case. You surely find it disturbing, and the violence of it probably activates your Care/harm foundation. But any attempt to condemn Meiwes or Brandes runs smack into John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, which I introduced in chapter 5: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The next line of the original quote is: “His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.” From within the ethic of autonomy, people have a right to live their lives as they please (as long as they harm nobody), and they have a right to end their lives how and when they please (as long as they leave no dependents unsupported). Brandes chose an extraordinarily revolting means of death, but as the Penn students in my dissertation research often said, just because something is disgusting, that doesn’t make it wrong. Yet most people feel that there was something terribly wrong here, and that it should be against the law for adults to engage in consensual activities such as this. Why?
Imagine that Meiwes served his prison sentence and then returned to his home. (Assume that a team of psychiatrists established that he posed no threat to anyone who did not explicitly ask to be eaten.) Imagine that his home was one block away from your home. Would you find his return unsettling? If Meiwes was then forced by social pressure to move out of your town, might you feel some relief? And what about the house where this atrocity happened? How much would someone have to pay you to live in it for a week? Might you feel that the stain would be expunged only if the house was burned to the ground? (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.146-7)
I began by summarizing the standard explanations that psychologists had offered for decades: Conservatives are conservative because they were raised by overly strict parents, or because they are inordinately afraid of change, novelty, and complexity, or because they suffer from existential fears and therefore cling to a simple worldview with no shades of gray. These approaches all had one feature in common: they used psychology to explain away conservatism. They made it unnecessary for liberals to take conservative ideas seriously because these ideas are caused by bad childhoods or ugly personality traits. I suggested a very different approach: start by assuming that conservatives are just as sincere as liberals, and then use Moral Foundations Theory to understand the moral matrices of both sides. (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.164-5)
Another angry reader posted to a blog discussion his own list of the "top fifteen reasons that people vote Democrat" (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.168-9)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 chapter 8 PDF
In one classic experiment, economist Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter asked Swiss students play twelve rounds of a “public goods" game (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.178-9)
When Westerners take these drugs, shorn of all rites and rituals, they don't usually commit to any group, but they often have experiences that are hard to distinguish from the “peak experiences” described by the humanistic psychologist Abe Maslow.22 In one of the few controlled experiments, done before the drugs were made illegal in most Western countries, twenty divinity students were brought together in the basement chapel of a church in Boston.23 All took a pill, but for the first twenty minutes, nobody knew who had taken psilocybin and who had taken niacin (a B vitamin that gives people a warm, flushed feeling). But by forty minutes into the experiment, it was clear to all. The ten who took niacin (and who had been the first to feel something happening) were stuck on Earth wishing the other ten well on their fantastic voyage.
The experimenters collected detailed reports from all participants before and after the study, as well as six months later. They found that psilocybin had produced statistically significant effects on nine kinds of experiences: (1) unity, including loss of sense of self, and a feeling of underlying oneness, (2) transcendence of time and space, (3) deeply felt positive mood, (4) a sense of sacredness, (5) a sense of gaining intuitive knowledge that felt deeply and authoritatively true, (6) paradoxicality, (7) difficulty describing what had happened, (8) transiency, with all returning to normal within a few hours, and (9) persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior. Twenty-five years later, Rick Doblin tracked down nineteen of the twenty original subjects and interviewed them.24 He concluded that “all psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives.” One of the psilocybin subjects recalled his experience like this:
All of a sudden I felt sort of drawn out into infinity, and all of a sudden I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation.… Sometimes you would look up and see the light on the altar and it would just be a blinding sort of light and radiations.… We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.
3. Raves
Rock music has always been associated with wild abandon and sexuality. American parents in the 1950s often shared the horror of those seventeenth-century Europeans faced with the ecstatic dancing of the “savages.” But in the 1980s, British youth mixed together new technologies to create a new kind of dancing that replaced the individualism and sexuality of rock with more communal feelings. Advances in electronics brought new and more hypnotic genres of music, such as techno, trance, house, and drum and bass. Advances in laser technology made it possible to bring spectacular visual effects into any party. And advances in pharmacology made a host of new drugs available to the dancing class, particularly MDMA, a variant of amphetamine that gives people long-lasting energy, along with heightened feelings of love and openness. (Revealingly, the colloquial name for MDMA is ecstasy.) When some or all of these ingredients were combined, the result was so deeply appealing that young people began converging by the thousands for all-night dance parties, first in the United Kingdom and then, in the 1990s, throughout the developed world.
There’s a description of a rave experience in Tony Hsieh’s autobiography Delivering Happiness. Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) is the CEO of the online retailer Zappos.com. He made a fortune at the age of twenty-four when he sold his start-up tech company to Microsoft. For the next few years Hsieh wondered what to do with his life. He had a small group of friends who hung out together in San Francisco. The first time Hsieh and his “tribe” (as they called themselves) attended a rave, it flipped his hive switch. Here is his description:
What I experienced next changed my perspective forever.… Yes, the decorations and lasers were pretty cool, and yes, this was the largest single room full of people dancing that I had ever seen. But neither of those things explained the feeling of awe that I was experiencing … As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational person in a group, I was surprised to find myself swept with an overwhelming sense of spirituality—not in the religious sense, but a sense of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the universe. There was a feeling of no judgment.… Here there was no sense of self-consciousness or feeling that anyone was dancing to be seen dancing.… Everyone was facing the DJ, who was elevated up on a stage.… The entire room felt like one massive, united tribe of thousands of people, and the DJ was the tribal leader of the group.… The steady wordless electronic beats were the unifying heartbeats that synchronized the crowd. It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness.25
Hsieh had stumbled into a modern version of the muscular bonding that Ehrenreich and McNeill had described. The scene and the experience awed him, shut down his “I,” and merged him into a giant “we.” That night was a turning point in his life; it started him on the path to creating a new kind of business embodying some of the communalism and ego suppression he had felt at the rave.
There are many other ways to flip the hive switch. In the ten years during which I’ve been discussing these ideas with my students at UVA, I’ve heard reports of people getting “turned on” by singing in choruses, performing in marching bands, listening to sermons, attending political rallies, and meditating. Most of my students have experienced the switch at least once, although only a few had a life-changing experience. More commonly, the effects fade away within a few hours or days.
Now that I know what can happen when the hive switch gets flipped in the right way at the right time, I look at my students differently. I still see them as individuals competing with each other for grades, honors, and romantic partners. But I have a new appreciation for the zeal with which they throw themselves into extracurricular activities, most of which turn them into team players. They put on plays, compete in sports, rally for political causes, and volunteer for dozens of projects to help the poor and the sick in Charlottesville and in faraway countries. I see them searching for a calling, which they can only find as part of a larger group. I now see them striving and searching on two levels simultaneously, for we are all Homo duplex.
THE BIOLOGY OF THE HIVE SWITCH
If the hive switch is real—if it’s a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding—then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones. It’s not going to be a spot in the brain—a clump of neurons that humans have and chimpanzees lack. Rather, it will be a functional system cobbled together from preexisting circuits and substances reused in slightly novel ways to produce a radically novel ability. In the last ten years there’s been an avalanche of research on the two26 most likely building materials of this functional system.27
If evolution chanced upon a way to bind people together into large groups, the most obvious glue is oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus. Oxytocin is widely used among vertebrates to prepare females for motherhood. In mammals it causes uterine contractions and milk letdown, as well as a powerful motivation to touch and care for one’s children. Evolution has often reused oxytocin to forge other kinds of bonds. In species in which males stick by their mates or protect their own offspring, it’s because male brains were slightly modified to be more responsive to oxytocin.28
In people, oxytocin reaches far beyond family life. If you squirt oxytocin spray into a person’s nose, he or she will be more trusting in a game that involves transferring money temporarily to an anonymous partner.29 Conversely, people who behave trustingly cause oxytocin levels to increase in the partner they trusted. Oxytocin levels also rise when people watch videos about other people suffering—at least among those who report feelings of empathy and a desire to help.30 Your brain secretes more oxytocin when you have intimate contact with another person, even if that contact is just a back rub from a stranger.31
What a lovely hormone! It’s no wonder the press has swooned in recent years, dubbing it the “love drug” and the “cuddle hormone.” If we could put oxytocin into the world’s drinking water, might there be an end to war and cruelty?
Unfortunately, no. If the hive switch is a product of group selection, then it should show the signature feature of group selection: parochial altruism.32 Oxytocin should bond us to our partners and our groups, so that we can more effectively compete with other groups. It should not bond us to humanity in general.
Several recent studies have validated this prediction. In one set of studies, Dutch men played a variety of economic games while sitting alone in cubicles, linked via computers into small teams.33 Half of the men had been given a nasal spray of oxytocin, and half got a placebo spray. The men who received oxytocin made less selfish decisions—they cared more about helping their group, but they showed no concern at all for improving the outcomes of men in the other groups. In one of these studies, oxytocin made men more willing to hurt other teams (in a prisoner’s dilemma game) because doing so was the best way to protect their own group. In a set of follow-up studies, the authors found that oxytocin caused Dutch men to like Dutch names more and to value saving Dutch lives more (in trolley-type dilemmas). Over and over again the researchers looked for signs that this increased ingroup love would be paired with increased out-group hate (toward Muslims), but they failed to find it.34 Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more. It makes them parochial altruists. The authors conclude that their findings “provide evidence for the idea that neurobiological mechanisms in general, and oxytocinergic systems in particular, evolved to sustain and facilitate within-group coordination and cooperation.”
The second candidate for sustaining within-group coordination is the mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons were discovered accidentally in the 1980s when a team of Italian scientists began inserting tiny electrodes into individual neurons in the brains of Macaque monkeys. The researchers were trying to find out what some individual cells were doing in a region of the cerebral cortex that they knew controls fine motor movements. They discovered that there were some neurons that fired rapidly only when the monkey made a very specific movement, such as grasping a nut between thumb and forefinger (versus, say, grabbing the nut with the entire hand). But once they had these electrodes implanted and hooked up to a speaker (so that they could hear the rate of firing), they began to hear firing noises at odd times, such as when a monkey was perfectly still and it was the researcher who had just picked up something with his thumb and forefinger. This made no sense because perception and action were supposed to occur in separate regions of the brain. Yet here were neurons that didn’t care whether the monkey was doing something or watching someone else do it. The monkey seemed to mirror the actions of others in the same part of its brain that it would use to do those actions itself.35
Later work demonstrated that most mirror neurons fire not when they see a specific physical movement but when they see an action that indicates a more general goal or intention. For example, watching a video of a hand picking up a cup from a clean table, as if to bring it to the person’s mouth, triggers a mirror neuron for eating. But the exact same hand movement and the exact same cup picked up from a messy table (where a meal seems to be finished) triggers a different mirror neuron for picking things up in general. The monkeys have neural systems that infer the intentions of others— which is clearly a prerequisite for Tomasello’s shared intentionality36—but they aren’t yet ready to share. Mirror neurons seem designed for the monkeys’ own private use, either to help them learn from others or to help them predict what another monkey will do next.
In humans the mirror neuron system is found in brain regions that correspond directly to those studied in macaques. But in humans the mirror neurons have a much stronger connection to emotionrelated areas of the brain—first to the insular cortex, and from there to the amygdala and other limbic areas.37 People feel each other’s pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates. Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile. The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile, which in turn passes the smile into someone else’s brain.
Mirror neurons are perfectly suited for Durkheim’s collective sentiments, particularly the emotional “electricity” of collective effervescence. But their Durkheimian nature comes out even more clearly in a study led by the neuroscientist Tania Singer. 38 Subjects first played an economic game with two strangers, one of whom played nicely while the other played selfishly. In the next part of the study, subjects’ brains were scanned while mild electric shocks were delivered randomly to the hand of the subject, the hand of the nice player, or the hand of the selfish player. (The other players’ hands were visible to the subject, near her own while she was in the scanner.) Results showed that subjects’ brains responded in the same way when the “nice” player received a shock as when they themselves were shocked. The subjects used their mirror neurons, empathized, and felt the other’s pain. But when the selfish player got a shock, people showed less empathy, and some even showed neural evidence of pleasure.39 In other words, people don’t just blindly empathize; they don’t sync up with everyone they see. We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.40
HIVES AT WORK
From cradle to grave we are surrounded by corporations and things made by corporations. What exactly are corporations, and how did they come to cover the Earth? The word itself comes from corpus, Latin for “body.” A corporation is, quite literally, a superorganism. Here is an early definition, from Stewart Kyd’s 1794 Treatise on the Law of Corporations:
[A corporation is] a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual.41
This legal fiction, recognizing “a collection of many individuals” as a new kind of individual, turned out to be a winning formula. It let people place themselves into a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential for gigantic rewards.
Corporations and corporate law helped England pull out ahead of the rest of the world in the early days of the industrial revolution. As with the transition to beehives and city-states, it took a while for the new superorganisms to work out the kinks, perfect the form, and develop effective defenses against external attacks and internal subversion. But once those problems were addressed, there was explosive growth. During the twentieth century, small businesses got pushed to the margins or to extinction as corporations dominated the most lucrative markets. Corporations are now so powerful that only national governments can restrain the largest of them (and even then it’s only some governments, and some of the time).
It is possible to build a corporation staffed entirely by Homo economicus. The gains from cooperation and division of labor are so vast that large companies can pay more than small businesses and then use a series of institutionalized carrots and sticks—including expensive monitoring and enforcement mechanisms—to motivate self-serving employees to act in ways the company desires. But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership)42 has its limits. Selfinterested employees are Glauconians, far more interested in looking good and getting promoted than in helping the company.43
In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership)44 generates more social capital—the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms. Hivish employees work harder, have more fun, and are less likely to quit or to sue the company. Unlike Homo economicus, they are truly team players.
What can leaders do to create more hivish organizations? The first step is to stop thinking so much about leadership. One group of scholars has used multilevel selection to think about what leadership really is. Robert Hogan, Robert Kaiser, and Mark van Vugt argue that leadership can only be understood as the complement of followership.45 Focusing on leadership alone is like trying to understand clapping by studying only the left hand. They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it’s no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.
These scholars note that people evolved to live in groups of up to 150 that were relatively egalitarian and wary of alpha males (as Chris Boehm said).46 But we also evolved the ability to rally around leaders when our group is under threat or is competing with other groups. Remember how the Rattlers and the Eagles instantly became more tribal and hierarchical the instant they discovered the presence of the other group?47 Research also shows that strangers will spontaneously organize themselves into leaders and followers when natural disasters strike.48 People are happy to follow when they see that their group needs to get something done, and when the person who emerges as the leader doesn’t activate their hypersensitive oppression detectors. A leader must construct a moral matrix based in some way on the Authority foundation (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the Liberty foundation (to make sure that subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation (which I defined in chapter 7 as a response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions).
Using this evolutionary framework, we can draw some direct lessons for anyone who wants to make a team, company, school, or other organization more hivish, happy, and productive. You don’t need to slip ecstasy into the watercooler and then throw a rave party in the cafeteria. The hive switch may be more of a slider switch than an on-off switch, and with a few institutional changes you can create environments that will nudge everyone’s sliders a bit closer to the hive position. For example:
• Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.51
• Exploit synchrony. People who move together are saying, “We are one, we are a team; just look how perfectly we are able to do that Tomasello shared-intention thing.” Japanese corporations such as Toyota begin their days with synchronous companywide exercises. Groups prepare for battle—in war and sports—with group chants and ritualized movements. (If you want to see an impressive one in rugby, Google “All Blacks Haka.”) If you ask people to sing a song together, or to march in step, or just to tap out some beats together on a table, it makes them trust each other more and be more willing to help each other out, in part because it makes people feel more similar to each other.52 If it’s too creepy to ask your employees or fellow group members to do synchronized calisthenics, perhaps you can just try to have more parties with dancing or karaoke. Synchrony builds trust.
• Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. As McNeill said, soldiers don’t risk their lives for their country or for the army; they do so for their buddies in the same squad or platoon. Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.53 Intergroup competitions, such as friendly rivalries between corporate divisions, or intramural sports competitions, should have a net positive effect on hivishness and social capital. But pitting individuals against each other in a competition for scarce resources (such as bonuses) will destroy hivishness, trust, and morale.
Much more could be said about leading a hivish organization.54 Kaiser and Hogan offer this summary of the research literature:
Transactional leadership appeals to followers’ self-interest, but transformational leadership changes the way followers see themselves—from isolated individuals to members of a larger group. Transformational leaders do this by modeling collective commitment (e.g., through selfsacrifice and the use of “we” rather than “I”), emphasizing the similarity of group members, and reinforcing collective goals, shared values, and common interests.55
In other words, transformational leaders understand (at least implicitly) that human beings have a dual nature. They set up organizations that engage, to some degree, the higher level of that nature. Good leaders create good followers, but followership in a hivish organization is better described as membership.
POLITICAL HIVES
Great leaders understand Durkheim, even if they’ve never read his work. For Americans born before 1950, you can activate their Durkheimian higher nature by saying just two words: “Ask not.” The full sentence they’ll hear in their minds comes from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address. After calling on all Americans to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle”—that is, to pay the costs and take the risks of fighting the cold war against the Soviet Union—Kennedy delivered one of the most famous lines in American history: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
The yearning to serve something larger than the self has been the basis of so many modern political movements. Here’s another brilliantly Durkheimian appeal:
[Our movement rejects the view of man] as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which, suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest … can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
Inspiring stuff, until you learn that it’s from The Doctrine of Fascism, by Benito Mussolini.56 Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights. It’s the doctrine of the nation as a superorganism, within which the individual loses all importance. So hive psychology is bad stuff, right? Any leader who tries to get people to forget themselves and merge into a team pursuing a common goal is flirting with fascism, no? Asking your employees to exercise together—isn’t that the sort of thing Hitler did at his Nuremberg rallies? (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.230-9)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 complete book? PDF
..... On surveys, religious people routinely claimed to give more money to charity, and they expressed more altruistic values. But when social psychologists brought people into the lab and gave them the chance to actually help strangers, religious believers rarely acted any better than did nonbelievers.
But should we really expect religion to turn people into unconditional altruists, ready to help strangers under any circumstances? Whatever Christ said about the good Samaritan who helped an injured Jew, if religion is a group-level adaptation, then it should produce parochial altruism. It should make people exceedingly generous and helpful toward members of their own moral communities, particularly when their reputations will be enhanced. And indeed, religion does exactly this. Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity. People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that giving is to religious organizations. 52 It’s the same story for volunteer work: religious people do far more than secular folk, and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations.
There is also some evidence that religious people behave better in lab experiments— especially when they get to work with each other. A team of German economists asked subjects to play a game in which one person is the “truster,” who is given some money on each round of the game. 53 The truster is then asked to decide how much money, if any, to pass on to an anonymous “trustee.” Any money passed gets tripled by the experimenter, at which point the “trustee” can choose how much, if any, to return to the truster. Each person plays many rounds of the game, with different people each time, sometimes as the truster, sometimes as the trustee.
Behavioral economists use this game often, but the novel twist in this study was to reveal one piece of real, true personal information about the trustees to the trusters, before the trusters made their initial decision to trust. (The information was taken from questionnaires that all subjects had filled out weeks before.) In some cases, the truster learned the trustee’s level of religiosity, on a scale of 1 to 5. When trusters learned that their trustee was religious, they transferred more money, which shows that these Germans held the same belief as did Locke (about religious believers being more trustworthy). More important, the religious trustees really did transfer back more money than did the nonreligious trustees, even though they never knew anything about their trusters. The highest levels of wealth, therefore, would be created when religious people get to play a trust game with other religious people. (Richard Sosis found this same outcome too, in a field experiment done at several Israeli kibbutzim.) 54 (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.264-7)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 chapter 11 PDF
But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of the same genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything. What’s more, identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to each other, or to their adoptive parents; they tend to be more similar to their genetic parents. Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities.
We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your religiosity; and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: Genetics explains between one-third and one-half of the variability among people in their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.
How can that be? How can there be a genetic basis for attitudes about nuclear power, progressive taxation, and foreign aid when these issues emerged only in the last century or two? And how can there be a genetic basis for ideology when people sometimes change their political parties as adults?
Innate does not mean “hard-wired” or unmalleable. To say that a trait or ability is innate just means it was “organized in advance of experience.” The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process.
After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, 15 researchers, led by Penn State political scientist Peter K. Hatemi, found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to the functioning of neurotransmitters, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear. This finding, published in The Journal of Politics last October, fits well with many studies showing that conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise. Other studies have focused on genes related to receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has long been tied to sensation seeking and openness to experience, among the best-established correlates of liberalism. As the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne said: “The only things I find rewarding…are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.”
Even though the effects of any single gene are tiny, these findings are important because they illustrate one sort of pathway from genes to politics: the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences. These are two of the main personality factors that have consistently been found to distinguish liberals and conservatives. A major 2003 review paper by political psychologist John Jost in Psychological Bulletin found a few other traits, but nearly all of them are conceptually related to threat sensitivity (e.g., conservatives react more strongly to reminders of death) or openness to experience (e.g., liberals have less need for order, structure, and closure).
Step 2: Traits Guide Children Along Different Paths
Where do our personalities come from? To answer that question, we need to distinguish among three different levels of personality, according to a useful theory from Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams. The lowest level of our personalities consists of what he calls “dispositional traits,” which are the sort of broad character dimensions that manifest themselves in many different situations. These are traits such as threat sensitivity, novelty seeking, extraversion, and conscientiousness, and they are fairly consistent from childhood through old age. Don’t think of them as mental modules that some people have and others lack; they’re more like adjustments to dials on brain systems that everyone has. (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.278-9)
My own intellectual life narrative has had two turning points. In chapter 5 I recounted the first one, in India, in which my mind opened to the existence of the broader moralities described by Richard Shweder (i.e., the ethics of community and divinity). But from that turning point in 1993 through the election of Barack Obama in 2008, I was still a partisan liberal. I wanted my team (the Democrats) to beat the other team (the Republicans). In fact, I first began to study politics precisely because I was so frustrated by John Kerry’s ineffectual campaign for the presidency. I was convinced that American liberals simply did not “get” the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen, and I wanted to use my research on moral psychology to help liberals win.
To learn about political psychology, I decided to teach a graduate seminar on the topic in the spring of 2005. Knowing that I’d be teaching this new class, I was on the lookout for good readings. So when I was visiting friends in New York a month after the Kerry defeat, I went to a used-book store to browse its political science section. As I scanned the shelves, one book jumped out at me-a thick brown book with one word on its spine: Conservatism. It was a volume of readings edited by the historian Jerry Muller. I started reading Muller’s introduction while standing in the aisle, but by the third page I had to sit down on the floor. I didn’t realize it until years later, but Muller’s essay was my second turning point.
Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.”34 Christians who look to the Bible as a guide for legislation, like Muslims who want to live under sharia, are examples of orthodoxy. They want their society to match an externally ordained moral order, so they advocate change, sometimes radical change. This can put them at odds with true conservatives, who see radical change as dangerous.
Muller next distinguished conservatism from the counterEnlightenment. It is true that most resistance to the Enlightenment can be said to have been conservative, by definition (i.e., clerics and aristocrats were trying to conserve the old order). But modern conservatism, Muller asserts, finds its origins within the main currents of Enlightenment thinking, when men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke tried to develop a reasoned, pragmatic, and essentially utilitarian critique of the Enlightenment project. Here’s the line that quite literally floored me:
What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.35
As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science. It followed, therefore, that as an atheist and a scientist, I was obligated to be a liberal. But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Could it be? Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete against liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society? (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.288-9)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 chapter 12 PDF
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 chapter 12 HTML
I am not anticorporate, I am simply a Glauconian. When corporation operate in full view of the public, with a free press that is willing and able to report on the externalities being foisted on the public, they are likely to behave well, as most corporations do. .....
I think liberals are right that a major function of government is to stand up for the public interest against corporations and their tendency to distort markets and impose externalities on others, particularly on those least able to stand up for themselves in court (such as the poor, or immigrants, or farm animals). Efficient markets require government regulation. Liberals go too far sometimes – indeed, they are often reflexively antibusiness, which is a huge mistake from a utilitarian point of view. But is is healthy for a nation to have a constant tug-of-war, a constant debate between ying and yang over how and when to limit and regulate corporate behavior. (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.298-9)
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 more excerpts
In 2007, David Goodhill's father was killed by an infection he caught while in a hospital. In trying (Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 p.302-3) see chapter 12 PDF
(Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind” 2012 more excerpts
Consumers Should Drive Medicine David Goldhill on America’s deadly, dysfunctional health care system February 2014
Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" 2008
Behavioral economists employ an experimental procedure called the Ultimatum Game. It goes something like this. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you are both richer by that amount. How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90–$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money maximizer, he isn’t going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that deviate much beyond a $70–$30 split are usually rejected. .....
Markets are moral, and modern economies are founded on our virtuous nature. If that were not the case, market capitalism would have imploded long ago (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.10-2)
(Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.10-2)
If Bill Gates is the Antichrist in the lefts pantheon of fallen gods, for those who embrace producer-directed economics, Wal-Mart resides just below the (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.36-7)
We have both virtues and vices, which interact and feed on one another, and whose relative expression depends on the social context. (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.40-1)
As midnight approached on December 20, Keech's group gathered to await the arrival of the aliens' mother craft. As dictated by Marion, the members eschewed all metallic items and other objects that would interfere with the operation of the spaceship. When one clock read 12:05 A.M. on the twenty-first, anxious squirming was calmed when someone pointed out a second clock reading 11:55 P.M. But as the minutes and hours ticked by, Keech's clique grew restless.
At 4:00 A.M., Keech began to weep in despair, recovering at 4:45 A.M. with the claim that she had received another message from Clarion informing her that God had decided to spare Earth because of the cohort's stalwart efforts. "By dawn on the 21st, however, this semblance of organization had vanished as the members of the group sought frantically to convince the world of their beliefs," Festinger says. "In succeeding days, they also made a series of desperate attempts to erase "their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction in the hope that one would come true, and they conducted a vain search for guidance from the Guardians." Marion Keech and her most devoted charges redoubled their recruitment efforts, arguing that the prophecy had actually been fulfilled with an opposite outcome as a result of their faith. Festinger concluded that Keech's assemblage reduced the cognitive dissonance they experienced by reconfiguring their perceptions to imagine a ,favorable outcome, reinforced by converting others to the cause.
Doomsday cults are especially vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, particularly when they make specific end-of-the-world predictions that will be checked against reality. What typically happens is that the faithful spin-doctor the nonevent into a successful prophecy, with rationalizations including (1) the date was miscalculated; (2) the date was a loose prediction, not a specific prophecy; (3) the date was a warning, not a prophecy; (4) God changed his mind; (5) the prediction was just a test of the members' faith; (6) the prophecy was fulfilled physically. but not as expected; and (7) the prophecy ,vas fulfilled-spiritually.
Of course, cognitive dissonance is not unique to doomsday cults. We experience it when we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses, and unsuccessful relationships. Why should past investment influence future decisions? If we were perfectly rational, we should simply compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward, jettisoning our previous beliefs. Instead, we are stuck rationalizing our past choices, and those rationalizations influence our present ones.
Unfortunately for those bent on curing themselves of the chronic effects of cognitive dissonance, research since Festinger shows that, if anything, he underestimated its potency. As two of Festinger's students-Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson-demonstrate in their aptly titled book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), our ability to rationalize our choices and actions through self-justification knows no bounds.
The passive voice of the all-telling phrase-mistakes were made-shows the rationalization process at work. In March 2007, United States attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales used that very phrase in a public statement on the controversial firing of several U.S. attorneys: "I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility." Nevertheless, he rationalized, "I stand by the decision, and I think it was a right decision."5 The- phraseology is so common as to be almost cliche. "Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served," confessed Henry Kissinger about Vietnam, Cambodia, and South America. "If, in hindsight, we also discover that mistakes may have been made. . I am deeply sorry," admitted Cardinal Edward Egan of New York about the Catholic Church's failure to deal with priestly pedophiles. And, of course, corporate leaders are no less susceptible than politicians and religious leaders: "Mistakes were made in communicating to the public and customers about the ingredients in our French fries and hash browns," acknowledged a McDonald's spokesperson to a group of Hindus and other vegetarians after they discovered that the "natural flavoring" in their potatoes contained beef byproducts. "Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it," Tavris and Aronson note.6 It is in that process of reducing dissonance that our self-justification accelerators are throttled up.
One of the practical benefits of self-justification is that no matter what decisioin we make - to take this or that job, to marry this or that person, to purchase this or that product-we will almost always be satisfied with the decision, even when the objective evidence is to the contrary. Once the decision is made, we carefully screen subsequent information and filter out all contradictory data, leaving only evidence in support of our choice. This process of cherry-picking happens at even the highest levels of expert assessment. In his book Expert Political Judgment, the political scientist Philip Tetlock reviews the evidence for the predictive ability of professional experts in politics and economics and finds them severely wanting. To the point, expert opinions turn out to be no better than those of nonexperts-or even chance-and yet, as self-justification theory would predict, experts are significantly less likely to admit that they are wrong than are nonexperts.
Politics is rampantly self-justifying. Democrats see the world through liberal-tinted glasses, while Republicans filter it through conservative - shaded lenses. Tune in to talk radio any hour of the day, any day of the week-whether it is "conservative talk radio" or "progressive talk radio" and you'll hear the same current events interpreted in ways that are 180 degrees out of phase. Social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen quantified this effect in a study in which he discovered that Democrats are more accepting of a welfare program if they believe it was proposed by a fellow Democrat, even when, in fact, the proposal comes from a Republican and is quite restrictive. Predictably, Cohen found the same effect for Republicans, who were far more likely to approve a generous welfare program if , they thought it was proposed by a fellow Republican.
Economic positions, whether staked out by birthright, inheritance, or creative hard work, distort our perceptions of reality as much as political positions. The sociologist John Jost has studied how people justify their economic status, and the status of others. The wealthy tend to rationalize their position of privilege as deserved, earned, or justified by their benevolent social acts, and assuage-any cognitive dissonance regarding the poor by believing that the poor are happier and more honest. For their part, the underprivileged tend to rationalize their position as morally superior, nonelitist, and within the bounds of social normalcy, and look down upon the rich as living an undeserved life of accidental or ill-gotten privilege.
Cognitive distortions can even turn deadly. Wrongly convicting people and sentencing them to death is a supreme source of' cognitive dissonance. Since 1992, the Innocence Project has freed fourteen people from death row, and exonerated convicts in more than 250 non-death row cases. "If we reviewed prison sentences with the same level of care that we devote to death sentences," says University of Michigan law professor Samuel n. Cross, "there would have been over 28,500 non-death – row exonerations in the past 15 years, rather than the 255 that have in fact occurred." What is the 'self-justification for reducing this form of dissonance? "You get in the system and you become very cynical," explains Rob Warden of Northwestern University School of Law. "People are lying to you all over the place. Then you develop a theory of the crime, and it leads to what we call tunnel vision. Years later. overwhelming evidence comes out that the guy was innocent. And you're sitting there thinking, 'Wait a minute. Either this overwhelming evidence is wrong or I was wrong-and I couldn't have been wrong because I'm a good guy.' That's a psychological phenomenon I have seen over and over,"
The deeper evolutionary foundation to self-justification, cognitive dissonance, and the elevation of truth telling and mistake admission to a moral principle worthy of praise can be found in the psychology of deception(and self-deception). Research shows that we are better at deception than at deception detection, but liars get caught often enough that it is risky to attempt to deceive others, especially people with whom we spend a lot of time. The more we interact with someone, the more that person is likely to pick up on the cues we give when we are attempting to deceive, particularly nonverbal cues such as taking a deep breath, looking away from the person we are talking to, and hesitating before answering. But those cues are less likely to be expressed if you actually believe the lie yourself. II This is the power of self-deception, which evolved in our ancestors as a means of fooling fellow group members who would otherwise catch our deceptions.
From an evolutionary perspective, it is not enough to fake doing the right thing, because although we are fairly good deceivers, we are also fairly good deception detectors. We have to believe we are doing the right thing, too. What we believe we feel, and thus it is that we do not just go through the motions of being moral, we actually have a moral sense and retain the capacity for genuine moral emotions. This is borne out in research on both primates and hunter-gatherer groups. What follows are the numerous ways that cognitive biases interrupt our ability to make rational decisions in our personal as well as our financial lives.” (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.66-9)
Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" more excerpts
Have you ever watched a white rat choose between an 8 and 32 percent sucrose solution by pressing two different bars on variable-interval schedules of reinforcement? No? Lucky you. I devoted two years of what would otherwise have been a misspent youth to running choice experiments with rats in Skinner boxes for my master's thesis on "Choice in Rats as a Function of Reinforcer Intensity and Quality." Boys gone wild! (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.94-5)
In honor of the late economist Milton Friedman, author of the radical book Free to Choose, I propose that we begin by marketing this brand — the Principle of Freedom: all people are free to think, believe and act as they choose, as long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" revised quotes in article "Free to Choose"
One answer is to reframe the problem in an intimate, short-term context. Consider how nonprofits concerned with the plight of starving third-world children might employ the “adopt a child” strategy in order to tap into potential first-world donors’ natural empathies. The effect of the strategy was endearingly portrayed in the 2002 film About Schmidt, in which Jack Nicholson’s title character adopts a Tanzanian child named Ndugu, with whom he carries on a one-way correspondence that becomes the narrative outline of the story of Schmidt’s search for meaning in his later years. After writing countless self-centric letters about matters trivially irrelevant, Schmidt discovers in the film’s final scene that his foster charge cannot read or write. But the letter from the nun who looks after the boy brings redemption, as it is accompanied by a stick-figure drawing made for Schmidt by Ndugu that depicts an adult and child holding hands beneath a deep blue sky and radiant yellow sun. the scene is so moving in its emotional simplicity that it evokes empathetic tears. By touching one small child worlds away – a child with a name and face and a visual acknowledgement for a small but significant act of kindness – Schmidt’s life became meaningful. Call it the Ndugu Effect.
We care more about one named child with a face than we do about tens of thousands of nameless and faceless children. In the modern world, it is an irrational moral calculation – rational economic man should care more for the many than the one. But an apparently irrational calculation becomes a rational moral choice in the ancient world of our evolved brains, where we care more for the one than the many, .....
I went online through World Vision’s program to sponsor an eleven-year-old girl named Suada Isaku from Tirana, Albania, who lives in the rural farming district of Elbasan with her parents and sister struggling to survive on bread, vegetables, beans, and dairy products. My modest monthly donation, World Vision tells me, “will help provide Suada and her community with clean water and improved healthcare facilities. Your support will help create educational partnerships between parents and teachers to enhance students education. Economic forums will help the community develop plans for growth.” An accompanying photograph with additional details about my sponsored child – she enjoys reading, helps at home with housework, likes to play ball games, and is in good health – reinforces my sense of attachment to her. A subsequent search on Google Earth promptly carried me through cyberspace to Suada’s village, pulling on the heartstrings of my brain’s dopamine reward networks, igniting my Middle Land propensity to connect to those near me, transforming a total stranger into honorary family through the power of markets, minds and morals. (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.136-8)
Ethics and Nonprofits By Deborah L. Rhode & Amanda K. Packel Summer 2009
In a related experiment on cooperation, nine subjects were given $5. If five or more of the nine cooperated by donating their $5 to a general pot, all nine would receive $10 (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.180-3)
(Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" also cited in Science Matters: Why Markets are Moral
In the end of course people choose to be good or evil. We can change the positions and attenuate the potential .....
In the 1987 film Wall Street, Michael Douglas's character, the high-rolling corporate raider Gordon Gekko, explains to Charlie Sheen's youthfully naive Bud Fox ......
Do people really believe that this description best characterizes the corporate world? They do. .....
.... This is, in fact, why WorldCom and Enron type disasters still make headlines. If they didn't -- if such corporate catastrophes caused by egregious ethical lapses were so common that they were not even worth covering on the nightly news -- free market capitalism would go the way of the dinosaurs.
This is not in any way to deny the abuses committed during the past two centuries, or point a rosy picture of corporations that has no basis in reality. My point however, is that such abuses are the exception not the rule, they are the product of evil corporate cultures more than they are the result of evil corporate leaders. The contrast between Enron and Google, then, will serve to make the contrast in striking detail that demonstrates the power of the situation to draw out the better or worse angels of our nature. (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.214-7)
Just as Coke is a proxy for flavor, hunger a proxy for caloric need, lust a proxy for reproductive necessity, and guilt and joy proxies for immoral and moral behavior, so, too, can we market moral brands to rewire brains to value and choose good ideas. ..... So in honor of the late economist Milton Friedman, author of the once radical but now mainstream book Free to Choose, I propose that we begin by marketing this brand--the Principle of Freedom: all people are free to think, believe and act as they choose, as long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.
Consider the gene that codes for the production of the brain neurotransmitter dopamine. Called D4DR, it is located on the short arm of the eleventh chromosome (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.232-3)
Free will is a fuzzy fraction of determinism. Instead of thinking of concepts like "free will" and "determinism" as reified things — Platonic types that exist as
the product of matchless genes, environments, and historical pathways that are so complex and so ... Free will arises out of this ignorance of causes.
Free will is an evolutionary by-product. Because of our uniquely huge brain and exceptionally large prefrontal cortex, we are self-aware and aware that others are self-aware. (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.236-9)
Capitalism may not need apologists and propagandists but it does need a scientific foundation grounded in psychology and evolution, which I have attempted to give it in this book. Now I would also like to look into the future. (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.246-7)
(Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" additional excerpts
You can even reverse the causal link-giving subjects a nose spray that includes a dose of oxytocin induces them to cooperate twice as much as they normally would. Trust is good for business and is among the most powerful factors affecting economic growth in a country. (Michael Shermer "Mind of the Market" p.256)
Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007
It's hard to tell who is in greater demand today: the Madison Avenue branding experts who are brought in to teach political parties how to define themselves, or the political consultants brought into corporate boardrooms to teach businesses how to communicate more effectively. The tools and techniques invented on Madison Avenue firmly took hold in Washington during the Reagan years-and they continue to drive our politics today. Similarly, more and more companies are turning to political professionals for help achieving the speed, agility, and linguistic accuracy that were once the unique province of electoral campaigns.
Pollsters and the polling they do are unnecessarily shrouded in a cloud of mystery, much of it their own making, in the mistaken assumption that the less people understand about the pollster's craft, the more the pollster can charge. The two best-known pollsters of the modern political era are Pat Caddell, who did the numbers for the Carter White House from 1977 through 1981, and Dick Morris, who became more of a general political advisor to President Clinton for most of his political career. Both men took on almost mythical proportions in the eyes of their clients and the media for their uncanny ability to translate staid numbers into vibrant political and linguistic strategy. And both men broke the first professional rule of thumb (and by the way, the term "rule of thumb" is based on an archaic rule where a husband was not allowed to beat his wife with anything thicker than his thumb) that the pollster is not the maker of public opinion but the translator of it.
Nevertheless, they forever changed the world of public opinion gathering. Caddell was the first pollster to test and turn language into a powerful political weapon, applying the art of "wordsmithing" to the science of opinion gathering. Morris, through the actual polling services of Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, was the first outside political adviser to essentially drive White House communication strategy. Between them, they applied the techniques of ongoing public opinion sampling and the application of language as an instrument of policy to create the permanent presidential campaign.
Today, polling is no longer a black art. There is a poll on every possible topic, and some Americans follow polls the way Wall Street follows the market. I am constantly amazed that the Q&A periods following my speeches across the country to various corporate and association audiences are consistently peppered with questions about some specific polling result in the news that day and its veracity-usually asked by someone who holds a contrary point of view.
The truth is, Americans are drowning in polling numbers. National news organizations poll on a monthly or even weekly basis, and the results are given more weight, space in print, and time on air than what the politicians are actually saying. Most recently there have been times when polls about the war in Iraq drowned out the real, actual events of the day. Unfortunately, while the media have all the numbers they can possibly crunch, most surveys and their accompanying analyses are lacking in meaningful insight.
I don't seek to undermine the profession that built my home and pays my mortgage, but telephone surveys have serious limitations that most readers would acknowledge-if they were in fact polled. The first is the increasing difficulty of getting a truly random sample of the population. The increase in cell- phone usage, particularly among those under age thirty, has made it extremely difficult to sample younger Americans (because some cell-phone calling plans charge individuals for incoming calls, it is not acceptable to poll cell phones). Similarly, the rise of "do not call" lists, the increase in unlisted phone numbers, and a general unwillingness of some Americans to answer questions from a stranger are all challenges that pollsters have to overcome every day.
Another problem with telephone polls, and Internet surveys as well, is that Americans don't want to respond yes or no to alternatives that are either unacceptable or require clarification. In the context of today's political environment, there are too many shades of gray, too many "Yes, but what I really think is ..." attitudes, too many voter priorities that cannot be ranked and explained over the phone. You can test a few words or slogans, but after about fifteen minutes, the respondent will stop responding. Internet surveys have an even shorter patience threshold before respondent fatigue sets in.
Even more problematic is the ordering of questions. Opinion pollsters know full well that where they ask a question within the survey exerts tremendous influence on what answers they receive. If a pollster has just spent fifteen minutes with you on the phone, grilling you about the frustrations of dealing with your HMO, and then closes the survey by asking you to rate the importance of health care reform against a host of other issues, you're far more likely to pick health care as highly important than you would be if it had been the first question in the survey. Likewise, laying out a new corporate pension policy to your employees will generate a strikingly different reception if you've first explained to them that the current policy is bankrupting the company and will lead to layoffs.
And even if the ordering of questions is correct, too many polls report what voters or consumers think without explaining how they feel-and why. They measure thoughts and opinions, but they don't provide a deeper understanding of the mind-and the heart. Feelings and emotions are what generate words that work.
That's why I am a committed disciple of focus groups in general and the "Instant Response Dial Session" in particular. A focus group is often nothing more than a formal discussion for ninety minutes or two hours with eight to twelve people who have similar backgrounds, behaviors, opinions, or some other commonality. Madison Avenue has been commissioning focus groups for more than half a century, and virtually every aspect of every major new product launch will involve a dozen or more of these sessions. Political researchers were slower to apply the value of face-to-face discussions to politics, as they are somewhat less profitable and somewhat more labor-intensive than traditional telephone surveys.
Focus groups have been much maligned by the media as a rogue science, designed to learn how to obscure and/or manipulate. True, they do have their limitations, most important among them the scientific inability to project the results of a discussion with two or three dozen people to a population of thousands or millions. They are reflective of the people in the session, not the total population.
But a well-run focus group is the most honest of all research techniques because it involves the most candid commentary and all of the uncensored intensity that real people can muster. As in telephone polling, focus groups begin by gauging respondent awareness and superficial opinions and attitudes. But unlike telephone polling, the superficiality is then stripped away, revealing deeper motivations, associations, and underlying needs. The interaction between a professional moderator and the participants encourages more honesty and less pandering, while measuring the intensity of opinion as well as individual motivation. That's where you'll find the words that work.
A well-run focus group is a laboratory for social interaction and word creation-yet it is one of the most obscure components of audience research. The composition of the focus group must be arrived at scientifically and statistically, and most Americans will never be invited to participate simply because most Americans don't qualify. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.72-9)
(Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 extended excerpt
As a footnote, I am often asked what I would have advised John Kerry if I had been his communications adviser. The answer, and I told this to Kerry early in 2006, may have shocked and offended Bible Belt Republicans, but it would have changed the dynamic of the controversy. I would have asked Kerry to wait until he had a friendly audience in front of him (think visually) and the TV cameras behind him, and then had a reporter call out: “Senator, those people are questioning your patriotism. What do you have to say to them?” I would have had Kerry turn and face the accuser, with the friendly audience now as his backdrop, and I would have told him to deliver the following lines in a stern but controlled voice:
Let me tell you something, I fought for this country. I was wounded for this country. I’m proud of my service. You tell the people peddling this trash, and the people who support them—including the President and the Vice-President—to go to hell. I went to Vietnam and fought for the American flag. They didn’t.*
Unless and until you say something to break the rhythm of a negative story, it will continue. A graphic profanity would have broken the rhythm, changed the focus, and, while a debate about the use of such words in politics would have ensued, that would have been a better debate for John Kerry. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.88-9)
We know so much about things that don’t really matter because we see them on television—and therefore it matters to us—yet we are so remarkably ignorant about what should matter—our own national heritage, culture, and traditions—because no one ever explained why we should care. Relevance sells—and seeing it on television makes even the most obscure and trivial seem relevant.
Popular entertainment in general, and the thirty-second spot in particular, need not be corrosive of the lexicon or the culture. Truth is, not all ads are bad. From the ads promoting Radio Free Europe that dramatically captured life behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s to the infamous frying egg “This is your brain; this is your brain on drugs” in the 1980s and the fantastically successful “Know when to say when” campaign by Anheuser-Busch over the past decade, some promotional efforts have been enlightening, informative, and occasionally even influential.
And not all ads have to air hundreds of times for us to remember them. Two ads stand above all the rest for their impact, even though they were officially broadcast just once: the aforementioned “Daisy” spot that helped sink Barry Goldwater in 1964, and the infamous “1984” commercial for Apple that aired during that year’s Super Bowl—forever connecting Hollywood production with Madison Avenue creativity. That spot, designed to introduce the much-anticipated Macintosh computer, was put together by the dream of award-winning director Ridley Scott and advertising powerhouse Chiat/Day—and Advertising Age named it the top spot of the decade. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.116-7)
*Tom Brokaw had asked Quayle to explain what he would do if, as vice president, he had to assume the duties of president. Quayle’s response was to emphasize correctly that he had “as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Bentsen’s quick response sounded like it was ad-libbed, but according to political journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover in their outstanding text “Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars,” Bentsen had actually tried a similar line in a debate rehearsal: “You’re no Jack Kennedy and George Bush is no Ronald Reagan.” (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.126-7)
In rare cases, applying words that work is about focusing on people’s fears rather than appealing to their hopes and dreams. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.136-7)
The following linguistic contract negotiation checklist outlines the dos and don’ts of specific words and phrases. This analysis is based on interviews with close to 5,000 union members over the past three years from various economic sectors, but the words will also apply to most employees in most fields. You’ll notice throughout that the language that worked well twenty or thirty years ago has a better alternative today: (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.144-5)
Myth: Americans are educated
False.
First, in the formal sense, fewer than half of us have graduated from college. In fact, only 29 percent of adults in the United States over the age of forty-five have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and only 27 percent of adults over the age of twenty-five are college educated.4 (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.184-5)
MYTH: AMERICANS READ
False.
In all my years of conducting polls, dial sessions, and focus groups, I’ve found again and again that nobody reads. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.187)
MYTH: AMERICAN CONSUMERS RESPOND WELL TO PATRIOTIC MESSAGES
Wrong, sort of. It’s American pride that sells products. Pride in American workmanship and in “Made in the USA” labels are far more appealing to a broad swath of the public than other more direct or flamboyant evocations of patriotism. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.)
MYTH: AMERICANS VOTE ACCORDING TO A CANDIDATE’S STANDS ON THE ISSUES
Not true. The news media naturally tend to place great importance on policy prescriptions and legislative proposals because they are concrete, specific, and substantive. What ends up in the headlines are the sound bites and the horse race, but reporter questioning is primarily focused on what the candidate believes rather than who the candidate is. The unspoken reality, though, is that the vast majority of Americans don’t vote based on particular issues at all. The fabled issue voter is a rare specimen indeed, and “agrees with me on the issues” is inevitably one of the least important candidate attributes in determining public support. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.188-9)
“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.”
—Will Rogers
Don’t call Anthony “Tony” Robbins a motivational speaker. Sure, he created the self-help industry and has “motivated” more people in his three decades than anyone else in his field, but he hates that label with the same kind of intense passion with which he embraces life. What you see in his infomercials is exactly who he is, what he represents, and the product he sells. Whether he’s speaking to 20,000 people in an arena or sitting behind a one-way mirror watching would-be consumers react to his message, there is a sense of passion to everything he says and does. Passion for understanding. Passion for communication. Passion for success. In my two decades of moderating focus groups, this was the first and only time where the real action was happening behind the focus group mirror, not in front. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.205)
One business, Wausau Insurance, puts a friendly face on an industry that is often seen as anything but. Welcoming customers to a world where “price does not equal cost,” Wausau gives consumers the impression that they, as opposed to their money, are most important. This utilization of the word shows that value is just as applicable to business as it is to the customer. “Value” is a relative term. Just as in the corporate context, in politics, “value” is not absolute, but contingent—judged as a ratio of what you pay versus what you get. In plain English, it is the answer to the question: “Are you getting your money’s worth?” (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.212-3)
10. “Patient-Centered”
Let me begin this discussion with the single dumbest linguistic creation of the last half century: the phrase “managed care.” Think about it. When you’re sick or in pain, do you really want your care “managed”? When an operation, procedure, or medication is required to save your life, do you really want some accountant applying a financial equation to your personal situation? The originator of the term “managed care” should be thrown in jail for linguistic malpractice—and that word needs to be dropped from the health care lexicon forever. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.254-5)
The best way to demonstrate how the Words That Work actually work is to open up the vault and allow you to read a sampling of actual language memos I have produced for various political and corporate clients. Most of my work is proprietary and cannot be revealed. I have even refused the pressure of journalists and polling associations who have insisted that I disclose these documents because of their impact on the public debate. But several of my more controversial memos did not involve specific clients or require me or my firm to sign confidentiality agreements. Those are the documents I include here publicly for the first time. (Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 p.269)
(Frank Luntz “Words That Work” 2007 PDF
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