The Domesticated Brain: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!’

This chilling chant comes from a dramatic scene in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, when English schoolboys, marooned on a desert island, work themselves into a blood-lust frenzy before they descend on the innocent boy Simon, beating him to death with sticks.¹ It is a tale about the inherent evil of mankind because, far away from the confines of civilization, Golding thought children would descend into savagery. He wrote the book based on what he thought was the true nature of humans after witnessing the atrocities of World War II. Prior to the war, Golding believed that man was inherently good but afterwards would later lament,

I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.²

The true nature of man is a question that has preoccupied thinkers for centuries. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, believed that children were born selfish and needed to be taught how to become useful members of society. In the West, this view of the lawless child prevailed up until the last 100 years and it was thought that the best way to parent was through a regime of strict discipline, since only harsh schooling would instruct children how to behave in society. Children, according to this view, lacked a moral compass and, left to their own devices, would run amok and descend into an animalistic battle for survival as captured in Golding’s nightmarish vision.

In contrast, the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought the inherent disposition of man was good. In his natural state, man was a ‘noble savage’ and it was society that corrupted the individual – a moral perspective that would later underpin the justification for the French Revolution. If everyone had equal opportunities, societies would not become corrupted and despotic.

During the twentieth century there was a shift towards Rousseau’s vision, with less cruelty towards children, but even today many adults continue to believe that children require punishment in order to learn right from wrong. This view is especially common among those who tend to be more right-wing in their political outlooks – a world view fuelled by media stories of moral decline as our streets descend into a jungle, occupied by gangs of youths who have no sense of morality.³ However, the crime statistics suggest that life is improving as we move to a more humane society, despite the adoption of less punitive attitudes towards children.⁴ Even though we use less corporal punishment, and it is now outlawed in many countries, there is no evidence that children are becoming more lawless.

Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s polar positions are reminiscent of the nature and nurture division discussed earlier in the book when we talked about the biology of personality – are people born evil or do they become that way by experience? In this chapter, we will reach the same general conclusion in our discussion of morality – biology and experience always work together but in ways that are often surprising and counter-intuitive. Violence and aggression are not covered, even though these are indeed some of the most important aspects of our domestication. The reason is that experimental research on human aggression is sparse and, for obvious ethical concerns, there is even less work on children. Rather, here the focus is on moral conventions that vary culturally such as sharing, helping, honesty and generally how to behave in good company. To what extent are these learned and/or motivated by biological drives to become accepted by others?

The moral instinct

Every member of a society needs to know right from wrong. In general, our moral principles are based on the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Morals govern how we behave and all members are expected to abide by the rules if they wish to remain within the group and enjoy the same rights and opportunities as others. Some of these rules are enshrined in legal systems whereby transgressions are dealt with by punishment, whereas others are codes of conduct about how to behave in polite society. Being cruel to someone may not be illegal if it does not breach the law, but it is none the less morally wrong. Whether through law or social norms, adhering to the morals of the societies we live in is critical to becoming domesticated. But where do these rules come from and how do children learn them?

There are some universal morals, such as not killing members of your own family or harming the innocent. However, there remains considerable cultural variation about what is right or wrong for other practices that cover everything seemingly trivial, such as what to wear or eat, to what consenting adults can do behind closed doors. This variation is most obvious when there is a cultural clash between groups who differ in their moral judgements, most often reflecting religious views. For example, there are varying Islamic practices for maintaining the modesty of women that range from covering just the hair with a scarf to the full body cover of the burqa. This is part of the religious moral code of Islam, though even so, there is considerable variation about how it should be interpreted and implemented. In 2011 France outlawed the burqa in public on the grounds that it was an infringement of civil liberties, though ironically many Muslim women regarded the ban as a form of religious persecution.⁵

Other aspects of modern Western societies, such as gay marriage, legalized prostitution, pornography and drug use, are considered morally depraved by various religious and conservative groups. Not only do moral values differ but they also change over time. Up until 1967, when the law was finally changed, homosexuality was illegal in England. Since then, there have been progressive amendments, despite intense objection from many groups, to remove discrimination by providing equal rights.

These examples of cultural variation over time and between different groups show that morals are not cast in stone but rather reflect the histories and nuances of various groups, who maintain their identity by enforcing moral values. This might suggest that all morality is learned in the Hobbesian tradition. However, in the same way that infants are wired to acquire a language depending on where they are raised, they also seem pre-configured to adopt the morality espoused by the social groups they enter.⁶

This preparation for morality is reflected in the way young infants interpret others’ behaviours. Even before they are capable of understanding any instruction from an adult, babies can tell the difference between right and wrong. As we have seen, babies as young as twelve months interpret moving geometric shapes as having goals and intentions because they looked longer when the objects changed their behaviour from helping to hindering.⁷ Arguably they were simply telling the difference between the good and the bad guys. In an extension of this original discovery, infant psychologist Kiley Hamlin at the University of British Columbia wanted to know whether telling the difference translated into actual preferences. After watching a sequence of the helper and hinderer puppets, Hamlin offered babies the opportunity to play with either puppet. Four out of five twelve-month-old infants chose the puppet that had been seen to be helpful.⁸ In another scenario, a puppet dropped its ball, which rolled over to one of two other puppets. One puppet returned the ball to its owner, whereas the other puppet ran off with it. Again, when offered the choice, infants preferred to play with the helpful puppet. Babies are not simply demonstrating that they can tell the difference between behaviours in these puppet shows; they are expressing a preference to be with the one that helps.

Not only do they prefer, but infants also punish. In one further set of these infant morality plays, a puppet that had previously stolen a ball was having difficulty opening a box. Along came two puppets. One helped the naughty thief open his box while the other one jumped on top of it, slamming it shut. At eight months, babies preferred to play with the puppet who thwarted the ball thief. Not only did they prefer to see justified retaliation, but they were also capable of dishing out punishment to antisocial puppets themselves. When they were given the opportunity to hand out treats to the puppets, two-year-olds punished the ball thief by giving them fewer or no treats and rewarded the good puppet that had retrieved the ball.⁹ Playing with puppets is all very well, but how do these preferences translate into real interactions with humans? To test this, two actresses each retrieved a toy and offered it to twenty-one-month-old infants. One of them failed in her attempt to hand the toy over by accidentally dropping it short, whereas the other offered the toy but snatched it back from the child just as they were about to grasp it. After witnessing the kind and the teasing adults, the infant was given the opportunity to retrieve a dropped toy to give to one of them in return. Three out of four infants preferred to hand the toy to the actress who had tried to be helpful even though unsuccessful, rather than the other one who had also smiled and spoken nicely to them but was deliberately mean-spirited.¹⁰ This suggests that infants are treating helpfulness as a disposition or trait in others – something that predicts how they will behave. Babies understand that there are the ‘good guys’ who are worth becoming friendly with because they are likely to help you in the future.¹¹

These findings have led my colleague Paul Bloom at Yale to argue that babies are born with the ‘sprouts’ for morality.¹² Even though they lack a full moral understanding of the adult world of crime and punishment, they recognize the basic difference between good and bad. Well before they enter a social world where they have to get on with others in the playgroup, children already have a sense of a reciprocal altruism – that one good turn deserves another and that freeloaders or mean people should be punished.

The property instinct

When young children get into conflicts, it is more often than not a dispute over ownership. About 75 per cent of young children’s arguments with peers concern possessions.¹³ As soon as a toy comes into the possession of another child, preschoolers want it.¹⁴ Owning stuff is all to do with status amongst competitors. These early disputes are a taster for later life in the real world. In many societies, especially in Western culture, possessions serve important functions as ostensive markers for self-identity to the extent that some adults will put their lives at risk defending their property. Every year, car owners are seriously injured or sometimes killed trying to prevent the theft of their vehicle by standing in front of, or clinging on to, the bonnet as it is driven away – acts that they would never contemplate in the cold light of day.¹⁵ Ownership can make us behave irrationally. William James was one of the first to recognize this importance of ownership as a reflection of self when he wrote,

A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.¹⁶

Later, Russell Belk a professor of marketing, would call this materialist perspective the extended self,¹⁷ whereby we use possessions to broadcast to others our own sense of identity; something that advertisers have understood ever since they realized that linking positive role models to products was the secret to sales success. We are what we own, which explains much of our emotional overreaction when our possessions are violated through theft, loss or damage. This is because we experience these transgressions as a personal tragedy or insult against us.

We are a species that spends extraordinary amounts of time, effort and resources in acquiring possessions, and when our stuff is taken away from us we feel personally aggrieved. Some have even gone as far as to call it a property instinct, wired into our brains.¹⁸ As such, understanding the power of ownership and the rules that accompany possessions are key components of domestication. We must learn to respect ownership rights in order to live together harmoniously. When I take possession of an object, it becomes ‘mine’ – my coffee cup, or my telephone. Ownership plays an important role in domestication because it is one way to demarcate acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. Theft and vandalization are wrong precisely because they are violations against another’s property.

Children as young as fourteen months know what it means to own something¹⁹ and by two years many already have possessions that they are attached to.²⁰ Around this time they begin to use possessive pronouns such as ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. At first, children only enforce property rights for their own possessions, so two-year-olds will protest if their stuff is taken away,²¹ but by three years, children will intervene on behalf of another by telling a puppet to ‘stop’ if it tries to steal someone else’s hat.²²

Understanding ownership can be complex as the rules are not always obvious. As Waterloo psychologist Ori Friedman points out, it may be acceptable to collect seashells from a public beach, but to take them from a stall selling them is theft.²³ There is nothing on the shell to tell you who owns it, but rather we rely on rules and conventions that have to be learned. Collecting seashells from many national parks is illegal, so without knowing the local regulations, one can easily fall foul of the law. Or it might be an unfamiliar custom. Each year, tourists return lava rocks that they have collected from Hawaii. It is not illegal to take them, but when they learn of the bad-luck curse that is said to befall those who remove the rocks from the island, they feel compelled not to tempt the local superstition.

Then there are some ownership disputes that can be baffling and ambiguous. Imagine a boy trying to knock a coconut from a tree. He manages to dislodge it with a well-aimed rock, but it falls at the feet of another boy walking past, who picks it up. Which of them has the rightful claim of ownership? The one who put in the failed effort to retrieve the coconut or the one who ended up with it in their possession? Or consider the real-life case of the Banksy graffiti artwork painted in May 2012 on the outside wall of a North London thrift shop to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. Only days after the mysterious artist painted it on a mundane section of wall, it was chiselled off by the building’s owners and sold at auction for $1.1m in Miami despite attempts by the London authorities to prevent its sale as a piece of public art.²⁴ The owners of the building argued that, as it was their wall, they owned the art. The residents argued that it was public property, and if they had asked a three-year-old, they might have got the same answer. When it comes to the trade-off between materials and effort, preschoolers are more likely to attribute ownership to the one who did all the work and came up with the idea, whereas most adults (unless they are local London residents) take into consideration who owned the material.²⁵ The same goes for intellectual property. When children were asked to make up a story and then the experimenter retold it to another, either acknowledging that it was the child’s idea or taking the credit themselves, children as young as five years disliked those who took credit after stealing their ideas.²⁶

There is something very personal about ownership. Interestingly, the change of ownership of any object to one’s own object registers in the brain as enhanced activity.²⁷ In particular, there is a spike of brain activity known as a P300, which occurs 300 milliseconds after we register something of importance – it’s a wake-up-call signal in the brain. When something becomes mine, I pay more attention to it in comparison to an identical object that is not mine. This is why children and adults remember more shopping items placed in their own basket compared to the experimenter’s basket, even though they were not instructed that there was going to be a memory test.²⁸ Their P300 signals reveal that their brains register the significance of the object as belonging to them, and so focus on it, which leads to better memory.

Why should we care more about, and remember, objects that belong to us? One possibility suggested by the extended self is that the concept of who we are is partly constructed by the physical objects that we accumulate, which remain as permanent reminders of our identity, so it is important to remember what is ours. From the domesticated brain perspective, it is critically important to remember what is ours so as not to conflict with others’ ownership.

This shift of interest to things that we own and our extended self explains one of the more unusual discoveries in human consumer behaviour. In a classic study²⁹ by economist Richard Thaler, students were handed out coffee mugs and then given the opportunity to sell them to other students. As every real-estate agent would expect, each student’s asking price was on average much higher than buyers were willing to pay. This bias, known as the endowment effect (TEE), is a tendency to overvalue things that come into our possession. Even just the prospect of owning an object, such as when we bid for an item in an auction, is enough to trigger our tendency to spend more than we would imagine. If we are temporarily the highest bidder in the course of an auction, we psychologically take possession of the object and are more willing to bid higher.³⁰ If we touch an object that is for sale, then that physical contact means that we are more willing to buy it³¹ – something that every good salesperson knows, when they tell you to try an item of clothing on or take a car for a spin.

One commonly accepted explanation for TEE is that it reflects loss aversion – the prospect of a loss outweighs our attitudes to the prospect of a gain.³² There are infinitely more things that we can gain in the world, but there are a finite number of things that we can lose. Brain-imaging studies of adults trading for items showed that when they were buying objects at a bargain price, the reward centres of their brains lit up.³³ However, if they were made a derisory offer for an object they possessed, adults experienced negative emotions to the extent that their pain centres were activated. They felt bad about having to sell it at a lower than expected price, which is TEE. In rare cases, TEE can become so extreme that individuals cannot bear to throw anything away and become compulsive hoarders.

TEE has been found in children as young as five years of age,³⁴ but it is not clear that it appears earlier or is a universal phenomenon. Some societies show weaker effects³⁵ and TEE has been reported not to exist in one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, who carry relatively little in the way of personal possessions when they are on the move.³⁶ We have also looked for TEE in much younger children in our own lab with little success. This is surprising, because we know that they have a basic grasp of ownership and will fight over toys. One possibility is that TEE is shaped by the emerging sense of self in relation to others which probably begins when children begin socializing with other children. As young children start to accumulate possessions as markers of self-identity, they begin to overvalue stuff that comes into their possession. However, this simple ownership bias must be reconciled with the need to fit in with others. They have to learn to share and be reasonable about possessions, because one cannot live a purely selfish life without running the risk of being rejected by the group.

Sharing

Young children are notoriously selfish when it comes to sharing. Although they spontaneously empathize with others’ emotions, preschoolers will not willingly share their own food at lunchtime unless they have been specifically asked.³⁷ They do understand that they cannot keep objects that belong to others, but left to their own devices, young children tend not to share with other children.³⁸ As many parents know, they have to be told to share.

Children’s willingness to share was tested in a game wherein they could decide which of two rewards in the form of sweets they and an anonymous other child received.³⁹ There were three games that pitted a strategic option against an egalitarian option of equal sharing as shown in the table below.

In game one, they could choose between the strategic option, where either they received one sweet and the other person received nothing, or they both received one sweet. In game two, the strategic option was that the child received one sweet and the other received two sweets, or the egalitarian option where they both received one sweet. In game three, the child could choose the strategic option to keep both sweets and the other received nothing or again the egalitarian option where both got one sweet.

An adult in game one should select the egalitarian option unless they are inherently nasty to other people, since they realize it should not make any difference to them. In game two, it still does not make any difference which option you choose, but you can maximize the other person’s wealth by selecting the first option. In game three you can either share or take everything for yourself. When presented with these options, three- to four-year-old children tended to act most selfishly, always maximizing their own sweet collection. Less than one in ten was willing to share or optimize the other’s gain. In contrast, almost half of the seven- to eight-year-olds behaved more equitably, making sure that there were no imbalances on any of the games, with one exception. If they were told that the other anonymous child was from their own school, they were more likely to give them the larger reward on game two. They were more sensitive to establishing potential allegiances.

Potential allegiances are important when you need support or have to work together through cooperation. When forced to cooperate, younger children also seem to get the point of sharing. Pairs of three-year-old children were faced with a problem where both individuals had to jointly pull on two ropes to dislodge a barrier that released desirable marbles.⁴⁰ The clever trick was that the mechanism was rigged to give one individual a greater reward than the other, despite their joint effort. When this happened, the child who received the greater reward shared their winnings with the other child. If they had not worked together and the apparatus simply delivered an unexpected reward to one child, they did not share. In this cooperative situation, much younger children were willing to share, just like the older children. In contrast, chimpanzees hardly ever share. Faced with the same barrier problem but working for food instead of marbles, chimpanzees kept the reward for themselves irrespective of whether they had help or not from another chimpanzee.

It would appear that as soon as young children have to work together, they share the fruits of their labour. Yet only when they are older than five years will they spontaneously begin to share treats from a sudden windfall. With more domestication, children become increasingly sensitive to the inequalities that life sometimes brings and act more altruistically.⁴¹ There are a number of reasons why children might become more generous. They may simply become less selfish and more prosocial because it is in our human nature to become kinder with age, when we come to understand and appreciate the inequalities of life. That would be the noble interpretation. It may be that, with experience, children learn that the social norm is to share because in all likelihood this will be reciprocated in future encounters.

An alternative, darker explanation is a bit more Machiavellian. One reason that people share or are generous is to enhance their reputation in the eyes of others by appearing to be kind. Support for this ulterior motive comes from observations that adults are less financially generous when there is no audience to witness their donations⁴² or the amount they donate remains anonymous.⁴³ It would seem that noble acts of generosity are intended to help ourselves more than help others. This is also true of children. When five-year-olds were presented with the opportunity to share stickers, they were decidedly ungenerous unless the recipient was present and the amount they shared was transparent.⁴⁴

Ulterior motives do not mean that all of us operate like this and the fact that vast amounts of money and property are donated to charities anonymously seems to undermine the ignoble account. However, these forms of altruism work at the psychological level because they make us feel better about ourselves. In order to understand such altruistic acts, we have to recognize how helping others makes us feel good, but feel bad when we don’t.

The kindness of strangers

We often help others in situations where there is no immediate benefit to ourselves or indeed there is no reward in the future. We are even willing to help strangers. Young children start to help strangers surprisingly early. At eighteen months, they will spontaneously pick up dropped items and open doors or boxes to help an experimenter even when they are not told to do so or given a reward.⁴⁵ In fact, rewarding children makes them less helpful because we generally do not like having our acts of kindness reduced to something that was done for obvious gain.⁴⁶ It is unlikely that children have been trained to help, but rather, they do so because it is in our human nature.⁴⁷ Animals can help other members of their own species, but the observations of helping in non-human primates are sporadic and open to alternative interpretations that divide the scientific community. In fact, some argue that the basic principle of helping others out of good will is uniquely human.⁴⁸

Chimpanzees will reliably help a human retrieve an out-of-reach object, but the helping may have been shaped during their captivity. Whenever we see domesticated animals performing feats that are not observed regularly in their natural habitat, we have to ask whether those abilities are part of their repertoire or rather demonstrations of the power of learning and expectations. After all, throughout this book we have been arguing that domestication changes brains and behaviour. Semi-wild chimpanzees⁴⁹ and other non-human primates⁵⁰ appear to cooperate, but they do not necessarily think of helping as a selfless act. There are many reports of animals working in collaboration but ultimately these are strategies to benefit the individual.

Chimpanzees will lend a hand to help another gain access to food, but not if they have to give up food that is already in their possession. Not only do chimpanzees fail to share food with non-relatives but that selfishness also applies to mothers and their babies. When their baby is begging for food, it has been observed that mothers will pass on a morsel, but when they do, it is usually done reluctantly and she gives the less nutritious and appetizing parts of the plant to her baby.⁵¹ Of course, chimpanzee mothers possess a maternal instinct to protect their babies, but apparently that nurturing does not reliably extend to readily giving up a treat or two. Can you imagine a human mother behaving like that at the local nursery group?

For humans, helping is all about emotions. We help others out of the goodness of our hearts. As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.’ The kindness of strangers reminds us that humans are an altruistic species willing to help others even when there is no obvious pay-off. We do so because it seems right but also because we feel better about ourselves and worse when we do not. When we help others we get a ‘warm glow’– an experience that registers in the pleasure centres of our brain.⁵²

The other mechanism that promotes altruism is not pride, but the fear of criticism from others for not helping. Swiss economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter developed a cunning game to test people’s motives to help the group.⁵³ They had teams of adults play a game where they were given tokens worth money that they could either keep or put into a collective pot as an investment that would be paid out to everyone irrespective of whether they contributed to the pot or not. The best strategy is for everyone to contribute, but someone who wants to get the most out of the game – in other words, to be a freeloader – should not contribute any of their own money and just reap the benefits of all the other players willing to make a contribution. The game was played anonymously, but after each round of the game it was revealed who had contributed what. Now players were given the chance to ‘fine’ those who had not contributed sufficiently to the pot. The twist was that whoever imposed the fine also had to pay for the privilege even though they would not get their money back.

As the study progressed, something interesting happened. Even though it came at a cost to impose a fine, players were more willing to pay up in order to punish freeloaders. Over time, freeloaders started to contribute more to the pot as the rounds continued. Anonymous punishment was changing their behaviour. We prefer to punish transgressors even when it comes at a cost to ourselves, but that punishment eventually changes selfish people’s behaviour.

Revenge is a dish best served cold

People will do things that come at a cost to themselves just because they know that the cost will be greater for someone else they wish to hurt. They will say, ‘I know it was wrong but it was worth it just to see the look on his face.’ It is an act of revenge but one that comes at a personal cost. Why do we do this? Consider the following scenarios. How would you like £10 for doing nothing? No strings attached. You would probably eagerly say yes. Now imagine a different scenario where I offered £100 to another person who was allowed to keep some of it only if they shared it with you. Whether or not they got to keep any money depended on your decision. What if they offered you £10 and kept £90 for themselves? Chances are you would refuse the offer and you would both end up empty-handed. Why? In both situations you would be getting exactly the same amount of money for doing nothing and yet most people think that it is unfair to be offered anything below 20 per cent. Rather than accept something for nothing, they would prefer that the other person did not get anything at all.⁵⁴

This scenario, known as the ultimatum game, demonstrates that humans have a sense of fairness. This comes with domestication, where there are implicit rules operating as much as codes of conduct. Most people would rather sacrifice than suffer to see someone else do better than them. This is when we act out of spite. The reason is that we have a sense of fair play and when we think that others are benefiting unfairly we then seek a way of redressing the balance. However, that requires giving up or rejecting a potential reward. It’s a bit like not eating the marshmallow now so that you can benefit from knowing that you have ensured that things are fair. This requires inhibiting the urge to take the money, which is why the PFC of adults who play the ultimatum game is activated when they reject derisory offers.⁵⁵ Also, when adults have the PFC part of the brain temporarily disrupted, using a very powerful brief magnetic pulse, they do not reject the meagre offer even though they know it is unfair.⁵⁶

Chimpanzees do not have this sense of fairness, which is why they do not share food when they have cooperated together to retrieve it. It also explains why they will happily accept something rather than nothing in a chimp version of the ultimatum game.⁵⁷ However, the primatologist Frans de Waal disagrees that non-human primates lack an understanding of fairness and argues instead that social animals do have a sense of fair play. One of the best examples he gives is the video of a capuchin monkey trained to exchange a rock for a piece of cucumber.⁵⁸ Cucumber is a rather unappetizing food, but they will happily accept a trade unless they see another capuchin in the cage next door being offered a desirable grape instead of a dull piece of cucumber. In this situation, the first capuchin threw a temper tantrum at the injustice of the situation, rattling the cage in anger, and tossed the food back at the experimenter. The trouble with this interpretation is that capuchins and chimpanzees will show outrage even when there is no other animal around benefiting from these exchanges.⁵⁹ They don’t care whether or not another animal gets a good trade, only that they do not get one.

Another negative emotion related to perceived injustices is jealousy. Jealousy is one of the most corrosive aspects of social development, and it can endure well into adulthood. We do not easily grow out of this mindset as it comes to shape the way we perceive justice in the world. Most industrial disputes are not to do with an individual’s own working conditions and salary but more to do with those of everyone else. Our decisions are driven by the sense of relative comparisons.⁶⁰ When we learn that other people in our company earn more than us, we are indignant as we perceive this as a devaluation of our own self worth.

If we care so much about our self worth, why do we go out of our way to help or harm others at all? Surely the best strategy is not to expend resources at all. This has been studied in a field of behavioural economics known as game theory, made famous by the Princeton mathematician John Nash (the subject of the Hollywood blockbuster A Beautiful Mind). Nash studied negotiation situations using mathematics to determine the optimal strategies. One particular game-theory problem, known as the prisoners’ dilemma, led him to conclude that non-cooperation was the best policy. In this game, two suspects are interrogated in separate prison cells and must decide whether or not to inform on each other. The dilemma is that each is offered a deal of freedom if they inform on the other, putting their fellow suspect in jail for six months. If they both inform, then they both get three months. If both prisoners keep quiet, they only get one month apiece. Nash mathematically modelled the prisoners’ dilemma over many repetitions of different responses and concluded that the optimum strategy was to always defect and rat on the other person.⁶¹ However, if this is the case, then why do we see cooperation in the natural world, especially amongst humans – a question that dogged Darwin himself?

This has always been a puzzling aspect of cooperation. However, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out in The Selfish Gene, it is not the individual who benefits from these acts of revenge or altruism but rather the genes that shape these social behaviours.⁶² If genes produce behaviours in individuals that lead to a better fit for the group in the environment, because they generate the best strategy for procreation, these genes will win out and multiply, even though the individual may make sacrifices for the common good.

Another factor when it comes to humans is that we are not mindless vehicles for our genes. Game-theory problems assume that the decisions are made entirely independently, but if prisoners are allowed to communicate, cooperation rather than being selfish wins out as the most successful strategy.⁶³ Most importantly, domestication shapes how we feel about our decisions. We experience a mental and emotional life that motivates us to help or harm others and those reactions are shaped by our interpretations of what is right and wrong; interpretations that come from participating in a culture where we are expected to contribute.

Appeals to the heart

Charities depend on the milk of human kindness, but it turns out that this willingness to help depends on how much we see ourselves related to others. Read the following appeals from two charity campaigns and decide which you would be more likely to donate money to:

A) Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl who lives in Mali in Africa. Rokia is desperately poor and faces a threat of severe hunger, even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed and educate her, and provide her with basic medical care.

B) Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children. In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42 per cent drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated three million Zambians face hunger. Four million Angolans – one-third of the population – have been forced to flee their homes. More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.

Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychologist who advises governments and charities, has shown that when cases are presented like this, adults are more likely to give to little Rokia and offer twice as much than to donate to a cause that supports millions.⁶⁴ The amount they give is directly related to the emotions they experience, indicating that the quickest way to a donor’s pocket is not through the head but through the heart.

Those we relate to more easily trigger our emotions because we can identify with them. This phenomenon, known as the identifiable victim effect (IVE), is well appreciated by numerous charities that use the poster-child strategy to focus a campaign around an individual rather than a group. News media also exploit the IVE to maximize the impact of a story by providing a face and identity to tug at our emotional heartstrings. The public is more likely to rally around the plight of a single victim who can be identified than many unknown victims. You may have noticed the same strategy creeping into politicians’ rhetoric when they illustrate their case with an individual who they describe in ways the public can identify with. It seems that we can more easily empathize and understand the plight of one as opposed to many.

Even though we may be aware that we are being manipulated, we still find it difficult to avoid the IVE. One reason is simply the difficulty of comprehending the suffering of vast numbers.⁶⁵ As Joseph Stalin once remarked, ‘The death of a single Russian soldier is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.’ When we hear of a mass loss of life we are unable to comprehend it – to get our heads around it. It would appear that we are simply overwhelmed by the numbers. We are much more likely to act when we are faced with one victim or, as Mother Teresa explained, ‘If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’

There are a number of possible reasons why we are more likely to help one versus many. For a start, we are sensitive to the numbers involved. We reason that saving ten out of one hundred is more effective than saving ten out of one million. Dealing with many seems daunting and ultimately doomed to failure. With an identifiable victim there is a well-constrained target, one that is achievable. If this were true, then we would be more willing to help a small rather than a large number. However, there is something that rings hollow about the argument based on relative numbers. The IVE drops off rapidly if you increase the number of victims from one to two. Slovic has found that as soon as you introduce Rokia’s brother, ‘Moussa’, sympathy and donations decline significantly.⁶⁶ This suggests that it is the individual we identify with because we find it easier to empathize with the plight of one person. As we will read later, we are always at the mercy of the group when it comes to our decisions, but we can more easily put ourselves in another’s shoes than imagine the suffering of more than one person.

Gut reactions

Much of our moral reasoning seems to be guided by emotional reactions to what we think is right and wrong. When we consider immoral acts, we may literally feel disgusted and repulsed. Domestication shapes these gut reactions, using them to fuel our sense of moral outrage. For example, homosexuality is tolerated in many societies both today and in the past, which indicates that there is no natural built-in prejudice against same-sex relationships. If children are raised in a society that condemns the practice, they must be assimilating the moral outrage projected by the group as a personal feeling of disgust.

The reliance on feelings of disgust has been referred to as the wisdom of repugnance by those revolted by certain acts who feel justified for condemning others’ behaviours because it makes them feel sick.⁶⁸ The problem with moral repugnance is that what people find disgusting depends on who you ask. As the evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering points out in his recent exposé of human sexuality, Perv, there is considerable variation in so-called typical sexual behaviour.⁶⁹ The disgust factor is a poor barometer of what and why some sex acts are considered wrong. Consider the following scenario as a way of examining your own moral attitudes and repugnance. Imagine that a brother and sister who are both over the age of consent are on holiday and decide one night to have sexual intercourse. Both willingly agree to participate, take adequate precautions and decide not to tell anyone. Even though no one was hurt in any psychological or physical way and both enjoyed the experience, do you think that they acted immorally? Most people who consider this scenario are disgusted, but when asked to explain why, they are unable to provide a good reason as to why it is so wrong. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt⁷⁰ puts it, they are ‘morally dumbfounded’.

Haidt believes that some moral values are not learned but rather are based on intuitions about what is right or wrong – maybe the same good and bad reasoning that has been observed in infants. We have a gut reaction that is emotional, often in the absence of having any good reason to explain our feelings. In what has become a very famous thought experiment known as the trolley problem, adults seem to reach different moral judgements based on gut reactions.⁷¹ In this problem we are told that there are five engineers working on a railway track as a runaway carriage (trolley) approaches them. If the trolley is not stopped, then all five will die in the collision. However, there is a junction with a switch that will divert the trolley on to another branch of the track where there is only one engineer working. What should they do? Do nothing and let the trolley plough into five workers, or intervene to push the switch to divert the trolley on to the track so it ends up killing only one worker. Most people think that the right thing to do is to divert the train. In fact, not only is it the right thing to do, it would be morally wrong not to flip the switch. We may feel for the individual but we know that it is right to save the group.

Now consider a different version of the trolley scenario. In the footbridge problem, you are standing on a footbridge over a railway track. Again there are five workers on the track with a runaway engine threatening to kill them all. However, you can prevent their deaths if you push a fat man who is sitting on the edge of the bridge on to the track. This will lead to his death but block the track and save the five engineers. Even though the outcomes are exactly the same in terms of the number of lives saved, very few adults think that they could take this action of pushing the man. For some reason it does not seem quite right.

This dilemma in decision-making reveals that most of us are moral intuitionists – basing our judgements about what is right or wrong on our gut feelings. Most of us would not push that man because it is too emotionally traumatizing to consider. If we did not have to physically push the man but rather he was standing on a trapdoor over the track, then individuals are more willing to release a switch to let him fall and block the trolley – same outcome, but less involvement.

This effect of emotional detachment explains why it is easier to kill others, the less contact and the further distance we can place between ourselves and victims – a concern that has been raised in current technological warfare where operatives use machines to wage attacks on the enemy. Gone are the days when soldiers had to be trained to overcome their emotional repulsion at using a bayonet to disembowel the enemy, when we can push a button and let a remote drone do the job thousands of miles away.

When we think about good or bad, we are employing different reasoning systems in the brain. One is fast and intuitive, whereas the other is slow and reflective. Even so, both systems can come into play when we act quickly and then justify our actions. Social neuroscientist Joshua Greene has shown that when adults are placed in a brain scanner and presented with the footbridge problem,⁷² emotional circuitry involving the posterior cingulated cortex, the MPFC and the amygdala is activated, indicating that they are feeling the situation. In contrast, the trolley problem, where you flip the switch rather than push the man, preferentially activates the reasoning areas of the PFC and inferior parietal lobes that perform calculations. This is where reason is the driving mechanism when deciding what to do.

In the same way that we are more likely to help an identifiable victim, we are less likely to harm someone we also identify with. We are more likely to sacrifice a stranger off the bridge than a relative, but more willing to sacrifice someone we hate than a stranger. It also explains why individuals are more willing to sacrifice their own lives in the footbridge problem if they perceive themselves as strongly related or fused to the same social group as the five workers.⁷³ They are now brothers-in-arms.

Why is it the case that morality is sometimes driven by our emotions rather than reason? Greene argues that we evolved to make rapid decisions that are based on feelings and gut reactions. In threatening situations we need to act quickly without thinking, which is why people often do things to save others that in the cold light of day they would not imagine themselves doing. Even though we might be about to use the slower system of reason to decide that it would be justifiable to push the fat man off the bridge, it would still feel wrong. We would feel guilty.⁷⁴

To lie is to be human

Guilt is a powerful motivator to conform. We feel guilty when we have done something that we regard as wrong. But how do we know what is right and wrong? As infants, we may have an intuitive sense of what is right or wrong when it comes to evaluating those who help or hinder, but other rules have to be learned over childhood. We have to learn the various rules by which the rest of those around us abide as part of our domestication. Some of these are moral laws (those that protect the rights of others, such as avoiding violence) whereas others are social rules (conventions that enshrine social values, such as dress codes). Somewhere around three to four years of age, children seem to become increasingly aware of the consequences of rule breaking, which they internalize as a sense of guilt.⁷⁵

When it comes to the law, most young children below seven or eight years of age operate like Judge Dredd, the futuristic law enforcer who makes no exceptions to the rules. They focus on the absolute outcome and judge an accidental act that causes more damage (knocking over fifteen cups) as more naughty than an intentional act that causes less damage (trying to steal a cup and dropping it). When young children learn that something is wrong, they are black and white in their reasoning and see no exceptions. They think that it is wrong for a husband to steal a new drug from a pharmacist who is selling it at an extortionate price, even if he does so to save his dying wife.⁷⁶

With age and experiences, children become more sophisticated in evaluating each situation. One common moral dilemma is whether to tell the truth or not. Initially, children learn that it is wrong to tell fibs, but around eleven years of age they understand that sometimes it is necessary and morally right to deceive. It’s not that younger children cannot understand deception. After all, they can pass the theory of mind tasks at four years that require understanding deception. Rather they are more rule-bound.

Nobody likes to be lied to and yet just about everybody lies. A lie is a deliberate attempt to generate a false belief to manipulate situations. We can either withhold important information or implant false information through deception so as to control the thoughts and behaviours of others. If someone says they do not lie, then (a) they don’t know what a lie is, (b) they don’t have anyone to lie to, or (c) they’re lying.

Diary studies kept for a week reveal that fewer than one in ten of us say that they did not lie at all during this period.⁷⁷ Many think that lying means making things up, but it also includes not fully disclosing all the information when it is relevant. Of course, sometimes there is a good reason to lie. If a murderer turns up at our house asking where their intended victim is hiding, then clearly we should lie if we know the answer. This would be a justified lie because it would be morally wrong to disclose the whereabouts of the victim. We cannot and should not always tell the truth.

To lie is to be human and even if it were possible not to lie, then it would not be preferable. How often do we lie to prevent hurting someone’s feelings? Not only would it be excruciatingly embarrassing if we always told the truth, but eventually relationships would break down and social cohesion would grind to a halt. Sheldon Cooper, the savant physicist in The Big Bang Theory comedy, is constantly struggling with this aspect of normal human social interaction. If you always told the truth, you would lose friends and partners fast. We need to lie in order to keep the peace.

In fact, most lies are not directed at making others feel better about themselves because we are twice as likely to tell lies that affect what others think about us.⁷⁸ People tell lies to enhance their self-esteem, to get others to like them or to gain respect. They also lie to avoid punishment. Such lying is done to conceal our true feelings, motives, plans and actions because we believe that others will judge us more negatively if we reveal the truth.

The trouble with lying is being found out. Very often, it is not so much the act but rather the deception and loss of trust that is the most distressing aspect of lying. To avoid exposure as a cheat, lying is a powerful incentive and so there is a constant battle to deceive others and detect those who deceive us. Domestication is supposed to teach us how to get along with each other but sometimes that requires learning how to deceive to avoid being rejected or punished.

Would I lie to me?

One way to avoid being detected is to convince ourselves that we are in fact telling the truth. This is our capacity for self-deception.⁷⁹ The sociobiologist Robert Trivers argues that we have developed the capacity for self-deception so that we may deceive others more easily by not emitting cues that reveal that we are lying.⁸⁰ When people are forced to maintain the truth and a lie simultaneously, this places demand on their executive functions to ensure that they tell a consistent story that does not contradict itself. Depending on the extent of the lie, the deceiver is likely to become entangled in a web of deceit. By deceiving ourselves we can better deceive others.

Self-deception has many advantages and opportunities. Self-deception enables us to help convince others that we are better than we really are.⁸¹ We like others to be confident, especially when we feel vulnerable, and that confidence in us, in turn, perpetuates the initial lie to ourselves. From lovers to leaders, we prefer those who exude confidence and are more willing to believe what they say and follow their recommendations. By enhancing our self-image through deception, we are increasing our perceived illusion of control, which in turn reduces uncertainty in our choices and improves performance. Also, the more that we engage in self-deception, the more we come to believe our own stories. This is because of the reconstructed nature of recall and the problem of false memories. Participants forced to make up fictitious stories about a short movie they had watched eventually came to believe their own lies after two months. They could no longer tell the difference between the truth and the fiction that they had created. In short, self-deception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The path to self-deception is an easy one to take. Most of us already believe that we are above average on all the important social traits of beauty, wit and intelligence. We are more likely to take the credit when things turn out right. Eight out of ten of us assume that everything is going to turn out better for us. Divorce rates in the West are currently at 40 per cent, which means that two out of every five couples will split, but not surprisingly, when asked, no newly-wed couples think that they will separate in the future.⁸² Even divorce lawyers, who should know better, think they are not likely to get divorced. People literally see themselves in a more positive light.

It has often been assumed that we engage in self-deception as a defence mechanism to protect ourselves from harsh reality. That’s why many of us avoid going to the doctor’s to take a diagnostic test or wait longer in the hope of good news. Trivers thinks otherwise. He believes self-deception is an offence mechanism that facilitates our manipulation of others. When we self-deceive, we are generating a positive spin to impress others. Moreover, self-deception has one final twist, in that we are more likely to forgive and not punish others when they show all the signs that they are not aware that they are deluded. We can almost forgive someone who has fallen into their own trap of self-deception. It is as if they are not responsible for their actions.

Saying sorry

Another important component of domestication is knowing when to apologize. When we say sorry, we are telling the victim that we regret our actions but, most importantly, that we value who they are. If we did not care, we would not say sorry. This is one reason why we are more likely to forgive someone when they apologize, but should we believe them? After all, it is easy enough to say sorry if you think that it will get you off the hook. When we deceive we are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, but if our scam is revealed then the retribution is much more severe.⁸³ Apologies can backfire when we discover the act was intended to harm the injured party. Then the perpetrator is obviously trying to dupe the victim, which is why we cannot easily forgive someone who apologizes after deliberately trying to take advantage.

False apologies generally work because it is in our nature to believe what we are told. We are a species that relies on information and advice from others and so it makes sense to trust them. ‘She told me that she thinks you are really attractive’ or ‘I would not eat that if I were you!’ are just two sorts of statements that could change the course of our lives. If you did not believe what you were told, then you would not survive very long. It is in our interest to trust others.

Children start out as fairly gullible creatures, trusting what they are told. Part of the fun of being an adult is our ability to easily trick children and they generally enjoy the deception. Fantasy, magic, jokes and unexpected surprises work particularly well with children because they trust adults are telling the truth. This makes a lot of sense because they are naïve. They are not in a position to check the truth of many of the claims they hear. Imagine trying to pass on information if everything you said was taken with a degree of scepticism. Schooling children would be impossible if they always doubted.

This bias to believe even shows up in our brain activity. Neuroscientist Sam Harris put adults in a scanner and asked them to decide whether statements were true or false.⁸⁴ Irrespective of whether participants agreed with the statement, were not sure or rejected it, the PFC was activated. However, when participants rejected statements as false, this decision activated other regions of the brain, including the ACC and the caudate that are both involved with negative emotions. They also took significantly longer to reject statements. This finding supports an idea originally proposed by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote that merely contemplating an idea leads to the assumption that it is correct and that rejecting it as untrue is more difficult. We want to believe what we are told. We prefer to trust.

We are both good and bad

Humans are naturally inclined to be helpful. It is not in our nature to disagree, refuse help or harm others in our group. But we must also be guided by domestication as to what is appropriate. There may always be temptations to take advantage of others, but this is risky and we do so at our peril. When we lived in smaller groups, it would have been catastrophic for our survival if we were excluded from the group as a cheat or freeloader. The evolution of cooperation and collaboration that propelled early hominids into societies bound by rules was based on the principle of reciprocity – an eye for an eye. Even today, when it is possible to survive on our own because we no longer need to forage and hunt for survival, most of us still carry the burden of obligation deep in our brains as the emotional consequences of prosocial behaviour.

Of course, there are always a few that do not operate with these inclinations and this may come down to their biology, their childhood experiences or some combination of the two. Earlier, we learned how abusive experiences shape children’s brains and influence their behaviour. In one study comparing children raised in stable homes with those raised in abusive environments, only one toddler from an abusive household came to the aid of or comforted another distressed child in the playgroup. Most from the stable homes helped.⁸⁵ Remember how securely attached children readily seek out and accept comfort from a caregiver. In contrast, insecurely attached children either do not seek out comforting or do not readily settle when it is offered. When they observed the helper/hinderer movies we described earlier, insecurely attached infants were not surprised when the mother shape abandoned her child.⁸⁶ This is why domestication is so important in moulding children’s expectations about what is right or wrong.

On the other hand, our biological propensity to be prosocial does not of course mean that we will indiscriminately help anyone. The modern world is still full of conflict between groups that fight over territory, resources and ideas. We may be prosocial animals but our kindness typically only extends to those we identify with – the groups to which we belong. This may be due to an evolutionary imperative to favour those with whom we share genes but the general rule of thumb is to be kind and assume that others will be kind back to you. Somehow that message seems to get lost when we think about the ills of our modern society. This need to belong to groups and the way it influences our attitudes and behaviour is extraordinarily strong – one of the most powerful incentives we can experience as a social animal. It may be no surprise that most people prefer social acceptance, but what is surprising are the lengths that some will go to to become members of a group – and the terrible retribution they can wreak when they are excluded.