The Domesticated Brain: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

Shane Bauer was one of three American hikers imprisoned in Iran in 2009. At the time of their arrest in the Middle East, Shane, his girlfriend Sarah Shourd and friend Josh Fattawere were hiking in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, looking for the Ahmed Awa waterfall, a tourist attraction near the Iraq–Iran border. After they visited the waterfall, the Iranian authorities claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and arrested the three on suspicion of spying. Shourd was released after fourteen months on humanitarian grounds, but Bauer and Fattawere were convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. They spent twenty-six months in captivity and were later released in September 2011 after bail of $500,000 was paid.

This experience in a foreign land would leave a profound effect on Bauer and his attitude towards imprisonment, especially when he discovered that prison conditions were sometimes more extreme in his own country. In an article in the magazine Mother Jones¹ Bauer wrote, ‘Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. I never thought I’d see worse in American prisons.’ He was determined to reveal the horrors of his homeland’s use of solitary confinement as a form of legalized torture. On a visit to a Californian prison, an officer asked him about his time in Iran. Bauer explained

no part of my experience – not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners – was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated?

Loneliness is often only a temporary state as one adapts to new environments, but when that isolation is used as a punishment enforced over days, months and even years in solitary confinement, it can be the cruellest way to treat another human. Physical torture and starvation are dreadful, but according to those who have suffered imprisonment, it was the isolation that they found the worst. Of his time in prison on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote that ‘Nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship’, and he knew men in prison who preferred half a dozen lashes with a whip rather than being in solitary confinement.²

It is estimated that 25,000 US prisoners are currently locked in tiny cells, deprived of all meaningful human contact. Many of them spend a few days there. Some have been isolated for years. These are not always the most violent inmates. Prisoners have been ‘locked down’ for simply reading the wrong book. There are no international codes of conduct for this punishment and no other democratic country uses solitary confinement as much as the US. It is a shocking anomaly from a nation that claims to be so committed to human rights. In 2012, the New York Civil Liberties Union published their findings about the use of solitary confinement in the state and concluded ‘These conditions cause serious emotional and psychological harm, including severe depression and uncontrollable rage.’³

Those who willingly volunteer for isolation can also experience psychological distress. Forty years ago, French scientist Michel Siffre conducted a series of studies to investigate the rhythms of the body when isolated from external measures of time such as natural sunlight. He spent months in caves without any clocks or calendars and discovered that the human body operates not on a twenty-four-hour cycle, but rather on a forty-eight-hour cycle when there are no daylight cues. Given enough time in isolation, people will revert to a cycle where they stay awake for thirty-six hours and then sleep for twelve.⁴ He also discovered the psychological pain of social isolation. Even though he was in constant communication with his assistants above ground, his mental health began to deteriorate. In his last study, conducted in a cave in Texas, he began to lose his sanity.⁵ He became so lonely that he tried to capture a mouse that he had named Mus that occasionally rummaged through his supplies. Siffre wrote in his diary,

My patience prevails. After much hesitation, Mus edges up to the jam. I admire his little shining eyes, his sleek coat. I slam down the dish. He is captured! At last I will have a companion in my solitude. My heart pounds with excitement. For the first time since entering the cave, I feel a surge of joy. Carefully I inch up the casserole. I hear small squeaks of distress. Mus lies on his side. The edge of the descending dish apparently caught him on the head. I stare at him with swelling grief. The whispers die away. He is still. Desolation overwhelms me.

Such is the need for companionship that the audience can fully understand why the shipwrecked FedEx employee Chuck Noland played by Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away (2000) strikes up a relationship with a volleyball he calls Wilson (after the ball’s manufacturer). He even risks his own life to save Wilson when the ball falls into the ocean during an attempt by Chuck to escape the island on a makeshift raft. Chuck dives into the ocean after the ball, calling out desperately for Wilson, but eventually gives up, apologizing to the ball as it drifts off on the current. It is one of the most unusual ‘death’ scenes for an inanimate object and yet this emotional trauma immediately resonates with the audience because we understand what loneliness can do to someone.

Just like me

These tales of desperation for companionship reinforce a central point of this book: that the human brain evolved for social interaction and that we have become dependent on domestication for survival. Social animals do not fare well in isolation and we are the one species that spends the longest period being raised and living in groups.⁶ Our health deteriorates and life expectancy is shortened when we are on our own. The average person spends 80 per cent of their waking hours in the company of others and that social time is preferred to time spent alone.⁷ Even those who deliberately seek out isolation, such as hermits, monks and some French scientists, are not exceptions that prove the rule.

It is not enough just to have people around; we need to belong. We need to make emotional connections in order to forge and maintain those social bonds that keep us together. We do things to make others like us and refrain from doing things that make them angry. This may seem trivially obvious, until you encounter those who have lost the capacity for appropriate emotional behaviour and you realize just how critical emotions are for enabling social interactions. Various brain disorders such as dementia can disrupt emotions, making them too extreme, too flat or too inappropriate. Even those without brain disorders vary in their capacity for emotional expression. Those lacking in or unwilling to share their emotions are cold and unapproachable, whereas others who willingly express their emotions, assuming they are positive, are warm and friendly.

Sometimes others’ emotions can be infectious. Emotional contagion describes the way that others’ expressions can trigger our emotions automatically. Many of us get teary when we see others crying at weddings and funerals. Or we may collapse into a fit of the giggles when a friend does, even though we should be keeping our composure in front of others. Actors call this ‘corpsing’, probably because the worst time to giggle is when playing a corpse on stage.

Laughter and tears are two social emotions that can transmit through a group like an involuntary spasm. When we are sharing these emotions we are having a common experience that makes us feel connected to each other. We know this is innate, rather than learned, because babies will also mimic the emotions of others. They cry when they hear other babies cry or see others in distress. Charles Darwin described how his infant son William was emotionally fooled by his nurse: ‘When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed.’⁸

What could possibly be the benefit of emotional contagion and why do we mimic some expressions and not others? One suggestion is that expressions evolved as adaptations to threat. Fear changes the shape of our face and raises our eyebrows, so that can make us more receptive to potential information from the world. On the other hand, disgust, where we wrinkle up our noses and close our eyes, produces the opposite profile, making us less susceptible to potentially noxious stimuli.⁹ Seeing or hearing someone vomit makes us gag, possibly as a warning to expel the contents of our own stomach as we both may have eaten something that is not good for us.

Our capacity for imitation is supported by brain mechanisms that form part of the so-called mirroring system – a network of brain areas that include neurons in the motor cortex that control our movements. These neurons are normally active when we are planning and executing actions. However, back in the 1990s in Parma, Italy, researchers chanced upon a discovery about motor neurons that was to change the way we think about ourselves and what controls our actions. Vittorio Gallese and colleagues had been measuring from a neuron in the premotor cortex of a rhesus macaque monkey, using a very fine electrode.¹⁰ The cell burst into activity when the monkey reached for a raisin. That was to be expected as it was a premotor neuron that initiates movements. However, the Italian researchers were astonished when the same cell also fired as the monkey watched the human researcher reach for a raisin. The monkey’s brain was registering the experimenter’s reaching; an activity that was controlled by the human brain.

The reason this is remarkable is that it used to be thought that the areas for perceiving others’ actions were different from the network for producing your own movements. Instead, the Italian researchers had discovered that around one in ten neurons in this region were ‘mirroring’ the behaviour of others. It was as if these mirror neurons in the monkey’s brain were pantomiming the actions of others. As neuroscientist Christian Keysers explained, ‘Finding a premotor neuron that responds to the sight of actions was as surprising as discovering that your television, which you thought just displayed images, had doubled all those years as a video camera that recorded everything you did.’¹¹

This dual role of copying other people’s behaviour and executing your own set the scientific community alight. Direct mapping between our brain and the brains of others, by observing them, could explain why we cry at weddings, feel others’ pain, emotional contagion and all manner of social behaviours that seem to reveal the human capacity for mimicking. It was as though scientists had found a direct psychic connection between the minds of others. It was even announced that the discovery of mirror neurons was as significant to understanding the brain as the discovery of the structure of DNA was to biology; while this is an exaggeration, it captures the excitement mirror neurons generated.¹²

Others were more sceptical because recording directly from neurons in the brain of a human had not been done. However, in 2010, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried published a study¹³ of patients he had been treating for epilepsy. To isolate the affected brain region, he implanted electrodes to determine which areas to surgically remove – much in the same way that Wilder Penfield had done all those years earlier with his neurosurgery patients. During this procedure, the patients were fully conscious and able to take part in a study designed to establish the presence of mirror neurons once and for all. They were asked to either smile, frown, pinch their index finger and thumb together or make a whole grip with their hand. When Fried found neurons that were activated during one of these movements, the patients were then shown a video of someone else making the same types of movements. Just as in the macaque monkey, premotor neurons were activated both by making a movement and also by watching someone else perform exactly the same action – bona fide mirror neurons in humans. The real burning question is how did they get there?¹⁴ Are they simply neurons that have acquired their dual activity after years of watching others and mapping their behaviour to one’s own movements? Or are babies already prepackaged with mirror neurons, which might explain reports where newborns have been shown to copy adult facial expressions without any learning?

The ‘in’ crowd

As we read in Chapter 2, there are reasons to believe that we may be born with a rudimentary capacity for mimicking others. Infant mimicry is instinctual but the system is not simply a dumb mechanism that slavishly copies every Tom, Dick or Harry a child encounters. Rather, infants become more discerning of others, assessing whether they are friend or foe. Initially, this distinction is drawn between those that share the same interests and preferences as the baby. In a food-preference study,¹⁵ eleven-month-olds were offered the choice of crackers or cereal from two bowls. Having made their choice, they watched as two puppets came along and approached the food. For each bowl, one puppet said, ‘Hmm, yum, I like this’ and the other said, ‘Ewww, yuck, I don’t like that.’ Each puppet expressed the opposite attitude to each food. The infant was then offered the choice to select to play with one of the puppets. Four out of five infants chose the puppet that had the same food preference as him or herself, irrespective of whether it was crackers or cereal. Before they have reached their first birthday, babies are showing clear signs of preference and prejudice. Just as their brains are tuning into the faces and voices that surround them, so too are they learning to identify who is, and who is not, like them.

To make this distinction, one has to have a sense of self-identity – knowing who we are and how we differ from others. This emerges most conspicuously during the second year of life. Famously, humans and other social animals recognize themselves in mirrors.¹⁶ Initially young infants treat their reflected image as a playmate, but around eighteen to twenty months they begin to show reliable mirror identification, indicating a new level of self-awareness.¹⁷ Somewhere between two and three years of age, children begin to show signs of embarrassment as indicated by blushing. As blood flushes our skin, reddening our face, blushing is an indicator of being uncomfortable in a situation that attracts the undesired attention of others. As Charles Darwin noted,

It is not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us, which excites a blush. In absolute solitude the most sensitive person would be quite indifferent about his appearance.¹⁸

Why blushing evolved is a bit of a mystery, but one suggestion is that it could work as a visual apology to others, thereby averting social ostracism.¹⁹ The problem with that is that blushing is not obvious in dark-skinned people and we were all dark once. Did it evolve its signalling properties only after the migration out of Africa? Nobody really knows why humans are the only animal that blushes, but the fact that it only occurs in the company of others means it must be related to signalling our sense of shame and guilt – emotions that depend on what we think others are thinking about us.

Self-awareness in children is also signalled by the appearance of the use of personal pronouns that we talked about in the last chapter when it comes to owning stuff. Towards the end of the second year, children are using ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, but they are also using gender labels such as ‘girl’, ‘boy’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – though females are ahead of males simply because they are generally more advanced with language.²⁰ This self-labelling as a boy or girl is one of the first markers of identity. Infants are sensitive to gender much earlier because they all show preferences for the female face at three to four months of age,²¹ but by the time they are two years old, most have a preference for their own gender.²² In fact, sensitivity to gender predates racial prejudice that appears much later. When asked to select potential friends from photographs, three- and four-year-olds show a reliable preference for their own gender but not their own race.²³

Once they know they are a boy or a girl, they become gender detectives, seeking out information about what makes boys different from girls.²⁴ This is when they begin to conform to the cultural stereotypes present in society. Not only are they gender detectives but they also police the differences as enforcers, criticizing those who display attitudes or behaviours associated with the opposite gender. By three to five years of age, children are already saying negative things about other children who they do not identify with. They are making a distinction between in-groups and out-groups. If you are in my gang, then we are both in-group members.

Initially group identity is gender specific but it can be based on something as trivial as dress code, which is why three-year-olds will prefer other children who wear the same-coloured T-shirt as themselves.²⁵ Child psychologist Rebecca Bigler at the University of Texas in Austin, who has spent twenty-five years studying interventions aimed at countering children’s bigotry, has concluded that once the child develops a prejudicial social stereotype, it can be almost impossible to get them to abandon it – ‘In the case of stereotyping and prejudice, it may well be that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’²⁶

Knowing me, knowing you

When we think about ourselves and others, certain areas are activated in our brains. Harvard neuroscientist Jason Mitchell,²⁷ one of the new vanguard of researchers in the field of social cognitive neuroscience, has pointed out that there is good evidence that there may be four to six regions that form networks that are consistently activated in social situations and not in other types of problem solving. If you are asked to imagine whether or not a historical figure like Christopher Columbus would know what an MP3 player is, this type of question activates these socially sensitive networks. This is because you have to infer the mindset of Columbus and imagine what he would think. However, if you ask whether an MP3 player is smaller than a bread bin, these areas remain silent. This is because the question now becomes a perceptual judgement based on your knowledge about the size relationship between different physical objects.

One of the circuits activated by social encounters is the mirroring system and includes regions where the mirror neurons we mentioned earlier have been found. This circuitry registers the physical properties of others as well as our own body shape and movements. It includes the premotor areas, parts of the frontal cortex and the parietal lobes – all regions involved in actions. The integration of neural systems that represent both our own bodies and the bodies of others can explain why watching the suffering of another person when they are in pain also triggers our own corresponding brain regions.²⁸

In addition to a system that registers the physical similarities with another person, another circuitry is activated when we contemplate ourselves, compared to thinking about others. This mentalizing system involves the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC – the region in the middle of your forehead), the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ – where the two lobes meet, which is a couple of inches above the temples) and the posterior cingulate (PC – located close to the crown of the head) and appears to support thought processes when you are thinking about yourself. These contemplations include the relatively stable aspects of our personality that we have insight into, such as ‘I am really quite an anxious person’, as well as ever-changing feelings such as ‘I am feeling quite confident at the moment’. This circuitry is also active when we mentally time travel to think about the past or imagine our self in the future.

Both stable and transitory self-reflection show up as increased activation of the MPFC.²⁹ Self-reflection also includes the extended self of objects. In the same way that there is a characteristic P300 brain signal that registers stuff that belongs to you, as discussed in the last chapter, the MPFC is activated in situations where the endowment effect is triggered, which supports the idea that this region is part of the neural representation of at least one aspect of self.³⁰

The self-reflection system is not just about naval gazing, however. It enables us to imagine our self in different situations that others might face. This sort of ability would enable one to self-project or simulate another person’s situation possibly as a way of understanding what their thought processes or emotions might be. The Scottish social neuroscientist Neil Macrae has described the MPFC system as a kind of knowing me, knowing you mechanism. In other words, when you are making judgements about other people, you are really comparing them to yourself. This is why, when adults are asked to judge others, the more objectively similar they are to the person they are thinking about, the more activation is observed in their own MPFC.

Once we identify with others in our group, we are more likely to mimic and copy them. These are acts of affiliation, signalling our allegiances. We want to be seen to be like others in the group in order to consolidate our position. However, if someone from an out-group copies us, we interpret this mimicry as mockery – an act of provocation. It is not enough that we like those who like us, but we are actively suspicious of others who are not in our tribe.³¹

Our empathy is also two-faced. When we watch someone from our ethnic group receive an injection in the cheekbone, we wince and register more mirrored pain in our brains compared to watching the same pain inflicted on someone from another race.³² We can more easily watch others suffer if we do not identify with them. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can witness and inflict suffering upon others without feeling any remorse by dehumanizing them. This is one of the reasons why we refer to those we persecute as insects, parasites, animals, plagues, or any other term that demeans our enemy or victim as not being a member of the human race.

When the division between groups escalates into conflict, humans treat each other in the most terrible ways imaginable. Whether it is political, economic or religious justification, there seem to be no boundaries when it comes to the suffering and cruelty we can inflict upon other humans when we regard them as the enemy. This has been borne out in countless conflicts in the modern era, where neighbours have turned on each other and committed atrocities that seem inconceivable. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Syria are just a few examples where communities that had known decades of peaceful coexistence suddenly erupted into genocide as one group tried to obliterate another.

That ordinary people can readily commit extraordinary atrocities against their neighbours is puzzling. What can make people behave in such a way that one would never dream possible? One explanation is that our own moral code is not as robust as we would wish. We are not as independently minded as we think we are. Rather, we are easily manipulated by the influence of the groups to which we belong and conform to the will and consensus of the majority rather than stand up against persecution and prejudice. We readily submit to the commands of individuals we perceive to have authority in the group. Whether it is our compliance to fit with what others do and say, or our obedience to follow orders, we are remarkably malleable to the pressure of the group. Our desire to be good group members seems to trump our desire to be group members who do good.

This idea is supported by two classic studies that dominate the field of compliance. The first was Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies,³³ conducted at Yale in the 1960s. Here, ordinary members of the public were recruited to take part in what they thought was a study of the effects of punishment on memory. The were asked to ‘teach’ a student in another room to learn lists of words by punishing mistakes with increasing levels of electric shock, rising in thirty increments from an initial 15 volts to the final 450 volts. The first level was labelled ‘mild’ whereas the 25th level (375 volts) was labelled ‘danger, severe shock’. The final two levels of 435 and 450 volts had no label other than an ominous ‘XXX’. In reality, the student in the other room was a confederate of the experimenter and there were no electric shocks. The real purpose of the study was to determine how far someone would go in inflicting pain on another innocent individual when instructed to do so by an authority figure. Contrary to what the psychiatrists had predicted – they thought only about one in a hundred members of the public would obey such lethal orders – two out of three participants administered the maximum level of electric shock even though the student had been screaming and pleading to be let go. They were prepared to torture the other person to death. This is not to say most were sadists at heart; many became very distressed at the pain they were causing and yet continued to obey the orders.

The second classic study that contributed to our understanding of the way that individuals conform to group pressure is Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo’s prison study,³⁴ conducted in 1971. In this mock scenario, students were recruited to take part in a two-week study of the effects of assigning the roles of prison guards and inmates in a makeshift prison built in the basement of the Stanford psychology department. The guards were told that they could not physically abuse the prisoners but they could create boredom, frustration and a sense of fear. After six days, and on the insistence of a fellow psychologist, Zimbardo abandoned the study after the guards were abusing the prisoners to such an extent that it went beyond the realms of ethical procedure. Even though they had not been given instructions to directly harm the inmates, some of the guards began to torment and torture the ‘prisoners’ over and beyond the original instructions. In the same way that three-year-olds were prejudiced against classmates who wore a differently coloured T-shirt, adult students took their prejudices and acted them out in violence. For Zimbardo, who interprets his study as a demonstration of the lack of personal responsibility, it was not the individuals but rather the toxic nature of the ‘us’-and-‘them’ mentality of the situation that had created the right conditions for cruelty.

First they came …

When we become members of a group, we activate biases and prejudices. Even groups formed on the basis of the flip of a coin exhibit these attitudes and behaviours. We know this from the seminal work of Henri Tajfel, the former head of my department at Bristol, and subsequent studies that found the same basic automatic effects of prejudice. Before he became a psychologist, Tajfel had been a prisoner held by the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war, this experience of seeing how humans can treat and degrade their fellow man in the most appalling ways led him to spend the rest of his professional life studying the psychology of groups and how prejudice operates. Tajfel discovered that prejudice does not have to be a deep-seated, historical hatred based on politics, economics or religion. These axes to grind can aggravate any bias, but they are not an essential factor in forming prejudice. Nor does it require authority figures dictating how group members should behave. You simply have to belong to a group. Tajfel showed that simply arbitrarily assigning Bristol schoolboys into two groups by the toss of a coin produced changes in the way members of each group treated each other.³⁵ Even though the boys were all from the same class, those within the same group were more positive to each other but hostile to those in the other group. They went out of their way to help members of their own group, but not others.

After the war, those quick to criticize German citizens accused them of apathy because they did nothing to stop the Nazis’ persecution. However, another viewpoint is one that comes from the out-group perspective. The individuals targeted were from the minorities in society so the majority did not feel threatened – it was not their problem. Initially the process was slow, during the pre-war years, so there did not appear to be a major cause for concern. Then, once the final solution was under way, people ignored what was going on.

This group mentality echoes the famous statement made after the war by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who had spoken out about the reluctance of citizens to prevent the atrocities when he said:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.³⁶

Other variations of this famous statement include the Catholics and of course the Jews, who became the focus of the ‘final solution’. In addition, gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally retarded were all considered substandard humans and outcasts by the majority of German society, so it was easier to ignore their plight.

Of course, the circumstances that led up to the Holocaust are extremely complicated and there were many contributing factors. It is easy with hindsight to pass judgement on others, but the ease with which people seemed to descend into moral depravity or at least an unwillingness to help the persecuted is a testament to the power of groups. Rather than dismissing a whole nation as apathetic, anti-Semitic or even evil, it is more sensible to look for explanations that address the way people behave once they identify with a group and consider themselves to be different.

Nothing has really changed, because history repeats itself with every ethnic conflict that arises around the world. If you take our built-in tendency to be members of a tribe and the prejudices that entails, and combine it with charismatic leaders who have an agenda to coerce the group to believe that they have a legitimate grievance against an out-group, then it is easier to understand how ordinary people with no political agenda and history of racism could turn on their neighbours. Automaticity of prejudice explains how groups of otherwise peaceful citizens become violent mobs seeking out enemies of the state in hate-fuelled witch-hunts for those who have been identified as out-group members. The ease with which we take sides also explains why other countries are reluctant to get involved in these non-domestic disputes unless their interests are directly threatened. One of the most disturbing aspects of mankind is that ordinary people will turn on others who they regard as different. This is especially true when they are perceived to be in competition for resources – a bias that is exploited by political groups to stir up hatred.

These examples seem to suggest that we are all sheep, prepared to go with the crowd even when that means behaving in an immoral way. Another more plausible interpretation is that we can reinterpret our behaviour as not being bad at all, but rather for the good of the group. Even in Milgram’s shocking studies, participants were more likely to comply with the instructions if they were told that it was necessary for the success of the study rather than simply told that they had no choice. Zimbardo had instructed how the guards should behave in his scientific study. It may be that these examples of extreme obedience and compliance are less about people blindly following orders but rather persuading others to believe in the importance of what they are doing. This creates a diffusion of accountability, where the individual no longer feels responsible for their actions. As British social psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, who repeated Zimbardo’s prison study in 2002, point out, ‘People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.’³⁷

Primate prejudice

It is often assumed that the prejudices that fuel group conflicts are attitudes that we have to learn. When you consider that for much of our civilization there has been constant conflict between groups of different economic, political and religious identities, then it is tempting to think that the prejudice that accompanies such conflicts must come from indoctrination. After all, national identity, political perspectives or religious beliefs are cultural inventions that we pass on to our children. And as we noted in the last chapter, we are inclined to believe what we are told. Surely we must learn to hate from others around us. However, when you look at other social animals you find evidence that prejudice is not uniquely human.

My colleague Laurie Santos at Yale wanted to know whether rhesus macaque monkeys were prejudiced.³⁸ Like nearly all primates, macaques live in social groups with hierarchies that are relatively stable, with dominant individuals and familial ties. The macaques Santos studies live on the beautiful Caribbean island of Cayo Santiago, a sanctuary for animals that had previously been used in US laboratories. The island is now home to around 1,000 free-ranging macaques who have formed into six distinct groups. Their social order has been well-documented, but Santos and her colleagues wanted to know if in-group members displayed evidence of prejudice against out-group members.

First they tested how individual macaques responded to static photographs of in-group and out-group members. When given a choice, macaques looked longer at the out-group individual in comparison to the in-group member. This was not because this out-group monkey was unfamiliar, because they also looked longer at a monkey who had previously spent much of its time as a member of the group before it switched allegiance to join another group. The most likely reason why they were paying extra attention to the out-group monkey was that they were being vigilant for a potential threat.

Not only do they look longer at out-group monkeys, they also associate them with unpleasant experiences. Using an ingenious technique to measure each monkey’s emotional response to pictures of in- and out-group members, they found that monkeys were quicker to associate positive images of delicious fruit to pictures of in-group members and negative images of spiders with out-group members. (Like humans, monkeys hate spiders.) Not only do they aggress against out-group members, they do not like them either.

Recognizing your own group is important, but why does it feel good to belong? Humans have evolved rationality and logic to calculate the benefits of living in groups as opposed to being alone. Why do we need to feel emotions towards others as well? Feelings and emotions are two sides of the same coin. Emotions are short-lived, outward responses to an event that everyone around can read, like a sudden burst of anger or fit of laughing, but feelings are the internal lingering experiences that are not always for public consumption. We can have feelings without expressing them as emotions. They are part of our internal mental life. Without feelings, we would not be motivated to do the things we do. Feelings we get from others are some of the strongest motivations that we can have. Without feelings, there would be no point getting out of bed in the morning. Even pure logic needs feelings. When we solve a puzzle, it is not enough to know the answer – you have to feel good about it too. Why else would we bother?

It is through our social interactions that most of us find meaning in life – through the emotional experiences they generate. Pleasure, pride, excitement and love are feelings largely triggered and regulated by those around us. When we create or strive, we are not just doing it for ourselves – we seek the validation and praise of others. But others also hurt us when they cheat, lie, scold, mock, belittle or criticize. Living in groups has its ups and downs.

Social norms

Since we are social animals, it is in our collective interest not to lie, cheat or take advantage of each other in our group. This is something that good persuaders and con artists manipulate. They know that most people are kindhearted and willing to give others the benefit of the doubt when there is conflict of interest. These expectations form the basis of social norms of behaviour – what is expected by members of a group. Social norms can be so powerful that we will even apologize for something that is clearly not our fault. Anthropologist Kate Fox deliberately bumped into commuters and jumped queues at Paddington Station in London to provoke characteristic responses that she calls the ‘grammar’ of social etiquette.³⁹ As you might have already guessed, Fox found that there is almost an automatic reflex to say ‘Sorry’ when we bump into strangers in the street. Failing to apologize in such a situation would be considered rude – the violation of a social norm.

We are remarkably susceptible to the power of others when it comes to conformity. A classic set of studies by American psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated that individuals were also prepared to deny seeing something with their own eyes if there were enough people in the room to say otherwise.⁴⁰ He set up a situation where a real participant was part of a group with seven other confederates who were in on the true purpose of the experiment. They were told that it was a study of perception and that they had to match the length of a test line to one of three other lines. The experimenter held up a card and then went around the room, asking each person to answer aloud in turn. The real participant was among the last to be called on. The task was trivially easy. Everything was normal on the first two trials, but on the third trial, something odd happened. The confederates all began giving the same wrong answer. What did the real participant do? Results showed that three out of four of them conformed and gave the wrong answer on at least one trial.

For many decades, this research was interpreted as evidence that we comply with the group consensus. People merely said something they did not believe in order to gain social approval. It only took the presence of one other person who disagreed with the answer for the real participant to stick to their guns and give the correct answer. However, this finding has been undermined by many studies that show that even when responses are anonymous, people still go with the flow.⁴¹

One remarkable possibility is that people’s perceptions are indeed changed by the group consensus. To get at the difference between public compliance and private acceptance, you can look at brain activation. In a recent brain-imaging study,⁴² men were asked to rate photographs of 180 women for attractiveness. They were then placed in an fMRI scanner and asked to rate all the faces again, but this time they were provided with information about how each one had been rated by a group of peers. In fact, the group ratings were random. If the group said ‘hot’ but the participant had originally rated ‘not’, the participant shifted his rating higher and there was an increase in activation in two areas associated with evaluating rewards, the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex. Both areas light up when viewing sexually attractive faces.⁴³ When the group rated a face that the participant had originally thought beautiful as less attractive, there was a corresponding downward shift in his rating and brain activity.

We are so keen to fit in with the group that our behaviour can be easily manipulated. You may have noticed this with the signs and messages left for guests appearing in some of the hotels you stay at. When a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona, left a variety of different message cards in their guests’ bathrooms in the hopes of convincing those guests to re-use their towels rather than having them laundered every day, they discovered that the single most effective message was the one that simply read: ‘Seventy-five percent of our guests use their towels more than once.’⁴⁴ This technique has recently become used to nudge people into making economic decisions that previously were imposed by the state, often raising a degree of resentment. Authorities can more easily persuade people by nudging them rather than threatening them, as a better way of influencing their behaviour.⁴⁵ When a pension fund sends out a letter saying, ‘Most people are willing to invest a proportion of their earnings towards their pension …’, the fund’s managers are relying on our herd mentality to conform with the group rather than threatening us, which is less effective.

Hypocrites in the brain

How does conformity work? One answer is that when we are conforming we are avoiding the experience of discordance in our brains. It has long been known that humans need to justify their thoughts and actions; especially when they behave hypocritically. For example, if we expend a lot of effort to attain a goal to no avail, rather than accept that we have failed, we are more inclined to reframe the episode in a positive light such as ‘I didn’t really want that job’ or ‘That relationship was never going to work out’. We would rather re-evaluate the goals as negative so that we avoid discord. Aesop wrote about such ‘sour grapes’ in his fables as when the fox abandoned the grapes that were out of reach, dismissing them as probably inedible anyway. The reason we justify our actions is because of cognitive dissonance – the unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes inconsistency in his or her own actions, attitudes, or beliefs. In the same way that we generally prefer truth over lies, we like to believe that we are true to ourselves.⁴⁶

This belief means that we will frequently be disappointed in ourselves. All too often in life, we let ourselves down, which presents us with a state of dissonance – when things do not match up to our expectations. None of us is a saint – we are all flawed to a lesser or greater extent. We may cheat, lie, deceive, be economical with the truth, slack on the job, contribute less, fail to help, be hurtful, cruel or misbehave in other ways. We are often hypocritical – congratulating others through gritted teeth when we would have preferred to win the competition.

These flaws stand in direct contrast to the positive attributes we believe we possess – trustworthiness, kindness, helpfulness and generally being a good person. Very few of us are full of self-loathing or un-hypocritical. That is why there is a dissonance. Presented with the evidence of our wrongdoing, we may realize there is a contradiction. When people experience the unpleasant state of cognitive dissonance, they naturally try to alleviate it. This can be achieved by revising one’s actions, attitudes or beliefs in order to restore consistency among them. So we say, ‘They had it coming’, ‘I didn’t like them in the first place anyway’, or ‘I always knew that they were a bad egg’ – anything to reframe the situation so that whatever negative thing we have done becomes justified as a reasonable way to behave.

In one fMRI study of cognitive dissonance,⁴⁷ participants were scanned while they entertained the contradictory notion that the uncomfortable scanner environment was actually a pleasant experience. They were told that after forty-five minutes in the scanner they would be asked to rate the experience by answering questions. Half were asked to say that they actually enjoyed the experience in order to reassure a nervous participant who was waiting outside to do the study. The other half was a control group who were told that they would receive $1 each time they answered questions by saying that they enjoyed the experience. Imaging revealed that two regions were more active in the participants who had to endure the cognitive dissonance condition. These were the ACC, which detects conflicts in our thoughts and action, and the anterior insula, which registers negative emotional experiences – the same two regions that lit up during the study measuring what happens when we have to disagree with others. Not only were the ACC and the insular regions activated, but on a follow-up set of questions when there was no need to lie, the participants in the cognitive dissonance condition also rated the experience as more pleasant than the group who were paid, proving that they had indeed experienced a shift in their evaluation of the experience. In other words, they had convinced themselves that it was not such a bad experience, whereas the ones who had been paid knew they were lying for cash.

Cognitive dissonance is something that persuaders can so easily exploit. Imagine someone pushes in front of you in a queue to use a photocopier. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer⁴⁸ found that six out of ten would not object if the person said, ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier?’ Even when the apology is not intended, more than half still let the queue-jumper in front. Why is that? For one reason, most people want to avoid conflict and so do not confront the individual. They may be annoyed but not to the extent that it is worth doing something about it. Very often under these sorts of situations we will rationalize our response by reasoning that our own inconvenience is minor and thus not worth the effort. As soon as the person gives a reason such as ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier because I am in a rush?’, nine out of ten do not object. By providing a reason, they have made it easier for the people waiting patiently in the queue to justify their decision to acquiesce.

We are compliant because saying ‘no’ is uncomfortable. Of course, there are some individuals who seem perfectly happy to barge to the front of the queue and are indifferent to others, but many of us would squirm with embarrassment. Unless, of course, we apply our own cognitive dissonance by justifying our actions, for instance by convincing ourselves that ‘My needs are greater than others’. This allows us to realign our self-concept so that we do not have to entertain a contradiction that we have jumped the queue but are still really a nice person. With cognitive dissonance, we can be comfortably rude in the belief that our needs really do outweigh those of others. It is the self-deception that we discussed in the last chapter but one that applies to our whole concept of what we think we are like. Cognitive dissonance is dangerous because we can convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing even when we are not aware that we are distorting the truth. It enables us to live with our selfish behaviour and all the contradictions that entails.

Undercover racists

Most of us do not think we are hypocrites. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, ‘There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.’⁴⁹ We like to think of ourselves in a positive light and very few of us would want to have all our attitudes exposed as racist, sexist or generally bigoted. And yet, despite the balanced, reasonable persona that we would like to present to the rest of the world, most of us may hold implicit ugly attitudes that are not acceptable in decent society. We know this because you can measure the level of implicit attitudes by asking participants to undertake a speeded response test where they have to match negative and positive words with different pictures.⁵⁰ It could be different races, men and women, young and old, liberals and conservatives – any of the various groups that generate stereotypes. Although most of us do not consider ourselves bigoted, the implicit attitude test reveals that we are faster to associate negative words with members of other races and positive words to members of our own group. Deep down in our unconsciousness, we have stored vast amounts of associated thoughts that reflect all the experiences and exposure to attitudes that we have encountered over our lives.

Even if we do not hold deep-seated racist attitudes, then we can still be prone to stereotypes. This has been shown in a study where white and black US adults were presented with faces of their own in-group (same race) or out-group (other race) on a computer screen.⁵¹ When the face presented on the screen changed, they were given a painful electric shock. Eventually participants learned to associate all face changes with pain. Then the experimenters turned off the shocks to see how long it took participants to unlearn the painful association. Participants were much quicker to return to normal when the face changes were from their own race compared to faces from the other race. They took longer to become more trusting and less fearful of the other race even though they were not racist on measures taken before the test.

Does that mean that we are hard-wired to be racist irrespective of our wishes and desires? Not necessarily, because the effect was restricted to male faces and the race bias was not found in participants who had dated a member of the other race.⁵² Male faces are more characteristic of threatening individuals because males are more often portrayed as aggressive. However, the racial effect can be counteracted by exposure and experience of other races. What is clear is that despite our good intentions and choices that we know we should make, biases lurk deep down in most of us that influence our decisions. These findings do not mean that we behave like this in real life, but they do reveal the problem of undercover attitudes that might surface under the right circumstances.

Judging a book by its cover

One inevitable problem of joining and identifying with groups is that we generate stereotypes that influence our judgements about and attitudes towards others. Stereotypes are assumptions that we make about all members of the same group. The problem is that stereotypes lead us to jump to conclusions that are unfair. Consider the following story about a surgeon and the unexpected shock they get one day at work:

A father and his son were involved in a car accident in which the father was killed and the son was seriously injured. The father was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and his body was taken to a local morgue. The son was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and was immediately wheeled into an emergency operating theatre. A surgeon was called. Upon arrival, and seeing the patient, the attending surgeon exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, it’s my son!’

How can that possibly be? If the father is dead, then how can he be the surgeon? Is there some subplot or paternity mix-up? Maybe it was the stepfather who was killed. Around half of us who read this are at a loss to explain the scenario.⁵³ Why are most of us so slow to realize that the surgeon is actually a woman – the boy’s mother?

As Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman addressed in his bestseller, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, we have two modes of thinking.⁵⁴ One is fast and automatic that occurs without intention or effort. When we make these rapid decisions about people, we quickly pigeonhole them based on the stereotypes we hold. The other type of thinking is more slow, controlled and reflective. This allows for us to consider exceptions to the rules. However, we tend to rely on the rapid process of judging people rather than defer to the more considered evaluation of others, especially when we are put on the spot. For most of us, the stereotype of a surgeon is of a white male and, having reached that decision about his identity, we find it really hard to consider that the surgeon might be female.

Rapid pigeonholing does not bode well for racial prejudice. In one speeded response task⁵⁵ adult participants earned money by ‘shooting’ an assailant on the screen if they were perceived to be holding a gun but punished if they were holding a camera. Of course, they made some mistakes but these were revealing. Participants were more likely to judge that a picture of a black male holding a camera showed him holding a gun instead, whereas a white male holding a gun was typically judged to be holding a camera. This was true irrespective of whether the person making the decision was white or black. Our society has become contaminated with stereotypes that we promiscuously apply out of context. This kind of stereotyped thinking is not trivial and can have fatal consequences if the one making the decision is an armed police officer.

A brain that seeks patterns in the world generates stereotypes. Our brains do this for good reasons. We build models of the world that enable us to interpret it more quickly and more efficiently. The world is also complex and confusing, so the models we build help to make sense of it. Speed, effort and efficiency mean that a stereotyping brain is going to be better adapted to deal with situations that require important decisions without the luxury of contemplative thought. Not that we have a choice. We cannot avoid building these models of the world because all experiences are filtered through the mental machinery that generates categories – summaries of our experience that chop the world up into meaningful chunks. Categorical processing is found throughout the animal kingdom, indicating that brains have evolved to seek out patterns and group them together. This happens in the brain all the way up the nervous system, from simple sensations to complex thoughts. Depending on the ecological niche a species occupies, it may only be sound and vision, but for contemplating humans it also includes judging the social groups we think others belong to and all the stereotyping that grouping entails.

Person categories refer to different classes of individuals we encounter – rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief. Each one of these categories takes many forms in terms of information, such as what they look like, how they speak, how they think and what they do. No one member is likely to tick all the boxes of the category to which they belong, but they are going to be more like each other in the same category in comparison to those from outside the category. When an individual is identified as belonging to a group, we assume they share the characteristic traits attributed to that group. This is because categories are networks of related concepts that are automatically triggered.

Another problem with pigeonholing people is that stereotypes are difficult to overcome. We accept them even when we have no evidence to either support or contradict them. We willingly accept the testimony of others because stereotypes strengthen the in-group/out-group division by attributing negative attributes to members outside our group and positive ones to our own members. We assign generalized characteristics to all members of an out-group and yet maintain that our group has much more individuality. Finally, we seek out evidence that confirms stereotypes rather than look for exceptions.⁵⁶ In a cognitive exercise known as confirmation bias, we select those aspects of an individual’s behaviour that are consistent with our stereotype and conclude that they are typical.

Take the case of women drivers. Have you noticed how many bad women drivers there are? That, of course, is a negative stereotype that widely circulates in the West. In 2012, the mayor of Triberg, a small town in Germany, announced the opening of a new car park that had provision of a dozen ‘woman only’ spaces that were extra-large, well lit and near the exits.

Are women really such bad drivers? Experiments typically report superior spatial skills in males,⁵⁷ which are used to justify the claim that women are really bad at parking. However, the story is somewhat different in the real world. In the UK, the National Car Parks company conducted their own covert study⁵⁸ of 2,500 men and women using their sites and found that on average females were better at parking than males and that included the infamous reverse parking. This real-world analysis shows that women are better drivers and yet the UK Driving Standards Agency report that female drivers are more than twice as likely as males to fail their driving test on the reverse-parking manoeuvre. Are they better or not?

Females may have inferior spatial skills than males on computer lab tests, but it is probably the stereotype that women are bad at parking that is responsible for their failure on this component of the driving test. When women are reminded that males are better at maths, they perform worse in a subsequent maths test compared to women who are not primed with the stereotype.⁵⁹ The same effect was observed for African Americans who were simply reminded of their ethnicity by stating it at the beginning of an IQ test.⁶⁰ Those who wrote their race performed less well than other black students who were not reminded of the stereotype. So when it comes to parking under the scrutiny of the driving inspector, women may have a crisis of confidence and ‘choke’ in their performance. Simply giving women encouragement makes them more confident and improves their performance. The problem of stereotyping and why it is wrong, aside from the inequalities it creates, is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bad to the bone

When it comes to thinking about others, there is a real tendency to make judgements that appeal to a deeper sense of identity. As if there is something inside people that makes them who they are. This belief explains some surprising attitudes.

Would you willingly receive a heart transplant from a murderer? Under these life-or-death circumstances, I expect most people probably would, but they would be reluctant. Given a choice of organ transplantation from either a morally good person or someone who is bad, we prefer the Samaritan over the sinner.⁶¹ It’s not simply that one is evil. Rather, there is a real belief that our personality would be changed. In 1999 a British teenager had to be forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared that she would be ‘different’ with someone else’s heart.⁶² She was expressing what is a common concern, namely that someone else’s personality can be transferred through organ transplantation.⁶³ It is not uncommon for transplant patients to report psychological changes that they attribute to characteristics of the donor but there is no scientific evidence or mechanism that could explain how such a transfer could happen. There is a much more likely explanation that comes down to the way that we reason about others.

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviours of category members. Even as children, we intuitively think that dogs have a ‘doggie’ essence, which makes them different from cats, who have a ‘catty’ essence. There are, of course, genetic mechanisms to explain the difference between dogs and cats, but well before mankind had made the discoveries of modern biology, people thought in terms of essences. In fact, the Greek philosopher Plato talked about the inner property that made things what they truly were. Even though individuals may not be able to say exactly what an essence is, there is a belief that there is something deep, internal and unalterable that makes an individual who they are. In this sense, it is a psychological placeholder to explain membership of one category as opposed to another.⁶⁴

Child psychologist Susan Gelman from the University of Michigan has shown that psychological essentialism operates in young children’s reasoning about many aspects of the living world.⁶⁵ By four years of age, they understand that raising a puppy in a litter of kittens will not make the puppy grow up into a cat.⁶⁶ They understand that while a stick insect may look like a stick, it is really an insect.⁶⁷ Both children and adults expect animals to maintain their identity even if external superficial features are changed. They increasingly learn to go over and beyond outward appearances when judging the true nature of things.

This explains why adults are reluctant to receive organ transplants from those that they perceive as bad. Children also develop this essentialist view. When asked about whether they would be changed by a heart transplant, six- to seven-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, thought that they would become either more or less mean and either more or less smart, depending on the psychological level of the donor.⁶⁸

Essentialism develops well into adulthood when it comes to categorizing others into different social groups.⁶⁹ The Nazis under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels were expert at producing propaganda that demonized the persecuted as inferior, but such indoctrination was not necessary. As soon as we make a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, people assume the contrasts are intrinsic, fundamental and incommensurable – they are essentially different. By adopting an essentialist perspective, we are evoking a deeper level of justification for our prejudice. We do not want to touch them. We want to keep our distance. We are making judgements about their core features because they are ‘bad to the bone’. The extent to which we think of ourselves and others as possessing qualities that define who we are is a mark of our essentialist bias – a prejudice operating early in our development but one that appears to strengthen as we grow older. Psychologist Gil Diesendruck has been studying essentialist reasoning in children raised in Israel from different groups: secular Jews, Zionist Jews and Muslim Arabs. He found that by the time they are five years old, children already use category membership to make inferences about other children’s personalities based on prejudice which strengthen as they grow older.⁷⁰

Eventually, essentialism becomes enshrined in the moral codes that keep people segregated. In biological reasoning, essentialism is a useful way of categorizing the world but it is one that can be easily corrupted by those who have a prejudicial axe to grind. What is remarkable is that humans seem trip-wired to generate these distinctions and hold them without any reasonable evaluation. There is something very automatic about group membership and one of the best examples of this rapid processing is when we suddenly become aware that we have been excluded.

Social death

One day, psychologist Kip Williams from Purdue University was out walking his dog in the park when he was accidentally hit in the back with a Frisbee. He picked it up and flipped it back to the two men who had been playing, and, to his surprise, they tossed it back to Williams. Soon, he found himself enjoying an impromptu game of Frisbee with two strangers. However, this newfound friendship was short-lived. After a minute or two, the two strangers resumed passing it between themselves without any explanation or goodbyes. Williams felt hurt. He had been excluded.

What shocked Williams was his automatic reaction to this innocuous event, the pain of rejection, and how fast it kicked in. It was a humiliating experience but one that gave him a great idea. He went on to develop a computer simulation called Cyberball, where participants play a game in which a ball is tossed back and forth on a screen between two other playmates. Just as in his Frisbee experience, the computer includes the player for varying amounts of time and then unexpectedly excludes the player. At this point, players feel rejected. Not only that, but they feel physically hurt, which registers in the pain centres.⁷¹ When adults played Cyberball in a brain scanner and they were excluded, their ACC, the region associated with physical pain, was activated. Their feelings were really hurt. But it also hurts to hurt others. Using the same paradigm, a recent study has shown that being forced to ostracize others is upsetting too.⁷² People who were instructed to ignore others that they had just been playing with felt bad. We don’t like to be made to ignore others.

Research with Cyberball reveals how easy it is to induce social pain but why should social exclusion be painful? Most pain reactions are to warn the body that damage has taken place or is about to take place. One idea is that social isolation is so damaging that we have evolved mechanisms to register when we are in danger of being ostracized.⁷³ This registers as pain to trigger a set of coping mechanisms to reinstate ourselves back into the social situation that threatens to expel us. As soon as it becomes clear that we are in danger of being ostracized, we activate social ingratiating strategies. We become extra helpful, going out of our way to curry favour with individuals within the group. We can become obsequious, agreeing and sucking up to others even when they are clearly in the wrong.

This is the initial response to ostracism, but if the reintegrating strategies fail, then a much more sinister, darker set of behaviours can appear. For many, the attempts to rejoin the group are replaced by aggression against the group. This aggression has been studied experimentally in a version of Milgram’s shock experiment where participants believed that they were administering painful noise. Participants were asked to select an initial level of noise that ranged from 0dB to 110dB to be administered to other subjects. Prior to making their selection, they were told that increasing levels were more uncomfortable and 110dB was the maximum level. When some subjects, who in reality were experimenter confederates, rejected the real participant in a sham ostracism scenario prior to the test, he or she wreaked revenge by administering more painful sound bursts in retaliation to the others.⁷⁴ If the participant did not perceive the others as a group, they administered lower painful bursts.

Sometimes victims can be entirely innocent. In another ostracism experiment, rejected individuals spiked the food of the next participant in the study with unpleasant hot sauce even when they knew they were innocent.⁷⁵ It is the experimental equivalent of the displacement aggression when someone kicks their dog out of spite when things have gone wrong elsewhere in their lives. For many, aggression seems to be a way of getting back at an unjust world when they feel they have been injured by the thoughts and actions of others. For a few, this impulse towards revenge can be taken to the ultimate extreme.

The ultimate act of spite

Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only if you did not fuck the living shit out of me … Ask yourself what you did to me to have made me clean the slate.’

Cho Seung-Hui’s ‘manifesto’, describing his subsequent

shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University

For many, the worst thing in the world is being rejected by others – kicked out, cut off, blackballed, sent to Coventry, unfriended. It doesn’t matter how it is done. They are all ways of being ostracized. To be excluded by others is psychological death.

Exclusion is also a form of non-physical bullying, and it can sometimes have devastating consequences. In the US, the Center for Disease Control has estimated that around 4,600 children between the ages of ten and fourteen years commit suicide every year.⁷⁶ Teenage bullying is associated with depression, loneliness and suicidal thoughts.⁷⁷ Although the direct link between bullying and suicide remains to be established, contemplating killing oneself is considered a major risk factor. It is not always the physical aspects of bullying that are so detrimental, but rather the social exclusion that it usually entails. A Dutch study of nearly 4,811 schoolchildren aged between nine and thirteen years of age found that social isolation was more harmful than physical violence for both boys and girls.⁷⁸ Given the choice, teenagers would rather be hit than excluded as those who had experienced both forms of bullying reported that social aggression made them feel worse.⁷⁹ What makes these findings all the more shocking is that many teachers do not regard social exclusion as being as bad as physical bullying. In other words, not only is it difficult to monitor or police because it may go on largely unnoticed by teachers, but they can also be more tolerant of it.⁸⁰

Rejection can also be accompanied by that other toxic thought, humiliation – ridicule and mocking by the group. No one can easily tolerate the public destruction of one’s self worth, because that would make life worthless. When people feel they have been humiliated, some will wreak terrible revenge. If they do not turn the aggression in on themselves with suicide, a few will direct it back at others. They ‘go postal’ – a reference to the spate of US postal workers who murdered former colleagues in rampages during the 1990s.

Rampage killings are the consequences of social rejection taken to the ultimate extreme. One analysis⁸¹ of school mass shootings such as Virginia Tech and Columbine revealed that in thirteen out of the fifteen cases, the perpetrators had been socially excluded, as illustrated so shockingly in the quote from the Virginia Tech manifesto. Others simply try to hurt society as much as possible. In the Dunblane school massacre, Thomas Hamilton targeted the most innocent victims – children – as retribution against the adults who questioned his suitability as a Scout troop leader in charge of children. In letters to the press, the BBC and even the Queen, he spelled out his resentment at his dismissal from the Scouts, which had festered for twenty-five years amidst rumours and accusations that he was a pervert, leading to his ridicule by the community. We do not yet know enough about the Sandy Hook atrocity of 2012, but gunman Adam Lanza clearly acted to inflict as much suffering as possible, and again on children. What sort of disturbed individuals could care so little about the hurt they brought to others?

One could argue that it is not that these murderers did not care about others, but rather they cared too much. They cared more about what other people thought about them than they did for the lives of their victims, their families and ultimately themselves. These atrocities were deliberate sabotage in order to be noticed. In their disturbed minds, these murderers thought they were getting even with an unjust world.

Most of us lead relatively normal lives without the extremes of ostracism and violence, but we all know what it feels like to be excluded. Even in the absence of extreme exclusion, we still lead our lives seeking the approval of others and, in doing so, maybe we all care just a little too much. Almost everything that we do is motivated by what others think, and how we are being judged.

If you ask most people about ambitions and goals, they will talk about success – something that many want but few can attain. Success is defined by what other people think. Even success in terms of material wealth and possessions has this curious aspect. We want more money to buy more of the trappings of success so that we can have status within the group. Non-material success, such as fame or infamy, is again defined by what others think. Every author writes in the hope that he or she will be read by many. Every painter wants his or her work to be appreciated. Every singer or actor wants an audience. Every politician needs support. Even the solitary rampaging gunman is motivated by what others think.

We have reached a point in our civilization where many want to be famous for the sake of just being famous, irrespective of how they go about it. There is some deep compulsion in most of us to be noticed by the group. When a small child is crying out to his parents, ‘Look at me, Look at me!’, they are declaring one of the fundamental needs when it comes to being human – the need for attention. That childhood urge never really goes away as we grow up into adults seeking the attention of others because they validate our existence.

The need for attention is the bittersweet twist to domestic life. Most children are raised in a nurturing environment that breeds dependency on others. Initially that dependency addresses all the physical and emotional needs that our long childhoods engender. It is a time when we learn how to become members of the groups that surround us, but when we eventually grow up to attain a level of independence, acceptance and inclusion as adults, most of us remain bound in a continual cycle of seeking approval from others. Almost everything we do is done with a view to how others will perceive us. That quest provides both the joys and the miseries of being a social animal.