What Should We Be Worried About?

THE BEHAVIOR OF NORMAL PEOPLE

KARL SABBAGH

Writer, television producer; author, Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us

The most worrying aspect of our society is the low index of suspicion about the behavior of normal people. In spite of the doctrine of original sin that permeates Christianity, the assumption most of us hold about most people in everyday life is that they are not, on the whole, criminals, cheats, mean-spirited, selfish, or on the lookout for a fast buck. Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted. Good behavior is seen as the default mode for humans, and bad behavior is seen as “aberrant,” even though, from self-knowledge as well as experiments like Stanley Milgram’s, we know that “normal” people are not always saints.

This unwillingness to believe the worst of people permeates society and harms us in all sorts of ways. The most egregious current example, of course, concerns bankers and financiers, who have shown that only the most severe constraints on their activities would stop them from filching our purses and grabbing huge salaries or severance payments that are usually rewards for failure. And it is precisely those constraints that the institutions resist most strongly, promising after each one of their crimes is exposed that self-regulation will prevent the next. But any daily newspaper will show countless examples of individuals who demonstrate that when they (we?) can get away with something, they will.

There is much psychological research into the nature of evil. This usually proceeds from the assumption that people are naturally good and tries to explain why some depart from this “norm.” Isn’t it time we took the opposite view and looked into why some people, perhaps not many, are “good”? If you look hard, you can find examples of these. Whistleblowers, for example, who cannot stand by while bankers fiddle, doctors cover up mistakes, priests abuse children, or statesmen cheat on their expenses. Paradoxically, instead of their good deeds being welcomed, whistleblowers are often ostracized, even by people whose behavior is not—at least overtly—meretricious but who feel that reporting illicit behavior is itself distasteful.

Just as there is emerging evidence of a biological basis for political beliefs, left-wing vs. right-wing, perhaps we should be looking for a biological basis of goodness. So many of the world’s problems have at their root the propensity of humans—and, indeed, nations—to behave in ways that try to maximize benefits to themselves at the expense of others. Even attempts to instigate solutions to climate change are bedeviled by personal and corporate selfishness.

What we should be worried about, therefore, is that science is missing out on a possible alternative solution to many of our problems. It should be considering how to make more people “good” rather than trying to understand what makes people “bad.”