Behave

By Robert Sapolsky

None of this will be easy. When contemplating the challenge to do so, it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mindset. The psychological distance from them to us is vast, separated by the yawning chasm that was the discovery of “It’s not her, it’s her disease.” Having crossed that divide, the distance we now need to go is far shorter—it merely consists of taking that same insight and being willing to see its valid extension in whatever directions science takes us.

The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like “evil” and “soul” will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop…Many who are viscerally opposed to this view charge that it is dehumanizing to frame damaged humans as broken machines. But as a final, crucial point, doing that is a hell of a lot more humane than demonizing and sermonizing them as sinners.

I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.

Behave overlapped heavily with Determined. I read them out of order. A lot of the studies and findings about how brains work were familiar.

• In addressing human violence, he referenced Pinker’s Better Angels. There were significant criticisms of some of Pinker’s data and conclusions about warfare. Interestingly, those seemed to be ignored at other points and his main thesis accepted.
• A section late in the book addressed aversion to killing. There were stats about how few soldiers fired their weapons at enemies in historical wars. As a known problem, militaries have found ways to address it and increase willingness to fire. The civil war was especially low. The more close quarters the action was, the less people want to do killing. Group membership, defending your buddy next to you, was the most powerful motivator to shoot. In this section, the Christmas ceasefire in WWI was described. Soldiers in trenches from both sides stopped fighting, ate together, buried dead together. To a point, the men in the trenches began to identify more with each other than the infantry on either side identified with their remote commanding officers.

The Epilogue summarizes the nearly 700 pages that came before:

• It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. And it’s often easiest to avoid temptation with distraction and reappraisal rather than willpower.
• While it’s cool that there’s so much plasticity in the brain, it’s no surprise–it has to work that way.
• Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong, even multigenerational. however, more adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.
• Brains and cultures coevolve.
• Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
• Repeatedly, biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.
• Cognition and affect always interact. What’s interesting is when one dominates.
• Genes have different effects in different environments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else–we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context.
• Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren’t opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.
• Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn–context, context, context.
• Arbitrary boundaries on continua can be helpful. But never forget that they are arbitrary.
• Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.
• You can’t understand aggression without understanding fear (and what the amygdala has to do with both).
• Genes aren’t about inevitables; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities. And they don’t determine anything on their own. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. Evolution is most consequential when altering regulations of genes, rather than genes themselves.
• We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.
• We aren’t chimps, and we aren’t bonobos. We’re not a classic pair-bonding species or a tournament species. We’ve evolved to be somewhere in between in these and other categories that are clear-cut in other animals. It makes us a much more malleable and resilient species. It also makes our social lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns.
• The homunculus has no clothes.
• While traditional nomadic hunter-gatherer life over hundreds of thousands of years might have been a little on the boring side, it certainly wasn’t ceaselessly bloody. In the years since most humans abandoned a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we’ve obviously invented many things. One of the most interesting and challenging is social systems where we can be surrounded by strangers and can act anonymously.
• Saying a biological system works “well” is a value-free assessment; it can take discipline, hard work, and willpower to accomplish either something wondrous or something appalling. “Doing the right thing” is always context dependent.
• Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization.
• Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.
• When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had ever seen before.
• “Me” versus “us” (being prosocial within your group) is easier than “us” versus “them” (prosociality between groups).
• It’s not great if someone believes it’s okay for people to do some horrible, damaging act. But more of the world’s misery arises from people who, of course, oppose that horrible act… but cite some particular circumstances that should make them exceptions. The road to hell is paved with rationalization.
• The certainty with which we act now might seem ghastly not only to future generations but to our future selves as well.
• Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great empathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.
• People kill and are willing to be killed for symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.
• We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.
• Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don’t forget that the same applies to our best behaviors.
• Individuals no more exceptional than the rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans.
• If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” … You’re one of the lucky ones. So try.
• Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.