"The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference." Elie Wiesel.
This is a central point of this book - we don't hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. Because violence in the right context is different....We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it's the "right" type of aggression, we love it.
Which reminds us that we don't hate aggression; we hate the wrong kind of aggression but love it in the right context.
the more neurons that a neuron projects to, the more neurons it can influence; however, the more neurons it projects to, the smaller its average influence will be at each of those target neurons.
Addiction - reoccurring brain activity resulting in a thought pattern that induces undesired behaviors and/or cravings. (mine) Addiction is clearly a complex disease that involves motivational and higher-order cognitive processes that initiate and control goal-directed behaviors, and accumulating evidence implicates altered glutamatergic neurotransmission mediated by projections to and from the prefrontal cortex in the neuroplasticity of addiction (Jentsch and Taylor, 1999; Kalivas, 2009). The PFC is highly integrated into the addiction neurocircuitry. Addictive behaviors, such as those associated with alcohol abuse and alcoholism, include loss of control over consumption and relapse to drinking. The PFC normally exerts “top-down” (e.g., information derived from prior experience) inhibitory control over internal and external sensory-driven compulsive behaviors. Increasing evidence suggests that continued drug exposure leads to attenuation of the ability of the PFC to monitor and inhibit these behaviors, with eventual loss of inhibitory control over drinking. Alcohol and the Prefrontal Cortex. The following are commonly considered to be addictive: heroin, cocaine, alcohol, opiates, nicotine, amphetamine, and their synthetic analogs. These drugs alter the neuromodulatory influence of dopamine on the processing of reinforcement signals by prolonging the action of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens or by stimulating the activation of neurons there and also in the VTA. The most common drugs of abuse stimulate the release of dopamine, which creates both their rewarding and the psychomotor effects. Compulsive drug-taking behaviors are a result of the permanent functional changes in the mesolimbic dopamine system arising from repetitive dopamine stimulation.
depolarization is a change within a cell, during which the cell undergoes a shift in electric charge distribution, resulting in less negative charge inside the cell.
Hyperpolarization is a change in a cell's membrane potential that makes it more negative. It is the opposite of adepolarization. It inhibits action potentials by increasing the stimulus required to move the membrane potential to the action potential threshold.
BLA - Basolateral amygdala
Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.
When we stop fearing something, it isn't because some amygdaloid neurons have lost their excitability. We don't passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn't anymore.
Fear and aggression are not inevitably intertwined - not all fear causes aggression, and not all aggression is rooted in fear. Fear typically increases aggression only those already prone to it; among the subordinate who lack the option of expressing aggression safely, fear does the opposite.
the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.
self-discipline is good
Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent with that, the frontal cortex is atypically vulnerable to various neurological insults.
Pertinent to this is the concept of "cognitive load." Make the frontal cortex work hard - a tough working-memory task, regulating social behavior, or making numerous decisions while shopping. Immediately afterward performance on a different frontally dependent task declines.
automaticity - the ability to do things automatically without thinking about it. This occurs as repetitive tasks move from the frontal cortex to more reflexive parts of the brain such as the cerebellum.
But while emotion and cognition can be somewhat separable, they're rarely in opposition. Instead they are intertwined in a collaborative relationship needed for normal function, and as tasks with both emotive and cognitive components become more difficult (making an increasingly complex economic decision in a setting that is increasingly unfair), activity in the two structures becomes more synchronized.
(vmPFC = ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or emotional part of prefrontal cortex.
dlPFC = dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or deliberate part of prefrontal cortex.)
Working memory is a form of sustained attention for the processing of prospective action. Thus, working memory involves the maintenance and manipulation of task-relevant information in the service of planning, problem solving, and predicting forthcoming events.
This is our world of habituation, where nothing is ever as good as that first time.
Unfortunately, things have to work this way because of our range of rewards. After all, reward coding must accommodate the rewarding properties of both solving a math problem and having an orgasm. Dopaminergic responses to reward, rather than being absolute, are relative to the reward value of alternative outcomes. In order to accommodate the pleasures of both mathematics and orgasms, the system must constantly rescale to accommodate the range of intensity offered by particular stimuli. The response to any reward must habituate with repetition, so that the system can respond over its full range to the next new thing. Thus, in typical mammals the dopamine system codes in a scale-free manner over a wide range of experience for both good and bad surprises and is constantly habituating to yesterday's news. But humans have something in addition, namely that we invent pleasures far more intense than anything offered by the natural world....Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than in stimulated in our old drug-free world.
An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consume more, we'd desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get.
In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.... In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is almost an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it's the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.
...Though the dopamine system is similar across numerous species, humans do something utterly novel: we delay gratification for insanely long times...: we use the dopaminergic power of the happiness of pursuit to motivate us to work for rewards that come after we are dead -depending on your culture, this can be knowing that your nation is closer to winning a war because you've sacrificed yourself in battle, that your kids will inherit money because of your financial sacrifices, or that you will spend eternity in paradise. It is extraordinary neural circuitry that bucks temporal discounting enough to allow (some of) us to care about the temperature of the planet that our great-grandchildren will inherit. Basically, it's unknown how we humans do this. We may merely be a type of animal, mammal, primate, and ape, but we're a profoundly unique one.
While this neurobiology is mighty impressive, the brain is not where a behavior "begins." It's merely the final common pathway by which all the factors in the chapters to come converge and create behavior.
Self representation is fundamental to mental functions. While the self has mostly been studied in traditional psychophilosophical terms (‘self as subject’), recent laboratory work suggests that the self can be measured quantitatively by assessing biases towards self-associated stimuli (‘self as object’). Here, we summarize new quantitative paradigms for assessing the self, drawn from psychology, neuroeconomics, embodied cognition, and social neuroscience. We then propose a neural model of the self as an emerging property of interactions between a core ‘self network’ (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex; mPFC), a cognitive control network [e.g., dorsolateral (dl)PFC], and a salience network (e.g., insula).
New paradigms have emerged from psychology, neuroeconomics, embodied cognition, and social neuroscience that provide objective measures of the self.
Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies using these new paradigms have revealed central roles for three brain networks in self-processing: a core ‘self network’ (medial prefrontal regions), a cognitive control network (lateral PFC and superior temporal sulcus), and a salience network (insula, amygdala, and striatum).
Self-processing has also been gaining increased attention in neuropsychiatric research, because initial evidence suggests the self is altered in almost all psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and personality disorders.
The importance of bodily signals in selfhood has also been extensively examined in recent studies. This line of research emphasizes that sensory (e.g., proprioceptive) and physiological (e.g., heart rate) signals coming from the body are crucial for the conscious awareness of feelings and ‘self as object’ ....These studies suggest that the sense of the self largely depends on the spatial boundaries of the body; by experimentally manipulating bodily information, the perception of the self can also be altered.People often form beliefs about themselves through the lens of others and interactions with others.
Based on the literature reviewed above, we propose a neural framework of the ‘self as object’, which considers the self as an emerging property of interactions between brain networks implementing the ‘core self’, cognitive control, and salience processing
Self as Object
Forming memories doesn't require new synapses (let alone new branches or neurons); it requires the strengthening of preexisting synapses.
Memory is strengthening, or more tightly coupling. Translated into cellular terms, "strengthening" means that the wave of excitation in a dendritic spine spreads farther, getting closer to the distant axon hillock.
We've seen how in adults experience can alter the number of synapses and dendritic branches, remap circuitry, and stimulate neurogenesis. Collectively, these effects can be big enough to actually change the size of brain regions.
Hippocampal neurogensis is enhanced by learning, excercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors.
Thus, experience, health, and hormone fluctations can change the size of parts of the brain in a matter of months. Experience can also cause long-lasting changes in the number of receptors for neurotransmitters and hormones, in levels of ion channels, and in the state of on/off switches on genes in the brain.
With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression...Basically, most anything you can measure in the nervous system can change in response to a sustained stimulus. And importantly, these changes are often reversible in a different environment.
This chapter's key fact is that the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the mid/twenties.
But in reality the brain is about circuits, about the patterns of functional connectivity among regions. The growing myelination of the adolescent brain shows the importance of increased connectivity.
An oft-repeated fact about adolescents is how "emotional intelligence" and "social intelligence" predict adult success and happiness better than do IQ and SAT scores.
Adult life is filled with consequential forks in the road where the right thing is definitely harder. Navigating these successfully is the portfolio of the frontal cortex, and developing the ability to do this right in each context requires profound shaping by experience.
But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you.
Depression's defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia.
Depression is fundamentally a pathological sense of loss of control (explaining the classic description as "learned helplessness").
The link between exposure to childhood media violence and increased adult aggression is stronger than the link between lead exposure and IQ, calcium intake and bone mass, or asbestos and laryngreal cancer.
As we'll see, genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors. Be sexually abused as a child, or witness violence, and your adult prognosis is better that if you had experienced both. Experience childhood poverty, and your future prospects are better if your family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.
As emphasized by the psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, the opposite of play is not work - it's depression.
(a) each gene specifies the production of a specific type of protein; (b) a gene has be "activated" for the protein to be produced and "deactivated" to stop producing it - thus genes come with on/off switches; (c) every cell in our bodies contains the same library of genes; (d) during development, the pattern of which genes are activated determines which cells turn into nose, which into toes, and so on; (e) forever after, nose, toes, and other cells retain distinctive patterns of gene activation.
While little in childhood determines an adult behavior, virtually everything in childhood changes propensities toward some adult behavior. "childhood matter"
Similarly, it shouldn't require molecular genetics or neuroendocrinology factoids to prove that childhood matters and thus that is profoundly matters to provide childhoods filled with good health and safety, love and nurturance and opportunity.
Genes typically come in different versions: we each consist of an individuated orchestration of the different versions of our approximately twenty thousand genes.
In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture.
A gene is the basic physical and functional unit of heredity. Genes, which are made up of DNA, act as instructions to make molecules called proteins. In humans, genes vary in size from a few hundred DNA bases to more than 2 million bases. The Human Genome Project has estimated that humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes.
Every person has two copies of each gene, one inherited from each parent. Most genes are the same in all people, but a small number of genes (less than 1 percent of the total) are slightly different between people. Alleles are forms of the same gene with small differences in their sequence of DNA bases. These small differences contribute to each person’s unique physical features.
The entire stretch of nucleotides that codes for a single type of protein is called a gene. The entire collection of DNA is called the genome, coding for all of the tens of thousands of genes in an organism; "sequencing" the genome means determining the unique sequence of the billions of nucleotides that make up that organism's genome. That stretch of DNA is so long (containing roughly twenty thousand genes in humans) that it has to be broken into separate volumes, called chromosomes.
DNA determines RNA determines protein. And implicit is that central dogma is another critical point; one type of gene specifies one type of protein.
the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment. In other words, genes don't make sense outside the context of environment, both internal, and external. Thus not only does environment regulate genes, but it can do with effects that last days to lifetimes.
a. Genes are not autonomous agents commanding biological events.
b. Genes are regulated by the environment, consisting of everything from events inside the cell to the entire universe.
c. Much of DNA turns environmental influences into gene transcription; evolution is heavily about changing regulation of gene transcription, rather than about genes themselves.
d. Epigenetics can allow environmental effects to be lifelong, or even multigenerational.
heritability - gene tendency, the lower the heritability score the less like are genetics in explaining a behavior: it's not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment.
a. A gene's influence on the average value of a trait (i.e. whether it is inherited) differs from its influence on variability of that trait across individuals(its heritability).
d. Gene/environment interactions are ubiquitous and can be dramatic. Thus, you can't really say what a gene does, only what it does in the environment in which its been studied.
Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high(e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high socioeconomic status families but is only around 10 percent in low socioeconomic kids. Thus, higher socioeconomic allows the full range of genetic influences to flourish, whereas lower socioeconomic settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you're growing up in awful poverty - poverty's adverse effects trump the genetics. Similarly, heritability of alcohol use is lower among religious than nonreligious subjects - i.e., your genes matter much if you're in a religious environment that condemns drinking.
Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavior traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability. They have to be, given, that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent. Ask not what a gene does. Ask what is does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.
But consider a paper published in Science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops). Lo and behold, the more gender equality the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.
Culture leaves long-lasting residues - Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.
And in other, other, other words, when we contemplate our iconic acts - the pulling of a trigger, the touching of an arm - and want to explain why they happened using a biological framework, culture better be on our list of explanatory factors.
Inequality emerged when "stuff" - things to possess and accumulate - was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies.
Economic capital is the collective quantity of goods, services, and financial resources. Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation....Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital. Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, have efficacy, to be visible. (For example, as income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.)
But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct the wealthy feel from improving public goods. Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good - a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, "the more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition". Evans notes how this "secession of the wealthy" promotes "private affluence and public squalor."
Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty among plenty is. For example, extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations.
Why does income inequality lead to more crime? Again, there's the psychosocial angle - inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. And there's the neomaterialist angle - inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. Kaplan has shown, for example, that states with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education. As with inequality and health, the psychosocial and neomaterial routes synergize.
As documented by Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, it is only when societies grow large enough that people regularly encounter strangers that "Big Gods" emerge - deities who are concerned with human morality and punish our transgressions.
(a) a religion reflects the values of the culture that invented or adopted it, and very effectively transmits those values; (b) religion fosters the best and worst of our behaviors.
Another key theme is the paradoxical influence of ecology. Ecosystems majorly shape culture - but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth's humans have inherited their belief systems about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.
"Nothing in biology makes except in the light of evolution." Theodosius Dobzhansky
Evolution rests on three steps: (a) certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means; (b) mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits; (c) some of those variants confer more "fitness" than others. Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more "fit" gene variants increases in a population.
misconceptions: (1) evolution favors survival of the fittest. Instead evolution is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes; (2) evolution can select for preadaptations - neutral traits that prove useful in the future. This doesn't happen; selection is for traits pertinent to the present. Related to this is the misconception that living species are somehow better adapted than extinct species. Instead, the latter were just as well adapted, until environmental conditions changed sufficiently to do them in; the same awaits us. (3) evolution directionally selects for greater complexity. Yes, if once there were only single-celled organisms and there are multicellular ones now, average complexity has increased. Nonetheless, evolution doesn't necessarily select for greater complexity - just consider bacteria decimating humans with some plague. (4) evolution is just a "theory."
Evolution sculpts two broad ways. "Sexual selection" selects for traits that attract members of the opposite sex, "natural selection" for traits that enhance the passing on of copies of genes through any other route - e.g., good health, foraging skills, predator avoidance.
First misconception, we are not descended from chimps. Or from any extant animal. We and chimps share a common ancestor from roughly five million years ago (and genomics show that chimps have been as busy evolving since then as we have.)
Measure after measure, it's the same. We aren't classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused - mildly polygamous, floating somewhere in between.
"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the wold into two kinds of people and those who don't." Robert Benchley.
What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies. All invisible, until they are yoked with arbitrary markers such as dress, ornamentation, or regional accent.
Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by: (a) the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power.
So in-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well. This is the essence of tolerating inequality in the name of loyalty. Consistent with that, priming loyalty strengthens in-group favoritism and identification, while priming equality does the opposite.
Most common is forgiving Us more readily than Them. As we will see, this is often rationalized - we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that's how They are.
But Us-ness based on sacred values, with whole bigger than sums of parts, where unenforceable obligations stretch across generations, millennia, even into afterlives, where it's Us, right of wrong, is the essence of faith-based relationships.
The nature of group membership can be bloodily contentious concerning people's relationship to the state. Is it contractual? The people pay taxes, obey laws, serve in the army; the government provides social services, builds roads, and helps after hurricanes. Or is it one of sacred values? The people give absolute obedience and the state provides the myths of the Fatherland. Few such citizens can conceive that if the stork had arbitrarily deposited them elsewhere, they'd fervently feel the innate rightness of a different brand of exceptionalism, goose-stepping to different martial music.
"Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker." Paul Rozin
Essentialism is all about viewing Them as homogeneous and interchangeable, the idea that while we are individuals, they have a monolithic, immutable, icky essence.
"The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual." Reinhold Niebuhr
"race" is a biological continuum rather than a discrete category - for example, unless you cherry-pick the date, genetic variation within race is generally as great as between races.
Furthermore, the notion of race as a fixed, biologically based classification system doesn't work either. At various times in the history of the U.S. census, "Mexican" and "Armenian" were classified as distinctive races; southern Italians were of a different race from northern Europeans; someone with one black great-grandparent and seven white ones was a white in Oregon but not Florida. This is race as a cultural rather than biological construct.
Like other hierarchical species, we have alpha individuals, but unlike most others, we occasionally get to chose them. Moreover, they often are not merely highest ranking but also "lead," attempting to maximize this thing called the common good.Furthermore, individuals vie for leadership with differing visions of how best to attain that common good - political ideologies. And finally, we express obedience both to an authority and to the idea of Authority.
hierarchy = is a ranking system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources, ranging from meat to that nebulous thing called "prestige."
The Socioeconomic /health gradient is ubiquitous. Regardless of gender, age, or race. With or without universal health care. In societies that are ethnically homogeneous and those rife with ethnic tensions. In societies in which the central mythology is a capitalist credo of "Living well is the best revenge" and those in which it is a socialist anthem of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.
politics = the struggle among the powerful with differing visions of the common good.
It also gives insight into a puzzling feature of the political landscape: how is it that over the last fifty years, Republicans have persuaded impoverished white Americans to so often vote against their own economic self-interest? Do they actually believe that they're going to win the lottery and then get to enjoy the privileged side of American inequality? Nah. The psychological issues of needing structured familiarity show that for poor whites, voting Republicans constitutes an implicit act of system justification and risk aversion. Better to resist change and deal with the devil that you know....
Related to this is "terror-management theory," which suggests that conservatism is psychologically rooted in pronounced fear of death; supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their mortality makes them more conservative.
These differences in threat perception help explain the differing views as to role of government - providing for people (the leftist view; social services, education, etc.) or protecting people (the rightest view; law and order, the military, etc.).
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality - it must be a drag being right-wing. But, despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists. Why? Perhaps it's having simpler answers, unburdened by motivation correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and Left increases.
insular cortex - mediates gustatory and olfactory disgust, and moral disgust in humans.
As we saw, make a liberal more tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.
Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity so visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.
Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of gray matter in the cingulate cortex (with its involvement in empathy), whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala (with, of course, its starring role in threat perception).
social identity theory - the concept of who we are is heavily shaped social context. Being different = Being wrong.
"the issue isn't how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it's how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad." Zimbardo. rather than concentrating on one evil person at a time (medical approach), one must understand how some environments cause cause epidemics of evil. (public health approach). "Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do - given the same situational forces."
"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago.
Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of its caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.
We're really out there as a species in that sometimes our high-status individuals don't merely plunder and instead actually lead, actually attempt to facilitate the common good. We've even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion. A magnificent achievement. Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable to five-year-olds deciding who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland.
If you really want to understand someone's politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more importantly, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.
Finally, the pull of conformity and obedience can lead us to some of our darkest, most appalling places, and far more of us can be led there than we'd like to think. But despite that, even the worst of barrels don't turn all apples bad, and "Resistance" and Heroism" are often more accessible and less rarefied and capitalized than assumed. We're rarely alone in thinking this wrong, wrong, wrong. And we are usually no less special or unique than those before us who have fought back.
morality is not only belief in norms of appropriate behaviors but also the belief that they should be shared and transmitted culturally.
But at their core, market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity.
Shame is external judgement by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame is about honor. Guilt is about conscience. Shame requires an audience, Guilt is private.
Bizarrely, the American legal system considers a corporation to be an individual in many ways, one that is psychopathic in the sense of having no conscience and being solely interested in profits. The people running corporations are occasionally criminally responsible; however, they are not morally responsible.
"Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness." Greene
our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive. They are the end products of learning; they are cognitive conclusions to which we have been exposed so often that they have become automatic, as implicit as riding a bicycle or reciting the days of the week forward rather than backward.... Our guts learn their intuitions.
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." Oscar Wilde
most intergroup conflicts ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose "right" is better.
In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions - religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit - bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.
Resisting temptation is as implicit as walking up stairs...; it's what moral imperatives have been hammered into you with such urgency and consistency that doing the right thing has virtually become a spinal reflex.
This is not to suggest that honesty, even impeccable honesty that resists all temptation, can only be the outcome of implicit automaticity. We can think and struggle and employ cognitive control to produce similar stainless records, as shown in some subsequent work. But in circumstances like the Greene and Paxton study, with repeated opportunities to cheat in rapid succession, it's not going to a case of successfully arm wrestling the devil over and over. Instead, automaticity is required.
sympathy - means you feel sorry for someone else's pain without understanding it.
empathy - means you understand someone's pain, taking their perspective, walking in their shoes.
compassion - your resonance with someone else's pain leads you to actually help.
Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people's emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal.... wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence.
"If I look at the mass, I will never act." - Mother Teresa
"The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." Joseph Stalin
When it comes to empathic states, "emotion" and "cognition" are totally false dichotomies; you need both, but with the balance between the two shifting on a continuum, and the cognition end of it has to do the heavy lifting when the differences between you and the person in pain initially swap the similarities.
[Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone's pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn't simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst. Leslie Jamison.
empathy training - focus on feeling the pain of someone else in distress.
compassion training - focus on feeling warmth and care for another person in distress.
exaptation - a trait that evolves for one purpose and is co-opted for something else.
Sacred values are defended far out of proportion to their material or instrumental importance or likelihood of success, because to any group such values define "who we are."
but peace is not the mere absence of war, and making true peace requires acknowledging and respecting the sacred values of Them.
compatibilism - we have something resembling a spirit, a soul, an essence that embodies our free will, from which emanates behavioral intent; and that this spirit coexists with biology that can sometimes constrain it...It's encapsulated in the idea that well-intentioned spirit, while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak.
mitigated free will - people need to be held responsible for their actions, but there can be mitigating circumstances. It is the idea that there can be "diminished" responsibility for our actions, that something can be semivoluntary.
things that affect the execution of free will: brain specific transcription factors, neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogensis. Aspects of brain funtion can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast, etc.
homunculus - a very small human or humanoid creature.
Essentially everyone working with a model of mitigated free will accepts that if there is enough brain damage, responsibility for a criminal act goes out the window.
..."our social world is ultimately as much a product of our determined, materialist brains as are our simple motor movements."
causation verses compulsion - causation suggests every behavior is caused by something. compulsion suggests there is a subset of behaviors that compromises rational, deliberative processes. In this view some behaviors are seen as more deterministically biological than others.
readiness potential - a signal from the motor cortex and supplementary premotor areas that a movement would soon be initiated... readiness potentials appear about half a second before the reported time of conscious intent to move.
Of all the stances of mitigated free will, the one that assigns aptitude to biology and effort to free will, or impulse to biology and resisting it to free will, is the most permeating and destructive. "You must have worked so hard" is as much a property of the physical universe and biology that emerged from it as is "You must be so smart."
"Brains don't kill people. People kill people."
It seems like something has to give, either our commitment to free will or our commitment to the idea that every event is completely caused by the preceding events." Shaun Nichols
we still can't predict much about behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial.... Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation.
People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this incredible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces.
"We argue that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, despite the fact that existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate whatever neuroscience will tell us. New neuroscience will change the law, not by undermining its current assumptions, but by transforming people's moral intuitions about free will and responsibility."
"Free will, it is often said, requires the ability do otherwise"
For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.
Punishment is effortful and costly, ranging from forgoing a reward when rejecting a lowball offer in the Ultimatum Game to our tax dollars paying for the dental plan of the prison guard who operates the lethal injection machine. That rush of self-righteous pleasure is what drives us to shoulder the costs. Sure, as I said, punishment would still be used in an instrumental fashion, to acutely shape behavior. But there is simply no place for the idea that punishment is a virtue.
DNA determines RNA determines protein. And implicit is that central dogma is another critical point; one type of gene specifies one type of protein.
the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment. In other words, genes don't make sense outside the context of environment, both internal, and external. Thus not only does environment regulate genes, but it can do with effects that last days to lifetimes.
a. Genes are not autonomous agents commanding biological events.
b. Genes are regulated by the environment, consisting of everything from events inside the cell to the entire universe.
c. Much of DNA turns environmental influences into gene transcription; evolution is heavily about changing regulation of gene transcription, rather than about genes themselves.
d. Epigenetics can allow environmental effects to be lifelong, or even multigenerational.
heritability - gene tendency, the lower the heritability score the less like are genetics in explaining a behavior: it's not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment.
a. A gene's influence on the average value of a trait (i.e. whether it is inherited) differs from its influence on variability of that trait across individuals(its heritability).
d. Gene/environment interactions are ubiquitous and can be dramatic. Thus, you can't really say what a gene does, only what it does in the environment in which its been studied.
Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high(e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high socioeconomic status families but is only around 10 percent in low socioeconomic kids. Thus, higher socioeconomic allows the full range of genetic influences to flourish, whereas lower socioeconomic settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you're growing up in awful poverty - poverty's adverse effects trump the genetics. Similarly, heritability of alcohol use is lower among religious than nonreligious subjects - i.e., your genes matter much if you're in a religious environment that condemns drinking.
Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavior traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability. They have to be, given, that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent. Ask not what a gene does. Ask what is does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.
But consider a paper published in Science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops). Lo and behold, the more gender equality the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.
Culture leaves long-lasting residues - Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.
And in other, other, other words, when we contemplate our iconic acts - the pulling of a trigger, the touching of an arm - and want to explain why they happened using a biological framework, culture better be on our list of explanatory factors.
Inequality emerged when "stuff" - things to possess and accumulate - was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies.
Economic capital is the collective quantity of goods, services, and financial resources. Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation....Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital. Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, have efficacy, to be visible. (For example, as income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.)
But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct the wealthy feel from improving public goods. Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good - a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, "the more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition". Evans notes how this "secession of the wealthy" promotes "private affluence and public squalor."
Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty among plenty is. For example, extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations.
Why does income inequality lead to more crime? Again, there's the psychosocial angle - inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. And there's the neomaterialist angle - inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. Kaplan has shown, for example, that states with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education. As with inequality and health, the psychosocial and neomaterial routes synergize.
As documented by Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, it is only when societies grow large enough that people regularly encounter strangers that "Big Gods" emerge - deities who are concerned with human morality and punish our transgressions.
(a) a religion reflects the values of the culture that invented or adopted it, and very effectively transmits those values; (b) religion fosters the best and worst of our behaviors.
Another key theme is the paradoxical influence of ecology. Ecosystems majorly shape culture - but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth's humans have inherited their belief systems about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.
"Nothing in biology makes except in the light of evolution." Theodosius Dobzhansky
Evolution rests on three steps: (a) certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means; (b) mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits; (c) some of those variants confer more "fitness" than others. Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more "fit" gene variants increases in a population.
misconceptions: (1) evolution favors survival of the fittest. Instead evolution is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes; (2) evolution can select for preadaptations - neutral traits that prove useful in the future. This doesn't happen; selection is for traits pertinent to the present. Related to this is the misconception that living species are somehow better adapted than extinct species. Instead, the latter were just as well adapted, until environmental conditions changed sufficiently to do them in; the same awaits us. (3) evolution directionally selects for greater complexity. Yes, if once there were only single-celled organisms and there are multicellular ones now, average complexity has increased. Nonetheless, evolution doesn't necessarily select for greater complexity - just consider bacteria decimating humans with some plague. (4) evolution is just a "theory."
Evolution sculpts two broad ways. "Sexual selection" selects for traits that attract members of the opposite sex, "natural selection" for traits that enhance the passing on of copies of genes through any other route - e.g., good health, foraging skills, predator avoidance.
First misconception, we are not descended from chimps. Or from any extant animal. We and chimps share a common ancestor from roughly five million years ago (and genomics show that chimps have been as busy evolving since then as we have.)
Measure after measure, it's the same. We aren't classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused - mildly polygamous, floating somewhere in between.
"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the wold into two kinds of people and those who don't." Robert Benchley.
What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies. All invisible, until they are yoked with arbitrary markers such as dress, ornamentation, or regional accent.
Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by: (a) the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power.
So in-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well. This is the essence of tolerating inequality in the name of loyalty. Consistent with that, priming loyalty strengthens in-group favoritism and identification, while priming equality does the opposite.
Most common is forgiving Us more readily than Them. As we will see, this is often rationalized - we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that's how They are.
But Us-ness based on sacred values, with whole bigger than sums of parts, where unenforceable obligations stretch across generations, millennia, even into afterlives, where it's Us, right of wrong, is the essence of faith-based relationships.
The nature of group membership can be bloodily contentious concerning people's relationship to the state. Is it contractual? The people pay taxes, obey laws, serve in the army; the government provides social services, builds roads, and helps after hurricanes. Or is it one of sacred values? The people give absolute obedience and the state provides the myths of the Fatherland. Few such citizens can conceive that if the stork had arbitrarily deposited them elsewhere, they'd fervently feel the innate rightness of a different brand of exceptionalism, goose-stepping to different martial music.
"Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker." Paul Rozin
Essentialism is all about viewing Them as homogeneous and interchangeable, the idea that while we are individuals, they have a monolithic, immutable, icky essence.
"The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual." Reinhold Niebuhr
"race" is a biological continuum rather than a discrete category - for example, unless you cherry-pick the date, genetic variation within race is generally as great as between races.
Furthermore, the notion of race as a fixed, biologically based classification system doesn't work either. At various times in the history of the U.S. census, "Mexican" and "Armenian" were classified as distinctive races; southern Italians were of a different race from northern Europeans; someone with one black great-grandparent and seven white ones was a white in Oregon but not Florida. This is race as a cultural rather than biological construct.
Like other hierarchical species, we have alpha individuals, but unlike most others, we occasionally get to chose them. Moreover, they often are not merely highest ranking but also "lead," attempting to maximize this thing called the common good.Furthermore, individuals vie for leadership with differing visions of how best to attain that common good - political ideologies. And finally, we express obedience both to an authority and to the idea of Authority.
hierarchy = is a ranking system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources, ranging from meat to that nebulous thing called "prestige."
The Socioeconomic /health gradient is ubiquitous. Regardless of gender, age, or race. With or without universal health care. In societies that are ethnically homogeneous and those rife with ethnic tensions. In societies in which the central mythology is a capitalist credo of "Living well is the best revenge" and those in which it is a socialist anthem of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.
politics = the struggle among the powerful with differing visions of the common good.
It also gives insight into a puzzling feature of the political landscape: how is it that over the last fifty years, Republicans have persuaded impoverished white Americans to so often vote against their own economic self-interest? Do they actually believe that they're going to win the lottery and then get to enjoy the privileged side of American inequality? Nah. The psychological issues of needing structured familiarity show that for poor whites, voting Republicans constitutes an implicit act of system justification and risk aversion. Better to resist change and deal with the devil that you know....
Related to this is "terror-management theory," which suggests that conservatism is psychologically rooted in pronounced fear of death; supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their mortality makes them more conservative.
These differences in threat perception help explain the differing views as to role of government - providing for people (the leftist view; social services, education, etc.) or protecting people (the rightest view; law and order, the military, etc.).
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality - it must be a drag being right-wing. But, despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists. Why? Perhaps it's having simpler answers, unburdened by motivation correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and Left increases.
insular cortex - mediates gustatory and olfactory disgust, and moral disgust in humans.
As we saw, make a liberal more tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.
Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity so visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.
Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of gray matter in the cingulate cortex (with its involvement in empathy), whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala (with, of course, its starring role in threat perception).
social identity theory - the concept of who we are is heavily shaped social context. Being different = Being wrong.
"the issue isn't how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it's how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad." Zimbardo. rather than concentrating on one evil person at a time (medical approach), one must understand how some environments cause cause epidemics of evil. (public health approach). "Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do - given the same situational forces."
"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago.
Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of its caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.
We're really out there as a species in that sometimes our high-status individuals don't merely plunder and instead actually lead, actually attempt to facilitate the common good. We've even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion. A magnificent achievement. Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable to five-year-olds deciding who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland.
If you really want to understand someone's politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more importantly, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.
Finally, the pull of conformity and obedience can lead us to some of our darkest, most appalling places, and far more of us can be led there than we'd like to think. But despite that, even the worst of barrels don't turn all apples bad, and "Resistance" and Heroism" are often more accessible and less rarefied and capitalized than assumed. We're rarely alone in thinking this wrong, wrong, wrong. And we are usually no less special or unique than those before us who have fought back.
morality is not only belief in norms of appropriate behaviors but also the belief that they should be shared and transmitted culturally.
But at their core, market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity.
Shame is external judgement by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame is about honor. Guilt is about conscience. Shame requires an audience, Guilt is private.
Bizarrely, the American legal system considers a corporation to be an individual in many ways, one that is psychopathic in the sense of having no conscience and being solely interested in profits. The people running corporations are occasionally criminally responsible; however, they are not morally responsible.
"Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness." Greene
our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive. They are the end products of learning; they are cognitive conclusions to which we have been exposed so often that they have become automatic, as implicit as riding a bicycle or reciting the days of the week forward rather than backward.... Our guts learn their intuitions.
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." Oscar Wilde
most intergroup conflicts ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose "right" is better.
In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions - religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit - bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.
Resisting temptation is as implicit as walking up stairs...; it's what moral imperatives have been hammered into you with such urgency and consistency that doing the right thing has virtually become a spinal reflex.
This is not to suggest that honesty, even impeccable honesty that resists all temptation, can only be the outcome of implicit automaticity. We can think and struggle and employ cognitive control to produce similar stainless records, as shown in some subsequent work. But in circumstances like the Greene and Paxton study, with repeated opportunities to cheat in rapid succession, it's not going to a case of successfully arm wrestling the devil over and over. Instead, automaticity is required.
sympathy - means you feel sorry for someone else's pain without understanding it.
empathy - means you understand someone's pain, taking their perspective, walking in their shoes.
compassion - your resonance with someone else's pain leads you to actually help.
Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people's emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal.... wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence.
"If I look at the mass, I will never act." - Mother Teresa
"The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." Joseph Stalin
When it comes to empathic states, "emotion" and "cognition" are totally false dichotomies; you need both, but with the balance between the two shifting on a continuum, and the cognition end of it has to do the heavy lifting when the differences between you and the person in pain initially swap the similarities.
[Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone's pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn't simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst. Leslie Jamison.
empathy training - focus on feeling the pain of someone else in distress.
compassion training - focus on feeling warmth and care for another person in distress.
exaptation - a trait that evolves for one purpose and is co-opted for something else.
Sacred values are defended far out of proportion to their material or instrumental importance or likelihood of success, because to any group such values define "who we are."
but peace is not the mere absence of war, and making true peace requires acknowledging and respecting the sacred values of Them.
compatibilism - we have something resembling a spirit, a soul, an essence that embodies our free will, from which emanates behavioral intent; and that this spirit coexists with biology that can sometimes constrain it...It's encapsulated in the idea that well-intentioned spirit, while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak.
mitigated free will - people need to be held responsible for their actions, but there can be mitigating circumstances. It is the idea that there can be "diminished" responsibility for our actions, that something can be semivoluntary.
things that affect the execution of free will: brain specific transcription factors, neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogensis. Aspects of brain funtion can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast, etc.
homunculus - a very small human or humanoid creature.
Essentially everyone working with a model of mitigated free will accepts that if there is enough brain damage, responsibility for a criminal act goes out the window.
..."our social world is ultimately as much a product of our determined, materialist brains as are our simple motor movements."
causation verses compulsion - causation suggests every behavior is caused by something. compulsion suggests there is a subset of behaviors that compromises rational, deliberative processes. In this view some behaviors are seen as more deterministically biological than others.
readiness potential - a signal from the motor cortex and supplementary premotor areas that a movement would soon be initiated... readiness potentials appear about half a second before the reported time of conscious intent to move.
Of all the stances of mitigated free will, the one that assigns aptitude to biology and effort to free will, or impulse to biology and resisting it to free will, is the most permeating and destructive. "You must have worked so hard" is as much a property of the physical universe and biology that emerged from it as is "You must be so smart."
"Brains don't kill people. People kill people."
It seems like something has to give, either our commitment to free will or our commitment to the idea that every event is completely caused by the preceding events." Shaun Nichols
we still can't predict much about behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial.... Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation.
People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this incredible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces.
"We argue that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, despite the fact that existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate whatever neuroscience will tell us. New neuroscience will change the law, not by undermining its current assumptions, but by transforming people's moral intuitions about free will and responsibility."
"Free will, it is often said, requires the ability do otherwise"
For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.
Punishment is effortful and costly, ranging from forgoing a reward when rejecting a lowball offer in the Ultimatum Game to our tax dollars paying for the dental plan of the prison guard who operates the lethal injection machine. That rush of self-righteous pleasure is what drives us to shoulder the costs. Sure, as I said, punishment would still be used in an instrumental fashion, to acutely shape behavior. But there is simply no place for the idea that punishment is a virtue.
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 make sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters - when we judge others harshly.
"we speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" David Hume
"It must be stressed that the contrast of intuition and reasoning is not the contrast of emotion and cognition. Intuition, reasoning, and the appraisals contained in emotions (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991) are all forms of cognition. Rather, the words intuition and reasoning are intended to capture the contrast made by dozens of philosophers and psychologists between two kinds of cognition. The most important distinctions (see Table 1) are that intuition occurs quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, such that the outcome but not the process is accessible to consciousness, whereas reasoning occurs more slowly, requires some effort, and involves at least some steps that are accessible to consciousness." Jonathan Haidt
"moral discussions and arguments are notorious for the rarity with which persuasion takes place. Because moral positions always have an affective component to them, it is hypothesized that reasoned persuasion works not by providing logically compelling arguments but by triggering new affectively valenced intuitions in the listener" Jonathan Haidt
"It is hypothesized that people rarely override their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because reasoning is rarely used to question one's own attitudes or beliefs."
defense motivation, "the desire to hold attitudes and beliefs that are congruent with existing self-definitional attitudes and beliefs"
This review is not intended to imply that people are stupid or irrational. It is intended to demonstrate that the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and ethical sophistication should not be sought in our ability to search for and evaluate evidence in an open and unbiased way. Rather than following the ancient Greeks in worshiping reason, we should instead look for the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and virtue in what the mind does best: perception, intuition, and other mental operations that are quick, effortless, and generally quite accurate
post hoc constructions. When asked to explain their behaviors, people engage in an effortful search that may feel like a kind of introspection. However, what people are searching for is not a memory of the actual cognitive processes that caused their behaviors, because these processes are not accessible to consciousness. Rather, people are searching for plausible theories about why they might have done what they did. People turn first to a "pool of culturally supplied explanations for behavior," which Nisbett and Wilson (1977) refer to as "a priori causal theories"
A priori moral theories can be defined as a pool of culturally supplied norms for evaluating and criticizing the behavior of others. A priori moral theories provide acceptable reasons for praise and blame
Even though people in all cultures have more or less the same bodies, they have different embodiments, and therefore they end up with different minds.
J Haidt
The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail Jonathan Haidt
The anxiety-reducing effects of belief are logical, given that psychological stress is about lack of control, predictability, outlets, and social support. Depending on the religion, belief brings an explanation for why things happen, a conviction that there is a purpose, and the sense of a creator who is interested in us, who is benevolent, who responds to human entreaties, who preferentially responds to entreaties from people like you.
It's not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it's being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochical identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds.
shared goals reprioritizes Us/Them dichotomies.
"I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him." Booker T Washington
Despite the claims of some economists, we are not rational optimization machines.
Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren't opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.
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.
When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had even seen before.
"Me" versus "Us" (being prosocial within your group) is easier than "us" versus "them" (prosociality between groups).
The road to hell is paved with rationalization.
Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great sympathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.
People kill and 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.
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. .
Religion, Brain and Behavior Journal
"we speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" David Hume
"It must be stressed that the contrast of intuition and reasoning is not the contrast of emotion and cognition. Intuition, reasoning, and the appraisals contained in emotions (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991) are all forms of cognition. Rather, the words intuition and reasoning are intended to capture the contrast made by dozens of philosophers and psychologists between two kinds of cognition. The most important distinctions (see Table 1) are that intuition occurs quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, such that the outcome but not the process is accessible to consciousness, whereas reasoning occurs more slowly, requires some effort, and involves at least some steps that are accessible to consciousness." Jonathan Haidt
"moral discussions and arguments are notorious for the rarity with which persuasion takes place. Because moral positions always have an affective component to them, it is hypothesized that reasoned persuasion works not by providing logically compelling arguments but by triggering new affectively valenced intuitions in the listener" Jonathan Haidt
"It is hypothesized that people rarely override their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because reasoning is rarely used to question one's own attitudes or beliefs."
defense motivation, "the desire to hold attitudes and beliefs that are congruent with existing self-definitional attitudes and beliefs"
This review is not intended to imply that people are stupid or irrational. It is intended to demonstrate that the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and ethical sophistication should not be sought in our ability to search for and evaluate evidence in an open and unbiased way. Rather than following the ancient Greeks in worshiping reason, we should instead look for the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and virtue in what the mind does best: perception, intuition, and other mental operations that are quick, effortless, and generally quite accurate
post hoc constructions. When asked to explain their behaviors, people engage in an effortful search that may feel like a kind of introspection. However, what people are searching for is not a memory of the actual cognitive processes that caused their behaviors, because these processes are not accessible to consciousness. Rather, people are searching for plausible theories about why they might have done what they did. People turn first to a "pool of culturally supplied explanations for behavior," which Nisbett and Wilson (1977) refer to as "a priori causal theories"
A priori moral theories can be defined as a pool of culturally supplied norms for evaluating and criticizing the behavior of others. A priori moral theories provide acceptable reasons for praise and blame
Even though people in all cultures have more or less the same bodies, they have different embodiments, and therefore they end up with different minds.
J Haidt
The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail Jonathan Haidt
The anxiety-reducing effects of belief are logical, given that psychological stress is about lack of control, predictability, outlets, and social support. Depending on the religion, belief brings an explanation for why things happen, a conviction that there is a purpose, and the sense of a creator who is interested in us, who is benevolent, who responds to human entreaties, who preferentially responds to entreaties from people like you.
It's not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it's being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochical identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds.
shared goals reprioritizes Us/Them dichotomies.
"I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him." Booker T Washington
Despite the claims of some economists, we are not rational optimization machines.
Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren't opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.
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.
When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had even seen before.
"Me" versus "Us" (being prosocial within your group) is easier than "us" versus "them" (prosociality between groups).
The road to hell is paved with rationalization.
Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great sympathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.
People kill and 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.
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. .
Religion, Brain and Behavior Journal
