Feeling the other's pain

 

In the Reign of Terror, by Jessie Macgregor (1891). We don’t respond equally to signs of emotional distress in other people (Wikicommons)

We like to think that all people feel empathy to the same degree. In reality, it varies a lot from one person to the next, like most mental traits. We are half-aware of this when we distinguish between "normal people" and "psychopaths," the latter having an abnormally low capacity for empathy. The distinction is arbitrary, like the one between "tall" and "short." As with stature, empathy varies continuously among the individuals of a population, with psychopaths being the ones we find beyond an arbitrary cut-off point and who probably have many other things wrong with them. By focusing on the normal/abnormal dichotomy, we lose sight of the variation that occurs among so-called normal individuals. We probably meet people every day who have a low capacity for empathy and who nonetheless look and act normal. Because they seem normal, we assume they are as empathetic as we are. They aren’t.

Like most mental traits, empathy is heritable, its heritability being estimated at 68% (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013). It has two distinct components: cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Some researchers identify a third component, pro-social behavior, but its relationship to the other two seems tangential.

Cognitive empathy appears to be the evolutionarily older component of the two. It is the capacity to understand how another person is feeling and then predict how different actions will affect that person’s emotional state. But this capacity can be used for selfish purposes. Examples are legion: the con artist; many telemarketers; the rapist who knows how to charm his victims ...

Affective empathy is the younger component, having developed out of cognitive empathy. It is the capacity not just to understand another person's emotional state but also to identify with it. A person with high affective empathy will try to help someone in distress not because such help is personally advantageous or legally required, but because he or she is actually feeling the same distress.

Affective empathy may have initially evolved as a means to facilitate relations between a mother and her children. Later, and to varying degrees, it became extended to other human relationships. This evolutionary trajectory is perceptible in young children:

Children do not display empathic concern toward all people equally. Instead, they show bias toward individuals and members of groups with which they identify. For instance, young children of 2 years of age display more concern-related behaviors toward their mother than toward unfamiliar people. Moreover, children (aged 3-9 years) view social categories as marking patterns of interpersonal obligations. They view people as responsible only to their own group members, and consider within-group harm as wrong regardless of explicit rules, but they view the wrongness of between-group harm as contingent on the presence of such rules. (Decety and Cowell, 2014)

Similarly, MRI studies show that adults are much more likely to experience emotional distress when they see loved ones in pain than when they see strangers in pain. A stranger in distress will evoke a response only to the degree that the observer has a high capacity for affective empathy. The higher the capacity the more it will encompass not only loved ones but also less related individuals, including total strangers and nonhumans:

Humans can feel empathic concern for a wide range of 'others', including for nonhuman animals, such as pets (in the Western culture) or tamagotchi (in Japan). This is especially the case when signs of vulnerability and need are noticeable. In support of this, neural regions involved in perceiving the distress of other humans, such as the anterior cingulate cortex and insula, are similarly activated when witnessing the distress of domesticated animals (Decety and Cowell, 2014)

While we associate affective empathy with morality, the two are not the same, and there are situations where the two come into conflict. In most societies, kinship is the main organizing principle of social relations, and morality affirms this principle by spelling out the duties to one's parents, one's kin, and one's ethny. The importance of kinship may be seen in the Ten Commandments, which we wrongfully assume to be universal in application. We are told we must not kill, steal, lie, or commit adultery if the victims are "thy neighbor," which is explained as meaning "the children of thy people" (Leviticus 19:18). High-empathy individuals may thus subvert morality if they view all human distress as being equal in value. At best, they will neglect loved ones in order to help an indefinitely large number of needy strangers. At worst, strangers may develop strategies to exploit high-empathy individuals, i.e., to milk them for all they are worth.

Mapping empathy in the human brain

Empathy appears to arise from specific mechanisms in the brain, and not from a more general property, like general intelligence. It is produced by a sequence of mental events, beginning with "mirror neurons" that fire in tandem with the observed behavior of another person, thereby generating a mental model of this behavior. Copies of the model are sent elsewhere in the brain to decode the nature and purpose of the behavior and to predict the sensory consequences for the observed person. Affective empathy goes further by feeding these predicted consequences into the observer's emotional state (Carr et al., 2003).

Recent MRI research has confirmed that empathy is associated with increased development of certain regions within the brain. Individuals who score high on cognitive empathy have denser gray matter in the midcingulate cortex and the adjacent dorsomedial prefontal cortex, whereas individuals who score high on affective empathy have denser gray matter in the insula cortex (Eres et al.,2015). A high capacity for affective empathy is also associated with a larger amygdala, which seems to control the way we respond to facial expressions of fear and other signs of emotional distress (Marsh et al., 2014).

Can these brain regions be used to measure our capacity for affective empathy? Two studies, one American and one English, have found that "conservatives" tend to have a larger right amygdala (Kanai et al.,2011; Schreiber et al., 2013). This has been spun, perhaps predictably, as proof that the political right is fear-driven (Hibbing et al., 2014). A likelier explanation is that "conservatives" are disproportionately drawn from populations that have, on average, a higher capacity for affective empathy. 

Do human populations vary in their capacity for affective empathy?

Is it possible, then, that this capacity varies among human populations, just as it varies among individuals? I have argued that affective empathy is more adaptive in larger, more complex societies where kinship obligations can no longer restrain behavior that seriously interferes with the ability of individuals to live together peacefully and constructively (Frost, 2015). Whereas affective empathy was originally expressed mainly between a mother and her children, it has become progressively extended in some populations to a wider range of interactions. This evolutionary change may be compared to the capacity to digest milk sugar: initially, this capacity was limited to early childhood, but in dairy cattle cultures it has become extended into adulthood.

I have also argued that this evolutionary change has gone the farthest in Europeans north and west of the Hajnal Line (Frost, 2014a). In these populations, kinship has been a weaker force in organizing social relations, at least since the early Middle Ages and perhaps since prehistoric times. There has thus been selection for mechanisms, like affective empathy, that can regulate social interaction between unrelated individuals. This selection may have intensified during two time periods:

- An initial period corresponding to the emergence of complex hunter/fisher/gatherers during the Mesolithic along the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic. Unlike other hunter-gatherers, who were typically small bands of individuals, these people were able to form large coastal communities by exploiting abundant marine resources. Such communities were beset, however, by the problem of enforcing rule compliance on unrelated people, the result being strong selection for rule-compliant individuals who share certain predispositions, namely affective empathy, proneness to guilt, and willingness to obey moral rules and to expel anyone who does not (Frost, 2013a; Frost, 2013b).

- A second period corresponding to the spread of Christianity among Northwest Europeans, particularly with the outbreeding, population growth, and increase in manorialism that followed the Dark Ages (hbd chick, 2014). The result was a "fruitful encounter" between the two: on the one hand, Christianity, with its emphasis on internalized morality, struck a responsive chord in these populations; on the other hand, the latter modified Christianity, increasing its emphasis on faith, compassion, and original sin (Frost, 2014b).

Conclusion 

Recent research has brought much insight into the nature of empathy, which should no longer be viewed as being simply a noble precept. We now understand it as the outcome of a sequence of events in specific regions of the brain. We have also learned that individuals vary in their capacity for empathy and that most of this variability is heritable, as is the case with most mental traits. Moreover, empathy has two components—cognitive and affective—and the strength of one in relation to the other likewise varies. Although we often consider affective empathy to be desirable, it can have perverse and even pathological effects in some contexts.

References

Carr, L., M. Iacoboni, M-C. Dubeau, J.C. Mazziotta, and G.L. Lenzi. (2003). Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 100, 5497-5502.

http://www.ucp.pt/site/resources/documents/ICS/GNC/ArtigosGNC/AlexandreCastroCaldas/7_CaIaDuMaLe03.pdf  

Chakrabarti, B. and S. Baron-Cohen. (2013). Understanding the genetics of empathy and the autistic spectrum, in S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, M. Lombardo. (eds). Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=eTdLAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA326&ots=fHpygaxaMQ&sig=_sJsVgdoe0hc-fFbzaW3GMEslZU#v=onepage&q&f=false  

Decety, J. and J. Cowell. (2014). The complex relation between morality and empathy, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 337-339

http://spihub.org/site/resource_files/publications/spi_wp_135_decety.pdf 

Eres, R., J. Decety, W.R. Louis, and P. Molenberghs. (2015). Individual differences in local gray matter density are associated with differences in affective and cognitive empathy, NeuroImage, 117, 305-310.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915004206 

Frost, P. (2013a). The origins of Northwest European guilt culture, Evo and Proud, December 7

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html 

Frost, P. (2013b). Origins of Northwest European guilt culture, Part II, Evo and Proud, December 14

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/12/origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html 

Frost, P. (2014a). Compliance with Moral Norms: a Partly Heritable Trait? Evo and Proud, April 12

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/04/compliance-with-moral-norms-partly.html

Frost, P. (2014b). A fruitful encounter, Evo and Proud, September 26

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/09/a-fruitful-encounter.html 

Frost, P. (2015). Two paths, The Unz Review, January 24

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/two-paths/ 

hbd chick (2014). Medieval manorialism’s selection pressures, hbd chick, November 19

https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/medieval-manorialisms-selection-pressures/ 

Hibbing, J.R., K.B. Smith, and J.R. Alford. (2014). Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 297-350

http://www.geoffreywetherell.com/Hibbing%20et%20al%20paper%20and%20commentaries%20(1).pdf 

Kanai, R., T. Feilden, C. Firth, and G. Rees. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults, Current Biology, 21, 677 - 680.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)00289-2 

Keysers, C. and V. Gazzola. (2014). Dissociating the ability and propensity for empathy, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 163-166.

http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/S1364-6613(13)00296-9.pdf 

Marsh, A.A., S.A. Stoycos, K.M. Brethel-Haurwitz, P. Robinson, J.W. VanMeter, and E.M. Cardinale. (2014). Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 15036-15041.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15036.short 

Schreiber, D., Fonzo, G., Simmons, A.N., Dawes, C.T., Flagan, T., et al. (2013). Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS ONE 8(2): e52970.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0052970  

The evolution of antiracism

Collection box for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, circa 1850 (Wikicommons).

 

Throughout the world, kinship used to define the limits of morality. The less related you were to someone, the less moral you had to be with him or her. We see this in the Ten Commandments. The phrase "against thy neighbor" qualifies the commandment against bearing false witness and, implicitly, the preceding ones against killing, adultery, and stealing. For the modern reader, "thy neighbor" is helpfully explained as meaning "the children of thy people" (Leviticus 19:18).

In some cases, this kin-based morality gradually ceased to apply the farther away one went from home and from immediate kith and kin. Usually, however, the limits of one's moral community coincided with some kind of boundary: a geographic barrier, a political border, and/or an ethnic frontier. Beyond lay the world of "strangers."

Toward a universal morality

The first efforts to universalize morality—to create a single moral system that could apply to everyone—"arose simultaneously around 500 BCE in various parts of the world, from China in the Far East to Southern Italy in the West" (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 121). These efforts were initially driven by the need to form alliances between different peoples:

Alliance - the formation of treaties - proved the most important instrument of internationalism. Forming an alliance required mutual recognition of the deities which served as patrons. The treaties which these empires formed with each other and with their vassals had to be sealed by solemn oaths invoking the gods of both parties. The list of these gods conventionally closes the treaty [...]. They had to be equal in their function and rank. Intercultural theology became a concern of international law. (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 125) 

As ancient empires expanded and absorbed different peoples, this intercultural theology became useful for internal peace, notably with the Hellenistic empires that arose in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests. By affirming that different religions are interchangeable, it became possible to create a common civic culture for diverse peoples:

Hellenization had two faces. On the one hand, it referred to the diffusion of Greek language, ideas and customs all over the Ancient World; on the other hand, it appeared to be more of a construction of a 'common culture', suggesting a similar change in Greece as in the other cultures. Flavius Josephus did not speak of 'Greek' but of 'common culture', ho koinos bios, as the goal of Jewish assimilation or reform in the Hellenistic age. (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p.  127) 

One result would be the emergence of a universal religion. We like to associate this development with the teachings of Jesus, but a kind of proto-Christianity was already emerging near the end of the pre-Christian era.  At that time, many Jews were adapting their belief in one God to the universal worldview of Hellenistic culture:

Thus, while biblical universalism was founded on a notion of the mission of Israel to save all of humanity and bring them to the true worship of the only God, Hellenistic notions of universalism involved the assumption that all the gods were really different names for one God. (Boyarin, 1994, chap. 3). 

The two belief-systems merged among the increasingly Hellenized Jews of the eastern Mediterranean, thus setting the stage for Jesus and making it easier for his movement to succeed.

The Christian impulse

This new religion became a vehicle not only for moral universalism but also for belief in human equality. For if morality is universal, all humans must have the same capacity to follow its rules. In Christ, asserted Paul, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28).

While Christianity would steer people in the direction of universalism, there were limits to how far it could go. Theologians sometimes spoke of the need to set lower aims for average people and higher aims for saintly men and women. We see this realism in Augustine's position on prostitution: "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust" (De Ordine ii, 4). The same could be said for the Church's position on war, slavery, prejudice, and other manifestations of human inequality. These were the realities of an imperfect world. 

Such imperfections nonetheless became harder to accept over the following centuries. First, there was "mission creep." Once the Church had established certain ideals, there was continual pressure to bring human behavior into line with them. Second, the geocenter of the Church was shifting away from the eastern Mediterranean, where the absolute morality of Christianity had been constrained by the relative morality of kinship. Farther north and west, beyond the Hajnal Line, kinship ties were weaker and people more receptive to universal principles. There was thus a "fruitful encounter" between the Christian faith and these northwest Europeans who were more willing to internalize such principles and apply them more thoroughly (Frost, 2014a). 

Within this region, Catholicism would radicalize to the point of splitting away and becoming Protestantism. Here, too, Christian ideals would increasingly be taken to their logical conclusion.

The Abolitionist movement

Abolitionism began in the 17th century among English Quakers as a movement to abolish the slave trade. Over time, it grew more radical, seeking not only to free black slaves but also to extirpate racial and ethnic prejudice. Although "antiracism" did not yet exist as a word, its form and substance were already recognizable by the early 19th century. This was particularly so in the American northeast, where radical abolitionists denounced not only slavery but also fellow abolitionists who wanted to settle freed slaves in Africa. "In the 1830s, for the first time in American history an articulate and significant minority of Americans embraced racial equality as both a concept and a commitment" (Goodman, 1998, p. 1). This militant minority wanted more than simply an end to slavery: 

Believing that racial prejudice underpinned slavery, abolitionists committed themselves not just to emancipation [...] "Our prejudice against the blacks is founded in sheer pride; and it originates in the circumstance that people of their color, only, are universally allowed to be slaves," Child argued. "We made slavery, and slavery makes the prejudice." Color phobia, abolitionists contended, is irrational, wicked, preposterous, and unmanly. It is contrary to natural rights and Christian teaching, which recognizes no distinctions based on color. Race prejudice, Elizur Wright Jr. exploded, is "a narrow, bitter, selfish, swinish absurdity." (Goodman, 1998, p.58)

Decline ... and resurgence

That first wave of antiracism subsided in the late 19th century, partly because of the rise of Social Darwinism and partly because of disillusionment with the Civil War's aftermath. Radical abolitionists had long set their sights on ending slavery and crushing the American South, yet achievement of both goals failed to bring the final goal of human equality any closer. In the face of growing self-doubt, they lacked the ideological stamina to keep the faith and push forward, come what may. The movement thus fell into decline, remaining dominant only in the American northeast.

This first wave did not die, however. It was resuscitated in the early 1930s and would give rise to a much more dynamic second wave. The rise of Nazism convinced many Jewish intellectuals, notably the anthropologist Franz Boas, of the need to fight "racism" in all its forms, this word being initially a synonym for Nazism (Frost, 2014b). The war on racism would outlive the defeat of Nazi Germany, as a result of continuing fears of anti-Semitism in the postwar era. Moreover, it had now taken on a life of its own, much like its 19th-century predecessor. 

Today, some eighty years later, that war is still being fought. What began as a reaction to Nazism has become a permanent cultural revolution.

References 

Assmann, A., and S. Conrad. (2010). Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, New York

http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/1831/1/Assmann_Globalization_2010.pdf  

Boyarin, D. (1994). A Radical Jew. Paul and the Politics of Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press.

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7w10086w;brand=ucpress  

Frost, P. (2014a). A fruitful encounter, Evo and Proud, September 26

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/09/a-fruitful-encounter.html  

Frost, P. (2014b). From Nazi Germany to Middletown: ratcheting up the war on racism, Evo and Proud, July 19

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/07/from-nazi-germany-to-middletown.html  

Goodman, P. (1998). Of One Blood. Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality, Berkeley: University of California Press.

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=Zy47hp0QjFQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&ots=f0ONCiUl-T&sig=TDfjRtlGuGRd-kxwZ8fXlL8OpCU#v=onepage&q&f=false

The White Man's burden

 

From the Cape to Cairo, Puck, 1902. (Source: Library of Congress, public domain). The White Man's burden has been turned against itself. If the British adhere to a higher standard of civilization, their behavior must likewise be judged by a higher standard. They must play fair with former colonial peoples, but the latter are much less obliged to do the same.

 

Growing up in rural Ontario, I would talk with older folks about politics. A favorite topic was Quebec, and how those selfish French Canadians wouldn't fight in the Boer War, the First World War, and the Second World War. Later, as a student in Quebec City, I would hear the other side. French Canadians saw those wars as foreign entanglements of no concern to them. They were willing to fight and die, yes, but only for their own soil. That may seem selfish, but so were we with our slavish loyalty to the British Empire.

The folks back home would have disagreed. The Empire wasn't just for the British or even for Europeans in general. It was for people of all races and religions. It was an instrument for raising everyone up to British standards of fair play, morality, and civilization. In short, for making the world a better place. Take up the White Man's burden ...

Such talk puzzled me, even as a kid. The sun had long ago set on the British Empire. There was the Commonwealth, but why would its leaders defend our imperial heritage? Most of them had fought for independence from the Empire. They valued the British connection only to the extent that it was useful to themselves and their people.

Some Commonwealth leaders wouldn't even be that generous. When Robert Mugabe dispossessed the British farmers remaining in his country, we could only look on helplessly. A century ago, people called the Ottoman Empire the "sick man of Europe."  Today, that title surely applies to the remnants of the British Empire.

There is a difference, though. The Ottomans were militarily helpless. We are ideologically helpless. Our universal morality has been turned against us, and it is in the name of our notions of fair play that we're giving everything up, often to people, like Robert Mugabe, who make no pretence of believing in fair play. And we accept the logic of the situation. We think it normal to judge ourselves by a harsher standard and others by a more permissive one.

Double standards normally work the other way. Normally, one judges people of another kind by a harsher standard. They are less likely to share the same notions of right and wrong. They are also less likely to feel the sort of kinship affinity that makes people want to help each other and forgive minor wrongs, or even major ones. 

But we’re doing the reverse. That kind of situation is inherently unstable, even self-destructive. No other human society has ever attempted such a thing.

 

Rotherham

All of this seems obvious to me. Why is it less so to other people? The question crosses my mind when I see how thinking men and women respond—or rather fail to respond—to the Rotherham sex-abuse scandal. In an English town of some 250,000 people, at least 1,400 school-age girls were "groomed" for prostitution by gangs of Pakistani origin. Grooming begins with seduction and ends in abduction, trafficking, and confinement. This final stage apparently explains why some 500 girls were missing from the town's 15 to 19 age group at the last census.

This went on for years without anything being done and little being said. From time to time, the parents of the girls would complain, and the police would immediately investigate ... the parents. Finally, in August of this year, a long report broke the logjam of silence by officials and the media (Jay, 2014). There is still a pervasive bias against this news item, as seen in coverage by three online magazines. Slate ran one story about Rotherham and four about Jennifer Lawrence. Jezebel had one story about Rotherham and six about Jennifer Lawrence. Feministing made a passing reference to Rotherham and ran two stories about Jennifer Lawrence (Durant, 2014).

Who is Jennifer Lawrence? She's an American actress, and last August someone leaked nude photos of her online. That's why she matters so much more to thinking men and women.

It gets weirder. Social media have become overwhelmingly opposed to quarantining of the Ebola outbreak (Alexander, 2014). At one time, quarantines were considered a progressive measure, the sort of thing you would support as a thinking man or woman. If you didn't, people would assume you were a fool who knew nothing about modern science.

So what makes the Ebola outbreak different? The difference is simple. Quarantining means that light-skinned people will be detaining dark-skinned people. So we just can't do it. Because? Because.

The same applies to Rotherham, which was about dark-skinned men seducing, confining and, ultimately, enslaving light-skinned women. That, too, triggers the same mental lockdown—Don't go there! That's how thinking men and women unthinkingly respond—or almost anyone who has gone to college and watches TV. The response seems almost Cartesian: I try not to think, therefore I am a moral person.

Unfortunately, we cannot make unpleasant truths go away by ignoring them. Sooner or later, we will have to confront them. We will especially have to confront our universal morality, including the assumption that only light-skinned folks have moral agency and only they are to be held accountable for their actions.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for a new improved universal morality. Morality can never be universal. It is a product of local conditions—to be specific, it arises from a co-evolving system of cultural, historical, and genetic factors. If forced to choose between saving one or the other, we should first save this foundational system. Anyhow, that's all we can really save. Morality has no existence above and beyond the humans who act it out in their daily lives.

That's a hard message to swallow, but we will have to. Eventually.

 

References

 

Alexander, S. (2014). Five case studies on politicization, Slate Star Codex, October 16

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/  

Durant, J. (2014). John Durant compares coverage of Rotherham abuse vs. Jennifer Lawrence nudes, Twitchy Media, September 3

http://twitchy.com/2014/09/03/john-durant-compares-coverage-of-rotherham-abuse-vs-jennifer-lawrence-nudes/

Jay, A. (2014). Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997-2013

http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham    

Compliance with moral norms: a partly heritable trait?

 

Election poster from the 1930s for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (source). Is the welfare state more workable if the population is more predisposed to obey moral norms?

 

Do we differ genetically in our ability, or willingness, to comply with moral norms? Please note: I'm talking about compliance. The norms themselves can vary greatly from one historical period to another and from one society to another.

Apparently some people are more norm-compliant than others. This is the conclusion of a recent twin study from Sweden (Loewen et al., 2013). A total of 2,273 individuals from twin pairs were queried about the acceptability of four dishonest behaviors: claiming sick benefits while healthy (1.4% thought it totally or fairly acceptable), avoiding paying for public transit (2.8%), avoiding paying taxes (9.7%), and accepting bribes on the job (6.4%).

How heritable were the responses to the above questions? The heritabilities were as follows: 

Claiming sick benefits while healthy - 42.5%

Avoiding paying for public transit - 42.3%
Avoiding paying taxes - 26.3%
Accepting bribes on the job - 39.7%

Do these results indicate a specific predisposition to obey moral norms? Or is the genetic influence something more general, like religiosity or risk-taking, both of which are known to be partly heritable? To answer this question, the authors ran correlations with other factors:

Significant correlations were exhibited for age (r=.10, p=.00), sex (r=.12, p=.00), religiosity (r=.06, p=.00), preferences for risk (r=-.09, p=.00) and fairness (r=-.10, p=.00), locus of control (r=-.03, p=.01), and charitable giving (r=.09, p=.00). However, these significant correlations were relatively weak, suggesting that our measure is not merely standing in for these demographic and psychological differences between individuals. There were no significant correlations with behavioral inhibition (r=-.00, p=.81) or volunteering (r=.01, p=.29). (Loewen et al., 2013)

The jury is still out, but it looks like compliance with moral norms has a specific heritable component.

 

Population differences

Does this heritable component vary from one population to another, just as it seems to vary from one individual to another? The authors have little to say, other than the following:

Replication in other countries should occur, as the exact role and extent of genetic and common environment-influence could change in different national and cultural contexts. Such a multi-country approach could thus offer some clues on the generalizability of our findings. (Loewen et al., 2013)

Swedes seem to be better than most people at obeying moral norms. Only 1.4% think it acceptable to claim sick benefits while healthy! Maybe that's why they've been so successful at creating a welfare state. So few of them want to be free riders on the gravy train:

Gunnar and Alva Myrdal were the intellectual parents of the Swedish welfare state. In the 1930s they came to believe that Sweden was the ideal candidate for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. First of all, the Swedish population was small and homogeneous, with high levels of trust in one another and the government. Because Sweden never had a feudal period and the government always allowed some sort of popular representation, the land-owning farmers got used to seeing authorities and the government more as part of their own people and society than as external enemies. Second, the civil service was efficient and free from corruption. Third, a Protestant work-ethic—and strong social pressures from family, friends and neighbors to conform to that ethic—meant that people would work hard, even as taxes rose and social assistance expanded. Finally, that work would be very productive, given Sweden´s well-educated population and strong export sector. (Norberg, 2006)

This is not how most of the world works. While studying in Russia, I noticed that the typical Russian feels a strong sense of moral responsibility toward immediate family and longstanding friends, more so than we in the West. Beyond that charmed circle, however, the general feeling seems to be distrust, wariness, or indifference. There was little of the spontaneous willingness to help strangers that I had taken for granted back home. People had the same sense of right and wrong, but this moral universe was strongly centered on their own families.

In sociology, the term is amoral familialism. Family is everything and society is nothing, or almost nothing. It was coined by American sociologist Edward Banfield:

In 1958, Banfield, with the assistance of his wife, Laura, published The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, in which they explained why a region in southern Italy was poor. The reason, they said, was not government neglect or poor education, but culture. People in this area were reluctant to cooperate outside of their families. This kind of "amoral familialism," as they called it, was the result of a high death rate, a defective system of owning land, and the absence of extended families. By contrast, in an equally forbidding part of southern Utah, the residents were engaged in a variety of associations, each busily involved in improving the life of the community. In southern Italy, people did not cooperate; in southern Utah, they scarcely did anything else. (Banfield, 2003, p. viii)

 

Where did Western societies get this desire to treat family and non-family the same way? To some extent, it seems to be a longstanding trait. English historian Alan Macfarlane sees a tendency toward weaker kinship ties that goes back at least to the 13th century. Children had no automatic rights to the family property. Parents could leave their property to whomever they liked and disinherit their children if they so wished (Macfarlane, 2012).

Indeed, Macfarlane argues that "Weber's de-familization of society" was already well advanced in Anglo-Saxon times (Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174). This picture of relatively weak kinship ties is consistent with the Western European marriage pattern. If we look at European societies west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, we find that certain cultural traits predominate:

- relatively late marriage for men and women

- many people who never marry
- neolocality (children leave the family household to form new households)
- high circulation of non-kin among different households (typically young people sent out as servants) (Hajnal, 1965; see also hbd* chick)

Again, these characteristics go back at least to the 13th century and perhaps much farther back (Seccombe, 1992, p. 94).

Historians associate this model of society with the rise of the market economy. In other words, reciprocal kinship obligations were replaced with monetized economic obligations, and this process in turn led to a broader-based morality that applied to everyone equally. In reality, the arrow of causation seems to have been the reverse. Certain societies, notably those of northwestern Europe, were pre-adapted to the market economy and thus better able to exploit its possibilities when it began to take off in the late Middle Ages. The expansion of the market economy and, later, that of the welfare state were thus made possible by certain pre-existing cultural and possibly genetic characteristics, i.e., weaker kinship ties and a corresponding extension of morality from the familial level to the societal level.

 

References

Banfield, E.C. (2003). Political Influence, New Brunswick (N.J.): Transaction Pub.

Hajnal, John (1965). European marriage pattern in historical perspective. In D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley. Population in History. Arnold, London. 

Loewen, P.J., C.T. Dawes, N. Mazar, M. Johannesson, P. Keollinger, and P.K.E. Magnusson. (2013). The heritability of moral standards for everyday dishonesty, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 93, 363-366.

https://files.nyu.edu/ctd1/public/Moral.pdf  

Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/On_Individualism.pdf  

Macfarlane, A. (2012). The invention of the modern world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/07/invention-8/  

Norberg, J. (2006). Swedish Models, June 1, The National Interest.

http://www.johannorberg.net/?page=articles&articleid=151  

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe, London: Verso.

 

Recent evolution of complex behavior

I once knew an African student who told me that his language had no words for “good” or “evil”. When the missionaries translated their materials into his language, they had to write “Jesus is beautiful” instead of “Jesus is good.”

This sort of semantic evolution has occurred in all human languages. People have expressed new concepts by recycling older ones. Typically, these older concepts refer to primary sensations that are largely hardwired, i.e., ‘beautiful’, ‘cold’, ‘hot’, and so on.

Interestingly, it looks as if some of this hardwiring is being reused when we imagine evolutionarily recent concepts. For instance, when we recognize someone as friendly, we use neural pathways that are associated with the recognition of warmth.

During the autumn of 2006, a series of volunteers arrived at Yale University's psychology building. Each was greeted in the lobby by a researcher, who accompanied them up to the fourth floor. In the elevator, the researcher casually asked the volunteer to hold the drink she was carrying while she noted down their name. The subjects did not know it, but the experiment began the moment they took the cup.Once in the lab, the 40 or so volunteers read a description of a fictitious person and then answered questions about the character. Those who had held an iced coffee, rather than a hot one, rated the imaginary figure as less warm and friendly, even though eachvolunteer had read the same description. Answers to other questions about the figure, such as whether the character appeared honest, were unaffected by the type of drink. (Williams & Bargh, 2008).

Similarly, we have developed the ability to form moral judgments by building upon a mental algorithm that serves to judge cleanliness:

In one recent study, Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth, UK, and colleagues showed half their volunteers a neutral film and the other half the toilet scene from the film Trainspotting. (The uninitiated need only use their imagination here: the clip features what is described as the "worst toilet in Scotland".) Those who viewed the Trainspotting clip subsequently made more severe judgements about unethical acts such as cannibalism than volunteers who had viewed the neutral scene. Exposing subjects to a fart smell and placing them in a filthy room had a similar effect (Schnall et al., 2008).

Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto in Canada and Katie Liljenquist, now at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, asked volunteers to read a first-person account of either an ethical act or an act of sabotage. They then had to rate the desirability of various household objects, including soap, toothpaste, CD cases and chocolate bars. Those who had read the sabotage story showed a greater preference for the cleaning products than those who had not.

A self-perception of physical cleanliness thus seems linked to one of moral cleanliness. Moreover, like Pontius Pilate, the mere act of washing your hands reduces feelings of moral responsibility.

… In another part of their study, Zhong's team asked volunteers to recall an unethical deed from their past. Under the guise of a health and safety precaution, he then gave half the subjects antiseptic wipes to clean their hands. The participants were then asked if they would take part in another experiment, this time to help out a desperate graduate student. Only 40 per cent of the subjects who had cleaned their hands volunteered, compared with almost three-quarters of those who hadn't. (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006)

These studies suggest an answer to a question that has bothered me. How is that complex and relatively recent social behaviors often have moderate to high heritabilities? Surely such hardwiring would have taken an impossibly long time to evolve? Just think of all the genes involved…

Well, the answer is surprisingly simple. Natural selection has simply altered a hardwired algorithm that already exists. There’s no need to build it all from scratch. You just jerry-rig what you already have.


Update

Mangan’s Miscellany is back!! In fact, he's back at his old address (www.mangans.blogspot.com) and at a new one (www.mangans.typepad.com/mangans).


References

Giles, J. (2009). Icy stares and dirty minds: Hitch-hiking emotions, New Scientist 2725:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327252.200-icy-stares-and-dirty-minds-hitchhiking-emotions.html* 15 September 2009

Schnall, S., J. Haidt, G.L. Clore, A.H. Jordan. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096-1109.

Williams, L.E. & J.A. Bargh. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth, Science, 322, 606-607

Zhong, C.B. & K. Liljenquist, K. (2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened moralityand physical cleansing, Science, 313, 1451-1452.